The Road to Hell Page 13

  ‘Alice?’ the DCI asked, pointedly ignoring the constable. The sergeant nodded. ‘Yes, for the moment. We’ve got statements from as many of her friends, colleagues, or whatever you’d call them, as we could find in the hostels, drop-in centres, settlement flats and so on. For all the use they are. With the exception of that man.’

  ‘Yes, except for bloody Taff, of course,’ DC Cairns interrupted.

  ‘Taff?’ the DCI said.

  ‘Apparently he was her best friend,’ Alice replied, ‘None of her so-called pals have been exactly falling over themselves to talk to us, and even if they do it’s difficult to tell how reliable they are. But one name, his name, keeps popping up. Otherwise it’s pretty hopeless. Three people at number 194 claimed to know her just to get a cup of tea off us, drank it down and then immediately confessed to their “mistake”. Another one assured us that Moira died last winter, and yet another had a theory that Taff was her son.’

  ‘OK. You can go home now, Liz,’ the DCI said, jerking her head in the constable’s direction. The young woman collected her coat from the back of her chair and then waited, looking towards Alice who was busy logging out of her computer. When the constable made no further move to leave, DCI Bell said impatiently, ‘Off you go, Elizabeth.’

  Taken aback by her insistence, the constable said, ‘I’m just going, Ma’am. I was waiting for Sergeant Rice.’

  ‘No, on you go,’ the DCI said, deliberately catching Alice’s eye to let her know that she was to wait behind. Once the slightly puzzled constable had left the Murder Suite, DCI Bell stood up and, looking out of the window again, she stretched.

  ‘It was just to let you know we’ve found the car.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In a back-street garage in Fountainbridge. The lab are pulling it to pieces now.’

  ‘Do we know who was driving it?’

  ‘No,’ the DCI said, ‘not yet. It’s yet another unlicensed banger. It probably rose, like Frankenstein, from some scrapyard or another. But it’s . . .’ She turned to face her Sergeant.

  ‘Thanks, Ma’am,’ Alice said before she could finish the sentence, rising and walking towards the door, suddenly desperate to escape. Whoever had killed him, Ian was dead and she did not want to talk about it, be reminded about it right here and right now. Finding out about Moira Fyfe had, like some wondrous drug, staved off all thoughts of him. But his death was not just another case to her, and the wound was still too raw. She did not want to be overwhelmed, to break down in front of her Chief Inspector, and she could already feel the tears beginning to well up. The slightest sign of fragility and she might find herself jobless and hopeless. She knew what would fill that particular vacuum, and dreaded it.

  ‘Alice!’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am?’ she replied, her head still turned away from her boss.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Elaine Bell asked, coming towards her.

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ she said, nodding, still heading for the door but then briefly turning and forcing her features into a smile.

  In her flat, Alice spent a couple of hours sorting through Ian’s possessions, throwing out rubbish, putting his clothes into black bags, separating their books and stacking his ready to be stored in the cardboard boxes that she planned to acquire from the friendly assistants in a nearby wine shop. Some objects defeated her. A photograph album, once hers alone, had become a joint possession, recording their life together, and it was filled with images taken by him. A derelict boat in Dunbar harbour, a close-up of the prickles on a thistle, the golden eyes of a half-submerged frog, so many things she would have overlooked without him beside her with his keen eye. Should the album go to his mother, or his son, or could she keep it?

  It fell open on her lap and she looked down at a large photo on the left-hand page. It showed Ian in their kitchen. He was grinning widely, naked to the waist, his bottom half clothed in a strange grey-and-white woollen garment. It had a wide waistband which he held out daintily on either side. Memories of the day she had taken the picture flooded back. They had returned from a weekend away, cold and hungry, their clothes wet from an ill-judged, rainy, seaside walk taken on impulse, on the way home. Finding no trousers in the clean laundry basket, or in any of his drawers, he had simply improvised and worn a favourite sweater as trousers. Amused at his own appearance in the mirror he had posed for her camera, his legs one in front of the other in a flat-footed balletic pose.

  Looking at the photo, she smiled. She would keep it and the rest of them for her and her alone. No captions would be necessary, because the album had recorded their life together.

  The ringing of her mobile woke her. She had fallen asleep in the armchair. In the dark she searched the room frantically for the phone, almost tripping over one of the piles of books. But when she picked it up, no voice was forthcoming. In the silence she said ‘Hello’ several times, but still no one spoke, no one answered her. She checked the call log as she wandered, still half-asleep, to her bedroom. Caller unknown.

  Three hours later, at 2.30 a.m., her phone went again. This time when she picked it up she heard her own name, followed by the first few bars of a tune. The music was faint, and had an ethereal quality to it. Still drowsy, she could not place it. She listened for over a minute, and hearing no voice, turned the phone off.

  Later, as she tossed and turned, trying to get back to sleep, she realised what the tune was, but the knowledge gave her no relief, no further slumber. In the silence, and frightening herself as she did so, she hummed the melody once more, hearing in the dark the first few solemn bars of Beethoven’s Funeral March.

  At five o’clock her mobile rang again and, at first, she ignored it. Then, worried that it might be a work call, she picked it up.

  ‘Alice?’ It was a stranger’s voice.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it . . . I’m waiting for you.’

  Before she could say another word, the line went dead.

  10

  Strange snippets about a life, Alice thought, could be gleaned from reading an individual’s medical records. From among the dry details, something of their personality always emerged.

  The medical notes in the file for Moira Fyfe, née Sykes, began, as expected, at the very beginning, with her own birth. The event had taken place at home and was straightforward, but the presence of the strawberry nevus on her cheek seemed to have been a worry from the first. It was noted by the GP to be ‘large, red and diffuse’, and a drawing showed it covering her right cheekbone.

  At the age of four, she was described in a letter of referral to an orthopaedic surgeon as ‘a high-spirited wee girl’, having crashed her tricycle into her grandparents’ cold frame and broken her right wrist. Her teenage years were sparsely documented, with entries only for prescriptions for acne, reference to a bout of glandular fever and to a spell in hospital following a fall from a roof. When later she was attending the Family Planning Clinic, a letter spoke of ‘Moira Sykes . . . this delightful young nurse’, and another alluded to ‘this charming young woman’.

  In the 1980s three separate miscarriages were recorded in between more mundane complaints: bouts of flu and tonsillitis and, in an isolated case, a spell during which she suffered from tennis elbow. An operation note detailed the birth of her son by Caesarean section. His death, too, appeared, albeit indirectly, with a psychiatrist speculating as to whether it had been the catalyst for the episodes of depression she later suffered.

  In 2002 an irregular italic hand noted the death of her husband, ‘her black mood’ and ‘suicidal ideation’. Thereafter, the record was sprinkled with prescriptions for Prozac, and the clinical notes often mentioned her depressed state, the adjective usually favoured to describe this being ‘low’.

  Less than a year later, when she had attended for an ‘ulcer-like pain’, the GP had added to his clinical comments the observation, ‘smells strongly of alcohol’.

  From then onwards the signs of Moira Fyfe’s decline into alco
holism could be read clearly enough: a succession of falls, injuries from a fight with a ‘friend with whom she had been drinking’, an unexplained injury on her right hand and marked, continuing weight gain followed by an equally dramatic loss. By 2006 she was noted as suffering from ‘acute pancreatitis’, developing into ‘chronic pancreatitis’, and by 2008 ‘Type-2 diabetes – alcohol induced?’ had been added to the list.

  A second folder, which contained a copy of the records from the Royal Infirmary, proved to be the most valuable because, amongst other paperwork, were documents concerned with two separate attendances at A&E in Little France. The first visit arose from an assault that she had been subjected to while ‘dossing’ in Warriston Cemetery. In this incident, her nose had been broken and she had lost a tooth. But it was the sparse entry for the second visit that caught Alice’s attention and made her heart beat a little faster. It was a clinical note dated 13 January 2010 and was short and to the point: ‘Attendance following a fall in the hostel. Alcohol +++. C/O a head injury on the left temple. O/E external bruising, yellowish, on R. temple. Fairly bright and alert. PERLA.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’ DI Manson inquired, standing behind her and peering over her shoulder. Deep in concentration, she was startled by his sudden appearance.

  ‘Possibly – it’s hard to tell, it’s in their usual code. But at the PM, Professor McConnachie found blood on the woman’s brain resulting from an injury to the left side of the head. He wasn’t sure whether she died from its effects or the hypothermia or both. But it was that collection of blood which made him think she might have been hit on the left temple.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘An A&E entry for the 13th of January records an injury to the left temple. So there may have been no blow . . . meaning, she wasn’t hit. Everything could be explained by a fall in the hostel two nights before we found her.’

  ‘No blow?’

  ‘Exactly. No blow. They told me at the hostel about the fall but I didn’t realise she’d hit her head.’

  ‘What’s PERLA?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Looking into her eyes, he said, ‘You all right, pet?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Really? You’re a bit pale.’

  ‘Really, I’m fine,’ she answered jauntily, turning away, knowing that any other answer would disconcert him. Kind as he had been, he was not a natural Good Samaritan, nor her natural confidant. Anyway, it was too bloody dangerous to say anything else; her fitness for the job depended on her being ‘fine’, and without her job she would fall to pieces. Whatever happened, and that included harassment by a nuisance caller, she must not be taken off the investigation.

  ‘Good. Glad to hear it. Has the Prof seen these records yet?’

  ‘No. I was just looking at them first, so that . . .’

  Turning away, he interrupted her, too keen to get on to wait. ‘Have them sent over to him the now and then go and discuss them with him, eh, pet? He’ll sort it out for us. That PERLA and so on.’

  Professor McConnachie was seated at his desk, three foil cartons in front of him and a pair of wooden chopsticks poised above his favourite, beef in black bean sauce. As Alice drew up a chair he popped a morsel of meat into his mouth and said, ‘I prefer them, don’t you? More authentic, I always think.’

  When she looked blank, he waggled the chopsticks at her. She nodded noncommittally, watching as he deftly plucked a battered prawn from another container and put it between his crooked, ivory-coloured teeth. Steam from the hot food misted the edge of his glasses, and a pink drop of sweet-and-sour sauce was running down his blue-and-yellow striped tie.

  ‘So, have you changed your view about the cause of death?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ he said, clacking his chopsticks together before plunging them back into the beef.

  ‘But what about the accident in the hostel? We didn’t know about that before. Wouldn’t it explain the injury to the left temple?’

  ‘Yes, it would. But that’s always been my position. Nothing in the copy records you’ve provided me with has made me change my mind on that issue.’

  ‘But we didn’t know about the fall,’ she said, perplexed.

  ‘Correct. What I’m saying is that I’ve always thought that the subdural haemorrhage was likely to have been causative of her death. Whatever caused it – fall or blow. It and the hypothermia, probably.’

  ‘You’d agree then that she may not have been hit by anyone in the Hermitage?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he nodded, unable to speak due to his mouthful of food. After he had finally swallowed it, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he did so, he added, ‘Aha. I accept that the fall in the hostel can account for the subdural collection, that’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘What about the other stuff? The bruise on the right side of her head, her undressed state, the scratches to her legs and arms?’

  ‘With the benefit of the PM, it was only the subdural that really bothered me. Not the other bruise – it was healing, superficial. I thought she’d been hit on the left side. If there was someone after her, chasing her, then that would explain the scratches and so on, an attempt to get away through a thicket or some such thing. Likewise, he might have been responsible for the undressing. But, you’ll have heard that no foreign DNA was found on her, or at least none suggestive of any sort of assault, sexual or otherwise.’

  ‘So what are you saying? Can we close the case?’

  ‘Uh, uh. Not so fast,’ he said, extracting a piece of gristly meat from his mouth and looking at it askance.

  ‘This is beef?’ He wrinkled his nose. Placing the morsel to one side, he wiped his chopsticks on a paper napkin and put them back in his desk drawer. Then he continued. ‘As far as I’m concerned, everything except the fatal injury may now be accounted for by the hypothermia, but I’d still like to know why she died from the bleed – it caused her death, after all.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  He extracted a crumpled linen handkerchief from his trouser pocket, and as he unfurled it a paperclip flew out onto the table. Unperturbed, and folding the handkerchief in four, he dabbed his lips with it.

  ‘She went to hospital, didn’t she, so why didn’t they pick it up? I think this new information muddies the waters further.’ He stopped speaking as he looked at the pink goo on the linen, wiped the drip from his tie and then put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  ‘The woman was in their hands, so to speak,’ he carried on, ‘precisely because of the fall, and yet they failed to pick up the bleed. Why didn’t they find it? It must have been there, to some extent at least, when they saw her. So, why wasn’t she X-rayed or CT-scanned? Did they even check her on the Glasgow Coma Scale? There’s nothing about that in the notes. The Triage Nurse’s assessment seems to have been done in indecent haste, judging by her hurried scrawl. Ms Fyfe was an alcoholic for heaven’s sake! We know she’d had a skinful earlier. So how could they properly assess her mental state? How could they tell what might be attributable to the effects of alcohol and what might be attributable to the effects of the fall?’

  He shook his head and began carefully to reseal the cartons with their white cardboard lids. ‘Always enough for two,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it back for my wife to eat tonight. I think you’d best speak to Elaine . . . to DCI Bell. I don’t think the file can be closed on this one just yet. In fact, if anything, I think we may well be on our way to a Fatal Accident Inquiry.’

  ‘Oh, I will consider it. No, never been there, Sir. I’m not sure if the club even allow women onto their hallowed turf, do they? At any rate I think we have to undergo ritual cleansing or something first?’

  Elaine Bell tried to keep the fury she felt out of her voice. Fortunately, the Superintendent seemed to think that their phone conversation was over, and hearing the click at the other end, she dropped the receiver as if it was red-hot, murmuring under her breath, ‘Arsehole!’ To be subordinate to, patronised by, that man, a golf-playing mason
and worshipper of authority (however bone-headed it might be), was not good for her health. No doubt he had only mentioned Muirfield in order to rattle her, to deliberately provoke her. A social at a place that did not admit women! But the red rag had done its job, because she could feel the veins pulsing in her forehead, and her vision seemed to be altering subtly with each heartbeat.

  Conscious that her GP had warned her that her blood pressure was now ‘dangerously high’, she brought the portable blood-pressure cuff from her desk drawer and applied it to her left wrist. Automatically it inflated itself, tightening on her flesh and constricting her blood vessels. The dial began flashing. After the requisite thirty seconds she examined it. 200/125. With a reading like that, she was heading for a stroke! Now on the edge of panic, she deflated the cuff and quickly applied it to her right arm. Once more she felt the thing activate itself, gripping her arm like a small boa constrictor. 125/40. How could one account for two such different readings from a single heart? What could they mean? Hypertension followed by hypotension, a positively catastrophic fall in her blood pressure. Surely by now she should have fainted or something?

  On the other hand, perhaps the kit was unreliable? That might well explain it. It had, after all, cost under a tenner at Superdrug. Perhaps she should take it back and return to alternative medicine, to the infusion and the gemstones. A lapis lazuli for blood pressure, wasn’t it? One from the pack she had ordered online was still in her desk drawer. As she raked through it, pushing aside the various cold remedies that cluttered it up, the door opened and Alice Rice’s face appeared.

  ‘Can I speak to you, Ma’am?’

  ‘Yes, come in,’ Elaine Bell replied, taking the gemstone surreptitiously out of the drawer and clasping it tightly in her hand, at the same time concealing it and yet allowing it to begin to exert its miraculous powers.

  ‘What’s the Prof’s view then?’ she asked, knuckles white around the stone.