Nor All Your Tears by Keith McCarthy

have a nice time.’
    He smiled. ‘Thank you, Lance. I think I will.’
    With which slightly gnomic remark, we parted.

FOURTEEN
    I ’ve never been entirely sure why I decided to become a police surgeon; I hate being on call – it had always been the worst aspect of medicine for me – yet this entirely voluntarily (albeit paid) duty involved a lot of the bloody stuff. I suppose part of it was because my father had been one in his day and I rather love him; when I announced my decision to him, I was unaccountably moved almost to tears that he was so delighted. If I’m honest (which I try not to be and, as a doctor, tend not to be out of habit) part of it too was the money, and part of it was stupidity because we had just amalgamated with the London Road practice, so that the on-call rota had gone from one in three to one in seven; as a consequence of all this I had thought, Why not?
    Anyway, whatever the reason, the phone rang that Saturday night and I knew immediately that it wasn’t Dad telling me how bracing the weather was down in Brighton. ‘Dr Elliot?’
    It was Sergeant Abelson; she sounded bored. I, however, could have done without being called out; not that I was doing much, what with Max having disappeared two hours before because of a Great Dane with a brain tumour. ‘I was last time I checked.’
    â€˜I’m afraid we need your help, Dr Elliot.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜At the central nick in Croydon.’
    â€˜What’s the problem?’ Usually it was drunk drivers.
    â€˜One of our customers is complaining of chest pains.’
    Which could mean anything, from complete fakery (far from unknown) to injuries unavoidably obtained when ‘resisting arrest’ (also, lamentably, far from unknown). I looked at my watch. ‘Give me half an hour.’
    â€˜No hurry,’ she assured me.
    Bruce Forsyth was doing what only he could do – making an imbecilic game show interesting and not making the contestants look undignified – but duty called. I was halfway through eating with some delight something I had recently discovered – ‘Toast Toppers’ (strangely, Dad had looked at me with some despair when I had informed him of my epiphany) – but in no time at all I had polished these off, and then I was on my way. The traffic was light and the tarmac at least beginning to harden up as I drove into the centre of Croydon, along Wellesley Road and into Park Lane; I had special dispensation and parked in the police station’s ample car park beside a heavily armoured police van. There was still plenty of light, although there was all about the late evening’s crepuscular remnant of a hot day’s dust, the kind that seems to hide more than it reveals, that seems to suffocate. The central police station had never been a particularly beautiful building – red-brick, rectangular, old before it was born, and possessing only the character of characterlessness. The entrance hall smelled of disinfectant; it might have been my imagination but I had the impression that it masked a faint tang of vomitus; at which, I suddenly wondered if it was poo. It wasn’t that many years since the foundation stone of the imposing headquarters of the Croydon stretch of the thin blue line had first been laid but, internally at least, the constant battering and physical abuse from the less than enthusiastic customers had left their marks; there were holes in the wall caused either by fists or toecaps, while the once pristine magnolia emulsion was badly scuffed and covered in what I can only describe as an ‘interesting and thought-provoking’ variety of graffiti (much of which was most appallingly spelt and gave me scant optimism in the Labour government’s faith in comprehensive education).
    Having presented my credentials, I was forced to wait for fifteen minutes in the company of a drunken gentleman of the road who possessed