by Mairi Chong
‘What did the paramedics think it was?’ Cathy asked.
Alex finally met her gaze, having watched the ambulance reverse and then move away. His eyes were a cool grey. ‘Cathy, I don’t want to be over the top, and I didn’t want to say it to them, but I think she’s got a very serious drink problem.’
Cathy stared at him. ‘Oh?’
‘She was fine today though. She’s been buzzing around the place all morning, to be fair. I’ve known for a while that she drinks too much. It’s been obvious since she started working here three or four months ago. She’d come in half-cut some days, not that the rest of them probably noticed. Stinking of it. She’s been at my place too. Arrived with bottles of vodka. Very troubled girl. Honestly, I don’t know what brought her to Glainkirk in the first place. She’s like a fish out of water. Incredibly smart. None of us knows a thing about her. I liked her though. There was something candid. Innocent, I suppose, although she could be a brat.’
‘You’re talking in the past tense.’
Alex smiled slightly. ‘You always were sharp, Cathy. I’m so glad that you turned up again. Slip of the tongue. I hope she’ll be fine. She’s young after all, only in her twenties. Whatever is wrong with her, at least she has age on her side.’
Cathy nodded. ‘So, she just arrived in Glainkirk a few months ago?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said, now looking calmer. ‘She was a feisty little menace at times. Caused mayhem in the shop and irritated the hell out of Carol, purely out of devilment, it seemed. Carol won’t miss her while she’s in hospital, that’s for sure, nor will Tricia, for that matter. Always winding them up.’
‘How was she with Betty?’ Cathy asked, not knowing quite why she did so.
Alex looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Funny,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘She took it quite badly; Betty’s death, as it happens. Adopted almost a vigilante role really, trying to find out what had caused the old woman’s death. That was why she turned up at my door. Wanted to thrash out some ideas about who might have been the culprit.’
‘And who did she suspect?’ Cathy asked, hardly daring to breathe.
‘Oh, just about everyone in the shop, but then she was like that. She had a good imagination and could come up with a tale to fit all of them. She will have no doubt suspected me too, I imagine.’ Alex laughed. ‘It got far worse, I suppose, after Neil’s story about Fernibanks just before Christmas. She was sure that it linked back to the old hospital and the tragedy up there.’
‘Alex,’ Cathy said seriously. ‘We need to talk about this. About all of it. What was she doing before she fell ill today?’
He laughed, but his eyes didn’t smile. ‘Rummaging around in the skip out the back. Said she’d lost a ring, although I must say, I never saw her wearing one.’
Cathy raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment. ‘Are you still OK to meet up later?’ she said instead. ‘I need to get back to the surgery just now. I flew out of the place with no explanation.’
Alex nodded. ‘Thanks, Cathy. I appreciate … Well, you know.’
Between patients, she rang up A and E to enquire after the girl Holly. It was Suzalinna’s senior registrar who spoke with her, a man called Brodie who she had met a couple of times on nights out with her friend.
‘What do you think then?’ she asked. ‘I have heard that she is a heavy drinker, but other than that, she’s not bothered to register with the practice since moving to the area approximately four months ago. She was a volunteer at the charity shop and lived alone, but that’s about all I know. I’ll be speaking with someone who may have known her more intimately later on, so I’ll ask him about her history.’
‘We suspected from her lab results that alcohol was an issue. It explains the deranged liver function, No, it’s renal function that’s worrying us though, Cathy. I’m getting her transferred up to the unit in the next hour if she goes off any more. She’s acidotic. Very.’
‘Do you think she’s taken something?’
‘She’s drifting in and out. Very sedated. Yes, that’s my suspicion. Overdose. You know how long the poisons stuff takes to come back though. We’ll treat her symptomatically until we know. Her temperature’s high, and when she arrived, she was in sinus tachy. We’ve slowed that down a bit at least.’
‘QRS interval?’
‘Ha, yes, you’re right. That was our inclination too. It would be nice to know if she was taking tricyclics at a prescribed dose, or if she was completely naive to them.’
‘Is that what you’re going with then? Antidepressant overdose?’
‘For now, it has to be.’
‘No sign of her regaining consciousness yet?’ Cathy asked, but Brodie snorted.
‘Not a chance for now,’ he said. ‘If you do happen to hear any more about her home situation, can you let us know, Cathy? She’ll have been moved upstairs by then, but call switchboard. Oh, and if you can get hold of any family …’
Cathy promised that she would try. She spent the rest of the afternoon attending to her patients having called through to Linda to thank her for covering earlier.
She had already called the police station. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t best pleased to hear from her so soon again. But what else could she do? She suggested that they nip down to the charity shop and take a look in the skip in case the girl who now lay unconscious, had found something. Cathy explained that someone from the shop had suddenly been taken seriously unwell but as yet she had no details. She supposed that the police would call the hospital and find out more themselves. Things had been decidedly quiet since Thomas had been run over and Cathy wondered in what direction their leads were taking them. Admittedly, it had only been a week since Betty had been killed, but so much had happened since then. Cathy thought of the young girl now lying on the renal ward. A possible tricyclic antidepressant overdose. The drugs were used less often nowadays for depression, but, occasionally, Cathy found them still being prescribed and had recommended them herself as a last resort. If only they knew more about this Holly girl, then things might make more sense. Cathy was sure that Holly was far more involved than they already knew. She had a sickening suspicion that if someone was going to overdose, they would hardly choose to do it when they were at work. It seemed likely, to her at least, that this stranger to the town, Holly, had been targeted. First Thomas Hogg, and now her. Both had known too much, and both had been silenced, although, Cathy hoped, not for long.
‘James, have you got a minute?’ she asked, tapping on his door and going in.
James looked up from his notes, his pen poised. ‘Cathy, whatever’s wrong? Come in and sit down.’ He got up and ushered her to a seat, and then closed the door behind her. ‘Well?’ he asked, his eyes smiling. ‘Was the afternoon that bad? I saw that you had to dash out? Anything serious?’
Cathy looked at her partner. He was so much older and wiser than she. He had seen so many people come and go and had cared for so many of them. ‘James,’ Cathy said. ‘I’m not happy about Betty Scott’s death.’
Her partner grimaced. ‘Well,’ he said half-laughing. ‘Join the club, Cathy. No one in the town’s happy about it. I assume you’ve heard the latest; that she was hit on the head before being left to die by the railway line? You’re certainly not alone in being unhappy. And I also heard that Thomas Hogg is now in hospital, although I had assumed that the police were charging him.’
Cathy shook her head. ‘No, oh no, James. It wasn’t Thomas that killed her, although he may know more about it than he thinks he does. His mother was an inpatient up at Fernibanks. I saw it in the notes. I think that’s why he was run over. The police released him without charge. I think he was targeted after that. It’s commonly known that he was shouting and singing about knowing who the murderer was that night in the pub, although he was probably lying. He potentially knows something though, but what it is, I don’t understand.’
‘Cathy, you’re talking in riddles,’ James sighed.
‘I know, I know,’ she said sadly.
The pair of them sat for some moments in silence.
‘James,’ Cathy finally said, as if coming to her senses. ‘Did you manage to get in touch with that old medical school friend for me?’
‘Eric?’ James asked. He leaned back in his chair. ‘I did. I would have spoken with you earlier, but I’ve been concerned.’
‘Oh?’ Cathy asked. ‘What about?’
‘You,’ he said seriously. ‘You’re burning yourself out again. Won’t you let this all drop and leave it to the police?’ Cathy’s look must have spoken volumes because he sighed. ‘I’ll tell you then. It’s not a pretty tale I’m afraid, but Eric did remember about it only too well. It was the end of the old psychiatric hospital. A good twenty years ago. A fire broke out in one of the buildings. It happened overnight, and no one was alerted until early the next day. By then, the building was simply a burnt-out shell. They found a body. One of Eric’s colleagues had perished inside. He was a lead psychiatrist and well-respected. It came as a blow to the medical world. Thankfully, he was the only fatality and no patients died. As I say, it pretty much signalled the end of the place. It was run down before, of course, but following that, I suppose the health and safety folk started poking about and they found that the rest of it was about as bad. Poor electrics and cracks in the walls. You can imagine.’
‘A tragedy, like you say,’ Cathy thought aloud. She was still confused as to how the accident might fit in with Betty’s death and the attempted murder of Thomas Hogg. ‘I still don’t see though,’ she said. She looked at James. ‘That’s not all, is it?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ James confessed, ‘that was what everyone on the outside knew. Eric told me a good deal more.’ He licked his bottom lip as if stalling for time before reluctantly continuing. ‘The doctor, it seems, although well-thought-of in his younger years, had begun with some research project or other that hadn’t been cleared by an ethics committee. He had been fixated on the idea that electric shock treatments might be of use to treat a whole host of ailments. You know, it’s still very useful even now for select cases?’
Cathy nodded.
‘Eric said that much of what this psychiatrist had been up to, only came out after his death. The man had kept meticulous notes, but his thinking was quite flawed. He used the shock treatment extensively on several patients; depression cases, anxiety, even on the learning-disabled. Naturally, it was covered up, especially when they found that he was experimenting with trying the treatment on non-sedated patients, something that would have been absurd.’
‘Oh God, James, how horrible.’
James nodded. ‘It had to be hushed up of course.’
‘Well, I had expected something, but not that,’ Cathy said. ‘If one of those patients was still alive now, they might well feel a good deal of anger, not only towards the man who had done the experiments but perhaps the matron who could just have conceivably turned a blind eye to it.’ Cathy thought of her recent visit to Thomas Hogg’s poor mother, Flora. She recalled the woman’s distress when she heard that Cathy was a doctor. ‘Oh James, it makes me feel quite sick.’
‘Stop thinking about it,’ James advised, crossing his arms. ‘The police will find out the person responsible. You’ll only make yourself ill.’
Cathy grunted. ‘You sound like my father.’
The older man smiled. ‘I do rather see it that way sometimes.’
Cathy hesitated at the door. ‘James? Did your friend say if the psychiatrist was married? Did he leave anyone behind? Children?’
James’s brow wrinkled. ‘I didn’t ask about a wife or family. I assume not. Eric mentioned something about a couple of rather unsavoury allegations. Apparently, he wasn’t the most respectful when it came to women.’
‘Verbally or physically?’
James looked grave. ‘Sexually,’ he said.
Cathy was aghast. ‘Oh, God. As if his experiments weren’t bad enough!’
‘Listen, this is all second- or third-hand though. All old gossip and none of it is relevant today. The man died in what sound like horrible circumstances. If he was inappropriate …’
‘With patients, James? Had he assaulted a patient?’
James sighed. ‘This has to stop, Cathy. You’re driving yourself mad.’
When Cathy left the room, she stood in the corridor for some time thinking. Had Betty known about the dreadful psychiatrist? Had she seen what he was doing, experimenting on his patients? Even turning a blind eye would be enough to enrage his victims. In consulting her, Cathy wondered if the old woman had spoken out in fear, knowing that she was at risk. Had the original killer been reminded of the dreadful injustice all those years ago, and finding Betty still lording it up behind the till, had they then decided to take matters into their own hands once again? Had they set fire to the old psychiatric place, killing their tormentor all those years ago? Had they then decided that the business was still unfinished? Cathy felt even more determined after what she had learned from James. There was someone out there, intent on covering up their crimes, and it seemed that they would stop at nothing to do so.
29
Alex was waiting for her outside the shop. ‘I should have met you at the house,’ he said. ‘Then, we could have gone together from there. I would have offered to drive but the car’s in the garage.’
Cathy told him it didn’t matter.
‘It’s an odd first date,’ Alex said and caught her eye as if checking he hadn’t overstepped the mark. ‘Oh Hell, I’ve not signed out. Can you wait a second? Carol’ll go nuts if I don’t.’
He dived into the shop once more but was soon sitting in the passenger seat once again, grinning. ‘Sorry. Think it’s to do with fire regulations. They need to know how many people are in the place at one time. Are you really sure you want to do this? I mean, I’m sure you have your reasons.’
Cathy smiled. She checked over her shoulder that no traffic was coming, and pulled out into the road. ‘I promise we’ll talk more after. I know it seems strange, but I have to do this first. You’ve heard about your friend Holly, I assume?’
‘She’s gone up to the renal unit, they said to me. Wanted to know if I knew anything more about her, but of course, I don’t know a thing,’ Alex said.
Cathy smiled slightly as they drove, knowing that perhaps his plea of ignorance was too forceful. She had no claim on Alex though, and it was none of her business if he had been seeing this mysterious Holly. She wondered why he wanted to distance himself from her so greatly.
Cutting into her thoughts, Alex told her that it was the next left. ‘I always look out for the tree,’ he said. They drew level with a sycamore, and he said that they should park up and walk. ‘It’s that one there,’ he said, pointing to the house. ‘The last time I came was for his wife’s birthday. He said he needed moral support. That was a year ago though. He’ll get a bit of a surprise seeing us.’
They came in line with the hedge that bordered the garden. It had been trimmed and was quite sparse. The house itself was one of the more substantial properties in the area. Symmetrical and pleasing to the eye, and made of old, solid stone. As they walked up the path, a light came on by the front door. Cathy looked at Alex.
‘I feel a bit funny all of a sudden,’ she confessed.
‘He’s alright actually. He’ll spin you a good story though, so get ready.’
He pressed the bell. From somewhere deep within the house it sounded, shrill and harsh. Cathy grimaced as she heard footsteps and then, against the now-lit hallway inside, she saw the man’s figure approaching. The front door was ajar, leaving the porch open. The glass panel of the inner door distorted his uneven gait, making a grotesque caricature.
When Neil opened the door, he was indeed taken aback. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, but almost immediately, he remembered himself and stepped sideways. ‘You’d better come in then, hadn’t you?’
‘It’s just a flying visit, Neil,’ Alex said, standing aside to allow Cathy to go first. ‘We don’
t want to disturb you.’
‘A house call from the doctor?’ Neil asked, smirking.
‘In a way,’ Cathy said as they were led through to the high-ceilinged living room.
Neil waved them to sit. ‘All alone this evening too. Roslyn’s gone out. Bingo,’ he explained shaking his head. ‘Nice to have a bit of peace.’
He offered them drinks, listing hot and cold beverages to no avail. Cathy would be glad to find out the information and go. She didn’t take any great pleasure in prying into other people’s business, especially when it was a sensitive subject such as this.
‘So, Alex, what can I do for the pair of you? I certainly wasn’t expecting this, and after all of the hullabaloo at the shop today too. I saw you arrived as one of our volunteers was being carted off, Doctor. I wondered if she was your patient. History of this sort of trouble, was there? Overdoses and the like? She was an unstable character, to say the least, but no doubt Alex has filled you in as he knew her so well.’ The old man covered his mouth in mock horror. ‘Sorry Alex, hope I’ve not put my foot in it.’
Cathy went to speak, but Alex answered for her. ‘There was nothing I could tell Cathy in particular, and she wouldn’t tell you if she was Holly’s doctor anyway, Neil. Confidentiality, you should know that.’
The older man nodded and smiled. ‘Of course, of course. Well, what can I do for you then, there must be a reason for this unexpected pleasure?’
‘I wanted to ask for a bit of information, as it happens, Neil. It might seem like an awful cheek, but I don’t think I’m breaching anyone’s privacy in telling you that I had heard that you told a story which caused a bit of a stir in the charity shop not long before Betty died.’
Neil looked from Alex to her, clearly unsure what she meant. Cathy watched the man closely and saw the moment of realisation.
‘You mean about the fire, I assume?’ he asked.
Cathy nodded.
‘Well,’ Neil said leaning back in his armchair, clearly readying himself for a good yarn. ‘I don’t know that it has any bearing on the oddities that have been going on in Glainkirk recently.’