Perfect.
Now, with Trubshaw, I was official. His own coat might be on a shoogly peg, but it was still hanging up. Together we went back out to the front desk and accessed the computer screens and hunted through the ancient A4 records and even some mildewed dog-eared Lloyd George envelopes. And we called Security to find that the CCTV footage was erased every week. But Trubshaw wasn’t for giving up. Who was on that night? Who would remember? Who was the triage nurse? Somebody called Connie. Yes, by a stroke of luck, Connie was on just now. Where’s she working? She’s in Recovery. Could she spare five minutes?
A slim, sharp-featured woman with cropped black hair emerged from the back of the department with the hunted, haunted look – a peculiarly British look – of someone who has fallen foul of authority.
‘Ah! Connie!’ I had the impression that Trubshaw, despite the familiarity, wouldn’t have recognised her from Adam. ‘We wonder if you remember a patient named Bletchley. You triaged him a couple of weeks ago.’
She coloured deeply and shook her head. Clever girl. When you are about to be accused of something and you don’t know what it is, default to denial. Especially in this country. Never explain. Never apologise. Don’t put your hand up.
‘You put him in the Gloom Room.’
She shook her head.
I nudged her memory. ‘He was an addict. You triaged him category 6.’
The blush was rapidly filched away to be replaced by a deathly pallor. I sympathised with Connie. Now she could see where this one was going. She had passed a snide remark on paper and it was coming back to haunt her. Bletchley was dead and she had triaged him 6 as a joke.
‘It’s okay.’ Put her out of her misery. ‘We just want to follow him up and don’t know who he is or where he lives. We think he gave a false name. That’s all.’
It was hard to know whether Connie was reassured. She had clammed up. Yes, she remembered the guy now, but she didn’t know him. Had never seen him before and hadn’t seen him since. It was another dead end. Could she get back to Recovery now?
And that was that. Trubshaw spread his hands in a gesture of apology. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with today?’ He was courteously withdrawing his sponsorship. It was time to go.
‘Come and work for us! The offer stands! You’d be most welcome.’ The cheery salute again. We shook hands and he made his way back through the security door. I found myself once more speculating about the nature of his impairment. He had been dubbed an ‘impaired professional’. Substance abuse? A mental health issue? Professional misconduct? Sheer incompetence?
Impairment. It had become the ultimate stigma in the profession.
Well. We’re all impaired.
X
‘Get your shoes on. We’re going flying.’
Caitlin tossed her Hello magazine aside. ‘Cool!’
Thank heaven I caught her mood. Anything to get out of this dank, cloying mist. But first, I had to endure a meeting in the west end of Glasgow. This is what I meant about a lack of monothematic attentiveness in my life. Forbes sent me to Glasgow and there it is. I dropped Caitlin off on Byres Road where she was happy to mosey around the shops, parked on Church Street, and passed under a frowning gothic archway that might have been familiar to Lord Lister. The hospital site was a great higgledy-piggledy mishmash of more or less newly erected buildings crammed inside the original quadrangle of black sandstone which must hardly have changed in a century. I found the emergency department with some difficulty. An inconspicuous notice above a small doorway in a gloomy recess bore the legend ‘Accident and Emergency’. Was this really the front door of the hospital? And what did that say about the attitude of the hospital towards its clientele?
I can’t remember the substance of the meeting. Something about drugs. There was some anti-Edinburgh vitriol that I first mistook for joshing, for banter, but swiftly came to realise was unalloyed contempt. I might have been in Timbuktu for an hour. A Patient Advocate whined nasally, ‘Parachute me anywhere into Glasgow and I’ll find you a dealer within fifty yards.’
On my way back to the car I was accosted by an emaciated cadaver, shoving a tatty magazine in my face.
‘Gishoo?’
‘Gesundheit.’
‘Have a nice day.’ He looked so crestfallen that I changed my mind and handed him two pounds fifty.
Later I asked people back in Edinburgh what The Big Issue was. They weren’t very sure. Something to do with poverty and deprivation. Unemployment, maybe. Or alcoholism. Or drug addiction. Or homelessness. Or maybe the whole shebang. The poor ye will always have. And I remembered, that was what MacTaggart said, gesturing at the emergency department. The poor ye will always have.
Why is this so? I used to think that it was because some people are temperamentally suited to poverty. They cling to it as a child clings to a woolly toy for comfort. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s simpler than that. The poor will always be there because the rich will always rip them off. The other stuff is just a piece of propaganda. It suits the rich to peddle it, because it justifies them in their wealth. This is why Glasgow is such a travesty. For decades, for generations, the city fathers who should have fixed it have maintained the status quo. And the City Chambers sit smugly and grandly east of George Square like a Kremlin.
People are absurdly sentimental about Glasgow. They buy coffee table picture books of cosy couthie folk grinning toothlessly against a crumbling backdrop of tarnished municipal pride. They would not be out of place in a Brueghel. Urchins play in the dust in tenement back lots. It could be the Warsaw ghetto. Everyone is cheerful. Salt of the earth.
And yet, d’you know, I prefer Glasgow to Edinburgh. All of life is there on Buchanan Street. Glasgow is simultaneously magnificent and terrifying. Edinburgh looks nice but there is something impenetrable about its society. There is something repulsive about the self-satisfied smugness of Edinburgh’s elite. I could spend a lifetime there and I would never fit. I would always be colonial. Get out, before you become completely dissociated and displaced. Get back to Auckland. Go home.
Back on the western periphery of Edinburgh, at the aero club, the aviators were hanging about as aviators do, waiting for the weather, waiting for an engine part, quipping, gossiping. There’s a lot of waiting in aviation. I might have been a commercial pilot but for the waiting. You wait for clearance and you take off and climb and establish the cruise and then you wait for top of descent. The guys at Edinburgh Airport momentarily shifted their attention to Caitlin, radiant as a French impressionist painting in the cusp of her loveliness. We escaped airside through the security doors, and donned fluorescent yellow windcheaters to cross the apron. I had chosen a Slingsby Firefly, and there she sat, sleek and low slung, waiting, wondering why we’d taken so long.
In the fog we barely achieved the minima for a legal take-off, but out to the north-west there was a promise of finer weather. We took off on runway 24, turned right, climbed and headed out over the south bank of the Forth. The rail and road bridges, and the half-constructed stanchions of the third bridge, emerged surreally out of the great blanket of haar, and slipped behind the trailing edge of the starboard wing. Ahead, the oil refinery at Grangemouth with its flaming cauldrons was sparkling in sunlight. Here were the broads of Skinflats; Kincardine Bridge and Clackmannan Bridge formed a V across the river. On the north side of the Forth stood the bulky chimney of the Longannet Power Station which was a useful marker for the extended downwind leg of the runway 24 circuit at Cumbernauld. Now that we were clear of that, we had the skies to ourselves. It was very quiet up here, no traffic around, and at last this blessed eagle-eye visibility. I stayed on the Edinburgh frequency and they let us operate between Stirling Castle and the Kincardine Bridge, up to 7000 feet over the flatlands.
When you fly an aeroplane you really don’t feel inclined to think about much else. I wondered why I hadn’t done this earlier. All these months sitting around in a dank Marchmont apartment when all I needed to do was give myself a
shake and come up here! What a blessed relief to get out of the mist into this delicious air, to gaze through the sparkling orb of the prop at Dumyat Hill to the west of the Ochils, and to pan further west to the first of the great Scottish mountains, Vorlich, Stuc a’ Chroin, Ledi, Lomond. Flying a plane is like climbing a mountain; you rise above all your petty preoccupations and attain a new perspective. For a time, you escape. And Caitlin was enjoying herself. On the right hand seat she looked very chic with her headphones on. ‘Can we turn some tricks?’
‘There’s a turn of phrase. You mean aerobat? Sure. You have control.’
‘I have control.’ She put her hands confidently on the dual controls, stick and throttle. We had done this before, in New Zealand. She was a natural. I told her what to do and she just did it. HASELL checks: height, airframe, security, engine, location, and lookout. I called Edinburgh again. Still happy. They had us on radar.
We started with a loop. ‘Moderate dive … 130 knots, pull back on the stick … keep the wings level … there goes the horizon, keep the back pressure… . there’s the other horizon, power off into the dive … pull the nose up past the horizon, power on gently … very good!’
‘Hey-hey!’ Caitlin’s eyes were shining. A breakthrough. ‘Can we do a roll?’
Temperatures and pressures ok, quick lookout …
‘120 knots, pull back to forty five degrees … check the stick … full left aileron …’ (I felt the joystick push against my knee.) ‘Whoa! Where you off to?’ We regained straight and level in a sickly way.
‘Terrible roll, not a bad barrel roll.’ She laughed. I said, ‘Stall turn?’ She nodded.
‘110 knots … pull back to the vertical … hold it there … speed coming back …’ The Slingsby reached for the sky and almost came to a halt in the vertical climb. ‘Full right rudder now …’ The nose yawed around in perfect slow motion. ‘And … into the dive … power off … centralise the rudders.’ The ground was comfortably far away. ‘And … gently pull back … back up to the horizon … power on … straight and level … perfect!’
She was giggling now. Not a care in the world.
Then Edinburgh called. ‘Golf Echo Charlie Kilo Oscar descend to below 3000 feet expedite.’
I guess there must have been some incoming jet traffic. I read it back and then said to Caitlin, ‘Let’s show them expedite. Spin?’
She nodded.
‘Power off, straight and level, speed coming back … bring the nose right up … stall warning buzzer … there’s the buffet … full left rudder … stick right back …’
Then the world went crazy. Always the combined yaw and roll and pitch is a welter of confusion. We were spiralling down to earth in a maelstrom. I counted the revolutions of the sun.
Three … four … five … six …
‘Recover!’
---
‘Recover, Caitlin.’
Her feet were jammed solid on the rudder pedals in full left deflexion.
Seven … eight …
‘Get your feet off the rudders, Caitlin.’
Nine … ten … eleven …
‘Caitlin!’
Twelve … thirteen …
I slammed my right elbow into her midriff. The buckle of the five point harness took most of the force but it was enough. She jack-knifed forward and suddenly the rudder pedals were free and I pushed full right rudder, paused, and deliberately began to push the stick forward.
And nothing happened. The sky and the sun had vanished and we had slipped under the horizon and there was nothing but a great whooshing spinning screaming helter-skelter grey-black kaleidoscopic blur of solid earth tumbling all around us.
Suddenly the rotation came to halt.
Centralise rudders, pull back on the stick, bring the nose up … up … up …
There was the horizon. We were out of it. I glanced at the altimeter.
650 feet.
Christ!
‘Caitlin?’
She threw up all over the instrument panel and the bubble canopy.
Three times before I had felt Death sit with me in the cockpit, once coming out of a short strip at Coromandel, once descending into Queenstown, once trying to find Paraparaumu in a howling gale. Here he is again, crouched unceremoniously in the back for the rumble seat ride, rather a droll figure, with his white face and his black cape, like that chess player in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. His visitations come upon you very quickly. You go through the motions as an aviator, but really, it is he who decides whether to remain with you, or depart and leave you for a future assignation.
‘The broom’s in blossom in late December! You can even smell its scent. Like marzipan. It’s incredible. I don’t remember anything like this. It’s like living in a green house.’ David Walkerburn gazed meditatively out of the window towards Heriot Row’s private gardens.
‘I think that’s the general idea.’
‘Quite.’ He turned back into the room’s gloomy interior. ‘So you decided to tell the police after all? What was their reaction?’
‘They weren’t remotely interested.’
‘Indeed!’
‘I did try to take it a little further. I went back to PMH to try and find contact details for Bletchley.’
‘Above and beyond, surely?’
‘Maybe. Anyway he’s lost to follow up. I can’t think what else to do.’
‘Did you keep Professor Pearson apprised?’
‘No. Do you think I should have?’
He raised his eyebrows and bounced the question back at me. In the Maori culture, raising your eyebrows is like nodding your head. It signifies a yes. That was the closest Mr Walkerburn ever got to giving me his own opinion.
Back out in the car parked outside No 48, Caitlin had shifted across into the driver’s seat. ‘Can I drive?’
‘Sure.’ I handed her the keys. ‘All yours. I’m going for a walk.’ I headed east. She caught up with me a minute later and handed the keys back.
‘Incidentally, why do you need a lawyer?’
‘It’s something to do with work.’
‘Is somebody suing you?’
‘Not yet. Look! There’s No 17. RLS stayed here.’
‘RLS?’
‘Robert Louis Stevenson. You know … Kidnapped?’
‘Haven’t read it. We did Catriona at school. I liked Miss Grant.’
‘You’ve got to be joking. She’s just so Edinburgh!’
We wandered up on to Princes Street. Caitlin still looked a bit green about the gills. To tell you the truth I wasn’t feeling that chipper myself. I wanted to feel the earth under my feet. I don’t think Caitlin had any notion just what a close-run thing that spin had been. The Slingsby’s instruments had recorded 5G coming out of it. I still had butterflies in my stomach. I’d experienced a sharp pain in my right ear during the plummet towards earth and now I had a strange clicking sensation that I first thought was my traumatised drum settling down, but then it seemed to morph into a tic, an auditory hallucination. For a moment I was a quivering mouse, trying to find a way out of the horrific labyrinth of my own limbic system. Wee sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie … An electronic mouse. Click click.
The aerobatics, and a near disaster, exerted further curious effects. Three things. I was thinking about the man in the cockpit with the white face and the black cape, the man who had cuckolded me. I suddenly realised after all this time that I was very angry with Mary, for having wandered away with him. Meanwhile, I was aroused from nigh on twelve months of libidinous hibernation. Mortal danger – it is the last aphrodisiac. Up on Princes Street we headed east along the broad crowded pavement. Christmas shopping! It didn’t mean a thing to me; I was living in a parallel universe. In my memory I am alone, yet I know Caitlin was there. Maybe she was lagging behind, looking in the shop windows. I kept glancing back, but it wasn’t to look for Caitlin. I had considered myself – in a self-indulgent Walter Mittyish fashion – a single-handed vigilante looking for a lone psychopat
h. Now it suddenly occurred to me that there was a third party involved, that the compiler of The Bottom Line would not himself perpetrate the act to fulfil its dark prediction. He would not sully his hands; he would be a ‘grey eminence’ working invisibly in the background, quietly pulling the levers like a pilot flying a drone by remote control and from a great distance.
Meanwhile, I was distracted. I was subjected after all these months, once more, to the appalling tyranny of being male. I call them The Nubility. Here were two posh types, arm in arm, both loaded with designer bags and designer labels, jaunty with youth, mistresses of the universe. Then a tall black girl in a tight oil black shirt and the palest blue jeans, loping, thoughts miles away. Now a corporate executive type, pin-striped skirt and jacket, rather elaborate white blouse open to a deep tanned cleavage, slim legs, heels, moving forward, on a mission. Click click click. Beneath the New Club, a waif, short blond hair, the most beautiful face, frowning, biting her lip, texting. At Jenners, the sullen hauteur of a señorita, Hispanic, no – Argentinean – I swear I have seen this girl on the Avenue July the 9th. And at Waverley Bridge, a group of goddesses emerging from the train station and crossing the road, in animated conversation. Stop perving! You’ll end up on some sort of register! Look at this fair apparition, effortlessly beautiful in jeans and T-shirt, as we move to pass one another opposite the Balmoral. I held her eyes momentarily and she did not avert her gaze but gave me a shy, appraising smile. The earth moved. I felt rather than heard a muffled buffet followed by a sharp cacophonous report and I instinctively ducked. I stopped dead in my tracks. Something had happened above and behind my right shoulder. Everything dissolved into slow motion. I looked up at the battlements of the Castle. There was a wisp of smoke. I ran my eyes along the Old Town Skyline and back to the solid and substantial stonework of the Balmoral. The clock said five minutes past one. It would. I looked back at my pretty girl. She too had stopped dead and the smile had frozen on her face. Her mouth had opened in an exaggerated O of surprise and she was taking a deep breath and lifting a hand to cover her mouth. It had happened to me again. I’m a sucker for it. Every time, lunchtime Princes Street, I forget. These damned efficient adrenals squirt their adrenaline and noradrenaline into the circulation before my brain can tell them to stop. I gave my pretty girl a smile and a brief shake of the head in reassurance. It’s only the one o’clock gun. Its reverberations still rattled along the windows of the Princes Street frontages. Here’s Caitlin again. She’s rushing towards me. She’s as white as a sheet! She’s pushing me towards a shop doorway. It’s not that bad! I should have warned her about this ridiculous daily ritual up on the castle battlements, while the Balmoral’s clock runs fast as an aid for late train commuters. There was a brief rumble and a grumble above my head and a sharp crack in the ground beneath me. Something stung my right shin. A tonne of masonry had calved itself off from high up on the Princes Street frontage and joined us on the pavement.
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