A Bleeding of Innocents

by Jo Bannister

  She was about to order him aside but thought better of it. Unfit as he was for any kind of physical encounter, he needed his self-esteem more than he needed her protection. She gave a faint smile. ‘I’m not going to fight you for the privilege.’

  He grinned. ‘I’m only going first’cause I know he hasn’t got the shot-gun.’

  Half-way up the stairs, too late to change places, Liz murmured, ‘At least, we know he hasn’t got that shotgun.’

  On the first landing they had a choice of three doors and another staircase. Behind the nearest door Liz found a dining room furnished with good but slightly shabby pieces in a variety of periods and styles: stock which had failed to sell. From the dry, slightly stale air Liz thought it hadn’t been used much recently. Donovan found the new kitchen with unwashed pots in the sink. The third door was a living room with the television, a tea-tray on a low table, and in one corner a playpen where a rabbit in evening dress hung by one ear from the bars. Apart from the rabbit, which greeted them with a knowing look, there was no one in any of the rooms.

  Donovan indicated the stairs and Liz nodded. She said softly, ‘If he’s here, that’s where he has to be.’

  There were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Donovan checked the bathroom but it was empty so they tried the bedroom doors.

  The master bedroom was a large room at the front of the house decorated in pastel chintzes and featuring a walnut wardrobe, an oak one, and a chest of drawers and dressing table in rich red mahogany. Brocade curtains made for larger windows hung from a vast pelmet pleated to fit. The curtains were pulled across the window but showed the universal sign of having been drawn by a man: they didn’t quite meet in the middle.

  Swann was sitting on the half-tester bed. He glanced up at her entry with a slightly surprised but not wholly displeased look and smiled. His wife had trained him well: he’d taken his shoes off before putting his feet on the bed.

  ‘Boss.’ Donovan was in the open door of the other room, half in and half out. The stillness of his long body and the timbre of his voice said he’d found something. Liz backed out of the master bedroom and joined him. When she touched his arm he stood aside to let her through.

  It was a child’s room, decorated in primary colours, with circus scenes on the walls and a hot-air balloon for a lampshade. Rainbow-coloured curtains had been drawn more carefully than the brocade ones next door. A child’s bed lay along the wall and a duvet covered in cartoon characters was humped over a child-sized mound.

  Liz stepped softly across the floor. She didn’t want to startle a sleeping child but she needed to know if he was all right. As she approached the bed she said, quietly reassuring, ‘Are you asleep, Danny? Don’t be afraid – I’m a policewoman, I’m just here to see you’re all right.’

  There was no response from the bed. Liz wondered if the little boy was genuinely asleep or cowering in silent terror under the bedclothes at the sound of a stranger in his room. She reached out to ease the duvet away from his head, still talking in the same quiet, friendly voice. ‘I like your room, Danny. Did you choose the pictures? I like this one of the clown. Do you like the circus, Danny? Does your dad take you sometimes?’

  Her outstretched fingers reached the upper edge of the duvet. ‘Will you come out for a minute while we have a quick chat?’ she asked. ‘Danny?’ She lifted the top of the duvet.

  The little white face that greeted her was set in such sweet repose, the eyes shut, the long lashes curving down to the rounded cheeks, the rosebud lips pursed in a thoughtful pout, that at first she thought all her reassuring noises had failed to rouse him. With a careful fingertip she brushed a lick of fair hair off his satiny brow.

  Donovan heard the breath catch in her throat. A stride brought him to her side.

  The satin skin was as cold as ice, as smoothly unresponsive as wax. Nothing she could do would startle Danny Swann from his sleep. He was dead. The little body was already stiffening.

  After Emil Saunders she had thought nothing would shock her again. But she was shocked by this. The eyes she raised to Donovan’s were deep with tragedy: this beautiful child lying dead in his bed in his perfect child’s bedroom. Her voice cracked. ‘Donovan, his son! He’s killed his own son!’

  Donovan’s good hand fastened on her arm with enough pressure to steady her. She was glad of his strength. Gradually a little of it seemed to pass from his body into hers, warming the cold veins. By degrees the horror settled in her brain, finding its own level, no longer monopolizing her thinking. With hardly a tremble she said, ‘He’s in the other room.’

  Donovan moved towards the door. ‘You stay with the kid.’

  But there was nothing she could do for Danny Swann. She went with Donovan into the main bedroom.

  Swann looked up again with his amiable smile as if they were customers in his shop not police officers in his bedroom. He recognized Donovan, more by the plaster than the face, nodded a friendly greeting. Then he saw the hollowness in Liz’s eyes and nodded again, understandingly. ‘You’ve seen Danny.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  There was sorrow but nothing she recognized as guilt in Swann’s voice and he answered without hesitation. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘How?’

  There was a small brown bottle on the dressing table by the bed. Beside it lay a syringe charged with an all but colourless liquid. ‘With that. Morphine. I got it from Dr Saunders. I told him it was for Danny. It did a good job, he’s safe now. Danny’s safe with his mother, and if you’d been five minutes later I’d be on my way to join them.’ He glanced between Liz and Donovan and said, as if he already knew the answer, ‘I don’t suppose—?’

  Liz shook her head once, sharply. ‘Sergeant.’

  Donovan put himself between Swann and the syringe. Swann, resigned, smiled at him. ‘How’s the wrist now?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Donovan. He didn’t know what else to say.

  Liz’s voice was hard. ‘You killed Dr Saunders as well? And Maggie Board? And Kerry Page?’ At each name Swann nodded again. Liz’s iron control cracked. ‘In God’s name, man, why? And why Danny? Why your son?’

  Swann swung his legs to the floor and stood up. His face was curiously untroubled. ‘I will tell you,’ he promised. ‘Everything. I want you to understand. I’m not a bad man. I’m an ordinary man. One thing, though, before we go. Can I say goodbye to Danny?’

  Liz’s eyes widened. She said nothing, but her eyes said: You killed him, and now you want to say goodbye?

  Swann’s tone was quietly reproachful. ‘I loved my son, officer. Everything I did was for him. Only a minute, that’s all. Stay with me if you like. I’m not going anywhere.’

  In the bottom of the house sounded a hammering like hollow thunder: Shapiro seeking admittance. Liz moved towards the stairs. ‘You have as long as it takes me to answer the door. My sergeant will stay with you. Then we’re going to the police station and you’re going to tell me why four people are dead.’

  ‘Five,’ said Swann.

  ‘Five?’ Liz’s neck-hairs prickled up. There was a fifth?

  ‘My wife. When the inquest is held the coroner will find that she took her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. But Mary was as much a victim as Danny was. Two innocent victims; too much innocent blood.’

  Shivering, Liz went to answer the door.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Donovan didn’t come to the police station with them. ‘If you can spare me for half an hour I’ll drop in on Page, tell him we’ve got the guy and what it was all about. I don’t want him hearing it on the radio. Anyway, I’d like to see if he’s OK. I’m uneasy about him. This was bound to knock the stuffing out of him, I’m not saying the man isn’t entitled to grieve but somehow it’s more than that. He could end up needing a shrink, you know?’

  Shapiro knew. A few days ago he’d been thinking the same about Donovan. ‘That’s all right, you go. We’ve only the gory details to get from Swann, we’ll have this f
inished by tonight.’

  Donovan’s glance lingered. ‘Then tomorrow—?’

  Shapiro nodded wearily. ‘Yes, Sergeant. Tomorrow we’ll see if we can make CID history by pulling DI Clarke’s killer out of a hat.’

  ‘You know whose hat, don’t you?’ said Donovan in a forcible murmur.

  Shapiro spoke like a man saying something he’s already said several times and expects to have to say several times more. ‘I know what you believe, lad. I know you’re very likely right. But I still have no evidence against him, and until I have I’m not jeopardizing the case by going at him like a bull at a gate. If he did what you think I want to make sure of him.’

  Donovan nodded, mollified if not wholly convinced. ‘I’ll go see Page.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Shapiro.

  George Swann, local businessman, devoted husband and father, and mass murderer, was as good as his word. At the station, still speaking mainly to Liz, he told them everything – what he had done, how he had done it, why.

  ‘I was thirty-nine when Danny was born and Mary was thirty-six. We’d been a bit slow off the mark: we didn’t marry till we were in our thirties and though we wanted children time was against us. We had other things to be grateful for. The business was doing well, Mary was made head of department. She was a teacher, did I tell you that?’ George Swann looked up with pride in his eyes. Liz nodded wordlessly.

  ‘She was a fine teacher,’ Swann went on, ‘everybody said so. I wish you could have known her, Inspector. I wish you could have known us both then. You’d have liked us. If someone had told you that one of us would commit suicide and the other kill four people, you’d have sent for a psychiatrist.

  ‘Then one day, long after we’d given up, we were no longer a childless professional couple on the brink of middle age, we were expecting a baby. Do you have children, Inspector?’ Liz shook her head. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but until it happens you can’t imagine how your life changes. Your job, your house, your nice car, all the things that mattered to you, suddenly they mean nothing beside this developing bump. Your life revolves around it long before it’s born. I’m telling you this so that you’ll understand how devastated we were by what happened.

  ‘He was a beautiful baby. You’ve seen him.’ He was still addressing Liz, though Shapiro was in the interview room with them, as if he needed something from her: understanding or forgiveness. But he’d be a long time waiting. Liz resented the implication that, as a woman, she would be more tolerant of crimes motivated by love. ‘He was still a beautiful child, even afterwards, but as a baby he was lovely enough to make you cry.’ He sniffed apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, I’m embarrassing you. I‘ll just tell the story.

  ‘He had a little hernia. It was nothing much, our GP said it was a common problem with boys, a little op would fix it. He referred us to Castle General and they said it’d be a good idea to do it fairly soon: not because it was dangerous but so that we could forget about it. It was no big deal, it wouldn’t cause him any more problems.’ He gave a little laugh, half angry, half tragic. ‘And it never has. They flushed my child’s brain out but by God, that hernia’s never given us a day’s anxiety.’

  The first intimation that something was wrong came when Mrs Board told them that Danny wasn’t coming out of the anaesthetic as quickly as he should. A ventilator was helping him breathe. After two days they took him off the ventilator and he breathed for himself but still he showed no signs of waking.

  ‘Mrs Board said it was an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic, something no one could have predicted. She couldn’t say when, or even if, he’d come out of it now. So that was it: our brief foray into normal parenthood. Then we became statistics.

  ‘He was in a coma for six days, then he started to stir and finally woke up. But it wasn’t our Danny who came back. It wasn’t anybody’s child, just a little pink machine taking in food at one end and ejecting waste at the other – never looking at you, never smiling. He never even cried. If he was hungry or wet or the sun was in his eyes, he just lay there. Like a log. Sooner or later someone fed him or changed him, or the sun moved away. Danny could wait. Danny was good at waiting.

  ‘All this time he was in the hospital. They wired him up to different instruments and compared graphs, and stood over him nodding and clucking as if they knew what they were doing. Finally they admitted it was massive, irreversible brain damage. He’d be a baby, wholly dependent on someone – Mary and me or an institution – for the rest of his life. When there was nothing more they could do we brought him home.’

  As the shock wore off the Swanns wanted to know more about what had gone wrong. At first there was no time, and no spare emotional capacity, to go into it. But when Danny was home and they’d found their feet – ‘Mary gave up her job and we moved over the shop so I’d never be more than a shout away’ – they wanted more information. Not because they wanted to blame someone but because this was how their life was going to be, how their son was going to be, and they needed to understand how it had happened.

  ‘I wasn’t ready for the hostility we met. Mrs Board acted as if I’d developed an unhealthy preoccupation. She used jargon I couldn’t understand and said it was no one’s fault and there was nothing to be gained from keeping going over it. This was my son’s life she was talking about, and the way my wife and I had to live now, and all she cared about was getting rid of me. I didn’t deserve that. If she owed me nothing more she owed me an explanation. I went to see the chief administrator.’

  ‘Hawley,’ said Liz, the trace of a thaw in her voice. She knew what trying to get information out of Hawley was like.

  ‘Mr Hawley,’ agreed Swann. ‘I said I’d clearly got Mrs Board on a busy day and perhaps he’d get me the information I wanted.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ murmured Shapiro.

  ‘He did not. He said there was no information to be had: it was just one of those things, like lightning – it always can strike, it seldom does. No one was to blame for Danny’s condition. It was time we accepted that.

  ‘It was the repeated insistence that nobody was to blame that made me wonder if perhaps somebody was. That maybe Danny was the victim of an accident rather than an Act of God.’

  But Swann’s solicitor advised against pursuing a claim. If something had gone wrong in the operating theatre the only witnesses were the surgical team who clearly weren’t talking about it. The chances of finding independent corroboration were so small that the best advice she could give him was to forget it.

  ‘And she was right. But it took me four years and every penny we had to find out. I tried to talk to Dr Saunders. He wouldn’t see me, referred me back to Mr Hawley. He was working at the Feyd Clinic by then so I made an appointment under a false name and saw him there. It didn’t do any good. When I asked what had happened he repeated the same line about an allergic reaction. It didn’t happen often, he said, but it was always a risk with surgery. And he said—’

  For the first time in the telling of his story George Swann’s voice broke. Until now he had managed to preserve an almost eerie calm, a detachment from the tragedy that had enveloped his family, as if now he’d brought it to an end he was able to step back and view it dispassionately. But the anguish was there, under the surface, suppressed but not dealt with, and momentarily it burgeoned forth in the twisting of his lips and the soaring note of his voice. ‘And that man said to me that I couldn’t just order a new nose here, a different shape of ears there, without being aware that surgery always carries some risk and shouldn’t be entered into frivolously.

  ‘He said that to me! I let him take my son because the best medical opinion I could get was that he needed the operation, and he’d come back as a kind of doll – one of those dolls that opens its eyes if you prop it up a certain way. And he dared accuse me of frivolity!’ He swallowed. After a moment he went on. ‘I knew then that there had been negligence, and who was responsible. Only a man with something to hide could be that cruel. But I still had
to prove it.’

  He spoke to Staff Nurse Carson. Kerry had been deeply disturbed to find herself assisting a gas-happy anaesthetist but she didn’t want to talk about it. The surgeon who had chosen to cover for him was still a senior staff-member in the hospital where she worked, even though she had transferred to another department, and she felt she had to protect herself. But she also felt Swann was owed an explanation, and at last he got it.

  ‘They didn’t realize at first. He wasn’t reeling drunk, they thought he was just in good form. There was a real party atmosphere going. But midway through the operation Mrs Board realized Danny was turning blue. There was an obstruction in the oxygen: if Saunders had been doing his job he’d have seen it and fixed it and there’d have been no problem. But he was too full of the joys of spring to pay much heed to a minor op so Danny’d been without oxygen for a couple of minutes before anyone noticed.

  ‘Even then Saunders couldn’t pull himself together. Mrs Board took over. She got the oxygen flowing, flushed Danny’s lungs out, gave him some kind of a stimulant. The nurse said she couldn’t have done any more or done it any quicker. Then they had to wait to see what damage had been done.

  ‘Dr Saunders recovered before Danny did. He begged them not to report him. It couldn’t do Danny any good, it could only ruin him. He swore it wouldn’t happen again. The Staff Nurse wouldn’t listen. But Mrs Board saw her afterwards and said that she wouldn’t be making a complaint. She too had suspected Saunders was intoxicated but now she thought she’d misjudged him. If Miss Carson was confident of her facts she could file a complaint but Mrs Board would not feel able to support her.’

  ‘Why?’ hissed Liz. ‘Why would she do that? Protect him – after what he’d done.’ Then her tone changed. ‘Oh—’

  Swann nodded. ‘Yes. She was in love. She was a middle-aged divorcee, and Saunders was just old enough to attract her and immature enough to play on that. Mrs Board had been alone long enough to take it for the real thing. She cared for him, couldn’t bring herself to ruin him. But she told him if she saw him in theatre again she’d have him struck off.’