The Malcontenta (27 page)

He blinked, trying to make out what had happened, but it was so dim.
My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me.
His head was spinning, half waking, half trying not to. He felt an agonizing cramp in his legs, but when he tried to move them he couldn’t.
They’ve paralysed my spine, for God’s sake.
He struggled desperately to make them work, and suddenly there was a thump and the trolley shifted slightly and he found he was able to move them at last.
Thank Christ for that.
He realized that it was so dim because the overhead light was off, and although it was only mid-afternoon it was so dark outside that little light was coming through the small high window. Or was it mid-afternoon? He really had no idea. His back was so bad after the manipulation that he could hardly raise his head and turn his wrist to look at his watch. When he finally managed it he saw it was only two-forty. He’d been out for twenty minutes or so.

Where was everybody? Surely they wouldn’t have left him to come round by himself? Or had Beamish-Newell finally given up on him? Rose too? He lowered his head down on to his forearms again and waited. Faintly, in the distance, he could hear some music. An exercise class perhaps, or relaxation. Maybe just cook in the kitchen, preparing another lentil soufflé. Nausea swept through him, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to stay lying there.
At least they could have left the bloody light on.

He sat up with difficulty, cursing his back, and swung his feet to the floor. When he tried to put his weight on them they buckled from the cramp, and he leaned back against the trolley, but only for a moment as he felt the sharp stab of a needle in his back.
Oh shit.
He reached behind him with a tentative hand and felt ten or a dozen needles, maybe more, in two neat rows down his lower back.

He waited for a moment for his legs to recover, moving his weight from one to the other, then reached for the towel lying across the end of the trolley. It felt heavy - and odd somehow. Everything felt odd. He shuffled to the door, and found it was locked. A large key was sticking out of the mortice. He turned it and opened the door, blinking from the sudden bright light of the corridor.

Waiting there a moment in the doorway, shaking the cotton wool out of his head, he saw two elderly ladies approach from the direction of the west wing. They stopped and stared at him, open-mouthed. One of them began to scream, the other crumpled to the floor in a dead faint. A moment later a male therapist came running down the corridor in response to the shrieks and saw Brock. In his subsequent statement to the police he described how he had noticed Brock’s posture, stooping as if he had been in an accident, and the small acupuncture needles covering his back. But before that he saw the blood, lots of it, all over Brock’s hands, drenching his legs, dripping from his towel, staining the carpet around his feet.

Word of another killing at Stanhope rippled through County Police divisional headquarters at Crowbridge, running fast through some parts of the building, more slowly through others. Kathy was sitting in an office on the fourth floor typing up her fifth report on the tyre-slasher, when the word reached the level below her. A uniformed WPC picked up a pile of papers and headed for the stairs, intending to speak to her friend in the next room to Kathy, but at the same moment Kathy’s phone rang. It was three-thirty, perhaps an hour after Rose’s throat had been sliced open.

‘Kathy, have you heard? There’s been another killing at Stanhope Clinic,’ Penny Elliot told her. ‘It looks as if war’s broken out on the second floor.’

‘No! I hadn’t heard. What’s happened?’ Kathy felt her heart start thumping with panic, as if she already knew the worst.

‘Hang on.’ Kathy heard her talking to someone nearby, then, ‘Apparently, someone’s been found down there with their throat cut.’

‘Oh God! Brock!’

‘What’s that?’

But Kathy had already jammed down the receiver and was running for the door, just as the woman in the next office looked in and said, ‘Have you heard …?’

Kathy skidded to a halt under the trees before the car park, full of marked and unmarked police vehicles. An ambulance had backed across the grass verge by the west wing and was standing with its rear doors open beside the door to the basement. The two ambulance men were waiting, smoking, chatting to a uniformed constable who challenged her when she got out of the car. She opened her wallet for him, barely slowing as she came down the steps, and raced along the corridor, sensing her way to the epicentre of the disaster from the increasingly strained expressions on the faces she met along the way.

Scene-of-crime and forensic were already well into their routine as she came to a halt, eased her way around a knot of crouching men and looked into the room from which the photographer’s light was flashing. She saw the dark blood everywhere, across the trolley, the walls, and all over the white coat of the body on the floor. She recognized the sheen of Rose’s black hair, wedged into the angle between the floor and wall.

She stepped back and took her bearings, looking around her, heart racing. Further up the corridor a man in blue overalls and wearing surgical gloves came out of a room carrying several plastic bags containing blood-stained items. She walked quickly up the corridor and looked inside. Brock was sitting motionless on a metal chair facing the door. He was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, originally white but now stained, like most of his body below the elbows, with blood. His face was as grey as his beard and his eyes seemed to be looking at something far, far away. One man was taking scrapings from his finger-nails, another swab samples from the blood on his feet, and another - she recognized Professor Pugh squinting through his glasses - was removing acupuncture needles from his back. For a moment Kathy was struck by the image of a grotesque beauty parlour.

‘Ah, Sergeant Kolla! How nice to see you again!’ Professor Pugh beamed at her. Brock looked up and his eyes met Kathy’s. Almost imperceptibly he shook his head, then lowered his eyes again.

‘I wondered if you might be coming along to the party,’ Pugh went on, stooping to retrieve a needle from Brock’s lower back. ‘I thought Chief Inspector Tanner must be calling upon your extensive experience of this place.’

As if on cue, a voice, low and cold and hard, growled in Kathy’s ear. ‘You - outside!’

Kathy turned and he indicated the corridor with a jerk of his head. She started walking and sensed him following half a step behind and to one side. She retraced her steps back below the west wing until the door at the end came into view. The uniformed man standing there straightened up as he saw them. Tanner’s hand on her arm stopped her and she turned to face him.

‘Go back to Division, clear whatever you’ve got on your desk in ten minutes, no more.’ He was speaking quietly, his face less than a foot away from hers. Round his shoulder Kathy could see the constable looking curiously at them, straining to hear what they were saying. ‘Speak to no one. Then go directly home and wait to be contacted. As from this moment you are suspended from duty.’

Part Three

It was strange how different the place was in daylight in the middle of a weekday afternoon. In theory it should have been the same as at the weekend, but somehow it wasn’t at all. The sounds were different: the cries of small children coming home from the primary school round the corner; heavy traffic on the main road at the front; complete silence indoors. The house seemed more squalid for being empty. She sat at the small table in the middle of the kitchen and saw all the things she’d never had time to notice before. She wondered whether she should try to do something about the deposits of black grease which had formed around the feet of the old gas cooker, but then saw the state of the lino, curling and cracking wherever furniture wasn’t pinning it to the floorboards. Without people rushing through it on their way to work or out for a date, the room was forlorn.

Especially forlorn was the cupboard on the opposite wall, with grubby stickers on all the doors identifying whose was which. Someone had done that several generations ago, someone with a tidy mind, or upset at having their stuff pinched. The names had remained the same, although the tenants had all changed. She was ‘Eric’, the girl on the ground floor who worked at the building society was ‘Monty’, and ‘Sylvester’ was a creepy little man in the attic. She didn’t know the other two tenants.

‘We never meet for the best part of a year, and suddenly we keep bumping into each other.’

Kathy jumped at the unexpected sound. ‘Oh yes. Hello again. So you’re “Mary”.’ She nodded at the name on the door he was reaching across to open. ‘Mary’ was a six-foot-two, fair-haired man with a boxer’s face whom she’d passed as he was talking on the pay-phone in the hall that morning.

‘My other name is Patrick. And you are “Eric”, I believe.’

‘Aka … Kathy.’

‘How do you do, Kathy,’ he shook hands formally. ‘You’re the detective, aren’t you? We never meet because we both work odd hours. I’m a rep with Whitbread’s.’

‘I was just realizing how little I know about this place, even though I’ve been living here all this time. I’m probably one of the longest-serving tenants by now.’

He smiled, a pleasant, battered, gentle smile, she thought, the asymmetry of the nose and the larger left ear potentially engaging, if that sort of thing appealed to you. ‘Not quite. You’re a figure of considerable mystery and speculation, though.’

‘Why’s that?’ Kathy asked.

‘Because of what you do, I suppose. And the fact that hardly anybody has spoken to you or seen you, except occasionally being picked up by bulky men in unmarked cars.’

‘I haven’t participated much in the community of number twenty-three, you mean? I honestly didn’t think there was one.’

‘Oh, you might be surprised. It’s helped me out from time to time.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll get the chance to find out. This place is pretty grimy. Maybe I should do something about it.’

‘That would be wonderful. None of us likes cleaning. Want some?’ He offered her some of the instant coffee he was making.

‘Thanks, I’m OK.’

‘Taking some time off?’

‘You could put it like that.’

‘You make it sound pretty bad.’

Kathy got to her feet. ‘Yes.’ She turned and made for the door. When she reached it she stopped to think. ‘Look. If you hear the phone any time over the next few days and it’s for me, would you make sure and bang on my door, no matter what time it is? It’s just that I don’t always hear it, being at the back of the house. My room is -’

‘I know where it is.’ He smiled again. ‘Yes, I’ll do that, of course.’

‘Thanks.’ She strode off down the threadbare hall carpet, avoiding the pedal and oily chain of the padlocked bike parked at the foot of the stairs.

A couple of hours later Kathy was lying on her bed, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling, when there was a soft tap at her door. She jumped to her feet and yanked it open.

‘Hi.’ Patrick grinned shyly at her in the gloom of the landing.

‘Is it the phone for me?’

‘No, no. I was just thinking, I have to go out to pay a call on someone. It’s a nice quiet place, not far away. I wondered if a drink might brighten your day.’

‘Thanks, it probably would. But I’d better stay here, just in case.’

‘Jill just got back from work. Her room’s right next to the phone, you know. She says she’s going to be here till her friend picks her up at eight, and she’ll ring the number I give her if any calls come in for you.’

Kathy hesitated. ‘I suppose it would look pretty bad if I refused, in view of my non-participation in the social life of the household so far.’

Patrick shrugged and nodded agreement. ‘Pretty bad.’

The ‘place’ was a drinking club called PDQ, for some reason that Kathy never learned. It was so dark that its actual extent was indeterminate. The darkness also had the welcome effect of suspending real time, so that it became difficult after a while to recall what hour of the day or night it was outside. They sat on stools at the bar and Patrick introduced her to Carl, the blond Swede who owned the place, whose forearms were as massive as the joint of cold beef he proceeded to carve for them for sandwiches with their drinks. After an initial altercation when Kathy tried to order mineral water, they both settled on lager. While Patrick took Carl’s order for the brewery and tried to interest him in a new strong beer, Kathy sipped her lager, munched on her sandwich and stared at the tiny silver stars glued to the midnight-blue ceiling. She thought of Brock, now more than twenty-four hours in Tanner’s hands. She thought of his grey face and the stoop of his shoulders. And she rehearsed once more the responses she would give to their questions, although the longer they took to call her in, the more difficult it was becoming to believe in her replies.

‘Looks to me like a case for a rusty nail, Carl,’ she heard Patrick say.

‘What?’ she said, bringing her attention back to the two of them. Patrick was looking at her with concern. ‘What’s a rusty nail?’

‘A liqueur folded into the spirit that forms its base. I suggest Lochan Ora and Scotch.’

‘Nah.’ Carl was shaking his head. ‘She needs a walkie-talkie, that’s what she needs.’

‘And what’s a walkie-talkie?’

‘You don’t need to know, but after I give you two of them, you can’t walkie and you can’t talkie.’ He roared with laughter.

‘Yes,’ Kathy said, imagining herself attending her interrogation in a state of alcoholic paralysis, ‘that’s all I need.’

The call came the following morning just after eleven. A secretary from administration told her to report to Interview Room 247 immediately. In the taxi, Kathy recalled Tanner’s earlier instructions to Dowling and herself.
You will do what you’re told; you will go to counselling; you will keep very, very low; you will be very, very quiet and humble. Because if I see or hear one cheep from either of you again, I am personally going to insert all the paperwork from this case into your private orifices and set fire to it.