Ward 19 (A Parva Corcoran Suspense Thriller)

by John L. Probert

  Parva’s right wrist was perhaps a little freer now. She gave the bonds another little tug. “What happened to your son?” she said, managing to keep the tremor out of her voice. She wasn’t feigning intrigue though. Whatever had happened, even Edmund Cottingham would have been fascinated.

  Laurence Pike frowned. “It’s a grim tale, Miss Corcoran.”

  Parva wanted to hear exactly what had happened to David Pike and besides, it would give her more time to try and get the bond around her right wrist a little looser. “When did David come back from Africa?”

  “He didn’t come back,” Pike snapped, “he was brought back.” The surgeon took a couple of steps away from her and looked around him, obviously still distressed at the memory. “A paediatric neurosurgeon friend of mine, Geoff Wilkins, had gone out to Tanzania to spend a couple of weeks putting shunts into children with hydrocephalus. When he came to one particular town to do a clinic he was asked if he would mind reviewing a patient they’d had there for several months. The patient had been taken there after some mishap – no one knew what, but he’d sustained a significant head injury and severe trauma to the rest of his body. He had no ID. In fact he’d had very little on him at all when they found him wandering down the dirt track that led into their town. They’d done their best in the little ramshackle hut that served for a hospital there but, because he had no money and no means of communicating, there wasn’t much they could do.”

  Parva frowned at that. “No means of communicating?”

  Pike nodded. “His tongue was gone and his fingertips had been taken too. It was assumed it was a gang attack, possibly for unpaid debts, possibly as an act of revenge. Whatever the reason, it meant that while they cared for him there was no way there were going to make his presence in the village widely known for fear of retribution.” Pike paused again, recounting the story obviously wasn’t easy for him.

  Parva leaned to one side and was rewarded with a satisfying creak as the fatigued metal gave way a little.

  “Geoff told them he specialised in children’s procedures and that there was little point in him seeing an adult, but they were adamant,” Pike continued. “It took him a little while to realise that they wanted him to come because they thought he might be able to understand what David was trying to say. When Geoff eventually relented and allowed them to take him to the filthy little room where they’d been keeping their only patient he said that what he found there was worse than anything he had ever experienced. But what shocked him the most was when the thing tried to speak Geoff’s name.”

  Parva was incredulous. “They knew each other?”

  “Geoff was an old friend of the family. We were close at medical school and did our best to keep in touch as the years went by. To David he was Uncle Geoff. Of course Geoff didn’t recognise him. Not until he’d recovered sufficiently.”

  Parva persisted. “But David was still lucid, then? In spite of his injuries?”

  Pike shook his head. “It depends on what you mean by lucid. He could remember someone from his dim and distant past, but trying to string together a coherent sentence or do any of the rudimentary things one must do to look after oneself, were completely beyond him. But it was only when Geoff was able to get him back to the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre that he was able to fully assess David’s injuries.” Pike paused again, taking a breath before he could continue. “And understand the full extent of what had happened to him.”

  Parva twisted in her seat again and was rewarded with another creak. “And what exactly had happened to him?”

  “Aside from his arms and legs having been broken, his skull having been caved in, his tongue having been removed and his fingertips having been cut off, he had also contracted leprosy.”

  “Leprosy? But that’s curable now.”

  Pike nodded. “And they got David started on Dapsone straight away to stop him from being infectious to others. But he had been suffering from the infection for a very long time before Geoff found him, with no treatment and in less than hygienic conditions. And you know what the effects of long-term chronic infection with leprosy can look like.”

  Parva had only seen photographs in textbooks. She shuddered to think what Pike’s son must have resembled when they finally had the opportunity to examine him.

  “What did they do?”

  “Patched him up as best they could,” Pike replied, “As best as anyone could. When he had recovered from the trauma and began to speak, then they sent him home. Back to England. Back to us.”

  Whether Pike stopped because he couldn’t go on or because he had noticed that Parva’s chair was now significantly bent to the right she couldn’t tell.

  “Can you imagine what it’s like to see your son again after two whole years, only for the twitching mumbling thing that turns up on your doorstep to not really be your son at all?”

  Parva shook her head and tried to ignore the chill that crawled down her spine. “I remember seeing the ambulance pull up and telling Marion to stay inside because it would probably be better if I spoke to Geoff first. Once I looked in the back of that ambulance and saw what David had become I went back in the house and told Marion not to leave the living room until we had David safely upstairs and in the room we had prepared for him. She objected, to the point where I was forced to lock the living room door to prevent her from coming out to see our son as he was helped upstairs.

  Geoff and I helped the scarred, twisted thing that David was up the path and into the house, while all the time his mother was beating her fists on the door of the room I had locked her in, demanding to see him, screaming that she wanted to see her son.” Pike’s eyes glistened. “He recognised her voice, tried to make his way to her, but we stopped him and guided him back towards the staircase. We got him into his room and once we were happy that he had calmed down we left. I made sure the door was locked and then told Geoff to go. Once he was gone Marion demanded the key from me.’

  Parva twisted again and felt the knot around her right wrist giving way. She kept her eyes on Pike, refusing to allow her expression to betray her.

  “He did something to her, didn’t he?” she said, to encourage Pike to continue.

  Pike looked furious and shook his head.

  “Of course not!” he shouted. “David would never have harmed his mother. But, oh my God the look on her face when she finally saw him, saw what he had become. I would have done anything to prevent that moment from taking place. Marion had been at the point of collapsing into clinical depression anyway, but from that moment on she was a broken woman. She refused to believe the man we had upstairs was her son, and she eventually became deluded that I had done something with David and replaced him with what came home. It all became too much for her.”

  Pike tailed off at that but Parva could imagine what had happened.

  She acknowledged the table of surgical instruments to Pike’s right. “What’s been happening here,” she said, tentatively. “Why the killing?”

  Pike’s brow creased for a moment before realisation dawned.

  “No – I’m not responsible for that. But I couldn’t have you discovering what has been going on,” said Pike, “Even after everything he’s done, I couldn’t have that.”

  Parva’s eyes narrowed. “After everything who’s done, Mr Pike?”

  The surgeon looked incredulous. “David killed those girls. After so many months under lock and key, of having such long conversations with him, bringing him back to some semblance of sanity, I thought it only fair to allow him some degree of freedom. Keeping him locked up in that room would have caused its own kind of insanity if I had allowed it to go on for much longer.”

  “Your son…”

  Pike nodded. “In his mind, his poor, broken mind, he still thinks he can be cured, and because his specialty was plastic surgery...”

  A chill went through Parva. “He thinks he needs skin grafts to cover up the destruction caused by the disease.”

  “Not just the disease,�
�� said Pike, “the destruction wrought by those bastards who broke his bones and tore out his tongue, who clubbed him to a state of near death and then left him in the dirt. He’s just trying to do what he used to do, Miss Corcoran.”

  “And you’re helping him?”

  Pike looked incensed. “I’ve been trying to stop him,” he said. “But he’s stabilising. The surgery is futile but carrying out the work is steadily returning the son I knew.”

  Now Parva knew the father was as mad as the son. She twisted in the chair. It creaked again and she felt something give.

  “If you’re trying to stop him,” she said, “then what am I doing here tied up like this?”

  “Because I can’t let him be caught,” said Pike, “I can’t let them put him away. That would completely destroy all the good work I’ve done over the past few months, rebuilding his shattered mind, his broken personality. You don’t think I’m going to let all of that go to waste, do you?’

  “It’s wrong.”

  “It’s necessary, Miss Corcoran,” Pike replied. “Just as you being here is necessary. David must continue to carry out the surgery, to rehabilitate himself. David?”

  There was a shuffling sound from the far right hand corner. At his father’s urging, the thing that had once been a man came into the light.

  9

  Despite her youth, Parva had seen many terrible things during her short career working as a trainee in forensic pathology. She had seen bodies chopped and broken, faces ravaged by cancer and ruined by tropical infectious diseases. She had seen the terrible things human beings are capable of doing to one another in the name of torture, and in the name of pleasure. In some cases they had been the same thing.

  Nothing she had previously seen, however, had prepared her for what came creeping out of the shadows.

  He might have been handsome once but that would have been before the left side of his skull had been caved in, the metal plate used to patch the hole still visible through the wisps of hair that clung to his scarred scalp. His lips were swollen and twisted and his nose was gone, leaving nothing but a gaping hole in the middle of his face that rasped and wheezed as he breathed. He regarded her with a single right eye, the lids of which were puckered and barely closed over the bloodshot orb. With an effort he could stand up straight, but that quickly became too much, and he had to assume a hunched posture that rendered his appearance even more disturbing. And, Parva thought, even more pitiful.

  The thing that had once been one of Britain’s foremost plastic surgeons said something to her, but all Parva could make out were guttural grunts and groans. He had to repeat it several times before she realised he was saying,

  “You should not have come here.”

  “It was your father who brought me here. David, I was subjected to terrible things too. I was tortured psychologically, by a brilliant man who turned out to be the worst type of psychopath. Your father has told me all about the terrible things happened to you when you were away.”

  The figure before her swayed a little but said nothing.

  “And I can’t begin to imagine how terrible that all must have been for you. But surely you must be able to see that killing those girls couldn’t possibly provide an answer to your own pain? All you are doing is creating more misery, more suffering.”

  “The girls’ deaths were an unfortunate side effect,” said Pike. “All we needed was the skin. But we could hardly let them go again after what we had done to them, could we David?”

  The ‘we’ was not lost on Parva, and neither was the fact that, as Laurence Pike’s son brought his hand to his face, she could see that there was no way the twisted, scarred fingers could hold a knife to a girl’s throat, much less perform complex skin grafting. Like the kind she could see on David’s forearm.

  She twisted herself to face Pike.

  “David didn’t do any of this, did he?” she said.

  Pike turned on the lights, filling the room with a harsh flickering glare from the still-functioning fluorescent light bulbs.

  Grafted onto the left side of David’s face, and his right arm as well, were segments of pink skin that were a healthier shade than the distinctly darker and more abnormal areas she could see elsewhere.

  “Of course the grafts don’t always take,” said Pike, “I don’t have access to appropriate tissue-typing laboratory tests. But with each graft I’m rebuilding David’s persona. ” He came closer, and now Parva could see he had a scalpel in his right hand.

  At that moment her chair finally gave way. She fell to the right, landing with a crash against the tray of instruments that had been arranged there. Her right wrist, already almost free, came loose at the same time. Before either of her captors had time to react, Parva grabbed one of the blades scattered on the floor and slashed through the rope tied around her left wrist.

  She was on her feet, brandishing the scalpel at both of them. Two doors led from the room. One was opposite where she had been seated; the other was in the adjacent wall. As she held father and son at bay she tried to work out which of them might be the way out.

  “You wouldn’t want me to hurt you son, would you?” she said, edging towards David Pike. “All that hard work.”

  Pike took a step forward. “Stay away from him! Everything I have done I have done for him. He’s all I have left.”

  Parva shoved David aside and ran for the door straight ahead of her. She could hear a muffled groan from behind her as she turned the doorknob, and prayed she’d made the right choice as she flung herself through the doorway. A dark corridor stretched ahead of her, the litter-strewn floor disappearing into darkness in the far distance. Parva had no time to think. She could hear Laurence Pike’s footsteps behind her. She ran headlong into the darkness, hoping that a curve at the passageway’s end might lead her into daylight. As the darkness closed in, crumpled cardboard boxes and pieces of rubble strewn across the floor tried to trip her up. She stumbled once or twice but somehow managed to keep going, all the while hearing the pursuing footsteps behind her.

  By the time she got to the end of the passageway her eyes had become accustomed to the dimness and she could she a flight of cement steps to her left leading upwards. She stumbled again when she was halfway up and screamed when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned and pushed as hard as she could, to be rewarded by the sound of a groan as Laurence Pike fell backwards.

  Parva kept on going, eventually emerging into daylight. She just had time to register that she was in one of the condemned pathology buildings - the old Ward 19 that Melvyn Davis had told her about - before her pursuer appeared.

  “Time to take you back to the operating theatre,” said Pike.

  Parva backed away, feeling behind her for anything she might be able to use as a weapon. Her hand came to rest on a jagged piece of slate that must have fallen from the roof and, without thinking, in one fluid movement she had grabbed it, aimed and thrown.

  It hit Pike square in the chest, winding him and giving Parva a moment to claw her way through the rubbish and undergrowth to the building’s exit.

  Parva was almost out of the building when he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back inside. She took a deep breath and screamed in the hope of attracting attention. She screamed harder until she tasted blood in her throat.

  It wasn’t long before somebody heard.

  10

  “It’s a great shame. A very great shame.”

  Dr Malcolm Williams put down the pen he had used to sign the release forms that would allow Parva’s superiors to review all the information the hospital had on file about the Pike surgeons, father and son. Despite being told her involvement with the case was over if she so wished, Parva had volunteered to talk to him after they’d been taken into custody.

  “Extreme situations can cause people to do terrible things, Dr Williams,” she said.“I suppose so,” said Williams with a sniff.

  “He loved his son and he loved his wife and the thought of losing both of them was too
much for him.” Parva took the documents from Williams’ desk and put them in her briefcase.

  Williams still looked very unhappy. “I suppose it’s going to be all over the papers?”

  “I think the press will do what they usually do, Dr Williams, and print what they think will sell the most papers.” She got to her feet and stretched out her hand.

  Williams shook it. “Goodbye Dr Corcoran. Hope we never have the pleasure of your company again.”

  Outside, the television camera vans were having to make way for construction traffic. As Parva left the main hospital building she could see two bulldozers being unloaded next to the old Ward 19. Soon it would be nothing but rubble, cleared away far more easily than the memories of what had happened there.

  She wondered if the building that would rise from its ashes would still be named after the plastic surgeon who even now was in an interview room awaiting questioning. Once they had finished with his father, of course.

  As she made her way back to her car she heard the roar of the bulldozer’s engine and a crash of bricks. Like the Pikes’ surgery was her grisly work the only way of rebuilding the person she had been before trauma had intervened? She knew that despite her superiors suggesting she take a holiday all she really wanted to do was get on with the next case, whatever that might be. And when that was over she would move onto the next, and the next until she had managed to exorcise the demons Edmund Cottingham had lodged so deeply within her.

  If you enjoyed this, you might like The Donor by Scott Griffin, also published by Endeavour Press.

  The Donor

  Scott Griffin

  SEGMENT ONE

  Only one thing is certain. The very fact that you’re reading this, that what I’m typing right now is darting back and forth before your eyes, means I’m dead.