by Gavin Smith
“Yes, I mean of course he’s not.”
Then they were in front of him, Hayley laughing and joking with the nurse as if they were old friends, the nurse mirroring her, relieved that the harpy had been replaced by the nice young woman who’d first introduced herself a few long minutes ago.
“Hello,” Harkness managed. “How are you, Hayley?”
“You big silly arse,” she replied in the bluff tone of the hockey pitch, the one she used when she didn’t want to cry. “What a mess you’ve made of yourself. And Slowey has to tell me.”
“Didn’t want to trouble you,” he offered, frowning as the flawed logic of keeping Hayley in the dark for her own benefit melted at room temperature.
“Well, you did, you stupid, stupid, bloody man. Really, they’re all such children.” She tutted and shook her head, exchanging a knowing glance with the nurse. “Let’s get you home.”
“Hayley,” he blurted. “Look at my hands. I can’t. You know. I can’t use them. Not for a week. Maybe more.”
“And you think that I’m going to leave you hogging a bed that belongs to someone really poorly just to avoid helping you in the bathroom. There, I’ve said it. Now, on your feet, Rob, and don’t step on mine. These shoes cost more than your wardrobe. Much, much more.”
Obedient and needful, he swung his legs out of bed, dragging himself upright, ignoring the twisting of the canula in his vein and the insistent tugging of the thick needle on the broken skin that had embraced it. He could submit to solitude or he could become beholden; he saw no third way.
“It’s Friday. All still a bit vague, is it Rob?” Newbould held court in Harkness’s back garden, straddling a chair and sizing him up over beefy forearms bearing faded green tattoos of armorial crests and writhing houris, spectres of a military career decades behind him. “You make this coffee? Bloody nice.”
“No. Hayley did. Made me a flask before she went out. What? Vague. Yep, afraid so. It’s the drugs. And the piss poor sleep.”
“Drugs? Anything good?”
“Enough codeine to constipate an elephant. And sleeping pills which seem to kick in some time after breakfast.”
“Get the basket?”
Harkness nodded. As a fee-paying member of the Fed who’d been injured on duty, he’d received the standard assortment of fruit, boiled sweets and assorted pickles on a wicker tray with a pro forma message thanking him for his commitment to duty and wishing him a speedy recovery. He’d spent a sulky hour in the sun wishing they’d sent whisky, then plucking out the grapes with his teeth and spitting them onto the lawn for the sparrows and blackbirds to fight over.
“Well, thought I should swing by. Welfare visit. Make sure you’re being looked after. You know the drill.”
“Not necessary, but thanks,” said Harkness, raising a hand in appreciation and wincing.
“How is it?”
“Getting there. Was unbearable. Now it’s almost unbearable.”
“I’ve got to ask, Rob, ‘cause I’m nosy and I’m a rude, obnoxious old bastard. How are you getting on in the crapper?”
“You don’t mince around do you, boss? I’ll tell you how. You spend a day or two getting a nurse to hold your pecker while you think about Margaret Thatcher and try not to enjoy it, then realise there’s no chance of that ‘cause it’s all shrivelled with embarrassment, so you think about anything at all until your bladder uncorks itself and you piss your pathetic drizzle into the cardboard pot while the nurse umms and ahhs like you’re top of the class at potty-training.
“If you really want more detail, and I just know you do, well I managed to disengage my bowels ‘til I got home – nurses didn’t like that at all ‘cause they want you to perform before you’re discharged. Perverts. Since then, well, Hayley’s had to do some really horrible things that neither of us ever wants to repeat because our bread’s not buttered that way. I still can’t look her in the eye. It’s fair to say the mystique has gone.
“I can manage it myself now, just about. Got a supply of those big cellophane gloves you get at petrol stations. Fit over the bandages nicely. Hurts like a bastard but that’s a small price to pay.”
“I thought your missus was off work?”
“She was until today. I persuaded her I can open a door and eat a sandwich unassisted. She’s a good girl.”
“Better than you deserve.”
“Amen.”
“Suppose you’d like to know what’s occurred, Rob?”
“I’d like to come back next week and find out for myself. I might need a scribe but that’s nothing new.”
“Doctor’s signed you off for a month, subject to review. And before you butt in like you always do, I want you to take it.”
“What’s next?”
“Testy bastard, aren’t we today? Right, item number one: Firth was switched off on Wednesday morning so he’s gone, dead, expired, well and truly out of the frame. Very sad and all that but problem solved.”
“I watch the news, boss. Dead despite the ‘heroic efforts of an officer who has yet to be named.’ When oh when will I get my moment?”
“Alright, smartarse. Want a Blue Peter badge, do we? Item two: The enquiry has developed. If that’s the word. ‘Clusterfuck’ would be my word but I’m just an old-fashioned sweary-Mary. The Detective Chief Superintendent and myself are of a mind to scale down the original murder enquiry. The prime suspect is dead. He was far and away the best fit for this and I can’t see us finding a better candidate. We’ll keep a skeleton crew running it to make sure we can write up the enquiry well enough to satisfy the Coroner.
“While I’m on the subject, Firth’s death will be examined by the team too. If we do it right first time, the dead stay buried. Anyway, fact is, you’re a witness. Maybe even a suspect, technically speaking. Enquiry team will be knocking on your door soon and boring you to tears with some very lengthy statement-taking. Now, because you’re a witness, I want you on ice ‘til I say different. That means home leave, out of the office, not contaminating my already too fucking complicated enquiry.”
“Why do I feel like a suspect?”
“’Cause you’re not as thick as you look and thought was given in some quarters to hanging it around your neck. But let’s get it said now and avoid fucking each other over later on. You probably stoked him up in the car. Trying to get a cough and do your job. Then you did some amateur surveillance. Would he have done it anyway? If you’d dropped him off without a word and taken yourself off for a long lunch like a normal cop? Who knows?
“Could somebody with two degrees and a big fucking chip on their shoulder argue that he did himself in because of something you said to him? Or that he did it to prove something to you, knowing you’d be watching? They could, but they couldn’t prove it unless the car was wired. I don’t know and I don’t want to know what you discussed on what was incidentally a suspiciously long fucking car ride to his gaff.
“Truth be told, I wanted you to lean on him and keep eyes on. And luckily for you and me, a handful of smartarse lawyers and cops with crowns on their shoulders signed off on bailing him out, so if they attack us, they’ll end up bending over with their trousers round their ankles when we roger them with the Nuremberg defence.”
“I did nothing wrong,” muttered Harkness, shaking Brennan’s imagery out of his head. “We did nothing wrong. This man………this youth…..Firth was broken before we even got hold of him.”
“I agree. That’s why we’re going to tidy up. We’re not burying anything, Rob. We’re just showing the truth in the best possible light.”
“I’ll need to think about this.”
“Good. Take your time. Lie in the garden. Watch Countdown. Boot up the interweb and abuse yourself silly, assuming you can make a fist. Do all the thinking you want.”
“This was supposed to be my case. I need to review it. There’s got to be a better resolution than this.”
“There will be.”
“The case hasn’t been solved.”
“It has, Rob. You just don’t know it yet.”
Harkness had Hayley dig out his undergraduate notes and began to re-acquaint himself with the universe beyond this squabbling city. In accepting an enforced leave of absence, he’d been compelled to admit that he had entirely forgotten how to use day after day of free time. Two or three days off between exhausting shifts was another thing altogether; one day could be devoted to catching up on sleep, another to recovering from a hangover and maybe a third to laundry, admin, acknowledging Hayley’s existence and the almost inevitable late call-out.
Yet a seemingly unbroken chain of unstructured days and empty time felt daunting when it should have felt liberating. The pain running its course through his hands made writing with a pen or a keyboard impossible and stymied his determination to review the case in as much detail as memory and Slowey’s secret bulletins would allow.
Maybe he should just settle for electronic distractions. Yet the ageing games console kept idle company with the DVD player in a dusty corner of the lounge; rampaging through a virtual world dispensing semi-automatic, hollow-point justice to the unrighteous held a vague appeal, but his hands couldn’t have held the controller. Hayley had acquired a stack of DVDs, trying to anticipate with very little guidance what might divert him, but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh at the stylised degradations of frat-house comedy, nor could he stomach the formulaic, violent and oddly sanitised retribution that seemed to clinch just about every movie thriller.
So he spent his days cross-legged on an outsize bean-bag on the living room floor, old notes, maps and diagrams laid out before him, laptop sighing away the heat of its thoughts, curtains tight shut for at least half the day to blank out the sunlight. Even indoors, the furious energy of the nearest star seemed to add an extra jolt to the voltage running through his hands.
In empty moments, his hands fascinated him. The torrent of needles tearing through his flesh now at least felt cleansing, as if the wrecking crew had been replaced by builders. He no longer wore bandages during the day, allowing the wounds to cool and breathe. The flesh of his hands resembled a Martian plain, rust-red and criss-crossed by deep rivulets. He spent a meticulous and excruciating hour every day excising the pale lids of blisters with sharp scissors, liberating the clean flesh beneath and making sure every raw surface was coated with anti-biotic cream.
Reprising his BSc in Astrophysics occupied his mind for most of his waking hours. At first, he’d found the intellectual contortions of fifteen years earlier beyond him, as if he were reading the work of some arcane specialist he could never hope or indeed need to emulate. Within days, he’d opened up, dusted off and aired chambers in his mind he’d long ago closed and forgotten about; and occupying those obscure rooms, hiding in peaceful obscurity, was the best and only way he’d found to shut out the noise of the distant past and the near present.
His parents, some of his friends, Hayley and the few people at work who knew his degree subject had been baffled by his career choice. After all, why would somebody with the wherewithal to understand celestial mechanics want to waste their brain as a copper? While he nodded along with them, he knew that astrophysics had been a hobby and not a vocation. He was fascinated and absorbed by the heavens, finding something in their study akin to spiritual solace; but he was driven by policing, or at least those parts of it that allowed him to set things right and re-order the world in his small, ham-fisted way.
So he revelled in his dusty notes and lofty thoughts but didn’t forget that this was the church he only turned to when his chosen life became too bruising; he was a foul-weather parishioner, sinking to his knees only for weddings, funerals and star charts.
Perhaps the discipline of astronomy offered as much solace as any other humbling devotion. Once its mathematical complexities and conundrums had wrenched your mind away from whatever earthly banalities and horrors had consumed it, you were free to gape in wonder at the incalculable immensity of time and space, the almost infinite possibilities that the universe harboured, out there, somewhere, sometime. Then you could let time gently coax you from your moorings and drift, watching the earth-bound tumult of fear and anxiety and commitment and toil recede into irrelevance.
“So,” Hayley had said, joining him on the floor on a lazy Sunday afternoon almost a week after the spate of deaths. “How do you know any of this is true? How can anyone know?”
“We don’t. Philosophically speaking, I can’t even be sure you exist. Sometimes I think I imagine you because I need a sexy, stroppy girl to slap me around and keep me in my place.”
The light faded from her eyes and she wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked older somehow, her temples speckled with a dull silver he’d never noticed before, a delicate tracery of lines fanning out from the corners of red-rimmed eyes.
“Look. I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why?”
“I haven’t earned back flirting rights yet.”
“No, Rob. That’s not it. It’s just. You can’t. I mean you shouldn’t. Fuck it.” She picked up her wine, gently rolling the sanguine liquid around the glass and admiring the traceries of evaporating alcohol. Then she drained it quickly and placed the glass firmly back on its coaster, the light back in her eyes. “Take me seriously. That’s all.”
“I do, love. Of course I do.”
“You do. As your flatmate. A flatmate you’re fond of but still just your flatmate. With the odd shag thrown in. When we’re both in the house and a bit squiffy and in the mood at the same time. You know, when the stars are aligned: you’re the expert so you’d know.”
“I’ve not been there for you. I know. I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done for me this week. You could have just, I don’t know, left me there. I deserved it.”
“Rob, don’t thank me, you big drama queen. Just appreciate me.”
“I do…”
“No. Listen. You’re married to your work and to Christ knows what else. I know you don’t tell me anything like all of it. We’re good together. We were good together. But you’re pulling away and I can’t stand much more of it.”
“I know. It’s the job. It can be better.”
“Don’t give me resignation and wishy-washy hope. It’s the job? You chose the job. I can’t take that to the bank. I love you. I want to take care of you. That’s in the contract; it’s not an extra you have to thank me for.”
“Tell me what you want.”
He’d craned his neck towards the coffee table and sipped up a good, strong dose of Laphroaig through a straw.
“You make me a bit sad, Rob. But that’s honest. That’s progress.” She sniffed, bright eyes dewing. “It’s dead simple. Come back to me. Make room in your life. Want to know something? Sounds stupid, it is stupid. But my regional manager, Jess. She and her husband are forever screaming at each other over anything. Football results. Not flushing the loo. Driving too quickly. Driving too slowly. You get the gist. Thing is: I’m jealous, ‘cause in their own dumb, screechy way, they’ve got passion. And they’re randy as stoats.”
“I’m so sorry, Hayley. I’ve been sleepwalking lately. I know I have to do better.” He remained numb, an impartial observer, in control. He knew it would all make sense later, when he returned from his trip around the solar system.
“You do. But I don’t want words. You’re low. You’re in pain. Your head’s fizzing with beastly, horrible stuff from work. Involve me. That’s all. I’m afraid. Desperately afraid you’re wasting my time.
“So. Here it is. I’ve thought about leaving you. I’ve thought about staggering into bed with other people at conferences. Maybe you have strayed. I don’t know. Don’t want to know. Couldn’t take it. I’ve thought about screaming at you and punching you.
“You’ve got a month. Get your thinking done. Decide what you want. If you love me and want me, tell me on your own terms. That’s it.”
Harkness had remained studiously blank, nodding gently and draining his whisky. He felt like a recal
citrant interviewee, stunned or calculating or both, allowing the whirring of the tape and the flickering of pens and the silent expectation to build, knowing someone might crack but it wouldn’t be him. ‘ “Ok. I will. I promise.” He meant it, every word. Or at least he would make sure he meant it, soon. “I’ll use this time to shake work out of my head and think about you. Us.”
“That’s all I want, Rob. And you can start by taking my question seriously. How do you know any of this astrology mumbo-jumbo is true?”
“Astrology? Go and wash your mouth out.”
“Go on, explain to me how the universe is expanding. If it goes on forever and it actually is everything, what the hell could it be expanding into? A bad-hair day for Geminis with foggy horizons for Leos makes more sense to me.”
“Well, it’s like this…”
“And just in case you haven’t worked it out, I’m not after a physics lecture, I just don’t want you to treat me like a powder-puff girly.”
“It’s called the Hubble Constant. At a galactic level, everything is moving away from everything else at dazzling speeds. In fact, the further apart things are from each other, the faster they accelerate. It’s as if the fabric of space itself is expanding. It doesn’t need anything to expand into because it is everything. Reality itself is expanding.”
“Cobblers. Really, Rob. You do know you sound like the skinny man in the kaftan you always find in the ‘chill out’ tent at festivals?”
“Open your mind, man.”
“Come on. How could you possibly know any of this?”
“Red shift. Distant objects are motoring away so quickly they elongate the wavelength of light we receive from them. The galaxies are being hurled apart in every direction with enough force to bend light itself and the void is swelling. Chilling stuff, eh?”
“Do you know how much you sound like the man on the High Street? You know, the one with the megaphone and the bible and all that ‘cast into the void’ nonsense?”