Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  She knows him and likes him and tolerated him sitting in the box, which is more than most of them do. She broke her waters at dawn and gave him, nice and easy, a compact filly foal, chestnut all through but for the pale pewter line around her eyes that tells the world she’ll be grey when the foal coat sheds. In a week or two, as she grows, she’ll be just another foal in the herd and the colt will be back in his place as the pride and joy. For now, though, he is second in line, and if I listen between the clarion cries of frustration, I can hear an old man whistling an endless reprise of ‘Marie’s Wedding,’ which is how he always welcomes his new children into the world.

  In another time and another place, I sit on the bed and taste the salt of a lost dream on my lips. The world might not have ended but it has stopped, for now, in its tracks. I have known Lee Adams for nine long years, and for every moment of that, she has known, we have known, the world has known, not just that she will be a surgeon, but that she will be the best of surgeons. She may not bear the dynastic flame of a Duncan but she will, none the less, carve a high place for herself in the world of bright names and brighter knives. For all the time I have known her, there has been nothing else in her world that matters. And now it is gone.

  I am slow for lack of sleep and I will not believe it. Nine years is too long to throw away in a morning. Whatever you have said, whatever you have done, it cannot cancel out the years of extra ward rounds, the days and nights in the library, the months in theatre taking the shit, the long, late evenings in anatomy working and working to know what it is that makes the human frame move and function and fail the way that it does. He needs you, that man. He respects you. You are the first one, bar none, who has stayed the distance. You can’t throw it all away. He won’t let you.

  But I can. He will. He has. You’re not listening. I have thrown it all away and more. Last night, for the first time, I killed a dying patient. I have, knowingly and willingly, taken a life because the death that was coming was worse than anything else I have seen and I could not sit by any longer and watch it happen. It should never have come to that. Never. This case was his case, his patient, his part of his clinical trial. His decision to keep on going with a treatment protocol that he knew was useless and worse than useless. He should have stopped this months ago and the only reason he didn’t is because Hillary Murdoch said that she needed more cases in the treatment group so that they could publish the results. He is committing murder in there. Long, slow, serial murder of people who trust him, people who know no better, people who go to their collective graves believing that this man has been doing his best when all he has done is rack up numbers for his tame statistician. It can’t go on. I won’t let it go on. I have lodged a formal complaint, of malpractice, of negligence, of wilful neglect. This man is a Duncan. This man is the Duncan. The men in white coats worship the ground he walks on but they have turned blind eyes his way for too long. Now, I will make them see. Now, I will stop him, whatever it takes. But I will never, not ever again, be a surgeon.

  In that, if nothing else, she was right.

  The day still holds on to the rain. Six families of house-martins have made their homes beneath the eaves. The parents started hunting at dawn. They are still hunting now; they make long, swooping passes through the clouds of midges and thunder flies that swirl like smoke in the air above the pond. They return, time and again, to the nests, to the incessant screaming of their young. I can hear it now only if I think hard, if I pull each of the sounds from the backdrop of noise and name them. I do it once, as an exercise, to bring me back to the here and now, but the effort is more than I want to spend and I let it go. I am empty, drained with lack of sleep. I am here and I am there, caught in the no-man’s land where time has no meaning. All I can feel is the shock of then and the ripples of it running through to now. I can feel the blinding heat of our tears, hers and mine on the back of my hand. She doesn’t weep. Lee does not weep. In all of my life, Eric or no Eric, the only time I have seen her weep was the morning she came home to the flat that we shared and told me that she had just thrown away all hope of ever fulfilling her dream. Even so, it was overspill, a small, silent fraction of what was going on inside. I didn’t have the understanding, then, to ask for more. Life would have been different if I had. You can’t feel that much and keep holding it in without damage to something. In the days afterwards, when the shock of it grew less and was replaced by the aching void of a life without direction, I can remember the feel of her anger, like slow-boiling lava, and me, waiting for, praying for, an eruption that never came. I remember, beyond that, the long days of going in to work and of people not speaking, of eyes not meeting mine, of words not spoken, as if by siding with the accuser I had become one of the accused. Then I remember the days drawing into weeks and the weeks into months and the slow, dawning realisation that nothing was going to happen, that the wheels had turned, the worm had performed a full 360-degree revolution and escaped the bird. The system closed ranks, reached for its broom, and the blood and the guilt and the bodies vanished tidily under the carpet. Records were lost by the drawerful. Not just individual case records but an entire bank of research reports vanished from history as if they had never been. Too late, we realised what was happening and, a long way too late, we tried to do something about it. We talked about going to the papers. We tried, I remember, a tame reporter, but she wanted proof in black and white and we had none and, in any case, the press was more servile in those days; editors still paid homage to the high god of medicine. Careers came and went on the need to uphold the patients’ faith in the profession. It would have taken more than a folder of facts to print a story.

  And so, slowly, unbelievably, everything returned to where it had been. Except that Lee was different. Nothing you could name or put a finger on, but changed in small ways that have blurred with memory until I can barely remember the difference between the bright, glowing flame of who she was and the harder, dryer, filtered version of who she became. When they offered her a job in pathology I thought she’d throw it in their faces, but she’d been three months out in the cold by then and Lee lived for the hospital in ways that I never did. She took it and she made the best of it, and all that she could once have been for the living, she became for the dead. But I have never seen her so much as nod at Randolph Duncan from that day to this.

  Randolph Duncan, whose son is dead.

  I gave up on the bed. Sleep was never going to come and the black-on-white lines of the ceiling were making me feel ill. I dressed in whatever was nearest and clean, poured a mug of half-cold coffee from the pot by the Rayburn and went outside to lean on the wall by the hawthorn hedge. The air was so very still, the sky so deeply, densely blue. The pond was poured lead, viscous and flat with only the slowest of ripples flowing out from the ducks at the edge. The martins were silent, hunting flies in the way whales hunt plankton: long, open-mouthed trawls through a swarm of smaller beings. A million flies dead to feed one bird. Someone, somewhere believes this to be a fair swap.

  ‘Kellen?’ The gravel crunched, once, behind me. You would think that, in the still of the day, I would have heard the car draw up, but I lost the sound of it in the steady grind of the tractors. I turned towards the gate. Dee stood in the shade of the house, propped sideways against the wall like a leaning broom. She was still in the running shorts and singlet from the morning, still with the blue hollows beneath her eyes, as if she’d spent the past hours pummelling her thumbs around her orbits.

  ‘Hi.’ She smiled, weary and self-mocking. ‘I glad I’m not the only one couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘It’s the weather.’

  ‘If you say so.’ She came over to join me at the wall.

  ‘It has to rain soon.’

  ‘The forecasters say wind but no rain.’

  ‘Idiots.’

  We stood together for a while, feeling the heat of the day, tasting the damp of it with every breath, watching the older foals—the duns, the bays, the chestnuts and the one outstan
ding strawberry roan—as they raced each other from tussock to teasel and back again across the field. The mares gathered in a cluster under the shade of the beech trees on the far side of the field, whisking flies in their sleep. I looked down at my hands, clasped together on the stones. A fine tremor ran through to the white knuckle-ends, like cold, or the beginnings of malaria. Or fear.

  I stood on the edge of reality and looked out into the void and knew I couldn’t face it alone.

  ‘It’s Randolph Duncan,’ I said.

  ‘What is?’ She was watching the foal, the strawberry roan. It stood part-balanced on three legs and used the fourth to scratch the back of one ear. They can only do that when they’re young, foals. Like children and young trees, they stiffen as they grow.

  ‘The next one. There is going to be a next one. Lee told me there was. I just didn’t think to ask how she knew …’

  The words ran dry in my throat. My hands were locked tight, jammed hard on the blunt stone of the wall, crushing skin on to bone to stop the shakes. I looked out over the field and tried to find the roan, a small token of reality to keep me from falling out over the edge. Dee moved in behind me, her arms looping in under my elbows, her hands covering mine. The tremor ran through them to her, up to the shoulders and down the span of her ribs. I felt her voice before I heard it, deep and resonant, a life-raft of sound.

  ‘She didn’t do it, Kellen. You told me that.’ Her hands were warm on mine.

  ‘I know. I was wrong. I wasn’t thinking. Or I chose not to think. I had forgotten quite how badly she hated Randolph Duncan. Eric always blamed Murdoch. She was away in the States. I suppose it was easier on all of us to despise someone on the other side of the world than a man you have to work with every day of the week.’ I sketched out the briefest details of Lee and her war with her mentor. ‘She never mentioned him once it was over. She never even said his name. It was as if he didn’t exist.’

  Her fingers traced lines on the backs of my hands. ‘It was half a lifetime ago, Kellen. What would make her start killing now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hillary Murdoch coming back, maybe. Or losing Eric. MacDonald could be right, she needed him there to keep her grounded. I just didn’t think … I thought she had more to live for than that …’

  ‘Kellen … don’t.’ She moved round then, sliding between me and the wall, blocking out the mares and their foals and the blurring fields. Her hands came up to my face; her palms were dry on the wet of my cheeks. The balls of her thumbs flickered over my eyelids, the skin rough, like a dry-tongued cat. ‘Kellen, stop it, you’re guessing. You don’t know any of this for sure. You need to go back and talk to her and see what she says and then you can decide on more than a maybe if she’s telling …’ She stiffened then, without warning, and her hands dropped to her sides. I spun on the spot. ‘Nina, I …’ and there he was, dressed up for work and without his dog and he looked no more happy to see us there than she would have.

  ‘Inspector MacDonald.’ I swayed back against the wall. ‘How very deeply intrusive. I thought I told you to stay off my land?’

  ‘Where is she?’ It came out stark and flat, no pretence at friendship.

  ‘Nina? She’s at work. She’ll be home this evening.’

  ‘Is that right?’ He stood with his feet braced and his arms folded and he didn’t move, except to chew, hard, on his bottom lip. ‘I’ve a warrant to make a search,’ he said. He bit the words short. ‘I thought maybe you’d rather we did it the easy way, but it’s all the same to me if you’d rather have half a dozen men taking the place apart instead.’ Outside the gate, a second car drew up. The fizzing whine of a radio sounded through the open windows. Nobody got out.

  ‘What?’ It was the weather. And the lack of sleep. Even then, I didn’t think. It was Dee who stepped between us, breaking the deadlock. Her face was bland, suddenly, without shadows, flattened out to a strange, puttied white. ‘I think,’ she said, and her voice broke on the strained end of a laugh, ‘I think he’s trying to tell us that he can’t find Lee.’

  Stray ears of barley stood tall and dry at the edge of the field, heads bent over the weight of the grain. I sat with my back to the gate and wove them in pairs, bending over and over, across and across, adding new stalks as the old ones came to an end. It’s not hard work but it takes some thought to keep the strand unbroken beyond the first few turns. I had eleven inches of woven grass by the time they finished searching the house. Another three for the barn. The uniformed muscle gathered outside the back door; there were three of them, all of a height, sweating in their shirt sleeves. Sandy and Jon stood to the side and you could feel the promises of action building into something that would take some holding. MacDonald came out last from the house. The tread of his feet on the gravel gathered all of the anger and crumpled it tight.

  ‘Well?’ I didn’t wait till he stopped. ‘I do hope you checked the linen cupboard. There’s room for at least three in there if you pack them tight.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Pass.’ I looked up. Dee straddled the wall above the pond. I heard the small whistle of an indrawn breath and then nothing. ‘Wherever she goes, MacDonald, it won’t be here.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me if we differ on that.’ A thread of sweat ran down the outside of one cheek, gathering mass on the way. ‘I counted the saddles in the tack room,’ he said. ‘There’s some horses out.’

  ‘Really? How odd. Remind me to shut the business the next time you want to come out to play.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Ask Jon.’

  ‘He said seven.’

  ‘That’ll be seven, then.’ I picked another stalk, a long one, dried to a good corn yellow but not too brittle to weave. The tractors and the colt and the martins filled the silence.

  ‘So I’ll wait, if you don’t mind, till they all come back.’

  ‘Fine.’ The stalk bedded in well, a nice, solid join. I looked up at Dee. ‘You better give my apologies at the meeting. It looks as if I’ll be here for a while.’

  She blinked only once. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said. ‘They’ll call it off if you’re not there.’

  ‘So reschedule.’

  ‘We can’t, Kellen. Folk don’t reschedule their dying. You can’t drop out now.’ She looked over at him, spread her arms wide. ‘She doesn’t have to stay, surely?’

  He shrugged, his eyes on me. ‘Not on my account.’

  ‘I think I should.’

  ‘Kellen. I’ll drive. You just have to be there. We can’t do it without you.’

  ‘I really don’t think I should …’

  ‘Just go.’

  The last stalk broke. I pulled out the wasted fragment and dropped it back on the grass. On the edge of vision, I saw Dee lie back, very slowly, along the stones of the wall and turn her face to the sky. ‘If you insist.’ I stood up and looked over at Dee. ‘Your car?’ I asked.

  She stared up at the clouds. ‘If you think you can stand my driving.’

  MacDonald stood still in front of me, each elbow gripped with the thumb of the other hand. The tendons stood out pale against the summer brown of his skin. The backs of his hands were damp with sweat. ‘I need to find her, Kellen.’ His voice had lost all inflection, as if someone had taken the curves of the vowels and pared them all down with a razor.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If she’s not a danger to anyone else then she’s in real danger herself.’

  ‘I am all too well aware of that.’

  ‘So then why are you lying to me?’

  ‘It’s a habit. I don’t cope with authority. I thought you’d have noticed that by now.’ I pulled together the two ends of the stalk and tied them into one single, wide-looped ring.

  ‘Kellen …’

  ‘I don’t know where she is, all right? I will swear that on anything you can find that matters enough that we’ll both believe it.’ I bit off a free strand of straw. ‘Go and talk to Mhaire Culloch out on the Ayr road. If there’s anyone k
nows what’s happening now it’ll be her. If you draw a blank after that, I can’t help you.’ I looped the weaving round his neck, felt the heat of him on my hands and, beneath it, the layers on layers of contradiction. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘I want you to call me if she comes here.’

  ‘I know you do.’ I took him by the shoulders, pressed a dry kiss to his forehead and turned him round to face the house. Five men found things to stare at in the gravel. ‘The ride should be back by twelve,’ I said. ‘You can help yourself to coffee in the kitchen while you’re waiting. Just don’t ask Sandy or Jon for help—I don’t want to come home and find you’ve had to lock them both up for assault.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I sat in the passenger seat of Dee’s car and watched her negotiate the potholes of the lane. She had changed clothes from a bag in the boot: loose jeans, a longer-sleeved shirt, a waist pack for her keys. The lack of sleep was less obvious, as if the exhaustion had gone with the clothes.

  ‘No problem. We did improvisation at college. It’s supposed to help the creative flow.’

  ‘You’re food.’

  ‘I know.’ She twitched a smile, her eyes on the road. ‘I’ll let you see my raku sometime. Are you going to tell me where we’re really going?’

  ‘To see Randolph Duncan—left at the end of the lane—and then maybe back to see Mhaire Culloch. If MacDonald doesn’t get there first.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘Duncan? I’ve no idea. Somewhere on the south side. Just get on to the motorway and get us over the river. I’ll have an address by the time we need it.’ I pulled the mobile from my belt and tested a number I thought might work.

  ‘Are you sure Lee isn’t going to turn up at the farm?’

  ‘Totally. If she’s looking for help, she’ll go to someone she trusts and that isn’t—Hello, Jessica? It’s Kellen. Look, I’m sorry to bother you at work, I need to go and see your father-in-law, it’s kind of urgent, d’you think you could let me have his address? … What? No … I’m sorry, I’m on the mobile, the reception’s lousy … OK, let me write it down … Right. Where’s that? … Yes, I remember. Got it … What? … Who? … When? … Yes. I will. Thanks. No, it’s all right, don’t bother, we’ll be there in twenty minutes.’