The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

  Agnes watched him saw away at the rope with the blade for a moment. Common sense told her that she’d be safely down on the ground long before his knife had made any impact on the rope at all. But something about his hissing voice, his ashen face shook her. ‘Col,’ she persisted, her voice trembling, ‘I saw it on the computer.’

  ‘Come on,’ Agnes heard Jeff shout from below. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Not another word,’ Col said, his knife still working at the rope.

  ‘Col, what’s up?’ Jeff shouted. ‘Talk her down.’

  ‘Swear it now,’ Col hissed.

  Agnes saw she had no choice. ‘OK, I promise. Not another word,’ she said.

  Col straightened up and put his knife away, and Agnes let out another length of rope. She could see Col receding through the branches, his face a pinched mask of fear.

  ‘Great, ace,’ she heard Jeff call. ‘And again.’ This time she let out enough rope to slide gently, even elegantly downwards, pushing with her feet against the trunk to keep straight, landing with, she hoped, some style, trying to look as if she made a habit of learning the hard way. Which, of course, in a way, she did.

  ‘You an’ Col up a tree together, eh?’ Sam giggled, later that evening.

  Rona handed Sam a bowl of soup. ‘Side by side on a branch, they were, like bloody budgies.’

  ‘An’ you really abseiled down?’

  ‘Piece of cake,’ Agnes laughed.

  ‘Wish I’d been there to see it,’ Sam said.

  ‘Did you hitch back?’ Rona asked her.

  ‘Nah, Mike dropped me off down the lane and I just walked up.’

  ‘How’s it going with Mike?’ Agnes asked carefully.

  Sam turned to her with a radiant smile. ‘It’s like a dream come true, Agnes, really it is. I never have to see my mum again. And he’s got all these satellite channels on his telly.’

  Agnes smiled at Sam. She could see Dog pacing up and down outside Zak’s bender. ‘Zak not back, then?’ she asked Rona.

  ‘No,’ Rona said. ‘He got a call from his girlfriend, he’s going to pick her up from the M11 junction. He shouldn’t be long, poor old Dog.’

  Jeff got up and helped himself to more soup. Dog suddenly came over to Agnes and nudged her arm, whining gently. She put down her empty bowl and patted him. Sam was showing Rona a bracelet that Mike had bought her in town earlier. Agnes stood up, and Dog was ready, watching her, waiting for her to follow. Together they wandered off towards the woods. Agnes heard Jeff pick up his guitar, caught a few bars of music before they disappeared out of earshot altogether.

  ‘Well, Dog, I hope you know what you’re doing,’ she whispered to him as they took the path they’d followed that morning. There was no sign of Bill, to Agnes’s relief. Dog seemed sure of his route, and once again they went towards the edge of the woodland. From time to time Dog paused and sniffed. It was dusk, and the shadowy reaches of the forest seemed full of menace in the fading light.

  Dog suddenly froze. They waited, listening, then set off again. Agnes could hear the odd snap of twigs behind them, and felt sure they were being followed, but Dog had a new urgency in his pace. The path came out into a clearing. They paused, and listened, Dog’s ears alert, nose twitching. Again a crack of twigs. Agnes scoured the bushes around her for a weapon, a broken branch, a stone … when Dog suddenly set up a low keening, a wail that seemed to echo around the swaying shadows of the trees. He darted across the undergrowth, and seemed to disappear. Agnes ran after him and saw him lying down in the undergrowth, barking and yelping, next to — next to a prostrate figure. Col.

  Dog was licking his face, and Agnes ran to him, turned his head, feeling for a pulse. To her relief there was one, low and irregular. He took a breath, laboured, endless, then no more. ‘Col — Col,’ she called, gently slapping his face. He made no response. Another breath, rasping and slow. She riffled desperately through his pockets, hoping to find an inhaler. A penknife. Some bits of paper. No inhaler. The sound of approaching footsteps made her freeze.

  ‘There you are,’ she heard a male voice, and saw the tall, draped outline of Bill. ‘I heard Dog.’ He took in the scene. ‘Christ, is he breathing?’

  ‘Just.’

  Bill crouched down by Col, and put one arm under his head. ‘It’s OK, mate, we’ve got you. It’s going to be OK.’ He lifted him gently to a sitting position, then slung him over one shoulder as if he were a mere child. Again the horrifying, rattling breath. ‘Let’s get you to the camp and phone for an ambulance.’

  Bill stood up, the limp white body of Col hanging from his shoulder. Agnes saw a warm flash of smile, then he turned and set off, Agnes and Dog loping to keep up with him. As they reached the camp, faces turned towards them in the flickering firelight.

  ‘He’s still breathing,’ Agnes said, as Dog ran to Zak.

  Rona wordlessly handed Agnes the phone, and she dialled 999. Bill laid Col gently down away from the direction of the fire-smoke and said, ‘We need blankets. Where’s his stuff — does he have an inhaler?’

  People bustled to the benders, whilst Agnes was saying on the phone, ‘Yes, it’s an anti-road protest camp — oh for Heaven’s sake, everyone round here’s heard of it … just off the A414 — right, head for Broxted, turn up the track behind the church … for God’s sake the kid is hardly breathing — right. Good. So I should think.’ She rung off, shook her head.

  ‘They know it when they need to,’ Rona said, as people reappeared with blankets.

  ‘Sam?’ Jenn was calling. ‘Does Col have an inhaler?’

  Agnes looked up to see Sam standing at the edge of the fire, white-faced.

  ‘An inhaler, Sam? Quick,’ Jenn said.

  Sam turned and fled up to her tree-house, and a few moments later dropped something down to Jenn.

  Bill took it and held it to Col’s mouth. ‘Breathe, man,’ he whispered. Jenn supported his head, and they watched as he took a breath, then another.

  Agnes checked her watch. ‘Six minutes,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘Six minutes since I phoned.’

  Rona was pacing up and down. ‘One of us should go in the ambulance with him.’ She looked around for Sam. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, pacing again. ‘If they ever get here.’

  Zak yawned. Dog stood next to him, immobile, watching Col.

  ‘That’s great,’ they heard Bill whisper, ‘good work, man, keep it up.’

  Blue flashing lights appeared in the lane, and Rona ran down to direct the ambulance up the track as far as it could go. Bill was taking the inhaler away, and Agnes saw Col had his eyes open. She went over to him and took his hand.

  ‘Col —’

  He turned to her, his eyes aged and staring. She heard his breathing, still rasping, but now more regular. Two ambulance men were coming up the hill.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Agnes whispered. ‘I promised.’

  Col patted Dog stiffly. ‘He saved your life, that dog,’ Agnes smiled.

  Col shook his head. ‘Nnn — ’ he said. Then he turned to Agnes, his eyes dark with urgency, and opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘It’s OK lad, you’re OK now,’ one of the ambulance men said. Agnes saw Col’s pale face, behind him the stout legs of the men, the stretcher, oxygen cylinders, coarse red blankets. She tightened her grip on Col’s hand. He took a breath, then said, ‘Em— ’

  ‘Come on then, lad, you’re going to be all right,’ said one of the men, as they crouched down to lift him on to the stretcher.

  Col grasped Agnes’s hand tighter, breathed in a rasping, wheezing breath, looked into her eyes and said, ‘Emily.’ Then he was lifted on to the stretcher, bundled into blankets, carried away from her.

  Agnes watched as they processed back down the hill, the white shapes of the attendants crisp against the moonlight, Rona bobbing next to them as they reached the ambulance, the flashing lights and siren pulsing, fading, merging with the rumble of the distant road.

  Chapter Eleven

  Agnes s
at emptily in the encroaching silence of the camp. Jenn took a torch and wandered off to refill a water tank. Agnes looked around for Bill but he’d vanished again. Zak had gone into his bender, Paz was somewhere up in a tree-house. She felt absently in her pockets and touched the papers she’d found on Col; she must have pocketed them in panic when Bill had come upon them in the woods. She fished them out now, realising, at a glance, that they were the same as the flyer that Charlie had shown her.

  ‘WITHAM’S WATER IS POISON. FYFFES WELL IS RUN BY FILTH AND THEIR FILTH IS POLLUTING THE WATER. DON’T DRINK IT.’

  Col had three of these, all the same, plus the one he’d snatched from her. Agnes folded them up together and put them back in her pocket, as she heard Bill’s light tread again. She was aware of him behind her and looked up to see him standing with a mug in each hand. He smiled and crouched down next to her by the fire.

  ‘I brought you a drink.’

  She took the mug and smiled at him.

  ‘Just tea. Thought you might need it.’

  Agnes sniffed the whisky steam rising from the mug. ‘I hope you haven’t used your best single malt.’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘Maybe one day you’ll tell me how you come to have whisky like that in a place like this,’ she said.

  He considered her, his head on one side. ‘Mmm. Maybe.’

  Agnes felt the whisky warming her. ‘It’s lucky you were there. In the woods, I mean.’

  ‘No, it’s lucky you were. I just followed you.’

  ‘I followed Dog.’

  ‘Good for Dog, then.’

  They grinned at each other.

  ‘I hope Col’s OK,’ Agnes said.

  ‘He will be. You saw him rally.’

  ‘Where did Sam get to?’

  ‘She stayed up in her twigloo, I think.’

  ‘Hmm. Strange.’

  ‘Why strange?’

  ‘Because of her usual concern for Col —’ Agnes looked up at Bill who was now gazing at her intently, and remembered that only a few hours ago she’d called him a prat. She also remembered the footsteps she’d heard behind her in the forest, furtive and deliberate, keeping in rhythm with her own. She looked at Bill, his weather-beaten face a warm brown in the flickering firelight.

  ‘Do you still distrust me?’ he asked, holding her gaze with his own.

  ‘Do I have cause to?’ she asked.

  With a clatter of water tank, Jenn reappeared, stoked up the fire and refilled the kettle, just as the mobile phone rang. She picked it up.

  ‘Hi — oh, hi, Rona, yeah, great — what? He’s …?’ Jenn sat suddenly, heavily, on the ground. ‘He can’t be … He was breathing … OK. Do you want one of us there …? Sure, right.’ She rang off, then slowly looked up. ‘It’s Col. He — he died. About five minutes ago.’

  Agnes tried to speak. ‘But he was —’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Jenn said. ‘He was breathing and everything, wasn’t he, Bill?’

  Agnes turned to Bill. His face was suddenly drained.

  ‘He must have been worse than I realised,’ he murmured. ‘Rona said could you go down there, Agnes? You’re kind of official — it’ll help, she said.’

  ‘Of course, but I’m not sure of the way.’

  Bill got up. ‘Come with me,’ he ordered. ‘Which hospital?’

  ‘They’re at Chelmsford. In Accident and Emergency.’ Bill strode off down the track, and Agnes got up to follow him. ‘Jenn — look after Sam, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m worried she’ll do something stupid. I mean, this might panic her, with Becky as well.’

  ‘It had crossed my mind,’ Jenn said. The sound of a motorbike engine broke across the quiet.

  ‘Is that Bill?’

  ‘Pretentious git. God-awful news like this and he wants to play Leader of the Pack.’

  Through the dazzle of a single headlight Agnes could see Bill holding out a crash helmet to her. ‘I thought I was going to follow you by car,’ she said.

  ‘This’ll be quicker.’

  She took the crash helmet and fastened it under her chin, then got on the bike behind him, her arms round his waist. They set off, fast, searing moonlit hedgerows, emerging into the yellow haze of the dual carriageway. Twelve minutes later they swerved into the Casualty entrance and Bill screeched to a halt. Agnes handed him back her crash helmet.

  He took it from her. ‘Ephedrine,’ he said, his voice flat, his eyes shadowed with anguish.

  ‘The inhaler?’

  ‘I should have known.’ He revved his engine and turned the bike round. His headlamp streaked a path across the tarmac as he roared off again into the night.

  Agnes pulled her coat around her and walked towards the bright lights of the hospital.

  ‘So what are they saying?’ Agnes asked Rona. A nurse had led her to a corridor, where she’d found her sitting alone on a line of chairs, clutching a paper cup. Rona shook her head.

  ‘Someone will be with you in a minute,’ the nurse said, then left them alone, her footsteps fading into the echoing reaches of the hospital.

  Rona looked at Agnes with blank, shocked eyes, and Agnes took her hand.

  ‘Were you with him?’ Agnes asked.

  Rona nodded. ‘We were waiting to be admitted, he was still on his trolley thing, he was awake and everything. Some doctor came and talked to him, then she went away, then Col just …’ Rona’s voice faltered. ‘He kind of grabbed my hand and then his eyes turned up, like when someone’s really had it … oh God it was bloody awful, and he was shaking and I was trying to find someone. I left him to find a nurse and when we came back …’ Rona burst into tears and Agnes took her in her arms.

  ‘Are you with Colin Hadley? Could you come this way?’ A young man in a white coat had emerged from a doorway and was now waiting for them to follow him. They went into a small room with frosted windows. A woman, also in a white coat, was there, and she nodded at Rona. Agnes saw her badge said ‘Dr S. Shannon’.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said to Rona. ‘We did all we could.’

  Agnes passed Rona a paper handkerchief.

  ‘Are you — um, relatives?’ the young man asked.

  ‘I’m Sister Agnes. I’m a nun, I work with the Safe House project at St Simeon’s Church in London. This is Rona. We knew him from the anti-road camp out by Ongar. That’s where he was living.’

  Dr Shannon said, ‘He seems to have no next of kin. The address on his DSS documents is of an aunt, but he hadn’t been in touch with her for months.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ Agnes asked.

  The two doctors exchanged glances, then Dr Shannon said, ‘We can’t say at this stage. Obviously, he was brought in with all the symptoms of an asthma attack, but the post-mortem might show something more. We’ve informed the Coroner, of course. Apart from that, there’s not much we can do at this stage.’

  ‘Ephedrine —’ Agnes began.

  ‘Yes?’ the doctor said.

  ‘Can it — can it be fatal, sometimes?’

  ‘If someone has a weak heart, very occasionally. Obviously, that’s something we’ll be looking for.’

  Agnes nodded. She thought about Bill speeding back to the forest, saw once again his expression of despair.

  ‘Can we see him?’ Rona asked in a small voice.

  The little group proceeded down the corridor to another door. Dr Shannon opened it, showed Agnes and Rona in, then left them alone. Col was lying there, covered with a sheet. Agnes gently drew back the sheet. His eyes were closed, and his hands were crossed against his chest, which was naked. His skin was chalk-white.

  ‘Which one of us next, eh?’ Rona said, tearfully.

  Agnes put an arm round her shoulders. ‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no need to think that way. It’s just coincidence.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ Rona asked.

  Agnes looked into the eyes that were welling with tears. She sighed. ‘I don’t k
now what to think.’

  ‘He knew he was dying,’ Rona said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘When he was wheeled in through the doors, off the ambulance, right? He said, he’d been in hospital twice in his life, once when he was born and now to die. He kind of whispered it to me.’

  ‘Do you think he wanted to die?’ Agnes said.

  Rona gently reached out and touched Col’s hand with her fingertip. ‘Maybe,’ she said softly.

  Agnes noticed that Col’s fingernails were stained bright yellow. ‘He was talking of going to Wales when you all get evicted.’

  Rona turned and looked at Agnes. ‘Yeah, he wanted to escape from something, didn’t he?’

  ‘Any idea what?’

  Rona shook her head. Agnes noticed a neat pile of his clothes on the chair next to the bed. She took his jacket and started riffling through the pockets.

  ‘Don’t nick anything, will you?’ Rona said. Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘Although it’s not as if there’s anyone else to care.’

  Agnes brought out a dog-eared benefit book, his penknife, a cigarette lighter, two doorkeys on a ring, a chewed pencil and a bus ticket. On the back of the ticket the name ‘Tom Bevan’ was scrawled in pencil, with a phone number. ‘Just an old bus ticket,’ she said quickly to Rona, slipping it into her pocket, carefully putting everything else back where she’d found it. She checked all his other pockets but found only a handful of loose change and a half-smoked roll-up. She replaced the jacket and glanced down at Col. There were some leaves matted into his hair and she picked a few out, knowing already what they were.

  ‘Rosemary,’ she said. ‘For remembrance.’

  Rona blinked up at her. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Agnes said. ‘Do you want to say goodbye on your own?’

  Rona stood up to go. ‘Done all that, really. I just hope they invite us to the funeral.’

  They left their names and details with Dr Shannon, then, feeling awkward and useless, wandered out of the hospital. Dawn was breaking, softening the angular bright windows of the hospital against the pale sky. Agnes and Rona set off in a directionless way, eventually finding themselves on the edge of the shopping precinct where an all-night tea-bar trailer was just packing up. Agnes bought them both sweet tea, and they sat on a bench and watched the pigeons pecking at mangled bits of polystyrene.