After the Flood

by Peter Turnbull

  Inside, the health centre had a similar atmosphere to the bookshop, in that it was quiet and solemn, not a place for levity. It was also brightly decorated and had posters advertising various services pinned to the noticeboard in the waiting room: a gamblers’ support group. Alcohol Concern, a domestic-violence advice line, the Childline number. In the waiting room the chairs were arranged in rows, with further chairs round the walls. About a dozen people were waiting patiently. A young child played with a brightly coloured toy; soothing, controlled Radio Four was playing on the radio; a pile of magazines lay disturbed and untidy on a table near to where the child was playing. As was always Yellich’s observation, most of the people in the waiting room were women. Men die young, women live for ever, but they live for ever at the expense of indifferent health. There’s more going on in a woman’s body than there is in a man’s, Yellich reasoned, more things to go wrong. Always more female beds in a hospital, always more women in a doctor’s waiting room than men. Yellich was happy being a male; he did not at all envy women their lot, save one thing: just once in his life he would like to have experience of the female orgasm—so much longer, so all-consuming, compared to the brief shudder that was the male climax. And after a lot less work too.

  ‘DS Yellich.’ Yellich showed his ID to the middle-aged, smartly dressed receptionist. ‘Can I see the practice manager, please?’

  ‘I’ll see if he’s free.’ The receptionist picked up the phone on her desk and pressed a two-figure number. ‘Police to see you, Mr Pearson,’ she said when the call was answered. She listened and said, ‘Very good, Mr Pearson.’ She replaced the receiver and addressed Yellich. ‘If you’d care to go through the swing door, Mr Pearson’s office is at the end of the corridor.’

  ‘Diving,’ said Pearson as Yellich accepted his invitation to take a seat. Pearson was a smartly dressed man in his fifties.

  ‘Sorry?’ Yellich smiled.

  ‘Most people wonder how I broke my back, a few are insensitive enough to ask, but all go away wondering. Whenever you see a fella or a woman in a wheelchair who was clearly born whole, don’t you ask yourself, I wonder how he did that?’

  ‘Well, since you mention it…’

  ‘I was a young man. I didn’t do it from a diving board either, with my head back instead of down. I was in the surf, with my mates, big wave came and I dived into it. I woke up in traction in a hospital, a specialist spinal-injuries unit, hundreds of miles from the candy floss and kiss-me-quick hats. Lost consciousness in one world and woke up in another.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, I’m not over the moon about it. My mates didn’t notice anything at first, then realised I was floating face-down. They only just revived me from drowning. Confess for many years after I thought. Why did you have to rescue me? Why couldn’t you have let me drown?’

  ‘I can understand that, I think.’

  ‘It takes ten years to adjust to a wheelchair. Never know whether it’s better to break your back when you’re young or when you’re middle-aged. With one you have time to adjust and carve some sort of life; with the other at least you’ve had a life; you may have climbed a mountain and become a parent. I’m paralysed at the fifth vertebra, I can move my shoulders, arms, neck—a paraplegic. Any further up and I would have been a quadriplegic, able to speak and that’s about all, a brain, eyes and ears stuck to a body that is an inert vegetable.’

  ‘Not funny.’

  ‘No control of bodily functions, so I’m sorry about the smell of urine.’

  ‘It’s barely noticeable.’

  ‘Men have it easier than women. You can fit a catheter tightly round the male member and if I drain the reservoir about once very two hours I can keep on top of the smell. That’s why male paraplegics find employment; our wheelchair-bound sisters have to drain into pads and the smell of urine they produce makes it impossible for them to find social acceptance, and hence employment.’ Pearson smiled. ‘I was dead lucky—or would I have been lucky dead? I can’t decide even now. But that’s my story, so you won’t go away wondering. How can I help the police?’

  ‘Amanda Dunney?’

  ‘Oh…’ Pearson groaned, ‘she haunts us still. Not a clever time for this practice. The confidence of our patients was shaken.’

  ‘Really?’ Yellich had already found Pearson to be a very ‘giving’ personality. He settled back into the chair, knowing that he was going to be told a story.

  ‘Acid-tongued, thin-lipped woman. No longer here. It must be—what?—fifteen years since she left us, soon after I started, and she left well under a cloud. She was suspended—professional malpractice.’

  ‘Can you be specific, Mr Pearson?’

  ‘Well, she was a Roman Catholic, and she allegedly subscribed to the notion of salvation through suffering. In practice what that meant was that she was wilfully under-administering the prescribed dose of morphine to terminally ill patients. It had probably been going on for some time, and she had been getting away with it because the nature of terminal illness is that all of us go there just once, so the patients have no previous experience to draw on. What Dunney was doing was massively under-administering the stuff, so that if the doctor had prescribed, say, thirty units of morphine per day to a patient riddled with cancer who wanted to die at home, Nurse Dunney would visit and administer just ten, and the patient would assume that they were getting all that they were entitled to.’

  ‘Oh.’ Yellich felt genuinely dismayed.

  ‘Makes you angry, doesn’t it?’ Pearson raised his eyebrows. ‘It finally came to light when somebody had got prior experience of terminal illness, vicariously speaking. An elderly gentleman had nursed his sister through the final stages of cancer and then he started the whole sad business again with his wife, believing he knew what was going to happen. But he soon noticed that his wife, who he knew wasn’t given to complaining, was in much greater distress than his sister had been. He was also a retired chemist and he was able to see at a glance that the amount of morphine in the syringe wasn’t anything like the amount the GP had told him would be his wife’s daily dose. So he notified the health centre and the doctor told her he would be administering the dose for a number of the terminally ill patients for the next day or two, did so, and asked them how they felt. All reported an absence of pain for the first time in ages and others said they had been able to sleep for the first time for a long while. Dunney was confronted and admitted it. She said, I am told, “They prescribe but I administer.’”

  ‘No built-in safeguard.’ Yellich was open-mouthed. And angry.

  ‘There isn’t, is there? No monitoring. The system is based on the assumption that the nurse will administer the prescribed dose, and on trust that she will. And most abuse is a form of betrayal of trust.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, anyway, Amanda Dunney admitted what she had been doing but claimed it was because of her religious convictions and she genuinely believed she was helping the patients get to heaven more speedily.’ There was a note of sarcasm in Pearson’s voice.

  ‘You don’t sound convinced of that?’

  ‘I’m not. It doesn’t gel with Dunney’s character as I recall it, to do anything to anybody that could be seen as a kindness, no matter how twisted the logic. I think I can understand her because, unlike the doctors and other nurses, who have been privileged in their life, I have gone occasionally into a state of mind where I wanted a victim. Breaking my back at the age of twenty-two has made me feel bitter, and when I was making my adjustment I found myself doing spiteful things like trapping flies, torturing them to death and enjoying their suffering. I drew pleasure from it. I got good at it, trapping flies, pulling a wing off and then dropping the disabled insect into a spider’s web.’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I think so.’ Yellich pursed his lips. ‘A name comes to mind, inservice training…Lambrusco?’

  Pearson grinned. ‘That’s a wine. Cesa
re Lombroso, nineteenth-century criminologist, founding father of criminology at Turin University. I did an Open University degree in sociology, which had a criminology component, but yes, you’re thinking as I am thinking. The concept that the criminal is also a victim in some way. You can be a victim without also being a criminal, but you can’t be a criminal without being a victim. Not necessarily of crime, but some brutalisation, some trauma, some injustice whether real or imagined causes criminality…it’s all coming back to me now. The injustice of my accident caused me to seek victims, which I found in the form of flies.’

  ‘Pretty harmless though.’

  ‘In the scale of things, yes. But had I not dived into that wave, had I completed my degree and begun officer training for the Army…’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes…I had passed the selection board. All I had to do was complete my degree, then I was up to Sandhurst. Took an Easter break with a couple of friends before the final term of the course, just a week in the sun before the last burst of energy and the exams. I was still in traction when they sat their finals. I can’t imagine myself as a twenty-five-year-old Army officer making victims out of insects. So the accident changed my personality, and at twenty-five I was living alone in an adapted one-bedroom bungalow, drawing intense pleasure from the death throes of flies. I used to fry them as well.’

  ‘Flies?’

  ‘Yes. Got skilled at catching them in a tumbler. Invert the tumbler on a frying pan, put a fork from the top of the tumbler to the bottom of the pan so the glass doesn’t shatter, apply a low heat…the fly doesn’t half bounce about. I don’t do it any more. I have made my adjustment. I enjoy being good at my job, I have a lovely garden behind my bungalow and a rabbit which I have house-trained. But because of my accident and what it once made me do to flies, I saw something in Amanda Dunney that I don’t think anybody else saw.’

  ‘That need for a victim?’

  ‘Exactly. The discussion among the staff here was all focused on how someone could allow her religious values to invade and compromise her professional obligations. But…I don’t wish to be judgemental, but sometimes you have to be judgemental to grasp the nettle.’

  ‘OK…within these four walls. I know she had to wear maternity smocks all the time, so I can picture her figure.’

  ‘Right, large maternity smocks as well, and not a pleasant face on top of it all. I imagine that any woman dealt that hand in life, who is surrounded by images of female perfection courtesy of the advertising industry, can feel like a victim.’

  ‘And hence, you think, a victim’s need for a victim?’

  ‘She had cold eyes, kept making cutting remarks, kept referring to my “next lover” knowing that I haven’t had a partner since my accident and am not likely to attract one. But of course she didn’t get a partner either.’

  ‘Hence the cutting remarks.’

  ‘As you say.’ Pearson shifted his weight from one buttock to the other. ‘Have to redistribute my body weight in order to avoid pressure sores. I have no pain warning, you see; my legs could be covered in open sores and I wouldn’t know unless I saw them. I have been operated on below the fifth vertebra, intrusive surgery without anaesthetic, all I needed was a plastic cup to vomit in.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Oh, there’s more to breaking your back than a wheelchair, Mr Yellich.’ This was said with what Yellich thought was a courageous smile. Very courageous.

  ‘Amanda Dunney?’ Yellich refocused the conversation.

  ‘She was suspended immediately, and the police were notified. I think they had difficulty framing charges. What she did didn’t seem to fit any crime on the statute book. Is withholding medication an assault? It would have been an interesting precedent.’

  ‘Well, it causes pain and distress.’ Yellich wondered what other crime she might be construed to have committed.

  ‘The patients got to hear about it, and we had angry relatives in here, demanding Dunney’s address. A few folk phoned up in a very friendly, calm manner, pretending to be her friend and asking if I could “remind” them of her address. Then she disappeared, just vanished…solved a lot of problems in a sense. And now you’re asking about her again, after all these years? Has she turned up?’

  ‘Yes.’ Yellich saw no reason to hide the information from Pearson; he had warmed to the man and Pearson had given much useful information. ‘Her skeleton has.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘In a field to the north of the city, exposed by flood waters. Over time the course of a beck changed, inched nearer the shallow grave, and the flood waters did the rest. Doubtless you’ll hear about it in the media.’

  ‘And it is Amanda?’

  ‘Not definitely—we still have to match the dental records—but it is highly likely to be her.’

  ‘So somebody did get to her. You know, it did cross my mind that might have happened. There were a lot of angry relatives around at that time. It seems to be the case that people get more annoyed about injuries done to a loved one than injustices done to themselves.’

  ‘I can understand that as well.’ Yellich stood. ‘Thank you for your information.’

  ‘I’ll look them out,’ Pearson smiled.

  ‘Look what out?’

  ‘The names and addresses of all the patients Amanda Dunney was helping get to heaven more quickly than the doctors would have wanted. Doubtless you’ll want to speak to their relatives?’

  Yellich returned the smile. One point to Mr Pearson, he was one step ahead of him. ‘Thanks again.’

  Yellich walked the walls back to Micklegate Bar Police Station, where he wrote up the interviews with Amanda Dunney’s brother, with Mr France and Mr Pearson, adding them to the file of ‘Amanda Dunney?’. He felt certain that the question mark would soon be removed. He picked up the phone and dialled the dental surgery.

  ‘If you could show your ID and provide me with a receipt.’ Mr Serle had a warm, melodious voice. ‘And you’ll have to guarantee to return them.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Yellich assured Serle.

  ‘Well then, I’ll look them out. When can you call to pick them up?’

  ‘Soon after lunch, sir.’

  ‘That would be fine.’

  Yellich thanked Mr Serle and replaced the telephone receiver.

  He took lunch in the canteen. It was inexpensive but filling, not to the taste of the chief inspector, nor of the commander, the presence of either in the canteen being the cause of much comment. But Yellich was a young man, with a needy son, a wife and a mortgage—above all a mortgage—and when his outgoings were as modest as those of the chief inspector and the commander, then he too would lunch out. But until the arrival of those more fortunate times he was obliged to lunch in.

  After lunch he picked up the phone, dialled, and when it was answered he identified himself.

  ‘The police?’ The voice was alarmed. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Nothing for you to be concerned about, madam. Mr France at the Pages bookshop gave me your number.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘In connection with a reading group.’

  ‘Oh yes. Do you wish to join us? We have room.’

  ‘No, thank you… Can I ask, have you been coordinating the club for a while now?’

  ‘How long is a while?’ The question was asked with humour. There was also a calm authority to the voice. A retired schoolteacher, perhaps, thought Yellich.

  ‘Since Amanda Dunney was in the group.’

  ‘Amanda… Well, that is a name I haven’t heard of for some time, and thereby I answer your question.’

  ‘Do you have details of people who were contemporary with Miss Dunney in the group?’

  ‘Details I do not…I don’t keep records. Any telephone numbers would be in my personal address book. I changed my address book three years ago, about, and only transferred the address from the old book to the new if I was still in contact with the person concerned. Amanda’s name was not
transferred.’

  ‘I see. Did Miss Dunney have any particular friends in the reading group?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She wasn’t…well, particularly popular. She was suffered more than she was accepted and her presence wasn’t eagerly sought.’

  ‘She did receive an invitation to the reading group annual dinner though?’

  ‘She did not!’

  ‘Not invited?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. Not popular, as you say, Mrs Ferguson.’

  ‘Not a question of popularity, Mr…?’

  ‘Yellich.’

  ‘Yellich. Not a question of popularity. The reading group does not have an annual dinner.’

  Yellich paused. ‘It doesn’t?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Oh…’ Yellich paused. He glanced out of his office window. The sky was darkening; a rainstorm was in the offing. ‘Who was contemporary with her in the group before she disappeared?’

  ‘Before?’

  ‘I mean about the time of her disappearance.’

  ‘That’s a more sensible question, I would have thought.’

  ‘Well…Major Robertson and Timothy Ashton, the retired classicist, were, but they are now both deceased. Sandra Da Silva has gone to live in New Zealand with her second husband; Thomas Ryden is still in the group, he was a contemporary of Amanda’s. He’s a bachelor, a chartered accountant, quite a catch for a woman like Amanda, but he made it plain he wasn’t interested in her. She would come on to him embarrassingly strongly. It was a reading group, not a dating agency. Mrs Vesty is still in the group: she was a contemporary of Amanda’s, as was Martin Mason. Nobody else is still in the group who would have known Amanda. Other people have joined subsequently.’

  ‘So, just four,’ Yellich pondered. ‘Thomas Ryan, the chartered accountant, whom Amanda liked but who didn’t care for her; a Mrs Vesty—’