Deep Sleep

by Frances Fyfield

  Kim closed the door behind her, blinking in the bright strip lighting which illuminated everything on display. Behind the corner at the far end lay Pip’s dispensary, always in half light by contrast despite the close work they did in there. Here, stock ran wild, escaping from shelves to be thrust back hourly and even then Kim swore everything got up at night to change places. There were all the conventional shampoos, toothpastes, soaps, patent medicines as well as the homoeopathic range in one corner along with the vitamins, a perfume bar under lock and key, a section devoted to babies’ bottoms, one to handcreams and festooned among it all, underwear, cheap jewellery and fourteen different brands of cosmetics. The underwear, nylon dreams of black lace, frills, suspenders, knickers and multicoloured stockings, somehow spilled across the shop to lend it a raffish air. All this had been Margaret’s sideline, while the rest of her strove to bring order into the chaos. She had wanted such changes, Margaret, such as less ordering and the closing of the back dispensary, a room beyond the room he shared with Kim and where Pip insisted, like a good, old-fashioned pharmacist, on making some of his own preparations. In strict privacy. Not commercial, Margaret had said loudly, get rid of it. God rest her soul, said Pip piously, forgetting the arguments.

  ‘Morning, Pip. Are you winning?’ Kim shouted as she edged her way through the crowded shelves which customers would rearrange and upset with their various bulks throughout the day as they made their way to the counter where Pip was endeavouring to hang a tinfoil sign bearing the legend ‘A Happy Xmas to all our Customers’. Really, she thought, this shop was made for midgets, not someone of her statuesque build, a sharp contrast to Margaret who had been built like a pixie. Hence the nature of all Mrs Carlton’s favourite underwear, best worn by persons of miniature proportions and chiefly bought for a joke. Kim loved it.

  ‘Course I’m winning. I have winning ways.’ Pip was perched on the counter, posed like a coquette, one hand spread fan-like in greeting. ‘My, you’re a sight for sore eyes. By which I don’t mean an eyesore, ha, ha, oh dear me, no. You look very pretty.’ He scrambled down, the decoration trailing after him. Pip never quite finished most tasks, all of them started with boyish enthusiasm. ‘Here, let me take your coat. How’s Tombo?’

  His puns and his civilities were engaging and irritating by turn, but Pip’s energy was always infectious. He was a thin, sprightly man, forty with the bounce of twenty, kept trim by the lonely jogging which he undertook with obsessive zeal, the way he did almost everything. The old customers loved Pip; Kim said they would eat cat food if he told them it was good for them. This morning, after breakfast, she was disposed to like him, forget that undertone to his affectionate manner which was ever so slightly disturbing. The hand on her arm pressed the elbow unnecessarily as he removed the coat: she was not sure if she understood that or not.

  ‘Tombo’s fine,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Sulking, though.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll send him home something nice. Health-giving lollipops, new order.’

  ‘Oh, Pip,’ she said, looking at an open box on the floor, full of sugar-free sweets, a new line when there was no room for the old, ‘where on earth are we going to put them?’

  ‘We’ll find a place. We’ll find places where we didn’t know we had places. Tea?’

  His glance was rather too intent in its admiration, but for once, she was buoyed by his artless optimism. He was such a kind man and you had to make allowances for grief. ‘All right, Lord and Master,’ she said grinning back. ‘But I’ll make it.’

  ‘Ready to tee off, are we?’ He roared at his own pun, ready for the day. Silly git, she thought with weary affection, ready for a day full of more of the same and a dozen cups of tea. Kim hung her coat on the hook Pip had placed too high. The red skirt rode up, revealing an acre of sheer-coated thigh. Only one of them noticed.

  ‘Would you like tea, Dr Hazel?’ the nurse asked, reconciled to the doctor staying longer than anyone usually did with a patient.

  ‘No, I would not. I’d like an extra large belt of whisky, but I doubt if you could arrange it, darling. Then I’ll go on and breathe my glorious fumes over the princess next door.’ He sighed. ‘OK, then, I’ll have tea with my favourite patient. Who has a little colour in the cheeks today and a little light reading matter. Good God, what’s this?’

  After Helen’s third day in hospital, the room had begun to look more like an office. The place was full of flowers, not arranged with any great care or skill, but extravagantly admired; there was a pile of books on the bedside locker and three files spread from the bed to the floor where they had fallen and she had not bothered to retrieve them.

  ‘That’s never work, woman, is it?’ he gestured, horrified. ‘A little something from your office, along with the blooms? Blackmail.’

  ‘Doctor, that is one of my words, not yours. And not accurately used in this context, if I may say so. Blackmail is the obtaining of a pecuniary advantage by threats. There are no threats, only flowers, and I am impecunious.’

  ‘Oh you and your legal words. I meant the emotional sort of a bargain. I’d have anaesthetised your tongue if I’d known you were a lawyer. Always know a lawyer’s health by the state of his mouth. When it’s shut, he’s dead.’

  ‘Sit down for heaven’s sake, you make me even more restless and you owe me fifty pence. Have a glass of wine since you can’t have whisky. You can rinse your mouth out after. Tell me about the world outside.’ They had become very comfortable together, dark Helen West and grizzled old Dr Hazel whose flecked eyes regarded her with affection. A tough customer physically, Miss West. Her recovery had been swift, and the thought of her itching to go filled him with an unidentified sadness. But then no patient of right mind ever wanted to stay inside a hospital, even if they were allowed to drink and smoke. In mute conspiracy, each lit a cigarette, his a Players full strength, hers milder.

  ‘The world outside? Oh glory be to God, what do you want to know about that for? They’ve just lit the lights in Regent Street, the shops are awash with Christmas carols already. It’s murder out there. The rest you’ll find from your newspaper and why on earth did your bloody office send you files? Don’t they know you’re sick?’

  She laughed. ‘And since when, in your career, did a surgeon ever take any notice of that? Even when you were my age as opposed to the rude old man you are now? Physician, heal thyself; get to work.’

  ‘The buggers wouldn’t think twice. Bring out your needle, Hazel, my lad: we’ll give you a chair if you faint and a mask to keep germs off the patient.’

  ‘So. I get files in here because no one else can read my handwriting. If I hadn’t volunteered, they’d find out how stupid I am. Can I pick your brains?’

  ‘You’ll be lucky.’

  ‘Right.’ She motioned to the file half on, half off the bed. ‘I’m not really working, you know, I’m playing at it. Reading a report where there could be a question of homicide, but I haven’t managed more than page one. Tell me, why should a woman of forty-six, non-drinker, non-smoker, healthy, until she dies in bed, simply die? No obvious physical cause at all.’

  ‘She could have been very, very tired,’ he suggested flippantly. ‘Or she might have been contemplating Christmas. Known to kill many, the mere thought of it. Blood pressure? Heart attack?’ He leant forward and leered comically. ‘Poison?’

  ‘No evidence of anything in a routine post-mortem. Blood test awaits. I’ve only half the report. Sleeping like an infant, she was, curled to one side.’

  ‘Even less likely for asphyxia. I don’t know why she died. And I don’t care. Leave it to the coroner.’

  Helen put aside the half-complete Police Report on the death of Mrs Margaret Carlton, relieved to do so, and the talk fell happily to more palatable reading matter. A glass of wine was poured while Dr Hazel scoffed at other books now littering the room. The wine in her veins was preferable to the drip which had left in the removal no trace of a bruise or needle mark, sure sign of a clever anaesthetist.
A little alcohol went a long way towards the recovery of the patient, but the verbal fencing was better. The merits of a favourite novelist were under attack. Hazel enjoyed an argument.

  ‘How can you say this is a heap of rubbish, or is your eyesight bad?’

  ‘Oh, get on with you; the woman is indecipherable …’

  Exactly the kind of conversation which Bailey, that most literary of police officers, should have been able to join with ease, but his coming upon them ended the camaraderie, as Helen could have predicted without quite knowing why, his quiet arrival in that hospital room signalling Hazel’s abrupt departure. Quite different from the nurses who simpered in Bailey’s presence, there was something in Hazel which obviously disliked the aura of policeman inherent in his mild appearance, shied from it like a nervous pony about to throw the rider. A familiar syndrome which nevertheless provoked in Helen a sharp irritation. He often had this effect on people; the talking cadaver at the feast, as if he reminded them suddenly of a cold outside, conscience, and all sorts of old ghosts. He held the door for Hazel. The doctor neglected to thank him.

  The irritation was reciprocal. Tearing across London from the grubby east to the smarter west, Bailey might have expected her to be surrounded with other visitors – Helen attracted nice and nasty without turning any way – but he had not expected to find the patient looking weak but well, wine in one hand and cigarette in the other, deep in conversation with some scruffy male party who was obviously besotted. Last evening he had found Helen scarcely mobile, but playing draughts with the same Dr Hazel: there was something vaguely insulting about it, as if his own protective, companionable role had been usurped. Then he sniffed. The air was full of flowers, tobacco; the sanctity of hospital lost, and the knowledge of that restored his mood. The hackles of insecurity rose and sank back while he registered the beginnings of a mess in the room, secretly rejoicing in this sign of recovery. His own two winter roses were thoroughly dead in a vase by the bed; she had a strange liking for half dead petals and was always reluctant to throw out flowers. Helen might be a peculiar kind of civil servant, but she was clearly impossible to institutionalise.

  ‘Files,’ he said caustically, lifting them from the floor. ‘What’s this, darling?’

  ‘You may look,’ she said with mock primness. ‘That one comes from somewhere near you, not your manor exactly but near your flat. A chemist.’

  ‘Mrs Carlton,’ he read, before putting it down, sitting close to the bed in the chair still warm from Dr Hazel. ‘Bugger Mrs Carlton. How are you? When are you coming home?’

  ‘I’ve got four massive stitches,’ said Helen conspiratorially as he bent to kiss her, ‘on my Easter egg.’

  Bailey drove straight back east into the dim car park of the police station where he worked most of the time. He was not seeking the panacea of work: nor was such available since his tasks were now the delegation of tasks, the current investigations run by remote control. He relied on the self-motivation of most of his men; no immediate panics, despite the unexplained deaths, the missing lorry loads, the Asian bride burnt in some feud they would never understand, the armed robbery of the wages van, and all the other weekly hazards of East Central London. Bailey had become a manager by default, controlled three teams of detectives, although control was not always the appropriate word. Respect was what they showed, co-operation forthcoming as often as not while, rather to his own surprise, they could be prevailed upon to confide both professionally and privately, allowing him to circumvent some of the worst disasters before they actually occurred. Such as refusing to authorise a search warrant requested without a shred of evidence, or deflecting the young sergeant about to punch a rival. Sometimes Bailey thought that his present post, his role as the near but still distant wise old man of the division, was a role designed to do no more than save the Commissioner embarrassment. For some time he had felt he was suffering from a new version of an old malaise, a growing disinterest in life, and he wondered if this managerial appointment was the cause or result of despair. For months now, ever since he and Helen had returned from outside London, ever since he had seen and heard a boy burn to death, he had felt he was slipping. Did not want to know any more the ingredients of these tragedies, see bodies or hear screaming. All in all, even while resenting many of his current tasks, he preferred welfare and discipline. He had lost touch with his streets; here, there was just enough to keep his mind ticking over, and the patience he displayed did not have to touch his heart. The role called for silence, contemplation, passive intelligence, and while Bailey would not have admitted to boredom he hoped that was all that ailed him.

  Fog blanketed the ugly building that was East Ham station, Victorian brick-built, solid, but without the fortress appearance of more modern equivalents, oddly and quite invariably ill lit inside and out. Spotlights relieved the gloom of the car park, but once inside the back door, gloom prevailed on painted walls and everyone, uniformed or not, looked as sallow as the mustard of the decor. Bailey had a separate, although tiny, office with a door leading through into the CID room where several detectives sat by day, teasing a harassed secretary.

  Some wag had stuck a Christmas decoration on Bailey’s door, a loud Santa Claus with frogging on the shoulders and a tie in Bailey’s favourite claret colour round the neck. He liked that: it indicated a measure of the popularity he never courted since that way lay madness. There were times when he would have liked to be hail fellow well met, able to drink with the team, share their outlook and be fêted as one of them, but, being himself, was rarely the subject of jokes, perceived as dry, stern, innovative without ever being revolutionary, the cynicism hidden and the intelligence far too acute for most people’s liking. Bailey’s own officers wanted to please, almost blushed at his praise, but they did not slap him on the shoulder.

  Empty offices always reminded Bailey of empty schools, deserted markets; places which bore no resemblance whatever at night to what they were by day, so lonely he would have the feeling each time of having arrived at the wrong place. As he sat at the desk and dealt briskly with his in-tray, transferring most of it to OUT, the odd sensation of the quietness, punctuated by cars in the yard, murmurings from the front desk, became odder as he heard sounds from the room next door, strange little snorting noises, masked into anonymity by the constant murmuring of the antiquated heating which gave all occupants of this unsympathetic space the sensation of water on the brain. Bailey’s long hands, as well equipped for the mending of his clocks as they were for the writing of clipped phrases in elegantly official prose, paused, lay flat on the desk as he raised his head, immobile with curiosity, invisible antennae ready for action although instinct told him there was no threat in these sounds. Burglars do not come into police stations for the purposes of burglary, but what crossed his mind was the unlikely prospect of one of his men working late, or, as likely, staying away from home. The last possibility was more illicit; some male with female officer, taking advantage of an empty room. In which case, best not to interfere: such delicate matters were not his concern. But just as he debated whether or not to move, or at least to clear his throat in signal, the noise became definable. Snoring: unrhythmical snores, falling and dying, ragged sounds not orchestrated or controlled. As soon as Bailey identified the snores, he knew who it was next door. Duncan, back from the pub. If he had driven here in his car, Bailey would skin him. Duncan Perry, Detective Constable, the muscle of the squad, the door breaker, el machismo incarnate.

  As Bailey opened the door between his room and the next Duncan stirred, not woken, but reaching the natural end of what must have been an uncomfortable sleep. His bulky body, that of an athlete going to seed, was slumped into a chair, one leg extended, the other curled, maintaining his seat by a miracle, while his torso was precariously supported on the desk, head on one arm, the other arm dangling free and dragging him slowly towards the floor. As he woke, the elbow slipped, and Bailey saw him slide out of sight, his face transfixed with surprise. Reaching the floor, h
e let out a grunt of astonishment. Bailey, looking at the controlled mess of the room, reckoned a little more litter would make no difference, and also reckoned that although Duncan had fallen with quite a thump, he was beyond pain.