A Rush of Blood

by David Mark

  Lottie squeezes Molly’s arm. ‘I hate seeing you upset.’

  ‘I don’t feel upset. I’m irritable. I want it all to be clean and nice and sort of, well, advanced. But it’s all such a mess …’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Life. London. The way we all live. It’s all so shapeless and tangled.’

  Lottie looks unconvinced. ‘Darling, I’ve seen your house. I’ve seen your accounts. You are not somebody who wants it to be neat and ordered. And you run a Victorian theme pub. When did you get so excited by the idea of gleaming metal worktops and fabulous efficiency?’

  Molly has the grace to laugh.

  Lottie looks at the papers in her lap. She straightens them and taps her nose, theatrically, with her finger. ‘I feel like a spy, giving you all this. Like I’m being naughty.’

  ‘You love feeling naughty,’ says Molly, shaking her head and trying to focus on the here and now. She sits up a little straighter. There is a notepad in her pocket but she feels that to use it would be an act of make-believe, as though she were playing dress-up.

  ‘It’s a bit ugly,’ says Lottie, apologetically. ‘You don’t want the photos, I’m sure. But I can tell you the basics.’

  ‘Please.’

  Lottie nods and consults the pages before her. She is holding the autopsy report into the death of an unidentified female found dead in a layby off the A3 in early January.

  ‘I can’t let you have it,’ says Lottie, and she looks mortified by the admission. ‘Printing it was bad enough and I couldn’t email it without a great cage landing on me from the ceiling, but I can tell you what the pathologist found.’

  ‘Whatever I need to know,’ says Molly, and she cocks her head at her friend, aware she is deliberately taking her time.

  Lottie stares past her at the scene beyond the window. The sky looks like it has been used to clean the paint from an artist’s brush. The street is populated entirely by individuals; office workers on their phones, ricocheting off shop staff hurrying through the deluge to buy sandwiches and bottles of pop. The street is full of noise but nobody is talking to anybody nearby. Each interaction is conducted at volume, via satellite, over the sound of the ceaseless traffic.

  ‘Body of an unidentified girl, aged eleven to twelve years old,’ says Lottie, at last, in a flat and neutral tone she would never use on her social media platforms. ‘Found in a copse of woods near Malden off the A3. Discovered by council workmen there for a refuse collection. Victim was clothed in a white, sleeveless, ankle-length gown. She had bare feet. She was laid on her back on a patch of grass at the foot of an alder tree. She showed signs of having been malnourished …’

  Molly shifts in her seat. It feels as though her clothes are too tight across her back. She feels anxious. Her leg is moving up and down as if she is working a sewing machine.

  ‘Height: 142.24cm. Weight: 32kg. Hair: brown, slightly curly. There is a small area of apparent alopecia measuring 3 by 2.5cm present on the posterior parietal-occipital area of the scalp. Eyes: conjunctivae: no jaundice; petechial haemorrhages not present. Sclerae: petechial haemorrhages not present. Iris colour: hazel/green. Pupils: equal diameter, each side 5mm. Ears: normally formed, without blood or other fluid in the external auditory canal. Mouth: lips are normally formed with no blood or other fluid or obstruction visible externally or in mouth cavity. Native dentition in good condition. Both upper and lower frenulum are intact. There is a recent injury to the buccal aspect of the upper right lip …’

  ‘What did she die of?’ asks Molly, quietly. ‘You don’t need to read it, you know it, I can tell.’

  Lottie lowers the pages that she had been gripping in front of her as if they were a shield. ‘Blood poisoning,’ says Lottie, flatly. ‘I was getting to the significant injuries. Puncture marks in the crooks of both elbows and ulcerations around the buttocks and calves. High volume of chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride in blood stream …’

  ‘That’s like Prozac,’ says Molly.

  ‘A bit. Librium. Anti-anxiety medication. Used as a tranquilizer.’

  ‘And the puncture marks – is that heroin?’

  ‘None found in the bloodstream. No signs of diabetes. But signs of an irritation to the skin, as if from an allergic reaction.’ Lottie pauses, unsure whether to go on. ‘Skin sample demonstrated an intolerance to a form of prescription wormer used in the poultry industry. Panacur. It kills the gizzard worm in geese and ducks. Not easy to come by.’

  ‘She was from an agricultural background, perhaps? Or she’d been on a farm …?’

  ‘The sliver of a goose feather was found inside one of the puncture wounds,’ says Lottie, looking down. ‘It had broken off. There was blood inside it. Blood group O. No matches on the database.’

  Molly sits still. Behind her, the door opens and a man in a Homer Simpson T-shirt, jeans and woolly hat announces to the barman that he is wetter than a squid’s pyjamas and demands an immediate pint of Brooklyn and a pickled egg to remedy the situation.

  ‘The description,’ says Molly, staring into her empty glass. ‘Tallish. Brown hair. Hazel/green eyes.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Lottie. ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Not dissimilar though. You could tick all of those boxes for Meda.’

  ‘So? You could tick them for Hilda.’

  ‘Goose quills, Lottie. Goose quills in her arms?’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ says Lottie. ‘But horrible things happen all the time. This is one of them but it’s nothing to do with Meda, or you. It’s nothing to do with me and I’m a pathologist. It’s just more ugliness in an ugly world but if you start splashing about in it you will end up stained.’

  Molly rubs her forehead. She looks tired. She lets herself think of Hilda for a moment, trying to comfort herself with visions of her daughter, but the first image that flashes across her mind is of she and Meda playing together, holding hands and feeding the animals at Stepney.

  ‘What stage is the investigation?’ she asks quickly. ‘There must be an ID. Karol seemed to think he knew who it was, didn’t he? Didn’t you get that impression? Have you Googled it? Seen what the papers have said?’

  ‘There’s no interest,’ says Lottie, soothingly. ‘She may as well be one of the Ripper’s victims, my darling. There’s a different world just underneath us. Everything we think we know is a veneer. It’s all gross and I’m saying that as somebody who is about to go and dissect a drowned tramp. But, sweetheart, you can’t be thinking the worst or you will make yourself ill.’

  Molly considers having another drink and then quickly talks herself out of it. She starts her shift in half an hour and won’t rest until they have got rid of the last customer and cleaned down the bar. She can expect to see her bed around three a.m. None of it seems important. She feels irritated with herself. Sees a fool, playing dress-up and revelling in the gory happenings of a time that she always feels oddly at home inside.

  ‘I’ve asked the copper in charge to give me a ring with an update,’ says Lottie, and she seems unsure whether she has done right or wrong. ‘I don’t think there’s any connection at all with what happened last night, but if it helps you sleep easier I’ll be a good friend.’

  Molly is scratching at the crook of her arm. For an instant she feels transplanted; removed; spliced into another existence. For a moment she is naked, save for a simple lace shift. The sharpened stem of a goose feather is sliding into her veins like a straw pushed into a carton of drink.

  ‘Thanks for this,’ says Molly, indicating the papers on the table. They have fallen open on a simple drawing of a human form and Molly’s eyes are drawn to the sad little inscription handwritten by the pathologist. No breasts. No body hair. No evidence of sexual contact. A life still unlived, thinks Molly, as she slides her arms into her damp coat.

  As she barges back out into the grey and sodden air, she feels the eyes of the woman in the Victorian painting upon her back. Wonders, if she turned around, whether it would feel like looking in a mirror.<
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  HILDA

  Lottie was the coolest grown-up I knew. Everybody said Mum was awesomely stylish and funny but it’s weird to think of your Mum as cool, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve seen her sitting on the sofa watching Emmerdale in her onesie, eating Frosties from the box and trying to balance the remote control on her head, and none of that strikes me as being cool. Lottie was different. She was the rock star in our little world. When Mum wore her ace clothes and did her hair in wacky styles she always looked amazing, but Lottie had this look about her that suggested she would still be the most fabulous person in the room if she were wearing a traffic cone and a pair of waders. She cut up dead bodies. That was her job! She had her own YouTube channel. She ran a museum dedicated to the weird and wonderful things that had been fished out of the human body. She said ‘fuck’ a lot and had a habit of calling men ‘total dick faces’, though if I’m totally honest, I think she stole that from Mum.

  I’m remembering, now. Getting my head into some sort of order. What came next? There was a day or two of not very much, when life was just life and the rain rained. If I had pens and paper I would draw a read-out from a heart monitor and in the space between hearing Karol tell us that Meda was missing, and then him telling us she was going to be OK, would just be a steady stream of tick-tick-tick. So I’ll gloss over that. School. Lunch. More school. The bus … and then my memory kicks back in properly. Words. Full sentences. Facial expressions and clothes …

  We were in the snug at the Bonnet and Lottie was showing me and two lucky spectators the new routine she intended to perform during the next event at her Pathology Museum. Lottie was the cat’s pyjamas when it came to curating her specimens and slicing up bodies. She’d told me so, and I believed her. I’d seen loads of her videos online and even read some of her day-in-the-life pieces for the websites that thought she was awesome because she coloured her hair and painted her nails then shoved her hands into people’s intestines.

  ‘Did you know that the Grand Old Duke of York was so poorly embalmed that in 1997, he exploded during Evensong?’

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at her sceptically. ‘Like William the Conqueror?’ I asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Lottie, looking pleased with me. ‘You remember stuff, don’t you? Forgot I told you that. They dropped the coffin and the great Conqueror pretty much popped into ten stone of flying mince and mulch in front of the congregation. Not a bad end, really.’

  The husband and wife sitting in the arched area behind the metal barriers seemed incapable of leaving. They studied us with the sort of morbid curiosity that Lottie was capable of provoking in just about anybody. It helped that she was wearing her new costume – the one she would be wearing when she debuted her new character at the upcoming burlesque show in Clerkenwell.

  ‘Do you mind me doing this again?’ asked Lottie. She addressed her remarks to the husband. He was a middle-sized gent with unusually blond hair for a chap in his sixties. Grey eyes, big ears and a gut like a capital D. Surveying Lottie’s form and timing the intervals between gyrations had kept him transfixed for the past hour. His face suggested that he didn’t really think any of this was actually happening and that he was pretty sure this was the result of some coma which he was disinclined to leave. His wife, on the other hand, had the look of a frightened puppet. She had flat, lifeless hair that sat atop a wooden spoon of a face, spilling down into cardigan, floral print dress and sandals that revealed the kind of toes that looked as though there was a lot of formaldehyde in their future. Lottie could have studied them for days.

  ‘You go for it, love,’ said the man, adjusting his England shirt and seeming to mouth a silent prayer of thanks for the rain that forced he and the wife into this peculiar pub where they asked permission to eat their sandwiches in exchange for a pint of bitter and a port and lemon.

  ‘What is this?’ asks the wife, looking apologetic and confused.

  ‘Burlesque,’ I said, and tried not to give the impression I thought she was an idiot.

  ‘We’re only here on a coach trip,’ said the woman, and her whole demeanour exuded remorse for her lack of knowledge. ‘I think we’ve got a bit lost. What’s burlesque?’

  ‘It’s like stylish striptease,’ said Lottie, arching her back and pushing out her chest. She was wearing a white lab coat that she had adjusted to show off her chest, waist, stockings and suspenders. ‘It’s a parody show, really. Making fun of stuff. But tastefully sexy. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Oh aye, love,’ said the man.

  ‘Not really,’ said his wife. She groped for safer ground upon which to build an explanation. ‘We’re from Barnsley.’

  I was laughing a lot that night. I had no reason to believe that everything was going to be OK but Lottie was a calming presence and there was something so comforting and homely about the Bonnet that it seemed kind of unthinkable that Meda was having a terrible time or something bad was happening to her. I was caught up in the moment. I was eating Scotch eggs and crisps and drinking hot chocolate. I was putting off doing my homework and had tied my school shirt in a knot across my tummy so I looked a bit older and fancier and a lot more like Lottie. I was happy, I suppose.

  ‘It’s this bit,’ said Lottie, pouting. She rubbed a gloved hand across her crimson lips and snarled at her reflection as it flickered in the glass of the display cases. She looked cross with herself, even as she shone back from a newspaper clipping about the butchery performed on Long Liz by the Ripper in 1888.

  ‘What bit?’ I asked.

  ‘Where I go into the crab,’ she said, arching backwards and momentarily becoming a structurally unsound bridge. I heard the unmistakable sound of a rotund Yorkshireman saying the words ‘bloody hell’ and his wife hissing his name.

  ‘I want to open my coat and have my breasts as perfect skulls but I worry about the light,’ says Lottie, grumbling. ‘They might just look like I’m wearing doilies. What do you think?’

  She unfastened her coat and assumed the position.

  I was laughing, I remember that. Big stupid grin on my face and some daft snorts erupting from my nose and mouth as the fat man started choking on his pint and his wife said the word ‘blimey’ over and over again. That’s where I was. Where I was standing and what I was thinking as Karol came through from the main bar.

  ‘We’re popping out,’ he said, more to Lottie than me. ‘Molly is coming with me. She won’t be told.’ He turned to me and made his face unexpectedly soft. ‘We’ve heard from the bad men. It will all be OK.’

  He was gone before I could formulate a response. Gone before I could ask why he was here or what the hell it had to do with my Mum.

  Out the door and into the night.

  Out into a night that offered no promise of tomorrow.

  MOLLY

  The call came through as Molly was drawing her unexpected guest a pint of real ale. She has always enjoyed the act of pulling cask ale. She knows she has good arms and the light captures the definition in her biceps as she cranks the pump and spurts froth into the large tankard. She likes people to think of her as kooky and artistic but doesn’t object to the occasional appreciative glance at her slim waist, round backside and graceful limbs. She has never been able to embrace the notion that being physically admired is an insulting gesture of patriarchal oppression. She has been to enough strip nights with her friends to be aware that women are happy to objectify men in the same way that blokes have been admiring the sorority for generations. The difference, as she sees it, is that women haven’t spent thousands of years turning such appreciation into brutally invasive physical attacks. Sometimes she fancies that women will only have true equality when they work out a way to rape men. Then she tells herself off and decides to think about something easier on the brain, like how to solve the situation in Israel.

  ‘I tried a pint of something calling Old Peculier,’ said Karol, over the hubbub in the front bar. ‘They spelled it wrong. Was that on purpose?’

  ‘I’ve been to
the brewery,’ said Molly, brightly. Her hands were jittery and her voice was higher than she intended. ‘Masham in North Yorkshire. Very pretty. They sponsor a crime writing festival every summer. I wanted to go when I thought about being a crime writer but never got around to it.’

  Karol sipped his drink and nodded. He didn’t seem bored by the burst of personal details that she found herself reeling off without quite understanding why.

  ‘First time I try warm beer I think they taking the piss,’ said Karol, twitching a cheek in a close approximation of a smile. ‘Or that maybe they piss in it already. Now, every time I come to England I drink the stuff. Pork scratchings too.’

  ‘I can only eat them when I’m drunk,’ said Molly, busying herself with wiping down the bar top despite having just done it a moment before. ‘I’m not sure that any snack should have toenails.’

  ‘Toenails?’ asked Karol, confused.

  Molly thought about explaining herself then decided there were too many opportunities to show herself up. She poured herself a glass of water and decided to get a grip of herself. This was her place. Her environment. She shouldn’t be feeling intimidated. She knew how to talk to people.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You get over here a lot?’

  Karol shrugged. ‘Depends on the work. I go where people need me.’

  ‘You sound like a superhero.’

  ‘Superhero?’

  Molly was about to explain when she caught the little glint in his eye that suggested he knew exactly what she was talking about. She grinned and pulled a face.

  ‘You not like other women I meet here,’ said Karol, thoughtfully. ‘You dress different. Talk different. You pull faces and make fun of yourself.’

  ‘You should come to Scunthorpe,’ said Molly, rubbing her finger in slow circles on the tip of her nose and wondering why on earth her brain had sent such a message to her hands. ‘There’s loads of me.’

  ‘Doubt that,’ said Karol. ‘You unique.’

  Molly used every ounce of willpower not to preen. She had always been undone by compliments – especially when they were accompanied by the same intense gaze which Karol had suddenly fixed upon the place where her neck reached her breastbone. For an instant, she wondered whether there was something vampire-like about her guest; whether he was imagining the blood pulsing beneath the skin.