Chameleon Read online

  Chameleon

  Ken Mcclure

  Ken McClure

  Chameleon

  PROLOGUE

  Gail Spooner smoothed the front of her skirt and evened her lipstick by pursing her lips several times as she saw the car slow down. She had been expecting it, because the same Ford Orion was on its third 'lap' of the area. It drew to a halt and she switched on her smile. Stepping out from the shadows, she walked over to the car and rested her elbow on the car's roof as she bent down to speak to the driver through the open window. 'Hello there,' she said as if he were an old friend. The driver leaned across to open the passenger door and said, 'Get in.'

  'Oh, the masterful kind,' said Gail getting in and swinging her legs round to expose the maximum amount of stockinged thigh. 'I like a man who knows what he wants.' She turned to look at the driver and found no smile on his face. 'God, you're not the police are you?' she asked nervously.

  'No. Where do we go?'

  'The car park at the back of Tesco's. It's nice and dark there and no one will bother us.'

  'No, not in the car.'

  'I've got a place but it's going to cost you.'

  'How much?'

  'Forty five. More if you want extras.'

  'Extras?'

  'You know, if I have to dress up or do anything…'

  'What do you mean?'

  Gail said, 'It's all right, I'm not criticising. You can tell me what turns you on. Anything goes as long as it doesn't hurt.'

  'No, nothing like that.'

  'Right then, we'll have ourselves a little party shall we? How about a drink first?'

  'No drink. Where do we go?'

  'My place is in Spicer's Row. It's a studio flat, an attic really but it's cosy.'

  The car crept through the dark streets and glided to a halt at the junction between Barton Road and Spicer's Row.

  'We'll walk from here.'

  'Please yourself.'

  The couple walked down Spicer's Row and turned into a darkened doorway to wait while Gail fumbled in her handbag. The rattle of a lipstick against a powder compact continued intermittently until it gave way to a more metallic sound as she found her keys. She reached up to insert her door key in the lock with her bag held awkwardly under her arm. Curtains moved and a face looked out from a ground floor window to their left.

  'Nosey old cow!' hissed Gail.

  The man looked away to the right and drew his collar up. Gail thought nothing of the gesture. She was used to men being ill at ease at being seen with her; pulled-up collars and furtive looks over the shoulder were all part of the job.

  Gail led the way up a flight of winding wooden stairs which creaked badly. She stopped half way up to turn and say, ''You haven't touched my bum. They all touch my bum when I climb these stairs. You've got a bit of class. I like that.'

  The man just grunted in reply and they climbed to the top where Gail opened a door and clicked on the light. They entered and she switched on a fan heater which rattled intermittently and filled the room with the smell of burning dust from elements which had not been used for some time. Gail took off her jacket and threw it casually on the bed. She placed her hands on the man's shoulders and smiled up at him, saying seductively, 'Let's enjoy ourselves shall we?'

  Ignoring her, the man looked about him. A slight sneer played on his lips as he looked at the posters on the wall. They were mainly of film and pop stars but there was a large travel poster for the Greek islands. 'Have you been there?' he asked.

  'Not yet,' Gail replied.

  The man looked at her without expression for a moment before continuing with his inspection of the room.

  'It's not much but it's home,' said Gail with a small forced laugh. The man did not smile.

  Interpreting the man's silence as possible shyness Gail smiled and took a step backwards to begin taking off her clothes. She did it with the confidence of a woman sure of her ability to arouse men. When she was down to her underwear she turned sideways and simpered coyly, 'Perhaps you would like to help me with the rest?'

  'Lie down.'

  'So you are the masterful kind,' smiled Gail, spread-eagling herself on the bed and putting her hands behind her head.

  There were a series of ribbons tied to the end of the bed. The man took them lightly in his hand and let them run through his fingers as if captivated by the sensation.

  'So that's what you like… Well, why not?' Gail held up her wrists and said in a husky whisper, 'Tie me. Tie me up and then I'll be completely at your mercy. Would you like that?'

  The man smiled for the first time and Gail took this as a sign of success in figuring out her client. She simpered professionally as the man secured each wrist to a corner of the bed and then removed two more of the ribbons to start working on her ankles. Gail giggled and said, 'Don't you think you should take off my panties first?' She said it like a shy schoolgirl but the man behaved as if he hadn't heard and finished securing her. He stood up to admire his handiwork and Gail pretended to struggle a little against her bonds. 'You've got me now,' she whispered. 'What are you going to do to me?'

  Beads of sweat appeared along the man's top lip and the muscle in his left cheek quivered slightly as he muttered something in what Gail thought was a foreign language. ''Here what are you talking about?' she asked, her voice suddenly taking on a degree of uncertainty.

  The man held Gail's gaze while he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a velvet cloth. He unwrapped it carefully and removed a metal object to hold it up before her. 'Do you know what this is?' he asked. There was a hoarse quality about his voice.

  Gail's eyes were wide with fear. 'It's a knife,' she stammered. 'It's one of these knives doctors use…' Terror had tightened her throat and made her voice sound strained. She watched helplessly as the man brought the blade down slowly towards her skin. He paused and then cut away her bra straps cleanly. He removed the material before tracing the flat of the blade gently to and fro down and across her stomach before cutting away the rest of her underwear.

  A distant smile appeared on the man's face and Gail found her voice. 'Steady on, they cost me a fortune,' she joked nervously. 'They're French.'

  The man looked at her as if lost in a dream but then suddenly his eyes hardened. Gail's fear turned to terror. She opened her mouth to scream but the man covered it with his hand and brought his face down close to hers. 'You're right,' he whispered. 'It's a knife that doctors use…’

  ONE

  'How do you feel?' Sue Jamieson asked her husband.

  Scott Jamieson looked up at the pretty girl who was smiling down at him, her head slightly to one side. 'Amorous,' he said.

  'Be serious.'

  'I am serious.'

  'You're not on,' laughed Sue.

  'Come back to bed.'

  'There isn't time. You can't be late for your interview,' she said sitting down on the edge of the bed and ruffling her husband's dark hair.

  'Of course there's time,' said Scott Jamieson. He circled his arm round Sue and pulled her down on top of him but she remained adamant. 'There isn't!' she said putting both hands against his chest to fend him off.

  Jamieson relaxed his grip and smiled. 'I love you,' he said softly.

  'I know you do and I love you,' said Sue. 'But right now… shower!'

  'You win,' conceded Jamieson swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Sue looked at the scars on his body as he sat up and kissed his shoulder on impulse. 'Change your mind?' he asked.

  'Get on with you,' she said. 'I'll get breakfast.'

  Jamieson turned on the shower with his right hand and felt a sudden, sharp twinge of pain in his fingers that made him draw back with a soft curse. He stretched his fingers out and examined them as he had done a thousand times before in the recent past but there
was nothing untoward to see, no disfigurement, no indication of misalignment, no obvious reason why he should not hold a scalpel again if it were not for a residual stiffness that prevented him keeping perfect control of it. Give it time Jamieson, he reminded himself and immediately felt pleased at his new-found philosophical attitude.

  It was a view he could not have expressed in the early months of his recovery when a mixture of frustration, self pity and blind anger had ruled his head and made him almost insufferable to live with. But Sue had never wavered. From the time of the accident she had been a tower of strength, nursing him through the physical pain and then the mental anguish that followed. It had even been her who had made him face up to the obvious — that he should at least think about changing specialties, an idea he had found abhorrent at first but had eventually come round to considering and finally to giving it a try.

  A change to pathology had been the first idea to be mooted but a career among cadavers and the sweet, sickly smell of formaldehyde had held little attraction. Too many of the pathologists he knew were well on the way to alcoholism and he could understand why. For him, medicine was about saving lives not finding out why they had failed. He knew that this was a ridiculously simplistic view of things but white tiles and the stench of death were not for him.

  That had left radiology and the lab specialties, haematology, biochemistry and microbiology. In all, Jamieson had spent eighteen months trying to find a new niche in medicine but in the end he had admitted defeat. His academic performance in refresher and re-training courses had been beyond reproach but once the challenge of learning something new had receded he had been left with an undeniable feeling of restlessness that he suspected the laboratory specialties could never satisfy. He was temperamentally unsuited to them, having known the excitement and challenge of surgery too well.

  Jamieson had reached the point of considering leaving medicine altogether and joining his father's business when one of the consultants on his last re-training course had persuaded him to let him put his name forward for a job he thought Jamieson well-suited for. He was unwilling to say exactly what the job would be, only that it would not be ordinary and that it would not be a desk job. Agreeing finally that he had nothing to lose by applying, Jamieson was invited to attend for interview at the Home Office.

  Scott Jamieson was thirty-three, eight years older than Sue. He had been brought up in the Scottish border town of Galashiels, a mill town that nestled on the banks of the River Tweed in soft, rolling countryside. The eldest son of a successful mill owner, Jamieson had been educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh like his father before him. Blessed with an easy charm and both physical and scholastic ability, he had sailed through his school years and in the process, acquired the confidence of someone who had never known anything other than success.

  A down to earth father and the level headedness of the border folk who were his friends and neighbours had prevented this confidence from ever fermenting into arrogance. It was one thing to be captain of rugby at school quite another to take the field with the rugby- mad border teams on a Saturday afternoon. Self-opinionation had a habit of coming to grief in border mud.

  From school Jamieson had gone on to Glasgow University to study medicine after taking a year out to work in his father's mill. Although he had enjoyed the experience of working in the mill, he knew that the life was not for him and had been relieved when his father had not seemed too disappointed when he told him as much. The fact that he had two younger brothers probably helped.

  At university, he made the first mistake of his young life when he underestimated the demands of first year medicine and spent too much time socialising when he should have been studying. He had come close to failing the exams but scraped through and was careful not to make the same mistake again. He eventually graduated in the top one third of his class. An elective at a Boston teaching hospital in the United States had been followed by residencies at two London hospitals and a decision to become a surgeon.

  He had met Sue, who was then a student nurse, during his appointment as surgical registrar at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge and, like so many men who had known a string of girl friends, Jamieson had fallen head over heels in love when the real thing happened. He had known at once that Sue was the girl he must marry and eight months later he did.

  Sue's father, a Surrey stockbroker, had given them a splendid wedding in the village where Sue had been brought up. They were married in the Norman village Church on a beautiful sunny day with Scott and his brothers adding colour to the gentle green of English grass by wearing full highland dress. Tartan had mingled easily with taffeta and champagne had sparkled in glasses shaded by floppy hats as both families and a host of relations celebrated the wedding of a golden couple whose horizons seemed unbounded.

  Ironically it was Jamieson's unfamiliarity with any kind of failure that had made him so unable to cope with it after the car accident. He was unconscious for nearly two weeks and very weak when he finally did come round but as soon as his strength started to return he felt sure that it would only be a matter of a few weeks more before his life would return to normal. He would start operating again and resume his career path to the top. When it finally dawned on him that recovery was going to be a long, slow process and there was still a question mark over how complete it would be, he had started to behave with a petulance and ill temper that he had never displayed before.

  His general rudeness to the hospital staff and in particular to the people who cared about him most had been compounded with long periods of relentless self-pity, with suicide at its main theme. Throughout it all Sue had shown a maturity beyond her years and she had brought him through the darkest period of his life to accept what lay before him — before them as she had never tired of pointing out. She eventually succeeded in restoring Jamieson to a point where he became thoroughly ashamed of himself and of his insufferable behaviour. From this point on Jamieson had improved day by day until now when, although there was still a large question-mark over his professional future as a surgeon, he was definitely restored to her as her husband, the old Scott Jamieson.

  'Good luck,' said Sue as Jamieson turned at the door and kissed her on the cheek.

  'If they want me to catalogue bedpans I'm not taking the job is that understood?' said Jamieson.

  'Understood,' said Sue with a smile. 'But I'll get something special in for dinner just in case.' She stood in the road waving until the car had disappeared round the corner at the end of the lane.

  Scott Jamieson always had to steel himself to leave the peaceful Kent village where he and Sue lived go up into central London in July or August. It invariably made him short tempered with its crowds and oppressive heat when the sun shone. But today the sun did not shine and a dull greyness gave the buildings in the city a blanket anonymity as he drove to an underground car park behind Trafalgar Square and collected his ticket at the barrier. It was a slow, five minute spiral before he found a place being vacated by an elderly man. The man was having difficulty reversing due to an inability to turn his head properly. Each attempt was accompanied by a corresponding increase in engine revs until, when he had finally succeeded, the entire parking level was filled with drifting blue smoke.

  Jamieson locked up his car and sprinted up the stairs to begin his walk to Whitehall, weaving in and out groups of tourists who were moving along aimlessly and seldom looking in the direction in which they were travelling. He had to halt and make three attempts to pass a Japanese man, Nikon held to his face, moving synchronously with him each time he decided to change direction. The Japanese man's wife laid a hand on her husband's forearm and the impasse was resolved with an oriental bow and an occidental smile.

  A uniformed man stopped Jamieson at the entrance to the Home Office and Jamieson produced his letter. He waited patiently while the man read it and then announced that he would have to check. He made a phone call on the internal system and then said, 'Miss Roberts will be down presently.'
He invited Jamieson to take a seat and indicated to a bench in the hallway.

  Jamieson sat down and idly watched the pedestrian traffic. A serious young man, wearing glasses that threatened to fall off his nose, shuffled quickly along the corridor simultaneously sifting through a sheaf of papers. The man had feet which pointed outwards, giving him the air of a silent-film comedian. His inattention to direction caused him to collide with two girls carrying tea cups. The tea slopped on to the floor as the girls tottered backwards holding their cups at arms' length. The man looked up from his papers and appeared not to realise that he had been the cause of the bother. He smiled briefly and walked on leaving the typists looking daggers after him. Jamieson smiled sympathetically and one of the girls shook her head.

  Two men, wearing conservatively dark suits, approached from the other direction, speaking in loud voices and moving slowly. Jamieson noticed that the uniformed men stiffened at their approach.

  'Absolutely,' said one of the men as they passed Jamieson without apparently noticing he was there. 'That kind of authorisation can only come from the Minister himself.'

  Jamieson watched their backs as they passed the uniformed men without a glance, totally engrossed or pretending to be, in what they were saying. God save me from office society, he thought.

  A woman wearing a mauve suit emerged from one of the lifts and walked purposefully towards him; she was carrying a clip-board. 'Dr Jamieson?' she enquired. Jamieson agreed and the woman made a tick on her clip-board before saying, 'I'm Miss Roberts. If you would like to come this way please.'

  Jamieson and the woman exchanged a brief smile as their eyes met in the lift and then the woman studied her feet for the remainder of the journey while Jamieson looked intently at the floor indicator. He was in fact trying to remember the name of the perfume the woman was wearing. In the confines of the lift it was strong and for some reason, quite haunting. Femme! he remembered just before the lift doors opened. He now remembered why it was haunting. In his teens he had once had a holiday romance with a girl who subsequently drenched her letters in the stuff.