The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (13 page)

As Erica ran up the Ivy
Lodge steps, she suddenly felt light-headed and there was a buzzing sensation
in her hands and feet. Hungry and dehydrated. In her room, she poured a big
glass of cold water, adding the juice of a lime from the fruit bowl, and had a
couple of rice cakes spread with low-fat hummus from her emergency rations
before her first appointment Laura Gibson arrived. She was one of those who’d
suddenly asked for an appointment ‘urgently’ after the report of Kingston’s
death, and Erica finding the body, had hit the media. But Erica assumed that
was a coincidence. Laura was a smartly dressed, intelligent business woman,
hardly the kind to seek shoulder-rubbing time with a corpse finder.

Today she was wearing a milky coffee-coloured
tailored jacket, a cream shirt and a turquoise scarf, with black trousers which
were well-cut but somewhat looser and longer than fashion dictated, to hide her
deformed right leg and built up shoe. She was dark, almost Spanish or Italian
looking, with black hair pulled back into a tortoiseshell clip and dark eyes.
She walked with a swinging limp and a slim black walking stick and sat down
with a small sigh. Erica recalled she had had the kind of tibia and fibula
fractures, many years ago, which Kingston had worked on, and a fizz of
anticipation ran through her. Was she about to hear something significant, or
just another paean of praise to the great knifeman of Wydsand?

‘Hi Laura, haven’t seen you in ages, how’ve you
been?’ Casual.

‘I’m fine.’ Always that insistence on the
positive, with a hint of defensiveness. ‘Business isn’t great, but hey, we’re ‘all
in this together’, allegedly.’

‘Yeah, right. So is it leg problems, or lower
back, or that neck trouble? All of it related to your shorter right leg of
course, referring stress and pain upwards as your body strives to correct
itself.’

‘Yes I know, the zigzag thing.’ Laura zigzagged
her hand in a gesture sweeping up her own body, from short right lower leg to
left lower back (sacro-iliac joint) to right neck and shoulder area to left
temple migraines. ‘Well all the usual aches and pains, I’m used to it. It’s
like my weather, I live with it.’

‘I know you got good results from Ruta Grav in the
past...’

‘I want to be sure anything I say here is confidential.’
Laura interrupted her in a sudden burst.

‘Absolutely.’

‘I want to speak to you partly as my homeopath,
and partly as a reporter. I saw your appeal for information about Kingston.’

‘Confidential on both counts, as patient and
source.’

‘I need to tell you. Tell somebody. Kingston was a
sick son of a bitch, and he got what he deserved. Only whoever did it was too
good to him, by all accounts they knocked him out with a rock first. I’d have
happily helped bash in the nails.’ She was trembling slightly and a sheen of
sweat was on her upper lip but she looked triumphant. ‘It feels horribly good
to say that aloud!’

‘I suppose you’d rather I didn’t quote you, even
anonymously?’

‘Actually I’d love it... but I don’t know... he
may have relatives who’d be hurt by it.’

‘So how do you know? Did he treat you at all?’

‘No, and yes. The original tib and fib fractures
were many years ago, as you’ll know, it was treated with an external fixator of
the old fashioned kind. But not by Kingston.’

The old-fashioned kind using pins like Kingston’s
souvenirs that ended up buried in his brain, Erica thought. She kept herself
still and calm. Mustn’t push it.

‘Anyway, months later, pins out, plaster on,
fracture clinics, all the usual. In the end, my tibia just didn’t heal. Didn’t
unite. I hate that. I need to be independent, in charge. I used to be. That
injury, somebody else’s incompetent driving, took that away from me. Instead I
got not just pain, permanent disability, a leg shortened by over an inch, but
the feeling of helplessness, my worst fear.’

Mine too, thought Erica. Then realised what had
been said. Laura’s leg was now considerably shorter than that. She frowned, and
Laura picked it up at once.

‘That’s right, that’s what the difference WAS. So
I just got on with my life and my business, working hard, struggling a bit,
walking with pain and difficulty, biting the humiliating bullet of disability,
as you know I had a bad ankle fracture as well.’

‘Not a good place to make new bone, the tibia,
lower down.’

‘Yes I know, bad blood supply. I’m an expert on
this injury believe me. So fast forward fifteen years or so, about four years
ago, I had a fall. Consultant checked me out, discovered the old tib fracture
still hadn’t united, and told me incidentally that nowadays I could have an
artificial ankle joint because of the damage there. But of course, I needed a
solid leg bone to fix it to. So the leg would have to be fixed first. Well all
those years it was out of alignment, painful as the broken ends were able to
move slightly, but I’d got used to it. But now I was being offered new
treatment for that too. Previously, they’d just written me off as soon as the
plaster was in the bin. I was excited. The consultant was Robert Kingston.’

She stopped, took a deep breath.

Erica put the kettle on. ‘Why don’t I make us some
tea? Or coffee? Like that fabulous jacket.’

‘Yes I look great from the waist up, don’t I?’
Laura laughed. Erica got busy making Laura’s choice of coffee, while she
continued.

‘So, Kingston persuaded me to have another lot of
pins and frames inserted. This time, the newer Ilizarov frame. First he
explained he had to open up the fracture site, and saw the ends off the broken
bones, as they were dead and he needed to get down to living bone. He said this
would stimulate them to unite. While the frame was on, I had to turn the screws
every day several times a day to force the bones to straighten and to stimulate
the new bone to form, lengthening the leg. This was a huge decision for me to
make. He was very keen to do it, a non-union that old was a challenge to his
skill. I should have realised that was his priority, not my quality of life...
but I take responsibility for agreeing to it. It meant at least eighteen months
of limited life, worse disability, difficulty with everything, but I hoped it
would be worth it in the end. So I went through with it, losing all the
mobility I’d fought so hard to regain, gaining much worse pain, and now,
ironically, the hospitals are dirtier and I got some foul infections, more
pain, antibiotics, all that. This went on for two and a half years. My business
suffered, my relationship broke down. And in the end it didn’t work. And it was
my fault, not Kingston’s. I take responsibility for that. I have no trouble
taking responsibility. It’s abdicating it I find hardest. You see there was a
question I should have asked him, and I didn’t. So keen to believe it would
work. To believe he could heal me. Him and technology. I’d lost sight of what
you know to be true - that even surgery and technology rely on the body’s own
healing power. If it doesn’t make new bone, it won’t heal.’

She sipped her coffee, holding the cup with both
hands.

‘So what was the question you didn’t ask?’

‘Oh yes. ‘If my tibia didn’t form new bone and
unite all those years ago, when I was much younger, why should it do so now?’
Well there was no reason, and it didn’t. But I blame myself for that. My leg,
my responsibility to research fully before making a decision. So far Kingston’s
just a typical alpha male surgeon drunk on his own skill, caring more about his
career than my life. That’s not unusual, I’ve heard a hundred stories, we all
have, doctors who didn’t listen or believe until it was too late, doctors who
said we, usually women, were imagining things, doctors who didn’t think about
the whole person. Doctors who were callous, clumsy, tactless. Gave bad news
badly. And to be fair, the op might have worked, has on some patients, he did
nothing I could make any complaints about. Even though I later found out a
different surgeon further south was doing the procedure much less invasively or
drastically... even then, perhaps he was doing the best he knew how. And if his
bedside manner was - disturbing, well that’s not uncommon either.’

‘Medics used to have all the empathy scorned and
trained out of them. Things are better now with the new students, or so I’m
assured. They even do poetry workshops.’

‘He was more than just tactless and callous and
cold. He hurt me. His hands hurt wherever he touched me... and of course being
me I had to hide it, stiff upper lip, but it wasn’t easy. He’d dig his fingers
hard into the injury site... it made me feel sick... and somehow, under attack.’

‘There’s no excuse for that, when he’s in a
position of power.’ Erica realised the man Tessa married was pretty much the
same at work as at home, but his victims there already had broken bones. And he
got kudos for fixing them, the clever bastard.

‘I know surgeons aren’t expected to be ‘kind’.
Their field is the unconscious patient, the damaged area, the fixing, the
skill, the success.’

‘I don’t think they’re all like that.’ Erica was
thinking of Jamie Lau and his care for patients’ pain and suffering.

‘No, well... anyway, we’re getting to the
monstrous bit, and I feel really - I don’t want to - so this horrible day, he
gives me the bad news, my leg hasn’t healed. I’ve gone through all that for
nothing. In fact worse than nothing, my leg is now even shorter, due to him
cutting the ends off the bone. From a small orthotic in my shoe and a limp, I’ve
now got a built up shoe and a worse limp. Well he just told me right out, and I
was upset. Yes, I cried. In front of him and the nurse. Know what he said? ‘What
are you crying for? We can just amputate your leg.’’

Erica felt sick herself. She impulsively put her
hand on Laura’s arm. Laura politely but definitely slid her arm out from under.
She didn’t like help or pity.

‘So I said no, no chance, I said you’ve failed to
put this right, I’m not giving you another chance to mess it up. He looked
furious, nobody was supposed to question him let alone criticise. ‘I never
offered you a guarantee’ was all he’d say. So anyway, so far so ghastly. Then
he took the wires out. And he hurt me as much as he could, doing it. I couldn’t
stop him or leave could I? The frame and wires had to come out. I asked for
pain relief, he said it wasn’t needed. The nurse looked upset herself but daren’t
say anything. So I had to lie there while he got them out, as roughly as he
could, it was like a kind of violation. Because it was more than indifference,
or coldness. It was more even than suppressed anger, that I’d criticised him,
regardless of my natural emotional state. The worst thing - the worst thing,
was that I could tell he was enjoying it. Hurting me, I mean. He was loving it.
I told myself I was being paranoid, I was mistaken. But after it was done, I
had a pounding headache as well as the pain in my leg, stress of course, and I
was wheeled out by the nurse, but as we left the room, she caught my file in
the door and opened it again, and I saw Kingston in an unguarded moment,
looking at my x-ray on the screen and holding the wires he’d taken out of my
bones and flesh in his hand against his - groin, and he was - aroused. His face
- it was as if he was looking at porn. He switched off the look and the posture
as soon as he realised the door was open, back to his haughty indifference, but
I’d seen it. He wouldn’t think he’d failed, because he could claim credit for
trying to save a leg others had given up on. But he was enjoying my reaction,
my pain, my damage. My marred life.’

Laura was flushed red with shame. Her weakness and
victimhood were as painful to her as the injury.

‘I’d already been through so much, injury, years
of pain, months of treatment, coping with work, my life disrupted, and yet this
was somehow harder to bear. He relished my suffering. It was
obscene
. I didn’t
tell anyone. It was a disgusting secret I had to share with that man. A foul
kind of intimacy. But what could I say? That nurse wouldn’t have backed me against
him. He was like god in there. They would have just said I was a fussy patient.
Hysterical. One of his favourite words for female patients. ‘There’s no need to
get hysterical.’ I’ve felt so ashamed as if I’d been complicit. I know that’s
irrational but I can’t help it. This is the first time I’ve told anyone. I
mean, all of it. And I’m glad I’ve told you and now I think I need chocolate.’

Hm, bit like asking for condoms in a convent, but
Erica went off to beg for some from Miles who fortunately had a few
foil-wrapped chocolate biscuits and donated one. ‘The C word? And there was
more rejoicing over one that was saved...’ he mocked.

‘It’s not for me, it’s for a...’

‘Friend, yes I know, I believe you.’

Erica inhaled deeply and furtively, the chocolate,
rich and sweet, dark and clinging, acting on her brain like cannabis, as Laura
ate with another coffee at her side.

‘Chocolate boosts seratonin levels. You need
pampering a bit. I’ll give you some contacts for an aromatherapy massage. Have
you had reiki? It’s a way of releasing old harmful emotions. There’s a whole
theory behind it, which the practitioner can explain, but if you don’t buy
that, which you probably won’t, you can regard it as a ritual which can focus
your mind and enable you to say goodbye to those feelings of hate and
humiliation, like a kind of funeral for bad feelings. It might work for you.’

‘I’ll give it some thought.’ Laura was closing
down now she’d opened up so far. Trusting another person wasn’t easy for her.
She’d exposed her weakness as she saw it, and Erica wouldn’t be surprised if
she never saw Laura again. The way friends dump you for listening to them drone
on about their lover’s faults, once they’re blissfully together again.

‘It’s entirely up to you.’ Erica was speaking Laura’s
language. She gave her a high potency dose of Ignatia and arranged for her to
come back to see if they could do something more about the leg, make it hurt
less. Her resistance to pain was being lowered by her emotional state. The
humiliation of the torturer’s victim...forced to participate in an obscene
intimacy, taking on the guilt and shame which rightly belonged to the abuser.