Quite Ugly One Morning

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  ‘The more geriatric beds you have, the more of these money drains you must admit to your hospital. So everyone said that the first thing the Trust would do would be to shut the George Romero and open a scaled-down geriatric facility within the RVI. But they were pressed into giving assurances that they weren’t going to close geriatric beds “while they remained in demand”. Of course, that meant they would be trying out any way imaginable to reduce that demand, or reduce perception of that demand.

  ‘The clinical staff got leaned on to turf patients out to their families or nursing homes as soon as they could stand up, and were basically told not to admit anyone who didn’t look like they would drop dead in an economically viable length of time – say, two days. But no matter what they do, the demand will never be reduced. The trouble is that so many beds are taken up by long-term patients, who you just can’t put in a home because their problems require proper, full-scale medical care. And not only can you not turf them out, but they reduce the number of beds available for shorter-term admissions. So presumably the Trust is going to sweeten the pill by saying that the money raised will help fund an “improved” geriatric unit within the RVI, which will have fewer beds but will deliver as much patient care “in real terms” as the GRH did. Is that it?’

  ‘Well, not quite,’ said Parlabane. ‘Ow! Shampoo in my eyes. Can you hand me a towel?’

  Sarah got up and lifted the off-white terrycloth sheet, holding it in front of the shower curtain. Parlabane’s soggy and soapy hand appeared from round the mouldy, translucent plastic sheet and clawed the air until Sarah placed the towel in it.

  ‘Ta,’ he said, whipping it inside then popping it back out. ‘They are planning to reduce the number of geriatric beds and bring them all within the RVI,’ he said, ‘but I think the sweetener is more likely to be that the property cash and the consequent saving will be better spent on “other ways of delivering patient care”.’

  Sarah snorted. ‘Yeah. They’ll make it sound like it’ll all be going on dialysis equipment, when it’ll really be buying a few more jobs for managers and some more fucking pot plants.’

  ‘But the thing is, Sarah,’ Parlabane continued, ‘the memo from Lime said the “bed-usage situation” had changed, and that the number of geriatric patients had been reduced.’

  The sound of the water stopped, and Parlabane pulled back the curtain, rubbing his face with the long towel, which swung back and forth across his body.

  ‘It said something about . . . what was it? Natural wastage, which I took to mean patients snuffing it, and what was the other thing? I didn’t quite follow it. Placing? Something like that?’

  ‘Placement,’ Sarah said, shaking her head. And that’ll be the main thing. “Natural wastage”, as he puts it, is negligible. Crumbles never die. Don’t believe the hype about frailty. They live forever – and the crazier they are, the longer they live. So the only way to get rid of them is placement. Buff and turf, as the yanks say.’

  ‘?’ said Parlabane’s look, amidst a flurry of towel and hair.

  ‘Buff them up, make them look healthy-ish. Then turf them into a home and fill the bed with someone less trouble before they can be sent back.’

  ‘Well here’s where our suspected villain makes his appearance,’ Parlabane said, wrapping the towel around his waist. And it looks like the big boss himself. There was a letter from Lime to a property developer down south, telling him the site would become available inside a year. Now, it’s dodgy enough that he’s noticed the patient levels are falling and he’s tipping a property developer the wink about the site before anyone even knows there are plans to close it, but according to the computer, that letter predated all memos about GRH bed-usage by several months.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Sarah said, staring blankly beyond Parlabane with a look that made him fear the mould monster from the ceiling had indeed decided to get territorial.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Jeremy,’ she breathed, sitting down helplessly on the toilet with a bump. ‘I’ve just worked out his role in this sordid affair. Jesus.’

  She stared into space, Parlabane waiting in excruciating limbo for her to collect her thoughts and elaborate.

  ‘Buffing and turfing on a grand scale,’ she said. ‘Lime was paying him to declare total crumbles fit enough to go into nursing homes. It wouldn’t matter if they collapsed in a gibbering, incontinent heap as soon as they were out the back of the ambulance, because by that time the bed would have been filled with a shorter-term admission, or more probably closed altogether.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it damage his professional reputation if patients he’d declared fit turned out to be complete messes?’

  ‘Not necessarily. The thing with crumbles is that they can genuinely switch from fitness to decrepitude or vice versa overnight. You’ll get some old dear with a few of her pages stuck together, brought in from a nursing home because of a chest infection. She looks like she’s at death’s door for a week, then one morning you come in and she’s drinking her tea and shrieking at imaginary cats. Equally, she might get her strength built up and appear to have made a complete recovery, then cack it the first night she’s back in the home. The only damage Jeremy’s reputation would suffer would be if he sent a few like that to the same home and they noticed whose name was on the paperwork each time.’

  ‘And what happens to the patient, now that the bed’s no longer available?’

  ‘The nursing home has to get on the phone and try to get her a bed somewhere else – in another hospital, and therefore in another Trust. Jeremy reduces the long-term patient levels and they get to close the GRH and sell up to Kickback Properties Inc.

  ‘But why kill him?’ she wondered aloud. ‘He must have been blackmailing Lime – taking money for clearing the wards then threatening to blow the gaffe about the whole thing unless he gave him more.’

  ‘It’s more likely he was just killed in case he ever said anything,’ said Parlabane. ‘No blackmail, just covering tracks. Because I feel the stakes for Lime could be a lot higher than putting the Trust in the black and scoring a few K on the side from the property deal. He was talking to that company down south about the site a long time ago, before anyone knew it was remotely likely to become available, and the name of that developer is not the same as the one that’s bidding for the GRH. I’d be very surprised if Capital Properties didn’t turn out to be a front for a joint venture between Four-Square Developments and a Mr Stephen Lime, which would further explain why he’s recommending the Trust sells the site at a knock-down price. Where is this place anyway?’

  Sarah unlocked the door. ‘Come on back to the room and get dressed. You can see it from there.’

  Dawn was thinking about breaking, at the stage where it was rolling about under the sheets after its alarm had gone off, weighing up the pros and cons of getting out of bed. There was a glow of light from beyond the horizon, tinting the city in faint, shadowy hues, like a huge room lit by a lamp with a dimmer switch.

  The castle cut the skyline with a tetchy cragginess, ill-tempered elderly resident of the district with a fragile tolerance of the newcomers to its neighbourhood.

  And not far beyond the longest spines of its shadow, just past the borders of the Old Town, in the vicinity of law courts, local government, big business and one of Europe’s busiest tourist honeypots, sat a crappy wee spread-out collection of prefabricated, low-rise bus shelters posing as a geriatric hospital.

  Ah,’ said Parlabane, looking out of the window.

  ‘Get the picture?’ Sarah asked, redundantly.

  ‘I’m thinking international class hotel with extensive conference facilities, maybe a shopping complex,’ he said. ‘Underground parking, centrally located office spaces, very exclusive residential development . . . whatever. Except that the deal’s off if some wee scrote of a doctor opens his gub.

  ‘Acres of prime site in the centre of one of Europe’s most prestigious and historic capital cities for three mill. Now that’s a b
argain worth killing for.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Aw for fuck’s sake.’

  There was a sharp tutting noise from the staircase behind where McGregor stood in the doorway.

  ‘Oh, sorry. Excuse the language, Mrs eh . . .’

  ‘Kinross.’

  ‘Aye. Sorry. It’s not a pretty sight.’

  ‘He’s away then,’ said the wee woman, peering up to the landing where the policeman and woman stood.

  ‘Afraid so.’

  McGregor had instantly regretted releasing the missing digit detail to the press. He had had no idea there could be so many nine-fingered males in the Lothians, and the cooperative public hadn’t let the ‘at least 6’5” tall’ part of the description deter them from reporting every bastarding one of them, never mind the specification that it was the right index finger that was lacking, and not the left pinkie, right thumb or either arm.

  The call had come at about ten o’clock that night, after an endlessly irritating day, and he had feared the worst when the switchboard operator told him what it was in connection with and he heard the prim, elderly tones at the other end.

  He had listened to the part about the nine-fingered man staying in her guest house with stoic patience, inclining gradually away from professional politeness when she started on about him killing her dog and trying to fake its accidental death in next door’s garden. When she said she had him tied to his bed in a room upstairs, McGregor was about to send a car round to pick her up and let her consider the folly of wasting police time at leisure in the surroundings of a particularly smelly cell. But then she told him about the envelope with the newspaper, the hair dye and the gloves inside, and he was on the phone to Dalziel forthwith, telling her to get in her car and meet him at the guest house immediately.

  They had sent Callaghan round the back to cover that escape route as they were met at the front door by the betweeded landlady, Mrs Kinross, who had been looking out for them there. Then they had ventured silently up to the first-floor landing, where the old lady’s key refused to enter the lock.

  ‘He’s jammed something in it,’ Dalziel whispered. ‘Which does tend to suggest he’s not tied up any more.’ She advised Mrs Kinross to move back downstairs as there could be trouble.

  Then the radio cut in, Callaghan informing them that a first-floor window at the back was both broken and wide open, and that there were what looked very much like blood spots on the flagstones below.

  Dalziel received Mrs Kinross’s permission to force an entry, and after a nod from McGregor, broke the lock off the door with two crashingly loud kicks, which precipitated pyjama-clad appearances from several of Mrs Kinross’s other guests.

  Then McGregor had switched on the light and surveyed the scene.

  There was a big puddle of fresh spew spread out on the carpet, between the radiator and the foot of the bed. The window was indeed open and broken, with blood smeared greasily over the shards that were still in place. And taking up most of the room was the bed, a big, brass-framed affair with the unusual decoration of lengths of rope attached to each of its four supporting posts. Its quilt lay discarded on the floor to one side, below a heavily bloodstained pillow, to reveal a further and larger streaky mess of damp red on the sheet underneath.

  ‘Do you think it was the man you’re after?’ asked Mrs Kinross from the stairs.

  McGregor hit the smirking Dalziel with a glower like stormclouds coming over the Ochils.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ he warned her quietly. ‘Not a fucking word.’

  Darren was woken from his uncomfortable sleep by the metallic grind of a freight train rolling lumberingly past and slicing his left hand off. His soul-shattered scream of agony and despair was lost to the surrounding buildings amidst the noise of the train’s horn and the heavy rumble of its passing.

  He looked at the wasted stump, spurting blood like something out of a cheap video, and burst into tears. His livelihood had just disappeared before he was even awake, and there was no facility for disability benefits in his line of work. That was his blade hand, his cutting hand.

  With the train slowly slouching its way off ahead of him, he stumbled along the track and found it, lying on a sleeper like Thing, palm down and ragged at the wrist, his sovereign rings glinting up at him from each of the four fingers. He bent down and picked it up with his four-digited right hand, then staggered mournfully back to his bag at the edge of the track, where he sat down with it in his lap and sobbed, bleeding steadily from the truncated forearm.

  He ripped the sleeve off the jacket of his shellsuit – his fucking favourite shellsuit – to make a tourniquet, as the blood showed no sign of letting up. He wrapped it as tightly as he could around his forearm and tied a double shoelace knot in it. It was agony, but at least it worked, kind of.

  It had been her fault. That old bitch at the B&B.

  He thought of the men he’d taken in his time. Big men, hard cunts. Kicked their fucking heads in. Bladed them, cut their throats. He thought of that tart, the one Lime had paid him for. That had been his first pro job, his start. She had been fit. He’d fucked her first. Nice. Mostly men after that. Sometimes fights, sometimes just personal, sometimes jobs, once his rep had got round and the work started to come in from all sorts.

  But now it was over because he had been well and truly fucked up by some tiny old Jock granny of a landlady.

  He had woken up in the semi-darkness, vaguely aware of someone hauling him about, but too fuzzy to quite work out what was going on. Through the hazy mist of his half-shut eyes he could see her little figure, both her hands clasping his left arm across his chest at the right-hand side of the bed. He felt dizzy and uncoordinated, as if something was trying to force him back into unconsciousness.

  The quilt was on the floor and his other limbs were already tied securely to the brass bedposts. His legs had been crossed and his right foot was secured to the left bedpost, his left to the right. His right arm was pulled across him and secured to the left post behind his head, and the old cow had looped some rope round the fourth post and was getting ready to tie his wrist to it.

  Ordinarily, he could have swatted her away with one shake of that arm, but his limbs all felt unusually heavy, and even though he got his hand free of her grip, it just swung erratically and slowly around in front of him.

  ‘Amgifackikillyou,’ he spluttered, still swinging at the trim figure beside the bed. She bent down, not ducking, but picking something up from the floor.

  ‘Recognise this?’ she asked, but he could only make out a grey shape between her hands. He strained his neck but that just made everything in his field of vision swim lurchingly in front of him.

  ‘Why don’t you take a closer look?’ she said, and biffed him in the face with it, breaking his nose and burying his head back into the pillow. Then she dropped the heavy object around his middle, crushing his balls, which had been sitting on top of his crossed legs inside his underpants. He gave a choked moan as the blood from his nose ran into his mouth.

  Mrs Kinross took his hand again, slipped a loop of rope around it and pulled it tight, fastening him completely to the bed.

  ‘It’s the stone you placed over my wee Ruffle’s head, to cover up the fact that you had murdered him,’ she hissed at Darren. ‘But I know you did it, and I know who you are and what else you did. You’re the one who murdered that young Dr Ponsonby. Well that boy’s father treated my Hamish, God rest him, and so it’s going to give me every pleasure to go down the stairs right this very minute and call the police. You’re going to pay the penalty, my boy. Cross a Kinross and it’s your loss, as Hamish’s father used to say.’

  And with that she lifted the stone, went out and locked the door.

  He pulled at all four of his bonds, but the knots were strong and efficient. Old cunt must have been in the Girl Guides. Maybe she started the fucking Girl Guides. However, he could get a tiny bit of slack in the ropes securing his arms if he pulled his body up the bed, although i
t practically cut off the blood supply to his feet.

  In his woozy and now pained quasi-consciousness, he remembered his knife, and hoped she hadn’t discovered it and removed it from under the pillow. He leaned to one side and strained his neck, trying to edge his head under the cotton-wrapped foam. At first he merely succeeded in squashing it against the brass frame behind him, but eventually it flipped up and landed on his face, from where he was able to wriggle it off his coupon and then use his elbow to nudge it out of the way.

  The knife was still there, the tip of the blade pointing towards his face as it lay on the sheet. With an almighty effort he was able to strain close enough to it to get the end of the blade between his teeth, unfortunately sharp side in, gently cutting the corners of his mouth.

  He needed to get his teeth into the handle, so he pulled his head back around until the knife was sitting at forty-five degrees to the mattress, blade pointing up, then attempted to gently slide his mouth down the metal to the hilt. However, as soon as he tried to do this, he felt the knife slipping backwards, threatening to fall away from his face and maybe even off the bed, from where it would be impossible to retrieve. Therefore, he had to maintain a grip on it with his lips as he drew his mouth along it, slicing deep slits at both corners until he was able to bite into the handle.

  Then he swung his head back around and in a nodding, sawing motion, cut through the rope that bound his left hand to the right bedpost, all the time the strain and friction pulling the cuts wider and deeper at the edges of his mouth. Once his hand was released, he gripped the knife and sliced through the rope securing his other hand in barely a stroke, then bent quickly forward to cut his feet free, a movement that made the room spin sickeningly around him.