Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  ‘Or that they might just let themselves in tonight while you’re indulging in all your glorious, unclaus-trophobic space?’

  ‘Kellen, will you—’

  ‘You’ve got three thousand acres of space out there if it comes to that.’

  ‘Will you let me finish the fucking sentence?’

  Nina was gone. The cat was gone. The dog was gone. We were alone in the room. Still, all of them heard. You could have heard that on the far side of the ben. She didn’t shout—I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her shout—but it carried clearly all the same.

  ‘Why? Have you got something useful to say?’

  ‘Listen to me, Kellen.’ She spoke very softly, very carefully. ‘I am going to say this to you once and once only. You are the closest friend I’ve got. You are, I think, the closest friend I’ve ever had. That does not give you rights of ownership. I am going home. I am going now and I am going alone. I am not coming back tonight, or any other night in the foreseeable future, and if you push this now, I may never come back at all. I am not, whatever you choose to think, in any immediate danger. The same could not necessarily be said for you. Believe me, we are better off with a good few miles between us. So either you give me back the keys to my car or I’ll walk to the village and I’ll call a taxi. The choice is yours.’ She had her back to the far wall, her fingers splayed at her sides holding it and herself together. She was chalk-white, shivering as if she had fever and her hair was glued to her forehead. She looked worse than she had when she first got out of the car.

  ‘At least will you take the dog with you? Please.’

  ‘No.’

  Nobody came near us as she left.

  I went riding that afternoon. I brought Maddie in from her day off in the hawthorn field, tacked her up and rode out on a route I’ve never taken before: way out past the loch to the far side of the ben and then back round the far edge of the moor and down the line of the river to the beech wood below the barn. It’s not a good route for trekking: too many dips and rises, too much unmarked bog. Too long as well. It’s a good two hours longer than the full-day ride up to the loch and back. Or it would be, at sensible trekking pace. But I wasn’t out for a trek and we didn’t keep to a sensible pace. The mare was fit from a half-season’s work and was ready to stretch her legs. I wasn’t fit at all but I needed to be moving. We did the whole thing, I think, in just under six hours.

  It was nearly dark as we came in along the line of the river. Jon’s promised rain had been and gone and come back again and settled in fitful drizzles, just enough to keep us wet and cool, not enough to be cold. The wind had been bad up on the ben, blowing hair and mane and tail in tangled circles, blasting us sideways, making the footing worse in places where it was already bad. By the time we reached the beeches, it had blown itself out and the evening lay still around us, waiting for the next front to bring in the rain. You could see it, the front, far out on the western skyline: great, sweeping banks of black cloud knifed through with streaks of vicious, sulphurous yellow. A sunset out of Hades, venting its spleen on the land and the sea. I gave the mare her head, let her set her own pace down the side of the water and spent the last twenty minutes of the ride trying not to feel as if I was becoming a part of the sky.

  We reached the end of the wood and the path turned in, away from the beeches, towards the farm. All the ponies know their way home from here. I slid down from the saddle and slackened the girth, knotting the reins up out of the way so that the mare could rest as she followed me in. We slowed the pace then, neither of us desperate to be home too soon. Maddie pushed up against my shoulder, the brown patches of her hide fading out in the shadows so that it seemed as if I walked through the fields with a half-horse walking beside me. The false horizon of the cloud covered the sun sooner than you’d expect for the time of year. One moment we were walking in dusk, watching the tussocks of grass at our feet, the next, it was a starless night and the small things of the dark were coming into their own. Bats flittered overhead, half seen in the faltering light. Tawny owls screamed at their young. A vixen barked to her mate, out beyond the woods. The mare’s not fond of fox. She pushed in closer to my shoulder. Later, I stumbled on a tussock and slid my arm up over her withers, as if the two of us, melded together, could see better than one. Not true, but the feel of her, solid and warm at my side, made the darkness seem less unfriendly.

  It took us an age to reach the far side of west acre paddock. I unhooked the gate and swung it open and swung it back again and the horse grazed for a moment on the far side as I fiddled to get the chain over the stone of the corner post. A hand took it from me and flipped it back into place. I froze and the world turned over. The horse huffed and went back to her eating. A dark shadow separated from other dark shadows along the hedge. ‘She didn’t stay then?’ he said.

  ‘Stewart MacDonald.’ The world came back into focus, hard and fast. ‘Get the hell off my land.’

  ‘Kellen, I’m not—’ Something pale flashed at knee level. White teeth gleamed over a lolling tongue and then disappeared more suddenly than they had appeared.

  ‘And your dog. Both of you. Now.’

  ‘Kellen …’

  ‘Or I’ll call the police. Aggravated trespass. Your dog is worrying my in-foal mares.’

  ‘Aye, very funny.’ He didn’t move.

  ‘If you think so.’ I walked to the mare, untied the reins, tightened the girth and remounted. There’s an advantage to height. I pulled the mobile from my pocket. I found his work number in the directory. My thumb hovered over the key to send. ‘Who do I speak to? Andy Baird?’

  ‘Kellen, you’re going to have to accept—’

  ‘I don’t have to accept anything of yours, MacDonald. I trusted you.’

  ‘Right. So what’s changed? We took her in and we questioned her. You knew that. What would you have me do? Pat her on the head and tell her she’s fine while she dreams up another fancy way to kill the next one?’

  ‘She’s killed nobody, and you know it.’

  ‘I know nothing except the facts, and right at the moment, she’s the only suspect I’ve got.’

  ‘Christ, you really can’t see past the end of your own nose, can you? Do you think if she really killed Hillary Murdoch, she’d walk out and leave her own name on a pad by the bed? Do you honestly believe she’s that stupid?’

  ‘No, I don’t. That’s why we let her go.’

  ‘Oh, very good. So maybe, just maybe, she’s telling the truth. In which case, she’s next.’

  ‘And maybe, just maybe, she’s brighter than any of the rest of us. Would you believe that?’

  ‘I’d believe nothing without decent proof, MacDonald. But I’ll tell you this. If she’s right and she’s the next in line and something happens and she dies while you and your uniformed fuckwits are spinning in circles digging holes to push her into, then, so help me, I will put the rest of my life into breaking you. I’ll have your job, I’ll have your livelihood, I’ll have your home. I’ll find everything that has ever mattered to you and I will destroy it.’

  The mare took the last step forward, upset by the tension. Still he didn’t move. He stood at her shoulder and his face looked up into mine. All I could see in the dark were his eyes. His hand came up to the reins. ‘You won’t have to do that, Kellen,’ he said. ‘If I’m wrong and she dies, I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘Good.’ I spun the mare round on her hocks. ‘So get the hell off—’

  ‘I’m going.’ His shadow became other shadows. His dog was already gone. ‘I’ll not be back.’

  Good.

  The night is cool. The moon is growing, peering in through the bedroom window, a sickle sliced in half by the window-frame. The cat lies in his place by the bed. His rasp is louder; his heartbeat, when I feel it, beats harder, bigger through the skeletal cage of his ribs. Today he stopped eating. It was the tension. We can believe it was the tension. We have a promise, both of us, that when he stops eating, we will let him go. But not tonight.
We will give him one more night. Because tonight, none of us ate and it might not be that he’s dying.

  ‘They’ve brought Colin Storey-Pugh over from Edinburgh. Did you know?’

  ‘Somebody has to run the Department.’

  ‘Is Lee still not back?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘All things are relative.’

  ‘Have they got a result yet on Murdoch’s post-mortem?’

  How should I know? Am I the only link to pathology? ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How’s the cat?’

  ‘He’s alive. He ate again this morning. Thank you.’

  ‘Good.’ A hand on my arm, a smile. ‘Don’t let them get to you.’

  They got to me. By ten o’clock on Monday morning, less than two hours into work, they got to me. I used not to hate Monday mornings, but then I had never before been exposed to quite so many well-meaning, solicitous idiots. Sadly, they were also my colleagues and thus relatively inescapable. Tuesday was no better. Dee was the only one who had the sense to ask pertinent questions about the cat, which I could cope with, and not about Lee, which I could not. So I talked to Dee, in the quiet moments between patients, and she was one of the few who knew what was really happening, as much as anyone did. Only Mike Bailey had a better idea of the truth. Better, possibly, than I did. By Wednesday lunchtime, I had had as much of not knowing as I could stomach. I picked up a sandwich from the canteen and headed down to the pathology block.

  ‘Mike?’ The door from the corridor to the mortuary was locked. Never, since Lee took the job as pathology resident, has this door been locked. I knocked for a second time, louder. ‘Mike, are you there?’

  Nothing. If I were somebody different, I might believe he’d gone out to lunch, but Mike Bailey never goes out to lunch, not in the conventional sense. I got out my keys and hammered them on the glass. ‘Mike? It’s me, Kellen.’

  He came out of one of the darkened offices in the far corridor, screwing up his eyes against the glare of the overhead lights. ‘Kellen?’ He didn’t unlock the door. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see you.’

  ‘Right.’ He didn’t say it like a question. He stood on the far side of the glass and probed a hollow tooth with his tongue. His eyes narrowed again and this time it had nothing to do with the light. He’s not a straightforward man, Mike Bailey, but fiercely, fiercely loyal. I would have said, until then, that his loyalty was all for Lee. Perhaps not. ‘Mike, what’s going on? I’m not …’

  ‘I know.’ He made whatever decision he needed to make. The key turned in the lock. ‘Come in.’ The lock clicked shut behind me.

  His office was in virtual darkness. Close-fitting blinds blocked the daylight from the windows. The only light came from the microscope on the bench. He switched on a desk lamp and cleared a mass of papers from a stool in the corner.

  ‘Sit down and don’t make too much noise. If anyone walks past, we’re not here.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Mike?’

  ‘Politics, what else?’ He pulled his chair round and sat astride it, his arms folded along the back. The light was all behind him, sparking yellowed highlights off the nicotine streaks in his hair. He probed another tooth. ‘Professor Pugh’s getting, shall we say, sensitive about who comes in here.’

  ‘Who’s he worried about?’

  ‘Lee, mostly.’ He chose not to look at me. ‘Or anyone who might be her friend.’

  ‘Fine.’ I will assume, until told otherwise, that I still count as that. ‘Why?’

  ‘This, for starters.’ He spun his chair round and nodded his head for me to pull mine up to the microscope. The focus blurred and then sharpened on a histology slide; long wavering black strands on an orange background sprinkled with tiny semi-circles in a wild, fluorescent green.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘See these?’ A pointer moved into the field of view and skittered round the greens. ‘Fluorescent antibody test. Pugh had it flown in from the States. We got it last night.’ The pointer found more bright green blots. ‘The black is skeletal muscle. The green means the neuromuscular junctions are staining positive for sxamethonium.’

  ‘So? What’s this got to do with Lee?’

  ‘The muscle came from Hillary Murdoch. This is the third one I’ve looked at. Three different muscles, three different sites. They all stain the same.’ He dulled the field and his face came away from the lenses. The lines around his eyes turned down more than they used to. He spun round on the chair. ‘He’s good, Pugh,’ he said. ‘Not as good as her maybe but not far off. This stuff is broken down in the muscle within three hours of injection. He saw the bruises down her back from the cramps and had the biopsies taken within minutes of getting her in here. If he’d left it another hour there’d have been nothing to find beyond a needle mark at the back of one shoulder and you don’t die from that even if it does go straight into the lungs.’ He leant sideways and unhooked the blinds from the windows. Daylight, harsh and over-bright, flooded the room and lit up a cramped space made more so by the intrusion of the microscope and the haggard, old-young figure of a man, hunched over his chair. He reached down under his desk, pulled out his gear and slowly, carefully, he rolled himself a cigarette. His eyes were on me. ‘It’s a hell of a way to die, Kellen.’

  It is. I don’t particularly want to think about it, but in this place, there is no choice. Hillary Murdoch died in total paralysis. Suxamethonium is a muscle relaxant, one of the first to be used in this country. The early anaesthetists wanted something to stop their patients from walking off the table when the ether ran low, so they took apart the structure of curare, the arrow-tip poison of the Amazon Indians, and re-created it in the lab. Curare is impressive by anyone’s standards. One scratch drops a jaguar in fifty paces. Translated into medicine, a couple of ccs injected into the bloodstream can drop a grown man just the same, and when it hits, every single muscle in the body goes into total spasm, absolutely rigid, like the worst case of cramp you can imagine. The pain is excruciating and the muscle damage lasts long after the surgery’s done. The paralysis comes on a minute or so after the cramps. Total neuromuscular blockade. All movement stops. Feeling is there, thinking is there, the ability to panic is there, but none of it is translated into action. You can’t walk, you can’t run, you can’t scream. And you can’t breathe.

  ‘God.’ It hit then, hard and ugly, like a fist. ‘Oh God, Mike. She died in asphyxia.’

  ‘She did.’ He nodded. He didn’t smile. He used always to smile. ‘Right bang on pattern. She came out of the cramps and she found she couldn’t breathe.’ He crushed the stub of his roll-up between finger and thumb and dropped it neatly in a small metal can at his feet. ‘We have a signature, Kellen. Fatal asphyxia. And she’s raising the stakes with each one. Joey drowned but he’d pretty well drunk himself into a coma before anything happened, so he won’t have known much about it. Coutts breathed air with no oxygen in it but he was out of his skull on Flatliners by the time he did it. Poor bloody Murdoch, God roast her soul, was right there, all her faculties working. One hundred per cent wide awake and functioning. Pugh reckons it would take somewhere round five minutes from the point of injection to clinical death and she’d have been conscious for most of that time.’ He reached for his gear a second time. ‘You’d have to hate someone an awful lot to do that to them, Kellen.’

  I watched him fingering the tobacco; I watched still, without comment, as he took out the resin from a separate compartment and crumbled it first on to the paper. He is losing his edge. Lee at least had him straight until six. I waited while he finished lighting up. The heady smell of it filled the room, flowed out through the window and down into the car park. It did nothing to change the nausea twisting the pit of my guts.

  ‘You don’t really believe she did it?’

  He shook his head. Long coils of hair fell out round his face. Smoke filtered between us. ‘I owe her, Kellen. You know that.’r />
  ‘But … ?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who else is there would know how to do that? Who else would want to? There’s no one else hated Murdoch that much. Eric, maybe, but you can’t point the finger at a dead man. Especially not if he turns out to be on the list with the rest.’ He took a long drag and held it in, offered the joint across to me before he’d breathed out and then took it back again when I shook my head. He exhaled through his teeth. ‘Pugh’s going to go back over him this afternoon and see if there’s anything she might have “missed” on the body.’

  ‘Eric didn’t die in asphyxia.’

  He was mid-way through another drag. The out-breath came, long and unhurried. His pupils flared oddly in the light. His features began to melt, like candle wax by a fire. He shook his head and shrugged again. ‘Not so far as we know.’

  A clock on his bench beeped a warning. He reached out, slack-jointed, and silenced it. ‘Fuck. Time for work.’ His voice was steady if his hands were not. He sighed and pinched out the glow. A dark patch on fingertip and thumb marks a thousand other premature endings. He reached up and wrapped a straggle of hair round one ear. ‘I’m not happy about this. You have to believe that. But it makes no sense any other way. We have a signature and we have a motive and we have no one else who fits the frame.’

  ‘Did Stewart MacDonald tell you that?’

  ‘No.’ He dropped the joint in an old can of Coke on the counter. It fizzled faintly in the bottom as he swirled it round. He looked at me slant-wise under the arc of his arm. ‘You’re joining the white coats, Kellen. That’s a bad sign. Just because I don’t have one doesn’t mean I can’t think for myself when I need to.’

  ‘Have you told the police what you’ve found?’

  ‘Hardly.’ He smiled at that, hard and flat and fully aware. ‘But there’s nothing I can do to stop Pugh. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he wasn’t spending his lunch hour with your friend MacDonald.’ The smile faded to nothing. ‘If she’s inside again by now, it’s not on my account. I’m on her side, still, whatever she’s done. I’ll stay that way just as long as I’m not next. You want to think about that, maybe.’