Hen's Teeth

by Manda Scott

  About the Book

  Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction

  Dr Kellen Stewart knows medicine can be used for good, but it can also be used to do great harm, that’s why she left the profession.

  When her ex-lover dies of a heart attack and shortly after she finds out that her brother, also a medic, died a few weeks before in exactly the same way, Kellen is convinced that they have both been murdered – after all heart attacks don’t come in pairs.

  As Kellen tries to find out who could have killed them she is drawn into a morass of vanishing corpses, drug barons and biomedical secrets – and danger. She desperately needs some answers – but they appear to be as scarce as hen’s teeth.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  Also by Manda Scott

  Copyright

  MANDA SCOTT

  HEN’S TEETH

  For my Family, with Love

  Acknowledgements

  As is ever the case, the list of those who deserve my thanks is far greater than the space allowed. There are those, however, without whom Hen’s Teeth would simply not have made it to publication and this is their place.

  My thanks first and foremost to Jane, the world’s most supportive agent; for unwavering faith, for unending patience and for continual good advice. Thank you, Jane.

  Thanks also to the clinicians, lay staff and final year students at the Cambridge Vet School for giving me the space, time and encouragement to start and, similarly, to David and all at Frontier for the freedom to finish.

  Chloë provided a writer’s perspective and encouragement, Dick kept me in touch with the things that matter in the veterinary world and so kept me sane. Shirley, the inspirational climber, introduced me to, amongst other things, the joys of Welsh limestone and dragged me out on to the rock when ‘word-processor-cramp’ was becoming permanent. Penny and Stat took me out with the dogs and opened up the dawns again, Pat and Pat made their farm a home and a model for the place I would most like to live. Caroline made magic with acupuncture needles, Sue simply wove magic and Päivi came along near the end with love and a magic all her own. To all of these, my thanks.

  Finally, for Debs, Tony, Mike and Robin, my reference points in a changing world, thanks are never enough – but are better than nothing. Thank you.

  One

  It was shortly after midnight when the phone rang.

  I was lying in bed at the time, counting Artex ridges on the ceiling as a creative alternative to sheep and trying not to think too hard about life, the universe or anything.

  Janine, who never lets the vagaries of our relationship interfere with her sleeping patterns, reached across me without waking and ripped the phone cord from the wall. The bedroom sank back into silence and the answering machine in the living room was left to take the call.

  It’s only ever Janine who gets calls in the wee small hours: a random array of journalistic crises that, invariably, will wait until morning. I lay back and listened with a kind of vacant curiosity. At that time of night a human voice, however strange, is better company than an Artex sheep.

  ‘Kellen, are you there? It’s Caroline.’

  What?

  I rolled out of bed, wide awake, jammed the line back into the socket and grabbed the receiver all in one go.

  ‘Hi, Caroline. It’s me. What’s up?’

  ‘Bridget’s dead.’

  Bridget? Mentor, teacher, friend and, a long, long time ago, my lover. The only one who ever counted.

  She can’t be dead.

  Not Bridget.

  ‘Kellen, are you still there?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Could you come over? Please? The police are on their way. I need someone here.’

  Don’t we all?

  ‘Will you come? Please.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  It’s not far out of Glasgow along the Great Western Road over the switchback through Bearsden to Milngavie and out to the Campsies beyond. The last mile or two from the village to the small farmhouse at the foot of the Ben are slow; no street lights and a single-track road make for tentative night driving unless you happen to own a four-wheel-drive Land Rover, which I don’t.

  The police did. Two, and both of them in a great hurry to be at the farmhouse ahead of me. I pulled into a passing place after the second one tried to push me off the road and waited for a moment, listening to the late-night news on the radio.

  A black 7-series BMW nosed along a few minutes behind the others. The green emergency light sat askew on the roof just above the driver’s-side window, flashing dysrhythmically. The local GP.

  I opened my door and stopped him as he tried to squeeze past. Not a popular move. A mid-thirties golfing executive with a sharp suit and an expensive tan glared at me from behind the wheel. Stravinsky conducted The Rite of Spring on the car CD. The window beside me slid open just far enough for me to catch the closing bars. His voice followed, carrying easily in the sudden silence.

  ‘Move.’

  It’s a long time since anyone spoke to me like that.

  I leant down and peered through the gap in the window. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Get out of the way. I’m a doctor. I need to get past.’ He enunciated each word with unnecessary care and then, when I didn’t jump into action, he shoved the car into gear and let it grate forwards until the bumper touched my door.

  I listened to the faint tap of the impact, estimated the size of his insurance compared to the value of my car and did nothing.

  He stopped, cursing. He jabbed one foot on the clutch and gunned the engine with the other.

  ‘I’m a friend of Caroline’s,’ I said carefully. ‘She called me.’

  Wrong password.

  I watched him while he categorized me: designer dyke, opportunist lover, ‘friend’ with sewn-on inverted commas. I could have told him that I was a therapist, but I wasn’t sure it would cut much ice.

  Try again. ‘I was Bridget’s partner in the business,’ I said. ‘I own half the farm.’

  ‘I see.’ Categories dropped. ‘You better come down then. There’s been an accident. Apparently Ms Donnelly’s had a heart attack.’

  ‘You’ve examined the body?’

  He toyed with the clutch again and the car shuddered under my hand. Members of the lay public do not question the given truth.

  I kept my face at the window and smiled my best professional smile. He humoured me.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘but the police were quite specific.’

  Jolly good. Diagnosis by constable.

  ‘Thanks.’ I kicked my car door shut to let him move on. ‘I’ll follow you down.’

  I gave myself five minutes to cool off before I pulled out and eased my tired Escort down the last half-mile to the farm. Time to lose the aftertaste of bile that went with the BMW and to wonder how in heaven’s name a man like that gets to enter the caring profession.

  The guard lights flicked on as I drew in and lit up a yard empty of cars except for Bridget’s old maroon Rover. There were a lot of skid marks though; someone had been playing handbrake turns in the gravel. Outside the gates, two police Land Rovers and a black BMW sat in a tight phalanx, grouped ready for mass escape.

  The back door to the farmhouse hung open. Inside, the k
itchen smelled of wet dog and peat smoke. It always did. The rusty knife of nostalgia twisted in the old reminders of home and I stopped for a moment just inside the door, to take stock and to check for the changes inevitable after four years’ absence.

  The newspapers on the breakfast counter were new. And the walking boots stashed under the bench by the fire. Surprisingly little else.

  Half a dozen empty mugs cluttered the Rayburn. The cats, displaced from their rightful space between the hot plates, lay in a furry pile on the flagged floor. Black limbs mixed with tabby-white and a single four-set of smoke grey. I crouched down and spoke to the king head on top.

  ‘Ashwood, where’s your mother?’

  One amber eye opened briefly and the brow whiskers twitched.

  Not here.

  There were voices somewhere, separated by two or three sets of lath-and-plaster but not difficult to trace. Caroline: low and musical as ever, but with an edge of controlled hysteria audible even through the walls. Two others: one male, one female, both unknown, possibly the law.

  I followed the sound upstairs, negotiating the creaking floorboards with the instinct born of long practice, and paused outside the half-open door to the bedroom.

  Caroline was there, standing stiffly by the bed. A fragile marionette waiting for a new pull on the strings. Odd shadows patched the delicate bones of her face, hiding whatever was there. Her fine, blonde hair turned to mouse in the soft light of the bedside lamp, except at the ends, where it caught in her mouth and she chewed it into dark rats’-tails. A slim gold chain at her throat, half-hidden beneath the open collar of her shirt, rippled to the rate of her pulse. A fast pulse. Too fast for comfort.

  Opposite her, on the other side of the bed, four uniformed police officers performed perfect examples of the elevated ostrich manoeuvre – if you don’t look, then what you can’t see doesn’t exist. Their eyes travelled blind circuits of the room, avoiding the dead woman on the bed, the live one opposite them and, above all, the series of prints and pencil life drawings on the walls. Too many likenesses. Too many boundaries broken.

  The WPC was coping better. She sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes on Caroline’s face and a hand on her arm, forming a bridge from living to dead.

  The dead. Bridget. She lay on the bed, fully dressed. Ready to go and feed the chickens or clean out a loose box. Peaceful. Still. Untouched by the ridiculous tableau around her. I could see her face clearly from the door, the strong cheekbones enhanced by the light and by the odd falling of flesh that happens with death. Her short, dark hair was stuck to one cheek as if she had just turned over in her sleep.

  At her side, his nose on her shoulder, lay Tan, the tricolour border collie we exhumed together from the living death of the RSPCA pound a lifetime or two ago. All he had to do was swipe his tongue across her cheek and wake her up. We could have got rid of the rest then, and sat on the bed and sorted things out. Except he didn’t, so she didn’t and we didn’t. But I was waiting for it all the same.

  Reality returned abruptly in the form of the adenoidal executive sneer of the BMW-driving GP speaking from the other side of the door.

  ‘Ms Leader, a preliminary examination would certainly suggest a cardiac arrest. Your . . . ah . . . “friend” . . .’

  You have to be joking. This is the 1990s, for gods’ sake.

  I stepped in sideways through the doorway.

  ‘“Partner”, doctor,’ I said. ‘She was her partner.’

  Brilliant. I should have been in the theatre. People wait lifetimes to make an entrance like that. Tan was ecstatic. He left the bed at shoulder height, a black and white and gold heat-seeking missile, intent on coating me in dog drool. I crouched down to absorb the onslaught and watched while the six people around the room recovered from the sudden intrusion.

  Caroline, predictably, was first. ‘Kellen!’ Her voice was raw. ‘My God, Kellen! What the hell are you playing at? Tan, leave!’

  The dog let me go and returned to his post.

  I joined his mistress by the side of the bed for a quick hug. ‘Sorry, C. The man’s an idiot. I couldn’t resist.’

  The four representatives of the law developed goldfish eyes and looked hard at spots on the far wall. The doctor stared daggers and his jaw muscles worked overtime, gritting his teeth. The artificial light reduced his tan to an interesting shade of terminal jaundice and the suave flick of dark brown hair flopped less suavely over one brow.

  I produced my best professional smile. ‘Everyone dies of cardiac arrest in the end, doctor. It doesn’t often happen spontaneously. Any ideas what triggered this one?’

  He slicked back his hair and pasted on a lopsided smile of virtuous but nevertheless waning patience. ‘A very large number of things may cause the heart to fail, Ms . . .?’

  ‘Stewart, Kellen Stewart,’ I said and offered him my hand.

  ‘Dr Kellen Stewart,’ added Caroline helpfully, waving a hand to include the group in the general introduction.

  The medic stopped in mid-shake, rearranging his preconceptions again. His eyes narrowed as he tried to work out where the ‘Dr’ came from.

  ‘PhD. Ancient Mongolian architecture,’ I lied. He knew it.

  ‘Edinburgh?’

  ‘Glasgow.’

  ‘The Royal?’

  ‘The Western.’

  It’s a social ritual. Like dogs sniffing under tails. Three things matter when medics meet. Where did you qualify? Where did you do your house job? He was two up on me, but I knew his answer to question three: What do you do now? My ace in the sleeve. He was a GP or he wouldn’t be there. I had no intention at all of letting him know what I did for a living.

  I released his hand and turned to the policewoman on the bed. Somewhere along the line she had taken off her hat and let her hair fall, straight and dark, below her ears. It turned her back into a human being, young but dependable. When I walked in, she was focused on Caroline, sheltering her from the invasion, providing good, basic, unconditional support. By the time I finished bickering with the doctor, she was staring at me with the kind of frozen frown that is either utter distaste or a desperate attempt not to laugh. Impossible to tell which.

  I nodded at her and raised a smile. ‘Is there an obvious cause of death?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘There is no evidence so far to suggest that Dr Kemp’s initial assessment isn’t accurate—’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. She was forty-one, for God’s sake! Nobody dies that young for no reason . . .’

  It’s a long time since I heard Caroline that close to the edge. Or with that much sheer frustration running under the surface. The WPC heard it too. At least, she frowned again and reached out a hand. Then she looked at me and took it back again. ‘We’ll get a post-mortem in the morning, ladies. That’ll tell us what we need to know.’

  We jumped, all three of us. It was the eldest and the most senior of the three police officers behind the bed. A wrinkled, sun-beaten man with peppered grey hair and a gorgeous West Highland accent. He would have looked a great deal more at home hauling in creels in a lobster boat than he did in a uniform in a dead woman’s bedroom.

  He looked at Caroline. ‘Are you the next of kin?’ There was sudden compassion then, as if we’d crossed the line into real life, part of his patch after all.

  ‘Aye. I mean, yes. There’s a will somewhere . . .’ She pushed a hand through her hair and her eyes flicked around the room. ‘Downstairs, I think . . .’

  He shook his head. ‘No need now. It’s a bit late in the day for that.’ He looked at me. ‘You can take care of the lass tonight?’

  I nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Good. There’s an ambulance on its way. It’ll be here any minute now, so you won’t have to stay in the house with—’ He broke off and stared distractedly towards the door, stroking the side of his nose. ‘In the meantime,’ he said, his gaze focusing back on me, ‘perhaps we’d all be better downstairs, where there’s a fire and a kettle.’

&n
bsp; And no bodies littering the furniture. What an amazingly good idea.

  He shepherded us in an orderly flock out of the bedroom and downstairs, to where the kitchen was filled with the warmth of the Rayburn and the sleepy opportunism of the cats.

  The three young constables crowded round the fireplace and played inexpertly with the peat bricks and kindling. Lazy puffs of peat smoke filtered out into the room, thickening the atmosphere and adding to the late-night sense of dreamy unreality.

  The young WPC joined Caroline at the Rayburn. Between them they made enough coffee to keep us all awake for the rest of the week and then began arranging a year’s supply of biscuits neatly on the breakfast tray.

  The doctor removed himself to the far end of the room and hovered by the door, staring at me poisonously through the haze, as if I reminded him of someone he’d rather forget.

  ‘D’you no think the lad needs company?’ The voice at my shoulder glowed with rounded vowels. The weather-worn police inspector stood beside me, a full mug of coffee clasped in either hand.

  I shook my head. ‘If he does,’ I said, ‘it isn’t ours. I think you’ll find he’s leaving.’

  ‘No, no. He’ll not be gone before the ambulance is here. We may as well make ourselves popular.’ He held out his hand. ‘The name’s MacDonald, Stewart MacDonald,’ he said, ‘and our friend over there is David Kemp. Dr David Kemp.’ A pair of hairy brows rose above a set of very balanced, very thoughtful sea-grey eyes. ‘Since he’s a colleague of yours,’ he said, ‘I think we owe it to him to share a drink. How do you suppose he takes his coffee?’

  ‘Neat,’ I said. ‘By intravenous drip. With the serpent blood.’

  ‘You reckon?’ He tilted his head, giving the idea due consideration. ‘I’d have said black, no sugar. Stimulation without the calories.’ He gestured towards the door with one of the mugs. ‘Shall we see who’s right?’

  We both were, oddly enough. The coffee went down like sewage down a sump, but the doctor wasn’t staying to make polite conversation. Or even to say thank you. The dialogue was minimal, monosyllabic and uninspiring, and the BMW was gone in a violent spurt of gravel before anyone else’s coffee was drinkably cool. Not quite the kind of man to inspire confidence in the open-hearted tendencies of the medical profession.