by Mark, David
Dr. Straub opens the door.
The room is lit by a glorious rectangle of light which scythes down from a high, undraped window set in a wall painted in deep crimson and adorned with black-and-white sketches in chunky gold frames.
In the center of a wrought-iron four-poster bed lies Anne Montrose. Both of her arms lie above the smooth cream-and-gilt bedspread, and her blond hair puddles on the pillowcase like a pool of molten gold.
The drip that feeds her and another tube that takes away her waste are discreetly hidden behind two tall rococo lamps, and McAvoy’s eye is drawn to a hand-carved pine bedside table and matching bookcase that stand against the near wall, beneath a giant mirror which makes the room seem even bigger and more opulent than it is.
“She looks like a princess,” whispers McAvoy.
Behind him, Dr. Straub laughs. “The families of our patients sometimes like to decorate the rooms. Whether it’s for them or the patient, I couldn’t say, but this one is a definite favorite with the staff.”
“The light that comes through . . .”
“There’s a set of bulbs up there,” explains Dr. Straub. “Even when the weather is shocking, it’s like a summer’s day in here. That’s how it was set up.”
“Can’t have been cheap.”
“Her bills are always paid very promptly, I’m led to believe,” says Dr. Straub, cautiously, crossing to the bed and smiling at the figure in its center. “And there are never any problems when we want to try new techniques that may cost that little extra.”
“I’m sure Colonel Emms is very generous,” says McAvoy, staring into Dr. Straub’s eyes.
“I wouldn’t be able to discuss that,” she says with a smile that tells McAvoy all he needs to know.
Curious, he crosses to the bed and leans over Anne Montrose’s sleeping body as if leaning out over a ravine. Her skin is perfect. Her face unwrinkled. Her hair full of luster and life.
“It’s like she’s . . .”
“Sleeping? Yes. That’s the difficult thing for loved ones to understand. They’re grieving for somebody who’s still here.”
“Is she still here?” he asks, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Do they come back?”
“We get some of them back,” she says. “Not always as much as was there to begin with, but they can come back.”
“And Anne? Will she . . .”
“I hope so,” says Dr. Straub with a sigh. “I’d love to get to know her. From her records we would appear to have lots in common, though I fear that the work she did abroad would have been beyond my generosity.”
“You know about her charity work?” asks McAvoy, stepping back from the bed.
“I’m her doctor,” she explains. “It’s my job to try whatever I can to get a response.”
“You remind her of who she was?”
“Of who she still is.” She stops herself and purses her lips. “What’s this about, Sergeant?”
McAvoy opens his mouth and begins to tell her it’s just routine, but stops himself before he has made a sound. “I think somebody is killing people who have survived atrocities and disasters,” he says, “and I think Anne is involved somehow.”
“You think she might be in danger?” asks Dr. Straub, pulling a face and raising a hand to her mouth.
McAvoy shakes his head. “Perhaps,” he says.
“But . . .”
McAvoy just shrugs. He’s too tired to go through it all, to explain the thought processes that have brought him into Dr. Straub’s world.
“Does she get many visitors?” he asks gently.
“Her mother,” says Dr. Straub, and there is more animation and excitement in her gestures now. “Her sister occasionally. Obviously, we have visiting doctors and students . . .”
“I understand she was in a relationship at the time of the incident,” says McAvoy.
“Yes, her personal effects were brought here when she was transferred to this facility, and I have spoken to her family as much as I can to get some details of her life. She fell for a soldier she met while working in Iraq. I’m led to believe he may even have been a chaplain with his regiment. A grand passion, it seems. Such a tragedy to have it cut short.”
“You use this in the therapy, do you?”
“We use whatever we can.”
“You read to her?” asks McAvoy, nodding at the bookcase.
“Sometimes,” she replies. “I’ve read her the odd romance. Some poetry. Talked to her about the political situation in Iraq.”
She smiles at McAvoy’s expression of surprise.
“Things she was interested in, Sergeant. I’ve got a patient downstairs who appears to become more withdrawn when we don’t tell him how Sheffield Wednesday got on. They’re still people. They’re just trapped in there. We’re looking for whatever it is that unlocks them. We’re trying to disentangle a miracle . . .”
McAvoy runs his tongue around his mouth. He looks again at the figure on the bed. Closes his eyes. Looks inside himself. Grits his teeth and presses his large hands to his forehead as he tries to make sense of what he thought he understood . . .
“Sergeant, are you okay?”
His vision is blurring. The room is starting to spin. His legs feel weak, as though unable to support the weight of his thoughts.
“Wait there,” says Dr. Straub urgently, as she lowers him into a sitting position on the floor. “I’ll get you some water.”
The door swings open and McAvoy is left alone in the room, his huge body folded awkwardly, cross-legged, heavy-headed on the wooden floor.
He finds the strength to look up.
Focuses on the bookcase.
Romances and poetry, fairy tales and myths.
He reaches out and takes a book at random.
The title swims in his vision. He blinks. Focuses.
Holy Bible.
Gives a half laugh and opens it.
The pages fall like leaves from a dead tree.
McAvoy finds his lap covered in pages of text, torn into confetti, ripped into angry strips and shards.
He stares at the hardback binding.
Scrawled in angry, jagged letters on the inside cover of the empty book McAvoy holds in his hands are five words. Words carved again and again, deep enough to be fatal if etched in human skin.
THE UNJUST DISTRIBUTION OF MIRACLES
And in the center of the mantra, amid the mass of angry letters and ferocious scribbles, a piece of scripture, dug into the page in the same furious hand.
On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed. Many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, “Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?” (Deut. 31:17)
McAvoy forces himself to his feet, torn pages of the scripture falling from his body as he yanks himself upright.
He is breathing heavily, trying to make sense of this rage, bit deep into the Holy Bible.
He stares again at the figure in the bed.
He scrabbles through the pages, creasing and crumpling leaf after leaf of mania.
Holds up a page of artful lines. Another. More.
Among the scrawls, the furious words, are half a dozen pen-and-ink drawings—vague and abstract, beautiful and unreal. The tears in his eyes, the blue tinge to his gaze, make the images suddenly swim into focus.
The pictures are all of Anne Montrose. Intricate, loving, detailed images of her laughing, smiling face.
He has seen such penmanship before.
He stares at the images in turn. They are poems to the feeling she has evoked in the artist. Smiling. Laughing. Sleeping . . .
McAvoy holds up the last image. It has been daubed on a tor
n-out page of a notebook.
It is a picture of Anne Montrose, asleep, in a wrought-iron four-poster bed, her arms above the bedsheets, her hair puddled on the pillow.
It is smudged with tears.
McAvoy turns it over.
It is signed and dated a little over a week ago.
He runs for the door.
Pulls his phone from his pocket.
Calls the only person he knows with the skills to raise the dead.
26.
Three hours later and McAvoy is pulling up outside Wakefield Hospital. The snow hasn’t reached this outpost of West Yorkshire yet. It’s bitterly cold, and the air feels like it has been breathed out of a damp, diseased lung.
McAvoy pushes his hair out of his eyes. He straightens his back and stands his collar on end.
He takes a last breath of outside air, then steps through the automatic doors and strides across the tallow-colored linoleum. Somebody has made an attempt to put Christmas decorations up in reception, but they look somehow obscene against the peeling plaster of the walls or hanging from ceiling tiles mottled with brown damp.
He endeavors to look like he knows where he’s going. Passes the reception desk without a glance. Picks a corridor at random and finds himself following the signs to oncology. He decides that the direction feels wrong, and spots another corridor leading right. He takes it, and almost immediately has to pin himself to the wall as two burly female nurses with round backsides and bosoms that strain their blue uniforms all but take him out as, side by side, they push two tall cages stacked with linens.
“Coming through,” says the older of the pair in a thick West Yorkshire accent.
“Narrow squeak, eh?” says the other, who has proper ginger hair and the sort of round spectacles that went out of fashion a decade before.
“Well, if I was going to get run over today, I couldn’t have asked for a nicer pair of assailants. Can I just check, am I going the right way to ICU . . . ?”
Five minutes later, McAvoy is stepping out of the lift on the third floor. His nostrils fill with the scent of blood and bleach, of flavorless food, of the squeak of trolley wheels and rubber-soled shoes on the scarred linoleum.
A fat prison officer is leaning back against the front desk, sipping from a plastic beaker. He has a head shaved down to guard number two, and small, slightly cauliflowered ears sit like teacup handles on the sides of a misshapen, potatoesque face. McAvoy is grateful the man is alone, that Chandler has clearly been deemed a low-risk prisoner, and that there are no uniformed constables guarding the door.
McAvoy makes eye contact with the man as he approaches. For the first time since the rugby pitch, he tries to make himself look big. Hopes he looks like somebody to be reckoned with.
He pulls out his warrant card and the guard straightens up.
“Chandler,” says McAvoy, businesslike and official. “Where are we at?”
The man looks confused for a moment, but the warrant card and the managerial tone are enough to show him his place in the scheme of things, and he makes no attempt to ask McAvoy why he wants to know, or who has sent him.
“On a private ward, yonder,” he says in an accent that sounds to McAvoy’s practiced ear as though it originated in the Borders.
“Gretna?” he asks, with an approximation of a smile.
“Annan,” says the guard, with a little grin. “You?”
“Highlands. By way of Edinburgh and just about everywhere else.”
They share a smile, two Scotsmen together, bonding in a Yorkshire hospital and feeling like they’ve just enjoyed a taste of home.
“Bad way, is he?”
“Not as bad as thought at first. There was so much blood. Parts of his neck were just flapping off. He must have done it himself. He was in solitary. Nobody was near him.”
“Is he conscious?”
“Barely. He’s had an emergency op, but there’s talk of microsurgery if the stitches don’t do the job. He was dead to the world a minute ago, face bandaged up like a mummy. I just popped out for a coffee. There’s another guard gone for his lunch will be back soon. Nobody said to expect visitors.”
McAvoy nods. Plows straight on through the other man’s growing cynicism.
“I need five minutes with him,” he says, eyes boring into the guard’s. “Asleep or not.”
The guard appears to be about to argue, but there is something in McAvoy’s gaze that seems utterly rigid in its devotion to purpose, and he quickly tells himself that there is no harm in stepping aside.
McAvoy thanks him with a nod. His heart is thumping, but he stills it with deep breaths and closed eyes. His shoes are surprisingly quiet on the linoleum floor.
The silence is eerie. Grim. It makes him wonder about his own final days. Whether he will die amid noise, surrounded by bustle and chat. Or whether it will be a solitary gunshot, and then nothing.
He steps inside Chandler’s room.
The curtains are the same drab color as the drapes on the maternity unit at Hull Royal, but everything else is a washed-out and joyless blue.
Chandler is lying pathetic and motionless on the bed. His false limb is propped next to the single bed, leaving his pajama leg empty. Nobody has bothered to tie a knot below the severed knee, and the garment is twisted, slanting left, so that at first glance it looks as though the leg is pointing at an obscene angle.
Chandler’s throat is wrapped in bandages. A tube connected to a bag filled with clear fluid runs into a needle in the back of his right hand. Another, thicker tube runs into his mouth and down his throat. It has been taped to the side of his face, and already a crust of drying saliva has begun to form over the adhesive strip.
McAvoy reaches inside his coat and removes the bottle from his inside pocket. Roisin had warned him to put gloves on while handling it. Had said that the stink would eat into the skin of his fingers and never wash out. He pulls down the cuff of his shirt. Wraps it around both hands. Holds the vial in one hand and carefully unscrews the lid with the other.
The stench is extraordinary. Even at the remove of an arm’s length he feels his nostrils flare, grows instantly dizzy as the raw ammonia courses into his brain.
He crosses to the bed in three strides. Holds the bottle under Chandler’s nose.
One . . .
Two . . .
Three . . .
The bandaged figure on the bed begins to thrash. There is movement beneath the wrappings as his eyes fly open and what’s left of his face begins to contort. His hands fly to his mouth and begin tearing at the breathing tube, at the bandages, as muted, rasping coughs escape his lips with a hiss.
His solitary leg kicks out and drums on the mattress.
McAvoy leans forward. Takes the breathing tube in one hand and pulls. It emerges wet and vile from his open mouth, and McAvoy drops it to the floor.
Chandler hauls himself upright and heaves bile into his own lap. Coughs and begins clawing at the bandages.
McAvoy’s face is impassive. He merely watches. Allows Chandler these few moments of panic. This agony of fear and confusion as he awakes in the dark.
He listens as Chandler finds his voice. Watches the serpentine tongue lick dry lips beneath the sick-stained dressings.
McAvoy leans in. “You survived, sir.”
“Sergeant . . . ?” The voice is dry and sore. “Sergeant McAvoy?”
McAvoy replaces the stopper and deposits the small vial of clear liquid back in his inside pocket.
“I’m sorry to have done that, Mr. Chandler,” he says, settling his large bulk on the bed at Chandler’s side. “I just need yes and no from you, sir. You’ve been through quite an ordeal. You are in hospital. You attempted to end your own life.”
Chandler’s eyes begin to open. He’s swallowing painfully, and McAvoy pours
him a beaker of water from the jug on the bedside table and lifts it to the writer’s lips. He takes a few sips and then collapses back on the pillow.
“You worked it out, didn’t you,” McAvoy says, locking eyes with the pitiful figure in the hospital-issue pajamas. “You know who and why.”
Chandler gives the faintest of nods. “My fault,” he says. “My big mouth . . .”
“He would have done it, anyway,” says McAvoy, and means it. “He’d have found a reason. The thing that was inside him would have come out no matter what.”
“But he was a good man,” stutters Chandler. “I was just talking. It was just drunken bollocks. I wasn’t telling him to change everything he believed . . .”
“Grief is a terrible thing,” says McAvoy.
“So is murder,” says Chandler.
They sit in silence for a moment, then McAvoy stands. Turns away from the bed. Walks to the window to compose his thoughts. Looks past the yellow curtains at the damp car park with its swaying trees and rain-lashed vehicles and scampering, stick-insect figures. Perhaps it is the elevation, the sense of looking down upon them, but he has never more felt that it is he, and he alone, who carries the burden of protection and justice. He turns. Wants to end this.
“Simeon Gibbons,” he says. “Where is he?”
The name hangs heavily in the air. Chandler’s lips close. The tension in his body seems to ease a little. McAvoy watches as he licks his lips afresh.
“I wish I knew.”
“When did you last see him?”
“About ten minutes before they arrested me.”
“He was there? At Linwood Manor?”
“He’s a permanent resident. His room’s paid for by an old army mate of his.”
“Colonel Emms? Runs a private security firm in the Middle East?”
Chandler nods. “Deep pockets, has Sparky.”
“And Gibbons?”
Chandler looks away. “He made me his confessor without telling me a thing.”
McAvoy feels the pieces coming together. For the briefest instant, he considers making any of this stick. Considers court hearings and legal processes and sentencing. He hopes that Emms is now confessing all to Pharaoh, who had set off for Brontë country as soon as he’d told her what he’d found in Anne Montrose’s room. But here, now, none of that matters. He wants to know, because he wants him stopped.