by Peter James
His eyes were shut, his face was gaunt, his skin waxy, his hair matted; he had lost a lot of weight.
‘I’ve brought you some pizza with wood-smoked ham, Justin, and some water.’
There was no response.
Thomas put down the tray, briefly studied the blackened, cauterised stump at the end of the reporter’s right arm, then compared it with the stump at the end of his left arm. Both were healing nicely and he was glad about that. No sign of gangrene.
‘Healing well, Justin!’ he said.
Then he checked the young man’s pulse. Weak. The skin felt clammy. He stood back, wondering whether to put the young man on a saline drip and nurture him back to strength. Perhaps with what he had learned down here he would now be a better reporter.
But he was a distraction. Thomas had to remind himself of that. Justin Flowering was a distraction. He could not afford to let his heart rule his actions.
I really would like to make you better, Justin, but I can’t, there are too many complications. I’m going to have to let you go. I’m sorry about this.
He climbed the stairs up to his den, took a hypodermic syringe from a drawer, then went back down to the kitchen and removed a vial of curare from the fridge. Obtaining medical supplies was easy for him. He printed out fake prescription forms copied from one of his own doctor’s, on his computer, then filled them in by hand. No problem.
Back in the cellar, he injected sufficient curare into a vein in the reporter’s wrist, then sat beside him, on a slatted pine seat in the sauna and waited.
After a few moments Justin’s eyes opened in shock. He was shaking. Struggling to breathe. His lips, cracked and blistered, parted a fraction, still connected by a thin strand of saliva.
Thomas looked him in the eye, feeling a confusion of emotions. ‘Back with us again now, Justin!’ he said, trying to sound encouraging, hoping to give this creature at least a few moments of kindness while he died.
The reporter made a wheezing sound. His face was starting to darken, the flesh tones turning blue. His whole body was juddering.
‘I’m here for you, Justin,’ Thomas said, taking his wrist and holding it. ‘I’m here for you.’
Justin Flowering juddered for a full two minutes, eyes bulging, making tiny sounds somewhere in the depths of his throat. Then he fell silent. Thomas continued to hold his wrist until a further sixty seconds had elapsed with no tremor from the pulse.
Now he needed to take the reporter down to his final resting place, alongside Tina Mackay. This was the messy part. This he really did not relish doing, but he should do it now, he knew, now, before he forgot, before any bad smells started to come from the man.
But first he took the tray with the slice of pizza back up to the kitchen. No need to waste it. His mother had taught him never to waste food.
Three hours later, exhausted, but elated by the power of what he had just done, Thomas carried a tray with four slices of pizza on it up to his mother’s bedroom, went in (no need to knock! he thought, joyously) sat down on her bed, then lounged back on it, deliberately keeping his shoes on, and balanced the plate on his lap.
He watched his reflection in the mirror in the top of the canopy. And on the wall opposite. And on the side walls. His mother’s smells rose up off the pillows and mingled with the pizza. He lifted a quarter segment and melted cheese rolled off the side like a lava flow. Crumbs fell onto the sheets. He smiled a defiant smile at his reflection. Then he closed his eyes and tried to conjure up his mother’s face. Instead, he saw the cheap wig and stark black bush of pubic hair of the woman, Divina.
Hope you’re watching, Mummy!
Hope you can see me, lying on your bed, getting pizza crumbs everywhere, thinking about other women!
Hope this is making you mad as hell.
There was a rubbery smell on his hands and an unpleasant odour of disinfectant on his clothes and in his hair. Jeyes fluid. He’d put on protective clothing, but the reek had got through it. And the embalming fluid. He wasn’t used to housework, but it had to be done, when you had guests staying.
Need a new light bulb for the kitchen unit.
His mother used to dictate a list each week. Dunning or some other member of staff would go out for the shopping. But in the last few years, when it had been just the two of them together, he had done it.
He liked shopping. It gave him pleasure to see that the things he saw in advertisements on television were real. You could buy them! It still gave him a guilty thrill to take something off a shelf that he had seen on television only hours earlier.
He tried to remember the weekly list of duties. The page was still there, but it wasn’t as clear as the circuit boards of the computers.
Cut the grass.
Hoover carpets.
Washing up.
Laundry.
Feed the fish.
He had remembered that he needed to feed the fish, but had run out of food. It didn’t make any sense to him that they had pet fish in the pond in the garden. His mother never went out there, so she never saw them. Why did she have them?
Must buy fish food.
Going to be a lot of changes around here, as soon as – His thoughts hit a stop light. He waited for it to change to green, then went on. Soon as – He stopped again. He had lost the thread. He was trying to remember the wattage of the neon strip bulb he needed for the kitchen.
He was trying to concentrate on the list. The list was important. He had to get the house clean, tidy, ready. He had a new guest coming soon.
Only the coin knew exactly when.
But he had a feeling it would be tonight.
Chapter Thirty-eight
‘Forty-five,’ Amanda said.
The boom and echo of the Tannoy system drowned Michael’s reply.
‘Didn’t hear you!’ she shouted.
The sun beat down hard. A mist of dust hung over them, stinging their eyes. Then the exhausts of fifteen large, tatty, beefcake-engined saloon cars shook their eardrums like an earthquake. The crowd, which had opened up like a sponge, now contracted again, squeezing in on them from all sides. Michael craned his neck but all he could see so far was empty track. The stadium stank of spent racing fuel and fried onions.
‘So Brian is sixteen years older than you,’ he said.
She cupped her hands over his ear and said, ‘Maybe I have a thing about older men!’
He glanced at her and smiled. She was joking but it was probably true. After her father had left home, her mother had had a string of boyfriends, all unsuccessful artists of one kind or another. She only had a sister, there had been no strong male throughout her childhood to whom she could look up. In her ex-boyfriend, Brian, she had clearly found a father figure. Maybe now with him too.
The male commentator boomed, through the Tannoy, ‘Just waiting for car twelve.’ Then in a more chatty tone, he added, ‘Good to see Dave Spall out there, in car four-three-two, having his first drive for five years. Car twelve is now ready. The course car is out! The start of the Len Wardle Memorial Trophy is under way!’
Michael saw a flash of metal. A gleaming red saloon pace car glinted past, followed by fifteen stock cars in a tight but haphazard formation, like a shoal of fish.
Amanda’s face was alight with excitement. ‘Come on, Dave Spall!’ she shouted. ‘Come on, number four-three-two!’
Michael, anxious now, craned his neck over the crowds, peering through the wire mesh fencing, trying to get a fix on Dave Spall’s yellow Toyota. There were four yellow cars in the race and it was difficult to make out his patient’s.
He had been treating Dave for four years. The one-time national champion stock-car driver, whose day job was machine-tool engineering, had suffered depression after a freak accident five years ago in a demolition derby, when another competitor’s seat-belt mountings had sheared and he had been flung through the driver’s window onto the track, under the wheels of Dave Spall’s car, which had killed him; a novice of seventeen.
W
hen he’d first been referred to Michael, Dave Spall had been unable even to cope with driving on public roads. Slowly Michael had coaxed him back to normality and now, today, Dave was taking to the track again, and had asked Michael if there was any chance he could come along. He’d told Michael it would be a big boost to his confidence if he knew he was out there in the audience watching him.
Michael liked the man and had been touched by the request. Amanda had leaped at the suggestion of joining him, and the meeting, at Eastbourne, was only half an hour’s drive from her sister, where she was going later that afternoon to her niece Leonora’s fourth birthday party.
The pace car reached the start line and swung off into the exit lane, then all hell broke out behind it. Two cars collided on the first bend; one spun, a third car hit it broadside and was badly rear-ended by a fourth. Dave Spall swerved past the mess and was lying in fifth place at the end of the first lap.
Amanda squeezed his hand excitedly; Michael squeezed back, it was an incredible feeling, just this tiny communion with her, amid the roar and shouts, under the blazing sun. She looked beautiful in her simple outfit of jeans and white T-shirt, and he was proudly savouring the admiring glances she was getting from other men.
Dave Spall held fifth place throughout the second and third laps. He was doing fine. Michael saw his head twitch and wondered if he was trying to spot him in the blur of faces. Just concentrate, Dave, get round that track, don’t try to win, just finish!
In the fourth lap a car tried to pass Spall on a curve, slid outwards into him, locked sides with him and pushed him over towards the barrier. Michael felt Amanda’s fingers biting into his flesh; she’d gone with him to the paddock and shaken Dave Spall’s hand, and then proceeded to ask him a raft of technical questions about his car that had amazed Michael, who had been left behind totally.
The two cars stayed locked together right down the length of the track then, to Michael’s relief, Spall eased off and let the other car go ahead. The grip of Amanda’s fingers eased also.
Michael glanced at her and she shot a smile of encouragement back at him that said, ‘Relax, he’s going to make it!’
He did make it. He finished sixth, intact. They hurried through the crowds back to the paddock, and Spall called Michael a great big four-eyed hairy bastard, threw his arms around him and planted a kiss on each cheek. Then he kissed Amanda and asked Michael why psychiatrists always pulled the best-looking birds, and told Amanda she could come and work as his mechanic any time, and spent the next ten minutes discussing the merits of superchargers versus turbochargers with her.
They left the paddock before the start of the last race. Amanda wanted to avoid the traffic – she was already running late for the party. As they walked towards the car park, arm in arm, Michael said, ‘I’m impressed! Where did you get your mechanical knowledge from?’
She save a funny little shrug that Michael found endearing. He’d noticed she always did that when he paid her a compliment, as if she wasn’t very good at accepting them. ‘Brian was car-mad. I was forever going with him to race meetings, and getting stuck at dinner parties next to men who ignored me because all they wanted to talk about was engines. I decided I wanted to stand my own ground with these people, so I learned everything I could on the subject.’
Michael shook his head, grinning. ‘You’re amazing! You really are!’
She gave another little shrug. ‘Actually, engines are really interesting when you get to know about them.’
She was full of surprises. It seemed that every few minutes he found something new to like about her. They stopped and slipped their arms around each other’s waist. The whole sky was dancing in her eyes. Michael’s heart was aching: he wondered whether it was possible for a human being to feel any happier than he felt at this moment.
He wanted to say it to her right now. Amanda Capstick, I love you.
It was a fight to hold the words back. But it was too soon. Even after their incredible night of lovemaking – four times! – it was too soon; he didn’t want to frighten her off.
He was scared at how happy he felt.
And as he watched Amanda driving off in her little red Alfa, clouds of dust kicking up under her tyres, her hand waving, so cheery, so fragile, he felt scared that something bad was going to happen and rip the happiness away from him once more, just as it had been with Katy’s death.
As if mirroring his sombre change of mood, a cloud rolled across the sun like a tarpaulin.
Chapter Thirty-nine
sunday, 27 july 1997.
Amanda Capstick used to have a dog called Ollie.
Sweet.
There is a colour photograph of Ollie on her website. A brown cocker spaniel, sitting on a pebble beach with its tongue hanging out.
Probably crapped on the beach, and some eight-year-old kid put his finger in it and then stuck it in his eye and got a Toxocara parasite in there which infests the retina, causing inflamation, granulation and permanent damage.
But Amanda Capstick won’t be concerned about that. A woman low enough to want to be penetrated by Dr Michael Tennent isn’t the sort of person to worry about children being blinded.
Some words of wisdom for you Dr Tennent. From a poet who does not use capital letters, e.e. cummings.
be a little more careful of love
than of anything else.
I expect you might wonder why I should be concerned about your welfare, Dr Tennent. You might wonder why I am nervous of your relationship with a woman who puts photographs of her dead dog out on the Internet.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, be ready for war.
You are a doctor, you should be able to speak Latin. These are the words of Julius Caesar. Are you ready for war, Dr Michael Tennent?
Julius Caesar murdered two million Gauls during his conquest of France. He is revered today as a great leader. Does that tell you something about mankind, Dr Tennent? Does that help your understanding of the human condition? Do you draw upon a reservoir of such knowledge when you see your patients? Did you when you saw my mother? When you rang her afterwards and left your message on her answering-machine?
I’m rather afraid I upset you this morning. It might be helpful if we had a quick chat on the phone.
I’m rather afraid I’m going to upset you now, Dr Michael Tennent. One of the things that will assist me in this is a thumbtack.
I wrote some days ago that I would explain about the thumbtack. It’s really very simple. As a medical man you will be aware of curare. Curarine is the type alkaloid of Guianese curare. Native South Americans extract it from a plant found in the rainforest; when rubbed on the tips of arrows, it induces almost instantaneous paralysis in victims. When their respiratory muscles become slack we see first cyanosis, in which the victims start to turn blue from oxygen starvation. They are able to breathe out, but not breathe in. Fatal asphyxia follows.
I have learned that there is an elegance to the natural world. The equations of mathematics; the balance of nature. Gödel’s theorem is especially elegant. So is Pythagoras’s. In good science there are elegant experiments, elegant solutions. I have made a special thumbtack: the needle of a hypodermic syringe carefully cut off a quarter of an inch below the tip and fitted with a tiny rubber bulb. I attach the thumbtack to the palm of my hand with a mild adhesive, then I fill the bulb with curare.
What could be more elegant than to shake hands with one’s victim?
If the dosage is measured with care and delivered subcutaneously, the respiratory muscles will be among the last affected. But just in case, as I have done before, I will take a portable heart-lung resuscitator along with me in the white van. This relieves me of the hassle of losing valuable time in performing manual cardiopulmonary support.
I must take the greatest care. After all, a human life is at stake here.
It would be a real tragedy for death to come too quickly.
Chapter Forty
A long, single-storey building with
grey pebbledash walls, and a covered drive-in one side, deep enough to take an ambulance or a small truck. Two pillars with open wrought iron gates, and a Tarmac car park, distance the building from a traffic gyratory system that includes in its congested circuit a grimy Victorian viaduct and a J. Sainsbury’s super-store. The subdued sign beside the brick pillars carries the cheerless words: BRIGHTON & HOVE MORTUARY.
The rain adds further gloom, but even on the brightest summer day this place looks horrible.
Glenn Branson had never been afraid of ghosts; it was the living he considered dangerous, not the dead. Normally the detective constable didn’t have a problem with human corpses, but this was not a normal corpse that was lying on the steel table, under the glare of four massive fluorescent lights.
Cora Burstridge might once have craved the spotlights, but these lights today, hanging on heavy chains from the high ceiling, were doing her no favours. This cold room, with its drain gullies, its grey-tiled walls with bright purple covers on the plug sockets, stainless-steel sinks, and stainless-steel work surface on which lay an assortment of surgical instruments and an electric rotary saw, was an indignity too far.
On another surface lay the paperwork, several forms, including the standard G5 form Glenn had filled out in Cora Burstridge’s flat.
Glenn was having a hard time keeping a grip on himself. His stomach felt like it was churning wet cement as he swallowed hard, trying to cope with the smell that was worse than a venting sewer. He looked everywhere but at the corpse. The mortician, a cheery matronly woman in her mid-forties, in a white apron and white boots, had just finished packing Cora Burstridge’s skull cavity with shredded paper and was now fitting the back of her head back into place.
Wincing he turned towards the coroner’s assistant, Eleanor Willow, a pleasant-looking woman in her mid-thirties with neat black hair, an elegant grey suit and pearl earrings, and she gave him the flicker of a smile. He glanced at the other two stainless-steel tables in the room, which were empty.
