Stations of the Soul

by Chris Lewando

  ‘Once I would have agreed, he wrote, but things not happening is good.

  She closed the book and tucked it into a yellow plastic shoulder bag that had seen better days. ‘If books remained true to life, most of them would be boring. You were unlucky, that’s all. In the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m glad you survived. You will be, too, one day. I’m Sarah, by the way.’

  Ah, the blood donor in the ambulance.

  I wanted to thank you. I didn’t think you were going to come.

  ‘I nearly didn’t. I work mainly in trauma or intensive care. Many patients die, so I try not to get emotionally involved. I was just doing what I thought was necessary at the time.’

  Well, thank you, anyway. You saved my life.

  ‘You would have done the same.’ She looked at him candidly. ‘You survived, which is amazing. One of the lucky ones.’

  If he could have sneered, he would have. He waved his pen briefly towards his face, then wrote, call this lucky?

  ‘One day you’ll think so. Your life will have changed, without doubt. This is a journey you never would have planned, but you can choose to live a full life, or wallow in bitterness for what might have been.’

  Platitudes?

  She smiled, and it was as if the sun had come out. ‘Not at all. I think if life throws you lemons, you should pour a gin. Or hurl them into a wall to watch them explode. I was told you were a bank manager.’

  Under manager. Was. Job’s gone.

  ‘Well, now you have a chance to do something better.’

  He scowled. Like take Jesus into my bosom?

  She laughed, and put her hand on his, stilling the pen. ‘Trust me, I’m not a religious fanatic on a mission. I came because I was curious. It’s not every day I personally save someone’s life. In fact, this might be a first. After seeing you pulled out of that wreck, I was amazed you’d survived – despite my donation. I wanted to see whether you deserved it.’

  He lifted one brow in query.

  ‘That remains to be seen. I’ve been told you’re wallowing in self-pity. I want this to stop. Right now.’

  He’d wondered if his impression of this nurse, from those early days in intensive care, had been coloured by magical rainbows, but she truly was as lovely as he recalled, though she seemed more human, somehow, without the uniform. Her hair, almost gold with a hint of red, was gathered into an untidy knot at the back of her head, but escaped around her face in a faint halo. Her skin had that almost-translucent clarity more usually attributed to redheads, and her hazel eyes seemed to spark with lighter flashes. He almost smiled at himself. He’d been here too long. Hers widened in acknowledgement of the perusal.

  You’re beautiful, he wrote.

  ‘A useful attribute,’ she said dryly. ‘Women envy me and men want to take me to bed.’

  I used to have that problem.

  She laughed. ‘Humour is the best medicine. When I come again, I want to hear that you’re thinking about a future.’

  Will you come again?

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  Yes. There was no one else who cared, after all. Even if she was pretending to care, it would be enough. He added, please.

  ‘Ok.’ She rose, and out of her bag pulled a hardback, A4 notebook, black, with red bindings. ‘I have to go, now, but I’ll make a deal. You stop wallowing in self-pity and work at getting back on your feet, and I’ll visit when I can. In the meantime, if all you can do is write, then write. I don’t mean a diary. Write what you feel, and every day write at least one positive statement about the future.’

  Would you want to read it?

  She gave a little sideways twist of the mouth. ‘No, it should be private, just an outlet for your frustration. Over these next months, people will make all sorts of suggestions to help you cope. It’s up to you which you choose to use. It’s a tool. You’re going to need a few tools, otherwise you’ll go sour, and that would be a shame.’

  Chapter 9

  When Sarah left Robin, she went in search of Joel, and discovered him, as she had guessed she would, in the hospital canteen, as his shift was due to start in half an hour. She collected a coffee, and they shared a smile across the room as she queued up to pay. She had no doubt he’d been expecting her. They were closer than a brother and sister had a right to be; more like twins in their unspoken communication.

  At first, she had supposed it to be a result of their upbringing. Their father had treated them as a cross between a eugenic experiment and a blasted inconvenience in his busy, academic life, and they’d spent much of their formative years trying to avoid him during the times he’d graced his decaying property with his presence. Being older than Joel, albeit by a little over eighteen months, Sarah had inherited the role of mother and carer to her needy brother, after his mother absconded. Her own had fled many years before, and she didn’t have the slightest memory to fall back on. She was angry that a woman could abandon her own child. Why hadn’t her mother taken her child? But if she had, who would have looked after Joel? As confused children, they’d clung to each other with all the neediness of orphans.

  Sarah often wondered whether Joel truly thought of her as his mother. That their father had been a sociopath, she had realised fairly early, and even Joel was pleased when he eventually died. He had spared no love for his offspring, but had expected absolute obedience when in residence. Usually they had the run of the place, but at those times they’d learned to be all but absent, fearing his cruel, antiquated methods of punishment. Sarah had often wished he would just send them to school, but she knew he viewed them as his own, personal experiment, having planned their births and followed their growth with the dedication of a lab technician. Their occasional live-in tutors had envied them because of their father’s independent wealth and lifestyle – lusting after the daughter, ridiculing the son for his lack of academic ability. But tutors didn’t last long. They arrived with high hopes and left with relief, as did the various nannies and housekeepers the Professor employed over the years.

  Their envied childhood had, in fact, been bleak.

  Later, Sarah was grateful that their father had decided not to waste money on boarding schools. His early demise had been a huge release, leaving them in charge of the decrepit, isolated property. It had been a long time before people stopped phoning, asking where he was, and had he finished writing the paper he’d been promising to publish? But no one came looking, and eventually the calls petered out, lending an unreal sense of peace that Sarah feared could not last.

  ‘Hi, Sis,’ Joel said, as she sat down at the yellow Formica table. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘As ever,’ she said, yawning and stretching with the words.

  ‘You should work days,’ he said. ‘Then you could come home, and we could drive to work together, every day.’

  ‘It’s too far. And I don’t want to live there,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Why not? It’s our home.’

  ‘I told you why. And that place isn’t home, it’s never been home. I don’t know how you can bear to be there.’

  He shrugged. ‘He’s not there anymore. You know.’

  She knew, all right. She’d known when he died, but his black soul must have gone straight to hell, because she hadn’t seen it. She’d thought of selling the place, but it was too big a risk. The cash would solve all their problems, of course. Wood Hall was a large, prestigious property, even though it would take a fortune to make the place habitable. But though she hated it, the fact was, they couldn’t ever sell it. Theoretically, they had inherited, but in truth, the solicitors would have a field day. It would be Bleak House, with nothing left to sell by the time it was all done and dusted. No, best leave it be. All they could do, one day, when things got out of hand, which would happen one day, was to simply leave it behind, disappear.

  What she did know was, she never again wanted to live in that house, with its bad memories and secrets. She didn’t even want to visit it, to pick up her few childhood possessions.


  ‘Maybe it’s time we just moved on. We could find a job in another hospital. Abroad even.’

  ‘I like living there. You’re supposed to be there with me. You’re supposed to look after me.’

  His tone was petulant.

  Supposed to? Was that how he saw her, now? Not just as his surrogate mother, but as a permanent fixture in his life? Well, in a way she was. She sighed. No, she couldn’t leave him. He’d inherited his father’s lack of emotion and social awareness, but not his academic ability. Quite the opposite, in fact. That he wasn’t too bright was something they both acknowledged, but lately he’d become frighteningly possessive, as if he’d taken over his father’s role of ownership, as if, being a woman, she had no free will of her own. It was a selfish, childlike need that he didn’t seem to grow out of, as she had once hoped. But she didn’t want to be his mother anymore, she wanted a life. Getting a job, and moving into the hospital’s staff accommodation in London had been the first move.

  When she had broached the subject of a job, he’d thrown a tantrum that would have done justice to a three-year old, and had only calmed down when he’d had the bright idea of working at the hospital, too. She’d been appalled, but in the end, he’d applied and got the job. How could he not have? It’s not as if hospital porters with his attributes came along every day: uneducated, physically big, immensely strong, didn’t bother about safety rules for lifting, and was emotionless in the face of death or pain. In the end, she was pleased he’d found something on which to maintain himself, not that she was going to tell him that, yet.

  And recently he’d passed his driving test, which had surprised her. But that was good, it left her with a little bit more freedom. He had his own room at the hospital, but every weekend he went back to that house, as if drawn to it by some inner compulsion. As a child she’d imagined Wood Hall with fires in all the empty grates, the big dining room with its fading velour swags, filled with guests. But more often she dreamed of burning the place down, letting fire cleanse everything their father had done.

  She wondered what Joel would be like if his will was badly crossed. When he’d been young, his rages had been small, short-lived spats that quickly dissipated, but as he got older, they’d been accompanied by a calculating expression that told her he knew exactly what he was doing. She doubted anyone at the hospital had ever experienced one of his tantrums; he was canny enough to hide this side of his nature, but for how long? The worse tantrum of all had been when she had moved out. Right to that point, he hadn’t believed she would. Then, he’d bullied and cajoled; it had always worked before, but not this time. She’d stood her ground. She needed her own space, she told him. And if he didn’t like that, she would up and go to New Zealand, or Africa or somewhere, and disappear out of his life altogether. That had scared him almost as much as he scared her, but she worried about him all the same. She couldn’t invest him with intelligence he hadn’t been born with, but neither did she want to be hamstrung by his continual presence in her life. She was a normal young woman, desperately lonely, in need of companionship and physical comfort.

  For some irrational reason, she was attracted to Robin Vanger. It wasn’t that she pitied him, either. Giving him blood in the ambulance was something she would have done for anyone. At the time he had been just anyone. But when she finally met him, there had been some indefinable thing that made her want to see him again. She wasn’t instantly in love with him, she wasn’t even sure love was a real phenomenon. No, when she had visited him it had been a normal response to a request she could easily accommodate. She’d seen lust in his expression, but her attraction towards him had taken her by surprise. Maybe it had been caused by her own blood running through his veins, she thought, amused. A subconscious, narcissistic response. He must have been classically handsome before, and if he could get past himself, the scar cutting across his face was less a blemish than a curiosity, lending him an air of mystery he probably didn’t deserve. What was he, after all? Some kind of accountant? When he got over his present anger at the world, she would find out what he was really like, and might discover he wasn’t so interesting, after all. But her fascination for Robin wasn’t something to share with Joel.

  She pushed her chair back. ‘I’m tired, away with the fairies. I need to get some sleep if I’m going to be any use on my shift, tonight.’

  He glanced at his phone. ‘And I should get to work, I guess.’

  ‘Catch you later.’

  ‘Sure.’

  They hugged and kissed, but she felt his eyes on her back as she turned away from him at the door. He knew something was different, he just hadn’t worked out what. He might not be academically able, but his subconscious intuition was well-honed. As was hers. They were different in a way she couldn’t have defined before coming to work at the hospital. And even now, she’d be hard pressed to explain that to anyone without sounding utterly and completely mad.

  Chapter 10

  Detective Inspector Redwall pinned the artist’s impression of Robin’s phantom vision on the pinboard in the incident room. It was Adonis personified. How did that poem go? Oh, weep for Adonis – he is dead! By Shelley, wasn’t it? His memory was letting him down these days. Whatever, as Jim would say. All avenues should be followed, no matter how unlikely… But he wasn’t going to expose himself to ridicule by circulating that image of a gay man’s wet dream. Robin might not be homosexual, but was probably drugged up to the eyeballs, and that face he’d pulled out of his id was androgynous. So, the image could hide in full view until someone pointed, and said, hey, that’s the man I saw! As if that would ever happen. Circulating it was useless, of course, and would result in a barrage of phantom sightings, an added workload he didn’t need.

  But he did need a break. He’d faced brick walls before, and this one had all the signs. If there was a clue, anywhere in this sea of paperwork, he wasn’t seeing it. Despite himself, he glanced at the drawing again. There was something striking about the face, though. He couldn’t seem to pinpoint quite what. In the event they discovered the young man, there might even be the hint of a likeness, if he even existed. The image was too perfect, too pretty to be real, but Robin had been as close to death as it gets, and if he’d been seeing angels, who could blame him? He wouldn’t be the first to seek God when death seemed inevitable.

  He sighed inwardly.

  When he’d decided to be a detective it had been with the arrogance of youth: he would be a good detective – the best. He’d put bad guys behind bars, save lives. But how many lives had he truly saved? How many bad guys had he put away? He’d put away a few in his time, but not one that he could truly say was evil. Most criminals, when you analysed it, just wanted something that belonged to somebody else. They were driven by frustration, jealousy, greed – everyone was seeking a dream of some kind. Except the truly psychopathic, and apparently most of them migrated to the commercial sector these days, making a killing as business executives, rather than gruesomely dissecting animals in the prescribed formula, or making lampshades out of flayed human skin. Thank God true life wasn’t peopled with as many twisted psychopaths as detective fiction conjured up. It was getting hard to find a good novel that didn’t have one, in fact.

  But what he was investigating now was surely the product of evil. What motivation for this horrendous crime could possibly exist? It was natural to assume the perp was a psychopath. In fact, he had to be. But what if this was a way of disguising a specific murder? He picked up the list of dead, and awarded himself another task, almost too big to comprehend. Who benefited? And how? Surely, it was too random, and involved too many people for it to be personal. But what if it was? What if the killer had been on the bridge waiting to spot a specific vehicle before triggering the device? He shook his head. It wasn’t exactly a sure-fired way of killing someone. People had miraculously been pulled alive from the wrecks, like that Robin Vanger. And if the perpetrator was that twisted, my God. To kill a load of people to hide one specific murder? Cou
ld such a person exist?

  Terrorism had been ruled out by psychoanalysts. A few fundamentalist groups had belatedly claimed responsibility, but before the facts leaked out not one had been able to explain how it had been achieved. The press had initially been misled on the method of its execution, with good reason. The only one who hadn’t printed that, was Freman. He’d suggested that the police were deliberately hiding the cause, and he’d been right, not that it stayed hidden for long. So, if not religious, political, or egotistical, it had to be about money. Most things were, in the end. Surely it wasn’t just an individual’s unholy glee in mayhem and destruction? That would suggest the very essence of evil, and unlike Milton, he wasn’t sure it was personified in one single entity.

  Age was sitting heavily in his mind. Was there any point, really? When he’d been young, he’d been on a mission. Somewhere over the years the goal had faded. He wasn’t quite sure what his mission was anymore, except to see it through to the end. Was he just working for his weekly wage, waiting for retirement and a long twilight of fishing or golfing? It was a depressing thought.

  The other wall space in the incident room sported a collage of the dead, the dying, and the traumatised, mindless as zombies, involved in something too big to comprehend. Police photographers had produced images of the whole pile, inch by steaming inch, as the sun had risen over the scene. The one miracle was that there had been no serious fires. With all that inflammable gas, there had been an overwhelming fear that fires and explosions would take more lives – rescue workers as well as those still trapped in their vehicles. Hoses had been trained where cutting equipment was being used; it would have only taken one spark in the wrong place. Thank God for small mercies. Except that he wasn’t sure He existed, any more than His counterpart.

  Jim came in, and dumped a blue folder on the table. ‘He was Ben Assim. His wife died eleven years ago, and we’ve managed to contact a son who emigrated to Australia. No one noticed he was missing, not even the people on the same floor in the block. The car he’d been driving was untaxed, with no insurance, and had been registered as scrapped. It’s amazing he never got booked.’