‘You could stick in a bit of both.’
‘It’s so difficult, you’ve no idea. I spent three hours last night trying to come up with something but everything sounded either totally boring or horribly pretentious.’
‘How long does it have to be?’ I took another satisfying swallow of beer.
‘They said up to two hundred words.’
‘You could try keeping it really short.’
‘What, like “Diane Davis lives in Rusholme”?’
I grinned.
‘What do people really want to know?’ She threw her hands wide as she asked the question. ‘I mean, if you go to an exhibition, you can see the work, what more would you want to know about the artist?’
I thought for a moment, took a swig from my glass, frowned in concentration. ‘How many cats they’ve got and if they do crochet.’
‘Sod off.’
Over our next drink I told Diane about the case of the dodgy tablets.
‘Someone’s for the high jump then. What a cock-up. Reminds me of those awful stories about keeping weed-killer in pop bottles.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ I muttered.
‘Bit embarrassing, eh? Use the family firm and they give you seriously shoddy goods. You reckon this doctor’s in on it, then?’
‘I’m sure he is, but it’s just a gut feeling. I can’t find a reason for him to be deliberately overdosing patients, in fact some of the patients he had transferred to Kingsfield weren’t even on medication. He seems to have pretty easy access for his patients to the Marion Unit there – his brother-in-law is the consultant.’
‘All in the family. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours?’
‘Possibly. You wouldn’t think they could get away with it, what with all these reforms and the Patient’s Charter and all that. And the bottom line is the woman’s got advanced Alzheimer’s anyway. She was ill in spite of the tablets, not because of them.’
‘But they can’t have helped.’
‘Oh, no. Moira reckoned they would have made anyone demented, especially when mixed with other drugs.’
‘Do you think he’ll get away with it, then, that sort of negligence?’
I nodded. ‘Unless something else crops up he’s home free. Everything points to the chemist, who will probably be suspended or whatever they do. I don’t think there’s much to be done about the doctor using samples from Malden’s – free market and all that. Anyway the police are looking into it now. And I need to find some more work.’
‘You could run an ad again,’ Diane suggested.
‘Yeah. It’s about time I did something like that.’
‘Hey, you could make one of those ads for the cinema, you know, stick it in with the ones about local jewellers and car dealers.’
‘Oh, spare me, please.’