by Caro Ramsay
‘And did you supply Paolo Girasole with the drug?’
She shook her head. ‘But I knew it was going on.’ She blinked, very close to tears.
‘Give us the quick version,’ asked Costello, not able to look at the skeleton staring at the strip lights, or the wizened paper thin woman holding a baby doll in her withered arms.
‘Dr Pearcy. Paolo said he needed it for the Duchess.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘No. We sometimes use it here to relax the muscles in the throat but Paolo was blackmailing James and Rodney, Mr Kirkton and Dr Pearcy.’ She corrected herself. ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly blackmail. He wanted the drug, and it is available for institutions like this. He just wanted the best room for Ilaria. That was all. Once he found out we had residents down here, paying and … well, not getting the service they are paying for.’
‘Where are their relatives? Does nobody visit? The care commission?’ Costello was horrified, but not surprised at Nicolson’s answer.
‘Nobody comes near them. Even if somebody does visit, it doesn’t take long to take them upstairs to a nice room, and pretend it’s theirs. Nobody cares. We feed them, clean them and keep them drugged. They aren’t even on the radar.’
‘And you charge them full care fees?’ Costello looked round at each face staring at the ceiling. No response, not awake, not asleep. Just staring. Like Pippa. ‘Poor bastards.’
SEVEN
Saturday 11 June
Batten was having trouble keeping up. Paul had waited a long time to tell somebody his story. He wasn’t going to hold back now. He had spent everything he had on keeping the Duchess in silks and finery while he lived in a garage like a homeless man. Then the money ran out, and the diagnosis of her cancer came through.
So he had scripted the end and he now had an audience for the whole story. The eloquence of the delivery was sublime. The actor had learned his part well.
Batten had asked him to start at the beginning. The night of the fire. He made sure the recording machine was on, and listened without interruption.
‘I couldn’t get to sleep. I never could when my parents had dinner parties, well, drinking sessions. Their carry-on echoed down the old chimney on the wall beside my bed. I’d ram my ears into my pillow, but I could still hear it. They got louder as they got drunker.
‘That night, that Christmas Eve, they were well pissed. I had made my den, in the floor of my walk-in wardrobe and lay there, listening. They were talking about me, singing the song from Pinocchio, the one about having no strings to hold me down. They were taking the piss out of me.
‘There were snowflakes outside, falling outside my window, so I slipped my yellow duffle coat over my pyjamas and in the hall, I tried to get my hat down from the upper hook of the coat stand. I couldn’t reach it so I moved the advent calendar and the candlestick to one side.
‘And I climbed up.
‘I’ve often wondered if I left the candlestick there on purpose.
‘The snow was light and fluffy. I remember the snowdrops tickling my face and the cold air nipping my nose. I ran and ran. Ended up at Vinicombe Street, at the theatre. The front doors with the sunflowers were closed. I started to cry. I was so alone. The tears were icy on my cheek. But I could smell hot cinnamon buns. I went round the side and the stage door was slightly open, as if they were waiting for me and I could hear them laughing. I crept closer and the smell of the toasted buns made my stomach hurt. Mum had forgotten to give me any tea.
‘I stepped into another world.
‘The next day I found my house had burned down. I sort of stayed. I never left. Pietro and I grew up together. We were Pietro and Paolo, Peter and Paul. Flyaway Peter, flyaway Paul. We were together. I became the Duchess’s son. They told a story of how much they loved me, I was allowed to stay, eventually.
‘But by his teens Pietro wanted a different life. He wanted a life as a girl. Then he became a different person. Paula. I used to hang about with Paula. She was so beautiful. Nobody knew. Not even the Duchess, that would have broken her heart.
‘It was when we were out celebrating the millennium, we got separated. We’d had a bit of an argument and she went off with some bloke. I had been ill with the flu and wanted to go home but she was keen to party. It took me a while to catch up with them. They were having a snog just off Ashton Lane, it was busy. There was a bit of a carry on. It didn’t look much, Paula should have been able to take a punch, but it was so quick. The bloke had realized, fumbling about, that he was snogging another man. So he lashed out. She laughed, and she really would have laughed at him. Then he punched her. She went down, he ran away. James bastard Kirkton. He just ran away. He left her there, dead.
‘I couldn’t let anybody know about Paula. Not his parents. That would have killed them. Guido died of grief six months later.
‘But at the time I carried her back to the theatre, it wasn’t far. I dressed him in my clothes, took his make-up off, his blonde wig. Paula stayed with me and I put Pietro back, he died as Pietro. His arm round my shoulder, I sang as I walked him back. Just a pissed pal being helped home. It was so easy.
‘So soon it was just me and the Duchess. She never spoke again. Not really, so I wasn’t really as good as the real thing, was I?
‘But second best was better than what I had before. I forgot all about Paul McEwan.
‘Then the dementia struck. I didn’t know what to do. They sold her property from underneath me to pay her fees at Athole House. The puppet theatre had to go as well. I wasn’t her son. None of it was mine.
‘I tried to start a campaign – just to get the dolls, the patterns, but no … Kenny Fraser put them in a skip. Lying in the rain, twisted and broken, my marionettes, my fractured little dolls that had been handcrafted and so loved by my family. I had to pull the velvet red curtains out during a downpour, a drunk had been sick on them.
‘Then I knew the end was coming, as it always does.
‘I thought, why not give her Pietro back? That’s what she wanted. Her favourite story was called The Enchantress, it had been hand drawn by Guido. He used to be a fire eater before he became a puppeteer, you know. God I find normal people so boring. I do like flames though. Flames and puppets.
‘And I am a very good actor. I can be anything, do anything. I had about four minutes to change from Paula to Paolo before I met that cop in Athole Lane. I had been talking to him face to face when I handed him the phone but a different setting, accent, pulled my hair back and a dirty face and he had no idea who I was.
‘None at all.
‘That’s how good an actor I am.
‘It was easy for me to think about bringing Pietro back. I needed an Enchantress. That wee girl. I don’t know her name, was so thin and so pathetic. I just picked her up off the street. She needed to be light, less strain on the wire. I was going to re-enact it and give the Duchess a different ending, her ending. I had seen Kirkton on the news. I knew it was him. I had watched him walk away from Paula, leaving her slumped against the wall, dying, her brain bleeding.
‘And now the Duchess was dying. She was sitting in that care home in her piss and shit. I wasn’t having that, not for her.
‘I made a list of my cast, my props. I knew they were abusing Paracuraium, easy to get them to give it to me. Taking the people was easy but that other girl just wouldn’t pass out, so I let her go with a message to go and speak to Anderson. I had met him once, and had read about the cold case unit. And then the first boy, he passed out too quickly and died. He choked. The cop was too drunk and fell over, I couldn’t get him up.
‘The second boy was easier though. And Sandra was my project. She looked a bit like Pietro, same face shape. And she so thought she had me, but I had her …
‘I bought her a car so I could use it without her knowledge. At Athole House the staff hang all their car keys on a rack. The fact I found jewellery she had been stealing in the boot just made it sweeter. She never, ever stole from the Duchess though.
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br /> ‘Then I thought, why not take it further. I could catch Kirkton, I knew I could. And like I said, I had met that nice cop once at an art gallery. I remembered him. He was a friend of Helena Farrell and I had a vague notion of his name. A junior police officer came to see the Duchess about the possibility of Pietro’s case being reviewed. And DCI Colin Anderson was named by them. I took that as an omen. From that minute on I had Kirkton in my sights. I wanted to destroy him.
‘So I did.’
Anderson was waiting for the lift, looking over the vast atrium of the Queen Elizabeth II University Hospital. On the way up to Jeffries’ room he had heard two patients refer to it as Sweaty Betty’s, and the hospital was living up to its name in this stinking hot weather. He looked out to the floors below, wheelchairs, queues, coffee drinkers and at the newsagents near the front door, every front page was about the arrest of James Kirkton for the murder of Pietro Girasole. The tabloids were making much of the irony of the safer society. His wife was standing by him, but from a distance as she was still in London with Tania.
Anderson had just finished interviewing Jeffries before the case would be passed over to the complaints team for an internal investigation, and Anderson could have written the script for that story himself. Jeffries, a DI, had been casual friends with Kirkton. It was natural for Kirkton to turn to him for help when he had punched Pietro, thinking he was Paula. It was a shock, he hadn’t meant it. Jeffries’ macho persona had swallowed that. At first, he was just turning a blind eye. But deceit had led to bigger deceits over the years, covering his own tracks as well as Kirkton’s. He had interviewed Paolo at the time and ‘Paolo’ had remembered. Over the years the case file had been requested from records, tweaked, pages lost, deleted, all on the pretence of reviewing the evidence in case something came up. Jeffries was a good cop who had got lost somewhere along the line, hiding in the dangerous coat-tails of James Kirkton. Why should a cop and the self-appointed police czar not be the best of friends?
The lift came, the doors slid silently open. It was full, Anderson waved it away, he would take the stairs. He thought that he might never get out of the hospital. He had already visited Wyngate, post-surgery for ligament damage to both his shoulders – he was going to be out of action for months. Baby Sam had been crawling over his dad’s bed, reaching for the games on the screen. Anderson was intensely aware of Wyngate’s wife’s scrutiny. Twice he had been operational in the field and twice he had been seriously injured. It wasn’t a debate he wanted to get into at that moment but he knew Wyngate’s wife had already mentally written his letter of resignation.
Walking down the corridor, to the room in HD, where another life hung in the balance, thinking about Mr Hollister; young and strong, had his life taken from him and nobody had noticed, nobody had come looking for him. Despite Costello and O’Hare’s best efforts, he remained unidentified. He was a body in cold storage and a selection of tissue samples on glass slides. Not much to show for a life. He allowed himself a wry smile at the thought of the Kilpatrick O’Hare reunion, jazz records playing at the care home, two aficionados doing their cool stuff. Good luck to them, two lonely souls had found some solace in all this mess.
‘Bloody hell,’ Anderson looked into the room, tubes and pipes and monitors everywhere. The body lay on the bed covered in a very light white sheet, the window at the side of the bed gave little light. There was an observation window that they were looking through now. Above the door, visible to those in the nursing bay was a series of lights. All of them quiet, no buzzers going off, no emergency going on. Life was ticking over slowly. In the room a ghost dressed all in white moved around. The outfit reminded Anderson of the scene of crime officers. There was some irony there, that those on the precipice of death were served by the same rules as those who had recently fallen over it.
Sandra Ryme would be very lucky if she made it. Or unlucky, as Costello had said. Unusually moved for her, her voice had broken slightly because it was such a horrible thing to happen to anybody, or any other woman, or because it had brought back some terrible memories for herself. That little scar on her forehead, and probably now another on her cheek on the opposite side to match it, courtesy of Mrs Kerr. Now David was back and relatively safe except a few psychological scars, and a dislocated shoulder, knee and ankle. The reunion had been tearful. Anderson had stood on the corner unashamedly tearful himself. Duncan Kerr had been left very much on the sidelines. Colin couldn’t help himself, he took the dad to one side and told him not to give up on his boy. He needed to be there for his son, kids are always kids, no matter how old they are. The man, tearful himself, had nodded. The marriage might have gone but that umbilical cord is never really broken. He wished he had been given that advice. Duncan Kerr had turned away and Anderson asked him if he wanted to go and sit outside, have a coffee from the machine and leave David with his mum. She deserved that.
And so Colin Anderson and Duncan Kerr moaned about the younger generation like two old codgers in the pub.
‘Funny, how when you work away, you know so little about them.’
‘Believe me, living with them doesn’t help.’
‘I never knew he had a girlfriend.’
‘He doesn’t. I turned your son’s life upside down and he does not have a girlfriend.’ Anderson took a sip of his coffee.
‘Ah, so his mum doesn’t know either. I felt rather proud of him. He kept his young lady a secret.’
‘Like father, like son?’
Duncan Kerr laughed grimly. ‘I guess I asked for that. But it proves you can’t trust them, no matter what you do.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Yeah, nice girl, long dark brown hair. Well spoken. She came into his room yesterday and gave him this crumpled up old bit of tissue, all red and dirty. Young romance, eh? It obviously meant something to them.’
‘Long dark hair?’ asked Anderson.
‘Yes, do you know her?’
‘Does anybody know anyone?’ asked Anderson, smiling to himself. One day he would get the hang of this parenting lark.
EPILOGUE
Anderson wasn’t so sure that it has been a good idea, but he could see the sense behind it and the emotion that drove it. David and Amy would both, hopefully, make a full recovery eventually. They needed surgery and a lot of physio. They needed to attend their lectures at university, different lectures but at the same place. They needed a little help if they wanted to stay there and not drop a year. Anderson didn’t know which one of the three had come up with the idea but he hoped Claire had something to do with it.
Paige Riley was given the job of running them around, pushing them up kerbs and holding onto the chairs as they rolled down. Amy’s operation was on one knee but David was looking forward to all kinds of bilateral surgery to get any kind of functional movement back. Anderson thought that Paige would be through their pockets and over the horizon before they could say borstal but something had happened to Paige. Maybe it was the way Amy and Claire made a friend out of her. They went for coffee. David joined them, Claire pushing one chair, Paige the other. Or maybe it was the fact that Paige had seen death up close. And she had seen life, the life of parents, children, getting on and believing in yourself. The last Anderson heard about her, she was thinking about moving on once Amy and David got back on their feet. She was thinking of going to college, and taking her Nat fours. Then maybe, going for an HNC in care.
Anderson hoped she made better choices in life than Sandra Ryme.
