by Manda Scott
The Inspector let out the breath he had been holding and nodded to himself.
‘Are you going to take fingerprints?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Not if we don’t have to. You’d not believe the mess it makes. Why?’ He turned to look at me. ‘Do you think I should?’
Depends.
I shrugged. ‘You have a practising GP who will tell you it’s a waste of time.’ I smiled to let him see I wasn’t joking and was surprised to see a momentary deepening of the crow’s feet.
‘You don’t trust our bright young friend?’
‘I don’t trust anyone who drives a BMW on an NHS salary.’
‘Oh, it’s that, is it?’ His eyes widened in mocking discovery. ‘And there I was thinking it was a touch of professional jealousy.’ He turned to gaze for a moment through the window, thinking. ‘We’d best wait till we’ve had the post-mortem,’ he said, turning back. ‘If there’s anything out of the ordinary, I’ll come back with the powder and the brushes and we’ll see how Ms Leader likes her home done all in white.’
We finished on the bedroom without turning up anything worth telling and after that it was a matter of minutes to take the pair of them back downstairs and lead them round the dusty, unused living room at the front of the house and then the drawing room at the back.
Neither held anything of interest and they departed a short while later. I saw them both out to their car, holding the driver’s door open for MacDonald.
‘Let me know if there’s anything else you need, won’t you?’
‘Oh, we’ll be in touch. Don’t you worry. These things are never as simple as they might seem.’ He swung up into the cab, slamming the door behind him. Then he leant out of the window to give me a paternal pat on the shoulder and, very delicately, to drop the real reason for the visit.
‘Chief Inspector Laidlaw sends his best regards,’ he said and winked.
The Land Rover swung round me in a wide arc and left the yard, tooting cheerily as it passed the gates.
I forgot to wave.
Whatever Chief Inspector Laidlaw might have sent, I doubt that his best regard was anything to do with it. Last time I saw him he promised that if we ever met again, he’d have me behind bars before I could blink and would see to it personally that my lawyer was not only bent but incompetent.
Laidlaw’s not fond of women at the best of times, especially not those with investigative pretensions, and he loathes medics with a terrifying passion. It would, I felt, have been a great pity if Inspector MacDonald turned out to be cast from the same mould as his Glaswegian colleague.
Basic, dreary management took up the rest of the day. All the minutiae that follow death in a bureaucratic society.
The solicitors were effusive in their condolences and confirmed in passing that I was still the sole executor of the will. The girl in the Herald office took the death notice for publication later in the week with succinct efficiency. Friends and distant relatives took the news badly, stolidly or dispassionately depending on temperament and the closeness of the relationship.
After the relatives came the riders. I trawled through the appointments book and found a long, detailed list in Bridget’s angular scrawl of everyone who had booked a ride in the next fortnight with home and business contact numbers. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t love Bridget like a sibling and want to spend the best part of an hour conducting their own personal obituary for my benefit. Horse people are like that.
I thought I had been through all this for the last time when Mother died. Once in a while, I thought I might have to do it for Lee and occasionally that she might have to do it for me. I had never expected to do it for Bride. I didn’t promise Caroline that I’d do it either, but, of the pair of us, I have the most practice. All through the intertwining threads of our lives, it’s been me who’s dealt with the formalities.
It was a very long afternoon.
Caroline came and went throughout the day, regaining stability in the routines of horse care and with it a sense of continuity. She finally flopped into a chair as I was getting ready to go and see Lee.
‘Want to come?’ I asked. ‘The Man does a wonderful haggis.’
‘Me? Go and see Lee Adams?’ She raised her brows to an improbable height. ‘No thanks, Kells. She’s not my type and you know it.’ She helped herself to a pizza from the freezer and began to stoke up the Rayburn. ‘And even if she was, I’m not up to socializing yet.’
‘Let me put this another way,’ I said, taking my jacket off and hanging it back on the door hook. ‘I don’t think you should stay in the house on your own. It isn’t safe.’
‘Crap,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s a hell of a sight safer here than Byres Road on a Friday night. Anyway, I’ve got Tan. He’s a brilliant guard dog.’
The collie grinned happily at the sound of his name and stood up with his forefeet on the counter to inspect the pizza. He looked about as dangerous as the average muppet.
I picked up the phone, shaking my head. ‘It’s not a joke, C. If you don’t want to come into town, I’ll call Lee and get her to come out here.’
Caroline took the receiver out of my hand and put it back on the hook.
‘No way.’ She smiled gently and handed me back my jacket. ‘I’m a grown woman, Kellen. I can cope for a whole hour, even two, on my own, so you can stop being patronizing. Go see your crazy girlfriend. I’ll make the spare bed up for you if I’ve crashed out by the time you get back.’
Patronizing? Me? I’m a therapist, for God’s sake. This woman knows all the fast routes to my sensibilities.
I picked the car keys off the table. ‘OK. Leave the back-door key under the water bucket. I’ll probably be late.’
I left the car in a side street and found the back stairs to the Man, avoiding the queue for the cinema and the pair exchanging goods for cash in the service entrance of the restaurant next door. In the old days, the girls worked off their jocks in the recesses of the doorways. Now all the good sites are taken up by the guys trading crack and the girls work the multistorey car park over the supermarket at the top of the road. It keeps the residents on their toes.
The Man in the Moon on Byres Road has seen generations of students through their undergraduate years and, for those who stay on in Glasgow, the familiar mix of city-trend and oak-beam-trad provides a steady support against the terrors of the real world.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Man rode the crest of a trend, attracting the cream of the cultural elite, spicing them with a sprinkling of the city’s more innovative politicians and adding that extra flavour of spaced-out student that is unique to Byres Road. For a while it was somewhere special and, in its own way, it made a genuine contribution to the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign and added flavour to the European City of Culture.
Now, with all the media hype out of the way, the cognoscenti have melted off to somewhere new and the Man has settled, with the rest of the city, into the muddled anonymity of recession, serving the same mixture of students and overpaid West End professionals that it always did.
And it still serves the best vegetarian haggis anywhere in the world.
Lee was there ahead of me, at one of the small rough-pine tables on the balcony overlooking the main bar. As a choice of seating it is noisy and exposed, but it gives a clear view of both doors and the floor area and it’s almost impossible to eavesdrop unless the candles are bugged, which I doubt.
Adams ages with more grace than the rest of us. If I looked hard I would say her face showed a slight hardening of the edges; a sharpening of the cheekbones perhaps to show that life was beginning to take its toll. Her fine, black hair was shorter than it used to be when we were students, better shaped to frame the gamine features, and, in the top light from the wall lamp, a sparkle of silver threads visibly through the black. Thirty-five is not a bad age to begin going grey and, given her lifestyle, it’s long overdue.
Lee Adams is not crazy, wh
atever Caroline Leader might think. She’s different admittedly, but then she has good reason to be. She is a medic and a pathologist and no one gets through to their finals, still less their FRCPath exams, without seriously disrupting their perspective on the sanctity of life and the injustice of death. We all rewrite the rule book, one way or another; Lee is just a little less compromising than most, that’s all.
Having said that, Lee was undoubtedly unique before she ever went into medical school. She had the kind of upbringing that made it inevitable.
She was born Elizabeth Katheryn Adams, shortly after midnight one hogmanay in the Inverness General Hospital, the product of an island lass and an unnamed father. Her mother did a runner on the first train south after the holiday, leaving the infant Lee in the care of assorted grandmothers and ageing great-aunts, who took her back home to the islands and devoted themselves to her upbringing.
The Scottish Hebrides are inhabited by a divided population. At any one time, half the community lives in thrall to a peculiarly fascist brand of Presbyterian fundamentalism, while the other half practises a form of rural superstition that has survived since before the Christians ever landed. Both halves speak Gaelic as the first language and neither is unduly fond of southerners.
From the sound of things, Lee’s mentors were not of the Christian persuasion and her early education was fairly unique, bearing only a passing resemblance to the national curriculum in any of its multiple incarnations. Then, as she grew up and it became apparent that she needed more formal schooling, the grandmothers sent her south to live with Mhaire Culloch in Glasgow.
In a world of mad old women, Mhaire is maddest of them all. Four years in her company would change anyone’s view of the world, whatever their background. Lee couldn’t have come out of it normal, even if she’d wanted to.
Mad Mhaire’s central tenet of life says that rules are there to be broken. She breaks them with gleeful impunity and she taught Lee to do the same. But she also sent her to one of the best schools in the city; one where she had the many and varied rough edges polished rather than battered into shape and where, most importantly, they made sure that the lass got good enough ‘O’ grades and Highers to get her into medical school, which was where she wanted to go.
I met Lee the evening before the start of full term in the corridor of the Queen Margaret Hall of Residence. She was standing alone, waiting for the lift, a slight, dark figure with wild eyes and a wilder smile. Her voice was low and there were odd accents on the vowels that made me think she was Norwegian and a novelty to be explored.
My father helped to carry her bags into the lift and, by the time we reached the third floor, we knew that we had been allocated adjacent rooms, that we were both there to study medicine, that her school in Glasgow had once beaten my school in Helensburgh at hockey and that she had been rock-climbing in the same mountain range where I had done my Duke of Edinburgh silver medal. They were the kind of facts that seemed important at the time.
In the limbo between the old life left behind and the new one starting, social barriers tend to drop and friendships form overnight, built out of trivial coincidences. We sat together at dinner that night because by then a known face, even tenuously known, was better than yet another new one and by the end of the evening, we found that we had damn all else in common but that we enjoyed each other’s company all the same. The next morning, we walked into the university together and the pattern was set. During the course of the first term, we developed tactics for sharing lecture notes and when the practical classes started, it was natural to pair up for those as well.
There must have been a point in early prehistory when it was possible to go through a medical training as a solitary individual, but as time has piled practical module on seminar on tutorial, it has become almost mandatory to take a team approach. The Adams/Stewart partnership worked better than most because we started early and we learned to delegate and, by the end, because we learned to think for each other. In the beginning, though, we came from quite opposite ends of a very broad spectrum.
In the early days, I was conventional in my nonconformity. A not-quite-head-girl, oozing street cred from every pore and heir to a set of wildly radical political views; the direct inverse of everything my parents believed in. I flaunted my green-socialist-feminism from the safety of my middle-class, Presbyterian background and thought I was being original. I hinted darkly at deviant sexuality without ever having set a toe over the line and watched my parents wither. In the hallowed halls of my single-sex, fee-paying school, I was labelled a rebel and I believed it.
In Lee, I met the real thing. Lee took risks because they were there to be taken. She had nothing to lose, no family values to overturn and nobody else’s visions to fulfil. Instead, she had a rock-solid sense of identity, a restless, questing brain and a merciless sense of satire.
The student ego is a fragile beast and easily wounded. In our first year of medical school, I watched Lee stalk, cat-like, amongst the malleable, fledgeling identities of our colleagues, and there were very few who didn’t catch the back end of a pensive, island stare and hate her for it. She never said anything out loud – the expensive private school had taught her the rudimentary principles of tact – but she never learned to turn her gaze in time. The general mass of the year dealt with her by pretending she didn’t exist and she, in her turn, continued to observe and, apparently, to judge.
On the whole, I was immune. Not because I didn’t catch her looking at me as if I’d finally lost my marbles on regular occasions, but because I knew her well enough to ignore the looks, to tell her to bugger off when the comments cut too close to the bone and to argue my corner if I had to. We developed a mutual respect that slid, over the three years spent together on the third floor of Queen Margaret Hall, into a solid friendship.
At the end of our third year, a flat became vacant on the far end of Otago Street. The paint was peeling off the walls, there were cockroaches breeding in the kitchen and on a Saturday night the rugby songs floated down from the men’s Union at the top of the hill, but it was no worse than any other student accommodation and it was within walking distance of the teaching hospital, which made it a prize worth having. I went to look at it one Friday afternoon when I should have been at a microbiology practical class and paid the deposit on the spot. By the end of the summer vacation, we had moved in, cleared the insect population and repainted every vertical surface in politically acceptable shades of lavender.
Lee turned out to know a lot of folk I had never met before. In the space of the next two years, she introduced me to a range of people I would never have met otherwise, except possibly on a stretcher in casualty, or drying out in the drink can.
On a regular basis, we were host to the Buddhist evenings and the Druidic evenings and the astrologer’s meetings and once in a while, when the planning went awry, to all three at once, which made life fairly amusing.
In between we had the endless stream of visitors from the islands and Mhaire’s drop-out friends who dropped in for a cup of coffee and a chat about the day’s racing form. I learned to listen, to keep my mouth shut and to overcome my inherent Presbyterian fear of gambling for long enough to recognize a good tip when we heard one and to let her risk the housekeeping on something with decently long odds. We didn’t always win but we came out on top overall by the end of the course.
Through it all was the single driving force of medical school – the long-distance obstacle course where the only way to escape is to fail. Whatever else we did, we were not going to risk that. We read books, we went to lectures and we attended tutorials. We put on our white coats, went into the wards and talked to patients. We put on our green cotton pyjamas, went into theatre and stared in mute admiration while the surgeons performed daily miracles of human carpentry and plumbing. We spent hours in the library staring at textbooks and we sat the exams – a long, endless stream of exams.
And we passed. Miraculous though it always seemed, we passed everything
, first time, and were allowed to move on up the ladder to greater and better things. At graduation, we held a five-day party in the flat – one day for each year of the course – and the day afterwards we moved in, together, to our junior house jobs at the Western.
Internships are hell on earth, all of them. Perfectly sane adult human beings have nightmares about their houseman’s year the way the rest of the population have recurrent dreams of exams. Amnesty International regularly cites sleep deprivation amongst the tortures for which governments are censured. In spite of that, most of the hospitals of the Western world are staffed by junior doctors who stave off sleep for twelve months with a frantic cocktail of caffeine, adrenalin and nicotine.
Neither of us smoke and Lee doesn’t touch caffeine, tannin or alcohol, which put us at a significant disadvantage when it came to coping with the late-night sense-of-humour failures. If the partnership had been slightly less solid, or if her sense of the ridiculous had been slightly more mellow, we would both have gone under at one of the many black spots. Undoubtedly, I would have sunk without trace when Mother died if Lee hadn’t been around.
Right at the lowest point of the surgery rotation, when we had been on call for a week and had had no sleep for ever, my mother was admitted as an emergency with a ruptured aortic aneurysm. The consultants revealed a rare spark of humanity and gave me leave to go and sit with her as soon as they’d finished the basic work-up. I held her hand for an hour or two and made her stories of home, talking her back into the glorious ice caves of her past.
It was an odd kind of peace-making, but she listened and nodded and, when they came to take her to theatre, she reached out for my hand as she passed. Lee joined me for a while and I paced around, like ordinary family, until they sent out an anaesthetist with the news that the lesion was too big, the haemorrhage too great and the hopes of survival too low to speak of.
