by Robert Innes
“So, he only died once he was in the lift?” Blake clarified, more to himself. “Interesting. Anything else? What about a cause of death?”
Sharon pulled a face that Blake had seen her pull before. It was one that suggested that she had found something that she knew did not make any sense. “He’s got some faint bruising around his neck. Now, in a hospital, that’s not necessarily all that unusual. He could have got them lifting a patient, or one of them turned a bit nasty and lashed out, it happens. Other than that, he hasn’t got a mark on him.”
“You mean it could be natural?”
“That’s the problem,” Sharon told him. “I gave him an initial look over when I arrived. And what I found in and around his mouth doesn’t make any sense.”
“His mouth?” repeated Blake.
Sharon nodded. “Water. And his eyes are showing signs of some form of asphyxiation or choking. There seems to be tears in his eyes, you know like how it sometimes does when you’ve been coughing?”
Blake stared at her, his eyes wide with confusion. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything yet,” Sharon reminded him. “Not till I can get him back.”
“But your initial thoughts are?” Blake pressed her. “Come on, Sharon.”
Sharon sighed and shook her head. “If we were in a more likely setting, with all that in mind and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Joe Tilsley was drowned in that lift.”
7
Gloria pulled Kelsey in tightly. Kelsey was too numb to even feel how hard she was squeezing. “Oh Kelse. I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
“What is there to say?” Kelsey said quietly, staring into the distance. The memory she had had of Lucy Pennock’s dead eyes staring up at her were now replaced by Joe, sprawled out on the floor of the lift. It was all so senseless. The impossibility of the event, the way Joe had somehow died while alone in the confines of the elevator, had not even begun to solidly register with her yet. What did it matter? Whatever had gone on, and however it happened, Joe was still dead.
“I don’t understand though,” Gloria said. “He was absolutely fine yesterday. He was a fit guy, there wasn’t anything wrong with him, was there? He wasn’t ill?”
Kelsey merely shook her head.
“Are you sure though?” Gloria pressed, as she released Kelsey and stared at her, confusion etched across her face. “I mean, nobody just drops dead for no reason. Are you sure he wasn’t keeping something from you?”
“There was only one secret Joe had,” Kelsey murmured. Her mind felt too exhausted from everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours for her to think about what she was saying. “And he wasn’t keeping it from me.”
“What do you mean?” Gloria asked. “What secret?”
Kelsey stared at Gloria, realising she was now completely on her own with the death of Lucy on her conscience, and an apparent stalker watching her every move. With Joe now gone, would all the responsibility for Lucy’s death fall to her? The only way Kelsey could see it, either The Watcher, whoever that was, was coming for her, or the police were.
She was saved from having to think of a response by a knock at the locker room doors.
Gloria frowned. “Who knocks to come in here? Come in!”
Kelsey’s body tensed up. Under the circumstances, she knew exactly who would need to knock before entering the room.
Sure enough, the door opened, and a young policewoman was standing there. “Kelsey Richards?” she said gently, walking in. “I’m Police Constable Mini Patil. Are you alright to answer a few questions for me?”
“Does she honestly look like she’s in any fit state to be answering questions?” Gloria snapped, pulling Kelsey into a tight grip again. “Her boyfriend just died.” She whispered the last word as if she thought it would spare Kelsey from any additional pain.
“I know,” Patil replied. “But it’s best we get all the details we can get while everything is still fresh in Kelsey’s memory. Would that be alright, Kelsey?”
Kelsey looked up at Patil. She had no idea what to say, but refusing an interview seemed to be just delaying the inevitable. She nodded, and Patil sat down beside her, smiling in a sympathetic way.
“Okay,” she said softly. “I’d like to start with -”
“Are we ready, Patil?” said a sharp voice from the doorway. Kelsey jumped as another police officer strode into the room. He was about thirty years older than Patil, and already Kelsey could tell that he had none of Patil’s gentleness about him.
Patil turned to the new arrival with a look that seemed to Kelsey to be a glare. “Yes, I was just about to talk to Miss Richards.”
“Sergeant Michael Gardiner,” said the officer, flashing his ID lazily at her. “I’ll be the officer in charge of the investigation into Mr Tilsley’s death.” He turned to Gloria. “And you are?”
“Gloria Nicolls,” replied Gloria. “I’m a friend.”
“I’ll have to ask you to leave us to it, I’m afraid,” Gardiner told her firmly.
“Oh, come on! You can see the state she’s in!”
“Yes,” Gardiner replied sharply. “And we will make this as brief as possible.”
“It’s fine,” Kelsey said to Gloria. “Go. I’ll be alright.”
Before Gloria could argue, her pager bleeped from her pocket. She stared at the screen and sighed in frustration, before throwing a filthy look at Gardiner. “Alright, but I will be back.” She stood up and turned to the two officers. “Look after her.”
“We will,” Patil said. “Don’t worry.”
With one last concerned glance at Kelsey, Gloria left the locker room and closed the door behind her, leaving Kelsey alone with the two officers.
Gardiner sat down in the chair Gloria had just vacated.
“Now then, I’d like to begin by expressing my most sincere condolences for the death of Mr Tilsley.”
He could not have sounded less sympathetic if he had tried, but Kelsey was too nervous to argue. “Thank you.”
“I’d like you to run through what happened this morning,” Gardiner told her. “From the start. I want to know your movements leading up to his death.”
Kelsey took a deep breath. “I woke up in the staff accommodation down the corridor. I was trying to find Joe. I knew he was starting his shift, so I wanted to find him before he started.”
“Why did you need to speak to him so urgently?” Gardiner asked her.
Kelsey hesitated. “Just to see him before his day started. Ask him what he wanted for his tea when he got in. We work long hours, he was always starving whenever he got home.”
“And did you manage to get hold of him?” Patil asked, scribbling in a notebook. “Was this on the phone? How did he seem?”
“Seem?”
“She means was there anything that suggested that he was in any trouble or at risk of suddenly dying?” Gardiner put in abruptly.
Kelsey was slightly stung by his words. “No. He sounded like he had a bit of a cough, but that’s all.”
Gardiner pulled a face that suggested that Kelsey had not given him a particularly helpful answer. “Go on, you were saying?”
“He said he’d come down to meet me, and that he was about to get in the lift. He hung up and that was the last time I spoke to him.”
“And the next time you saw him was when he was lying dead in the lift?” Gardiner clarified.
“Yes.”
Kelsey’s eyes darted between the two of them. There were questions she needed to ask, but she was unsure as to whether she actually wanted to hear the answers. “How did he die? Was it by natural causes?”
“I think it’d be a bit difficult to murder him in the middle of a lift shaft,” Gardiner told her.
Kelsey saw Patil throw Gardiner an exasperated look, before she turned to her. “We’re looking at every possible angle. We’ve got forensics on it now. There wasn’t anything else going on with him though? He didn�
��t have any enemies that wanted to do him harm?”
Kelsey’s eyes widened. “Enemies? You mean you think he was murdered?”
“Like I said, we’re investigating all possibilities until we’ve got a fix on the cause of death,” Patil told her gently.
Kelsey was finally starting to feel emotional. The idea that someone had done something to hurt Joe was almost too painful for her to comprehend. There was, of course, a very real chance that whoever had sent her the video message, played the bells over the tannoy, and had been responsible for that terrifying phone call was in some way responsible, but telling the two officers about it would be surely lighting a fuse that Kelsey had no way of putting out. Through the frantic confusion in her head, she landed on the decision to tell them nothing for now, until she had had a chance to come to terms with what had happened. She needed time to come up with a plan, and she felt a long way off cognitive thinking at this moment.
“I don’t think so,” Kelsey said at last, as the tears began to fall from her eyes. “Everyone liked him. He was really popular in the hospital, with the staff and the patients. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. Every phone call we ever had always ended with ‘I love you.’ Every single one. I don’t know why, it was just habit. Just tacked onto the end of ‘goodbye.’ We didn’t do it this time though. I didn’t get to tell him I loved him again.’
She began to sob, the last thing she had said being the most honest so far. Patil leant forwards and grasped her hand, then looked up at Gardiner. “I think we’re done here for the moment, aren’t we?”
Gardiner grunted. “Alright. We will need to speak to you again, Miss Richards, so don’t go where we can’t get hold of you.”
“Is there somebody you’d like us to call for you? Family?” Patil asked as Kelsey stood up.
“No, no, I’ll do that,” Kelsey said, her voice trembling. There was no family they could have gotten hold of anyway. Kelsey’s father had died about ten years ago, and her mother had been living in Spain for the past five years. Joe had been her only family.
Kelsey left the locker room and closed the door behind her, leaning against the wall while she tried to gather herself. As she took a few deep breaths in, she heard the two officers talking from inside the room.
“If you don’t mind me saying, Sir, you really need to work on the way you talk to relatives who have just lost someone,” Patil said crossly. “DS Harte is normally much gentler with them.”
“Yes, well I’m not Harte, am I?” Gardiner snapped back. “And she wants to be thankful that I’m not.”
“Why?”
“I spoke to him before I came in. He was babbling on about how he’s convinced Tilsley was murdered and that she, the girlfriend, is somehow involved in it all.”
Kelsey held her breath, listening to every word as she wiped her eyes free from tears.
“Really?” Patil asked. “What gave him that idea?”
“An extremely large dose of morphine, if you ask me. I had it when I had my kidney stones a couple of years back. Had me talking all sorts. Anyone can see she’s just a grieving girlfriend. Nothing suspicious about her.”
The door opened, and Kelsey flattened herself against the wall fearfully as Gardiner and Patil walked out of the locker room and made their way down the corridor, without seeing her.
Kelsey watched them disappear around the corner towards 7A, horrified by what she had heard. Blake Harte really was suspicious of her. All those distrustful looks she had seen him giving her had nothing to do with paranoia after all, and now all his colleagues were buzzing around the ward, trying to piece together the details of Joe’s death. Kelsey slid down to the ground and pulled her knees up to her chin. The walls were closing in on her, and she did not have a single clue what she could do about it.
8
For the next couple of days, ward 7A was a hive of activity with officers coming and going, talking to the staff and the occasional patient about what they knew about Joe Tilsley. Despite this, Blake was impressed that once Joe’s body had been removed, the ward seemed to return to some degree of normality. But Blake was itching to get back to work.
On the second morning after his operation, one of the nurses arrived at his bed to examine him. Blake recognised her from her badge as Gloria Nicolls. She had been, from what Blake had seen, the main person rallying round Kelsey.
“Morning, Mr Harte. How are we feeling today?”
“I’m fine,” replied Blake. “Can I go home? I’m able to walk around now. A bit more gingerly than I would normally, granted, but that’s nothing I can’t fix at home, surely?”
“Are you still feeling any discomfort?” Gloria asked as she retrieved a stethoscope from around her neck.
“No, not really,” Blake lied.
“Just lift your shirt up.”
Gloria pressed the stethoscope around Blake’s abdomen and listened. When she frowned, Blake asked, “What? What’s wrong?”
She removed the stethoscope from her ears. “Nothing to worry about too much. I’ve just listened to your bowels.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” Blake replied. “And? What did you hear?”
“Not a lot,” Gloria said briskly. “I would like to be able to hear something that tells me that your digestive system has recovered from the operation. As of yet, I can’t hear anything. Like I say, nothing to worry about, but I wouldn’t advise you go home just yet. Another day or so, and you should be good to go.”
“Another day?” Blake repeated, dismayed.
“It won’t do you any harm,” Gloria replied. “You’ll thank me when you haven’t collapsed again.”
“I need to get back to work,” Blake protested. “There’s nothing you can do? No medication?”
“Sometimes, time is the best cure,” replied Gloria.
Blake nodded. “Is that what you said to Kelsey? That time would heal her wounds?”
Gloria stared at him. “I don’t think that’s really -”
“Look, we can do this one of two ways,” Blake told her. “The second I’m out of here, I’m going to be back working, and trying to work out who killed Joe Tilsley, and why. Either, we can talk now, and you can have the knowledge that I’m working without even getting paid for it, or I can come back and talk to you in a more official capacity. What’s it to be?”
Gloria bit her lip and then glanced around the ward before sighing. She pulled the curtains around Blake’s bed. When they were isolated from the rest of the ward, she sat down in the chair.
“She won’t thank me for this,” she said. “I’m supposed to be her best friend.”
“Which in my eyes means that you’re probably going to be able to be the most helpful to her,” Blake told her. “Anyway, she won’t be hearing from me that you’ve spoken to me. Where is she? At home?”
“Yeah. She hasn’t been in since it happened. She said she wanted some time on her own.” Gloria looked down at the floor and wrung her hands together. “I’m worried about her though.”
“How long have you known her?”
Gloria shook her head, apparently resigned to Blake’s unofficial interview. “About two years. We both started nursing together.”
“And when did Joe come on the scene?”
Gloria shrugged. “About two months after. He used to work on this ward, but he applied for a new position last year, and got it.”
“So, he was quite a talented doctor then?”
“Yeah.”
Blake narrowed his eyes. He could detect a slight air of resentment from her. “How did you get on with Joe?”
Gloria paused, perhaps trying to decide how to answer. “Fair to middling. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that we never fully saw eye to eye.”
“Why not?”
“I thought at first it was because I was jealous. I mean, there were me and Kelsey, best gal pals, shopping, going out, having a laugh, and then he came along and suddenly she’s turned all her attention to him. I won’t
deny it stung slightly.”
Blake nodded. “I can understand that.” He remembered feeling similar feelings of annoyance when his best friend from his old position in Manchester, Sally-Ann, used to cancel on him constantly, because of some drama she was going through with a man. It was something he felt he had grown out of quite quickly, but he understood the notion.
“But I don’t think it was that,” Gloria added. “I just didn’t like how he treated her.”
“How he treated her? What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what I mean,” Gloria said. “Which is why I never bothered saying anything to Kelsey about it. She was happy. And you’re supposed to be supportive of your best friend, aren’t you?”
“Not if you think they’re in danger,” Blake said. “Did you think she was?”
“No, it was nothing like that. He just always seemed distant. He drank a lot. I assume it was just drink, I don’t know if he did anything else.”
“Drugs?”
Gloria shrugged. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me, put it like that. What I do know is that there were nights that Kelsey had no idea where he was. He’d just vanish, go on a bender, and then turn up the next morning, looking like crap but pretending nothing had happened. But whenever I’d ask Kelsey about it, she’d just shrug it off and make out that everything was fine.”
“I’ve heard that they rowed a lot.”
“Yeah, they did. It was normally about where he’d swanned off to. I tell a lie, once I said something to her. I asked her why she was letting him walk all over her.”
“And what did she say to that?”
“Not a lot.” Gloria sighed. “I could tell everything I was saying was just going in one ear and out the other. Before he came along, I remember we used to stay up till all hours of the night, planning for the future. She always used to talk about the big white wedding. Kelsey tries to pretend she doesn’t dream of being a princess for a day, but I know her better than that. I don’t think she even pictures who this guy is standing at the end of the aisle waiting for her. She’s in love with being in love, no matter what might be telling her that what was going on in that relationship wasn’t true love.” Gloria ran her hands through her hair and looked at Blake with a slightly sad expression. “Honestly? I think Kelsey stuck with Joe because she didn’t think she could do any better. She’d never admit it. She builds up this image of herself, loud hair, big personality. But beneath it all is a little girl dreaming of Wonderland.”