Shellagh crumpled the beige cup and stuffed it into one of the overflowing bins beside the green double doors, then went on through.
She checked her watch as a moment ticked by, then another moment, her life measured in the slow, steady passage of moments. Tomorrow would be different, she promised herself. Day one in a life without Dr Too Good to Be True.
She was rostered for High Dependency Unit in quarter of an hour, so she wandered down the corridor and took the service lift to the second floor.
Her soft-soled footsteps echoed, but without the clangy metallic precision of heels. The corridor divided at a T-junction, right under the sign for I.C.U., left under maternity. Shellagh went right.
The first two doors were open, the third and forth closed. The computerised bleep music of the life-givers, muffled through the closed doors, haunted the passageway. A bare gurney stood up against one wall.
Shellagh's head was filled to overflowing with a crazy jumble of thoughts and ideas that rolled and splashed around a core of numbness. Inside the numbness was a nascent fear. She shambled toward the line of open plan offices like a reluctant prodigal.
Within a few minutes, Shellagh had checked the medication lists off against the list on the clipboard and started making up the morning's batch of pills.
Two fresh-faced interns breezed in, full of gossip and good cheer, made themselves coffees and waited for the rounds to begin again at four.
The small part of Shellagh's mind that had any volition left tried to bludgeon the rest into thinking, but the old grey matter refused to cooperate. She felt suffocated. Angry. Sad. Her thoughts stayed mercifully dark. The glazed smile took hold of her face again. She watched her hands move. Felt them fumble with the medication.
But something was wrong and wouldn't leave her alone.
Something about Bren. Bumping into him like that. Coincidence?
It didn't feel right, but the more she tried to figure it out the further it receded: like the riddle of the Chinese finger puzzles of her childhood. She stopped trying and told herself it would come back eventually.
Jason Kelso was down for 50 mg of Pethidine and 900 mg Fenbufen, standard post-surgery pain killers and anti-inflammatories. Nothing to tax her more than was absolutely necessary. Familiarity with the routines had her hands running on automatic yet again, measuring the dosages almost as much by instinct as by any well worked methodology.
The drone of the staff television was down to almost nothing, but that didn't prevent Shellagh's attention from wandering that way.
A fire. At the big shopping complex south of the river.
Her heart skipped a beat, but the sky was black, even without the smoke pall. Night. No one would be shopping. No crisis. Let the fire services deal with it, if they haven't all been streamlined to a virtual close down by the bloody Government.
The young doctors were still chatting away, wasting time.
Shellagh felt strange. Dislocated. As if she were falling asleep on her feet. The image on the television faded into the face of the coloured presenter, her lips moving out of sync with the words in Shellagh's ears.
“Are you all right?” The smaller of the two interns asked from somewhere.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. Shrugged it off.
“Fine,” she mouthed, not hearing her own pat words. “Overworked, underpaid, and four hours to go, but otherwise just fine. Thank you for asking.”
The intern chuckled and sat back down.
The parents of a young girl stood in the doorway one down from Kelso, the dad, a thickset sheet metal worker, clutched a battered brown teddy bear, too close to the edge of breaking down not to slip the rest of the way. His wife, a pretty slip of a thing dwarfed by his brute physique, looked to be faring little better.
Viral Meningitis, Shellagh remembered, putting a name to the girl in room five. Partially blind and stone deaf, but arrested, another little girl walking in death's footsteps. Sometimes she wasn't sure if medical science was such a good thing after all.
One look at the harrowing sadness in the bear-clutching father's eyes sent her faith in miracles down another notch.
Shellagh tried to muster a smile for them as she wheeled the drugs trolley past. She wanted to say something, but the only thing that would come to mind was, “Less said, better mended.” And that was so wildly inappropriate she kept her peace, taking the solid ground and avoiding any misunderstood fireworks.
She knocked twice on Jason's door, called through, “Hope you're decent,” and went on in.
Part of Jason Kelso was stretched out on the bed, his plaster cast leg up on the winch still, his hands twisted up behind his head to clutch at the bedhead, almost as if they were tied to the metal struts in a parody of one violent delight she had never yet come close to satisfying her appetite for. His mid-section, from the waist up, was simply missing. Cut away. Blood soaked into the sheets, already thickened to a crisp patina. Shellagh Cramer stood frozen in the doorway, taking in the carnage, although what she was seeing didn't actually register.
The expression on Jason's face was a placid, flat calm, even thoughtful. The eyes, blank, hadn't rolled up to white, but stared now, blindly. The lights on, nobody home. His head was contorted to the right, flecks of blood sprayed around the thin, emotionless lips, and looking below, his neck was grotesquely severed, rough edges of striated tendon and ligament cut away like an uncooked Sunday joint fresh from defrosting on the drainer. Still hooked up to the ventilator, the suck-hiss of oxygen pumped through the truncated windpipe, flaring the severed muscles in regular waves.
A jag of bone splintered through the clustered tubing, a white javelin snapped off short of the point.
The lucid part of Shellagh's mind was horribly aware of all the minute details; the blood on the flower petals and on the fine hairs on his lip, the water rose red in the jug on the table, the two day old lacerations across his face and scalp, the shards of bone showing through, the dark sky coming through to the ambient glow of shepherd's warning, the organs laid out on the wheeled table, itself under the window, and the surgical gloves balled up beside a sliced kidney.
There was too much blood for just one body, surely. Compulsion moved her feet two hesitant paces into the room, the scream stillborn in her throat. A small, neatly stacked pound of flesh had been cut away from between his legs; only the bell-ended glans recognisable as part of his penis. The length had been peeled away like a banana with the aid of a surgical scalpel, so only the urethra remained attached to the mushroom.
His torso had been rolled onto the floor at the foot of the bed and lay in a puddle of congealed blood, the cavity between his ribs hollowed out, the muscular bag of his stomach ripped open.
Shellagh could see the part digested remains of yesterday's meal through the torn walls, mixed to a pulp. Slippery ropes of grey tubing unravelled in slinky loops. Something that might have been corn on the cob lay alone, a neat slice running through its seeds to part the layers of the defunct organ in wafer thin pages.
Whoever had taken the knife to Jason had also put his hands in the then steaming entrails and painted a border around part of the wall. Thrown handfuls of the stuff at the pristine paint.
Shellagh hovered there a moment more, her gaze matching the dead photographer's glassy stare for sheer emptiness, while the previously muted scream gathered strength in her throat and the sheer hell of it all hit her dulled brain with its full, terrible force.
Then she screamed.
And couldn't stop screaming, even when her throat had burned away raw and her voice had cracked away to nothing.
The sound of it stayed inside, haunting her head.
- 42 -
They drove and talked, Devlin behind the wheel, Kristy carrying the weight of the conversation for him.
Devlin wanted everything she had, without exception, and that meant putting together two-and-two's of half-formed suspicions and intuitive suppositions rattling around inside her head. Oddly, the simple act of r
epetition dulled the madness enough for it to almost make sense, and everything seemed to lose its edge of urgency. They had called ahead, and a response unit was probably already at Jason's bedside laughing along with his bad line in jokes.
Devlin said very little outside the occasional prod for her to carry on, the only exception being when they dropped away from the A69 beyond Corbridge.
“Bleak, isn't it? Especially at this hour. It always reminds me of Tolkien. The dead marshes. You can almost see the thousand lights of the dead souls on the moor, can't you?”
The grey-hued desolation was certainly breathtaking. Bleak and lonely moorland that disappeared into never with its black soil and moss-coated boulders furred with lichens, cemetery teeth eroded by the harsh winters into hard stumps. The vista was hauntingly beautiful in its barren eeriness.
The sky was filling with gradually diluting purple as morning rose into red.
She wasn't surprised that Devlin read, or that he collected barren images. Nothing about the C.I.D. man came as any surprise. Dangerous men were unpredictable, but that very unpredictability put her on the lookout for the unexpected, effectively cancelling out the element of surprise.
A huge Pantechnican thundered by in the fast lane. The only other traffic they had seen were Lorries destined for one of either the chemical plant in Hexham or the Longrigg paper mill in Westbrooke itself. Smoke and steam stacks rose from both, making clouds, but the rest of the county town was content to sleep.
Devlin followed the Pantechnican off the slipway into Hexham proper. On the hill, the Abbey and rings of surrounding houses provided the Minas Tirith to the dead marshes, in a spectacular protrusion of stained glass and Norman architecture. The dissipating purple swells lent the backdrop a suitably fantastic, holy aura. They followed the left around the Wentworth playing fields, within touching distance of the railway station and its assembly line of portaloos and payphones. Someone had sprayed: CAITLIN YOU'RE A DREAM THIEF on the wall next to BASH A PIG FOR A POUND OF GRAPES.
Devlin didn't ask the obvious question until they crawled over the sleeping policeman guarding the entrance to the hospital.
Neither of them was surprised by the line of police cars by the entrance to Accident. “But why kidnap the girl? How does that fit in?”
“I wish to God I knew. Nothing about any of this makes any sense after you scratch the surface,” Kristy admitted.
“I don't know, I don't know. Something's wrong. Doesn't fit. The kidnapping, suicide and murder, then the break-in at your place and the threats. I'd say you were definitely upsetting someone. It's like the bogland we skirted coming in. The more you think about it, the more you thrash about, the further down you sink until you're in over your head and choking on mud.”
“Nicely put.”
“Thank you. And if you are right, Richards is the only strip of solid ground for miles.”
“I'm right.”
“Of course, we are assuming these aren't just a set of coincidences,” Devlin noted, backing into a vacant space.
“As my editor loves to say, no such thing as plain old coincidence, meaningful or otherwise. It's Richards, all right. He's up to something so dirty it stinks all the way back to town. We've just got to find out whatever the hell it is, tie the rats, the missing gardener, Monk Sanders and Judith Kenyon in together and pull the plug on the doc's strange little game once and for all.”
“Why, you make it sound almost easy,” Devlin commented wryly.
“I get it from a friend. Believe him and absolutely nothing's impossible, moving mountains, parting the sea and pretty much run of the mill stuff like that. Break it down into component parts and it never looks half so bad.”
“I'll remember that.”
“You do that.”
They clambered out of Devlin's patrol car, and headed for the line of marked cars back by Accident and Casualty. For pre-5 a.m. the hospital car-park was surprisingly full. One car Devlin definitely recognised, the Home Office Pathologist's black Mercedes 500 SEL. Odd, Calum Salmund being up and about before the birds. That particular canny Scotsman liked his bed far too much to give it up for anything of less than biblical proportions, and even then it would take two sticks of dynamite behind the push, for leverage. No call for paranoia, he cautioned himself, but got the uneasy feeling that the part of his mind behind the warning was trying to lull him into an unpleasantly false sense of security. Devlin wasn't about to have anyone (not even himself) pull the wool over his eyes.
Something was going down, and for Calum Salmund to be out of his pit before the crack of dawn, it had to be something damned near explosive. There was nothing he could do about it standing around outside.
The radio cars had been abandoned in a hurry, the way they were parked variously skewed did nothing for his confidence. Kristy did not seem to notice, or if she did, she didn't let on.
Devlin's eyes flicked uneasily, scouting ahead. “No one home,” his attempt at a joke wasn't a great success and he knew it. Fingers of apprehension tickled up his spine. He moved up the steps, concealing the twist of alarm in his stomach with a cock-eyed smile. Kristy wasn't unduly surprised at just how deceptively light Devlin was on his feet. She put it down as another one of those things to be taped and stored for sometime never.
She had been unnerved by the stillness and the pervading atmosphere of apprehension, tension, but Devlin seemed unconcerned. Kristy took that as a form of reassurance, after all, this was Devlin's territory, not hers and therefore she let him guide her by the hand though the would-be minefield.
They both felt the oppressively deep sense of foreboding wrongness as they walked through the low key casualty area. The air had that certain something Kristy picked up on odd occasions - very often when the story she was covering turned bad. Devlin recognised it as a crossbreed of bad news and the shit hitting the fan.
The feeling that had dwindled to a mild buzz of apprehension between seeing Duke and the dog handler through her lounge window, and reaching the hospital gained a good three notches when Kristy saw the uniformed officer guarding the lift access.
Something was most definitely wrong, all right. Her heart pumped hard in her chest, like a turbine flooding with water.
Blood made noises in her ears. All wrong.
He couldn't have been more than eighteen, and covered in zits to prove it. Every ounce of colour had drained from his crater pitted face, the scars of his acne unflattering blue-grey putty. Devlin noticed an errant top button beneath the blue clip-on tie, but gauged it wise not to make an issue of it. Something had taken the wind right out of the kid's sails – pounded him in the gut and doubled him over, more like – and he had a horribly good idea what it was, at that.
“Sorry Sir, but this part of the hospital has been closed off.”
The foetid breath of antiseptic was strong. Devlin reached into his back pocket for his wallet, and flipped it open for the youngster to see his I.D.
“Sorry Sir, I didn't recognise you right off.”
“No need to be sorry, Constable. I didn't recognise you either, but that uniform of yours is a bit of a giveaway. What say we call it quits and you let me in on what's going on here?”
A trace of revulsion lingered on the young patrolman's face as his glance flicked to Kristy. “Nasty piece of business, Sir. Up in the Intensive Care. D.S. McKenna's taken charge, but it’s still one bloody shitload of a mess, if you'll pardon me saying.”
Two words slapped a tight grip on the panic handles inside Kristy's brain, the voice at the helm no more than an insidious vibration through her bones that she didn't so much hear as she did feel. Intensive Care meant one thing.
They were too late for Jason.
There wasn't an ounce of warmth left to be had from the hospital corridor. The anaemic strip lights thrummed, their buzz muted by the treacle-like sludge that had descended to swamp Kristy's senses.
“For the love of God, Devlin,” She was back in the bathroom, staring at the bloody scrawl; I.C
.U. CUNT! “Come on.”
Devlin was already pressing at the lift's call buttons, jabbing none stop, but the floor indicator lights had stuck on two. “Stairs?”
“That door there, Sir. If you don't mind me saying, Sir, maybe the lady wouldn't thank you for seeing what's up there, Sir. It really is a Godawful mess, take my word for that.”
Kristy, ignoring the young patrolman's good intentions, was already tugging at the fire door and disappearing into the concrete stairwell. The sound of her footfalls swelled to fill the cold, clammy shaft, booming as they echoed back down to the ground. The stairway was a breezeblock throwback to the Spartan stairwell of The Gazette, basic, functional, icy even in the heat of summer.
She could hear Devlin coming up behind her, three steps at a time.
“God, I hate these places,” he said, out of breath as he caught up with Kristy on the top landing. Ate these places. . . Ate these places. . . Came back to him, but she was already yanking the smoke door open to be on her way.
Two plain clothes officers were talking in emphatic whispers, their conversation as oddly mundane as the day before's Cup Final.
Devlin had to show his I.D. again. A band of yellow tape marked POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS blocked off the turn down to Intensive Care and the private rooms of the High Dependency Unit. They looked at him, and then let him pass.
People were milling, ashen faced and unsure, around the third door down, on the right. Jason Kelso's door. Sickness reeked strong in the foetid air, no breeze to stir it along. All the strength went out of her legs, “Oh, Christ, Jason,” she swallowed the first sob as it caught in her throat. Tears ran down her cheeks.
There was a sick purpose to the bustle.
“Sorry, Ma'am, can't let you through. The Pathologist's in there chalking up.”
Kristy felt herself gag, the cold, smooth-sided stone of despair sinking down through her suddenly queasy stomach. Felt Devlin reach out to steady her.
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