by Val McDermid
Now, it was beginning to look as if whatever ailed Robbie Bishop was no ordinary chest infection. His heart rate was all over the place. His temperature had climbed a further degree and a half. His lungs were incapable of keeping his blood oxygen levels stable, even with the assistance of the oxygen mask. Now, as Denby watched, his eyelids fluttered and stayed shut. Denby frowned. ‘Has he lost consciousness before?’ he asked the SHO.
She shook her head. ‘He’s been mildly delirious because of the fever-I’m not sure how aware he’s been of where he is. But he’s been responsive until now.’
An insistent beeping kicked in, the screen revealing a new low in Bishop’s blood oxygen level. ‘We need to intubate,’ Denby said, sounding distracted. ‘And more fluids. I think he’s a little dehydrated.’ Not that that would explain the fever, or the cough. The SHO, galvanized by the instruction, hurried out of the small room that was the best Bradfield Cross Hospital could provide for those who required their privacy even in extremis. Denby rubbed his chin, wondering. Robbie Bishop was in peak condition; fit, strong and, according to his club doctor, he had been perfectly well after Friday’s training session. He’d missed Saturday’s game, diagnosed initially by the same club doctor as having some sort of flu bug. Now here he was, eighteen hours later, visibly deteriorating. And Thomas Denby had no idea why, nor how to make it stop.
It wasn’t a position he was accustomed to. He was, he knew, a bloody good doctor. A skilled diagnostician, a cunning and often inspired clinician, and a good enough politician to make sure his department’s needs were seldom frustrated by the bureaucrats. He pretty much sailed through his professional life, rarely given pause by the ailments his patients presented. Robbie Bishop felt like an affront to his talent.
As the SHO returned with the intubation kit and a couple of nurses, Denby sighed. He glanced at the door. On the other side, he knew, was Robbie Bishop’s team manager. Martin Flanagan had spent the night slumped in a chair next to his star player. His expensive suit was rumpled now, his craggy face rendered sinister by a scribble of stubble. They’d already gone head to head when Denby had insisted the pugnacious Ulsterman leave the room while the doctors consulted. ‘Do you know what that lad’s worth to Bradfield Victoria?’ Flanagan had demanded.
Denby had eyed him coldly. ‘He’s worth exactly the same to me as every other patient I treat,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t sit on the touchline telling you what tactics to employ. So let me do my job without interference. I need you to give my patient his privacy while I examine him.’ The manager had left, grumbling, but Denby knew he’d still be waiting, his face pinched and anxious, desperate to hear something that would contradict the deterioration he’d already witnessed.
‘When you’re done with that, let’s start him on AZT,’ he said to his SHO. There was nothing left to try but the powerful retroviral medication that might just give them pause enough to figure out what was wrong with Robbie Bishop.
Monday
‘Remind me again why I let you open that third bottle,’ Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan sighed, putting the car in gear and inching forward a few yards.
‘Because it was the first time you’ve graced us with a visit since we moved to the Dales and because I have to be in Bradfield this morning and you don’t have a proper spare room. So there was no point in driving back last night.’ Her brother Michael leaned forward to fiddle with the radio. Carol slapped his hand away.
‘Leave it be,’ she said.
Michael groaned. ‘Bradfield Sound. Who knew my life would come down to this? Local radio at its most parochial.’
‘I need to hear what’s happening on my patch.’
Michael looked sceptical. ‘You run the Major Incident Team. You’re affiliated to the British equivalent of the FBI. You don’t need to know if there’s a burst water main causing problems for traffic on Methley Way. Or that some footballer’s been carted off to hospital with chest problems.’
‘Hey, Mr IT. Wasn’t it you who taught me the “micro becomes macro” mantra? I like to know what’s happening at the bottom of the food chain because it sometimes provokes unexpected events at the other end. And he’s not just “some footballer”. He’s Robbie Bishop. Midfield general of Bradfield Victoria. And a local lad to boot. His female fans will be staking out Bradfield Cross as we speak. Possible public order issues.’
Michael subsided with a pout. ‘Whatever. Have it your own way, Sis. Thank god their reception doesn’t stretch far from the city. I’d have lost my mind if you’d made me listen to this all the way in.’ He rolled his head on his neck, wincing at the crackling it produced. ‘Haven’t you got one of those blue lights that you can slap on the car roof?’
‘Yes,’ Carol said, easing forward with the traffic flow, praying this time it would keep moving. She felt sweaty and faintly sick in spite of the shower she’d had less than an hour ago. ‘But I’m only supposed to use it in emergencies. And before you go there, no. This is not an emergency. This is just the rush hour.’
As she spoke, the clotted traffic suddenly began to flow. Within a couple of hundred yards, it was hard to figure out quite why it had taken twenty minutes to travel half a mile when now they were moving relatively smoothly.
Michael frowned slightly, studying his sister, then said, ‘So, Sis, how’s it going with Tony?’
Carol tried not to let her exasperation show. She thought she’d got away with it. A whole weekend with her parents, her brother and his partner without any of them mentioning that name. ‘It’s working out pretty well, actually. I like the flat. He’s a very good landlord.’
Michael tutted. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’
Carol sighed, edging in front of a Mercedes who blared his horn at her. We probably saw more of each other when we were living on opposite sides of the city,’ she said.
‘I thought…’
Hands tight on the wheel. ‘You thought wrong. Michael, we’re a pair of workaholics. He loves his nutters and I’ve had a new unit to get up to speed. Not to mention trying to put Paula back together again,’ she added, her face tightening at the thought.
‘That’s a pity.’ The glance he gave her was critical. ‘Neither of you is getting any younger. If I’ve learned anything from being with Lucy it’s that life’s a lot easier when you share the nuts and bolts with somebody on the same wavelength. And I think you and Tony Hill are totally that.’
Carol risked a quick glance to check whether he was taking the piss. The man who once kind of, almost, sort of, maybe thought you might be a serial killer? This is the man you think is on the same wavelength as me?’
Michael rolled his eyes. ‘Stop hiding behind the history.’
‘It’s not about hiding. History like ours, you need crampons and oxygen to get over it.’ Carol found a space in the traffic and edged to the kerb, hazard lights flashing. ‘This is the part where you run away,’ she said in a bad imitation of Shrek.
‘You’re dropping me here?’ Michael sounded mildly outraged.
‘It’ll take me ten minutes to get round to the front of the Institute,’ Carol said, leaning past him to point out of the passenger window. ‘If you cut through the new shopping arcade, you’ll be at your client meeting in three.’
‘God you’re right. We’ve only been away from the city for three months and already I’m losing the mental map.’ He put an arm across her shoulders, gave her cheek a dry kiss then climbed out of the car. ‘Speak to you in the week.’
Ten minutes later, Carol walked into Bradfield Police headquarters. In the short gap between dropping Michael off and leaving the lift on the third floor, where the team she thought of as the ragged misfits was based, she had made the shift from sister to police officer. The only element the two personae shared was the mild hangover.
She carried on down a corridor whose lavender and off-white walls were broken up by doors of plate glass and steel. Their central sections were frosted so it was hard to see any detail of what was going
on behind them unless it was happening on the floor or dangling from the ceiling. The tarted-up interiors still reminded her of an advertising agency. But then, modern policing often seemed to have as much to do with image as it did with catching villains. Happily, she’d managed to keep herself as close to the sharp end as was possible for an officer of her rank.
She pushed open the door of 316 and stepped into the land of the dead and the damaged. This early on a Monday morning, the living were thin on the ground. DC Stacey Chen, the team’s IT wizard, barely glanced up from the pair of monitors on her desk, grunting something Carol took to be a greeting. ‘Morning, Stacey,’ Carol said. As she crossed to her office, Detective Sergeant Chris Devine stepped out from behind one of the long whiteboards that encircled their desks like covered wagons keeping the enemy at bay. Startled, Carol stopped in her tracks. Chris held her hands up in a placatory gesture.
‘Sorry, guv Didn’t mean to freak you out.’
‘No harm done.’ Carol let her breath out in a sigh. ‘We really do need to get those see-through incident boards.’
‘What? Like they have on the telly?’ Chris gave a small snort. ‘Don’t see the point, myself. I’ve always thought they’re a proper bitch to read. All that background interference.’ She fell into step beside Carol as her boss made for the glassed-off cubicle that served as her office. ‘So what’s the latest on Tony? How’s he doing?’
It was, thought Carol, a funny way to put it. She gave a half-shrug and said, ‘As far as I know, he’s fine.’ Her tone was calculated to close the subject.
Chris swung around so she was walking backwards in Carol’s path, checking out her boss’s expression. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh my good god, you don’t know, do you?’
‘Don’t know what?’ Carol felt the clutch of panic in her stomach.
Chris put a hand on Carol’s arm and indicated her office with a jerk of her head. ‘I think we’d better sit down,’ she said.
‘Christ,’ said Carol, allowing herself to be led inside. She made for her chair while Chris closed the door. ‘I’ve only been in the Dales, not the North Pole. What the hell’s been going on? What’s happened to Tony?’
Chris responded to the urgency in her voice. ‘He was attacked. By one of the inmates at Bradfield Moor.’
Carol’s hands came up to her face, covering her cheeks and pushing her mouth into an O. She drew breath sharply. ‘What happened?’ Her voice was raised, almost a shout.
Chris ran a hand through her short salt-and pepper hair. ‘There’s no way to soften it, guv. He got in the way of a madman with a fire axe.’
Chris’s voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off. Never mind that Carol had inured herself to sights and sounds that would have made most people whimper and gibber. When it came to Tony Hill, she had a unique vulnerability. She might choose not to acknowledge it consciously, but at moments like this, it altered everything. ‘What…?’ Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. ‘How bad is it?’
‘From what I heard, his leg’s pretty smashed up. He took it in the knee. Lost a lot of blood. It took a while for the paramedics to get to him, on account of there was a madman with an axe on the prowl,’ Chris said.
Bad though this was, it was far less than her imagination had managed to conjure in a matter of seconds. Blood loss and a smashed knee were manageable. No big deal, really, in the great scheme of things. ‘Jesus,’ Carol said, relief in her released breath. ‘What happened?’
‘What I heard was that one of the inmates overpowered an orderly, got his key off him, trampled his head to a bloody pulp then got into the main part of the hospital where he broke the glass and got the axe.’
Carol shook her head. ‘They have fire axes in Bradfield Moor? A secure mental hospital?’
‘Apparently that’s precisely why. It’s secure. Lots of locked doors and wire-reinforced glass. Health and Safety says you have to be able to get the patients out in the event of fire and a failure of the electronic locking systems.’ Chris shook her head. ‘Bollocks, if you ask me.’ She threw up her hands in the face of Carol’s admonitory expression. ‘Yeah, well. Better a few mad bastards burn than we get this kind of shit. One orderly dead, another one on the critical list whose internal organs are never going to be right again and Tony smashed up? I’d shed a few homicidal nutters to avoid that.’ Somehow, the sentiment sounded even worse in Chris’s strong Cockney accent.
‘It’s not an either/or, and you know it, Chris,’ Carol said. Even though her own gut reaction matched that of her sergeant, she knew it was emotion and not common sense talking. But these days, only the reckless and the heedless casually spoke their mind in the workplace. Carol liked her mavericks. She didn’t want to lose any of them because the wrong ears heard them sounding off, so she did her best to curb their excesses. ‘So how did Tony get caught up in it?’ she asked. ‘Was it one of his patients?’
Chris shrugged. ‘Dunno. Apparently he was the hero of the hour, though. Distracted the mad bastard enough for a couple of nurses to drag the injured orderly out of harm’s way.’
But not enough to save himself. ‘Why did nobody contact me? Who was our duty officer this weekend? Sam, wasn’t it?’
Chris shook her head. ‘It was supposed to be Sam, but he swapped with Paula.’
Carol jumped up and opened the door. Scanning the room, she saw DC Paula McIntyre hanging her coat up. Paula? In here a minute,’ she called. As the young detective crossed the room, Carol felt the familiar wash of guilt. Not so long ago, she had put Paula in harm’s way and harm had come running. Never mind that it had been an officially sanctioned operation: Carol had been the one who had promised to protect Paula and had failed. The double whammy of that botched operation and the death of her closest colleague had set Paula teetering on the brink of abandoning her police career. Carol knew that place. She’d been there herself, and for scarily similar reasons. She’d offered what support she could to Paula, but it had been Tony who had talked her back from the edge. Carol had no idea what had passed between them, but it had made it possible for Paula to continue being a cop. And for that she was grateful, even if it meant having that constant reminder of her own inadequacy on her team.
Carol stepped aside to make way for Paula and returned to her chair. Paula leaned against the glass wall, arms folded as if that would disguise the weight she had lost. Her dark blonde hair looked as if she’d forgotten to comb it after towelling it dry and her charcoal trousers and sweater hung baggily on her. ‘How’s Tony?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know, because I’ve only just found out about the attack,’ Carol said, careful not to make it sound like an accusation.
Paula looked stricken. ‘Oh, shit,’ she groaned. ‘It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t know.’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘They didn’t even ring me, actually. The first I knew about it was when I turned on the TV on Saturday morning. I just assumed somebody would have called you…’ her voice trailed off, dismayed.
‘Nobody called me. I was having a family weekend in the Dales with my brother and my parents. So we didn’t have the TV or the radio on. Do we know which hospital he’s in?’
‘Bradfield Cross,’ Paula said. ‘They operated on his knee on Saturday. I checked. They said he’d come out of surgery OK and he was comfortable.’
Carol got to her feet, grabbing her bag. ‘Fine. That’s where I’ll be if you need me. I take it there’s nothing fresh in the overnights that we need to concern ourselves with?’
Chris shook her head. ‘Nothing new.’
‘Just as well. There’s plenty to be going on with.’ She patted Paula’s shoulder as she passed. ‘I’d have made the same assumption,’ she said on her way out. But I’d still have called to make sure.
Dry mouth. Too dry to swallow. That was just about the biggest thought that could make it through the cotton wadding filling his head. His eyelids flickered. Dimly, he knew there was a reason why opening them would be a bad idea, but he couldn’t
remember what it was. He wasn’t even sure he could trust this fuzzy warning from his brain. What could be so bad about opening his eyes? People did it all the time and nothing bad happened to them.
The answer came with dizzying speed. ‘About time,’ the voice snapped from somewhere behind his left ear. Its critical edge was familiar but only historically so. It didn’t seem to fit the ragged impression he retained of his current life.
Tony rolled his head to the side. The movement reawakened pain that was hard to locate specifically. It seemed to be a general ache throughout his body. He groaned and opened his eyes. Then he remembered why keeping them shut had been the better option.
‘If I’ve got to be here, the least you could do is make conversation.’ Her mouth clamped tight in the disapproving line he remembered so well. She closed her laptop, put it on the table beside her and crossed one trouser-clad leg over the other. She’d never liked her legs, Tony thought pointlessly.
‘Sorry,’ he croaked. ‘I think it’s the drugs.’ He reached for the glass of water on his tray, but it was beyond his grasp. She didn’t make a move. He tried to pull himself into a sitting position, idiotically forgetting why he was in the hospital bed. His left leg, weighed down in a heavy surgical splint, shifted infinitesimally but delivered a completely disproportionate blast of pain that made him gasp. With the pain came memory. Lloyd Allen bearing down on him, screaming something incomprehensible. The glint of light on blue steel. A moment of paralysing pain, then nothing. Since then, flickers of consciousness. Doctors talking about him, nurses talking over him, the TV talking at him. And her, emanating irritation and impatience. ‘Water?’ he managed, not sure whether she would oblige.