Test Signal

by Nathan Connolly (Dead Ink)

  ‘I was asked to come in and make a statement, which of course I am happy to do. But?’ I end with a clear interrogatory lift to my voice and raise my left eyebrow.

  The man stands up and leans across the table with some sort of smile.

  ‘Hello. I’m Detective Constable Milburn and this is Detective Sergeant Taylor. Thank you for coming into the station to make your statement.’ He is very young and the words are rehearsed.

  ‘I was expecting a uniformed officer, as on the quayside.’ ‘This is now a murder inquiry. Your statement, as the person who found the body, the deceased, is very important.’ He puts out his hand and I move into the room and shake it quickly; the handshake is firm but his hand is sweaty. The detective sergeant’s handshake is brisk and cool and dry.

  I smile and adopt the parent-to-child voice, slow and clear, and keep my eyes on the boy’s.

  ‘In that case, with the two of you in the room, I prefer to have my solicitor present. Can we agree a time to meet later today?’

  He starts to speak but she cuts across him.

  ‘Yes, of course. That will be fine, Dr Jamieson,’ she says. ‘Ms Jamieson.’

  ‘Why did you do it, Ms Jamieson?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Why did you call us?’

  ‘Because the tide was turning. The body may have been swept out to sea.’

  ‘A good citizen,’ she says.

  We are both expressionless. I nod and leave.

  *

  Charles Dixon was my solicitor last time and, after initial incredulity, is forthright on the phone. He swears just once and then pauses, time to think, and I wait, trusting him.

  ‘You should’ve ignored it,’ he says.

  ‘Really? Would you have said that if I’d called you then?’ ‘No. No, not really. Two o’clock in the car park. Wait for me. Do not go in without me. We’ll have a talk and then go in. Tell them two-fifteen. Smart clothes, not black.’ Charles is still good looking in that overweight, former rugby-blue way and I know he is both charming and uxorious, devoted to his very clever barrister wife and two excessively attractive daughters. He has given me very good legal advice, for which I paid a lot, but he was also kind, which cost me nothing extra, so I can forgive his plenty. Although hearing him again is still painful.

  Two-fifteen and the police station again but with him beside me. The memories are swelling in my head as we go up the stairs. The air thickens and I have to pull it in through my nose as I count between the breaths. My lips are clamped shut: I will not have a panic attack. Not here. Not now.

  ‘You okay?’ Charles’s voice is calm as he takes my elbow.

  The elbow: no doubt one of the safe places for a lawyerly touch, far away from buttocks and far enough from breasts, difficult to misinterpret. The thought helps as I sit down in the chair he pulls out for me. He is beside me, solid and real, as the introductions are completed.

  ‘For the record,’ he says, ‘my client has come in voluntarily to the station to assist the police by making a statement.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you, Ms Jamieson,’ DS Taylor says.

  Her accent is northern but flat, not quite Geordie.

  I nod, matching her blank expression. I know how to do this.

  ‘So could you tell us what happened this morning?’ DC Milburn now.

  I describe exactly what happened from when I first saw the apparent log until I called 999. I speak slowly and fluently. They all listen without interruption, Charles and DC Milburn taking notes, DS Taylor looking down. I stop and watch the DC look quickly at the DS. He has already given me too much time. She nods and the questions start.

  ‘So you were looking out of the window at,’ he pauses theatrically, ‘five a.m. this morning?’

  ‘I was sitting by the full-length glass balcony doors looking down at the river,’ I say. Only repeat what you have already said. Give no new information that is not in your statement: do not try to explain. A lesson hard learned.

  ‘Are you usually looking out of your glass doors at five a.m.?’ he says.

  The DS intervenes as Charles raises his eyebrows just a little.

  ‘It is important for us to know if you had been disturbed, perhaps by a noise outside,’ she says.

  ‘I am often awake with the light. It is my usual practice to sit by the balcony doors and watch the river at that time.’ I hear Charles’s very slight intake of breath at ‘my usual practice’. Just words. I am too damaged for words to wound me anymore.

  The questions go on and my answers are brief, calm, consistent. Another mantra. There are no surprises until the DS, having thanked me politely, stands up, a signal for us to leave, but Charles remains seated.

  ‘You are aware, of course, of the appalling harassment to which my client was subjected previously. It is essential—’ He pauses, ‘—essential that she is not identified to the media. I seek assurance on this.’

  The DS looks at me, not him, and her trained gaze is level.

  ‘Of course. We wouldn’t release witness ID at this stage of an investigation.’

  ‘Not your usual practice to do so,’ I say. Charles is motionless, a message.

  *

  We stop by his car.

  ‘There should be nothing more. You, a good citizen, have done your civic duty.’

  ‘And when it leaks you’ll release the statement you are rushing back to the office to prepare.’ I manage a smile.

  He nods.

  ‘I want to go to the press now,’ I say. ‘No.’

  ‘It will leak. Why not get my version in first?’ ‘You mean the truth.’

  I shrug. ‘Whatever,’ I say.

  ‘No, not yet. Leave this with me. Please.’

  *

  This time Charles is wrong: they are already there, reporters with microphones but no TV cameras yet, a gaggle at the high outside gate, watched by the concierge in his glass office.

  ‘Dr Jamieson, Dr Jamieson.’

  I pause politely, smart in my one remaining blue suit, expensive scarf, hair and face in place.

  ‘Dr Jamieson, is it true you found the body?’ Never say ‘no comment’: another hard lesson.

  ‘Yes. I’ve just given a statement to the police. DS Taylor is in charge of the investigation and you will need to contact her. I saw a body in the river and called the police, as anyone would.’

  They are strangely silent, the pack, and they step back to let me walk through and the concierge shuts the gate behind me. He is excited, keen to be seen as my protector, for now at least, but there is still that flicker of uncertainty, the dropping of his eyes, as I walk past him.

  I go upstairs and shower and put on clean clothes, smart clothes again, and then I sit and watch the river, waiting.

  *

  I didn’t know that Prof. Wallace had left me anything at all. I knew she was lonely and dying slowly and that her death would be a long-awaited release. In all the years I was her GP, there was never any sign of her spending money on the decrepit but beautiful Georgian house, or on clothes or travel, but the house alone was way beyond any academic salary. She understood her illness intellectually and we talked, always briefly and on her terms, about what would happen as the disease progressed, about being immobile, unable to shop or to cook or to feed herself, about incontinence. She refused any discussion, though, about care, about family, about hospices. She grudgingly gave me her next-of-kin details, her solicitor’s card.

  I was asked in court if I had liked her, a question cleverly phrased by the prosecution barrister, an immaculate woman.

  ‘She was my patient. I cared for her as her doctor,’ I said.

  ‘So you felt nothing for her. You feel nothing for your patients?’

  ‘That is not what I said.’

  Charles had prepared me well for this line of questioning. This was not going to be a car crash like the GMC hearing, he had said. There, unprepared, I had answered openly with too much detail, a doctor explaining. And had been ruined.

&nb
sp; In truth, I hadn’t liked Prof. Wallace: she was autocratic and selfish and demanding, a difficult patient. I admired her, though: she faced her future unflinching and unbending. When she asked me to help her die, she was well prepared; her argument was phrased academically, evidence quoted, as was my response. The response we are trained to give: the end-of-life care plan, the living will, the need to involve family and friends, the support available.

  ‘You had to say that,’ Prof. Wallace said, her voice already weakened, almost a whisper. ‘All I want from you is the drugs. I’ll take them. It needs to be soon, while I can still—’ She paused and almost smiled, ‘—self-administer. But I need to be certain that it will work. Here, this is what I need.’ She handed me a printed sheet complete with headings and bullet points.

  I refused of course, at first. But she was implacable. In the end, because she was alone, because there was no one to help her, no one to love her, I gave her a series of prescriptions for drugs to alleviate her symptoms, enough to make a lethal cocktail. She, in return, took the drugs when she knew I was away in Ireland at a conference, and it was Jane, my colleague and friend, who certified the death. That should have been the end. An expected death in a woman with an incurable and now rapidly progressing disease.

  She left everything to me: a house worth over a million, jewellery and paintings worth much more. Her solicitor asked to see me the day I arrived back from Ireland, about the will, she said. She was very insistent and agreed to come to the practice, and I saw her in my room. She told me that Prof. Wallace had made a new will twelve months before her death, replacing a huge bequest to the university with a huge bequest to me. All of it.

  I sat in my usual chair, at my desk, and looked at this non-patient.

  ‘I didn’t know. I don’t want it,’ I said.

  She nodded but her eyes slipped away from mine. She suggested I sought advice.

  I went straight to Jane.

  ‘I’ll just give it away. Give it to the university,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course. But there’ll be probate and stuff. Phone the Medical Insurance Group. Get advice. It’s what we pay them for.’

  We looked at each other. She stood by me almost to the end.

  *

  The university immediately contested the will and complained to the GMC. The GMC decided that I had had too many deaths, way above average. I explained that it was because I was the oldest partner, had the highest proportion of patients over sixty-five, led on terminal care, had previously covered the hospice. I made it worse. After that, I can barely remember the sequence of events, it all happened so fast. The GMC suspended me. The GMC referred me to the police. The media called me the second Dr Shipman. I was struck off by the GMC. I was arrested.

  I was tried for murder.

  In court, Jane, stoic in my defence, told the truth. That she knew Prof. Wallace had asked for help to die, that I had given proper advice, that we had discussed this as colleagues should. But when asked about why she hadn’t recorded the conversation, why I hadn’t, she fell apart. Lost in explaining too much, she made all the mistakes I had made at the GMC hearing.

  This time, though, I was clear and explicit. Yes, I had prescribed the drugs. Yes, I had told her what the lethal combination would be. Yes, I had given her the means.

  ‘Let me summarise, Ms Jamieson. You admit that all these are your prescriptions and that you had informed Professor Wallace that these drugs in overdose, and particularly in combination, are lethal,’ my defence barrister’s calm and measured voice, repeating what the prosecution had already stated.

  ‘Yes. As does any doctor who prescribes certain drugs. Our duty of care requires us to explain the risks, fully and in detail.’

  ‘Did you know she wanted to take her own life?’ ‘Yes. But I advised her not to.’

  ‘But did you gave her the means to take her own life?’ ‘Yes. And advised her not to.’

  ‘Is it the case that without the drugs she could not have taken her own life?’

  ‘Yes. Because she no longer had the choice, the physical capacity, to hang herself or jump from a high building or run her car into a wall. I gave her back the means to make her own choice. I gave her back the power to make her own decision.’ My voice started to catch and I could feel the tears so I stopped.

  The silence carried on. I looked at the jury and they were all watching me, motionless.

  ‘I was Prof. Wallace’s GP for twenty years. All I could do for her in the end was give her that power, that decision. Give her back to herself.’

  I was acquitted. Set free to live alone, here, in my high tower.

  *

  The river is running slow again, the gulls barely moving on the water. The first of the end-of-work runners go by, then the boot camp teams, stopping to do kerb pressups and star jumps on the broad path. I can just hear the shouted instructions. I remember Jane, never in favour of exercise requiring sweat, dismissing a personal trainer on the grounds that she was not paying some boy to shout at her. I can see her, imperious, then laughing. My friend, before they all ebbed away.

  I watch the kittiwakes take off from the ledges on the Baltic. I sit, waiting.

  AND THEY SAY IT’S WHERE YOUR HEART IS

  REBECCA HILL

  She helps him unload the truck, laying saws and sledgehammers on the grass and propping the strimmer against the wall, and he watches her turn a claw hammer over before peeling the plastic covering off the head.

  ‘Didn’t know what we’d need, so I brought a bit of everything.’

  She hums and throws the hammer in the toolbox before ripping open a double pack of eye protectors. He takes the other pair when she offers, and for a moment he’s back in GCSE chemistry, just inches from Bunsenburnt fingers and nitrate-stained arms, but his eyes won’t leave the way her hair curls almost perfectly around her ear, pressed smooth against the wire of her glasses, until she shoves the plastic goggles on.

  Then it’s just a mess. But it’s nice to know she still looks ridiculous in them, and he’s willing to bet she’ll still be happy to tell him he looks better in a welding mask, even if she won’t look him in the eye.

  ‘We don’t need to demolish it,’ he says, pulling on a dust mask. ‘But I thought you might like to gut it.’

  She doesn’t answer, just stands back and looks up over his head at the roof, speckled with missing tiles and the dips of broken beams, little pockets of hollow space where it’s falling in on itself. Some of the windows are already broken, cavities of smashed glass and splintered frames dark against the Georgian white stucco, the sunlight no longer bouncing off the walls to blind them.

  He watches her, dragging his eyes down her throat the way she drags her own down the side of the house, and he wishes he didn’t notice the subtle loss of definition in her arms or the small lines of tension in her legs as she bends to pick up a sledgehammer.

  He weighs up a hammer of his own and gives it an experimental swing. ‘Still working out?’

  ‘Still running,’ she offers. She collects a saw and examines a power drill before heading towards the door. ‘Come on.’

  But she shoulders the tool bag without much effort, and leaves him standing in the shadow of the house, his skin prickling in the shade.

  He collects what he thinks he needs and jogs after her.

  *

  The kitchen falls more easily than expected.

  They work on opposite walls, hacking at plasterboard and brick, insulation spilling out around their feet until they’re left with nothing but two windows and a sliver of exterior wall, dull but for three or four patches of crisp white paint where the sideboards had been.

  There are fist-sized openings already, uneven channels where someone has stripped the copper from the wires and left the empty coloured casing hanging from the cavities. Cobwebs drape over detached pipes like shawls, and the mildew rises up the wall in ever fainter bands until it disappears just below the red pen line of Kieran, age 8. The edges of his notch are worn smooth and dark,
blunted to an old, ridged scar in the stained wood of the door frame, above Jack, age 4.

  For a moment she stills, one hand half-reaching towards the frame a few inches below Jack’s name, as if expecting something else to be cut into the wood there. It’s hard for him not to stare too, not to go down that same track and press his fingers to the wood where he can picture the top of another child’s head so clearly, the curls that could have been his shade of brown or her shade of burnt caramel.

  Instead he coughs quietly, taking in the mildew on the lone supporting wall. It’s as blackened and damaged as the exterior, with parts spilling out into the garden, brick dust streaking the grass like chalk lines on slate. With most of the wall down the July air comes in stagnant and heavy, warming quickly through the rubble, the promise of true heat pressing against his shoulders as he nudges some clumps of bricks around.

  He turns to find her still there, chipping away at one small corner almost too carefully.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, watching as she slowly pulls herself back to him. ‘You need a hand with that?’

  She takes one last long look at the wall, eyes grazing over the faded paint and the mix of crayon colours amid the water stains, the history slipping between the cracks, and pulls herself up straighter, hefting the sledgehammer in both hands.

  ‘Nah, I’m good.’

  She doesn’t stop swinging until the whole wall is down.

  *

  Upstairs the air seems to brace itself, and he’s not sure if it’s the way the ceiling threatens to fall or the way her shoulders refuse to, her posture tight and tense and completely foreign on her. He wants to reach out, to press his thumbs against her spine and push his fingers into the knot of muscle at her neck, but he just flips his hammer and lays down his saw instead, knocking on a wall to check if it’s hollow.

  The guest bedroom door is closed and stiff, and he has to take a chip off the frame to get it open. She wanders in behind him a few minutes later, her eyes scanning the joins and corners where they meet the floorboards. From the looks of it, she’s aligning the floor joists from downstairs, and he leaves her be for the moment. She stops beside him, just past the doorway, and whistles low and soft as she looks around.