Deadly Errand

by Christine Green

  Then inspiration struck. ‘Perhaps I could take over some of those visits,’ I said. ‘For a short time anyway.’

  ‘Praise be. The Lord must have sent you. If you'll wait behind I'll give you a few names and addresses.’

  I walked back into the church, sat at the front and waited. Edward Cable was a trusting soul. Trusting enough to allow a complete stranger to visit his aged flock. When he returned I asked if he would like references.

  He seemed surprised. ‘The Lord takes care of His people. The Lord has sent you to replace Jacky. To do Jacky's work. To give succour and comfort to the elderly.’

  ‘Just temporarily,’ I murmured. But he wasn't listening; he was busy writing down names and addresses. ‘I'm not sure when I'll be able to start.’

  ‘Start in the Lord's time, my dear. In the Lord's time.’

  Clutching my list I left, vowing never to return. I saved reading the list until I got home. I drank hot cocoa laced with whisky and read the names as I lay in bed. There were five in all. Two in Farley Wood, two in Longborough, and one in Leys Court behind the hospital. It was that one that interested me. Tonbridge? For a moment I couldn't remember where I'd heard the name before. Tonbridge. Margaret Tonbridge from the hospital. A relative, I assumed, and living near Kennie. Perhaps my dallying with religion hadn't been a complete waste of time after all. I wanted to see Kennie again and now I could combine the visits. I almost looked forward to working at St Dymph's again; compared with the church, it seemed like a haven of sanity. Had Jacky been quite sane, though, I wondered? Stray boys, old ladies and nursing seemed masochistic to me. What was she trying to prove? Or what sin was she trying to absolve? And who found her out?

  St Dymphna's as a haven of sanity seemed like a sick joke when I arrived on Monday night. Over the weekend the managers had decided to close two wards, Grant and Truman, and squash as many as possible into Melba and Harper. Several patients had chest infections, two were dying and two of the day staff were sick. Thankfully I was working with Linda Brington.

  ‘I'll just get on with the routine things, Staff, you see to the two who are pegging out.’

  That wasn't as easy as it sounded, for one of the dying was awake and frightened. ‘Sally, Sally,’ she called. ‘I'm dying, I'm frightened. Where are you?’

  ‘I'm here,’ I said stroking her hand. ‘I'm here all night.’ I knew from the report that Sally was her daughter. Sally was dead. There was no one else. I stayed with her, gave her sips of warm tea and gradually she sank into a deep sleep. The sounds of her death rattle were lost in the general torment of the ward.

  By eleven Linda and I were saying to each other, ‘We're winning,’ and thoughts of tea were just about the most important thing in our lives. Then I heard Linda shout from the top end of the ward. ‘Oh Christ!’

  I rushed up to the bedside. ‘What's the matter?’ I asked calmly, seeing neither blood nor fire.

  ‘It's so bloody inconvenient,’ Linda was saying. ‘She was always a selfish old …’

  My eyes followed hers. The patient was quite dead. Bolt upright, looking cheerfully triumphant, at least that's the way I saw her.

  ‘Better now than later,’ I said, trying to placate Linda. ‘I'll make some tea then we'll call the doc and let the undertakers know. It won't take us a trice to lay her out.’

  Linda smiled wryly. ‘It's just so typical of her to die without giving us proper warning …’ She paused, ‘I'm talking rubbish, I know. It's just that we'll probably be laying out three tonight. It's so depressing. And I bet we've only got two shrouds.’

  We began to laugh as we drank our tea. A siege mentality or hysteria or both. I'd rung the night sister whose tone was sharp, as though we were somehow to blame for the inconvenience.

  ‘Try to hang on to the rest,’ she said brusquely. ‘There's enough dying down here without having to worry about you lot. Have you rung the doctor yet?’

  ‘He's being bleeped.’

  ‘Good.’

  The phone banged down. We giggled again, only to be startled into silence by loud knocking on the door. It was Dr Robert Duston, or so his badge told us. Tall, dark and stunningly attractive, I looked at him in surprise and managed to stutter that we had had an unexpected death. My virtual incoherence sent Linda scurrying from the office in a fit of giggles.

  ‘What's the matter with her?’ Robert Duston asked.

  ‘Just circumstances,’ I replied, handing him the patient's notes. Attractive he may have been but there was no warmth in his dark eyes and I doubted he had a sense of humour.

  ‘Before you see the patient, Doctor, would you mind if I ask you a personal question?’

  He scowled. ‘What's on your mind?’

  ‘It's a bit of a cheek, I know, but I was a one-time best friend of Jacky Byfield. She wrote to me that you were friendly and yet I was at the funeral and you weren't.’

  ‘Are you trying to find out if we were having an affair? Because if you are, the answer is, we were not. She was a pain in the neck. A religious maniac, who plagued me for months. A nice enough girl, I suppose, for someone who liked the pure and virginal. I don't, Staff Nurse. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Crystal.’

  He walked past me into the ward. I followed on behind and watched him treat the dead woman to a very cursory examination, which didn't really surprise me. She looked very dead now that we had laid her flat.

  ‘Anything else?’ he said.

  ‘Two more, probably tonight.’

  ‘I'll see them now. If they die after two, get the night sisters up.’

  When he'd gone Linda reappeared. ‘Your face was a picture,’ she said. ‘Your eyes came out on stalks. He may be handsome but he's a surly sod. Jacky was the only one who liked him.’

  ‘He didn't seem …’ I stopped. Linda would wonder why I had asked him about Jacky.

  ‘No, he doesn't. Still, it's his business, isn't it?’

  Together we approached the bed of the dead woman. ‘Laying out' now consists of washing the corpse, putting in false teeth, combing the hair and putting on the stiff white shroud. Years ago it was much more complicated. The road to heaven has definitely become faster. The checking of the patient's belongings took the most time: two flannels – check; one lavender talc – check; two pounds fifty – check; three nighties – check. And so it went on. Until at last our one-time patient was labelled and all her treasures were safely in a black plastic bag. Packing belongings is a salutary lesson to the materialistic. You really can't take it with you.

  Wrapped in a white sheet the corpse lay there bright in the ward's dim light. We paused for a moment.

  ‘Do you know she didn't drink or smoke, was a housewife all her life and had been a childless widow for thirty years,’ said Linda. ‘Makes you think, doesn't it?’

  The ‘laying out' seemed to have made her introspective and that in nurses often led to philosophical discussions about the meaning of life and deaths as we'd known them. Not that I knew any nurses who were afraid of death. Just of protracted life. Still, we needed cheering up.

  ‘Talking of drink,’ I said, ‘there's some sherry in the cupboard. Shall we have some before the undertakers come?’

  Linda smiled half-heartedly and shrugged. ‘Okay. I bet it's British and been there for yonks – better than nothing though.’

  Pritchards, Funeral Directors, arrived during our second glass of sherry. The hospital, it seemed, had a standing order with them to remove bodies at night. I imagined Hubert being disappointed that he hadn't managed to acquire the commission.

  ‘Hello, girls, you all right?’ said the younger of the two men. ‘Which way?’

  I pointed to the bed.

  ‘Do you want to pull the curtains round the other beds?’ he asked.

  Pulling the curtains around the beds is traditional practice in most hospitals. Since all the patients on general wards know when someone has died, I could never see the point. And, anyway, mortuary trolleys have such a distinctive trundling s
ound you'd have to be deaf not to notice. But our patients were deaf, and demented, and they would, in the main, fail to notice if a helicopter landed in the ward.

  ‘No, just go ahead,’ I said. ‘They're all fast asleep.’

  Linda and I watched from the office door. The men didn't need our help. She was small and frail. They lifted her gently on to the cold hardness of the trolley and placed the lid over her. Then they progressed noisily down the ward. As death trundled past us, the men smiled and spoke in unison.

  ‘Cheerio. Have a good night.’

  It was a relief that the body had gone. We finished our sherry and Linda asked if she could go to first break.

  ‘Not that I'll be able to sleep. I'm a bit superstitious,’ she explained. ‘Whenever there's a death here, something else always seems to happen. Once I saw something in the day room. I wouldn't go in there for weeks afterwards.’

  Linda hadn't struck me as the nervous type but I could see by the anxious look in her eyes she was perfectly serious. ‘What did you see?’ I asked.

  ‘I think it was a patient. It was in the summer and it was hot so I'd opened the French windows and turned the chair to face them. I'd dozed off, and for some reason I opened my eyes and there in the doorway stood this old woman. Grey hair, Crimplene dress. I screamed and started to get up but she just disappeared. It scared me to bloody death. We never did find out who she was. But we'd had a death that night and, even now, I'm convinced it was her.’

  ‘Why don't you bring a chair in the office? I'll stay in the ward and sit with the dying ones.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Linda asked. But I could see relief in her face and the pained, scared expression disappear.

  I helped Linda carry a chair into the office and I sat in the ward by the patient called Dottie, who every few moments mumbled ‘Sally, Sally,’ between dry, cracked lips. The water I gave her trickled unswallowed from her mouth and all I could do to soothe her was to hold her hand and stroke her forehead. My eyelids began to grow heavy and I had to fight the urge to lay my head beside Dottie's and sleep with her.

  All I could hear in the ward were the sounds of breathing or snoring, so the sudden footfalls startled me. I went to the kitchen window but in the darkness I couldn't see a thing, just the path and the frame of the walkway.

  There was silence outside for a while and I went to the door and pressed my ear to it. But there was no sound. Then I heard it again, a noise like the crunch of feet on hard gravel. And I realised it was not coming closer but receding, going round the side by the staff loo. I rushed to the loo, fearful the window was open. It was, but only just. I stood on the lavatory seat and without opening the window any more I peered out. At first I couldn't see or hear anything but then I caught a glimpse of feet. Feet in running shoes. Ankles in jeans. A man. He was lifting his feet softly like a cat. Coming closer.

  Chapter Ten

  Kennie stopped underneath the window. In that moment of recognition my foot slipped, plunging painfully into the lavatory bowl. Struggling to keep my balance my mind screamed ‘Linda', but no sound came from my lips. And then for a moment as I fell sideways – oblivion. The great blackness coming down like the swift closing of an up-and-over garage door.

  I knew I was on my side but I felt it necessary to try to work out my position in relation to the walls and the door and the ceiling. That seemed impossible. I was in positional limbo.

  ‘Stay still,’ Linda was saying. ‘Did you faint?’

  I murmured something about looking out of the window and Linda set about prodding me and asking if I could feel my legs. That seemed to jolt me awake.

  ‘Feel them!’ I said. ‘The right one is killing me.’

  ‘Try moving your toes,’ suggested Linda. ‘I'll be back.’

  I became aware of the fact that my head was only a few inches from the wall and there was blood on the wall and I knew then, without a doubt, that was the reason my face felt sticky. I wondered in a vague way if I was bleeding badly but decided I wasn't. Linda came back with wet cloths, dry dressings and as I gazed up at her, a worried expression.

  ‘Shall I call the doctor?’ she said.

  ‘Am I that bad?’

  ‘It's only a tiny cut,’ she said as she inspected my eyebrow.

  ‘So my modelling days aren't over?’

  ‘Very funny. Do you feel like getting up now?’

  She helped me up. I'd sprained my ankle, and the mirror told me that I'd also have a black eye in the morning.

  Linda shuffled me back to the office and went off to make tea.

  ‘You'd better take off your wet tights and your shoe,’ she said on her return. ‘I'll stuff your shoe with paper and I'll rinse your tights. They'll be dry by the morning. Are you sure about the doctor?’

  I hadn't noticed how wet I was but now I became aware of the cold I shivered and began to wriggle out of my soaked tights. ‘I'll be fine. I heard someone prowling about. I had to see who it was.’

  ‘You should have called me. Who was it – Kennie?’

  I stared at her stupidly for a moment. ‘You knew!’

  ‘He's a harmless little prat. He just hangs around hoping to get a glimpse of the nurses. Some of the girls even give him cups of tea.’

  ‘But why was he creeping round by the staff loo?’

  Linda laughed. ‘He was probably going to pee in the drain that's round the side.’

  ‘You don't think he could have killed Jacky, then?’

  ‘Good God, no! Have you seen the way he walks? Like a constipated camel. He couldn't possibly have crept up on Jacky. She was quite good at martial arts, you know. She wasn't hefty, but she was quick and she would have heard Kennie's feet a mile off.’

  ‘So whoever killed her, she either didn't hear or she ignored because she knew who they were?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Linda grudgingly. ‘But it's all over and done with now. After all, the police seem to think a total stranger killed her.’

  ‘But what if the killer is one of the staff? We're all in danger until he or she is caught – aren't we?’

  Linda watched me warily like a dog surveying his own live-in cat. ‘You didn't strike me as the worrying type, Kate. But you seem very interested in Jacky's death. Anyone would think she was a friend of yours.’

  I feigned an attack of giddiness then and I felt quite proud of myself until I realised it was for real.

  ‘Come on,’ said Linda, ‘you need a proper rest. I'll walk you down to the day room.’

  I didn't argue but on our slow walk down the ward I did check the patients. ‘What about the turns?’ I said.

  ‘I can manage the lighter ones on my own and get one of the other girls to help with the rest. With any luck our two sickies will last till morning.’

  Gratefully I sank into one of the armchairs and Linda fetched me a pillow and a blanket. The budgie hadn't been covered and he chirped merrily for a while and the curtains fluttered noisily but neither kept me awake. I slept, hearing nothing, and without dreaming.

  When I woke up the birds outside were singing but it was still dark. The clock on the wall showed five a.m. I stood up too quickly, forgetting about my ankle and my head. Both throbbed in unison as I limped into the ward. At the far end Linda was lifting a patient on to the commode.

  ‘I can manage,’ she insisted, but I helped her just the same. From then on the patients called incessantly and although I still limped, I coped reasonably well, if a lot more slowly than usual. But by the time the day staff appeared at seven thirty, my head and ankle were dancing a tango of pain and I gave a very brief report before departing thankfully for home.

  Feeling a true martyr I decided to call in at Humberstones. My intuition told me Hubert might have some news. If he did, he refused to give it to me.

  ‘God. What a sight. Have you been in an accident?’ he asked, making me feel instantly worse.

  I explained I'd slipped down a loo. He didn't believe me.

  ‘I'll drive you home,’ he said.
‘You'll sleep better at home.’

  I didn't argue, but I did try to get him to tell me what he'd found out. He wasn't to be persuaded.

  ‘I'll tell you later,’ he said. ‘When you feel better. It's nothing that can't wait, my duck.’

  ‘You've never called me that before, Mr Humberstone. You must be local born. A true country boy.’

  He grinned and led me out to his car, loading me into the front seat as if I were one of his more cumbersome corpses. I was too tired and stiff to care. I dozed in the car and when we arrived Hubert insisted on helping me upstairs and on to the bed. I slept fully clothed until knocking at the door woke me.

  Slowly I made my way downstairs. It was Mrs Morcott of the WI. ‘Oh, my dear. I'm so sorry. I've disturbed you again and you've had an accident. You poor thing …’

  ‘Come in, Mrs Morcott. You'll have to forgive me if I'm not very communicative.’

  She bustled in, still apologising. ‘Do tell me if there's anything I can do for you, anything at all. I've really only come to invite you to join us on one of our day trips – a mystery tour – could be really exciting.’

  I declined, thanking her for thinking of me.

  ‘Well, I won't keep you, dear,’ she said. ‘I saw you at the funeral and I told myself not to forget to invite you to a more jolly occasion.’

  ‘I didn't see you, Mrs Morcott,’ I said.

  ‘No, dear. I did try to catch your eye but failed. I didn't go to the funeral tea so I didn't get a chance to say hello. Such an interesting service, terribly sad of course. I was talking to a little lady next to me in the church. She'd seen Jacky just two weeks before she died. “I mustn't forget to visit you next time,” Jacky had said. “I'll just put you down in my diary.” And the very day she was due to visit that lady – she was murdered.’

  I nodded and murmured, ‘Tragic.’ It was all I could think of by way of polite response, because all that echoed in my mind was diary, diary, diary! Where the hell was it? What detective misses at least looking for one? Most people have a diary, even if they don't use it. Was her mother failing to tell me about it because it reflected badly on Jacky or was it in fact missing? Or more to the point had the police got there first? I would have to search Jacky's room for the diary and the pass book. Although I felt it very unlikely the pass book was there and if it wasn't there, where else would Jacky have put it or hidden it? With the pass book I could see if Jacky had paid in her monies on a regular basis, establish a pattern.