The Garden Party by Peter Turnbull Page A

in a lightweight summer jacket with baggy corduroy trousers. The man would be carrying a khaki-coloured canvas knapsack over his right shoulder. The man would have been observed leaving the Royal London Hospital by a small door in the side of the building and then walking away with head down, shuffling gait, keeping himself closer to the walls of the buildings than to the road, and always, always being the one to move to one side when another foot passenger approached him. The observer would watch as the man halted outside the entrance to the public bar of a public house as if pondering whether to call in for a beer or two, and then, as if thinking the better of it, continued to shuffle along the pavement. By now the observer would think he was looking at a working man, unskilled or perhaps semi-skilled, who was making his way home after a day’s work. In fact, the observer would be looking at John Shaftoe, MD MRCP FRCPath.
    Shaftoe took the tube from Aldgate East to King’s Cross St Pancras and from there he took the overground suburban service to Brookmans Park. From Brookmans Park he walked from the railway station, over the railway bridge, passed the Brookman Pub and Restaurant on his left-hand side, a 1930s red brick roadhouse with a parade of shops to his right. He ambled into Bradmore Green and the beginning of leafy suburbia and put himself at the steady climb to take him into Brookmans Avenue, which was lined with detached houses, often with twin garages, and wide U-shaped ‘in-and-out’ driveways. He continued walking up the road noticing again how the homeowners’ cars, the Rolls-Royces, the Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches and Audis, were parked in the driveways of the houses and the more lowly cars of the domestic help, the Toyotas and the small Fords, were parked in the roadway. It was just not done for a home help to park their car in their employer’s driveway, but this was Brookmans Park, where even the domestics travel to work by car. Shaftoe followed the road as it bent round to the right and walked until he was near the top of the lane, whereupon he turned into a gravel-surfaced U-shaped driveway and let himself through the front door of the house. He was warmly greeted by his wife who told him she had prepared a cold supper for him, given the weather, to which he replied, ‘Champion, pet, just champion.’
    After a supper taken in the early evening, as was the custom in the north of England, John and Linda Shaftoe, both from Thurnscoe, pronounced, ‘Thurns-ku’, near Barnsley, and both children of Yorkshire coal miners, and both uncomfortable in well-set Hertfordshire, settled down for a quiet evening at home, enjoying each other’s warm company and speaking only to plan their next ‘base-touching trip’.
    â€˜Londoners are requested to make only essential use of water.’ The mantra, repeated frequently on the radio, ran through Penny Yewdall’s mind as she stood in the street outside her house cleaning her car; her small, red Vauxhall which she often said was ‘good enough for London but not any further’. She cleaned the lights and the windscreen, windows and the outside mirrors, but allowed the bodywork to remain unwashed. She stood back from the car as the sun settled and looked up and down Tusker Road and noted with pleasure that all the other motor cars parked in the street had the same badge of good citizenship displayed by their owners, not one being sparkling clean. She carried the soapy water back into her house and poured it on the small lawn at the rear of the building. Plants, she knew, did not like soapy water, but it was better than no water at all.

THREE
    T he two-tone grey phone on Harry Vicary’s desk warbled softly. He glanced out of his office window and the summer sky over London that morning as he let the phone ring twice before he picked it up leisurely.
    â€˜Detective Inspector Vicary, Murder and Serious Crime