by Hannah Howe
I sat on the edge of my sofa and placed my forehead in the palm of my left hand. My forehead was incredibly hot. Or maybe my hand was incredibly cold. Was the glass half-full or half-empty? When they embarked on a holiday, did philosophers take time out to think? I was becoming delirious, my thoughts swimming in a sea of confusion, as though trapped in a bad psychedelic dream.
“Are you okay, Missy?” Mac frowned while munching through a biscuit.
I nodded then made a supreme effort to gather my thoughts. “Where were we?” I asked feebly.
“Jesus...”
“Yes, Jesus...he did give me a very strange look when we first met.”
“And while he stared at you through glazed eyes the little voice in his head said, ‘shoot the pretty one’.” Mac shrugged philosophically. “It happens, Missy, it happens all the time.”
“You’re right, Mac. I hate to admit it, but Tyler was right and I was wrong. I suppose I put my dislike of her, my prejudices and my inherent belief in the good of those who suffer, in the way. Troubled people are not always saints, sometimes they do devilish things.”
Mac placed his coffee cup on a side table. He glanced at his knuckles then offered a rueful grin. “That was one hell of a devilish thing I did to him back there.”
I nodded in agreement. “I know why you did it, but I wish you hadn’t.”
Mac growled. He selected another biscuit. As he munched his way through it, he complained, “I got him to talk, didn’t I?”
“And you released some of your frustration.”
“Aye,” he conceded, “there’s that.”
“When you get home,” I asked, “do you think you can patch things up with your lover?”
“It’s over.” Mac sat back in the armchair. He placed his hands behind his head. With a sigh and a shrug he added, “So be it.”
“My fault,” I whispered.
“No, Missy, I told you before, the cracks were already widening. It’s time for us to go our separate ways.”
“Me and you too,” I smiled, a smile tinged with regret. Mac had made himself at home during his stay in my flat. A fine chef, I wished that I’d been well enough to enjoy his cuisine. The flat would seem empty without him. Strange, after years of solitude and adapting to my own company, it troubled me to think that I’d be living on my own.
“It’s back to the good Dr Storey for you,” Mac said, reminding me that Alan was firmly in my life, a vital, sanity-saving fixture. “He’s a fine man,” Mac added. “Damn pity he’s straight.”
Despite myself, I laughed, out loud, releasing a sound that bordered on the raucous. “Oh, he’s that all right, he’s that!”
Mac glanced under his armpit, to ensure that his Beretta was snug in its holster. He checked his coat pocket and his bar of fruit and nut. The chocolate bar was largely intact. However, he had taken to eating more custard cream biscuits. Would it be peevish of me to point out that fact? In the event, I held my tongue.
Mac disappeared into my spare room. As he emerged with his travel bag, I glanced towards the snow-covered window and said, “Maybe you should stay; it’s not safe to travel.”
“I’ll be okay. The main roads are passable; best to make tracks now before the blizzard really bites.”
I nodded, stood and hugged Mac. “Look after yourself, Big Man.”
“You too, Missy.” Mac gave me a kiss on my left cheek, his big, bristling moustache tickling my skin. At my front door, he paused, turned then said, “And you’re right, by the way; toughness does show itself in many different ways.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
With Mac on his way to Glasgow and with my mind adjusting to the idea that Jesus had tried to murder me, I phoned Alan. I told him that Mickey was in the clear, that Jesus was the culprit and that I was feeling better. That last part was a gross lie, but I had no mind to trouble him; the shooting had been solved; I could rest for a few days and by then I’d be fine.
I struggled out of my jeans, but decided that removing my sweater would be too much of an effort. So I crawled into bed wearing the soft, baggy garment and tried to sleep.
The night brought a series of bad dreams punctuated by bathroom breaks. I woke at dawn with no energy whatsoever. A wave of nausea swept over me and, on hands and knees, I crawled to the bathroom, where I was violently sick. My thoughts were a jumble and it was hard to maintain focus. My eyes were blurred; I couldn’t see a thing. I struggled to the sink and splashed water over my face. I blinked then sensed that my vomit was streaked with blood.
On my hands and knees, I crawled into the bedroom. My muscles were tight, tense and totally unresponsive. The simple task of locating my phone and placing a call took an aeon though, eventually, I did manage to shake the device free from my jeans pocket and contact Alan.
“Hello...”
“Alan...”
I didn’t need to elaborate; my voice must have revealed my desperation.
“I’ll be right over,” Alan said and I dropped the phone.
Front door, better open the front door. Keys, where the hell are my keys...
I sat against my wicker chair and watched a snake as it slithered across the ceiling. The snake hissed at me, and I turned away, afraid. Then a moment of clarity...the snake wasn’t real; I was hallucinating. Find your keys, open the front door then get back into bed...
My keys were in my shoulder bag and my shoulder bag was in the kitchen. Crawl to the kitchen, one hand in front of the other, drag your legs...
However, I had no energy. I couldn’t move. I sat there, in the kitchen, staring at my shoulder bag. Sweat soaked my face; my body burned. Get hold of your keys, open the front door then get back into bed...
I slithered like a snake across the vinyl floor, reached up to the worktop, grabbed hold of my shoulder bag. Its contents cascaded over me, while my gun bounced on to the floor and disappeared under the kitchen table.
By hook or by crook, I don’t remember how, I found my keys in my hand. I crawled to the front door, unlocked it, rested, then struggled towards my bed.
Somehow, I climbed on to my bed, but by then I was totally spent – I had nothing left in the tank. Running on empty, I stared at the ceiling while a tear dripped on to my pillow.
I turned my head, to the left. I spied my medicine bottles and Dr Felicity Barr’s tonic. Maybe I should take some medicine. Maybe I should try some tonic. But the tonic’s not doing me any good. In fact, it’s making me feel worse.
It’s making me feel worse...
‘You have lead poisoning,’ Mac said.
Love and hate, two sides of the same coin...
When love becomes an obsession...
Felicity...
Through the mist of my blurred vision, I tried to focus my eyes. I turned my head, and there she was, standing in my bedroom. Felicity.
She smiled, benignly. “You are still with us, I see. You are very strong, I give you that.”
“You...”
“Me.” Her smile broadened into something manic. “He’s mine. You can’t have him. You should never have entered his life. This is your fault for coming between us.”
I glanced towards the window and the bright white light, the sunlight reflected by the snow. “Alan...”
Felicity offered a sad shake of her head. “He won’t get here in time. The roads are all blocked, the traffic is barely moving. I had to walk here and that walk took me half the night. But,” she added, her tone dark, her voice satanic, “it was worth it.”
I glanced over to the wicker chair, to the bedroom carpet, to my phone. My mind screamed, imploring me to jump out of bed, to retrieve the phone, but try as I might, my body would not respond.
“Of course, Alan failed to tell you that I’m a member of the gun club. He failed to tell you that I’m a markswoman of some note.” Felicity dropped her medical bag on to my bed. She opened its clasp then rummaged inside the bag, producing a gun, a .38, identical to the weapon she’d used on me; presumably she had easy acce
ss to the guns, through the gun club. “Do you know why he failed to tell you?” She grinned, her eyes wide, manic, as though possessed by a demon. “Because, deep down, he loves me more than he loves you.”
My eyes widened. I could move them, flicker my eyelashes, but nothing else. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. The scream echoed inside my head, mocking me, reminding me of my vulnerability, of my impotence.
Felicity laughed, “That’s right, Alan’s protected me all along. He’s given his tacit support to everything I’ve done.” She nodded towards the diamond ring on my left hand. “That ring, he bought it for me. The trip to France, he went there with me. Every day he’s known you, we’ve been lovers. When he’s not with you, he shares my bed. And sweet Alis, my lovely daughter...I gave birth to her sixteen years ago, though of course we humour her and pretend that Elin was her mother. I love Alis. Alan loves me. He proposed, over dinner on Christmas Day. We shall marry on Valentine’s Day.”
In my confused state, I was wont to believe her. Alan had betrayed me, though even in extremis I hated myself for dwelling on that thought. He loved me. He wouldn’t betray me. He was with me throughout Christmas Day.
He was with me throughout Christmas Day...
Her words were a fantasy, a fairytale, grim in their conception. She was lying, she was deluded, she was sick; she’d lost all reason.
My voice sounded like a bullfrog with laryngitis, but I managed to croak, “You’re lying. You’re sick. You’re deluded.”
“No, dear,” she continued to smile, “you are the sick and deluded one.” She glanced at the bottle of tonic, her Christmas gift to me. “Antimony,” she explained, “it should have killed you by now. You are not much to look at, but you are incredibly strong.”
Antimony – the nightmare, my Jack the Ripper dream. Severin Klosowski, aka George Chapman, a Ripper suspect, had poisoned three of his wives with antimony. Even though I’d been blind to the truth since the bullet had entered my shoulder, unable to discern the facts, my subconscious had been active and had identified the source of the problem. You should listen to your subconscious more often, Samantha...I stared at Felicity and her gun...too late now...
Her gun was still on the bed. Get hold of the gun; use it on her...One big effort, one supreme endeavour; use your last ounce of energy to save your life...
I lunged for the gun, ignoring the pain in my injured shoulder. However, my attempt was pathetic and I fell on to the floor like a rag doll.
“Here, dear, do you want this?” Felicity offered the gun to my desperate hand. With my hand shaking violently, my fingers gripped the gun. I tried to wrap my index finger around the trigger, but my finger was paralysed, unable to respond. Throw the gun at her, aim for her temple, knock her out...With a groan, I hurled the gun at Felicity, only in reality, I didn’t; I merely dropped the .38 on to the carpet, at her feet.
Felicity picked up the gun then dropped it into her medical bag. She leaned back and laughed, “Did I say you are incredibly strong? I should have said you were incredibly strong.” For a moment, her eyes became reflective as she stared at her bag and the gun. “Of course,” she murmured, “I should have stayed and put another bullet into you, but I thought I heard someone on the stairs and I panicked. I ran and threw the gun away. However...” The grin returned to her face while the devil reclaimed her eyes. “...there will be no mistake this time.”
From her medical bag, Dr Felicity Barr removed a syringe and a vial. My eyes were too cloudy to see beyond broad outlines, mere shapes, but the needle and the glass container told me that the end was nigh.
“Potassium chloride,” Felicity informed me as she offered the needle to the vial. As she loaded the syringe, she added, “That’s right, the lethal injection they use on criminals in America. Now just lie back and you will drift into an endless sleep; you won’t feel a thing, I promise you.” She repeated, “You won’t feel a thing.”
Felicity rolled up the sleeve on my sweater. She placed the needle against my left arm. She squeezed my wrist, produced a vein then inserted the needle. “There,” she smiled, “that didn’t hurt, did it? Just relax; you won’t feel a thing...”
As tears stung my eyes and rolled down my cheeks, my mind screamed, ‘Alan!’ Then Felicity’s thumb moved over the plunger. She squeezed the plunger.
I closed my eyes and a blur of images flicked before me, like a film on fast-forward. Felicity was wrong – the needle did hurt. Then I moved beyond pain as a gunshot exploded in the bedroom. Distantly, I heard the report of a second gunshot while I drifted into a dark void.
Chapter Thirty
It was touch-and-go for a while as the antimony played havoc with my system. However, I was offered a treatment of gastric lavage, followed by the administration of activated charcoal to absorb the antimony in my gut. After that, I responded to chelation therapy as injections of dimercaprol were pumped into my system to remove the antimony already absorbed into my body.
I was sitting up in my hospital bed, smiling, admiring a large bunch of carnations. The carnations contained a card, a simple message, which read, ‘Get well soon, Missy’.
I was still admiring the flowers when Detective Inspector ‘Sweets’ MacArthur walked into my cubicle.
Sweets removed his trilby and tossed it on to the bed. He sighed, “You’re like a cat with nine lives, you.”
“Meow.” I made a scramming gesture with my left hand. Then I smiled. “In fact, I’m purring.” Nodding to my left, at a bedside table, my eyes feasted on a dozen red roses. “Look at these.”
“From Alan?”
“Uh-huh. He’s due to take me home soon.”
From his position on a bedside chair, Sweets admired the roses. He was wearing his raincoat, and from a pocket, he removed a paperback, a Western; a bag of sweets, hardboiled; and a crumpled sheet of paper. While flicking the paper, he said, “She really had it in for you, didn’t she?”
“Explain,” I frowned.
“As well as potassium chloride in the syringe, antimony in the bottle and enough small arms to equip a large army in her house, we also found a diary; here’s a brief transcript.”
I leaned forward and peered at the sheet of paper, held in Sweets’ left hand. “What did she write about me?”
Sweets puffed out his cheeks, shook his head, then gave me a sideways glance. “Let’s just say her words were not complimentary and leave it at that.”
“To her, I was the bitch from hell.”
“You were that, and more.” Sweets glanced at the sheet of paper. He added, “The diary suggests that she’d lost her mind. In her head, she and Alan were a couple, living together, while Alis was her daughter. She describes spending Christmas Day with him in France, where he proposed.”
“Yet, professionally, she was on top of her job.”
“Yeah, well...the psychiatrist I spoke to says such behaviour is not unknown. Indeed, far too many doctors, and other professionals, have continued to practice while being as dotty as a dork. Which reminds me...” Sweets grinned and I prepared to exercise my chuckle muscles. “A woman is chatting with her friend. ‘My husband bought me a mood ring the other day. It helps him to monitor my emotional state.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ says the friend, ‘how does it work?’ The woman replies, ‘When I’m in a good mood, it turns green, when I’m sad it turns blue, when I’m feeling romantic it turns pink, when I’m feeling sexy it turns purple, and when I’m feeling angry it leaves a big red mark on his forehead...’”
I laughed, grateful for the emotional release.
Five minutes later, I had a second visitor, Sweets’ acerbic colleague, Detective Inspector Carolyn Tyler. As Sweets sat, Tyler stood, staring at me; maybe it was my imagination, or a trick of the light, but I detected a hint of compassion in her eyes.
“Ms Smith,” Tyler intoned, “I am delighted to see you looking better.”
“I’m feeling a lot better, thanks.”
She dipped her head, paused, then looked up, contrition writ la
rge across her angular face. She conceded, “It seems that you were right, and I was wrong.”
I shrugged, then asked, “Has Jesus been released?”
“From police custody, yes, though he is undergoing further psychiatric assessment.”
“Did you discover his real name?”
“No.” Tyler shook her head, and her hair, which was loose today, swung across her shoulders. “It seems he’s a drifter, someone who doesn’t officially exist.” She glanced at her highly polished shoes, removed an imaginary speck from her finely tailored jacket, then gazed into my eyes. “Which leads me to my next question...who shot Dr Felicity Barr?”
I offered her my angelic, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression, the look that ushered me into the school choir. After one rehearsal, my voice propelled me out of the choir, but that’s another story. Of Tyler, I asked, “Do you have a suspect?”
The familiar glare returned to her face. “You know we do.”
“Then why don’t you arrest him?”
“Our prime suspect has an alibi...he was travelling to Glasgow; his car was spotted by motorway cameras along the M1; furthermore, five motorway cafe owners, when interviewed, were prepared to offer him an alibi.”
I shrugged my shoulders: that’s right, both shoulders. “Sounds watertight.”
“Unfortunately,” Tyler conceded, “it is.”
Tyler glanced at Sweets and my friend offered her a bonbon, which she refused. As Sweets unwrapped his bonbon, he winked at me, then left the room.
“You have been very fortunate, Ms Smith, very fortunate indeed,” Tyler said, her tone carrying the weight of Hercules. “Maybe you should quit while you’re ahead?”
While recovering from my latest mishap, I had pondered that question. My job, at times, contained certain dangers. Yet, as Alan pointed out, this episode stemmed from events closer to home. Felicity was dead – the bullets had been fired by an expert, by a man who knew his business – she would bother me no more, except as a phantom in my nightmares.
Quit? Maybe one day, but not yet.