Born in a Burial Gown

by Mike Craven

  With his file.

  He looked at it for a while. He’d suddenly become nervous. His mouth went dry and the vein in his neck pulsed. He opened it and went straight to the back where he knew the patient details stickers were kept, the stickers that went on every vial of blood, on every wristband he wore. On every letter. They had his name, address, and more importantly, a barcode.

  As if on autopilot, he removed a whole page and put it in his jacket.

  He spent the next couple of days preparing his letter. He went to a local printer and got some good quality copies of a blanked-out page of one of his own medical letters. He then tried various options with the text on the memory stick. Different fonts and letter sizes to try and find the ones the hospital used. He amended some of the language to fit in more with Leah’s style. He spent several hours trying to forge a natural signature, although like anyone who signed their name several times a day, Leah’s signature was little more than a scrawl. Eventually, he was confident he had a passable enough forgery. He had enough colour copies of the stolen letterhead to get the text in the right place by trial and error. He affixed one of the stickers and forged Leah’s signature. The process of stealing the stickers to having a fully forged document had taken just three days.

  He’d stared at the final version for nearly an hour in silence. He knew what he was about to do was wrong. Very wrong. It was a massive betrayal of someone who had only ever had his best interests at heart. It was a betrayal of Cumbria police who had stood by him during his ill health. And it was a crime. Fraud, making a false instrument, obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception, misconduct in a public office; take your pick, just a few of the charges he could face if he was caught. At best, he’d be thrown out in disgrace, at worst he’d do jail time. But most of all, it was a betrayal of himself, of his own values. He’d always considered himself a moral man. A man who stood up to bullies, who gave the vulnerable a voice. A man who had dedicated his life to doing the right thing, even if sometimes the right thing wasn’t always legal. If he did it, he could no longer stand on the high ground looking down.

  The last stage of his plan involved getting the letter sent from the hospital so it would have NHS franking marks on it. He ran through several scenarios but settled for just looking for an opportunity.

  It came the next time he was getting his blood checked.

  Again, he was a given a clean bill of health. Burkitt’s wasn’t the type of cancer that came back. It was a kill-or-cure cancer. He had to wait at the receptionist’s station on the way out while they sorted out his next appointment. As a frequent visitor to the ward, the staff knew him well and always had a chat. As she read out the next available appointments, Fluke pretended to lean over to see the computer screen. As he did, he slipped the letter into the middle of the pile of outgoing mail. He’d addressed it to the Occupational Health department.

  On the way out, he rang them to tell them he was fit enough to come back, requesting an assessment and to inform them that his consultant would be sending them a letter detailing his current condition which he hoped would support his return to work.

  A month later, he was back at his desk in Carleton Hall. He’d spent two weeks doing a phased return at the insistence of Occupational Health, and one week receiving a handover from the temporary DI they’d installed. Nine months after being diagnosed with Burkitt’s Lymphoma, he was back on the Force Major Investigation Team.

  For how long was now out of his hands.

  Chapter 29

  ‘You bastard! You utter bastard. How could you?’

  Fluke was surprised by her language. He’d never heard her swear before but he wasn’t surprised by her reaction. He decided to say nothing. There was nothing he could say. No point in denying it. No point trying to explain it. He was categorically in the wrong and had no choice but to ride the lightning.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  Still he remained silent. He was at her mercy now. He was curious why a copy of the original letter was being requested by HQ but the ‘why’ was irrelevant to what the consequences were going to be. Leah had stopped crying. Her eyes, normally so friendly, so warm, were cold, devoid of anything but anger and disappointment. Fluke was at a loss on what to say next. Everything would appear trite and self-serving. He also knew that any attempt to explain or excuse his deception would be fatal. He decided honesty was the best approach.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She held his gaze until his shame got the better of him. He broke eye contact.

  ‘Sorry? You’re sorry? Oh, well, that’s all right then. The great important detective is sorry. Do you realise what you’ve done? Forget the fact that you’ve risked your health, forget the fact that you’ve probably broken the law, you’ve put my job at risk. Why, Avison?’

  She looked at Fluke and her expression had changed slightly. She looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘I had to, Leah.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, you wanted to. You didn’t have to at all, you selfish bastard!’ she shouted, anger flaring up again.

  Fluke paused. He knew she was right. Selfish was a word he’d avoided using to describe his actions when he’d been justifying them to himself. But it had been. He could lie to himself all he wanted but he’d forged the letter for one reason only: himself.

  ‘Sorry. You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I wanted to go back to work. The job was all I had. I know this won’t mean anything but I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while.’

  ‘You’re right, it doesn’t mean anything. What am I supposed to do now? I know what I should do, what I’m required to do – go straight to the Trust board and tell them everything. Anything else and I’m complicit in this stupid thing.’

  Fluke instinctively knew that asking her not to would be the wrong thing to do. ‘Of course. You should do what you think is right,’ he said, lamely.

  ‘Oh, fuck off, you patronising arsehole. Don’t speak to me like that. I thought we were friends. This is me you’re speaking to. What do you think I should do? What do you want me to do? I’ve already lied once for you this morning. I’m not in the mood to do it twice, not if you don’t care enough to act like a grown-up. I’m not the headmistress, and you’re not a schoolboy, Avison. What do you want me to do?’

  She’d lied for him once already? He didn’t understand. Things were moving so quickly he was struggling to keep up.

  Fluke rubbed his hands over his eyes. He felt tired all of a sudden. There was also a sense of relief. The strain of lying to her had been debilitating. ‘I don’t know, Leah. I’m not trying to be coy, I’m really not. I don’t want to lose my job, of course I don’t. But the last thing I want is to get you into trouble. I need you to believe that.’

  She looked at him and her expression softened. ‘It may be out of my hands anyway.’

  Fluke looked up. She must have seen the confusion in his face.

  ‘No, I haven’t said anything to anyone. Not yet anyway. But how do you think I got this letter, Avison? What in your addled mind do you think is going on here?’

  Fluke said nothing. It was a letter. Letters got posted.

  ‘Oh, you stupid man. It was hand-delivered.’ She seemed to sense his confusion. ‘A police officer brought it. Someone called Fenton, Alec or Alex Fenton. He showed me a photocopy of the letter they received. He asked for the original for his files. Wanted to know if I remembered writing it.’

  Fluke lurched in his seat as if he’d been shot. He immediately felt nauseous. Alex fucking Fenton. It was very bad. As bad as it could get. He tried to speak but couldn’t. His mouth had turned to ash, his tongue was a stranger.

  Leah’s expression changed. Anger turned to concern. ‘Avison, who is Fenton? What does he do? How did he know about this letter?’

  Fluke put his head in his hands and didn’t answer immediately. He was in serious trouble. Prison trouble. ‘Alex Fenton is the superintendent in PSD, Leah.’

  She looked none the wiser. ‘What�
��s PSD, I’m not a policeman.’

  ‘Professional Standards Department,’ he said, almost resigned to his inevitable fate. ‘The cop’s cops. Internal affairs.’

  ‘I don’t understand, I—’

  ‘I’m screwed, Leah. There’s no need for you to get into trouble now. No need for you to cover for me. I would never ask you to anyway. I don’t even think I could bear you to risk anything for me at the minute. I don’t feel worth it today.’

  ‘That’s not what I was going to say, and you can cut the martyr bullshit. I’ll decide what I’ll do about this, not you. And certainly not Alec Fenton.’

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘Piss off. No, what I was going to say was, how did he know about this letter?’

  ‘He has access to all personnel files. He can poke his nose in where he likes. Someone of his rank speaks to who he wants when he wants. He can challenge anyone, investigate anyone.’

  ‘I’m not on about how he physically got hold of it. I mean, why did he know to ask for the original? If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew I hadn’t written it, it would have fooled me. It looked genuine. Nice job actually. I’d be impressed if I didn’t think you were an absolute shit for doing this.’

  Fluke had no clue why Fenton had thought to request the original. He would brood on that later. His time was going to become limited soon and he didn’t want to waste it thinking about his future. He needed to focus on the case. Leah, it seemed, did want to continue thinking about it.

  ‘So, tell me. Why did he ask for it? You must have done something to raise suspicions?’

  Fluke thought about it. PSD wasn’t the pariah that Internal Affairs was in the States. For most officers, it was something they got moved to in routine inter-departmental shuffles. It wasn’t anything to be feared. Do it well and it was a good career move. Nobody was castigated for being in PSD.

  Apart from Fenton. Fenton enjoyed it. Enjoyed the infamy of being the one member of PSD that wanted to stay. Enjoyed being feared. Enjoyed being able to hold grudges and act on those grudges. He’d tried to be a CID detective but had no aptitude for it, so he hated those who did. He was an arsehole, an isolated careerist, but he played by the rules. So if he’d asked for a copy of the letter then he had something concrete on Fluke, he wouldn’t be fishing. Fluke was in no doubt this was the start of something formal. It might even be the end of something that began some time ago. He had no way of knowing what Fenton knew.

  He briefly ran through the things that may have given him away. He settled on an early theory, although even as he said it, he knew how paranoid it sounded. ‘I’ve been having nosebleeds,’ he said. ‘Someone outside the team must’ve noticed and told my boss. He’s been after me for a while. All he’d have had to do was fake some concern, go to PSD with some suspicions and they’d do the rest.’ He put his head in his hands and sighed. Was this how it all ended?

  Important as it was, Fluke decided it would have to wait. He needed to focus on what he’d come for. Forget Fenton, forget the shit storm brewing in PSD. ‘Sorry to do this, and I promise we can talk about the letter later, but did you get a chance to find me a cosmetic surgeon to talk to?’

  Leah must have sensed he was finished talking about Fenton.

  ‘I did one better actually, and I’m sorry to kick you when you’re down but it’s not good news. From what you described, and from the photos you provided, I was able to email my friend in London. There’s little chance of identifying the victim through her surgery.’

  Fluke sighed again. He hadn’t really been hoping to get anything but there was always an outside chance her surgery had been so complex, another surgeon would recognise the work. ‘Did you ask if all the procedures could be done at the same time?’

  ‘Not a chance, I’m told. I didn’t think it was likely but you asked me to check. He tells me that because they were all in the same area it wouldn’t be possible. The face swells too much to attempt more than one at a time. Sorry.’

  Fluke said nothing. That was that then. He knew he should get back to HQ and make sure the hunt for Kenneth Diamond was progressing properly, but he didn’t want to leave things like they were. Leah also said nothing. She was no longer looking at him. She was looking at the card with the numbers on. He’d put it on the table when they’d been talking.

  He picked it up and put it into his breast pocket. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What was that?’ she said, the edge to her voice returning.

  ‘What, this?’ he said, pointing at his pocket. ‘Nothing, just something to do with the case. Something we’re trying to work out. It’s become a sort of unit puzzle. That’s why we all carry them about.’

  ‘No, I mean where did you get them? Tell me you didn’t steal them from me, Avison. It’s one thing forging that ridiculous letter but I have a duty, an absolute duty, to protect patient confidentiality.’

  The tiredness Fluke was feeling disappeared instantly. His mind, full of Fenton and lost careers, raced again, fully focused on Leah. Breaks in cases came from all sorts of place.

  He took the card back out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Leah. Listen to me very carefully. What do these numbers mean?’ he asked urgently.

  Fluke sensed she realised it was important but she didn’t understand why.

  ‘I’m not telling you anything, Avison, until you tell me where you got them. If you got them from my desk, I’m going to the management suite right now, I swear.’

  Fluke made a decision. Sometimes case integrity had to go out of the window. ‘We found them at the deposition site. They were left with the body. I didn’t steal them from you, of course I didn’t. I know this sounds strange coming from someone who spent three days practising your signature but you have to trust me on this. Now tell me what those numbers are. This is vital.’

  Her face softened. ‘They’re blood count results, obviously. A full blood count, the main three. Anyone can see that. You should be able to see that. You’ve had enough of them, for goodness sake.’

  Fluke felt numb. How had he failed to see it? These were numbers he should have instantly recognised. Leah was right. He’d been twisting the answer in his hands for nearly a week now. Looking without seeing. Up until then, he’d always thought his lateral thinking was good. He knew what the numbers were; he didn’t even need Leah to explain them. The 2.3 was the white blood cell count, 8.7 was the haemoglobin and 92 was the platelet count. The numbers were low. Not as low as Fluke’s had been during some stages of his treatment, but lower than a healthy person. It was the blood of someone who was ill.

  Fluke handed the card over to her and leaned forward. ‘Is there any way we can find out who these belong to?’

  Chapter 30

  Fluke and Leah arrived at West Cumberland Hospital less than an hour later and parked in the staff area at her insistence. He’d argued that it was police business, that a murder investigation was no place for a doctor but she’d insisted on accompanying him. In truth, he’d no choice in accepting her help. He’d asked her to check their medical records but blood test results didn’t work like that apparently.

  ‘Look,’ Leah had said, ‘although everything is computerised, the analyser machines that run the full blood counts in Cumbria’s haematology departments are on stand-alone systems. There isn’t a database that can be searched. The blood would have been taken by a phlebotomist, entered into the analyser and a report printed out. That report would have then given to the department who’d asked for it and they record the results on the patient’s records. Searching for blood test results can only be done manually, and unless there’s some way of narrowing it down, it’ll take ages. Days, even weeks – and that’s only if we’re able to get round patient confidentiality.’

  Fluke knew the last part was a big ‘if’. He couldn’t see any way he could reasonably ask a magistrate for permission to go through an entire department’s patient records, even for a murder investigation.

  ‘It isn’t just haematology who ask for full b
lood counts, Avison, you know that, don’t you?’ she said. ‘West Cumberland must do well over a hundred FBCs a day.’

  Fluke didn’t respond. He knew she was right, but he had a few things in his favour now. He knew the results weren’t Samantha’s. Up until she’d been shot, she was physically healthy. The fact the numbers had been found with her body meant that they were probably the killers. Assuming he wrote them down when he was in her flat, Fluke had a rough idea when. He ran through the scenario. The killer arrived at her flat, circumnavigated her security systems and waited for her. Before she’d returned, he either received or made, and Fluke’s money was on received, a phone call with his blood test results. He wrote them down on the nearest thing to hand, a notepad. He then tore off the top page to keep and left the notepad with the body rather than leave it in the flat, fearing exactly what had happened - the numbers being retrieved by some smartarse technician in a lab somewhere.

  The second thing in Fluke’s favour, and why he went straight to West Cumberland Hospital, was that he thought it unlikely that the deposition site being so close was a coincidence. Fluke was sure the killer must have seen the building site when he was at the hospital. He fully expected to be able to see the deposition site from the ward the blood test came from. The third thing, and why he’d eventually agreed to Leah coming, was that she knew all the other haematologists in the county and haematology ran the phlebotomy department in all hospitals. If they didn’t order the test themselves, it certainly went through them.

  ‘It’ll be easier if I go in and have a word with Nick Weighman, West Cumbria’s consultant, first,’ Leah mused. ‘There’s no way he’d ever give you open access to his files but he might give a nod in the right direction, enough for your lot to get a search warrant or at least know if you’re in the right area.’

  Against his better judgement, Fluke explained the case in as much detail as he dared on the journey across to the west. She impressed him by only asking the questions she needed answers to and respected there were things he couldn’t tell her. He was already in a grey area legally. Despite the investigation progressing quickly in the previous two days, he had very little on the killer yet, so he wasn’t much help to her.