The Road to Hell (20 page)

On the other hand, perhaps the kit was unreliable? That might well explain it. It had, after all, cost under a tenner at Superdrug. Perhaps she should take it back and return to alternative
medicine, to the infusion and the gemstones. A lapis lazuli for blood pressure, wasn’t it? One from the pack she had ordered online was still in her desk drawer. As she raked through it,
pushing aside the various cold remedies that cluttered it up, the door opened and Alice Rice’s face appeared.

‘Can I speak to you, Ma’am?’

‘Yes, come in,’ Elaine Bell replied, taking the gemstone surreptitiously out of the drawer and clasping it tightly in her hand, at the same time concealing it and yet allowing it to
begin to exert its miraculous powers.

‘What’s the Prof’s view then?’ she asked, knuckles white around the stone.

‘He thinks she died as a result of the head injury that she got when she fell in the hostel.’

‘Splendid. So we’ve finally unravelled the mystery. It’s no longer a suspicious death, just an everyday tale of a down-and-out having a drink in the Hermitage, who dies as a
result of the delayed effects of a fall the previous night. What about the bruise on the other side of her head?’

‘It’s old and trivial, apparently. It wasn’t the cause of her death, he says. He thinks she probably got it a few days beforehand. The fall caused the bleed.’

‘Another one bites the dust!’ said Elaine Bell triumphantly, now openly rubbing the stone with its small gold chain between her fingers. She wanted to slip it round her neck as soon
as possible. Already it seemed to be exerting its benign effects on her circulatory system and she felt calmer, her nerves no longer jangling. Muirfield, indeed! It was a joke. A bloody joke!

‘Professor McConnachie thinks we may need an FAI.’

‘What? Why on earth?’ Elaine Bell said, suddenly apprehensive again, her grip tightening once more on the stone.

‘Because he’s concerned that the hospital failed to pick up the subdural haemorrhage, didn’t do enough tests and so on.’

‘Oh for God’s sake! Do we know anything about that?’

‘No, we haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. He’s only just raised the possibility, after all. I’ll need to find out more about the accident at the Bread Street
Hostel, speak to the nurses, the doctors who saw her at the Infirmary and then go back to him.’

‘Right, on you go then. No time like the present. Once you’ve done that, we’ll wash our hands of it, pass the papers on to the Fiscal Service and see what they have to say. At
least it’ll be off my desk.’

She put the lapis lazuli pendant around her neck and countered Alice’s curious glance with a single raised eyebrow. It worked. No question was forthcoming from her sergeant.

The air in the Bread Street Hostel was chilly. The few old-fashioned, cast-iron radiators in the building were unequal to their task, incapable of making any real impact on
rooms with lofty ceilings and large Victorian windows.

Alice, shivering in the cold, waited in the manager’s office for about ten minutes as, one by one, various members of staff wandered in, looked at her and then marched straight out again.
None of them, she noticed, questioned the presence of an unaccompanied stranger in the office, free to peruse any sensitive information lying about on the desk.

Eventually, someone who had come in to collect a phone directory asked who she was waiting for.

‘Maureen McKee.’

‘Right. Mr Imrie’s away hunting for her the now.’

As more people passed through the office, Alice stared idly out of the window at the grey slate roofs of the tenements opposite. A pigeon, its dull, damp feathers puffed out, strutted up and
down the zinc-clad spine of the nearest building. Out of the grey, sunless sky another one arrived and immediately the resident pigeon began courting it, advancing towards it and then retreating,
head bobbing up and down, as if performing a well-rehearsed dance routine.

It was, she thought, as if spring had unexpectedly broken into winter. The second bird nodded its head, responding to the other bird’s display. And from nowhere, the thought of Ian’s
death, his eternal absence, hit her, ambushed her anew.

Determined to prevent herself from crying, she fixed her gaze on a prayer-card pinned to the wall. If she could focus the whole of her attention on that, it should drive unwanted thoughts away,
for the moment at least. Silently, she read it to herself.

What about naturally thin people or unrepentant fat people, she wondered. Are they, too, not precious to God? Then she looked hard again at the card and saw, with her now dry eyes, that it said,
‘Sinners are precious’. She laughed.

‘Is it me you’re wanting?’ an Irish voice inquired. When Alice turned round she found herself face to face with a small, plump woman with a high complexion and bushy, low-set
eyebrows which partially obscured her pale blue eyes. She, like the rest of the staff, was dressed for comfort, in baggy tracksuit bottoms and a loose-fitting T-shirt. The slogan on it read,
‘JC’s the Coolest Cat’.

‘Are you Maureen McKee?’

‘I am she,’ the woman replied, beaming as if pleased to be asked, chewing her gum and showing no obvious uneasiness despite the fact that a policewoman wanted to interview her.
Perhaps, Alice thought, she was not a car driver, and therefore had a clean conscience? Or, more likely, someone had already told her what the policewoman wanted to talk about.

‘I understand that you were in the room when Moira Fyfe had her fall?’

‘Moira Fyfe. Aha.’ The woman smiled again, sitting down and clasping her fingers together around a crossed leg, bending confidingly towards her inquisitor.

‘Could you tell me what happened?’

‘I could, I could, I certainly could. Moira had come back in that evening. She smelt of the drink, and another of our service-users, Linda, had a go at her. The pair of them didn’t
get on. She accused Moira, outright, of having stolen her money to buy the booze. It happened in the TV lounge. Like I said, Moira was the worse for wear and she lost it. Launched herself straight
at Linda, but luckily Linda seen it coming and dodged to the side. Moira toppled over, and on the way down she cracked the side of her head on something.’

‘Is Linda still living here?’

‘Aha.’

‘What did you do when Moira fell?’

‘I left her there. She was OK where she was on the floor. I went and filled in the Accident Book. You have to do that before anything else, I was trained for that. Later, I put the
ointment on her head. She’d no bruise there or nothing like that, but that’s what you’re supposed to do. Procedures like. Tiffany took Moira to her room to gather some
stuff.’

‘Tiffany?’

‘Tiffany’s another member of staff here. She’d been watching TV with the residents before I came in. I went with Moira to A&E.’

‘In an ambulance?’

‘No, in my own car. The manager told me to take her in it. Moira was mouthing away all the time, shouting out loud, saying that she didn’t need to go. I said to her, “And what
would you know about that?” “Everything,” she said, “everything!” As if she did know, as if she was a doctor or something!’

‘Did you wait with her in casualty?’

‘No. Well, not when they seen her, like. She got taken into a wee room by the nurse on her own, for privacy’s sake.’

Maureen coughed, holding her hand across her mouth.

‘What about when the doctor saw her? Were you with her then?’

‘Em . . .’ She continued coughing, her eyes watering, her colour rising so that even her neck became dark with blood. She sounded as if she was choking. Simply looking at her made
Alice feel breathless.

‘Are you all right? Do you need some water or a pat on the back?’

‘Em . . . no,’ the woman spluttered, gasping for breath and adding weakly, ‘it’s nothing. I just swallowed my gum.’

After a few moments of silence and when the woman’s breathing had returned to normal, Alice repeated her question: ‘Were you with her when the doctor saw her?’

‘I was not.’

‘Did she tell you what happened to her when she saw the doctor or the nurse? What they said to her?’

‘No . . .’ The woman coughed once more, attempting this time simply to clear her throat. ‘She said it had all been a feckin’ waste of time. She knew there was nothing
wrong with her, that she’d get a clean bill of health. Then she fell asleep in my car and snored like a pig.’

Linda Gates, Moira Fyfe’s accuser, looked about fifteen years old but claimed to be twenty-four. Alice found her in the pool room, waiting her turn, her gaze fixed on the
table and her cue held like a staff beside her. She was so small that the tip of it was a foot above her head. While she waited she whispered to a friend, periodically licking the chalk off her
fingers. She did not conceal her reluctance to talk, rolling her eyes heavenwards, and seemed to believe that denying everything, however trivial, would protect her and allow her to return to the
game more speedily. Accordingly, she denied knowing Moira Fyfe, denied accusing her of anything and of having been involved in any confrontation with her. Faced with the other witnesses’
accounts of events, she simply maintained that they were all lying, and when Alice questioned her as to why they might be doing that, she replied hotly, ‘Because they’re bitches!’
When her opponent in the game of pool guffawed at this response she shouted angrily, as if it was some kind of proof of her innocence, that she had no money to steal, so why would she be accusing
anyone of stealing something she’d never had.

Alice decided to try one more time. ‘So, despite the fact that you lived in the same hostel as Moira Fyfe for months, and two separate witnesses saw you accuse her of having stolen your
money, you’re maintaining that you never even met the woman?’ she asked, trying to sound incredulous. But she knew the answer she would get. It would be more remarkable, after the
stream of denials, if Linda Gates had conceded that she knew her.

‘Aye, that’s right. See, I never leave my room, do I?’

At this remark her opponent on the table laughed uproariously, twirling his finger at his temple to convey to everyone in the room his view of her sanity, or lack of it. Glaring at him, Linda
stamped to the door and slammed it behind her.

The alarm clock silenced, the Reverend Duncan McPhee yawned, stretched and then leant over and switched off his electric blanket. A good nine hours achieved, he thought,
pleased that he had not had to resort to a pill. While still under the duvet, he mumbled his devotions to himself, confident that God would hear him.

Steeling himself to face the cold, he lumbered out of bed and across the room to open the curtains. In the bathroom his ablutions were perfunctory, the only deviation from normal routine being
his use of a lather of mango-scented soap instead of Gillette foam. The can was empty.

Returning to his bedroom, he took his black clerical shirt off its hanger and buttoned it up, then looked blearily into his cuff-link box for his studs. Disentangling them from the catch of his
grouse claw kilt-pin, he affixed first one and then the other to his dog collar and shirt. His black trousers took more of an effort as the dry-cleaning process appeared to have shrunk them.
Finally conceding failure, he gave up in his attempt to do up the second button.

‘Thought for the Day’ on the radio caught his attention, and as he listened to it, he began to fume inwardly. More self-pitying drivel, of precisely no universal significance, from
that tiresome, rambling rabbi. If the fellow had nothing to say, as was clearly the case, why on earth was he being pandered to by the BBC and provided with a platform to peddle his trite nonsense
from? Could it be simply for old times’ sake? What other possible explanation could there be? Surely, licence payers, such as himself, were entitled to a bit more for their money than an
anecdote about burning the toast, impatient words to a partner followed by heartfelt penitence. If there was much more of this so-called religious twaddle, the militant atheists would win the day
and the slot would be scrapped. They were playing into Dawkins’s hands.