by Manda Scott
It’s winter. In the heat of summer, this room is in winter. A sudden snap of cold when I thought we might get through another week of mild weather. But now there’s snow, lying two feet deep on the ground. And all the dogs have come back. A lifetime’s collection. The black Labrador bitch and the tangled mess of a terrier. Behind them, an aged Welsh Springer with arthritic hips and a tumour deforming her muzzle. Beyond them again, a scattering of other spaniels and Labradors, the gun dogs and companions of decades past. There was a cat somewhere, fat and orange-striped, lying close to death on a blanket.
‘It’s yourself.’ He turned his head on the bed. His skin was yellow, the colour of old corn. His voice was rustled paper. ‘I thought you’d come.’
‘I’m here.’ I took his hand. ‘Where’s Sally?’
‘She’s on her way. The lass called her a while ago. And Joan. They’ll be here, no worries. I’ll not go before they get here. Will you let them bring in the dogs?’
‘Of course.’ I sat on a chair by the side of the bed. Jo McCauley sat opposite. The bandage on his arm was half a day old. The last in this lifetime. I took his hand and wished I’d brought in more heather. ‘Who are the others?’
‘You were listening, aye? No problem. The spaniel was Bramble. First dog I ever had. Died when I was twenty-one.’ He smiled. His eyes were at peace. ‘The year I met Joan.’
‘And the cat?’
‘Sally’s cat. Came as a youngster the day she was born. Just turned up at the back gate. Stayed with us ever since, like a shadow. Pined for a week when she went to school. He died last year. Before we knew about this.’ His arm lifted a fraction from the bed and fell back again. You could barely hear the soft noise of it over the air conditioning.
‘They’re all walking with you?’
‘No, no. We’re not walking now. No need. Thought we’d sit in by the fire. Watch the snow out of the window. Listen to it falling off the roof. Bring all the animals into the house with the family for the big meal.’
‘Is it Christmas?’
‘The day after.’
‘Christmas is for families, Jack; do you want me to go?’
‘No, no. You’re part of the family, now. Maybe when they get here. Stay here and talk to the dogs with me, meanwhile. You can bring yours in too. And the pup. Plenty room at the fire. We can …’ A heaving, rattling, shuddering cough tore at his lungs. It racked through him for minutes and there was nothing any of us could do. Jo sat by with the oxygen mask and held it up to his face for him to breathe when he could. I thought we might lose him then.
He lay back on the pillows when it was over, the mask on his face, breathing fast and shallow, his skin grey over the yellow, as if the frost had layered the corn. His eyes sunk back in his head, raisins pushed in on a melting snowman. I sat and held his hand and told him stories of the old cat who spends his nights by my bed, how he is fading away like the Cheshire cat until all that is left is his purr.
‘You’ll not make him go on too long?’ His hand tightened on mine. His voice was hollow, a husk. ‘Promise me you won’t make him go on past his time.’
I picked up his other hand, brought them together and kissed them. I tasted salt and realised it was mine. My vision blurred until all the yellow of him melded with the yellow of the walls and I couldn’t tell one from the other. ‘I won’t, Jack.’
‘We can give them that, at least. A decent ending.’
‘I know.’ It makes so much difference. I squeezed his hands, hard. ‘The day he stops eating, we’ll know that it’s time and we’ll let him go. I promise.’
‘Good lass.’
He didn’t speak after that. I sat holding his hand in the cool of the room, staring at the melting heat beyond the window, and made stories for him of Christmas and dogs playing in snow. Of cats catching mice in the winter barns. Of pups seeing ice for the first time, finding what it is to walk on water and then what it is for the ground to break underfoot as it breaks in the melt. His eyes flickered from shut to open and back again and his mind came and went with it. The door to the room brushed open and shut and his wife and his daughter came to stand by the bed, the two dogs there in the flesh, calm with the instinct that doesn’t need to be told it’s a time to be quiet. I would have let go of his hands and gone then but they said no with their eyes and the lass came to stand by my shoulder, her hands on his arm. He opened his eyes once after they got there and smiled and his wife took over the story, pulling in the colour I didn’t know from the places that had been home, and his daughter leaned over and whispered in his ear that she loved him and that she’d take care of the dogs and he died as they spoke to him, the two of him, with only the smallest struggle marking the ending.
The mortuary was cold, that evening, and smelled of disinfectant. The slab had been scrubbed clean. The air conditioning was on full, drawing good, sulphurous, Byres Road air down into the room. The chrysanthemums were still in the measuring cylinder at the side, splashing colour into the cold sterility. I topped up their water from the hose that dribbled lightly over the stains on the floor and went looking for Lee. She was in the lab at the back of the mortuary. It was a small room, just as white as the rest but slightly less cold and smelling of formalin-based embalming fluid more than anything else. She was perched on a stool, her eyes fixed to the binocular lenses of a microscope, both hands manipulating a pair of long, fine probes that led under the primary optic. I stood in the doorway and watched her.
‘Are you done?’
‘More or less. Come on in.’ She looked up. ‘Bad day?’
‘Fairly. Jack Souter’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She put out an arm, squeezed a hug round my waist. I put my hands on her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. It passed the barriers we’d normally keep to at work but there are times when a friend matters more than propriety.
‘It was good. If you have to go somehow, it wasn’t bad.’
‘Liver failure?’
‘Mostly. Lungs as well. I think everything just shut down all together.’ I pulled up a stool at the side of her microscope and cast around for a smooth change of subject. ‘Where’s the Gorgon? I thought you were going to get her to cover for you today?’
‘So did I.’ She shrugged, a loose, preoccupied shrug. ‘You win some, you lose some. Doesn’t matter. I’m nearly done.’ She bent over to the eye pieces again, picked up the long rod from the bench and angled it back under the optics.
‘Can I look?’
‘Sure.’ Her voice came out muffled. ‘Try not to jog the rig, will you?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
Her microscope has a teaching attachment—an expensive add-on that gives the students a preview of the magnified world of their elders and betters. I peered in through the lenses. The world, today, looked like white blotting paper would look from the viewpoint of a monocular bluebottle: a coarse weave of bleached thread with long wisps of finer cotton sparking off at odd angles. A lump of chalk sat in the centre, white, rough edged and granular. Except, of course, it wasn’t chalk.
‘What’s that?’
‘I think it might be soda lime. Watch this.’
A glass pipe the size of an elephant’s trunk loomed in from the left and deposited a football of liquid on to the rock. The whole mass of it turned a sudden, lurid purple, leaching out into the wide weave of the filter paper.
‘Eureka.’ She sat up and pushed her stool away from the bench. ‘We test positive for soda lime. Now we can go home.’
‘Picturesque, anyway.’ I took my eyes from the lenses, blinked and refocused on the far side of the room. A name and a picture were pinned to the wall. Our Association’s ex-president smiled for the camera, resplendent in full ceremonial regalia. It must have been taken a few hours before he died. ‘How are you getting on with Joey?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She spun round in the chair. ‘Would you come and have a look?’
‘Sure.’
Joey Duncan was still identifia
ble. His body slid, head first, from the cold-store. The winding sheet came up to his chin, covering the more obvious signs of post-mortem investigation.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Look at his face. What do you see?’
I’m not a pathologist. Like any art, the ability to see what’s there comes with practice. ‘I see Joey. He’s white. His face is puffed up. His eyes look bruised.’ As if someone pressed very hard to get his eyelids to close. In the old days, they used pennies and doubled them up as payment for the ferryman. Now, we use a good long push on to pads of wet cotton wool and leave the dead to pay their own way. This is the price of progress. I looked up. ‘What am I supposed to be seeing?’
‘You tell me. Look round his mouth. An inch or so either side of his lips and then again on the bridge of his nose.’
I don’t have the eyes for this. Or the stomach. I searched his face and tried not to remember too much of what it was like when he was alive. ‘He looks dead, Lee. I can’t go any further than that.’
‘Try this …’ She pulled an anglepoise lamp down from its resting place on the wall and shone the beam horizontally across the planes of his mouth. His lips threw puckered shadows across to the far wall. His nose shaded half of his face. ‘Here.’ She traced a finger around two patches of skin on either side of his mouth and another farther up on his nose. ‘It’s bruising. Can you really not see it?’
‘Maybe.’ I crouched down with my cheek to his shoulder and looked along the line of the beam. With the eye of faith and a deal of imagination, you could see them: three ghosted shadows, greasy fingerprints on the bone china of his skin. I stood up, stretching out the crick in my back. ‘If you tell me they’re there, I’ll believe you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t like to say I’d have found them on my own.’
‘Fair enough.’ She pushed the lamp back up against the wall. ‘That’s you and Mike both. Maybe I’m hallucinating. Nothing would surprise me.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t—’
‘Don’t be. There’s every chance I’m seeing things. It would make more sense if I was. But then we still have to explain the rest.’ She turned round and pulled a colour Polaroid print from a file. ‘Here, have a look at this.’
It’s easier to look at anything pathological at one remove. Or maybe I’m just more used to looking at photographs. A wide expanse of pale pink filled the frame. In the centre, a crescent of red flared like a new moon done in blood. ‘What’s this?’
‘The back of his throat.’
I don’t want to think about how she gets wide-angle photographs of the back of a dead man’s throat. I looked at it, imagining the original. The crescent resolved into something more mundane. ‘Is that a nail mark? A fingernail? Did he stick his finger down his throat to make himself sick, maybe?’
‘That’s what I thought.’ She slid the photograph back into the file. ‘So I checked both index fingers. Then I checked all of the others, thumbs included. If he’d made a mark like this, there’d be something to find.’
‘So?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘He did a lot of things with his hands that night. He picked his nose. He scratched his back. He made up something banana flavoured for the kid and he mixed it with the index finger on his left hand. As far as I can tell, he ate a fair bit of his own meal without bothering with the cutlery. What he didn’t do was stick any one of his fingers down the back of his throat. Not enough to make this kind of mark. And his hands weren’t anywhere close to his face when he was sick.’
‘That’s not altogether surprising, Lee. The man was out cold.’
‘He was. Which was odd because his blood alcohol level wasn’t all that high. Not for Joey, at any rate.’ She tucked the file under her arm. ‘Wait here.’
She was back in a moment, a black rubber mask in her hand, a twin to the one Jo McCauley used to give oxygen to Jack Souter as he died. The anglepoise lamp came back down to the horizontal. The fingerprints, a second time, were more obvious, as if, having seen them once, the eye was drawn back to them again. Laid very carefully on Joey Duncan’s face, the edges of the mask matched exactly with the bruising. I held my breath and peered very close. When Lee switched hands to hold it right-handed, the heaviest of the marks matched her fingers. We looked at each other across the body.
‘Someone tried to give him oxygen?’
‘No. I’ve spoken to Jessica and the paramedics. He was long past oxygen when she found him. And anyway’—the lamp swung back up to its bracket on the wall. The room mellowed without it—‘these are not post-mortem marks. You’ll have to take my word for that. If I’m right, and I’m not falling into some bizarre forensic hallucinations, then someone held a mask to Joey Duncan’s face while he was still alive and I don’t think that they were trying to revive him.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ She pulled the winding sheet into place and slid Joey Duncan back into his frozen limbo. ‘And up to a point, that’s not my problem. I’ve faxed a full report through to MacDonald telling him what I think I can see. If it’s still in the realms of imagination by Monday, I’ll get Colin Storey-Pugh over from Edinburgh for a second opinion. If he agrees, then it’s over to the police from here on in. In the meantime’—she slid the prints back into their file and stored it in a folder on the wall—‘there are a couple of things I need to pick up from the office and then we get the hell out of here while there’s still some of the day left.’
Her office is the smallest of all the rooms in the mortuary suite. She had the windows wide open, letting in the heat of the evening, letting out the smell. There were flowers here, too; a mixed bunch, hand-picked from the grove, throwing out a haphazard patchwork of colour and scent. The vase was a rough-thrown pottery thing that I found at the shop in Broadford in April when the three of us—me, her and Eric—went up to Skye and took a long, hard look at the Cuillin ridge and then decided we’d save it for another year. She keeps the vase as a reminder, a small token of chaos marooned in the sea of order that is her desk. It is so much more organised than mine, her desk. Half a dozen photographs lay in a two-by-three grid in the space beside the flowers. Mug shots. Blue and bloated and long, long dead. Stomach turning, even without the smell. All the same, I turned round the top one for a closer look. ‘Was this the stiff from this morning?’
‘Mm?’ She looked up. ‘Him? Stiff wasn’t in it. You could have poured him through a sieve by the time we got him.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Sorry.’ She shook her head and grinned, a weary, half-fired grin. ‘I’ve spent too long staring at bodies today. I’m losing perspective.’
‘This one?’
‘And Joey. And another look at Eric.’ She leant over the desk and turned the top row of prints round, one at a time. ‘It’s Martin Coutts,’ she said. ‘Murdoch’s pet statistician. Do you remember him?’
‘No.’ Nor, at this moment, do I wish to.
‘Take a look. The bruising on this one’s—’
No thank you. ‘Lee.’ I took her gently by the arm, lifted her bag from her chair and hooked it over one shoulder, then spun her round to face the door. ‘It’s Friday night. The lad’s dead. He’s not going to get any deader. It’s time to switch off your brain and come home.’
‘Kellen …’
‘You’re not staying here.’
‘I know. I don’t want to.’ She turned round. ‘What about Knapdale? We were going to go up and collect the car.’
‘We were. And we were going to look for a 5-mm friend on the top two pitches of your killer climb. But then you were going to have the afternoon off and I hadn’t planned to spend two hours with a dying man. The only way we’d make it there and back in decent time would be on the bike, and I’m not sitting behind you on a two-wheeled coffin-filler with us both in this frame of mind. If you still want to go, you can come back and stay at the farm tonight and we’ll go up tomorrow. In the car.’
‘The weather will have broken by tomorrow.�
�
‘Then we won’t die of heat stroke on the rock.’
She leant back against the door-frame, her head on one side, watching me. ‘Did I ever tell you you’re a control freak, Kellen Stewart?’
‘Daily. So we can go to the flat instead, if you like. Or down to the Man for a drink. Or anywhere else that doesn’t leave you feeling badgered. Just not three hours up to Knapdale and back. I can’t handle it.’ I stacked the photographs in a nice, neat, careful pile and laid them upside down on her desk. ‘Shall we go?’
The Man is closest, and at six o’clock on a Friday night, there’s still a fractional chance of finding a seat, especially if you know Bruce, and Bruce happens to be running the upstairs bar. We got a half of bitter and a bottle of water and two chicken salads and a seat at the back of the balcony, where the air flow is 360 degrees and the smoke’s gone out through the ventilation system before it’s had time to insult your eyes. Not bad at all for a Friday night in the west end.
Lee drew streaks in the ring from her glass. She only does that when she’s tired. ‘How’s Dee?’ she asked.
‘Quiet. Introverted. Cranky.’
‘Back to normal.’
‘More or less. She went home last night.’ The salad was warm. Everything that night was warm and sticky and hard on the lungs. ‘So you won’t have to share the spare room.’
A small spectre of a smile. ‘Thank you.’
‘I expect it could be arranged if you wanted.’
‘Kellen?’
‘Yes?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Even the bitter was warm. There was cold condensation down the sides when young Bruce splashed it down on the table. It didn’t last for long. ‘You haven’t heard from Sarah?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d tell you if I had.’
‘Sure.’
Peaceful. Close to the bone, but peaceful. And there was no line between the eyes. Yet.
Bruce floated past. If we stay long enough he’s going to ask about Eric. I don’t really want to get into that. I don’t want Lee to have to get into that. Better if we’re seen to be talking. ‘You were going to tell me something about the pictures on your desk?’