The price of her forgiveness

The doctor who vanished

Chapter 5: The Doctor Who Vanished

Lachlan

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. Not Marcus, who’d left three messages by eight a.m. Not Briony, who sent a single text, Feeling better. Dinner tonight?, and then a second one, a minute later, Everything ok? Not Cormac, who would have said be patient in that voice that makes a man feel like a fool for wanting answers.

I sent my driver home, took the old grey Volvo out of the garage, and drove across the city alone with the folder on the passenger seat and the seat belt across it, because I couldn’t stand to see it slide.

Marlowe Street is a narrow road behind the hospital district, all brass plates and awnings and the smell of cut stone. Specialists’ territory. People come here to be told things in low voices. I found the number halfway down on the left and pulled in under a plane tree, and for a while I just sat there with the engine ticking.

Shutters. That was the first thing. Grey metal shutters, pulled all the way down over a ground-floor window. A rectangle of cleaner brick on the wall beside the door where a plaque had hung. Someone had taken the brass off and left the four screw holes behind, like the eyes of a mask.

A laminated notice was taped to the glass of the door, curling at the edges, bleached by years of sun. These premises have been vacated. All enquiries to the managing agent. There was a phone number. I wrote it on my hand with the pen from my pocket, which is something I haven’t done since university.

I tried the door. Locked, obviously. I cupped my hands against the glass and saw a bare reception desk, a coat stand, a dead plant in a pot. No chairs. No magazines. Nothing a person would leave if she planned to return.

I said, quietly, “Dr. Pryce, where are you?”

A woman walking a small dog glanced at me and crossed to the other pavement. I couldn’t blame her.

The agent’s number went to a recorded message. The florist next door, a thin man with a carnation in his lapel, was more helpful.

“Pryce? Oh, he went. Three years ago, maybe more. One week there, the next week gone.” He snipped a stem at an angle and dropped it in a bucket. “No farewell. No forwarding. The post piled up for months. The landlord had to get a locksmith in.”

“Was he well liked?”

“Polite. Kept to himself. A bit of a nervous man, always looking at his watch.” He thought for a moment. “Not a lot of patients, if you ask me. You’d see one an hour, if that. I used to say to my wife, "How does he pay the rent?”

My mouth went dry. “Did he have staff?”

“A girl. Assistant. Nadia, something with an S. Tall, dark hair, always carrying a flask of that foul green tea.” He pointed with the spectators, down toward the end of the road. “She still works round the corner, I think. The library. Reference desk, third floor. Tell her Bertie says hello. She never took my roses.”

I thanked him and bought a bunch of the roses, out of some feeling I couldn’t explain, and walked to the library carrying them like a man on his way to a funeral.

It was a Monday, mid-morning, and the reference room was almost empty. Long windows, green lamps, a smell of floor polish and old paper. At the desk a woman in her early thirties was sorting returned books into a trolley with the neatness of someone who does a thing so as not to think. Tall. Dark hair in a plait. A steel flask by her elbow.

“Nadia?”

She looked up. Her eyes went to my face, then to the roses, then back. And I saw it happen. A small drop in the shoulders, as if she’d been carrying something for a long time and had just heard a footstep on the stairs.

“Mr. Vance,” she said.

I hadn’t introduced myself. I hadn’t given a name.

“You know me.”

“Everyone knows you. Your face is on the side of a building.” She put the book down very carefully. “I wondered if this would happen. I wondered every day for the first year. Then I stopped wondering, and then you walked in.”

“I need to ask you about Dr. Pryce.”

“I know.” She took the flask, unscrewed it, screwed it back, and set it down again. Her hands needed something to do. I recognised that. “Not here. There’s a room.”

The room was a glass box behind the stacks, with a table and four hard chairs. She shut the door and sat with her back to the window. I put the roses on the table between us. She looked at them as if they might go off.

“He was my first real job,” she said. “I was twenty-seven. I wanted to be a medical secretary. I thought it would be, I don’t know, meaningful. Taking calls from frightened people, helping them get in to see someone who could help.” She smiled without any humour. “There weren’t many frightened people. The diary was nearly empty most days. He told me it was a boutique practice. High-end. Discreet.”

“My wife,” I said. “Kaelia Vance. Was she one of his patients?”

“No.”

The word landed so flat and so quickly that for a moment I didn’t take it in.

“No,” Nadia said again, more gently. “Never. I kept a diary. I did the bookings. I’d have known the name, and I’d have known the face, you’re not an easy family to miss. Mrs. Vance never came to Marlowe Street. Not once, not that night, not ever.”

The room tilted a little. I put my hand flat on the cold table.

“There’s a report,” I said. “It describes an hour-long consultation. It says she was tearful. Disoriented.”

Nadia closed her eyes.

“He rang me at home that night,” she said. “Late. Quarter to eleven, near enough. He never rang me at home. He asked me to come in and open up, and I said, is it an emergency, and he said, yes, in a way. When I got there he was in his office with the lamp on and two sheets of paper and a face like paste. He said I wasn't going to book anything. I didn't mention it. He said he had a document to prepare and it was to go by courier first thing, and he’d handle the courier himself.”

“Did he say who it was for?”

“He said it was for the family.” Her voice cracked. “I thought, oh, someone’s in trouble, a child, an old person. I never thought,” She stopped and breathed. “I only saw the name on the folder after he’d gone. K. Vance. And I thought she must have come in while I was off. I checked the diary the next morning, because I couldn’t help myself. Nothing. Blank. And Dr. Pryce said, "Never mind, it’s a courtesy consultation, a favour for a friend.”

“A favour. For whom?”

“He didn’t say.” She picked at the edge of the table. “Three weeks later the clinic was gone. He told me one Friday that he was closing. He gave me four months’ wages in an envelope, in cash. He said it was a severance. I never saw him again. His phone is dead. His email bounces. I went to his flat once and there was a different name on the bell.”

“Where did the money come from?”

She was quiet so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

“I did his books,” she said at last. “Not the accounts, he had an accountant for that, but the day-to-day. Invoices, payments in. And in the last two years, nearly everything that came in came from one place. A single transfer. Every month. Regular as a clock.”

I knew before she said it. My stomach knew. It dropped through the floor of the glass room and kept going.

“It was marked as a retainer,” she said. “For consulting services. And the payer was a holding account. Vance Enterprise.”

The words came out of her mouth very small and very clean.

I heard my own voice, from somewhere a long way off. “My company paid him.”

“Every month. For two years before your wife, and then for six months after. Then it stopped, and so did he.” She looked at me, and her eyes were wet. “I’m so sorry. I should have said something. I’ve wanted to say something every day since. But I was twenty-seven and I had a mortgage, and who would’ve listened? A girl from a doctor’s front desk, against a name like yours?”

“You’re saying it now.”

“I’m saying it now.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, quickly, almost angrily. “There’s something else. It’s the reason I kept the box.”

“What box?”

She stood, went to the shelves behind her, and reached up to the top of a bookcase where a cardboard archive box sat under a layer of dust. She’d obviously put it there herself. She lifted it down with both hands, set it in front of me, and lifted the lid.

“When he left,” she said, “I was supposed to shred everything. I was told to. But it didn’t feel right. I thought, if somebody ever comes asking, I want to be able to put something in their hands.” She rummaged and pulled out a single sheet in a plastic sleeve. “A photocopy. I made it the night he rang me in. He left the original on his desk to be filed and I thought, no, I’ll keep this one.”

She slid it across the table.

It was a payment authorization. A form on cheap bank letterhead, the sort that gets stamped and filed and forgotten. Vance Enterprise Holdings. Reserve Account. A reference number. An amount with a great many zeros. Under the heading, Purpose: Professional Services Retainer, and below it, two lines, side by side, for Authorised Signatory.

The left-hand signature was a scrawl I couldn’t read, a quick ugly thing, all angles. A name I’d need a lawyer or a magnifying glass to decipher.

I looked at the right-hand one.

I’ve signed my name perhaps a million times. On cheques, on contracts, on the back of a hospital wing’s first brick. I know its shape better than I know my own face. The tall L with the hook at the top, like a shepherd’s crook. The V that dips a little too low on the left. The long flat tail on the final e, trailing off like a man leaving a room.

Lachlan Vance.

It was perfect. It was so perfect that for one wild moment I thought, I must have signed it. I must have been tired, and drunk on work, and somebody put a page in front of me, and I made my mark like I do a hundred times a week.

Then I saw the date. And I saw that on that day, at that hour, according to my own diary, I was on a plane to Singapore.

I didn’t sign it. I never saw it. I’d never in my life been in the same room as that page.

But somebody had sat down and learned my hand until they could write it better than I could. Somebody who’d seen my signature a thousand times. Somebody who knew the hook on the L, and the dip in the V, and how the e tails off at the end.

Somebody close enough to my life to know all that. Somebody who’d been standing in my house the whole time.