The Road to Hell Read online

  ‘No. That’s a part of the contract that we insist upon,’ he replied, speaking with a new self-consciousness, unable to take his eyes off the moving pen, his words suddenly difficult to find. ‘They have to agree not to bring any drink, drugs or whatever onto our premises. Their rooms are checked periodically to see that they’re sticking to their side of the bargain.’

  ‘And do they?’ she asked, not looking up from her notebook.

  ‘No, not always.’

  ‘On you go, Mr Brand,’ the Sheriff said, still noting down the witness’s answer but waving a hand at the Procurator Fiscal to signal that he could now resume his examination-in-chief.

  ‘For the sake of completeness,’ James Brand began, folding his arms beneath his black gown, ‘can you tell us what happened to the accommodation that you arranged in Niddrie for Miss Fyfe?’

  ‘Yes. Something that quite often happens in that sort of situation with our service-users. Something that, in many ways, goes to the heart of the problem. We got her moved in, the place redecorated. I helped her with that myself, and we found her furniture again. But in less than two months things started going pear-shaped. It’s very difficult for them, you see. They’re often isolated or whatever. Sometimes they’re near-suicidal, they’re so lonely. At a hostel they’ve had company, whether they like it or not, but in the flat they’re on their own again, with their own thoughts. Some of their pals from the hostel turn up and beg to stay for a couple of nights. Before you know it, they’ve got four or five, or more, of their friends dossing down on the living-room floor. So, there’s noise, mess, complaints – you can imagine. Next thing the police are involved . . .’

  ‘So what exactly happened in Moira Fyfe’s case?’ the Procurator Fiscal said. Standing with his legs wide apart, he had moved squarely in front of the witness as if about to challenge him to a gunfight.

  ‘Just that. Her pals, Taff and the rest, came to visit her and she allowed them to stay. Of course, they’d drink on them and shared it with her, so all the months and months of good work we’d done with her went down the plughole. There were fights, the neighbours complained and the police had to warn her about her behaviour and the disturbance and noise at all hours. The next thing I heard was that she was on her way back from London. Apparently, she’d left her flat, got herself south somehow and been living rough around King’s Cross. After her money and her phone had been stolen while she was dossing in a bus shelter she managed to persuade St Martin’s to give her a ticket on the next bus back to Edinburgh. From then onwards she was either with us or in one of the Bethany Trust places, Salvation Army, Streetwise or the Cyrenians. She took whatever was on offer. She had to.’

  After lunch the Procurator Fiscal attempted to question Linda Gates about the events at the hostel on the night of 13 January. With the end of her nose scarcely visible above the top of the witness box, she stared defiantly at her questioner. She was, as before, prepared to cooperate only to the extent of providing her name, which she uttered in a high, childish voice. When, after repeated denials, she was finally told off by the Sheriff she appeared to relent slightly, adopting a new tactic.

  ‘So, you were present in the TV lounge of the hostel at about 8 p.m. on the Sunday evening?’ the Procurator Fiscal asked wearily, repeating yet again the same question.

  ‘Sorry, pal, I cannae mind,’ she replied, grinning broadly as if pleased with her new gambit and allowing her eyes to roam freely around the courtroom as if for applause.

  ‘Can you recall if you were in the TV lounge at all that evening?’

  Loud, liquid-sounding coughing from the back of the courtroom made her answer inaudible. A group of four people, all seated in the back row of benches, were watching her, and one of their number was bent double, shoulders heaving, as he tried desperately to stifle the hacking coughs with his hands.

  ‘Nah,’ she repeated, unasked, once silence had returned.

  ‘Can you recall if you were in the hostel at all that evening?’

  ‘Nah. I’ve lost my memory, see? Substance abuse can dae that tae ye, ken.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ James Brand said crossly, fixing the woman with narrowed eyes, ‘I should remind you, as the Sheriff did earlier, that you are on oath.’

  The witness, now panicking, looked first at her interrogator and then up at the bench. Seeing the judge’s implacable expression, the remains of her smile vanished and she nodded her head as if, finally, she had understood. This was not a game, or, if it was, it was not one she could win. Thinking things over again, she managed to recall that she had, indeed, been in the TV lounge with Moira Fyfe.

  ‘At any time whilst you were both there, did you accuse Moira Fyfe of having stolen money from you?’

  ‘Aye, answer that one, Linda,’ a man’s hoarse voice rasped from the public benches. His words were followed by a ripple of applause from his companions, and a tall, thin woman with dark, greasy hair stood up and let out a muted whoop. Looking up from her note-taking, startled by the commotion, the Sheriff threw down her pen and bellowed, ‘Silence at the back of the court! This witness is trying to give her evidence and I am trying to hear it, so there will be no interruptions, NO interruptions from the public benches.’

  In the ensuing stunned silence, the tall woman resumed her seat. The Sheriff returned her attention to the witness. Catching her eye, she said, in a measured tone, ‘Could you now answer, please, Miss Gates?’ The order was thinly disguised as a question, but this time the witness recognised its imperative quality.

  ‘Aye,’ she replied, ‘I did. Because she had. I’d left thirty pounds in my room that afternoon and I’d telt her I’d got the money from the social, like. She was skint and begged a couple of pounds off me. I even gave them her. When I went back to my room after tea it had all gone. A couple of hours later Moira comes back all tanked up and she’d bought a whole load of stuff with her. Bacardi in her cardie, voddy in her body. Where did she get the money for all that from, I wonder, eh? From my bloody room! Where else?’

  The girl shook her head in disgust, reliving the anger again she had felt on discovering the theft, and looked hard at the line of people seated at the back of the room. None of them said a word. Having, to her own satisfaction, stared them all out, she sniffed, wiped the side of her nose with her hand and turned her hostile gaze once more to the Procurator Fiscal.

  ‘How did Moira Fyfe react to your accusation?’ the man said calmly, ignoring her aggressive stare and looking down at his notes instead.

  ‘She went radge. She tried to attack me, but I was too quick for her. I moved to the side and she fell over, never laid a finger on me.’

  ‘When she fell over, did she hit anything before she landed on the floor?’

  Tired of having to cajole, pressurise and threaten the witness to get anything useful out of her, the Procurator Fiscal had already resigned himself to a denial, further evasion or another sudden loss of memory. Linda Gates, however, surprised him. Shaking her head again, she giggled, putting up her hand to cover her mouth like a naughty schoolgirl, and said, ‘Aye. The daft old bitch split her heid on a wing chair on the way down. Served her right for taking ma wad.’

  The group at the back of the courtroom took little notice as the Macer led a plump lady towards the witness box. They did not, initially, recognise her. Only when she gave her name in a soft Irish brogue did they exchange glances, sit up, and start to whisper to each other.

  Because, for her court appearance, Maureen McKee had transformed herself. Her normally scrubbed face was now heavily made up, lips a dark red, and her distinctive bushy eyebrows had been trimmed and plucked into perfect arches. Abandoning her habitual T-shirt and jeans, she now sported a figure-hugging black polo neck, a tight maroon skirt and black knee-length boots.

  In contrast to Linda Gates, she appeared entirely at ease and seemed to view the giving of evidence as some form of theatrical performance. Speaking slowly, she willingly filled in some of the missing details, providing a fuller, more c
olourful account of the night’s events. Only when asked what Moira Fyfe had said before and after the fall did she hesitate for a second. Then, taking a deep breath, she repeated the litany of swear words that Moira Fyfe had unleashed, enunciating each one as if it came from a lexicon entirely foreign to her.

  Getting into her stride, she told the Procurator Fiscal about the journey to the hospital and her charge’s truculent manner in the casualty department.

  ‘She kept saying, “I’m fine, I don’t need to see nobody.” But I was having none of it. It would have been more than my job was worth not to follow the proper procedures . . .’

  When James Brand asked her if she knew what treatment Moira Fyfe had received, she appeared to be taken aback by the question. Then, in a mildly offended tone, she told him that she had no idea what treatment she had received, adding acidly that their service-users had a right to privacy just like anyone else.

  Aware that his witness was on the verge of losing confidence in him, he asked half-heartedly, ‘But given Miss Fyfe’s condition, which you’ve already outlined to us, how could you be sure what she would tell the doctors or nurses? If they were to treat her properly they’d need an accurate account of the accident, wouldn’t they?’

  As Maureen McKee grasped the full implications of the question, including the sly suggestion that she might have failed in her duty, her indignation rose. Leaning over the edge of the witness box as if to get at her antagonist, she put her hands on her hips and proclaimed: ‘If you, Sir, think that it is proper to go behind the curtain with someone then that is your business. But I do not. What goes on behind the curtain is private, private between the doctor and the person. Anyway, if I could tell that she was drunk, then, for pity’s sake, so could they, couldn’t they?’

  ‘I’ll ask the questions, thank you, Ms McKee,’ Mr Brand said curtly, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other and then back again as he tried to reassert himself.

  ‘Well, all that I’m saying is true, isn’t it?’ she replied.

  Turning to face the Sheriff, she added plaintively, ‘I took her to the doctors, Your Honour, so they could see the condition that she was in. There was nothing to stop any of them asking me about anything, anything at all, if they felt the need to, but none of them did. Were you expecting me to go behind the curtain with Moira, as if she was a child or something? It’s against human rights, and besides, Moira would have had something to say about that, let me assure you!’

  The last hour of the day was devoted to evidence relating to the finding of the deceased’s body in the Hermitage. By then the courtroom was hot, the air dry and an occasional snore could be heard from the benches at the back. Everyone was tired. The Macer sat slumped in his seat, staring vacantly into space, and James Brand’s voice sounded hoarse. The Sheriff seemed to have shrunk into herself, looking from afar like little more than a wig perched on an empty gown.

  The scene was set by Simon McVicar, the first person to find the body, and he, too, presented a very different picture from the traumatised, scantily-clad jogger interviewed by the police on that cold Tuesday morning. In his sharp suit, he was crackling with nervous energy, nodding incessantly as if his head was on a spring, licking his lips and answering questions before Mr Brand had finished asking them. Only when called upon to describe the dead woman’s appearance did he show any emotion, faltering for a second and putting his hand to his mouth as if he was gagging and might vomit. As he spoke about the flesh missing around the corpse’s mouth and earlobe, an audible gasp came from the back of the court.

  ‘Should I go on?’ he asked the Sheriff.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied blithely, seemingly baffled by his query, as if he had been talking about a recipe for rice pudding instead of describing chewed human tissue.

  After he had left the stand, the Sheriff closed her notebook and hooked the clip of her fountain pen over its cover. ‘We’ll start again tomorrow. Can you tell me who you intend to lead first, Mr Brand?’

  ‘I can, my Lady,’ the Procurator Fiscal replied, looking down at his open blue notebook, then leafing feverishly through its pages before adding, in a relieved tone, ‘we’ll start with Doctor Alton. It’s the only time he can come. He was the one who saw Ms Fyfe at the Accident and Emergency Department.’

  ‘Very good,’ the Sheriff replied, and as she adjusted her wig, getting ready to stand up, the Macer suddenly got unsteadily to his feet and boomed out, ‘Court rise.’

  The next morning, the young doctor raised his right hand as he had been requested by the Sheriff to do. Then, sounding like an impatient echo, he repeated the words of the oath after her. Looking down at the medical records from the Royal Infirmary as instructed, he said to the Procurator Fiscal, ‘Yes, I’ve found page 42. I saw Ms Fyfe. I don’t remember seeing her, but these are my notes, initialled by me.’

  ‘Can you explain your note to us, please, doctor – explain what it says?’ Mr Brand said, looking at the photocopies in his own ring binder.

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor began confidently, ‘“Attendance following a fall in the hostel” . . . that’s largely self-explanatory, I suppose. That’s the history that she must have given me at the time. “Alcohol plus, plus, plus”, that’s an observation. “C/O of a head injury” . . .’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ the Procurator Fiscal said, raising his hand like a policeman, ‘if I could just stop you there. We need to unpack this a little. The observation about the alcohol – what was that based on? For example, did she tell you that she had been drinking, or was she obviously drunk or did she simply smell of alcohol, or what?’

  ‘I’m afraid at this distance in time I can’t be sure,’ the doctor said apologetically, adding, ‘I suspect that it means the smell, maybe her manner too. Whatever it was, by noting “plus, plus, plus” it means that I thought she’d drunk to excess. Taken a lot of drink. Probably that she was obviously drunk at the time.’

  ‘Very well,’ Mr Brand said, nodding reassuringly, ‘would you continue?’

  ‘Right. “C/O” . . . that’s “complaining of”, a head injury on the left temple. Again that must have been what she told me, the area she pointed to, in all probability. O/E . . . ah, “on examination”, yellowish, external bruising on the right temple. So, apart from anything else, that means I saw nothing on the left temple. “Fairly bright” . . .’

  ‘Sorry, I need to stop you again. You say that you saw no bruising on the left temple but some on the right. What conclusion did you reach about the bruising on the right temple?’

  ‘That it was old. It had nothing to do with her fall.’

  ‘If there had been bruising, or any signs of injury, apparent elsewhere on her head, would you have made a note of that?’

  ‘Yes. Given her state and the history, I would have examined the whole of her head, I expect.’

  ‘You don’t know whether you did or not?’

  ‘As I said, I can’t remember the patient at all in amongst the thousands I have seen, but that would be my normal practice if I’d been given the history of a fall and a head injury by a person clearly under the influence of alcohol.’

  The sound of coughing echoed around the courtroom, and after it had continued for over a minute, building to a crescendo, a bent figure stumbled his way to the end of the bench at the back and scurried towards the exit. Once silence had returned, the Procurator Fiscal, who had been momentarily distracted, turned his attention back to the witness.

  ‘If you could continue?’ he said, returning his gaze to the photocopied pages before him and trying to find his place.

  ‘“Feeling bright and alert” – well, I suppose I’d be looking at her demeanour, her state of mind, her memory, checking that she wasn’t confused, disorientated, sleepy, vomiting and so on – those sorts of things. In short, checking that there were no signs consistent with a serious head injury, concussion.’

  When there was no immediate follow-up question, the young physician looked across at his interrogat
or expectantly. The lawyer said nothing, his eyes still scanning the page for an elusive entry. After a few seconds, Mr Brand resumed his questioning. ‘Very good, very good. Next, you have written “PERLA” – could you tell us what that means?’

  ‘With head injuries, you check the patient’s pupils,’ Dr Alton replied. ‘You look to see if they are equal, react equally to light and accommodation. It’s an acronym. You shine a torch into each eye to check both of the pupils’ reactions, and then make them focus on a close object to see if each one constricts and constricts equally.’

  ‘Did you X-ray her skull, give her a CT scan or an MRI scan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why on earth not? She might surely have had a hidden injury, a skull fracture or a bleed?’ The tone the lawyer adopted was one of mild incredulity but, being a bit of a ham, he overdid it.

  ‘There wasn’t time. I don’t remember her but I do now remember that night. We were inundated. There’d been a pile-up on the bypass and we were run off our feet. A bus had been involved and it was all hands on deck.’

  ‘When did you first recall this rather important detail – about the crash, I mean?’ Mr Brand asked, looking genuinely stunned by the news.

  ‘Last night. I was looking at my diary and I’d recorded it in there.’

  ‘And you’re sure that the pile-up was on the same night that you saw Ms Fyfe? You’ve never mentioned it before.’

  ‘Positive. It’ll have been in all the papers. You could check it there.’

  ‘In any event, going back to that particular night, you didn’t even assess her on the GCS, did you?’

  ‘Yes, I did!’ the doctor said hotly.

  ‘Before you go on,’ the Sheriff cut in, shaking her head to make her exasperation with the Procurator plain but addressing her remarks to the witness, ‘perhaps you had better tell us what the GCS is, exactly?’

  ‘The GCS is the Glasgow Coma Scale. It’s a neurological scale devised to produce an objective way of recording the conscious state of an individual. They’re tests – can the patient respond verbally? Do the eyes open responsively? There are scores for each exercise, and the total, in a healthy individual, is 15.’