Ward 19 (A Parva Corcoran Suspense Thriller)

by John L. Probert

  “Nevertheless,” replied Williams, “it will be good once they’re gone. Then we can get to building our new plastic surgery research unit.”

  “What are they used for now?” she asked.

  “Oh nothing, nothing.” Williams pushed past her and returned to his desk. “I suppose the grounds men might keep some tools and the odd lawnmower in there, but they haven’t served any real purpose for several years now, not since building work was completed on the final phase of the new hospital.”

  Parva gave the buildings one last look before turning her attention back to the head of medicine. “So what were they used for?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve only been here a couple of years and as far as I’m aware they’ve been lying empty for rather longer than that,” he said with a shrug. “I believe they were put up during the Second World War. They’ve been used for all sorts of things over the years. At one point they were wards, and after that I think they were part of the Pathology Department, but you’d be better off talking to someone who’s been here longer than I have.”

  Parva, itching to leave, was quick to take that as her cue. “Any suggestions?” she asked as she got to her feet.

  Williams raised his eyebrows. “Well you might try Laurence Pike - he’s been here longer than almost anyone now. In fact I don’t know why he doesn’t retire. But then, some of the old guard are so married to their jobs they don’t know any other kind of life. He could probably tell you a few stories. Unless of course you encourage him, in which case he’ll tell you about a hundred.”

  “Is he one of the groundsmen?” Parva asked.

  Williams chuckled but there was no real mirth in it. “Goodness me, no,” he said. “He’s our senior general surgeon.”

  4

  Laurence Pike also happened to be the on-call surgeon for the weekend. Friday night had brought him an incarcerated inguinal hernia, a probable appendicitis that he was going to take out this morning “the old fashioned way - none of this keyhole stuff for me”, a couple of abscesses, and a tennis ball wedged somewhere a tennis ball was never meant to go.

  “They always say they sat on it,” he had told Parva with a sigh. She had nodded wearily, causing the jolly older man to smile even more. “But we all know it won’t have been a case of mistaking such a small round spherical object for a cushion.” He winked at her and promised to meet up as soon as his work was done, “provided nothing else comes in that demands my expert attention.”

  Pike told her he hoped to be finished around mid-afternoon, which was fine as far as Parva was concerned. That was quite enough of talking for the moment anyway, and while she had found the surgeon thoroughly charming, he was rather overbearing. After having to deal with Drs Morton and Williams already that morning, she was happy to spend a bit of time by herself.

  Parva left the operating theatres, made her way down the stairs of the nearest fire exit, and found herself in the hospital grounds. The sun was shining and there were only a few wisps of cloud in the sky, but with October fast approaching there was already a chill in the air. She looked over at the Emergency Department. The patients attending this morning probably wouldn’t realise that most of the police cars parked outside were part of a murder investigation. Not until they got inside, saw the roped off areas and had to wait even longer than usual to be seen because most of the staff were being questioned by qualified officers.Parva wasn’t qualified to question witnesses.

  In fact, she wasn’t strictly qualified for police work at all. She had what had been termed ‘special dispensation’ from CID, but didn’t hold officer status. After the incident with her teacher and mentor, the brilliant forensic pathologist Professor Edmund Cottingham, from which she had barely escaped alive, she had undergone a long series of rehabilitation and counselling sessions with a very nice court-appointed psychiatrist called Paul Coppard. He had been understanding and kind but most of all he had realised just what Parva needed to bring her back to the right side of sanity after everything that she had been through.

  And so he had recommended that she be given a position with CID, assisting in the investigation of the very kind of crimes of which she had almost been a victim. She had trained under Cottingham and with the professor now in a maximum-security mental institution, and unlikely to ever come out, Parva was the closest thing the department had to give them insight into his deductive genius.

  Parva hadn’t argued, but then she had still been shell-shocked by what she had been through. She had often wondered, in hindsight, if it was entirely a good idea. She also wondered if Cottingham’s psychotic tendencies had actually arisen from his daily dealings with death.

  “His tendencies towards the psychopathic would always have been there,” Coppard had told her. “He may well have done what he did if he was a bus driver, or a primary school teacher. He just happened to be one of the country’s leading forensic pathologists.” Then he had tapped the right side of his forehead with his biro and smiled in a way Parva hadn’t found reassuring at all. “Who knows why we do some of the things we do?” he had said.

  Parva had no idea, just as she sometimes had no idea why she had agreed to take them up on their offer of helping CID to investigate murders with extraordinary and sometimes outlandish modus operandi. This was only her second case. The first hadn’t been significantly complex. The multiple minor stab wounds inflicted on the tiny murder victims in that instance had turned out to be the work of a psychopathic physical education teacher (perhaps Dr Coppard had known what he was talking about after all) and the link was obvious once she had found what they all had in common. This case was something entirely different.

  Parva turned away from the main hospital building and made her way towards the copse that Malcolm Williams had been pointing at. She crossed a broad area of immaculately trimmed lawn. It was split in half by the road that led from the hospital’s entrance gates to the main buildings. Dr Williams was right, she thought. St Margaret’s must be a very agreeable place to work. When there isn’t a killer on the loose.

  The path through to the condemned outbuildings took a little finding, and even as she began to make her way through, pushing aside brambles and stray branches, Parva wasn’t sure if she might just be imagining the scraps of overgrown paving stones that were just visible beneath the weeds.

  She pressed on, however, even though the trees were beginning to thicken and it had started to get a lot darker. Just as she was beginning to think she might need to use the pen torch she always kept in her pocket the foliage parted and she found herself standing in a clearing, filled with sunlight but as chill as a wine cellar.

  Parva looked back at the way she had come. The foliage was so thick that she could barely make out the hospital. Then she turned back to regard the crumbling brick buildings ahead of her.

  At first she thought there were three of them. Then she realised they were actually the collapsing remains of one long single storey building that had fallen into such disrepair that in places the roof had fallen in. It was difficult to see where the building ended, as the final and most dilapidated part stretched into the forest that surrounded it. The way in, however, was at the end where Parva was standing.

  Two wooden doors hung askew in their frames, flakes of white paint still adherent to the weathered pine in places. The glass that had filled the upper half of each door had long been smashed but spiked shards remained that could cause a nasty injury if anyone was foolish enough to try to get inside.

  Parva pushed gingerly at the door on the right. It fell to the ground with a crash that made her flinch. She reminded herself that an empty building was nothing to fear, not after everything that she had been through.

  But what if it isn’t empty? something inside her asked. What if this is the killer’s lair?

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  A physical jolt and a voice behind her made Parva jump. She turned to see an old man in battered clothes. He was still waving the handle of the hoe he had just prod
ded her with.

  Parva took a deep breath. This must one of the groundsmen, she thought, the one who wasn’t Laurence Pike.

  “Well?” he said.

  Parva showed him her ID badge. “I’m part of the murder investigation. And who might you be?”

  The scruffy man reached into one of the torn pockets of his overalls to produce a worn hospital staff identity card. Parva could just make out the name ‘Mervyn Davis’ beneath the finger stains. The picture had long since faded.

  “You don’t want to be going in there, Miss,” he said, pointing to the building behind her. “It’s full of rubbish and broken glass. The roof’s likely to fall down on you at any minute. I’m glad they’re going to demolish it, if you ask me.”

  Parva nodded. “I don’t suppose you know what it was used for?” she said.

  The old man leaned on the hoe and Parva could have sworn she heard his back creak as he did so.

  “Well,” he said, “it was used for storage up until a few years ago; old surgical instruments, that sort of stuff. One of the doctors over yonder used to keep it all to send to Africa. Then he left and the place got shut up.” He sniffed, hawked and spat all in one fluid, and obviously well practised, motion. “Before that I don’t rightly remember. Been here since the war, though. There were lots of these kinds of buildings then. The whole of the old hospital was made up of them. ‘Course, over the years they’ve all been demolished and built over. This one’s the only one left.” He edged closer to her. “They do say,” he continued, his voice a low growl, “that this used to be the old Ward 19. You know what that means?”

  Parva nodded again. “So they used to do the post mortems over here?”Davis cackled and spat again before, to Parva’s infinite relief, he took a step back. “So’s they say. Before that it was one of the wards I expect. But then there was the fire and all it was good for after that was storage.”

  “Fire?”

  Davis used the hoe to point at the window frame to the right of the door. Parva could see that in places some of the bricks beneath the sill were still blackened.

  “Of course most of the scorching has worn off the bricks by now,” Davis said. “No idea how bad the fire was, neither. But there definitely was one.”

  “How long ago?” Parva asked.

  Davis sniffed again. “Must be twenty years now, easily,” he said. “Mind you, when you get to my age it gets more and more difficult to remember things. You know,” he said, taking off his cap to scratch his unruly grey hair, “you’re a lot easier to talk to than those police officers.”

  It probably made a difference that she was on his territory rather than the white-walled room where Davis would undoubtedly have been grilled about where he was on the nights of the murders. Parva gave him her sweetest smile and said,

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr Davis. Are you usually around if I need to ask you anything else?”

  Davis nodded. “Except Sundays,” he said. “Sundays is sacred.”

  “Sacred?” Parva didn’t think he looked like a God-fearing man.

  “Aye,” he replied. “Pub ‘til closing, put a bit of a flutter on the dogs. Like I said, sacred.” He spat again before wandering off, presumably to attend to some urgent hoeing.

  Parva gave the crumbling, soot-scarred building behind her one last look before deciding that, only if her enquiries elsewhere proved entirely fruitless, would she come back here again.

  Right then, with the sunlight piercing the gaps in the trees and a chill breeze on her face, Parva Corcoran would never have guessed that she would be seeing the inside of it sooner than she thought.

  5

  You know, I do believe he’s right.”

  Laurence Pike still had a loop of bowel to untwist but the patient was going to take a while to get ready, so he had agreed to meet Parva for a cup of tea in his office. She had suggested the canteen but when they got there the place was packed. The press had turned up that morning, but because the presence of reporters and photographers would have interfered with the normal running of the hospital, they had been ordered smartly off the premises. They’d holed up in the one place the general public were allowed to congregate. At least the canteen was doing a roaring trade in coffee and bacon sandwiches, Parva had thought, although if the place had served alcohol it would probably have made a fortune by now.

  So instead she was sitting in a tiny cramped office lined with filing cabinets. The only wall that was free had been given over to shelves crammed with surgical journals. There was no window, and Pike had admitted he spent as little time in his office as possible because of it.

  “Yes, that old building was definitely used by the pathology department for a couple of years,” he said, stirring his tea. “But why are you so interested in it?”

  “No more nor less than I’m interested in this whole place,” said Parva, sipping her coffee. It was too strong and made with powder and she tried hard not to show her displeasure. “And everyone in it.”

  “Grotty coffee, isn’t it?” said Pike with a smile. “But yes, I can understand that. It’s a terrible business, and I wish I could help you more. I know you chaps aren’t allowed to release details but everyone is presuming the killings are linked. Would I be right in assuming that?” Parva nodded. “And I’m guessing there’s a suggestion the killer is medically trained?” Parva hesitated and the older man smiled. “I know, I know – you’re not allowed to say. After all, I presume I’m just as much a suspect as everyone else?”

  She looked down at the stubborn granules lurking on the top of her coffee and nodded. Her apologetic gesture just made him chuckle all the more.

  “Oh don’t worry, I’m not offended,” he said. “To be honest I’d be more upset if you hadn’t included me on your list somewhere – you’d hardly be any good at your job if you didn’t suspect someone who knows exactly how to kill somebody with a minimum of fuss.”

  Parva smiled. “I’m glad it doesn’t bother you,” she said.

  Pike folded his arms behind his head. “If it was me I’d probably go for the spleen,” he said. “Knife in and up under the left costal margin,” he pointed an angled finger beneath his ribs. “I’ve had to control the bleeding from enough spleens to know once they go you’ve not got long.” He leaned forward. “It used to be a method of assassination, you know.”

  Parva nodded. “In the tropics,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” replied the surgeon with an enthusiastic nod, “or anywhere that malaria was rife. Caused cavitation of the spleen and left it extremely fragile.”

  “Like a honeycomb,” returned Parva, sipping her coffee and realised she was enjoying the exchange. “One good blow and…”

  “Pop!” said Pike, clapping his hands. “Tell me, would you be at all interested in having dinner sometime?”

  Parva gave him the knowing, weary smile of someone who had already been one man’s mistress and got burned as a result. “And what would Mrs Pike have to say to that?”

  “Mrs Pike wouldn’t know,” was the reply, followed swiftly when Parva said nothing by “She died two and a half years ago.”

  And it still hurt, Parva could tell, despite Laurence Pike’s outwardly pleasant demeanour. No wonder he didn’t mind being stuck here on a weekend at his age. “I’m afraid we aren’t allowed to fraternise with suspects during an investigation.”

  “Then I shall look forward to your efforts meeting with a successful conclusion,” he said as his pager went off. He squinted at the digital display. “It would seem my patient is ready before I am!” he said, putting down his cup and getting to his feet. “You’ll have to excuse me, I have to legally insert a blade into somebody.”

  He ushered her out of his office, locking the door behind him. “Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you think I can be of any further help,” he said, shaking her hand. “Or if I can suggest anywhere nice for us to eat.”

  “I won’t.”

  He was already halfway down the corridor when she realised
that quite unconsciously she had already crossed Laurence Pike off her mental list of suspects. She chastised herself and put his name back on, with the reminder that a psychopath can just as easily have kind eyes and a charming demeanour, right up to the point where their smooth hands slip a knife into you.

  For a moment she found herself swept up in memories she foolishly thought she had managed to banish. She was so lost that she thought she could still hear the surgeon’s pager echoing down the passageway. Then she realised it was her own, beeping at her insistently until she unclipped it from her right hip and pressed the message retrieval button. What she read was good enough to distract her, both from thoughts of Laurence Pike and from things best forgotten.

  They had found another body and something else besides.

  6

  The latest victim’s name was Jayne Pitman. She was nineteen years old and had worked in the hospital canteen. Like Tricia Leonard, she had been murdered at some point during the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours and her body had been unceremoniously dumped, this time in the hospital incinerator. The only reason her body was still identifiable was because someone from Health and Safety had spotted the lack of smoke coming out of the incinerator chimney and had alerted the operators that their filter might be blocked.

  Even with the events of the past couple of days it hadn’t occurred to anyone that what they might find was the body of the killer’s latest victim, almost intact except for some charring.

  “I didn’t think I’d be back here again so soon,” said David Morton as he regarded the blackened body on the post mortem table before him.

  “Did you make it up with your sons?” asked Parva.

  Morton, adjusted the overhead lamp. The light gleamed off the charred flesh of the girl’s legs. “Yes. Now it’s just my wife I’ll be in the doghouse with. We were supposed to be at a dinner dance tonight.”