The Road to Hell

by Gillian Galbraith

‘Can you tell us anything about her?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked. He tipped the peak of his baseball cap upwards, looking, for the first time, directly at his questioner.

  ‘Anything, anything at all.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said glancing at his pale, watch-free wrist as if to check the hour, ‘I think I’ve the time, and I could do with a cup of coffee.’

  Twenty pence having changed hands through the kitchen hatch, he sipped at his cup of milky coffee, continuing to draw but, occasionally, deigning to answer their questions.

  ‘Where does Moira live?’ Alice asked.

  ‘No idea. I’ve not seen her for over a month and I’ve only ever met her in Candlemaker Row.’

  ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Just a wee bit . . . a wee, wee bit. When I first met her, maybe three years ago, I’d heard her called “Sister Moira”. She’d just lost her flat in Craigmillar. People liked her, she was kind, took her pals in. She’d share anything she’d got with you, everyone said that. I think she’d been a nun before or something, a religious person, maybe.’

  ‘Does she have a surname?’

  He shook his head. ‘No more than I do. We don’t ask questions of people – unlike you lot.’

  ‘Anything else you can tell us?’

  ‘Aye. She liked her drink, and she’d a nice singing voice. Knew Rabbie Burns’ stuff backwards and all the old hymns. She’d belt out “Jerusalem” at the drop of a hat.’

  Walking down the stairs, with Grace Shelley leading the way, Alice asked her why the ‘art gallery’ was bereft of pictures.

  ‘Goodness knows, it’s not my fault,’ the woman sighed, threading her bead necklace through her fingers. ‘It’s not through lack of trying. I read in the Evening News about an artist having an exhibition and it said he’d been homeless for a while, before he hit the big time. So I phoned him up and he seemed excited about the idea of having a gallery for the homeless, happy to help with it, but he never showed up. Then a woman, a teacher at the Art College who I’d found out about, seemed willing to get involved, but she never turned up either. So I don’t know what’s wrong. It can’t be the gallery itself, because they’ve never even seen it.’

  ‘What about the old chap upstairs?’ DC Cairns chipped in, ‘couldn’t he do something? He seems keen.’

  ‘Did you see his pictures?’ Grace Shelley asked, sounding taken aback by the suggestion.

  ‘No. He was leaning over them too much.’

  ‘Just as well! He only does women, huge, stark-naked women, and I’m not sure that all of our service-users would appreciate that. Besides, we’re supposed to be a Christian organisation . . . not a knocking shop.’

  In the Murder Suite DC Cairns sat back in her chair, took off her gold-rimmed spectacles and rubbed her tired eyes.

  ‘Have you finished your list?’ Alice asked, catching sight of her.

  ‘Yes, I’ve done it.’ She picked up a piece of paper and began reading it out loud. ‘The Sisters of Notre Dame, no. Sisters of Mercy, no. Sacred Heart and the Carmelites, no. Poor Clares, no, Dominicans . . . blah blah. None of them seem to have had anyone called Moira on their books, so to speak, in the last twenty years, or within living memory at least.’

  Alice nodded. ‘She could have changed her name, I suppose, like “Lad” and “Minnie Mouse”. She might have adopted Moira as a name when she went on the streets?’

  ‘Yes, I thought of that, too, but there’s no one who fits her description either. Her hair may not always have been grey, but she’d probably have had that birth-mark forever. Mr Burnett, or Redface or whatever the twins called him, said she sounded Scottish, so I’ve restricted myself to convents in Scotland.’

  ‘Me too, and I’ve done no better than you with my lot, including the Servites, the Benedictines and the Carmelites. Not forgetting, of course, the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, open brackets, Scotland, close brackets, “A worldwide order of queer men and women of all sexualities” as I discovered when I rang them in error.’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t a nun at all, maybe she was a nurse – “Sister” Moira. It’s just as likely,’ mused the constable. ‘Not because she was one, a Sister, I mean, but simply to mark her out as having been a nurse.’

  ‘If she was, what’s the quickest way for us to find out about her?’ Alice asked, yawning, unenthusiastic about starting to pursue a new line of inquiry while the earlier one was still incomplete.

  ‘Easy. The Nursing Register, but it’s unlikely she’ll still be on it.’ The constable hesitated, pondering, and then added, ‘I’ve got it – genius that I am. The Nursing and Midwifery Council will still have her details. They’ll know all about her, if she was ever one of theirs.’

  The emailed reply from the Council was not long in coming. It disclosed that they held details of four Moiras, one currently registered as a midwife and who had qualified in 2007; one who was now a Community Practitioner Nurse Prescriber living in Kent and Medway, and one who was recently deceased. But the remaining one, Moira Fyfe, seemed promising. She had qualified in 1975, been a Charge Nurse up until 2003 and, in that year, had been struck off the Nursing Register. Her last place of work was listed as the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Sciennes Road, Edinburgh.

  9

  With a steaming mug of tea in her hand, Alice spoke to the Clinical Nurse Manager at the Sick Children’s Hospital. The woman’s tired voice hinted at the pressure she was under, and twice she stopped, mid-conversation, to speak sharply to someone in her office.

  ‘Moira Fyfe,’ she said, returning her attention to her call. ‘That’s a while ago, back into the mists of time. I qualified with her, but after that I moved down south. If you want information about her, accurate information rather than just tittle-tattle, I’d speak to one of her old colleagues. There’ll still be a few of them around. Ginny Baird is the one I would try. She’s a Charge Nurse on the Neo-natal ward, and like me, she goes back to before the Flood, but, to the best of my knowledge, she’s spent her working life here.’

  The hospital cafeteria was busy, most of its seats taken and a low buzz of conversation filled the air. As they entered, a trim figure, dressed in a dark blue tunic and matching trousers, came forward to greet them. On a tray she carried a bowl of soup, a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of fresh orange juice.

  ‘Do you mind if I eat while I talk to you? We’re run off our feet at the moment,’ she said, leading them to a table by the ladies’ toilet and not waiting for an answer.

  ‘Anything you can tell us about Moira Fyfe?’ Alice said, getting down to business straight away and drawing up a chair opposite her. DC Cairns, feeling hungry and also determined to waste no time, left the table quickly, returning with two plates of chips, beans and sausages and laying one in front of her colleague. She herself had not eaten since breakfast and had no intention of missing lunch.

  ‘I worked with her for . . . twenty, twenty-five years,’ the Charge Nurse said, dipping her spoon into the mushroom soup and stirring it, deliberately dunking the croutons into the thick liquid.

  ‘What happened in 2003 when she was struck off?’ DC Cairns asked, her mouth full.

  ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ Ginny Baird said, screwing up her eyes and looking hard at the constable.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your face seems familiar. I think I do know that face.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ DC Cairns replied haughtily. ‘Maybe you’ve seen me in the supermarket or somewhere like that? Never mind that now. Could you just tell us about 2003, please?’

  ‘I’m sure I do . . .’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘It was awful – a tragedy. Earlier that year, in the January or the February, Moira’s husband died unexpectedly. They’d no children. Well, no living children at least. They’d had a son but he passed on when he was still a baby.’

  ‘What happened to her husband?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Isn’t that terrible, I was her friend
, but I can’t remember. A heart attack, something like that. Something very quick, very sudden. He was there one minute, gone the next. She got a dreadful shock.’

  ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘After her man’s death she took to the bottle. They were that close, the pair of them. I don’t think she could cope on her own without him.’ The nurse sighed heavily, raising a spoonful of soup to her mouth but continuing to speak. ‘She’d come in late, stinking of drink, and for a time we tried to cover up for her, but things got out of hand. It was dangerous, in a job like this. Eventually, the union stepped in and tried to help her, the occupational health people even got involved, but it was all hopeless. She couldn’t stop herself, she was that lonely.’

  She shook her head and, finally, drank a spoonful of the soup.

  ‘So what happened then?’ Alice persisted.

  ‘It was an accident waiting to happen . . .’

  ‘And?’ DC Cairns said, pushing her spectacles back up the bridge of her nose and looking at the woman earnestly.

  ‘I do know you,’ Ginny Baird said, returning her gaze, studying her features, trying to place the policewoman.

  ‘No, I’m sure you don’t. I must have a rather ordinary face, I think, because this happens to me all the time. So, could you just carry on with the story, please?’

  ‘She was supervising a senior student who was giving a subcutaneous injection of insulin to a twelve-year-old child. A girl, I think. The student got the dosage wrong, trebled it, and Moira didn’t notice. In the old days, that would never have happened. She’d have been onto it in a second, but she was half cut. The girl died and the student gave up nursing for good. It was all Moira’s fault, of course, and she took the blame for it.’

  ‘After she was struck off, what happened to her?’ Alice asked, spearing a chip with her fork.

  ‘Everything fell to pieces as far as I remember.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the parents of the girl sued the hospital and her. They got a lot of money through the courts. With no job, she had no money. She fell behind with her mortgage payments and I think she sofa-surfed, or whatever it’s called, for a while, until her friends could take no more of her. She was with me for a short while, but my husband kicked up after she nearly set the house on fire with a chip pan. The next thing I knew she was living in some kind of hostel.’

  ‘You continued to keep in touch with her, did you?’

  ‘Not really. We kept up for a little bit but . . .’ she hesitated, shaking her head, ‘I don’t think she wanted to see me, or anyone else much, any more. Not from her old life. She kept saying that she was getting treatment, counselling and so on, but if she was, it didn’t seem to be working. I don’t think there was a day she didn’t think about that wee girl.’

  ‘When did you last hear from her?’

  ‘In 2005 or 6. A while ago now. It was embarrassing. She asked me for money. She was living in some kind of supported flat, somewhere in Niddrie or Craigmillar, that sort of area. Niddrie Drive, Niddrie Avenue, maybe, somewhere or other down there. She turned up here, at work. She was pretty far gone, stinking of alcohol, and she had a pal with her, a Welsh bloke she called Taff. They were both talking loudly, laughing too much, but he had an edge about him. To be quite honest, he scared me. I gave her a tenner, just to get rid of them, and I’ve not seen her since.’

  ‘Is this her, the woman you’ve been talking about?’ Alice said, taking a photograph out of its brown envelope. It had “Mortuary” stamped on the back of it.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ the woman said, staring at the stark black-and-white image and returning her sandwich, untouched, to its plate.

  ‘It is Moira Fyfe, isn’t it?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. It’s her all right, but she looks – old, bloody awful. She’s only about my age, you know. I’ve never seen her with grey hair, but yes, it’s her all right. Poor thing, she looks as if she’s been battered.’

  As they were leaving through the canteen swing doors, Alice asked the constable whether she had ever worked in the hospital.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replied airily.

  ‘So Mrs Baird probably did recognise you?’

  ‘I certainly recognised her, but I wasn’t letting on. I had my hair dyed black then, when I was a student, so that may have confused her. I couldn’t let her know though, could I? I couldn’t help her to recognise me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ the young constable said, striding onwards, ‘I’d have no authority left, would I? Don’t forget, she used to tell me what to do – in another life – but now it’s me asking her the questions and,’ she giggled at the thought, ‘she’s the one who’s got to answer.’

  With the woman’s full name it proved easy. A few well-placed calls from the hospital car park established that Moira Fyfe had been living at a hostel in Bread Street immediately before she died.

  Her room there, number 14, was small and windowless, more like a monk’s cell than a bedroom. The worn trainers of its current occupant lay at the end of the narrow bed, and a dark blue, pinstriped jacket with elbow patches hung from a coat-hanger on the back of the only chair. On a wooden table lay a cigarette lighter and a broken plastic razor.

  ‘This was her room?’ Alice asked, looking round and thinking how austere it seemed despite still being occupied. The air stank of Dettol. The manager, Jack Imrie, a tall, thin man with intense, deep-set eyes and a gold stud in one nostril, nodded his head but said nothing. The owner of the jacket stood behind him in the open doorway, and he, too, nodded as if the question had been addressed to him.

  ‘Have you still got her stuff?’

  ‘We will have it. We keep it for about 28 days. It’ll probably be in the storeroom.’

  ‘Can we see it?’

  ‘No problem, I’ll take you there,’ the manager answered, gesturing to the resident that he could return to his room and then closing the door quietly behind him.

  Moira Fyfe’s entire worldly possessions fitted in to a single, scuffed holdall. A couple of changes of clothes, a pair of trainers, a few toiletries, a coloured photograph of a bearded man holding a baby and a worn, bedraggled, red toy elephant with one button-eye missing.

  ‘That’s it?’ DC Cairns said, in a tone of disbelief.

  ‘She’s got more than some,’ the manager replied, bundling her things back into the bag and then searching in a cupboard for the book they would have to sign to take them away.

  ‘When you last saw her, on the night of the 13th of January, how did she seem?’ Alice asked.

  ‘She was much as usual. Maybe a wee bit more crabby. After she got back from A&E she calmed down and went off to bed. I didn’t see her the next morning. My shift was over.’

  He pointed to the line on the form where the signature was to be written.

  ‘Why did she have go to A&E?’ Alice asked handing the biro back to him.

  ‘There was a scuffle between her and another woman. Nothing much, but she fell over and complained afterwards that she felt dizzy. Our procedures leave nothing to chance, so one of the staff went with her in the ambulance to the Infirmary. They didn’t keep her in or anything, but even then they didn’t get back until after midnight.’

  ‘Who’s her GP?’

  ‘She went to the one-stop shop near the St James’ Centre. She’s one of Susan Shaw’s patients.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report her missing?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, closing the book with a snap, ‘that’s not the way it works, is it? Our service-users come and go as they please, free as birds, with or without their things. We’d never be off the phone to you otherwise, and, mostly, wasting your time.’

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ a female voice inquired. A little woman with sparse, frizzy black hair and the pencilled-on arched eyebrows of an aged chanteuse had entered the storeroom. She was looking intently at the two police officers as if they were unauthorised intruders.

  ‘It’s
OK, Maggie,’ the man said, going over towards her, ‘they’re with me.’

  ‘Maybe they are, Mr Imrie,’ she said hotly, ‘but I’m supposed to be in charge of the store. Not you. No one should be in here without my say-so.’

  ‘Have you checked that out?’ she inquired of Alice, touching the sleeve of the navy jacket she had on and adding, ‘I happen to know that one of our other residents had her hopes set on it.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Alice replied, ‘but I don’t need to – you see, it’s mine.’

  ‘Not until I sign it out, it isn’t, young lady,’ the woman corrected her, looking down at the policewoman’s feet and adding, ‘I see you’ve not helped yourself to any of our new shoes, yet, at least.’

  ‘Well done, Alice,’ Elaine Bell said, taking a seat on the edge of her sergeant’s desk. She crossed her arms and looked out of the window, staring across at Arthur’s Seat and the dark clouds gathering around the summit.

  ‘I’m getting her records from Doctor Shaw, and once we’ve got them, Professor McConnachie can take a look at them, see what he makes of them.’

  ‘Fine. So, in summary . . .’

  ‘In summary, her name was Moira Ellen Fyfe and she was aged 59. Her last known address was at the Friends of Galilee place on Bread Street.’

  ‘She’s a down-and-out,’ DC Cairns added, uninvited, from the far end of the room, leaving her seat and coming to stand beside her colleague.

  ‘Forensics haven’t reported yet, so we still don’t know if she was sexually assaulted,’ Alice continued, ‘but when she was discovered she was partially undressed. No possessions were found near her, and a pair who travelled on the bus with her reported that she was drunk before she got off the bus. The Prof told us she was an alcoholic. She was covered in scratches, particularly on her hands and arms, as if she had been running from somebody . . . trying to escape from somebody.’

  ‘So, it’s still a murder hunt?’

  ‘Of course it is, she’d been practically stripped, Ma’am!’ DC Cairns blurted out, shocked that there could be any doubt about the matter.