by Unknown
I looked at her. Somehow in the last two weeks her hair had grown enough to cover the bare patches of scalp. It was brushed and there was even a bit of light reflected in it. She looked like she'd put some mascara on and there was something defiant about her as she stared at Lex's ma.
'Yes,' she said, almost trembling with the effort of keeping her voice in control. 'And you know what? I think she was right. I think she was right to love me.'
She rested a napkin on top of the doughnut box, and, like nothing had been said, like we weren't both staring at her, she sat on the chair in the corner, pulled the lid off her coffee and drank.
6
Autumn was coming, and out of the window, level with the third floor, the monuments and mausoleums of the Necropolis towered dark against the cloudbanks. On the roadway below the ward patients stood in dressing-gowns and slippers, smoking quick and intent, trying not to look up at those grave markers, at the austere statue of John Knox. Angeline sat in silence, watching me from the opposite side of the hospital room.
It was the third day and it had been a morning of skin. The Burns Unit nurse brought in a fringed tape to measure for pressure garments, leggings that would stop the scarring and make sure Lexie could move her joints when she healed. She'd have to wear them for a year and a half, said the nurse. A technician from the Myskin labs came to take biopsies. Where he worked, they could take small pieces of skin and grow them into sheets ready to graft back. At lunchtime the plastic surgeon started pushing the neurologist a bit: he wanted to debride Lexie's legs, snip away the dead flesh. The neurologist hummed and hah-ed but in the end they settled on that afternoon. By the evening Lexie would be out of theatre and in a high-dependency ward on the Burns Unit. Awake. She'd know all about her future, about the clinical-psychology services, and about how her skin was being grown in a lab a hundred miles away.
In the chair next to Angeline, the Ice Queen was dozing, her chin on her chest, a society mag crumpled on her lap. When Danso arrived he didn't come into the room, probably didn't want to face her. Instead he stood at the door with Struthers, looking like Columbo or something in his crumpled raincoat, and tapped on the windowpane, beckoning to me and Angeline.
'We're taking you for coffee,' he said, when we came out. He was holding the day's local newspapers and you could see it in their faces: something was up. Especially Struthers. He looked like he'd been given an extra pint or two of blood overnight. 'Something's changed and we're taking you for coffee.'
Danso set off in the direction of the hospital cafeteria and, without hesitating, I followed, keeping pace with him, going through the plastic crash doors, out through the car park, the drizzle plastering our hair to our heads. Struthers hung back with Angeline, offering his arm to her as she limped along.
'I'm going to tell you this now,' Danso said, as we went ahead of them through another set of plastic doors, back into the main building, our feet squeaking on the polished floor. He didn't turn to look at me: he kept his eyes on the door of the cafeteria at the end of the corridor. 'I'm going to tell you while he can't hear.'
'Struthers?'
He nodded. 'It's not why we're here but it's important to you and I wanted you to hear with a bit of privacy.'
'You wanted me to hear what?'
'We got the results back. This morning. From the forensic examiner.'
I was in mid-stride. I let the step hesitate a bit, my foot slowing in mid-air, then continue down in slow motion. It hit the floor and I carried on at the same speed. Like he hadn't said anything at all.
'They came back,' I said, my voice level. 'And?'
'And he left nothing. Nothing under her fingernails. No hair, no skin.'
'She'd have fought.'
'Yes. Three of her nails were torn off. The others ...'
'The others?'
'He'd cleaned. Scrubbed. They watch so much crime TV they all know how to cover their forensics these days. She'd have been unconscious.'
I kept walking, letting this settle on me.
'What does that mean, Peter, he left nothing?'
Danso stopped. We'd reached the cafe and he stood, his hand resting on the door, looking at me seriously. A ghost scene of him as my father played briefly in my head. I'd had that before, with Danso.
'He didn't get to her, son,' he said, resting a hand on my shoulder. 'Why did he leave her naked? Who knows? But he didn't touch her, so you can let that go.'
I stood there, getting an embarrassing urge to put my arms round him because a huge, paralysed section of my mind had clicked a bit and started to function again, like an iceberg coming free of the icecap. Then Struthers and Angeline appeared at the end of the corridor, coming towards us, and the moment was gone. Next I knew we were in the cafe, pulling off wet coats and finding a table near the radiators.
7
Danso drank tea from a stainless-steel pot and the rest of us had coffee in plastic filters that dripped all over the table. We ate damp ginger biscuits from heavy white plates still hot and cabbagy smelling, like they'd come straight from a dishwasher. The cafeteria was a Turkish bath, the tea urns and the hotplates steaming the place up, making the windows drip with condensation.
Danso and Struthers kept us waiting. They fed us snippets of information that hadn't got anything to do with the big news. They said they thought Dove had found us through the rental car. Somehow, Christ knew how, he must've picked me up on one of my drives, maybe from Oban police station, and had been watching the rape suite for days. They told us there had been seventy-eight public sightings of the saloon car, because it turns out a Celtic kit hanging over the back shelf isn't such a rarity in that part of Scotland. They showed us a tiny column in the Glasgow Herald saying the police were refusing to confirm or deny an attack in Dumbarton, which had left one woman critically ill in hospital.
'Which reminds me ...' Danso wiped his mouth and looked at me. 'Something else I wanted to ask you.' He swallowed his mouthful of biscuit. 'The car. You sure you didn't see that car parked?' He pulled a biro from the inside of his jacket, and uncapped it with his teeth. He unfolded a napkin and made some rudimentary lines on it. 'See, we think it could have been parked here.' He made an X on the road that led to the east of the estate along the playing-fields. 'What do you think?'
'Could have been. When I saw it,' I pointed to the parallel road, 'it was here – on this road.'
'So, let's get this straight. You'd driven in from here,' he marked the west road, 'from where your babysitter was, so you stopped here, facing this way, and you saw him here, parallel to Humbert Place.'
'Yes.'
'So he'd parked either here or here. Anyone on this road, or walking in the fields, would have seen him.'
'Anyone except our babysitter.'
Danso cleared his throat. 'We're just trying to plot his movements on the estate.'
'Because you want to get your lad off the hook?'
He sighed. 'Joe, I'm sorry. I see you think we came here to antagonize you. But we didn't. The officer wants to apologize to you when his disciplinary's over.'
I breathed out and sat back, my arms folded, giving him a disbelieving smile. 'Please. Don't jerk me around.'
'I'm serious. He wants to say sorry. It'd do him good to speak to you. What do you think?'
I grinned brightly at him, then at Struthers. A fake, face-splitter of a grin. 'What do you think I think? Did you really think I'd say yes?'
Danso ran a finger inside his collar, uncomfortable. 'Aye. That's how we thought you'd feel.' He glanced sideways at Struthers. 'We didn't think he'd be happy. Did we?'
'We didn't.'
'OK,' Danso said. 'I'm not going to force the—'
'I mean it. I'm not going to speak to him. I don't want to hear him whingeing about how difficult it was to see Dove on that estate.'
'That's not why we're thinking about Dove's movements.'
'Then why?' I put my hands down, looking at them both. I could feel a beat of anger flaring in my temple. '
What other reason do you need to know which way he drove on to the fucking estate to put my wife in a fucking coma?'
'Because,' Struthers interrupted, his face a bit red, 'we want to know when he posted this.' He pulled a brown envelope from his briefcase and put it on the table. 'That's why.'
There was a moment's silence. Me and Angeline stared at the envelope.
'He cleaned up the house,' Danso said irritably. 'I told you – there was nothing of him in there, nothing. Couldn't even place him on the estate until this. It's the only evidence we've got.' He opened the envelope and tipped out the contents. There were two black-and-white photographs and a manila envelope sealed in plastic evidence sheaths. 'Posted in the box on the estate some time before the collection at three on the day he did Lexie. If it's what we think it is, then everything's going our way.'
'Everything's going our way?'
'Everything.' He looked at me, then at Angeline, then back at me. 'It's a suicide note. He's telling us when he's going to do it.'
8
The envelope wasn't stamped. It was addressed to Danso at Oban and it contained the two photos of Malachi Dove gone from the study on Pig Island. The first showed him posed with Asunción, Angeline's mother. It might have been the wedding because she wore flowers in her hair and he had one in his lapel. The second was the photo of him praying. Lying on his back, dead-looking. When we saw it me and Angeline both reached out.
'Uh-uh,' Struthers warned. 'No touching. I had to sell my soul to the productions officer to get these for the afternoon. He's got "continuity of evidence" written on his heart – I bring them back covered in your prints he'll have my knob on a stick.' He gave Angeline a sickly smile. 'Sorry, pet. Pardon the French, eh?'
'They're his,' Angeline said, staring stonily at him. 'They're from his study.'
'Aye. We know. They're covered in his latents.' Danso turned the photos over to show lines written in a small, curled hand. He pushed the picture of Dove and Asunción towards us. We leaned forward and looked at the writing. Straight away I felt the tug in it.
'It's about you,' said Struthers. 'It's about you and Alex.'
I pulled the photo nearer.
I have ploughed with your heifer, my friend [he'd written]. And now that you have paid the uttermost farthing you are bound in fetters of iron, your torment is as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man. To live in grief is worse than death. In your days you shall seek death and you shall not find it: you shall desire to DIE, but death shall flee from you ...
A nasty smile twitched on my face. The words were dragging me back to the old days in Albuquerque when he was my adversary and my head was full of the cojones he spouted, and I was young and angry enough to have stabbed the bastard. Except this time I was the winner, because Lexie was alive. It was like one end of my life was being brought round to touch the other end.
'And this is the one you'll really like,' Struthers said, after a while. It was the back of the prayer photo. 'See if he's telling us what we think he's telling us.'
He'd divided the top of the page into two columns, one headed Taken by God and one headed Taken by the Antichrist. Under the Antichrist heading he'd written Judas and Ahithophel. Under the God heading he'd written: Abimelech, Samson, Malachi Dove. And at the foot of the page were a few lines:
I was wounded in the house of my friends and now my harvest is past, the summer is ended, my days are as grass, the wind passeth over them and they are gone. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O GOD I will fly away. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself, here, at the end of my fifty years.
There was a long silence. In the kitchen someone dropped a stack of plates. A door banged. Someone laughed. But at the table none of us spoke.
'At the end of my fifty years?' I said, after a while. Struthers and Danso nodded. They were looking from me to Angeline, watching us filter the information. Waiting to see if we came to the same conclusion. 'His birthday?'
'That's what we think.'
'Which is the twenty-fifth of September,' said Angeline, faintly.
'Exactly.'
'And that is ...'
'Tomorrow.' Struthers nodded. 'Tomorrow. All we have to do is keep Alex out of the papers for another twenty-four hours.'
Which was how we came to spend the whole of the next day on the edge of our seats, waiting for the day to crawl across the sky and be over. Thinking that if we could get past his birthday we'd be OK. Which is all very fucking funny, all a fuck-off laugh at my expense, when you consider that by the time his birthday was over it wasn't Malachi Dove I was thinking about. I'd forgotten to give a shit about him, and where or how they were going to find his body. Because by the night of his birthday the only thing I was thinking of was Lexie and how come it had worked out that she was dead. Of septicaemia. Nine-thirty on 25 September. Age: thirty two.
Part Three
LONDON
FEBRUARY
Oaksey
1
Ten empty Newkie Brown bottles hanging on the wall ...
There were ten empty Newkie Brown bottles lined up on the bog seat. Ten. I lay in the bath staring blankly at them, trying to work out how long it had taken to drink them. I couldn't talk myself into getting out of the bath and all the way over to the toilet, but I needed a piss – had needed one for the last twenty minutes, so I could have been here for, what? An hour? Two?
It was four months since Lexie died ('Sepsis,' the consultant had said. 'She would have been vulnerable to sepsis from the moment she was admitted and I find it difficult to believe you weren't warned of the possibility') and I suppose it'd be fair to say I'd let myself go. I didn't know if I was more depressed that she was dead than I was depressed Dove had won, after everything. Every time someone found a corpse in Scotland, bones mashed into the side of a rock or something bloated bobbing like a dirty tarpaulin in the sea, they thought it was Dove's body. But it wasn't. I'd thought he was going to be easy to find. So I'd been wrong about that too. Some days I thought I knew the answers, others I knew I didn't.
On the floor my mobile rang. I dropped my hand over the side of the bath and grabbed my jeans, shaking them until the phone fell out of the pocket.
'Are you supposed to use mobiles in the bath?' I asked the phone, staring at it. The display said: Finn. Answer? 'I don't know. I mean, will it kill me if I do?' I opened the phone. 'I'm in the bath,' I said. 'This could kill me.'
'Fucking great,' he said. 'It's two in the afternoon, you're in the bath and I'm sitting staring at an empty in-box. Was expecting fifteen thousand words and a synopsis by nine this a.m. At the latest. Instead I've got six slush-pile manuscripts and a Ghanaian asking me to ship money into his bank account.'
I didn't answer. I'd been dragging my feet, waiting for Dove's body to pop up before I committed to a book deal. But I knew I was losing it: a lot of what had happened out on Cuagach had already been released – the public knew about the pig corpses, the gargoyles, what life in the Psychogenic Healing Ministries was like. Two ex-members had already signed publishing deals for their stories. The story, the whole purpose behind the last six months, was slipping through my fingers.
'He's dead, Oakes. Dead. Can you hear me?'
I lifted my foot out of the water and studied it. It was pink and wrinkled into magnified folds, like the skin on a baby rat. I tried to turn the hot tap on with my toe, but it wouldn't budge.
'Oakes,' Finn snapped. 'Can you hear me?'
I pushed the tap harder. When that didn't work I changed my strategy and stuck my toe up it instead. I looked at it for a moment or two, then laughed. I was thinking about an old film where a plumber comes into the bathroom and finds some blonde or other with her toe stuck in a tap. I laughed again, liking the way my voice echoed off the walls.
'Oakes, you are weirding me out here. You're laughing. Can you hear yourself? Laughing.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'I know. I've got my toe in the tap. It's funny.'
'Yes. I knew.'
There was a moment's silence. I stared at my toe. Even more like a rat now. A rat with its nose up a tap.
'Oakes, you're hurting for money, am I right?'
I pulled my toe out, letting my foot splash into the water. 'Yeah,' I said dully. 'You're right.' I'd gone a long time without a paycheck. My syndication-agency accounts stood at zero. Worse, when I got back to London I'd discovered the hole Lexie had got herself into without telling me. She'd run up an overdraft of over three K on our joint account, paying her therapist seventy quid a pop. There was a P45 in the mail, too, from the clinic. Another part of her life she'd forgotten to mention.
'And then,' said Finn, 'yesterday I hear how some hack from Glasgow is auctioning his story. Reckons he's interviewed some of the major players in the police and the clean-up crew out on the island. Says they let him inside the temporary mortuary and what he's saying is there're photos.'
'I've got pictures from the mortuary,' I said coldly. 'I told you already—'
'I know, but that was more than four months ago.'
'Yes. And in those four months I lost my wife.'
Finn sighed. 'I'm sorry, I really am. But you're acting like you're on some fucking candyfloss cloud floating across the sky. Now, listen. I'm going to tell you what to do.' I could hear him switch off his computer and swivel round in his chair. 'First, get me those words. Don't worry about Dove, just do it. Then I want you to talk to that kid.'
'Kid?'
'The one who pulled the video hoax. The one arsing around with the devil suit. He's important to the story. Did you speak to him yet?'