Hen's Teeth

by Manda Scott

  Lee covered my on-call for the funeral and the brief ‘compassionate leave’, which was all taken up with lawyers and distant, frigid relatives who wanted to know what they were getting from the estate and how soon. At the end of it all, I went back to the ward for a rest, bereft of my last living parent and in possession of a three-storey Helensburgh town house that I never wanted and didn’t know what to do with.

  The surgical rotation finished shortly after that and we moved to medicine. With medicine, came Malcolm and life after Malcolm was quite, quite different.

  Malcolm was the kind of man who took medicine seriously and who, unusually, had managed to retain a sense of caring for his patients and his interns beyond the first few rungs of the clinical ladder. He was quiet – soft-spoken, with a slight fading of the consonants that sounded almost effeminate until one got to know him better. He was tall and slim and would have been fit if he had ever had time for exercise. He had the classic Donnelly hair: just one shade this side of black, thick and wavy and forever falling forward over one eye, so that he had developed a characteristic toss of the head to throw it out of the way when he was too rushed to have a spare hand.

  The female patients loved him whether he liked it or not. The younger ones lusted and the older ones promised him their daughters, immune to the fact that the lad barely had time for a passing cup of coffee, never mind a passing liaison in the laundry cupboard. The nurses just fell at his feet at convenient opportunities and then sulked pointedly when he apparently failed to notice.

  Somehow, at some time, the grapevine had spread the fact that Lee and I were not especially enamoured of men. I suspect it also spread the rumour that we were lovers, which happened not to be true, but at any rate it spared us the priapic attentions of the junior medical staff and, I suppose, may have made Malcolm feel safer in our company. At any rate, he took us in hand from the first day we hit his medicine ward and made it his life’s work for the next six months to teach us all the things they never dared show us before the exams.

  He turned life as an intern into something that bordered on an adventure and saw to it that we both came out at the end of the year fit to lead the worlds of surgery and psychiatric medicine respectively.

  It never happened, naturally. We weren’t the right kind of people to become world famous in either field. Lee got herself thrown out of surgery for asking the wrong questions of the wrong people at the wrong time and I had already left psychiatry under my own steam a year or so before that. Still, by then Malcolm was part of the family and Lee had grown to be one of the few stable points in my otherwise less-than-stable life.

  Which is, no doubt, why she was sitting there waiting for me, leaning back on her chair with her feet up on the table and one arm slung over the balcony, holding a half-glass of mineral water at a crazy angle over the heads of the crowd below.

  I pushed through the mass by the bar and dropped limply into the chair opposite.

  ‘Lee, hi.’

  ‘Hi. You all right?’

  ‘Alive.’

  ‘Hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘Starving.’ I slung my jacket over the balcony ‘I forgot to eat. It’s been one of those days.’

  ‘You’d forget to eat for weeks if you had to cook it yourself,’ she said and, raising a hand, she called forth a minor miracle in the form of a waiter with a long, dark ponytail and a gold stud in one ear who appeared beside the table flourishing a brace of haggis, another bottle of mineral water to join the two on the table and a carafe of red wine. The usual. We never eat anything else when we go to the Man.

  We ate together in silence for a while, letting things settle. Lee, for reasons of her own, kept a wary eye on the shifting mass of bodies by the bar and gave the occasional glance downstairs to the crowd round the door.

  The wine was very good for a house red. I poured myself a second glass and pushed my plate to the side, feeling better than I had done for a long time.

  This time Lee was watching me, not the others.

  ‘I did the post,’ she said.

  ‘Bridget’s?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you’re not going to like it.’ Her jacket hung over the balcony at her side. She fished a sheet of paper out of a pocket and slid it across the table towards me. ‘Have a look.’

  It was a preliminary post-mortem report form, sketchier than a final report to a coroner but complete enough to submit to the police officer in charge of the case.

  I ran my eye down the page. Most of the organ systems were labelled NAD – no abnormality diagnosed. Only the cardiac section showed up anything different and then only the changes associated with terminal cardiac arrest. As reports go, it was one of the least meaningful I have ever seen. Dr David Kemp, he of the fast car and the snakeskin bedside manner, would have been absolutely delighted. I wasn’t.

  The ponytailed waiter appeared out of nowhere and we stared at each other in silence as he cleared the plates. The report sat on the table, soaking up a ring of wine from my glass. A claret wash flowed across the meaningless cardiac findings. Incongruous.

  ‘So?’ I asked, when we were alone again. ‘Why did she die, Adams?’

  ‘Good question.’ Lee made a steeple of her fingers and tapped it against her pursed lips thoughtfully. ‘Look at this.’ She flipped a beer mat on to the report sheet and used it to underline the point where the stomach contents had been carefully recorded in order of digestion. It was hardly an appetizing list: coffee, toast, eggs (cooked), beans (tinned; brand unknown), cheese (cooked), TMP (400 mg).

  An average farmhouse meal thrown down in passing. Could have been breakfast, lunch, dinner or a filler in between.

  The beer mat sat under the final word: TMP (400 mg).

  ‘Temazepam?’ I asked.

  ‘Temazepam,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Shit.’

  Temazepam. New-generation Valium. Mother’s ruin. Daughter’s ruin. Nowadays, business executive’s ruin as well. And jelly babies for the crack-heads when the skunkweed gets too hot. A gateway to dreamland. But not usually lethal.

  ‘Is 400 milligrams enough to kill her?’ I asked.

  ‘It might be.’ She shrugged sparingly. ‘It’s more than enough to put her to sleep for a bit.’ She looked at me across the table, her chin resting now on the looped arc of her fingers. ‘How was their relationship, Kellen?’

  ‘Bridget and Caroline’s? Glowing, I expect. I don’t know. The Christmas cards weren’t exactly informative. Why?’

  ‘There were twenty odd capsules in there, Kells. You don’t take that much of anything by mistake.’

  ‘Are you saying this was deliberate?’

  ‘Well, I sure as hell don’t think it was an accident.’ She pursed her lips. ‘More to the point, your friendly police inspector isn’t going to think so either. I’ve got some bloods running through at the moment but unless there’s something out of the ordinary, the interim report will go through tomorrow morning and it’ll have “suicide” right at the top of the list of differentials.’

  We stared at each other across the table.

  ‘You don’t believe that,’ I said flatly.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I knew Bridget too. But it’s still the most obvious diagnosis. As the pathologist, I have to put it on the report.’

  ‘So where’s the note?’ I asked. ‘Or the tablet bottle?’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s up to the police.’ Her eyes drifted over the crowd on the floor below and then came back to mine. Her lips compressed into a fine, white line. ‘They’ll be all over the place soon enough, Kellen,’ she said. ‘Laidlaw’s going to have a field day with this. Jelly babies are public enemy number one on his drug list these days.’

  ‘Oh, great. That’s all we need.’

  I looked away, staring down at the milling bodies drinking pale, foreign lager in the main bar below. A bird’s-eye view of Glasgow’s professional classes. Not the kind of folk to take temazepam, except to r
ing the changes once in a while when the crack and the skunkweed are running low. Jelly babies are the small change in the rich world of gold dust and diamond dew. Not exactly a major police problem. Not for a man of Laidlaw’s calibre.

  I said as much to Lee. She followed my gaze down to the designer haircuts on the floor below, eyeing the crowd round the door. ‘It’s a problem when they raid the pharmacies for it,’ she said. ‘Himself is not keen on folk breaking into places on his patch. It’s bad for the record.’

  ‘I thought you could get it on prescription?’

  ‘You can, up to a point. But the GPs know the street value as well as anybody and when every man, woman and child on an entire estate comes to you pleading chronic insomnia, it gets a little silly. They draw the line once in a while and then the chemists get nailed.’

  ‘And that upsets the lads in uniform,’ I said. I could imagine. Laidlaw takes robbery on his patch as a personal assault.

  ‘It does indeed.’ Lee nodded abstractly, still staring into the crowd below the balcony. ‘And besides, if he can nick half a dozen poor bastards before breakfast for abusing sedatives, he can polish up his “drug prevention” halo without having to get his fingers jumped on by the mob. Simple.’

  ‘When was Laidlaw ever scared of the mob?’

  ‘When they have well-paid friends in high places who warn him off, largely.’ She raised an eyebrow in mock resignation. ‘The world of cops and robbers isn’t quite as black and white as it used to be when Cash Andrews owned everyone. We have about thirteen different sets of organized militia now. One single police force can’t cope with it all.’

  ‘How sad.’

  ‘Absolutely . . .’ Her voice trailed off and her attention shifted suddenly on to a movement in the crowd below. ‘Hell . . . ’Scuse me. Got to go for a pee.’ One shoulder lifted in an apologetic half-shrug that said she didn’t expect me to believe the lie. ‘Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She still moves like a dancer. I watched her go, threading her way neatly through the crowd in the general direction of the ladies’ toilet which, as luck would have it, is on the ground floor next to the entrance.

  I’m long past trying to take care of Lee Adams. Her problems don’t become mine unless she asks. So I turned my back to the milling crowd that had closed behind her, picked up my glass of wine and thought my way through the psycho-pathology of a suicide. Most have a history of depression. Most try more than once. Most leave something for those left behind. Those who want to succeed do it sensibly where no one will find them and leave short, functional notes. Those who don’t want to succeed do it publicly and leave long, vindictive literary landmines targeted on their nearest and not-so-dearest.

  For Bridget Donnelly to have done either would have required a character transformation so complete as to render her unrecognizable to anyone around her.

  Nothing may be impossible, but some things are seriously improbable.

  I was staring into the wine glass with my brain spinning in unlikely circles when Lee reappeared, shouldering delicately through the crowd.

  ‘Shall we go?’ she asked, tapping me lightly on the shoulder.

  A rhetorical question. She was on her feet with my jacket in her hand before I could answer, leaving me to follow her down the stairs and out to the lane at the back of the Man.

  We dodged across the traffic on Byres Road, scaring the life out of a drunk on a bicycle.

  ‘Where’s your car?’ she asked as we reached the safety of the pavements.

  ‘Dowanside Road. Half-way up the hill.’

  ‘Mind if we use it?’

  ‘Feel free.’

  The car sat in a pool of shadow between two lamp posts. We slowed to a lope and I dug in my pocket for the keys, opening her door first so that she could pull the choke and drop the handbrake while I piled in the driver’s side and stuck my foot on the gas. We were moving before she’d had time to close her door. One of Mhaire’s outlaw friends taught us that one. We used to practise it after parties for the hell of it. I’d forgotten it was this much fun.

  ‘Who are we running from?’ I asked when my breathing had settled. I was driving a complex loop round the university and back along Great Western Road towards Byres Road.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She wound down the window and reached out to angle the wing mirror so that she could keep an eye on the road behind. ‘The bad guys, I think. The ones Laidlaw doesn’t mess with. I was supposed to be meeting a lad called Danny Baird, but he didn’t show.’

  ‘And the bad guys showed instead?’

  ‘I think they might have done. I don’t know. They don’t wear shades and Doc Martens any more. Makes them difficult to spot.’

  ‘Do they drive a dark green Audi?’ I asked. There was one on the road behind us, weaving in and out of the traffic, not quite far enough back to be safe.

  ‘Possibly.’ She kept her eyes glued to the mirror. ‘How fast does this thing go?’

  ‘Not fast enough.’

  ‘Thought not.’ The smile was tighter than it might have been. ‘Why don’t you take a right at the lights and run up the east side of the Botanies?’

  ‘Right.’

  I pulled over into the right-hand lane and took a right. We watched as the other car rolled on westwards down Great Western Road. Lee grimaced briefly and I heard her breath hiss through closed nostrils. She used to be cooler than that.

  I made a U-turn at the top of the road and drove back to the lights at the Byres Road junction.

  ‘Do you want a lift home?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought I’d go into work for a bit.’

  ‘Oh, give me a break, woman. It’s almost eleven o’clock.’ I thought she’d grown out of this. ‘Repeat after me: “My name is Dr Elizabeth Adams and I am a workaholic” . . .’

  ‘Hardly.’ She had her eyes on the mirror again and when she spoke her voice was distant. ‘What do you suppose would have happened if Bridget hadn’t taken so much temazepam?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have died.’

  ‘Maybe. Or possibly she would have died anyway but there would have been damn all to see on PM. Like Malcolm.’ Her eyes came off the mirror and she looked directly at me.

  ‘Did you do Malcolm’s PM?’ I asked carefully.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Prof did that. A final gesture for an old friend and colleague. He does it once in a while to prove he can still use a scalpel.’

  ‘So if there was anything there he would have found it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She shrugged, unconvinced. ‘But I only found the temazepam in Bridget because I went looking for it and even then there was almost nothing left. Two or three more hours and the gelatine would have gone in the gastric acid. Malcolm’s body wasn’t found for almost twenty-four hours after he died. He could have been doped up to the eyeballs and there wouldn’t be anything to see in the stomach.’

  ‘You could find it on plasma samples.’

  ‘You could, but it’s not on the routine test list. You’d only find it if you had a reason to look.’

  ‘Did they keep any plasma sample from Malcolm?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never looked at the form. There didn’t seem any reason to at the time.’

  There are times when Lee’s logic has a certain inexorable quality.

  ‘Can we take a look now?

  ‘We can indeed.’ Her grin was positively wicked. ‘How would you like to come back to work, Dr Stewart?’

  Work. The Department of Clinical and Experimental Pathology. One small component of the Strathclyde Area Health Authority Hospital Trust. That well-known semi-private charity dedicated to the welfare of its patients. Something like that.

  As an aesthetic amenity the place never had much appeal at the best of times. On a damply depressive September evening, it was like walking through a cemetery with an active recruitment policy. From the moment Lee let us in through the back entrance, I hung on her heels, bumping into her back ev
ery time she paused to open a door, until we reached the top floor, where, gratifyingly, some unnamed hero was working late and had left on all the lights.

  Dr Elizabeth Adams has her office down at the far end of the corridor. Room 103: an upright coffin at one end of a row of other upright coffins. There’s a small plastic name tag screwed to the door, in case she ever forgets who she really is.

  Inside, there is just enough space for a filing cabinet, a chair and a desk big enough to hold a virtually obsolete Apple Mac. There’s a window, which is something. In normal working hours you would have a good view out over Kelvin Grove and the Art Gallery – given a clear day and a decent pair of binoculars.

  One wall is covered in posters with intricate diagrams of molecular pathology. The other sports an oversized Ansell Adams print of a frosted leaf in Yosemite National Park. The desk is forever tidy, with a box for everything and everything in its box. Even the Post-its line up in serial rows, keeping ordered messages from Lee to Lee in her indecipherable shorthand. It’s exactly like the room we shared for nights on call in the houseman’s quarters of the Clinical Department. Her half was always distressingly tidy.

  Lee sat down at the desk and flicked on the computer. It chuntered quietly through the start-up routine and checked itself for viruses. All clear. She clicked the mouse button, typed her password and in a remarkably short space of time, we had full access to the hospital network – the final resting place of all hospital information ever recorded, at least in Pathology.

  ‘Malcolm’s middle initial was “D”, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  She typed again and there was a pause while the hidden mainframe made up its mind, then threw up a window on the screen.

  NO INFORMATION AVAILABLE

  We looked at each other.

  ‘You’re sure it was “D”?’