Born in a Burial Gown (28 page)

‘Boss,’ he confirmed.

‘Al, I want a bulletin made up. Don’t fuck about with the E-fit, use the best photo we have, and a summary of both crimes. I want it sent to every force in the country. Let’s see if anyone else has come across her. I also want you to start on her financial footprint. She was paying cash for the flat but she had to have a source of income. Work with Longy and find it.’

He looked up from the notes he was holding. Everyone was waiting for him to dismiss them, waiting to get on with it. Energy had been renewed. Time to let them do what they did best.

‘Right, Matt is going to coordinate all this so include him in any updates. When I’m not here, he’s in charge.’

Half an hour later, Fluke left HQ and was driving back to Carlisle. He felt that he was spending half his life on the M6. There was no tram or underground system in Cumbria to ease the amount of driving you had to do, and the bus service was limited. In a county that big, and with a population that small, driving was the only option. The Americans had a term for it: freeway therapy, when someone was causing trouble but not enough to be sacked, they would be based as far away from their home as possible. They were then faced with either moving or spending hours driving. Fluke knew that the amount of driving he’d done over the previous few days was largely self-imposed and, as he was using his BMW X1 rather than the pool car, he wasn’t getting mileage but he didn’t care. Using his own vehicle gave him flexibility. Plus, you couldn’t smoke in the pool cars. He put on a Ramones CD and turned up the volume. He needed to clear his head of all previous preconceptions about the case, and loud fast music was the best way of doing that.

He’d checked with the ward that Leah was on duty and made an appointment. Anyone could have done that but he wanted to keep busy, to keep moving. He debated telling her about his nosebleed but decided against it. He knew it was down to over-exerting himself, and she’d only tell him to slow down, or worse, sit still while he had two hours’ worth of plasma. With a renewed focus to the investigation, he needed to speed up if anything.

He searched for a parking space but couldn’t find one. Even the overflow car parks were full. Fluke knew that you either got there at eight o’clock or you entered the parking space lottery. He and a black Saab prowled the main car park for a while before he eventually gave up and parked in the staff section, leaving a note in the windscreen that he was a police officer on official business. It didn’t give him any right to park there but it might buy him some time.

Despite his struggle to park, he was early for his appointment. Playing loud music always made him drive faster. The ward nurse asked him to take a seat in the dayroom while she informed Doctor Cooper he was there. There was only one other person in the room; a middle-aged man watching the highlights of some rugby match on the flat screen TV. The volume was on mute. He was wearing a baseball cap to hide the hair-loss. He was hooked up to a portable drip stand and had two bags of fluids feeding tubes that went under his T-shirt. A Hickman line no doubt. Fluke had had one fitted during his illness. When the chemicals going in him were so corrosive that the smaller veins were being destroyed, the only option was to fix a permanent rubber tube directly into a major vessel near the heart. Surgery to get it in and surgery to take it out. Fluke subconsciously rubbed his chest where he knew his own scar was.

A nurse came in and asked the man if he needed any pain medication.

‘Aye, lass,’ he replied, in a voice that had little fight left.

‘One or two?’ she said, removing a blister pack from her pocket.

‘Two, lass. Unless I can have three?’

‘Away with yer,’ she replied, with good humour. ‘More than my job’s worth.’ She popped two pills and placed them into a thimble-sized container, before handing them over.

Fluke frowned. Something had flashed across the subconscious part of his mind but he didn’t know why. He had the strangest feeling that he’d just witnessed something relevant. He replayed the innocuous exchange, but there was nothing there. He looked around to see if there was anything in the room that was going to help push something to the front of his mind.

It was a typical dayroom, found the length and breadth of hospitals the world over; a television and about thirty out-of-date tattered magazines. Books and games that had been donated were in a plastic storage box. There were children’s toys on the floor and Fluke felt a tinge of sadness that any child should have to visit a relative under such difficult circumstances. Posters on the institutionally painted walls displayed posters reminding staff to wash their hands. Nothing jolted his memory.

The man watching the rugby sighed as the wrong team ran in a try. It seemed nothing was going right for him.

‘Doctor Cooper will see you now, Mr Fluke,’ a heathcare assistant said, interrupting his efforts at retrieving whatever his memory was hiding. He noticed HCAs were virtually indistinguishable from nurses these days, no doubt a strategy developed by the Minister for Health to give the impression that ward staffing wasn’t as critical as the media was portraying.

Doctor Cooper and Mr Fluke
, he thought.
Very formal.

He knew the way to Leah’s office but the HCA led him there anyway.

‘If you can just wait outside, Mr Fluke, she’s finishing a telephone call.’

Fluke took a seat, perplexed. Normally Leah would come and grab him, and they’d have a cup of tea together. Even when he was being treated, it was never that formal. He’d been a copper long enough to be on his guard. Something was different.

It was over five minutes before Leah’s office door opened and by then Fluke had taken the card out again. He didn’t need it anymore; the numbers were imprinted on his mind. They continued to elude him. He’d rearranged them. Added them. Subtracted them. Ignored the decimal points. Nothing.

He was staring at them when Leah walked out. She saw him and walked back into her office without saying a word. She sat down behind her desk and stared at him. The second time someone had done that to him that day. Nathaniel Diamond had been a master of it, Fluke knew behind his eyes was pure danger. Eyes that hid a thousand dirty secrets. This was worse, far worse. Leah looked angry. Angry and sad.

Her desk was empty except for a letter. He could see it had a stamp on it, the sort admin used to show the date it had been received. He didn’t want to try to read it upside down, she looked angry enough. Leah picked it up and pretended to read it.

An uneasy feeling crept up on him. She hadn’t found out, surely? He knew that at some point in the future, he was going to have to tell her his secret. He’d never considered she might find out on her own. He wasn’t sure there was any way she actually could. This must be about something else.

‘Did you find a cosmetic sur—’ he started to say.

She cut him off. ‘Do you know what this is, Detective Inspector?’ She was holding it at such an angle that he wasn’t meant to see it.

Fluke looked back at her face and was astonished to see a tear running down her cheek. She made no attempt to wipe it off.

‘No, Leah, I don’t know what’s on that piece of paper.’

‘Are you sure? Your name’s all over it.’

The feeling of unease disappeared and was replaced by dread. ‘My name, how? Can I see?’ he asked, weakly. Fluke thought of himself as an excellent interviewer, being able to disguise his intent and knowledge when he needed to, but even he thought he sounded guilty.

She made no sign that she was going to hand it over. More tears ran down her face. She left them.

‘It’s from Carleton Hall. An official request for a copy of the letter I sent your Occupational Health department confirming you were fit to return to full duties.’

Fluke slumped in his seat. This was it. It wasn’t ‘something else’, it was his secret. His terrible secret. His complete betrayal of trust. His crime.

He knew there was nothing he could say. Nothing he could do to excuse himself. He’d known that if the secret ever became known, he’d be thrown off the force. He looked up. The tears seemed to have stopped. Their tracks had dried, and left marks on her lightly made-up face.

She spoke coldly, no emotion in her voice despite the tears and obvious distress. ‘Perhaps you can help me out here? Perhaps the great Detective Inspector Fluke could explain how the letter they want a copy of, the one I’m supposed to have written and signed and sent on hospital stationery, is a letter I’d never heard about until this afternoon.’

***

After his treatment, Fluke had left hospital a shell of a man. After major surgery, he hadn’t been in the best physical shape to begin with and his consultant in Newcastle had told him there would be times he’d hate them for what they would be doing. He tried to be polite to everyone involved in his treatment but at times it had been hard. The chemotherapy protocol for Burkitt’s was the most aggressive they did, and the effects on his body seemed more devastating than the tumour had ever been. The tumour had caused him to have an upset stomach. The treatment for the tumour left him with devastating side-effects. It caused him pain he’d never experienced before. He stopped eating and he lost too much weight. Simple things like washing and shaving became ordeals. He left hospital a different man; different physically, but also differently mentally.

Buoyant to be finally out and cancer-free, he had thought it was time to get back on with his life. The police had organised Occupational Health to assess when he was going to be fit to return to work. He’d realistically thought it was going to be two months of eating well, regaining some strength and completing the course of physiotherapy organised for him.

What he hadn’t realised was that some of the side-effects were irreversible. He was left with thrombocytopenia. His body wasn’t producing the right amount of platelets. It was manageable and it wasn’t dangerous unless he was wounded. In most jobs it wouldn’t have mattered. Fluke knew that the police was one of the jobs where it would. They couldn’t put him out on the street knowing a small stab wound could be fatal, that his blood was no longer able to clot, that he could bleed out before help arrived. That surgery had to be carefully planned, the right bloods had to be stocked up in advance, specialist surgeons had to come in. It was a condition that would end his police career. He’d be allowed to ride a desk but, as far as he was concerned, that amounted to the same thing.

Leah had explained it was a seldom-seen side-effect. Determined to get back to work, he decided not to tell the Occupational Health nurse. He hid it from everyone. Apart from the occasional nosebleed and bleeding gums, there were no external signs that would give it away.

Gradually, his strength came back, nowhere near the level he’d previously enjoyed, but enough so that he could give the appearance of being fit. His hair grew back and he put on weight. He was ready to go back to work.

Although he’d never been career-minded, he took the job very seriously. He wasn’t the type of detective who thought crimes were simply puzzles to challenge his intellectual vanity; he cared deeply about the victims. He wasn’t prepared to leave the job just yet. He had nothing else to fall back on, there was nothing else he wanted to do.

He knew he should tell Occupational Health, that not telling them wasn’t fair on his colleagues, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

When it became apparent that it was going to be a serious issue, he thought about ways round it but came up against a brick wall. He needed a doctor to declare him fit to return. Something Chambers wouldn’t be able to ignore. Occupational Health only summarised medical reports and what he told them. Physically he looked fit, a bit thinner, a bit paler, but nothing too startling. They wouldn’t do a blood test, they would expect his consultant to provide those.

Everything came back to Leah and he couldn’t see a way round it. He considered asking her to ignore his condition but knew that she wouldn’t and he had no right to ask.

He became distant and withdrawn, and for a while took it out on those around him. Increasingly, his thoughts turned to how he could circumnavigate the NHS. Nothing legal sprang to mind. He thought about, then dismissed, illegal ways he could do it. But the thoughts kept coming back. He justified it to himself by saying the force was better with him in it. A half-fit Fluke was better than any other fully fit detective. That the people of Cumbria deserved him, needed him. He told himself he was being altruistic, not selfish.

He knew he was lying to himself but he didn’t care.

The semblance of a plan started to come together. He needed help. He paid ten pounds to have his medical records copied as anyone was entitled to. He sent them to a struck-off doctor he’d found online advertising his services. Two hundred pounds got him a comprehensive report detailing everything he’d been through but omitting the thrombocytopenia. It was delivered on a memory stick. Fluke had a report, full of medical terminology, that gave him a clean bill of health. But he still needed a credible way of getting it to Occupational Health. One that would get him back to work with no more questions being asked. One that would avoid the need for a genuine NHS report.

For days, Fluke struggled with the best way of doing it. Every scenario he went through failed. The police weren’t irresponsible employers, they weren’t going to let him come back to work without a report from his consultant, and his consultant couldn’t give him one. Whoever he pretended the letter was from wouldn’t stop Occupational Health demanding a full report. The request would go to Leah and her reply would go to them. Fluke would be copied into it but it would be too late.

Fluke knew that the only way round it would be to do Leah’s report himself. For a month, he did nothing. He couldn’t bring himself to pay the price. He decided that he wouldn’t do it. He’d take his chances with the truth, hope for a restricted duties job where he could still have some input into investigations.