Deadly Diagnosis

by Mairi Chong

  As the flat was in darkness, and not wanting to turn on a light and draw attention to herself, Cathy switched on her mobile phone. She swung the screen display this way and that until she was familiar with her surroundings. The neighbour had been right in what he had assumed about Holly’s lack of pride in her short-term home. The place was a tip. Cathy moved through to the main living area, seeing books and clothes strewn everywhere, but few personal belongings other than these. There were no photographs and no ornaments at all. On the kitchen table, Cathy found Holly’s laptop, and beside it some papers and a notebook. She flicked through the pages, hoping to discover a name or address. She was shocked by what she read.

  It looked as if the girl had been jotting down thoughts on the murder. On the first piece of paper, she had written: ‘Numbers?’ This had been underlined and she had gone on: ‘Why so important? Speak to Thomas.’ Cathy didn’t understand where this line of inquiry was headed, so she moved on to the paper below. It appeared that Holly had been investigating each of the charity shop volunteers. Cathy read the line at the top of the page entitled: ‘Connections with Fernibanks. Reasons to Kill.’ Holly had documented Carol’s name first, and beside it; the girl had written: ‘Ex-social worker. Quit or dismissed? Why?’ Below Carol, came Tricia. Holly had scrawled: ‘Housewife? Possibly a psychiatric inpatient or nurse? How to access medical records? Would Marie know?’ Cathy didn’t know who Marie was, but she thought it was a useful nugget of information at least. Then it came to Neil, and it seemed that the girl had not heard about his connection to Fernibanks, because all she wrote was: ‘Idiot. Bigot. Antique dealer. Dodgy deals in shop.’ Cathy smiled despite the seriousness of what she was doing, feeling that this said a lot about both Neil and Holly. She came of course to Alex, as she knew she must, and almost didn’t want to read what it said. It seemed that the girl had done more research on him than on any of the others. Cathy straightened up, having read the words. She didn’t know what to make of it all. ‘Met. Police Division. PC dismissed. Gross misconduct. Unreasonable use of force.’

  Cathy stood rooted to the spot and frantically considered something Alex had said earlier that evening. Why it hadn’t occurred to her before, she didn’t know. She suddenly remembered his excuse for not driving that night. His car was in the garage. Why was it in the garage? Was it because he had been in an accident the night before last? Was it Alex who, having killed Betty after she unearthed the truth about his dismissal from the police and threatened to expose him, ran over poor Thomas Hogg in an attempt to silence him also? He must have been keen to frame the vulnerable man, knowing only too well that police suspicion might fall on him if he strategically left a trace of blood outside his house. Only Alex would have had the ingenuity and criminal knowhow. Suddenly, it all became so obvious. Who else had known vulnerable, odd Holly well enough to spike her drink and poison her? It could only be one person. How foolish and trusting she, Cathy had been. She had been so desperate to renew his acquaintance too.

  Just then, she heard a noise from the bathroom and turning, she saw Alex standing in the doorway. He looked across at her quizzically. Cathy’s mouth went dry.

  31

  After what seemed like a lifetime of confusion and thirst, and not wanting to do so, because where she had been these last twenty-four hours was infinitely easier, Holly pulled herself back into consciousness. At first, her whole body ached in a quite sickening manner. She tried to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth, but it appeared to be lodged there for now. Exhausted, she gave up and drifted once more back to sleep.

  When she next woke up, Holly tried opening her eyes. This she found, presented her with complete and debilitating sensory overload, and she hurriedly shut them and instead listened to the increasingly obvious beeping noises around her and the low hum of what she finally deciphered as voices. After a while, she decided to try the eyes again. This time, her left eyelid stuck, and for this small mercy, she was glad. Her right eye fluttered, and finally adjusting to the impossible brightness of the room, she began to see shapes. Slowly, Holly started to make sense of her surroundings. After some minutes, she concluded that she was in a hospital bed. This, she thought would do for now, and she again drifted into nothingness.

  When Holly next surfaced, she did so more vigorously and although she was not perhaps aware, she called out.

  ‘Better?’ a nurse asked. ‘You’ve been coming and going for a while now. You kept calling for your mother. If you can tell me her name and number, I’ll try and call.’

  Holly couldn’t understand what she meant.

  ‘Not to worry just now then,’ the nurse said, frowning slightly. ‘We’ve been rather concerned. You took something. I wonder if you even remember now?’

  Holly clumsily said that she didn’t.

  ‘The doctors are doing their rounds soon and they’ll explain what’s been happening. You’ll maybe want a sip of water to wet your lips. You’ve been getting fluids through a line since you came to us, but people always wake up thirsty.’

  Holly didn’t want to talk and lay motionless in her hospital bed watching as the nurses came and went. After a time, a group of doctors arrived and stood at the end of her bed and looked at her, but it was too much trouble to be interested in them. After asking her about a hundred questions, without receiving a reply, they left again.

  Sometimes, during those initial hours of wakefulness, when Holly opened her eyes, she was aware of someone sitting beside her bed. At first, she thought it was part of a dream, and she grinned stupidly to herself and closed her eyes once more.

  When she next woke up, the ward was in darkness. She looked for the figure beside her bed, but they weren’t there anymore. Holly felt a growing sense of self-pity, but she swallowed this down, along with the medication a nurse brought her and fell asleep once more. The next day, much the same happened, but the visitor that she had wondered about was less of a hallucination and more of a reality. The person sometimes spoke to her. The voice was soothing and melodic. Holly knew that she was being read to, but didn’t bother with the words.

  The following day, having been troubled with vague thoughts all that night about a skip, Holly awoke feeling less tired and called for a nurse to ask who had been sitting with her on the previous day.

  ‘Oh, I thought you were more aware of things. She said that she was family. A lady called Marie. Very patient with you. Lovely lady. She’s been going between you and another man on the orthopaedics ward. Taking it turnabout to sit with you both and read.’

  Holly nodded and smiled. Of course, it made sense.

  At last, there came a time when she felt much more like herself and she was able to collect her thoughts and to put them into some sort of order. Her current situation was clearly at the forefront of her mind and several points needed to be addressed with some urgency.

  The first was: what should she say when asked what she had taken to kill herself? She knew, from listening to the conversations around her, that this was exactly what the hospital staff had assumed. She had overheard one doctor asking a nurse if they had managed to get any more background information on her past psychiatric history and if she had been on the tablets for many years. She assumed, therefore, that they had yet to trace any of her family. This should have pleased her, but in some ways, she had wanted nothing more than to find that she had been outed and her family had come down to take her back home. Holly soon roused herself from this sentimental nonsense though. She had no home now after all, and the family that she thought was hers, never really had been. She decided, after much consideration, that if asked directly about the overdose, she would explain that it had been a moment of drunken madness. A friend had been on some tablets or other, and she had stolen them, not knowing what they were. She had taken them when she was intoxicated and feeling low. She had arrived at the shop the following morning, having forgotten what she had done, and it was only as the day had progressed that she had felt unwell. This seemed quite plausible to Ho
lly, and she congratulated herself on her ingenuity.

  The second point was harder, of course. Who was it that had tried to kill her? Holly felt sure that she had unearthed the only bit of physical evidence linking the killer to Betty’s murder. She thought of the bag in the skip and the blood-soaked clothes that she knew would no longer be there. The killer would have long since re-disposed of these. It had been an audacious ploy to get rid of them in such a way in the first place. But now, what could be more daring than to poison her in broad daylight, in front of the other volunteers, having clicked that she had found the evidence? It was either an act of supreme boldness or one driven by sheer panic.

  Holly thought back to that day in the cold when she stood knee-deep in binbags. She remembered the bathroom light at the back of the shop switching on and off, and a figure behind the mottled glass. They had seen what she was doing of course and had been forced to act quickly. Why, at the time, she hadn’t considered her own safety, she didn’t know. First Thomas, and now her. As she lay there alone save the beeping machines and the general hubbub of hospital sounds, she wondered how it had been done. How had they poisoned her? There had been a couple of opportunities, as she saw it. She wasn’t sure what she had swallowed, or how long the stuff would have taken to work. She considered that day and what she had consumed. Before she began her hunt in the skip that day there had been a cup of tea. It had been a consoling mug after she had failed to find the imaginary ring. And then, of course, odious Neil had emerged halfway through her skip pillage and had tried to get her to drink another. This, she had refused at the time, but it did make her suspicious of the man’s motives. She thought again of that freezing day. She considered it all. After making her discovery, she had gone inside. She had been confused and frightened, not knowing what to do next. She had sat in the bathroom trying to gather her thoughts.

  It was only then, that Holly recalled who had tapped on the bathroom door, urging her to come out and warm herself up with the cup of coffee he had made. He had left it for her on the side table in the kitchen. There, for her to pick up. Of course. It made sense that it was him, and of all of the volunteers, it was he who she had most wished it not to be.

  32

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Alex said. He came towards her, his arms outstretched. ‘What have you found?’

  Cathy leapt back and knocked her hip on the kitchen table. ‘Nothing,’ she said, and then gathering herself, she laughed nervously. ‘God, you made me jump. How on earth did you fit through the window? Give me a hand looking for any medication. You try the kitchen and bathroom. I’ll look in her bedroom for an address book, although I doubt, we’ll find anything.’

  Alex moved away and Cathy, still shaking uncontrollably, but glad of the excuse to move, forced herself to go through the motions of searching the flat. All the while, the notebook with the words: ‘unreasonable use of force,’ was in her jacket pocket. Several times, she caught herself touching it in case it was visible, with the corner sticking out, but she knew she must not draw attention to it.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asked, joining her in Holly’s bedroom. Cathy straightened up, having been looking on one of the bedside cabinets. The bedroom had revealed a good deal more about Holly. There were books and papers everywhere. Cathy had only glanced at a few, but seeing that they had no bearing on the case, she replaced them carefully, feeling guilty for having violated someone else’s private domain. Alex approached. ‘There’s no medication anywhere. No prescription papers, nothing,’ he said. ‘I can’t find an address either.’ He was again too close. He moved even nearer towards her. ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ he whispered, his lips twitching with a smile.

  Cathy laughed and ducked past, avoiding his eye. ‘Come on. We’d better get out before we’re caught.’

  He reached out to her and caught her sleeve as she passed. ‘OK?’ he asked.

  She was afraid he was going to try to kiss her so she moved purposefully towards the door. ‘We need to get out,’ she repeated and pulled away.

  They said little in the car as she drove him home. He must have known that it had all changed between them. But hopefully, he assumed it was because of her exhaustion and fear at what they had just done. More than anything, Cathy longed to get him out of the car. Now, every movement the man made, seemed sinister. Once, he accidentally touched her arm and she flinched as if she had been stung.

  When she pulled up outside his house, there was a horrible awkwardness.

  ‘Cathy?’ he asked.

  Despite her better judgement, she felt guilty, as if it were she who had let him down, instead of the other way about. ‘Look I’m sorry,’ she lied. ‘I’m just overwrought and exhausted. I’m sorry I asked you to come on a wild goose chase this evening. It was a stupid idea and we could have ended up getting ourselves into trouble. I never meant for that to happen.’

  He nodded, but she wasn’t so sure he was convinced.

  ‘We’ll meet up properly,’ she said. ‘Go on a real date another time. Let’s just wait until this is over with, OK? I feel like until this is done, I can’t move on. I know I didn’t know her personally, but she was my responsibility in a way; Betty, I mean. She came to me for help, and then she died, and horribly.’ Cathy didn’t even know why she said this. Perhaps to make him feel guilty. ‘Anyway,’ she said with finality. ‘I need to get home. I want to go now.’

  He got out of the car without saying a word. She turned the wheel smoothly and glancing in the rearview mirror, saw him standing in the street.

  When she arrived home, she ran up the front path, and getting inside, she locked the door. Having done this, she moved around the house, checking that all of the windows were secure also. She didn’t expect Alex to be so stupid as to come after her that night, but she felt she couldn’t be too careful after all that had happened. Pouring herself a glass of wine, she cursed herself for having picked the most dangerous person to firstly, ask for help in solving the crime, and secondly, have feelings for. Ridiculous, she told herself angrily. Too fast and far too soon. They had only just met up again and then she found out this. She moved the notepad across the kitchen counter where she had left it. ‘Unreasonable force’. What did that even mean? What had Alex done to be sacked from the police?

  She thought of Holly’s flat. So stupid. Such a risky position to put herself in. She thought of what she had seen there. Yes, the notebook, but there had been other things. Beside the computer, she had seen the folded paper. She had slipped it under the keyboard as Alex approached. But she had read the name. Was that why this girl Holly had come to Glainkirk? Had she found what she was looking for?

  Cathy took a long swig of wine and began to relax. Thankfully her hands no longer shook. Her cat came through and settled beside her now in the living room where she had moved with Holly’s notes. She had turned on all of the table lamps and had put on the electric fire too. Already, the place felt more secure and comfortable. Impulsively, she snatched up her mobile and scrolling down the list of numbers, she called Suzalinna. It had been ages since she last spoke with her and so much had happened since then.

  ‘Well darling, you’re right,’ her friend said, ‘a lot has happened. Two people in hospital now, you say? I wonder that the second one didn’t come in on my shift. I heard about your heroics from Brodie, by the way. I was going to call. Actually, I did call and left a message, but you didn’t get back to me. Too busy racing about the place, trying to unearth murderers. I must say, I was impressed when I heard about your minor surgery at the roadside. Treating a tension pneumo with a biro. Very clever darling. Very. You’ve achieved legend status with the medical students attached to the apartment anyway.’

  ‘I thought you’d like that.’ Cathy laughed. ‘He’s doing fine now. I rang the ward earlier and he’s getting his chest drain out tomorrow.’

  ‘And what about the other one, then?’ Suzalinna asked. ‘Poisoned, you think?’

  ‘Yes. She was acidotic. Still
unconscious. They think it was a tricyclic overdose, but I very much doubt she was prescribed them.’

  ‘Well, it seems incredibly simple then, darling,’ her friend said. ‘Tomorrow morning you go into work and trawl the notes. If any of the people at the charity shop are on tricyclics, you have your murderer, and twice-over attempted murderer.’

  Cathy didn’t speak.

  ‘Well?’ Suzalinna asked. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘It’s more complicated,’ Cathy confessed. ‘I’ve found something out about one of them already. It’s rather awkward now.’

  ‘What another motive, you mean? That doesn’t matter though, darling. From what you’ve told me, they all had a reason to kill really. No. Opportunity is what you need to look at now, and if you found out who actually had the drugs in their possession, it might lead you to the real killer. Focus on that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Why are you dithering? Who is this person you’ve found out about?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it if I said.’

  ‘Have you found out why the old woman went down to the railway anyway that night?’ Suzalinna suddenly asked.

  ‘You know, I went down there to look,’ she admitted.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I felt a bit of an idiot doing it actually, but I think I saw where she crossed the fence and then, the path she took along the side of the line. There was blood still. I saw that. It was horrible.’

  ‘Why did she do that though? Even if she was going to meet someone? I think you need to ask yourself the right questions, darling. What was an elderly woman doing grubbing about along the railway line? Listen, give me a shout if you need a sidekick. I think I’m pretty good at this detecting stuff. By the way, have you managed to track down Sally’s gorgeous ex?’