Scattered Remains (Nathan Hawk Mystery)

by Douglas Watkinson

  -14-

  I don't remember the last time I was in the women’s fashion section of a department store but it was probably with Maggie, watching her try on 20 outfits and then settle for the one that had first caught her eye. I’m told it was a privilege to have been a bystander at this ritual. Today my task was a macabre necessity.

  As we’d sat in the back of the ambulance, screeching through London streets on our way to University College Hospital with George Corrigan flat on his back and hooked up to an octopus of live-saving equipment, Laura had looked across at me and said, “You were right. I’d forgotten the real reason we called on Julien Raphael.”

  I told her there was no need to apologise. She wasn’t apologising, she said as sharply as you can in front of a dying man.

  “Did Raphael come out when the shot was fired?” she asked. “The rest of London seemed to.”

  “He stayed indoors. Diplomatic.”

  She looked down at herself. Her blue, knock-’em-dead outfit was turning purple, wet with more blood than it seemed Corrigan might have had in his veins to begin with. Her hands and arms were covered with it as well, her face streaked and spattered.

  “You’ll have to go to Debenhams for me. I can’t walk around like this all day.”

  “Not your colour,” I muttered feebly.

  “I’ll give you a list. Sizes. You choose the colour.”

  I nodded at Corrigan. “Will he be alright?”

  “I don't know.”

  “I want to see Jaikie.”

  I phoned him immediately and left a message, telling him that our plans had changed. He was to meet me in Debenhams, Oxford Street as soon as possible. Ladieswear.

  A few seconds later the ambulance braked, the doors were yanked open and Corrigan was handed over to people who save incoming lives on a daily basis and know the difference between a pain in the neck and a bullet in the guts. We fell back as a young staff nurse joined us and ran alongside the trolley taking in information from the paramedics, whom she then dismissed. She told the rest of us - Laura, me, police - to wait and pointed at a row of chairs. And as doors clattered open and closed behind Corrigan, I had an uneasy feeling that it was the last I’d see of him…

  “He needs a heart surgeon,” I said to Laura, as if I knew what I was talking about. She patted my arm as if I didn’t. And probably in response to the gawping sprained ankles and sore thumbs all around, she asked a passing orderly if she could have a patients’ gown to change into. She took it behind a curtain and emerged five minutes later in the guise of one of the customers, her hands, arms and face washed, blood-soaked clothes in a Waitrose carrier bag.

  One of the young coppers wanted to know if now would be a good time to ask what had happened. Laura told him it wouldn’t be and took pencil and paper from her handbag. She’d dropped it in the gutter before going to work on Corrigan but even so the spurting blood had reached it. Would she wipe it off and carry on using the bag, I wondered? Or would she chuck it, use the event as an excuse to buy a new one? For me it would’ve depended on whether he lived or died.

  Meantime, here I was in Debenhams, about to buy a dress. I’d attracted the attention of a standardly beautiful floor walker who inevitably came over and asked if she could help me. It didn’t seem right to tell her that my friend had been covered in the blood of a man who’d been shot in Bloomsbury Square, so I paraphrased it to, “Do you have this in a quieter colour?”

  I pointed at a mannequin in a noisily red dress.

  “As a matter of fact we do, sir. A subdued but very elegant green.”

  “I’d like underwear to go with it - bra, pants, tights.”

  I really must find out why most men of 54 have difficulty talking to women half their age about underwear. Mind you, I’m not sure this girl was fully at ease with the conversation either, unsure perhaps of who the clothes were meant for.

  “What size are we talking about, sir?” she said lightly.

  I handed her the piece of paper Laura had given me and she smiled. The dress, at size 12, clearly wasn’t for me. I’m at least an 18.

  “If you’d care to wait by the checkout, sir, I’ll bring the garments over for you to see.”

  I thanked her and loitered by the till. Once I’d approved the clothes, in the same self-conscious manner that I taste a bottle of wine in a restaurant, an assistant wrapped them and I paid. And at that point the surrealism of the occasion was compounded as the star of All Good Men and True crested the escalator and walked over to me.

  “Is he dead?” he asked anxiously.

  The film star, the frock and the frilly underwear, it might have been called. We forbore to explain anything to those around us and hurried from the store, back to UCH.

  I thought she looked pretty good in the dress. We all thought so, even Laura, and then she reminded us that it wasn’t a fashion parade but the serious business of waiting to hear if a friend was going to pull through. We sat in the surgical waiting area like the front row of a Sunday congregation, eyes front, contemplating miracles. Corrigan was in operating theatre two, having his heart started, stopped and started again, presumably to some purpose. Police were everywhere and I heard on the fringe of their chat that word was abroad of an SOU sergeant being gunned down in the street. It sounded as if a Chicago-style shootout had taken place in good old Bloomsbury Square with George Corrigan the intended target. Neither was true. It had been a single shot and it hadn’t been aimed at him.

  It was another two hours before a po-fagged cardio surgeon emerged from the operating theatre, looked round and beckoned Laura. She went over and they broke into medi-speak and, not for the first time since Patrick Scott had come into my life, I felt utterly superfluous. A month ago Jaikie had had mock acid thrown at him and I’d frozen. Laura had stepped in. Three hours ago she’d done so again, to stop the blood pumping out of George Corrigan. If I didn’t know myself better I’d say I was… concerned that all the presence of mind, all the effective action in this case, was being shown by a 50-year-old lady doctor.

  The surgeon finished his summary of the work he and his team had done. His body language, full of helpless shrugs and weary sighs, said that Corrigan’s chances were now in the lap of the Gods and I considered that to be typical of a man covering his back. I wanted his opinion, a percentage figure, on how likely Corrigan was to make it. I went over and put it to him but he scissored my question away.

  “Dr Peterson’ll give you the lay version. Suffice to say that your friend is a very lucky man.”

  The words were spoken in a tone of near resentment, as if critical of the man who had so recklessly gambled with his own life as to be shot in the guts and get away with it. Before I could respond, Jaikie was beside me, hand on my arm, steering me towards moderation. He gave the surgeon a reduced version of his smile and thanked him. I watched the man stagger away.

  “Why do surgeons think they’re God Almighty?” I asked quietly. Another question ignored.

  “Nathan, the bullet struck him right here,” Laura said, pointing with bunched fingers just above her own navel. “And the reason he’s lucky is that it hit the buckle of his belt first, which not only slowed it down but altered its direction. Upwards. It punctured his diaphragm, kept going, missed every vein and artery that would have … bled him out, as the Americans so vulgarly put it. Nevertheless it’s penetrated his left lung. Not enough to collapse it. The bullet ended up lodged somewhere between his left atrium and the superior lingula… left lung.”

  “Where is it now?” Jaikie asked.

  “Still inside him.”

  Again I reacted as if I knew what was best for Corrigan, far better than any good-looking surgeon. I guess it comes from years of needing to take control of a situation immediately or forever remain peripheral to it.

  Evidently, I made a move to follow the surgeon and have it out with him but Laura said, loud enough to stop me, “More deaths occur from surgeons poking around for objects when they should have left well alone, at
least until his other organs repaired.”

  “What about all the blood he lost?” Jaikie asked.

  “Ink spilled on the floor, always seems twice the amount that was in the bottle.” She laughed. “Hark at me, talking as if your generation uses fountain pens. The main problem wasn’t to stop blood escaping but to prevent air entering. Hence the polythene cover to the plans. I knew they’d come in useful one day.”

  Hospital canteens belong to that soulless family of eating places, along with railway buffets and motorway service stations, which offer food and drink while ensuring that whoever buys the stuff won’t hang around for longer than it takes to swallow it. I shared this thought with Laura and Jaikie, adding that this particular carrot cake, baked in China, no doubt, had never seen a root vegetable in its life.

  “Dad, you should be rejoicing,” said Jaikie. “The guy is still alive.”

  I looked at him across the top of my plastic cup as I blew on the tea to warm it. He had a point. Complaining was my watered down version of kicking the cat. I’d already tried to wind up the surgeon and failed, the canteen tea and cake showed every sign of being just as unresponsive, which left me with Laura and Jaikie. If they weren’t careful they’d take the full brunt of my guilt trip. That’s what it was, common or garden guilt. I won’t say that I’d led Corrigan into this mess, but could I have done more to forewarn him? If I’d taken Jaikie’s advice and told him, first thing in the morning, that we were heading into London, there was no need to follow us… I would probably be dead.

  “You do know what happened out there, don’t you?” I said.

  “Somebody jumped out of the bushes, ran up to George and shot him,” said Jaikie.

  “No, you bloody fool…” I caught myself and modified my reaction. “No, somebody jumped out of the bushes and ran up to me. George put himself between us.”

  The eyes widened with fear and excitement. “You mean he took a bullet for you?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake…”

  If hospital canteens have any merit it’s their anonymity. Nobody hears when you raise your voice, at least to a certain level, and nobody really cares if you’re a film star. Essentially you’re just another number, waiting in line. Jaikie was already apologising for his unguarded lapse into Hollywood and I was breathing deeply. Laura was merely being horrified at the substance of what I’d said.

  “You mean someone tried to kill you?”

  “Yes, and what’s more I recognised him. From the premier of All Good Men and True. On that occasion he was better dressed, wearing a bog standard dinner jacket, and threw mock acid in my son’s face. Jealous nutter or serious player? I say the latter. And he just upped his game.”

  It was eight o’clock the same evening when we heard that Sergeant Corrigan was now in the recovery suite and had come round from the anaesthetic, presumably the one he’d been given when they anchored the bullet to an unsuspecting internal organ. The nurse who delivered the news wasn’t prepared to say if he was going to live, but at the same time she was adamant that he wasn’t going to die. All eventualities covered then, I said, trying to pull her off the fence. At Laura’s suggestion we took what the nurse had said as good news and I told her it was time that she and Jaikie headed for home. I wanted to stay on, at least until I could look Corrigan in the eye and thank him for saving my life. As I rehearsed in my head the various ways of putting it, they all seemed insufficient, insulting, insincere, but I could hardly leave it unsaid.

  The time line for the next 12 hours was punctuated by negatives, apart from when Jaikie phoned to say they’d arrived home safely. I was in a pub at the time, helping myself to think straight, ice all the way to the brim.

  Back at UCH the canteen closed at ten and I was moved on by a black bear of a security guard. We met again, an hour later, when he found me asleep in a corner of the X-Ray Department’s waiting area. I was being worked around by a squad of cleaners, one of whom must have summoned him. His attitude was hostile. I tried to turn him but he wouldn’t shift. He had rules to follow, he said, and one of them was to throw people like me out by midnight. I moved on to Neuroscience and nodded off beneath a poster of a schizophrenic who was telling me that I shouldn’t be afraid of her. The next thing I remember was the security guard, hand on my shoulder, saying, “I told you not to come back. Why have you come back?”

  I could hardly blame him. I was feeling and no doubt looking pretty rough by then: I certainly needed a shave, the scotch was probably still on my breath and the savaged sleeve of a well-worn leather jacket wasn’t helping. I opted for the line of least resistance and on the way to the main entrance the guard allowed his true self a moment’s free rein, paused at a cupboard and took out a blanket and handed it to me. He thought I was a down and out. That was a first for me, but to have disabused him would have been unmannerly…

  Outside on the street it was cold and as I tried to settle in the doorway of one of London University’s many superfluous buildings, it occurred to me that I was probably in the throes of some psychological reckoning. Not too deep down, by allowing myself to be removed from the hospital like some pathetic old drunk, I was trying to apologise for being alive while Corrigan’s chances were still 50-50. Nearer the surface I was probably in shock, which was why the blanket came in handy, but in spite of it I slept as badly as I’d expected to, propped in a sitting position hard up against some fancy brickwork.

  It’s easy to forget, in the comfort of a reasonable pension and a decent place to live, just how debilitating rough living can be and my own refresher course on the subject was cut short at 5.30 in the morning when a boiler, which must have been the size of an ocean liner’s, burst into life in the basement across the street and started chucking out steam and carbon monoxide in equal measures. I stretched myself into human form, folded the blanket, and set off back to UCH.

  Hospital security is a strange animal. In some places you can’t pass the barrier without a full scale inquisition, others you could jog round naked without anyone batting an eyelid. I thought UCH would fall somewhere in the middle, so I entered via A and E, hoping I’d be recognised from the previous day, which would give me credibility. It was a smart move and as I strode into the waiting area, past the early morning cyclist knocked off his bike by a taxi, a scalded face from a breakfast kettle and a laid out drunk from the previous night, I spotted the staff nurse who had first received Corrigan. I paused, hoping to ease my way by thanking her for what she’d done yesterday but before I could speak she said,“How is he?”

  “Just going up to see. How do I get to the Recovery Suite?”

  She gave me directions, I gave her the blanket. She didn’t question it, simply threw it into a passing laundry trolley and called out for the next casualty.

  When I reached the Recovery Suite I was halted like a car at a crossroads by a uniformed police officer of 12. Standing squarely in front of me, hand raised, he planned on making sure that I hadn’t come to finish the job Bog Standard had started.

  “Go and ask Sergeant Corrigan if he’ll see me,” I said immediately.

  “Who are you?”

  “Hawk. I’m not good this early.”

  “Will he know you?”

  “Take a good look, describe me to him.”

  He stared at me and, recognising a more fragile state of mind than he was prepared to deal with, said, “Wait there.”

  He returned two or three minutes later and beckoned me to follow him. As we turned a corner the sister-in-charge came out of her office and tagged along. We paused at the window of Corrigan’s room and through the morning gloom I could see him, propped up with pillows, a drip feeding into his left arm. For a man who’d been shot less than 24 hours ago he looked pretty good, but then he had the advantage over me of a decent night’s sleep. The young copper tapped on the window, Corrigan focussed, then nodded to reassure his protector that I was friend not foe. And at that point the sister came into her own. She told me I had fifteen minutes. No more.

/>   I wasn’t the only visitor Corrigan had. In a low, hammock-like chair sat a woman in her early 60s and it was obvious from the general puffiness of her face, to say nothing of the tissues screwed up and dropped in the bin beside her, that she’d been crying. She’d probably slept no better than I had, but she was fully awake now and occupied, sewing the top button back onto Corrigan’s check shirt.

  “My mum,” he said quietly. “She brought some clean clothes from home.”

  I went over to her, stooped and offered her my hand. Her own was cold and I instinctively took it in both of mine with a sympathetic wince. It was too forward a gesture. She withdrew her hand and went back to the button.

  “I’ve got 15 minutes,” I said to her son.

  “During which time keep your mouth shut and listen.” He beckoned me to the bedside. “Jesus, you look like shit.”

  “You look better than you deserve to.” I pulled out a padded bench from beneath the bed and sat down. “What am I listening to? More abuse?”

  He lowered his voice to exclude his mother. “This Patrick Scott business has bothered me ever since… well, ever since I met you. When it came down to it, I didn’t really think you’d be wasting your time if there was nothing to it.”

  “You told me it was out of my league.”

  “Yes, well, you must have got close to something or why else would they want to shut you up?”

  He winced with pain, tried to relax and took a few shallow breaths. His mother came to the bed and elbowed me aside, asking him what he needed.

  “Mum, I’m fine. This is business, things that need sorting out, just Mr Hawk and me.”

  With an accusatory glance in my direction, she returned to her chair and picked up the needle and thread.