Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  ‘No. Who told you that?’

  ‘Dee. She wrote him the prescription.’

  ‘Oops.’ Lee turned and stashed the suction jar on the bench behind her, lining it up neatly with the bags that held Joey’s clothes, his watch and his rings. ‘Shouldn’t be any problem,’ she said, turning back. ‘The only interaction’s an additive effect on impotence. From incapable to totally incapable. It’s hardly lethal.’

  ‘Lucky Jessica.’

  ‘He wasn’t drinking any less when she married him.’

  ‘True.’

  She changed gloves, picked up a camera and took three photographs of his face. Not ones for the family album. Few people look good in death. I sat on the stool at the side and tried to work out if I was well enough to spend the rest of the morning in the office meeting deadlines on the paperwork. The doors swung shut behind me, which was odd because I hadn’t heard anyone walk down the corridor. There’s only one person I know who can walk as quietly as that.

  ‘Bad head?’ It was a low, resonant voice, rounded and smooth like Dee’s but deeper and with a different lilt. Totally distinctive.

  ‘Inspector MacDonald.’ I caught the back edge of Lee’s smile. ‘What in heaven’s name are you doing here?’

  ‘So glad to meet you too, Dr Stewart. I could ask you the same thing.’

  ‘I work here.’

  ‘There, and I thought you were across the way in the shiny new building with the folk who’re still breathing. Amazing how fast you get out of date if you don’t keep your ear to the ground …’ He wandered past me and took a long look in Joey’s mouth. A lot closer than I would have gone. The man with the cast-iron stomach. He looked up, his eyebrows arching. ‘Professor Murdoch’s left her new job, has she? And you’re taking over instead?’

  ‘In my dreams.’ Lee had her back to us both, writing something necessary in the day-book. MacDonald looked at me and one eyebrow rose another notch.

  ‘The day Professor Murdoch leaves,’ I said, ‘Dr Adams will break her lifelong stretch on the wagon and drown herself in champagne. And I will not be going for the job.’ The ache in my brain narrowed to a fine point. A power drill pushed in somewhere just behind my temporal lobes. I pushed my thumbs into the soft space at my temples. ‘I’m here to pay my last respects to a friend and colleague,’ I said, carefully. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  ‘I don’t need an excuse. I’m entitled to be here to observe duty pathologist in the discharge of her duty in any case of sudden death.’ He watched with interest as Lee laid out her dissection kit. ‘I heard he drowned in his own vomit. Would that be right?’

  ‘Looks like it. I’ll tell you for sure when I get a look at the lungs. It’s that or plain straightforward alcohol poisoning, but with Joey, I’d be surprised. From the sound of things, he wasn’t anywhere near his personal limit.’

  ‘No. That’s what I’d heard.’ He watched her fit a blade to the scalpel handle and remembered, suddenly, why he’d really come. ‘The local lads at Knapdale have found your friend’s motorbike,’ he said. ‘They’re bringing it back into town now, so—’

  ‘His kit? Did they find his climbing kit?’ Lee, the optimist, who believed there was something to find.

  ‘The keys were with it but we haven’t opened the panniers yet. It weighs in at a kilo or two overweight. The lads are expecting something big inside. I’ll need someone who can identify the contents.’

  So I didn’t, after all, spend the morning filling in forms. I spent it instead in the passenger seat of Stewart MacDonald’s car, hanging on to the dashboard and trying not to remember that plate of poached eggs and bacon. I think, on the whole, I would have been better staying in the mortuary. On a day like this, it’s the only place in the Department that’s reasonably cool. Outside in the real world it was hell, hot, muggy Glaswegian hell. Not the best thing for a migraine.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he asked. ‘On the record.’ We turned left out of the Ambulance exit and headed down Byres Road. The power drill bit deep into my optic chiasma.

  ‘If you like. I’m not making any promises about the quality of the answers.’

  He pulled out to overtake a taxi. I held on to the arm rest. ‘Yes or no will do fine.’ We stopped for the lights at the Old Dumbarton Road. He chewed on a thumbnail and watched two of the cars ahead of us jump the amber. The taxi cut past us to jump the red. He chose not to look. The pedestrian lights came on. A lass with three kids tried to persuade them all to cross at once. There are worse things in life than a headache. MacDonald slid his car into neutral and wound down the window. He laid his elbow on the sill and propped his chin on his fist.

  ‘Why was it Dr Adams did the autopsy on your friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Because he was a friend,’ I said. My fault. I had a headache. Not a good time to be smart.

  We got a green. He slid into gear. I think he sighed. ‘Sharpen up, Kellen. That’s not going to wash with the Fiscal.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She wasn’t on call. The man was a friend. You two found the body. If it’s an accident, you might get away with that. But you’re saying it wasn’t.’

  A blow torch joined the power drill and together they set about removing my eyes from my skull. There wasn’t much room in my head left for thinking. ‘I’m sorry. I still don’t understand.’

  MacDonald put his foot down and we cruised out towards Whiteinch. ‘In any case of sudden death,’ he said carefully, ‘it is usual for someone to find the body. It is usual for someone else to perform the post-mortem and for someone else again to inherit the totality of the estate. It is very, very unusual for the same person to accomplish all three in the same case.’ We pulled left, cut across some traffic and turned into an unmarked gateway. Ahead of us, a grim, grimed, semi-derelict warehouse sat amongst other very much more derelict warehouses. On either side, the hulking ruins of the Clydeside shipyards blocked any view we might have had through to the river beyond. This is the kind of place where it’s dangerous simply to walk along the street. I put my elbow to the door and nudged the button. The noise of the central locking hammered another nail into the soft parts of my brain. MacDonald turned in his seat. ‘Kellen, listen to me. In a fatal accident inquiry, no one gives a toss who’s named in the will. In a murder inquiry, it matters a lot. Folk are paid to notice that kind of thing. Folk with a lot less patience than me.’ He stopped. His eyes were grey, like the buildings around us. Outside in the car park the sky flashed white and a gull stooped to collect something unspeakable from the concrete. I closed my eyes. It didn’t alter the pain. ‘Why didn’t you tell me she stood to inherit the flat?’ he asked.

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  There was a pause. I heard his thumbs drumming on the steering wheel. His voice came flat and hard. ‘Kellen …’

  ‘Look, they lived together, they worked together, they climbed together. When you climb at that level, there’s always a risk one of you’s going to hit the deck and not get up again. Neither of them has any dependants. Each of them knew how much the place mattered to the other. Who else do you think they would leave it to? I didn’t tell you because I thought it was startlingly obvious.’

  ‘So then why, in heaven’s name, did she not hand the autopsy over to Professor Murdoch?’

  ‘Because it was Professor Murdoch.’

  He stopped drumming his thumbs. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was a promise. She made a promise. We were all at the flat the day Murdoch was appointed Head of Pathology. Eric said he’d rather die than have his post-mortem done by Medusa.’

  I opened one eye to look at him. He watched a car passing along the road.

  ‘It was a joke,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I could tell.’ He chewed the edge of his thumb. ‘I take it they didn’t get on? Him and Professor Murdoch.’

  ‘He hated her guts.’

  ‘Would you be able to tell me why?’

  A white Transit van drew up beyond the gateway. This time MacDo
nald reached for a pad and noted down the number. The gull lurched and took off, circling slowly as if one of its engines wasn’t firing on all cylinders. The van sat still with the engine ticking over. No one got out.

  ‘They worked together on a clinical research programme a year or two after we all qualified,’ I said. ‘Four of them: Eric and Lee, Joey Duncan and Hillary Murdoch. Eric was in medicine; Lee and Joey were in surgery working under Joey’s dad. Murdoch was in pathology, finishing off her Ph.D. One of the trials they were working on went wrong and the patients died. As far as Eric was concerned, Murdoch was responsible and should have resigned. She didn’t. He’s done his best not to speak to her since.’

  ‘And Lee? Is she the same?’

  ‘You could say. Lee was three weeks away from her part two surgery exams when the shit hit the fan. Twenty-one days from being a fully qualified consultant surgeon. There aren’t many female surgeons now. There were even fewer then. I can’t begin to tell you how hard she’d worked to get there.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ He stared straight forward out of the windscreen. Odd how the crow’s feet twist when he’s not smiling. ‘She’s not a surgeon now, Kellen. What went wrong?’

  ‘Everything.’ I found the lever to tilt back the seat. The roof of his car was dark and matt and easy on the eye. Memories, dusty and long hidden, hovered just out of reach. It’s not a time I would wish to remember, given the choice. ‘Lee was off clinics, revising for the exams. We shared a flat in Otago Street and I didn’t see her from one weekend to the next. She was in the library before I got out of bed and she came home after I’d gone to sleep. She wasn’t keeping tabs on the wards at all. Then she did a weekend’s ward duty for Joey and one of her own patients came in on the Saturday morning with everything possible going wrong. I don’t know the details but it was rough, even for surgery it was rough. The lass died on the Sunday night. Probably she would have gone sooner but I don’t think Lee was ready to give up. She hadn’t seen the others; she had no idea what had been going on. It took her apart.’ And Lee is not Eric. She didn’t blame Hillary Murdoch. She blamed herself. Whatever else has happened in the life of Lee Adams, she measures herself against the actions of that weekend.

  The Transit cut its engine. A lad in jeans and a faded Celtic football shirt wandered down the street, going nowhere, just passing the van. MacDonald half closed his eyes.

  ‘Did she resign?’ he asked, softly.

  ‘Hardly. She went to the Senate as soon as she came off duty on the Monday morning and asked them to bring a malpractice suit against Professor Duncan and the rest of the surgery department.’

  ‘Christ.’ He winced. ‘And they didn’t like that?’

  ‘Not much. If it was now, they’d call an inquiry and she’d be a media hero. But we’re talking fifteen years ago. Life was very different then.’

  ‘She lost her job?’

  ‘She’d lost it before she ever walked in the door. They had the letter typed and waiting.’

  ‘And what’s it all got to do with our shiny new Head of Department?’

  ‘Hillary Murdoch was the one who designed the trial.’

  ‘Ah.’

  We sat in the stillness of the car and said nothing. A wasp cannoned into the windscreen and danced along the length of the wipers, whining and angry and painful on the ear. MacDonald twitched the controls. The wiper blades sang in a single dry arc. The wasp whined away into the heat of the day. The van coughed twice in starting and pulled away from the kerb. The lad in the green striped shirt had vanished from sight.

  I unhitched my seatbelt and flicked open the door. Damp Glaswegian heat flowed in like a tide. Somewhere under all the smog, you could smell the river: brown and slow and dirty. Difficult to believe that St Mungo ever pulled out a live salmon. I got out of the car and leant on the bonnet. MacDonald stood up and swung on his door and said nothing. The silence hung still and filthy, like the smell.

  ‘Murdoch went to the States as soon as she got her Ph.D.,’ I said. ‘Lee took the job in pathology. Everybody got on with their lives and tried to forget. Then Professor Gemmell died and they needed a new Head of Department. Lee should have been next in line but she’s spent her life doing clinical work, not writing papers, which wasn’t necessarily the best career move. It’s the lines on the CV that count when it comes to rising up the ranks. Murdoch’s got them, Lee hasn’t. They let Lee take over as Acting Head for three years while they came up with a package that would lure Murdoch over from Boston and then that was it. End of story. Thank you, Dr Adams, it’s been a pleasure, please step aside.’

  ‘How long’s she been back?’

  ‘Murdoch? Just under three months. Long enough to put her mark on the Department. Research is in, real, live, hands-on clinical pathology is out. If you can’t turn it into a paper, it’s not worth doing. Medical totalitarianism at its most efficient. Which is why, if you look, you’ll see Dr Adams looking less than happy in her work.’

  ‘She could resign.’

  ‘She could, but it’s not her style. Anyway, she had Eric. They were a good team. Hospital’s a madhouse at the best of times. They worked well together. They kept each other sane.’

  ‘Until now.’

  ‘Quite.’ And that’s the thing I have been trying to avoid since I saw Eric lying on the rock in the sunlight. There is no one, now, to take the pressure off her days.

  The heat picked up water from the river and let it out in soft, soaking patches under my arms and around my waist. Old memories crowded on new ones and I had no real wish to pay attention to any of them. There is only so much to be gained from churning over the past. I left the car and walked over to the warehouse. ‘Suppose we take a look at this bike? I’m on clinics this afternoon. I need to be back at the Unit by two.’

  ‘No problem.’ He pulled out a bunch of keys from his pocket, carefully so they didn’t make too much noise. ‘It’s inside,’ he said, and he kicked open the door.

  Inside: a dark, foul, filthy mass of urban detritus where the air was saturated with a nose-clogging mix of dust and desiccated bird shit, where the only light came through three barred and broken windows at the back so that all you could see was a huddle of shrouded shapes gathered in the middle of a vast wasted space. MacDonald switched on a light. A scattering of small birds erupted from the rafters, screaming shock at the sudden intrusion. The ceiling rained bird shit. I put my hand to my head, thought better of it and pushed it deep in one pocket. The birds whirled and vanished. MacDonald stepped forward and lifted one of the cleaner sheets. Even in this light, the bike underneath shone with the opalescent silvered green of a fish in water.

  ‘The make and registration matches the one we were given. It’s his, yes?’

  ‘I think so. It looks the same. Can we see what’s inside?’

  He pulled a set of keys from a chain on his waist and fitted them in the lock. Nothing vital fell out of the panniers—no clues, no last-minute notes, no pleas for help—just a selection of standard climbing gear: two ropes, the slings, the friends. MacDonald spread the sheet on the floor, clean side uppermost, and then pulled on a pair of gloves so he could lay it all out for me to check.

  I stood back, watching, trying not to breathe in too much bird lime. ‘Do you normally take prints from the property of an accident victim?’

  ‘If I think it might be useful.’

  ‘Fine.’ I crouched down and counted everything. Thought back and counted again. Two of the 8-mm ropes. His belt. His rack. All of the spare friends. All of the spare friends. I had him lay them out in order of size, retentively neat, like Lee. Five of them. Two ones, a two, a three and a four. Nothing as small as 5 mm.

  ‘One of these is missing. The smallest.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I gave it to him last Christmas.’ I remember the card—clichéd, to match the season: For Eric; a friend for a friend. A friend for a friend. He may not have used it but it’s not the kind of present you break the day after Boxing
Day.

  MacDonald searched through the panniers, but found nothing more. He came back to crouch at the side of the sheet. ‘Are you sure he had it with him?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure of anything any more. I’ll ask Lee.’

  ‘Yes. He always took it with him.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s not at home?’

  ‘I’m sure. I’ve looked everywhere. It’s not in the flat and it’s not on my belt. If it’s not on yours, then it was on his rack when he packed.’

  ‘Or he’s lost it.’

  ‘The only way you lose a friend, Kellen, is if you leave it behind in the rock. I would know if he’d done that anytime before Friday.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ A pause. I sat on my stool in the morgue with my back to the white tiles of the wall. It was cool in there, gloriously cool. The only place in Glasgow where the temperature wasn’t out to get me. Someone, probably Mike, had brought in a bunch of sun-yellow chrysanthemums and left them in a measuring cylinder on the bench. The colour changed the temperature of the air in the room. It helped me think. ‘You wouldn’t know if it was stuck somewhere farther on up from the sheep ledge. We didn’t get that far.’

  ‘I know.’ She moved along the bench, laying out kits for the kids. ‘And you don’t use a rope if there’s no one holding the other end.’ She turned round, stripping the surgical gloves from her hands. ‘If the friend’s in the rock, then he was climbing and he wasn’t alone. So all we have to do is find it. After that, it’s up to MacDonald.’ She looked up at the clock. ‘When are you free?’

  ‘I could get out this afternoon if I had to. Officially, I’m not off till Friday afternoon.’ I should be at the farm, but they can live without me once in a while. ‘You?’

  There was a noise from the corridor. Half a dozen fourth-year students on vacation experience gathered in a huddle outside the door. They were more ordered than usual, noticeably subdued. At times like this, the hospital grapevine works faster than the speed of sound. All of them knew Joey Duncan was dead and that his body was in the mortuary. It’s unnerving if you’re not used to it.