Number Five by Colin Cotterill

Author:Colin Cotterill [Cotterill, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9786164560031
Publisher: Proglen
Published: 2018-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

*

Medici Pharmacy was a little alcove tucked into the unloved fashion lane at Tesco Supermarket. One of the two workers there wore a white coat which suggested she was a lot more important than she actually was. I climbed over the therapeutic paraphernalia to get to the counter.

“Medici Pharmacy, welcome,” said white coat. “How can I help you?”

I didn’t feel welcomed. Nor was I convinced she wanted to help me. I took the plastic bag, now inside a second, larger plastic bag, from my pack.

“Is that blood?” she asked.

You’d think a woman in a white coat would know the difference between blood and tomato sauce.

“No,” I said. “It’s sauce. My granddad’s a clumsy eater. He’s run out of his medication and he can’t remember what it was. Alzheimer’s. You know how it is. The sachet has the date on it.”

She took up her glasses and examined it.

“This was three months ago,” she said.

“Right. I was hoping you might have a record of the prescriptions you filled that day.”

She laughed.

“This isn’t that sort of pharmacy,” she said.

“The sort that fills prescriptions?”

“Right. We just sell medicine.”

“No connection to any doctors?”

“No.”

“How do you know what to recommend?”

“I’m a certified pharmacist.”

“Wow! I see. So, if my granddad came in here with bowel cancer, you’d know what tablets to give him?”

She glared at me.

“I’d prescribe something to ease his pain and suggest in the strongest terms that he visits a higher authority,” she said.

“Like a certified district nurse?”

“Look, I don’t…”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m drifting away from the point of my visit. I was hoping you might have a record of your sale of this medicine to my granddad on this date so I could repeat the order and… ease his pain.”

“I’d only have that sort of record if he was a member.”

“Of?”

“Of the global Medici Pharmacy Family,” she said. “Is he?”

“Most certainly.”

“Do you have his member card?”

“Err, no.”

“Never mind. Just give me his phone number and I can look up his membership number.”

“Sorry, I have dyscalculia. Can’t retain numbers, you know? But, how about you look up the sales for that day and -,”

“The sales of what?”

That Medici Pharmacy Family fondness was wearing thin.

“Whatever was in this sachet,” I said.

“It could have been any number of things,” she said. “What are his symptoms?”

“Illness,” I said. “General illness. He’s a walking compendium of medical conditions. If you show me the sales for that day I can probably recognize what he was suffering from around then.”

She looked at me mockingly and absolutely refused to let me browse the sales for the day in question which pretty much shut down our civil communication. So I did what I should have done in the first place. I phoned my brother-cum-sister Sissy in Chiang Mai and had her go through the Medici database. That girl could hack. While I waited for her to get back to me I had a mango blizzard in Dairy Queen. The woman in the white coat passed me by on her way to the

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