by Andy Maslen
“You took it off one of the nurses?”
“That blonde one who looks a bit like you. Same short hair. Come on.”
She flashed Stella a conspiratorial wink-and-grin then turned and pushed through the door.
The ward was deserted. Everyone had moved, or been moved, to the canteen to collect their tray of institutional food. Like a couple of children slipping out of school, the two women hurried to the far end of the corridor. Gloria unlocked the door and they were through and onto a landing. The floor was concrete, painted grey. White railings surmounted by a black plastic handrail spiralled down the staircase to the ground floor and basement beyond.
Stella turned to Gloria and opened her mouth to speak.
“Did Vicky—”
Her question was cut off by an incoming right hand, which smashed into the side of her face, knocking her round in a half-circle. She staggered back and fell to her knees, tasting blood in her mouth. Gloria Danktesh had reverted to Monica Zerafa.
13
All That Glistens
Monica kicked her in the ribs and delivered another blow to the back of her head. The gold rings opened a long cut on Stella’s scalp and she reached round to feel the damage. Her palm came away wet with blood.
“Now for the final jump, dearie,” Monica said. “Poor little suicidal Stella just couldn’t cope with the voices in her head.”
Stella felt the older woman’s hard hands grab her beneath her armpits. She was dragging her towards the handrail.
Instead of trying to pull free, Stella back-pedalled her heels against the smooth flooring, pushing back into her attacker’s body. The added impetus made the woman stagger, and in that moment, Stella straightened. Without thinking of her scalp wound, she dropped her head forward for a second then jerked backwards. She began the movement with her hips and used every muscle in her back and neck to accelerate her skull into the woman’s face.
The women shrieked in unison. Stella as the cut on the back of her head took another impact, Monica as her nose broke with a sound like a stick snapping. Their screams echoed and bounced off the hard surfaces of the stairwell.
In that moment, Stella twisted halfway round and wrenched herself free of the older woman’s wrestler-like grip. She was panting, dragging oxygen into her lungs.
With a grunt of effort, Monica lunged forwards, hands extended, fingernails aimed at Stella’s eyes. Adrenaline numbing her pain, Stella found herself with enough time to see the incoming attack. Almost as if Monica were moving in slow motion.
“Her knee, Stel,” Other Stella shouted. But this time from directly between Stella’s ears.
Stella ducked under the approaching arms and kicked hard on top of Monica’s right knee. The whole leg folded back on itself as if the joint had been put on the wrong way round. The ligaments, and the patellar tendon holding the kneecap in place, sheared in a volley of dull pops.
Monica’s face seemed to split in half as her mouth opened wide in a silent scream of agony. She staggered back towards the handrail.
Stella leapt forward and shoved her clawed fingers at Monica’s crêpey breastbone and pushed hard, accelerating Monica’s progress towards the bannister. As the small of Monica’s back met the handrail, Stella hooked her foot around her right calf and levered her up, pushing harder on her chest until her centre of gravity was up and over the edge.
Finding her voice again, Monica screamed. But it was too late. Arms windmilling, she rotated over the handrail.
She stretched out her right hand towards Stella as she fell. The grabbing fingers missed Stella’s face by half an inch and smacked down onto the handrail. Stella watched, horrified, as they closed reflexively on the plastic grip of the upper surface. Monica had saved herself.
Then Monica’s weight made its presence felt. Her body descended past the level of the handrail and, as it dropped towards the abyss, her hand slipped round to the underside of the rail and slid sideways between two of the square-section metal balusters.
With a sound like a butcher’s knife being sharpened on a steel, her gold rings whistled down the metal rods as her hand turned through ninety degrees. When it hit the bottom of the bannister’s steel frame, Monica’s body was completely below the level of the floor and picking up speed.
The thick gold rings on her index and little fingers jammed against the rods, turning her hand into a stopper knot on a cable of flesh and bone. With two loud cracks, Monica’s shoulder dislocated and her wrist snapped. She screamed.
“Yell all you like, darling,” Other Stella said. “They’ll just think it’s one of the loonies in here having a moment.”
White faced and swinging gently back and forth from her broken wrist, Monica looked up at the woman she’d been sent to kill.
“Help me, please. Mother of God, help me!”
Other Stella looked back. But not into her pleading eyes. At the hand, trapped against the steel rods by the thick gold rings.
“Never went in for much in the way of rings,” she said, squatting and reaching for the woman’s hand. “Just these two.”
She held out her left hand and straightened the fingers into a fan.
“Wedding and engagement. Oh, and this one.”
She held out her right, presenting the eternity ring.
“The diamond’s for her little girl. Lola. Did you know they burnt her to death? I wonder what the Mother of God would make of that, eh? Because here’s the thing, Gloria. Or whatever your name is.”
She reached for the woman’s hand and tugged hard on the ring on her middle finger. It came free, bringing a shred of skin with it.
Monica’s breath was coming in fast, shallow wheezes.
“No! Please!”
The ring on her fourth finger followed.
“It’s all too fucking late,” Other Stella said with a smile.
Monica’s hand started sliding between the steel rods. With the two rings gone, the fingers were able to squash together by a few fractions of an inch. Just enough. But the harsh steel edges of the rods didn’t want to give up their catch. With a wet, ripping sound, her hand – in the medical parlance common in the hospital – degloved. The stark red flesh and white bones emerged from the glove of skin like a baby from a caul. Monica Zerafa’s screams continued all the way to the ground.
Other Stella leant over the handrail and watched her fall, blood spraying from the damaged blood vessels in her hand in scarlet arcs that spattered the stairwell on her short journey to the bottom.
With a lurch, Stella found herself leaning over the handrail. Other Stella whispered in her ear before vanishing.
“Oops.”
The crunch as Monica Zerafa’s head met the concrete floor made Stella want to vomit, but she swallowed hard and turned away. She looked down at the bloody glove of skin, lying between the two steel rods as if left there by a careless cleaner. Looked away.
Holding a hand to the back of her head, which was now hurting like a bastard and dripping blood into her collar, she pushed through the door and back into the corridor.
14
Stopping Elsie
Becky was back on duty. As Stella emerged into the communal room with a crash from the door into the corridor, the nurse looked up.
“Oh, my God, Stella! What happened!” she shouted.
The patients who had returned from lunch swivelled their heads in unison at Becky’s cry. Their expressions were a mixture of horror, fear and curiosity. Eyes dulled by drugs, or wide and staring. Hands fluttering over mouths. Smiles flitting inappropriately across faces normally slack from inattention.
Stella had been intending to put on an act and stage a graceful collapse into the nearest armchair. Instead, her body made up its own mind to do it for real. Vision blurring, she fell sideways until her shoulder banged into the wall. Then she slid down until her bottom hit the floor. Legs straight out in front of her, she watched Becky rushing towards her before the curtains closed and everything turned black.
“That was an absolute
quality move, Stel.”
Stella opened her eyes. She found herself sitting on a white-painted bench looking across a body of water to a white stone city on a hill. Crowning its summit was the hemispherical dome of a cathedral. It reminded of her of St Paul’s. But the temperature was in the nineties. The sky was a pure, cobalt blue. And the people around her were speaking no language she recognised.
She turned to her right. Richard was looking at her. His skin was tanned beneath his white linen shirt. The honey-brown colour contrasted with his cropped blond hair. Lola sat gurgling on his lap.
“You sound like her,” Stella said.
“Who, darling?”
“You know, Other Stella.”
He smiled indulgently and bounced Lola on his lap until she let out a squeak of pleasure.
“The way you butted that Maltese bitch with the back of your head. She never saw it coming. Hurt like fuck though, didn’t it?”
“Where are we?”
“Don’t you recognise it? You should.”
Stella looked at the cathedral across the water. Listened to the voices swirling around her – the sounds were almost Arabic.
“Malta?”
“We spent our honeymoon in Valetta.”
“Did we? I must have forgotten. I thought it was Sicily.”
“No. It was Malta. You remember. You remember everything. You remember what you were like when we first met. Ambitious. Funny. Embarrassingly honest. Passionate about the law. Oh, and not a serial killer.”
Stella frowned and tried to stand. But something was preventing her from rising. She looked down. Lola had climbed onto her lap. She weighed a ton. An iron child. She looked up into her mother’s eyes.
“It’s true, Mummy,” she said, in the same mocking tone that came from Richard’s smirking lips. “By my reckoning, you’ve killed, ooh, let me think,” she held up a pudgy hand, dimpled over the knuckles, and counted on her fingers, “Moxey, Ramage, Fieldsend, Howarth, Ragib … Oops! Ran out of fingers. Start again. That fat bloke with the shotgun in Freddie McTiernan’s lockup, the guy in the Beemer who tried to kill you … um, ooh, yes, the two Albanians shaking down nice Dr Terzi. Oh, and Tamit Ferenczy and, she winked twice, his two bodyguards. There! Twelve. I’m all out of fingers. And eyes.”
“But they killed you and Daddy. I had to.”
“Yes. You did. And don’t forget that bad man, Collier. I burnt to a crisp because of him. And Daddy didn’t come off much better.”
Stella looked over at Richard. He smiled apologetically. The top half of his head was smashed like an eggshell and he was wearing the top of a red cast-iron pillar box like a hat.
Stella screamed.
People were pulling her to her feet. People with strong arms and gentle grips. Becky and a brown-skinned nurse she’d spoken to once or twice. What was his name? Hamish? That was it.
Hamesh was clamping a wad of something soft to the back of Stella’s head.
“Come on,” he said. “Come and sit down, Stella.”
They led her to the nearest royal-blue armchair. She slumped down immediately, groaning from the throbbing pain at the back of her head.
Becky knelt in front of her while Hamesh maintained pressure on the makeshift dressing. Becky’s face was crimped with concern, her eyebrows drawn together and her mouth turned down.
“I’ve called for a wheelchair. We’ll get you over to A&E. They’ll stitch up that gash and then we can talk properly. But what happened? Where were you? And how did you get out of the ward?”
“It was Gloria. She said she had something she needed to tell me about Adam Collier. My boss?”
“Yes, I know who he is.”
“She stole a key from one of the nurses. She took me into the stairwell. Then she went crazy. Sorry. I mean she, well, she did. She attacked me. Hit me from behind with those gold knuckledusters she wears. She tried to kill me, Becky. She tried to throw me over the bannister.”
“Where is she now?”
“I fought back. I had to. I thought she was going to kill me.”
“Yes, I’m sure you did. But where is she, Stella? Where’s Gloria?”
“Where she tried to put me. She overbalanced and went over the bannister. Her hand got trapped between the uprights.”
Becky’s eyes widened.
“You left her swinging there?”
Stella shook her head, then grimaced as the sudden movement set off a blast of pain at the back of her skull.
“Go and see.”
Leaving Hamesh to wait with Stella, Becky stood up and ran down to the end of the corridor and unlocked the security door.
She reappeared moments later, white-faced. Back with Stella and Hamesh, she knelt in front of Stella again.
“We have to call the police.”
“I know. Do it. But please can you hurry up with that wheelchair? I think I’m going to faint again.”
While Becky was talking to the police, Hamesh wheeled Stella out of the psychiatric ward, along a series of corridors, down in a lift and along a grey vinyl-floored corridor to A&E.
Stella had spent her fair share of time hanging around in accident and emergency departments waiting for suspects, or occasionally witnesses, to be stitched, stomach-pumped or sedated. Mercifully, she’d largely avoided the places as a patient or … What did they call it these days? Service user? The NHS was as full of pointless jargon as the police.
“What do we have here, then?” a triage nurse said, approaching Stella but speaking over her head to Hamesh.
“She was attacked by another patient,” Hamesh said. “Nasty laceration to the back of the head.”
The triage nurse went round to the back of the wheelchair, and Stella felt firm but gentle pressure pushing her head forward. She let her chin drop towards her chest and gasped as a sudden wave of nausea flooded her.
“You all right, pet?” the nurse said. “Not going to faint on me, are you?”
“I’m fine. How bad is it?”
“You’re going to need a few stitches and I daresay the doctor will want to give you a tetanus shot while she’s about it. That’s a nasty gash. Any idea what they used?”
“A fourteen-karat knuckleduster.”
The nurse laughed.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a cop with that kind of humour.”
“I am a cop.”
“Oh.” The nurse re-entered Stella’s field of vision and squatted down in front of her. “Sorry you ended up in the psych ward. Job got on top of you, did it?”
Stella shrugged.
“Something like that.”
“Well, let’s get you patched up physically first, then Hamesh and his colleagues can sort you out on the inside, eh? I’ll get you the next free slot for surgery, OK?”
“Thanks,” Stella said. “I appreciate it.”
Ten minutes later, Stella was sitting on a bed in a screened-off cubicle in the middle of the ward, while a nurse shaved the back of her head.
“I like your hair,” she said. “Very punky.”
“You don’t look old enough to remember punk,” Stella said, wincing as the razor clipped the edge of the wound.
“My mum and dad were punks. Sometimes I used to get their records out and have a listen. The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers, Polly Styrene and X-Ray Spex.”
“Your mum and dad? Jesus, do you have any idea how old that makes me feel?”
“Sorry. There, smooth as a baby’s bum. Now, you just hang on here and I’ll tell Miss Petersen you’re ready when she is.”
Miss Petersen turned out to be a frighteningly efficient and very well-spoken A&E consultant with long red hair tied back with a black velvet scrunchie.
She had just “popped” the anaesthetic in on each side of the gash when a high-pitched scream shattered the relative calm of the room. Moments later, an elderly lady, dressed in a backless hospital gown that revealed a scrawny behind and spindly, blue-veined legs, staggered into the centre of the room, grabbed a meta
l bowl full of surgical instruments and hurled it at the wall before tugging frantically at the gown until it came free of her wrinkled frame.
“They took my Bobby!” she screamed. “He was going to play for Chelsea, he was. Then they took him from me!”
She ran off, crashing into trolleys and tearing down cubicle curtains as she went.
A pair of nurses in green scrubs arrived in A&E, red-faced and panting. One shouted at the old woman.
“Elsie, come here, please. You’re frightening the other patients.”
They advanced on Elsie, who bent to pick up a yellow plastic waste bin marked “SHARPS.”
The consultant, Miss Petersen, put her newly-threaded needle down.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” she muttered.
Turning to a nurse trying to protect a trolley from any further attack by Elsie, she barked out an order.
“Haloperidol. Now!”
The nurse rootled among the glass phials on his trolley, selected one, added a syringe and handed both to the consultant.
“Need a hand?” he asked.
“Yes, please. You grab her while I stick her full of this.”
Together they began approaching the old woman who was keening in distress as she tried to raise the waste bin over her head.
Stella looked around. All eyes – of patients and medics – were on the trio. She slid down off the edge of the bed and took a few quick steps over to the abandoned drugs trolley. Looked down. Picked up a glass vial and a syringe package and pocketed them. She returned to her cubicle just in time to watch as Miss Petersen jabbed her loaded hypodermic into the old woman’s almost fleshless right buttock. With a sigh, Elsie collapsed into the waiting arms of the nurse who had helped corner her. Her watery blue eyes rolled up in their sockets.
“Wow! Proper knockout drops. What did that posh bitch call them?”
Stella didn’t even turn to greet Other Stella. She had a knack of appearing at moments of heightened stress or excitement.
“Haloperidol. I was actually going to see if I could find any ketamine.”
