by Jane Shemilt
Ed nods and walks out without replying; the door closes behind him.
It must have been the police she’d heard, then, returning to comb through the bedrooms alongside Ed. Why didn’t Ed tell her that? Does he know more than he is saying? Fear beats in her throat; she shivers although the room is hot.
The doctor slides a needle into the edges of the jagged wound, which puff up with the local anaesthetic. He probes for pieces of glass with a fine pair of forceps; the tips grate as they find fragments. Red stained, they shine like jewels as he holds them up to the light.
‘It’s deep,’ he murmurs after a while. ‘But I think I’ve got all the pieces. It should really be X-rayed. I can organise that for you tomorrow.’ He looks up; his glance is kind but searching. ‘So you fell with a glass in your hand?’
‘I was drinking.’ He will judge her for that, but she doesn’t care, though if he knew why she was drinking, he would finish what he was doing, lock the door and call the police.
‘Hence the smell of alcohol,’ he says calmly, as if it’s normal to drink in the morning, drink so much you are unsteady on your feet and your thoughts begin to slide. He cleans the wound then pushes his threaded needle through the torn muscle, sewing in silence. The quiet room, even the uncomfortable tugging sensation deep in her hand, adds to a sense of safety, of being looked after. She leans back in the chair.
‘If it wasn’t Jake, it must have been the police,’ she murmurs. ‘They said they might come back but I don’t know what they hope to find.’ In the following silence she stares at the bent head, the thick, wavy hair and glinting specks of dandruff at his parting, unease growing. Were they searching for the vials right now? ‘I’m frightened.’ The words slip out before she can stop them.
He cleans the skin again and begins to suture the edges together. ‘Don’t be, it’s going to heal beautifully.’ He pauses, his voice becomes more gentle. ‘But you must be mistaken about the police. There are none on the island today.’ He loops the thread into a neat knot and cuts it with the scissors. ‘They come over from Islay when necessary, but the ferry boilers were serviced in the early hours so the first boat docked only ten minutes ago.’
He’s implying that she imagined the noises she heard upstairs. A low chuckle takes her by surprise. She stares at the doctor; is he laughing at her now?
‘Almost there.’ His voice is kind. Her head begins to bang; she puts her free hand to her face, it feels wet.
‘The days following a death can be very difficult,’ Andrew continues. ‘How much longer will you be alone?’
‘My husband is fetching me tomorrow or the day after.’ She doesn’t explain that they haven’t settled on a day, that there are no definite plans for her return, or none she can remember. Panic begins to creep along her skin like the first crawling sensations of flu.
‘Can you manage till then, with one hand? Have you food in the house?’
She tells him she does, far too much food. She doesn’t admit she has eaten nothing for two days, that she feels light-headed as though floating unanchored. After he has finished, he draws up the fluid for the tetanus injection. As the needle pierces her skin, she begins to shiver uncontrollably, unable to stop her teeth chattering. Andrew wraps her in the blanket from the couch and, shrugging on his tweed jacket, helps her into his car. He drives slowly, waving to people as he passes, two capped old men leaning against a wall, a woman with a wide pram walking slowly in the centre of the road. He seems well known, liked.
‘Sleeping all right?’ He is driving a little faster now they are beyond Craighouse.
She nods; she has been sleeping a scant hour or two each night, but there is little point in telling him this.
‘Eating?’
At the thought of the chicken and slabs of cheese in the fridge she wants to vomit. She opens the window as they pass the lake and with a shock she sees a child between the road and the water, a little girl standing very still. Her dark hair and white dress look incongruous against the soft greens and browns of the landscape. She is looking straight at Beth, smiling as though she recognises her, and then she lifts her arm to wave, the small fingers stirring as if in a slight wind. Beth smiles and waves back, noticing as she does there is no one else in sight, no picnic rug, no car, no parents. She feels the clutch of panic and turns to Andrew. ‘There’s a little girl over there by herself, she’s only about four. We should stop.’
‘I’ve never seen such a young child out here on her own.’ He brakes. ‘Show me.’
She turns back to point, but the shimmering grass is quite empty apart from the ragged balls of bog cotton that glow in the grass like white flags.
‘She was over there, right there, waving at me.’ Beth’s voice wavers. She must have been imagining things, there is no one there at all. She puts her hand to her mouth, frightened. The child seemed so real, so familiar. She shivers again. The boards she nailed down are breaking up, something is seeping through.
Andrew drives in silence for a while and then starts speaking again. ‘Sadness and shock can affect us in different ways, making us imagine many things.’
His voice is gentle, the hands on the wheel look kind; in his warm car she feels sealed against the outside, protected from real life. It’s as though the world doesn’t exist, and she can tell him whatever she needs to. Doctors are sworn to confidentiality; he will keep her secrets if she shares them. It would be a relief to open her heart to someone she can trust.
‘It’s all my fault,’ she whispers.
His eyes are back on the road. He nods; her confession doesn’t seem to surprise him. ‘Guilt is a normal part of grief.’
‘I mean I was responsible from the very beginning. I’d had the idea in my mind for a while, I persuaded Albie to go along with it.’
The car goes over a pothole; her hand is jarred against the side of the door. She winces but he doesn’t notice. ‘You inspired him? Gosh. Your husband’s a great man, I follow his work.’ He sounds in awe of Albie, as Albie did once when he talked about Ted. Andrew smiles at her. ‘So you had this idea; where did it come from?’
She feels sick now. Her forehead is sweating, her vision darkening at the edges; she gropes blindly for words. ‘The vials, I think; yes, that’s how it began, with the vials.’
‘Sorry, Beth, what vials are these, exactly?’
She will have to begin at the beginning. She wipes her forehead with the sleeve of her shirt. Andrew’s right, she needs food; the facts are slipping away. ‘The ones Albie changed; Ted found them – evidence, you see. We had to do something then.’ She stops, surprised; that’s the story, the short version. There’s a longer story hidden behind the first one, about love and betrayal and loss, but the details slither from her mind. What was it that she lost? She glances at the doctor in panic.
‘It’s okay. I think I understand.’ Andrew’s voice is reassuring. ‘It was a collaborative effort, your husband followed your initial idea and adapted it. Ted backed it up with evidence. Something like that anyway, impressive teamwork. Well done, you.’
She turns away. How stupid he is. She shouldn’t trust him. He can believe what he wants, secrets should be kept anyway. She let Albie know hers, and look what happened. Her hand throbs, there is an answering pulse of pain in her tooth.
‘Can I get out now?’ She puts her good hand on the door handle, pushes it down. ‘I’ll walk the rest of the way.’
‘Watch out there.’ He presses a switch and the locks of the car clunk in unison; she feels a beat of alarm but his voice is matter-of-fact. ‘I’ll take you to the house. You’re not in a fit state to walk; you’ve had a tough time.’
She leans her head against the window; she is tired of him now. She might have made a mistake about the noises this morning and about the little girl just now, but if she imagined them, perhaps she is imagining this too. Perhaps nothing is real; she’ll wake soon and find herself back in London, in bed with Albie. She smiles. The phone will go and it will be Ted, asking Albie to
meet him for a run or discuss a patient he is worried about. Albie will comply; he always does exactly what Ted wants. She tries to hold this picture carefully; the fingers of her sore hand flex and the pain flares. Her hand opens, the images slip away.
The doctor has seen her smile and smiles too. It’s easy to see he likes her. When they arrive at the house, she doesn’t ask him in and he looks disappointed. He drives away and she goes inside. Harris runs to her, wagging his tail joyfully. She feeds him, pours herself a large glass of whisky and drinks it as she leans against the door to watch Harris trundle round the broken trees. She feels better already, she just needed that drink. She checks her phone but there are no more messages; instead she sends Albie one.
They didn’t find the vials. Billy’s ill, Jake’s coming back to London.
His returns in a second.
Good, as I planned.
What does he mean? He planned Jake’s return? How? She walks into the garden but stops abruptly, as though a trapdoor has opened in front of her that leads to deep watery blackness. The only answer that fits Albie’s text is one that terrifies her. Albie has enticed Jake home, using Billy’s illness as bait. Her hand is throbbing badly and she goes back into the house. If Albie is hurrying down a path she couldn’t have foreseen, she had opened the gate for him herself, she pushed him to the starting point, but they didn’t set out to harm those other children. They were accidental casualties; this is different. Billy might be in danger. Billy, whose head had smelt of toast, whose warm weight had rested so comfortably against her side. There is no reply to her phone call.
Don’t play games she texts instead. This is a child’s life, Albie.
A text comes back immediately.
Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to Billy.
She takes the whisky bottle and sits down on the kitchen floor next to the stove. Illness can catch you out. Gita will be frantic. Harris puts his head on her legs. She rests her sore palm on the dog’s warm skull and closes her eyes. Her tooth is banging in her mouth so she swigs from the bottle. The whisky warms her, hunger disappears, and after a while the pain slips away with the worry. She closes her eyes.
29
London. Summer 2018
Bruce is still there. The downloaded material must have escaped the computer monitoring system. The relief Albie feels is intense; he took an unnecessary step he can still retrace. Bruce is heading away down the corridor in the centre of a group of lab workers, his dusty hair and purple jacket unmistakable amidst the white coats of his colleagues. Bridget, flame-haired and noisy, is bustling along next to him.
‘Bruce!’
The lab is safely his; he must unravel the harm he has done to his friend before the images are tracked. He can pretend that he himself has been the victim of dubious images downloaded to his own computer, advise Bruce to check his files and delete what might be there before they are picked up.
‘Wait up.’ He runs down the corridor, but when he reaches the group Bruce is nowhere in sight. The lab workers stare at him, their faces blank with surprise; he feels giddy as though the world is tipping the wrong way.
‘Sorry,’ he manages to say, his cheeks stinging painfully. ‘Stupid of me, my mind must be playing tricks. I’ve been working too late. I could have sworn …’ He stops talking; there is nothing to say. The apparition had seemed so real from a distance. He shakes his head self-deprecatingly; a ridiculous mistake. The strain is telling on him, he needs to get a grip.
‘Carry on. I’ll join you folks in a minute,’ Bridget says. The little knot of workers move off and, motioning Albie to follow, she walks down the corridor to her own room where they sit either side of her untidy desk, littered with photos of cats and piles of paper. A bobbly mauve cardigan is slung over the back of her chair.
‘Thanks for coming in so quickly, Albie. I sent you that message urgently because I wanted to tell you before you saw it on the news. I wasn’t sure if you knew.’
‘Knew what?’ This could mean anything; he aims for an expression midway between bewilderment and concern.
‘Bruce was arrested yesterday.’ Bridget speaks calmly but the hand on the desk trembles. ‘They took his computer, his laptop, his phone. All his books, everything really.’
‘Bruce was arrested yesterday?’ he repeats, truly astonished. Bruce’s downfall was far swifter than he’d envisaged. ‘There must be some mistake.’
‘I went to see Mike Foster, the IT chief.’ She sounds bewildered too, her normal clipped delivery softened with dismay. ‘He wasn’t supposed to tell me and I’m not supposed to pass it on, but I know how close you were.’
Close? Perhaps that’s how they seemed to everyone: good mates supporting each other, chatting in the coffee room, discussing research. It might have been difficult to detect the rivalry between them.
‘Bruce has been downloading illegal material. Images from the net.’
‘He’s always looked at porn, we knew that. Is it illegal now?’
‘This wasn’t porn, Albie. These were pictures of children, abuse images.’
It’s easy to look appalled; the words, spoken aloud in Bridget’s unassuming office, with her cardigan and pictures of cats, seem grotesquely out of place.
‘What will happen to him?’ he asks, sidestepping the discussion about how people surprise you, how you never dreamt the person you knew or imagined you did was capable of such deceit.
‘Bail initially. Prison possibly, after a trial. One thing is certain, though …’
He watches the struggle between sorrow and anger on her homely face. She is used to managing schedules and work sheets; faced with depravity, she is out of her depth.
‘He won’t work here again. His career as a clinician is over and he’ll be barred from all research in labs which deal with children’s diseases.’ She rises from the desk. ‘Ironically, Bruce was keen to head the lab.’ She shakes her head sadly. ‘He told me once he was a little jealous of you, Albie. He thought you had your life so well sorted with the locum, your marriage, the holiday house, all those things. You seemed so steady to him. You may not know this, but he admired you. He mentioned you’d helped him considerably with his research. If we feel betrayed, you must feel worse.’
He walks down the corridor to the exit beside Bridget. She continues to talk; a stream of words he hardly hears. Remorse burns. He is incapable of reply.
‘… so come in next week.’ Bridget has stopped by the door to the lift. ‘Things will have quietened down. We’ll need to chat. I’ll provide the committee with an up-to-date reference, and after your appointment we can discuss future directions for the lab. Despite everything Bruce had some good ideas; some may be worth taking forward.’ She squares her shoulders as they round the corner and hurries towards the little group that is waiting by the water fountains.
There it is after all. Bruce will leave his mark. Albie enters the lifts but turns to peer back down the corridor, half expecting to see the curly haired figure of his colleague, leaning against the wall, his face puckered in amusement as if at a private joke.
Billy’s hand lies open on the sheet, a starfish of fingers and pink palmar curves. Green vomit lines the cardboard pan on the bed. Gita raises her head from the bed as Albie enters, relief in her eyes. Her hair is flattened on one side, the skin of a cheek has been scored into creases where it rested on the sheet. Billy begins to wail, a thin, high-pitched noise ending in breathless sobs.
‘He was fine overnight and okay-ish till the last couple of hours,’ Gita says, picking him up. ‘Since then he’s been getting worse; it’s happening so quickly.’
Albie rests his palm on the swollen forehead; the little boy jerks his head back. The renewed yells are deafening; he calls the nurse. A tall African woman comes in, bringing with her an air of stately calm.
‘I need to look at the back of his eyes, Judy. Can you hold him still for me?’
He angles the beam of his ophthalmoscope into Billy’s eyes. Immobilised in Judy’s
hands the child quietens. Gita stands at the window, her hands clasped against her mouth. The normally flat optic disks are bulging with the pressure transmitted from the brain; the engorged vessels that run with the nerve are distorted as they lip over the pronounced curvature at the edge of the disc.
‘What? What can you see?’
‘The optic disc is swollen, Gita.’
‘I knew the pressure was up.’ Her knuckles are white bulges of bone. ‘So there’s an infection somewhere in the system?’
‘Possibly, though he’s been on antibiotics as you know,’ he replies as he feels Billy’s scalp. The silicone dome empties under pressure but this time doesn’t refill. His heart sinks.
‘The shunt is blocked now, and the block is in the brain,’ he tells Gita quietly.
‘What makes you so sure?’ she asks as Judy puts Billy into her arms; he stirs and grizzles quietly as though exhausted.
‘The dome didn’t refill this time. That means fluid is getting from the dome to the abdomen but not from the ventricles to refill the dome; the shunt must be blocked in the ventricles,’ he explains carefully.
She stares down at Billy who has lapsed into sleep. ‘Will it unblock itself if you double the dose of antibiotics?’ she whispers.
‘It’s not quite as simple as that. Whatever the cause, if the shunt is blocked I need to operate. I can simply replace the catheter if it is not an infection. If it is, the whole system needs removal: the catheter, the dome and the peritoneal shunt.’ He forces himself to smile though the regret rises like bile, bitter in his mouth. He could have removed the catheter or the entire system hours before.
‘The last blockage was caused by an infection.’ Her mouth trembles. ‘What else might be blocking it this time?’
‘The little side holes in the shunt can just silt up with protein.’ He puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Rarely, the very tiny blood vessels that actually make the fluid can get sucked up in the end of the tube and block it.’ That would be the worst scenario, but there is no need to frighten her; the chances of that happening are minute.