Night Mares

by Manda Scott

  AFTERMATH

  The kitchen was a wasteland. A dozen pairs of booted feet had left indelible marks in black on the sanded oak of the floor. The rugs in the living room were beyond repair. The stairs looked as if someone had fallen at least once, on the way up or the way down and used the banisters as a crash barrier on the way to the floor. The bedroom, predictably, was a cave. A windowless, airless, smog-filled pit. And dark. So very, very dark. A dark that sucked. Took the torchlight and swallowed it whole and gave out sounds in its place. Soft. Hidden. Painful. The final keenings of heat-tortured wood. The whispers of falling plaster. The guttered groans of timbers shifting suddenly in the roof space. This place has stood for nearly three hundred years. Generations have lived here and died here and the cottage has never changed. It doesn’t like the intrusion of fire. It hates the intrusion of men afterwards. The air held something close to loathing about it.

  Fine fingers of fear traced their way up my spine and squeezed tight in my throat.…

  Also by Manda Scott

  HEN’S TEETH

  There is a vet school in Glasgow and it is in the middle of the Garscube Estate, more or less as described. This is as far as the facts go in this novel. Every other detail, every clinical case, every clinician, every particle of the landscape is a product of the author’s imagination. None of them has any basis in fact whatsoever.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Eastern Arts Council in the writing of this book.

  NIGHT MARES

  A Bantam Crime Line Book/published by arrangement with Headline Book Publishing

  Crime Line and the portrayal of a boxed “cl” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Manda Scott

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Headline Book Publishing, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH, England

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48880-0

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  For Hester

  Acknowledgments

  The number of people who contribute to the writing of any novel is immense. In this case, however, there are a well-defined few who made Night Mares what it is. Jane, my agent, is clearly well on the way to sainthood, and Anne and Victoria at Headline have kept remarkable good humour in the face of hard-pressed deadlines.

  On the veterinary side, I would like to thank Hester for some serious input on imaging and general veterinary common sense, Pat and Sean for digging up details of the pathogenesis and pathology of endotoxaemia, Warren for reminders on surgical technique and Shane for help with a certain feline forelimb fracture. On the medical front, my thanks to Dr Charles McAllister for help with the human anaesthesia and the intensive care protocols.

  Night Mares was written largely under the influence of Dublin Vet School and while I would like to make it clear that not one single bit of the content reflects on that remarkable and very wonderful institution, it would have been a great deal harder to write had I not been there. My thanks, therefore, to all of the clinical staff and final year students, specifically to Eilis, Deirdre, Mary and Cliona for being there, to Maureen P., for not being there when it mattered, to Warren for remembering and, with Niamh and Shane, for making the department such a rewarding place to work. Thanks also to Hester for opening her home, hearth, and wordprocessor to a wandering anaesthetist and, in England, to Betty and Joe, the world’s most patient neighbours, for taking care of cottage, cat and the essentials of life while I was travelling. Finally, thanks to my family, as ever, for keeping faith.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The world is blue. Pale and oddly translucent. Like the sky over Skye. Some cretin with a sense of humour has painted the ceiling in pharmacy blue. Because they could. And so the world is blue with magnolia walls.

  There’s a fat, bloated sun floating somewhere in the back of the blue. Above and to the right. Miles out of reach. It’s a drip bag. Fat and overfilled and yellow like flat Lucozade. The yellow is pentobarbitone. There’s enough in there to kill a horse. Several horses. I know. I put it there. I took every drop we had in the dangerous drugs cupboard, signed it all out and pumped it into a 500 ml bag of dextrose-saline. That bit was easy. It was getting the catheter in that was hard. I need to use a catheter. I’m not about to fuck up again. But it’s more difficult than I thought. I don’t have veins like a horse. And there’s only one vein on my left arm that’s worth going for. All the rest were shot to bits after last time. I used a 23 gauge cat catheter because I thought it would be easier to get in. Even so, it took me two tries. The bruising hurts more than I remember. It doesn’t matter, but it’s making things more difficult.

  I hooked up the drip to the catheter and turned it on, full bore. It’s slow, though. I forget how slowly things go through small catheters. Agonisingly slow. I can count the drops as they spill through the giving set. Small yellow doses of death falling like lethal, linear rain, back lit against the blue of the sky.

  I keep counting. It is important to count. To count the seconds between one drop and the next. Between one breath and the next. The breaths will end before the drops. I know this. I have been here before. The blue will expand outwards, filling the world and the magnolia will fade to nothing. The drops will keep flowing but I will stop counting. I will stop trying to work out how much time I have left. I will have no time left.

  There may be dreams. I worry most about the dreams. Last time there were dreams but then last time I woke up and had to remember. This time I won’t wake up. And if there are dreams, they will be dreams of another space and another time and they could not possibly be worse than the nightmare of the here and now.

  ‘It’s just pentobarb in the drip? On its own? Nothing else?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you used ketamine with it last time. And morphine.’

  ‘I know. And I fucked up.’

  ‘So it isn’t last time?’

  ‘No. It’s this time. It’s now. Soon.’

  ‘Do you want that?’

  ‘No. Not now.’

  ‘But, in the dream, do you want it?’

  ‘No. I don’t want it. But, in the dream, I have no choice. I can feel it coming, sucking me in. Like gravity. I can’t fight gravity, there’s no point. So I don’t try. I just sit there and watch it happening. And, in the end, I don’t care. I really don’t care at all.’

  ‘And now? How do you feel about it now?’

  ‘I’m too tired to feel anything, Kellen. I don’t want to feel anything. I can’t cope as it
is. There’s too much going wrong that I don’t know how to handle. Too many nightmares coming true.’

  ‘Could you take a break from work?’

  ‘And leave Steff with a surgical ward full of dying patients? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘About the dreams? Yes.’

  ‘And Matt?’

  ‘Matt’s always known.’

  ‘So you have two people who can help you. Use them.’

  The air is still. Some ideas need a long time to take root.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  We need more than that.

  ‘Nina, I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything … permanent … without calling me first. Will you do that? Can you do that?’

  A long pause. As if she is weighing her integrity against the pull of gravity and there is precious little to choose between them.

  ‘Yes. I promise.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She gets up to leave. At the door, she thinks of something new.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone, Kellen?’

  ‘Never. I can’t. You know that.’

  And besides, who in the world would want to know?

  1

  I counted seven magpies in the morning.

  Seven. All brilliant blue on black, sharp-edged against the raw white of the last frost of spring. The first six were spread out down the lane between the barn and the far paddock. One on the gate, one on the fence, one on the hawthorn hedge, three, all in a row on the fallen beech that bridges the stream. For a while, I thought that was the lot and warmed the morning with gentle fantasies of gold.

  The seventh hid at the back of the field, digging something bright from beneath a mound of horse dung. He saw me coming and fled to the beech wood, cursing me to a summer full of other people’s secrets. Gold, at least, would have had some novelty to it.

  I thought of them lazily throughout the day, in between clients. A kind of visual mantra, useful in keeping the tangles of one session from weaving their way into the next.

  I thought of them quite pointedly at six o’clock when Nina Crawford was late for her evening appointment without calling to let me know. Some people are late out of habit. Quite a few manage to ‘forget’ whenever they think things are running too close to the bone. Nina misses about one session in five simply because she is still in theatre with an unplanned emergency. But she has never yet forgotten to call. Not once in the last seven and a half years.

  Magpies loomed rather larger than I would have liked for the rest of the barren hour. Magpies and the pull of gravity. At half past, I pawned the car out of the car park and headed for home; out along Great Western Road, up through Anniesland Cross and over the switchback towards Milngavie. At the last moment, I turned right, across the dual carriageway and down into the gateway of Garscube Estate.

  You can ignore magpies for the rest of your life and get away with it.

  I’m not so sure about gravity.

  Dr Nina Crawford, senior lecturer in equine surgery at the University of Glasgow Veterinary Teaching Hospital lives on the job, for the job and through the job. When she’s not performing acts of veterinary heroism with her scalpel or leading her corps of students through the minefield of surgical anatomy, she lives in an ageing cottage in the grounds of Garscube Estate. The place was originally built for one of the farm workers in the days when the vast majority of farm workers were being piled on to sailing ships bound for Canada and only the lucky few were kept back to herd the sheep. Shepherds were not, I would say, expected to live long nor to enjoy the experience.

  It is pleasant to live in a home with a history. It is less amusing when that history prevents any kind of rational redevelopment. They let her put in electricity because the place was deemed uninhabitable without. They didn’t go for the double glazing, though, and I have been there on mornings in February when the condensation was frozen to the inside of the window and we had to break the ice in the cistern before it was possible to flush the loo. I have suggested once or twice that she might consider living somewhere with, say, central heating, as an optional extra. She counters with the fact that this is the only place within the boundaries of Greater Glasgow where the trees are thick enough to screen the traffic noise, where she can look out of her back door and see a heron standing on the river in the mornings and where she can listen to the toads mating at night. All of this may be true but it is also entirely spurious and we both know it. The real reason she doesn’t move is because the cottage is within a short sprint of the operating theatre and even if something goes into cardiac arrest on the table at two in the morning, she can be there before the attending clinician calls the time of death. This is the kind of drive that has taken her to the top and kept her there when anyone else would have been happy with a steady rung on the ladder.

  The back door to the cottage was unlocked when I got there but that in itself is nothing new. For a Glaswegian, Nina Crawford has a shocking disregard for the fundamentals of personal security. There were no letters in the basket beneath the letter box but that meant nothing either. This is a woman who lives on the wrong end of her e-mail account. The only genuine pen-on-paper letters she gets these days are from her mother and that’s only twice a year.

  I let myself in and did a quick tour of the kitchen. Let me rephrase that. I turned in a circle without moving my feet and was thereby able to investigate every surface. You could swing a cat in Nina’s kitchen, but only if it was less than eight weeks old. The door to the oven collides with the one to the fridge and both of them block the way to the sink. The kettle sits, unplugged, on top of the bread bin, which is, in its turn, pushed back into a corner to make way for a basket of crinkle-skinned apples.

  I checked them all out. The kettle was almost empty and the water covering the element was cold. The bread in the bin was hard. The grapes in the bowl on the hob had a two-day coating of grey mould. A rim of congealed bacon fat lined the washing-up bowl and a single plate lay untouched beneath a layer of scummy water. Nobody home. Nobody, at least, with any interest in cleaning up.

  Ominous.

  Nina is ordered by habit. It goes with the territory.

  There isn’t really any division between the rooms on the ground floor of the cottage. The kitchen area is bounded by a half-height barrier and leads into a kind of open-plan lounge/dining room, which I know from experience has sufficient floor space for one tallish woman with a sleeping bag—provided you move one of the halogen uprights away from the corner opposite the television and shove a pine blanket box out of the way into the space under the stairs. The rest of the furniture stays where it is and gathers dust. Only visitors use the lounge in this place—the ones who watch television and need to sit at a table to eat their dinner. Nina sits on the staircase to drink her coffee and the rest of us tend to eat our breakfast sitting on the low stone wall of the garden on the grounds that it’s warmer than staying inside. All of which means that I would be hard pushed to say if there was anything seriously out of place in the living room, but there were magazines where you would expect to find magazines and no one had taken the flex from the standard lamp to string themselves up from the ceiling, which was good enough to be going on with.

  I took a minute or two for a full look round and then elbowed my way past a pile of unironed laundry and scrambled up the near-vertical flight of stairs. I made that journey downwards once while drunk and nearly died in the process. In daylight, sober, it was easier.

  The main bedroom is on the right at the top of the stairs. A rounded stone from the river propped open the door and a shifting breeze pulled at the curtain hanging beside the open window on the far side of the room. A one-eyed bruiser of a black and white tomcat lay on the bed and glared at me with the venom of old acquaintance. The pattern of dips in the duvet told tales of undisturbed catnaps stretching back for several days. No sign of a human nap at all.

  Across the landing, her ‘office’ was knee-high in Xeroxed research p
apers and back copies of the Veterinary Record. The computer was dead to the world and the coffee half filling the mug was as old as all the rest of the food. A ‘1471’ on the phone said that a number with an Edinburgh dialling code had called yesterday at 22:47 and that if I wanted to return the call, I should press 3. I considered it for a moment, thought better of it and wrote the number on the back of my hand instead. Her mother lives in Edinburgh. But then so does the other half of the Scottish veterinary academic community—the ones who don’t work in Glasgow—and I wouldn’t know most of them from Adam. Or Eve. Time to find out later. If it matters.

  There’s a loft space, with access from the landing, which has more or less enough room to lie down in between the box files and old lecture notes. I found the pen torch in its usual place and flashed it once in a wide arc. Lots of dust and enough notes to bury a horse. No signs of human intrusion this side of Christmas. No body lying with a drip in one arm waiting for the countdown to zero. Oddly, it didn’t make me feel any more secure.

  I was back in the office checking dates on the papers when I heard the back door open downstairs. The stairs, in daylight and sober, are lethal if taken at speed. I lost my footing midway down and landed in a mess at the bottom.

  Nina Crawford stood in the doorway. Or rather, a tousled mess of humanity that bore passing resemblance to Nina Crawford stood in the doorway, staring at me in the way any ghost might look at the living.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  ‘You missed your appointment. I came to check that you weren’t dangling from a light fitting.’

  She grinned tightly, like a skull. All bone-white lips and no humour. Not pleasant.

  ‘You’re early. Come back in an hour. At least you’ll know not to bother with the ambulance.’

  ‘Very funny. Are you as bad as you look?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She rocked back against the door-frame and tried to lever off her wellingtons, the toe of one braced against the heel of the other. ‘How bad do I look?’