Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  I put the mug on the floor and leant forwards on the table to where I could see her face. ‘Can we talk, Lee? Really talk?’

  She shrugged, keeping her hands on the dog. Her face was still closed. ‘Up to a point.’

  ‘OK.’ It’s honest, at least. ‘Thank you.’

  It was almost night by then. I reached up and hit the switch on the wall behind me. The muted monochrome of the room flooded suddenly, too suddenly, to colour. She flinched. I ran a thumb across the dimmer, pulling it down to a softer, less threatening glow.

  I only need to see her face to know how much of what she says is the truth.

  She let go of the dog and sat up again; pulling her feet underneath her and both knees to her chest, resting her chin on her arms. Her eyes drifted to mine and stayed there, dark and too full of conflict to be easily read. This isn’t a time to be reading eyes.

  ‘Why is this happening, Lee?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Mhaire seemed to think that you did.’

  ‘Then I suggest that we leave Mhaire out of this. You’ve spent most of your life telling me she couldn’t be trusted. This might be a good time to put that into practice.’

  Fine. I let the silence draw out for a while. And then: ‘Are the police trying to link Hillary Murdoch to Joey Duncan and Martin Coutts?’

  ‘They’re not trying, they’re stating the obvious. Whoever killed Hillary killed the other two. There are not too many ways to create a fatal hypoxia. We seem to be working through most of them.’

  ‘And you’re next in line?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You don’t frame someone if you’re planning to kill them. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Very true.’ She rolled over to lie on her stomach. The dog grunted and moved to make room. ‘So maybe I don’t get to die. Maybe I get two decades in prison instead.’ That smile again. ‘Or life. Whichever is shorter.’

  ‘That’s not funny, Lee. We’ve been round this one before.’

  ‘We have. And perhaps Mhaire’s right, perhaps there is a way out, although I have to say it’s not obvious at the moment. No doubt, if there’s time, I’ll work out what it was she had in mind.’

  ‘You could pick up the phone and ask her.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  She propped her chin on the heel of her hand and watched me think. An unrewarding process. Too many questions, not enough answers. I got up and went to the window and peered out through the hessian blinds. Outside, the street-lamps were on. My car lay in a semi-circle of artificial light. Three lampposts farther down, two figures sat in an unmarked car, watching the light in our window.

  ‘They’re watching you,’ I said. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘They’d be negligent if they weren’t.’

  ‘Are they here all the time?’

  ‘Mostly.’ Meaning always. ‘Don’t let it get to you. That pair are harmless. It’s the ones you can’t see that you need to worry about.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.’

  I turned and leant back on the window-frame and watched her lying on the floor with the dog as if police surveillance was part of her everyday pattern. She’s taking this too easily. Something, somewhere has changed in her.

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’ A long, languid shrug. ‘But it makes a change from fighting Murdoch over research protocols.’ She came up behind me and pulled the curtains shut, then took my hand and led me back to a seat. ‘Come and sit down, Kells. They don’t need to see you to know that you’re here.’

  I went back to the sofa and turned the dimmer down another notch until we could have been sitting with a single small candle hanging down from the ceiling. My coffee was cold. I drank it anyway because making more would have meant putting on a light in the kitchen and that would have been too easily seen from the road. Suddenly I could understand how anyone living here might want to spend most of their time in the climbing room: no windows and thick padded walls, a safe place to hide.

  ‘Can they hear what we’re saying?’

  ‘Possibly. We have to assume so.’

  ‘And the phone?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘But not the modem?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Christ. ‘Where does it end, Lee?’

  ‘It ends when the last one on the list is dead.’ She sat now with her elbows on the coffee table, leaning forwards to see and be seen in the quiet light from the lamp. She smiled, and it was not a comforting smile. ‘Or possibly before that if I can work out the details before they get there. Like the harridan said, there’s more than one way at the crossroads.’

  And that, then, was the change in her. The fire, hidden down behind whatever brick wall she was building. It’s the challenge. She lives for the challenge. Death is the consenting partner and all of life is thrown at the biggest chance. This is, after all, why she climbs. Only, when she’s climbing, she has somebody sane there holding the rope.

  ‘Lee, I—’

  ‘Don’t. It isn’t worth it.’ She reached her hand across the table and hooked her fingers over mine in an old gesture, worn with familiarity. It has more feeling to it, sometimes, than an embrace. She smiled again and this time it was real. It felt safe, for a moment, to ask the questions.

  ‘Who is it, Lee? Who’s doing this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you think they’re planning more after Hillary Murdoch?’

  ‘There’s got to be at least one. They’ve got this far, they’re hardly likely to stop now.’

  ‘Do you know who?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Would you take help if it was offered?’

  ‘I can’t, Kellen. We’re too close to …’ She shook her head and her fingers tightened, like they would on a climb. ‘You’re too close to the firing line. If I make my own mistakes, I’m dead. I’m not having you out there making them for me.’

  It was long past dark. The streets of the west end were as calm as they ever are this side of midnight, lodged in that lull just before the pubs turn the last batch of customers out into the night. I was heading for the farm, but I changed my mind on the way up past the university, turned left instead of right at the lights on Byres Road and drove down to the Unit. The car park was empty. I parked under the trees and went to sit for a while on the bench under the sycamores. The gardener had finished long since. Wet clumps of cut grass packed round the soles of my shoes. The sharp, earthy smell of it hung in the air, warm and close, a smell from childhood that speaks of summer and freedom in the way that garden bonfires speak of rain and autumn and the imminent return to school. The wind tugged at the sycamores, lifting the leaves, spinning dry keys to the ground. I sat on the seat and watched the moon make silhouettes of the topmost branches. It was close to half full by then, an upended bowl, pouring cold porcelain light down on to the city. It was new when the killing started. If Mhaire’s informed guesswork is right, then it will all be over before it is new again and Lee Adams could easily be one among the dead. If Mhaire is right. If Lee is right with her. If both of them are not working to some other, unspoken, agenda.

  Trust. It all hinges on trust. Such a fragile thing and so easily broken. And then what is there left when it’s gone? I stood with my back to the sycamore turning over leaves with my toe and tried not to think of a future in which Lee Adams played no part.

  A light glowed suddenly in the Unit, fire in the blank mass of the stone. Three-quarters of the way along the bottom corridor, in a long row of blind, darkened windows, someone drew back their curtains and lit a single candle. It wavered and steadied, a great globe of a thing, spewing harlequin patches of coloured light out across the lawn; scarlet and indigo, saffron and jade, all of them weaving round the amber of the flame. I counted along the windows and came to Jack Souter’s room. In the massed ranks of my dead, this one does not weigh heavily on my conscience. I left the shelter of the trees, walked across t
he grass and let myself in through the back entrance, as Sally Souter had done, to visit the bringer of light.

  He was a much younger man than his predecessor. He sat up in the bed, his head on a bank of pillows, his face turned to the window, to the flame and the night beyond.

  ‘Hello.’ His head didn’t turn. ‘I thought you’d come in for the light.’ His voice was rich; a full, flowing south-side Glaswegian.

  ‘How did you know I was there?’

  ‘How did you know I lit the candle?’ He turned then to look at me. His hair was dark, like his eyes, and it hung in long coils to his shoulder. If he had been on any tumour therapy, it wasn’t in the recent past. ‘I was watching you,’ he said. ‘You were looking that sorry for yourself. I couldn’t leave you like that.’

  This from one who is dying, who must be dying or he wouldn’t be here.

  I moved in and sat on the chair by his bed, on the far side from the window ledge. The wick burned deep in the core of the candle. The air was soft with sandalwood, warm with amber light. His skin glowed darker than mine, as if he was one of the millions making the most of last week’s sun. He smelled of sandalwood and patchouli, of clean cotton and liquid soap. There was no smell yet, of death, no sign of why he might be here.

  He put his hand on my arm. ‘If I lit another candle, would you stay and talk?’

  His smile was warm, like the flame. There are candles enough, and in this place, I have never been averse to talking. Life is too short to play games.

  ‘No need for the candle.’ I put my hand over his. ‘I have a friend. She thinks she may be going to die.’

  ‘Is that so very bad?’

  ‘I think it is. She isn’t ready.’ Or I am not ready. Or, more properly: ‘It’s not her time, yet, to go.’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled again and it was like looking into the sea, the quiet sea where the water is clear enough to let you through and yet so deep you would never reach the bottom. ‘Is that not what everyone says?’

  ‘Not always.’ Rarely, in fact. And fewer still who have the understanding to ask it. ‘Is that what you say?’

  ‘No.’ The smile faded but the humour stayed; deep and darkly ironic. ‘But then, I know where I’m going.’

  It is not often in here that I find nothing to say. In this room, I am suddenly redundant, an unwanted player in someone else’s script. He pushed himself higher up in the bed and let the sheets fall away so that he sat as if in a chair by the fire. ‘You’re the therapist, aren’t you?’

  ‘Is it printed across my forehead?’

  ‘No. We’ve met before.’ He dipped his head with the grace of fresh meeting and stretched out a hand and he was not, after all, unscarred. A short row of dark purple bruises showed over the line of his vein. I/v lines, maybe, or blood samples. He pulled down the cuff of his night shirt to cover the marks. ‘Back in May,’ he said. ‘You were looking after Paul. I was here with him when he died.’

  And now, this close, I remember. They were not ready, these two, to part.

  ‘Nicco. I’m sorry. I didn’t recognise you. You’ve grown your hair.’

  ‘There was no point in having it cut.’ Said differently, there could have been such pathos in that. Said lightly, it came as a matter of fact.

  I found his notes near the foot of his bed. Nicco Gallianno: an Ayrshire lad of Italian extraction. Home address in Edinburgh. Next of kin, Mr and Mrs A. Gallianno of Troon. It is not, I would imagine, one of the best of places to grow up if you’re not of the mainstream. He came out remarkably balanced. I turned over the page and found his clinical history: paracetamol poisoning, self-induced. Two days ago, the surgeons offered him a liver transplant, providing they could find a tissue match in time. He told them he didn’t want them to look. And so the dusk of his skin is not only his heritage. In the candled twilight of this room, the effects of jaundice and the effects of the sun are not easy to tell apart.

  On the third page of his notes, the brief case history gave way to the hard data. I leant back against his bed, angling the paper to catch the best of the light. He sat behind me and read the figures over my shoulder. In the Unit, all the patients have full access to their notes. I think, at times, this stops the hard core of the establishment from sending them here, but the prejudice is less than it was. We read the fourth page together; a complex list of serial liver-function tests, taken twenty-four hours apart. The results showed a steady deterioration. He reached a long arm over my shoulder and laid a finger under the last set of bile acid results. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Your liver’s failing.’

  ‘I know that. I mean, how long have I got?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ These things are never totally accurate. ‘A week I would think, maybe two.’

  ‘Thank you.’ His arm stayed where it was. The smell of soap was replaced by the warm smells of male sleep. ‘The nurse didn’t want to say.’

  The nurse was probably waiting for me to say it first. ‘I’m sorry. I should have been here to tell you.’

  ‘No problem. It’s all much the same in the end.’

  It is. I wonder if he has any idea at all how bad the end can be. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Pretty good so far. It’s slower than I thought, that’s all. Maybe I didn’t take enough.’ His other arm came to rest on my shoulder and I was held in a loose embrace. There was diffidence to it, as if there were other things he needed to say. ‘I asked them to send me here. Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s what we’re here for. Why would I mind?’

  ‘I thought perhaps I might be taking you away from someone who needs you more.’

  ‘No. You’re here. That means you need us most.’

  ‘Thank you. Will you be here when I go?’

  It was not an idle question. I thought of what might happen in the next ten days. He felt the hesitation and qualified his request. ‘If your friend doesn’t need you?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be here. If she doesn’t need me.’

  He moved closer and we sat together, his chest against my back, his arms round my neck. I have met this man twice before in my life. In two weeks, maybe less, he will be dead. Comfort comes in the strangest places. He balanced his chin on my head and together we watched a bank of cloud, like a spreading stain, slowly cover the face of the moon. Soon the only light was the background glow of the street-lamps and the flickering amber of the flame. We spoke together, softly, as if otherwise something might wake.

  ‘Do you like my candle?’

  ‘I do. It was a good idea.’

  ‘You looked so cold. I couldn’t have you being cold.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m not cold now.’

  ‘But she’s still going to die, your friend?’

  ‘She’s running very close to the line. I think …’ and I had not thought this before, ‘I think that she has just said goodbye.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

  ‘I can find out who’s trying to kill her, perhaps, but I’m not sure what I can do after that.’

  ‘Ah.’ His arms squeezed tighter. As if this kind of death can be wrong where others are not. ‘I suppose the police are out of the question?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘You’d better get looking then, hadn’t you?’

  ‘I think that may be why I’m here.’

  His arms released me; his chin moved from my head. ‘You’ll come back?’

  ‘Yes.’ I can promise him that. ‘I’ll come back.’

  I was in the office, printing out files from Med-line, when Dee found me an hour later. I didn’t see her but I heard the footsteps along the corridor. She walks, always, as if she’s just warming down from a run. Once in a while, it’s true.

  ‘Kellen?’ She pushed open the door. ‘I just called for you at the farm. Nina said you were at Lee’s.’

  ‘I was.’ I tabbed down through yet another screen of references, saw nothing of value, printed it anyway. ‘How’s Nina?’

  ‘In bed. W
ondering when you’ll be home.’

  ‘Soon.’ I have no idea of time. I’m in limbo, dislocated from the spinning wheels of the world outside. I have joined the growing ranks of the techno-geeks and I could stay here all night. I sat up and stretched. My eyes felt dry from too long staring at the screen. My shoulders were permanently hunched. I hooked my fingers round the back of my neck and felt the vertebrae grind as I turned my head. Home and bed seemed a very long way away. ‘What were you calling the farm for?’

  ‘I need you here.’ She came in and sat on the edge of my desk, picked a page off the printer and ran her eye down the columns of print. I wouldn’t have said they made any more sense to her than they did to me. When she looked up, her eyes, and the skin around them, were grey. ‘It’s Claire,’ she said.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘One of the pulmonary mets is blocking her airway.’

  ‘So what are you waiting for?’ This, of all possible complications, we can manage. ‘Call in the duty surgeon and get them to put a tracheotomy tube and get the ventilator going. You don’t need me for that.’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes held mine, intense and hot. ‘I’ve talked to her about it. She doesn’t want a tracheotomy. She doesn’t want any more intervention. She’s asked to be let go, Kellen. I have it in writing.’

  Christ. ‘Has she any idea what it’s going to be like?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve spent the evening with her. She knows everything there is to know.’

  ‘How do you … ?’

  ‘Beth went like this. I know it all.’ Her eyes were too dry. The anger flamed inwards feeding on pain.

  ‘Does she want me there?’