Martha saw a laptop open on the bed beyond her, but couldn’t see the screen from here. There was an empty bottle of gin on the floor, and Rose’s hand was hanging over the side of the bed above it. That had been the noise – the sound of the bottle hitting the floor. On the bedside table was an empty bottle of prescription pills, the lid lying neatly next to the bottle.
‘Fuck,’ Billy said. ‘Rose?’ He went to her and shook her. ‘Rose.’
He sat her upright. Her head lolled to the side like a puppet with the strings cut. Totally out of it. Her breasts almost hanging out of her bra.
Martha pulled her mobile out and dialled 999.
‘This is total bullshit, Rose,’ Billy said. ‘This is not you.’
He shook her again, then tried to prise an eyelid open. The eye was rolled right back, just the white showing. He put his ear to her mouth, then felt her neck for a pulse.
‘She’s still alive,’ he said. ‘She’s breathing.’
Martha told the woman on the phone they needed an ambulance, told them the address, what had happened. She got put through to someone who asked what Rose had taken.
‘A bottle of gin and a bottle of pills.’
‘What are the pills?’
She went over to the bedside table and lifted the bottle.
‘Xanax.’ The prescription on the bottle was made out to ‘Ms R. Brown’.
They told her just to stay calm, they’d be there as soon as possible, and Martha hung up.
‘What did they say?’ Billy said.
‘To hang on till the ambulance arrives.’
‘Is that it?’
‘It’ll be here in a few minutes,’ Martha said. This was like last time, with Gordon, all over again.
‘We can’t just sit here.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘We’ve got to empty her stomach.’
‘You sure?’
‘You’ve seen it on television enough. Help me.’
They took an arm each and tried to walk her up and down the hall but her feet dragged behind her.
‘Come on,’ Billy said. ‘Fuck’s sake, wake up. You can’t do this, understand?’
It wasn’t working.
They walked her into the bathroom, to the sink, bent her over and Billy stuck two fingers down her throat. Martha’s gag reflexes worked at the thought of it as Billy continued, removing his fingers and pushing them in again between Rose’s pale lips.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Martha said.
‘I’ve got to do something.’
Just then Billy’s hand was swamped in vomit as Rose puked all over the sink and floor. Her throat spasmed as the puke was replaced by yellow bile. Martha saw undigested pills amongst the watery mess and wondered how many she’d taken.
Billy whispered in Rose’s ear. ‘Come on, wake up, stay with us.’
The buzzer went and Martha bolted to the door.
Two paramedics came in and hustled through to the bathroom, asking questions in steady voices. Martha showed one of them the pill bottle while the other spoke to Rose, easing her onto a stretcher and examining her.
‘Let’s move her,’ he said, placing an oxygen mask over her mouth.
They lifted the stretcher and their bags of equipment and headed for the door, Billy following them.
Martha headed for the bedroom. ‘I’ll see you down there.’
She ran and scooped up the laptop from Rose’s bed. Shoogled the touchpad to wake it up, but it was password-protected. She closed the screen and popped the laptop into her bag, then left the flat.
Downstairs they were getting the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, punters in the Regent ogling out the window at the activity.
Martha followed Billy into the ambulance. Their second ride in the back of an ambulance this week.
44
This time they had a legitimate reason to be in the ICU.
It was the same nurse from before, when they’d blagged in to see Gordon. She gave them a funny look, as if they were cursed. Who goes to see two unrelated people in intensive care in the space of a couple of days?
Maybe the nurse was right, Martha thought. Maybe she was the Grim Reaper, bringing death to all those who came near. She would’ve laughed at the idea if it didn’t have a ring of awful truth about it.
But Rose wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway.
The nurse buzzed them through, throwing them a scowl.
Martha wondered if Rose would be in the same bed, the one Gordon had died in. The deathbed. That would be a sign, wouldn’t it? A sign that Martha was a harbinger of doom.
But it wasn’t the same bed, her room was further along, on the other side of the corridor. Fate was never that neat.
There was a cop by Rose’s bedside. Not a PC Plod, someone higher up, judging by the stripes on the uniform. Hair greying at the sides, distinguished, but hangdog, his face tripping him. He was staring at Rose, laid out on the bed, white sheets over her body. She seemed somehow diminished, like she’d shrunk. Her face was a patchy grey, red blotches on her cheeks. Maybe the toxins were trying to leech out.
There had been stomach pumping at A & E, and a few injections. Martha didn’t know what of. Lots of doctor chat about anti-this and haemo-that. Some mention of adrenalin. Martha had plenty of that to spare. In the end, they said Rose was stable but in a coma. Same as Gordon. Although the A & E doctor – a woman not much older than Martha – said Rose had a good chance of recovery. The coma was probably just the body shutting down to repair itself, rather than powering down for good.
‘Stuart,’ Billy said.
The cop turned, saw Billy, turned back. Shook his head.
Billy put a hand on the cop’s shoulder.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.
The cop sighed. ‘You found her?’
Billy nodded.
‘This isn’t right,’ the cop said.
Billy indicated Martha. ‘Stuart, this is Martha, she works at the paper.’
Martha didn’t speak. What could she say? Nothing was appropriate for a man sitting by the bed of an attempted suicide in a coma. She knew that from bitter experience.
‘Martha, this is Stuart, DI Price, Rose’s . . .’
He didn’t need to say who this man was to Rose, it was obvious.
‘Describe the scene for me,’ Stuart said.
‘Are you sure?’
Stuart nodded.
Billy ran through it – the booze, the pills, Rose on the bed. Seemed more normal in the retelling, less life and death, somehow, just another everyday suicide attempt.
Stuart rubbed at his temple. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know,’ Billy said.
‘This isn’t like Rose at all.’
Billy just nodded. Martha supposed there was a limit to the number of times you could say ‘I know’. And their job wasn’t to fill the space, it was to let Stuart talk it out.
Martha remembered something. ‘The laptop.’
‘What?’ Stuart said.
‘Rose’s laptop was open on the bed, as if she’d been working on it.’
Billy’s eyebrows were raised. ‘That’s right, I forgot about it in all the madness.’
Stuart’s eyes widened. ‘We need to get that laptop right now.’
Martha undid the buckles on her bag and pulled it out. ‘I picked it up, thought it might be useful.’
Stuart and Billy gave each other a look that made Martha feel good.
‘But it’s password-protected.’ She opened it up. ‘Any ideas?’
Billy nodded. ‘I know it. “Jeanjeanie”.’
Stuart nodded.
Billy took the laptop and typed in the password. The screen lit up and they all stared at it. An open Word document, a few lines typed:
I’m sorry.
For a long time I have kept a secret. Their are terrible things in my past, things I shouldn’t have done, things I feel so guilty about. I have wronged someone so badly, and I have taken away the best ye
ars of his life as a result.
I don’t want sympathy. I am a bad person. I can’t live with what I’ve done. Sorry to everyone I’ve hurt. Goodbye.
‘Christ,’ Stuart said.
‘Rose didn’t write that,’ Billy said.
Stuart looked at him. ‘What?’
Billy pointed at the screen. ‘She would never make that mistake. “Their” instead of “There”.’
Stuart narrowed his eyes. ‘Not even drunk and on pills?’
Billy’s mouth was a thin line. ‘Trust me, Rose would not make that mistake.’
‘So someone else wrote this?’ Stuart said.
‘Johnny,’ Martha said.
‘Who?’
She told him everything.
Started with her dad’s suicide, her first day in the office, Gordon’s call, Ian’s journal, Carstairs, the Royal Edinburgh, and now Rose.
All apparently linked by one thing.
Johnny Lamb.
‘But why would he be behind this?’ Stuart said.
‘Good question,’ Billy said. ‘We tried to get a look at the court report of the incident we found in the paper all those years ago, but the reports that far back are archived, we have to wait a week to hear anything.’
Stuart nodded. ‘I’ll get it sooner. And I’ll dig out the police file as soon as I’m back in the office. We need to find this guy.’
‘That’s what we’ve been trying to do,’ Martha said.
‘What’s the last known address?’
Martha shook her head. ‘Drummond Street, but he’s not staying there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I’m staying there.’
‘Since her house burnt down,’ Billy said.
Stuart scratched at the back of his hand and stared at Martha. ‘Your house burnt down?’
‘Yeah.’
‘An accident?’
Martha shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Billy closed the laptop. ‘You think Johnny might’ve had something to do with that?’
That had never occurred to Martha. She’d presumed it had been her. The blanket. The fireplace. Short-term memory loss. But maybe she hadn’t destroyed her home after all.
Stuart frowned. ‘It’s my job to investigate things. Keep all possibilities open.’
He stood up. Leaned over the bed and kissed Rose on the forehead. ‘I’ll be back soon, love.’
He turned to Martha and Billy. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, then walked out the room.
Martha looked at Rose. Her skin was oily, like she was encased in a sheen of poison. Martha thought back to their meeting outside the hospital, when she came to see Gordon. Rose had said that Martha reminded her of herself when she was young. She wondered if this fate awaited her when she was older.
But she wasn’t going to reach fifty, lying in a hospital bed in a coma, tubes leading out of her. She had a sudden overwhelming feeling she was going to die soon.
45
It didn’t feel right being back in the office.
She should be out searching for Johnny, not cutting and pasting, writing picture captions. But she had to keep in with the paper, had to keep reminding herself this was her big break. Foot in the door and all that. And anyway, she had no idea where to begin looking for Johnny, that was the sad truth.
‘How you doing, Fluke?’ V said.
News of Rose had spread around the office already. Of course, why wouldn’t it? There was genuine concern on V’s face. Martha wanted to explain, but really, what did she know for certain? People were suddenly killing themselves around her, maybe that’s all there was to it. Maybe this whole Johnny Lamb thing was in her head, she needed a bogeyman to pin everything on, to take away from the awful realisation that some people just can’t handle it and want to end it all.
She had a splitting headache. She wondered about the ECT, if it was a delayed side effect.
‘I’m fine,’ she finally said.
She dug some co-codamol out her bag. V handed her a protein shake to wash them down. She took it and glugged. Horrible.
‘Anything I can do, sweetheart?’ V said.
Martha shook her head.
‘I guess we just have to get on with shit, huh?’
Martha shrugged. Yeah, get on with things. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope you don’t walk straight into an open grave, waiting for your sad and lonely little body. Just keep breathing and walking and talking and try not to accidentally shoot yourself in the face, or jump off a high bridge, or take a whole bottle of pills, or slit your wrists or jump in front of a train or stab yourself in the heart over and over again until there was nothing left but meaty mush.
Just get on with it.
She looked at the pile of stuff on her desk. V had helped, printing out likely targets for commissioning out obits over the next few days, making a note of people to call and chat to, freelancers to chase up, one piece of syndicated copy from the States to be edited and laid out on the page.
Truth be told, V had done most of it already, just one or two smaller pieces to write. That was up to Martha, mopping up the minnows, writing about the people no one else thought worthy of attention, shining a torch on the everyday lives of the faceless masses.
She looked at the top sheet of paper in the pile.
Beverley Shields, died peacefully in a hospice yesterday at a ripe old age. She had spent forty years as a nursery teacher in Duddingston. Just along the road from Martha’s house.
She thought of her house, a charcoaled shell.
This woman had done nothing amazing, she hadn’t travelled around the world, or been part of the fucking Bloomsbury set, or flown across the Atlantic single-handed in a balloon, or spent weeks behind enemy lines gathering intelligence. She had just gone in to work every single day with a smile on her face, teaching three- and four-year-olds how to count, how to behave, how to go to the toilet themselves, and remember to wash their little hands. She had done this for four decades, however many generations that was, and in the same place, so she must’ve seen kids that she’d taught in the seventies coming back years later as worried parents with their kids, or even grandparents with grandkids, all the while taking a simple pleasure in doing something good for society.
That was a life worth documenting.
Martha couldn’t see the piece of paper in her hand, her eyes blurry with tears.
‘Why don’t you let me do that?’ V said.
Martha sniffed and swiped at her eyes with her sleeve. ‘It’s OK, I’ve got it.’
V pointed at the screen. ‘The transcript’s in the usual folder.’
V had already interviewed the woman’s daughter. More than enough to fill the three-hundred-word slot they had left. Three hundred words was an insult. Beverley Shields deserved a whole book to herself, a whole fucking library.
We all deserve our own book, an account of how we live our lives, but we never get it. The only people who get written about are either famous bastards or selfish show-offs. Martha wanted to make Beverley front-page news. Look at this woman, look at what she did for everyone, how she lived, how her family and friends all miss her like crazy, how she left a tiny but indelible mark on the universe.
Martha sighed. She began sifting through the transcript, cutting and pasting, shaping it into a narrative. Stripping the extraneous language, the repetitive stuff, the incidental meanderings.
Three hundred words.
Done.
She opened up the page, ready to run the copy in. Stopped.
The obit above was for Gordon Harris.
Another three-hundred-worder.
Byline was ‘Virginia Tyler’.
Martha looked across.
‘I thought I’d better handle that one,’ V said.
Martha read it. It put a nice gloss on his life. No mention of the manner of death, of course, not the done thing. Made him out to be a quiet and reserved character, but a good guy, just getting on with things. And of cou
rse, his job as obit writer. V had played up the empathy for the grieving and bereaved angle. Didn’t go over the top, make him out to be a saint or anything, just a stand-up guy, living his life.
Until he died.
‘Good job,’ Martha said.
‘Thanks.’
‘You have a caring, considerate side after all.’
V smiled. ‘Don’t go spreading that about, Fluke, or I’ll crush you.’
Martha wondered again what her own obit would be like.
‘Will you write my obit when I die?’ she said to V.
‘Honey, I’ll be long gone by the time you die.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Martha said.
The phone rang.
Martha remembered the first time that had happened with her sitting here at the desk. The start of all this.
She breathed in and out heavily, then closed her eyes. Picked up the phone.
‘The Standard obituary desk.’
‘Sis?’
‘Cal.’ She unclenched her teeth.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Shit.’
‘How shit?’
Of course, he didn’t know about Rose yet. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
‘Well, I have some news that might cheer you up a bit.’
‘It better be good.’
‘I’ve just been speaking to Mum.’
‘I’m not cheered yet.’
‘She wants to talk.’
‘Still not happy.’
‘About Uncle Johnny.’
‘OK, you got me.’
46
A man and a woman wearing those white plastic onesies were on their hands and knees in the living room when Martha and Cal turned up.
Elaine was standing in the front garden, watching through the open window frame as they worked. They had a toolbox open on the floor between them, and they were putting samples into clear plastic bags, writing on the labels of the bags. Systematic, methodical.
They weren’t going to miss anything, Martha thought.
Cal went and put an arm around Elaine. She gave a sad smile and touched his hand with hers.
The Dead Beat Page 15
