Free You Are Dead by Peter James Page A

was a spacious, imposing consulting room on the ground floor of a rather ugly Victorian terrace, close to Church Road in Hove, with a tiny adjoining room for his secretary, Jenni Acton. She was fifty-seven, unmarried, and had worked for him with slavish devotion for twenty years.
    The room, as did his immaculate outfit, reflected his particular passion for neatness and order. His qualifications hung in a row, uniformly framed and uniformly impressive. In addition to being a general practitioner, he held qualifications in immunology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, homeopathy, Chinese medicine and acupuncture, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He had in fact qualified as a surgeon before deciding that working as a family doctor with an exclusive private practice suited him better. And his legion of private patients were glad about that, because he was widely liked and popular, to the extent that his list had been closed for many years, and he would only take on new patients by very special criteria.
    One such new patient, Freya Northrop, perched nervously on the edge of one of the two oak and leather chairs in front of his tidy, leather-topped desk, while he talked very charmingly and calmly to someone called Maxine on the other end of the phone. She was clearly distressed about her mother, who sounded, from what Freya could glean, terminally ill and in her last weeks.
    The only clue about the doctor’s private life was a silver frame on his desk, containing a posed studio photograph of an attractive brunette in her mid-forties with mirror-image beautiful teenage daughters on either side against a sky-blue background. All of them were laughing at some joke cracked, presumably, by the professional photographer.
    While he continued talking, making a promise to try to get the woman’s mother admitted into the Martlets Hospice, Freya Northrop stared around the room. Most doctors’ offices she had been in before were pretty nondescript. But this one was really rather grand, and it had more the feel of museum than a workplace. The wall just to her left displayed photographs and portraits of great medical pioneers; one she recognized as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, and another, the pioneer of X-rays, Marie Curie, with all their names and brief bios in small frames at their bases. Further along was a row of framed copies of Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings.
    There was a display case full of model human skulls. Next to them, and standing tall and proud as if presiding over the room, was a human skeleton on a plinth. It partially blocked the view from the office’s one window, with Venetian blinds that were open, looking out onto a parking area at the rear of the building.
    The doctor made a note on a pad on his desk with a black Montegrappa pen, then typed something on his computer, all the time continuing to try to reassure the woman called Maxine on the other end.
    There were several busts on plinths around the room, adding to the museum-like feel. Freya gazed at one, a man with a curiously elliptical-shaped bald dome and a beard that looked like flames.
    â€œFirst do no harm!” The doctor’s tone had changed.
    Startled, Freya looked around and saw he had his hand cupped over the mouthpiece of the phone and was addressing her, with an almost childlike twinkle of humor.
    â€œDo no harm?” she replied.
    â€œHippocrates! The fellow you’re looking at. Bit of a wise old owl. The Hippocratic Oath all medics around the world take, swearing to practice medicine honestly, and all sorts of related stuff. Actually, it wasn’t Hippocrates who said ‘Do No Harm,’ it was a nineteenth-century surgeon, Thomas Inman.”
    â€œAh!”
    â€œWon’t keep you a second.” He pointed at the phone. “I have a very worried and upset lady, just need to wait for her to speak to her mother. Yes, Hippocrates!”
    The doctor,