Dark Winter (28 page)

McAvoy gives the faintest of laughs.

‘She’s better than all of us,’ he says, gesturing, his vague wave taking in the street and its drunken occupants, its boarded-up shops and litter-strewn doorways. ‘Better than all this.’

Pharaoh regards him, holding his gaze. Eventually, she nods, a decision apparently made. ‘Keep making her shine, Hector. See if any of it rubs off.’

McAvoy is lounging against one of the red brick columns that make up the elegant portico framing the glass sliding doors.

‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy?’

He turns and sees a tall, slender, short-haired woman in a Puffa jacket over a white coat and trouser suit. The woman extends a pale, ringless hand which disappears entirely as McAvoy closes it in his own and takes care not to squeeze.

‘Megan Straub,’ she says.

McAvoy smiles and is pleased to see it returned.

‘I’m Anne’s doctor,’ she says, gesturing for him to follow her back into the warm embrace of the modern hospital. ‘I think some of our executives and pencil-pushers are a bit upset about all this,’ she adds brightly as the double doors swish open and they begin walking down a long corridor laid with gleaming polished wood.

‘Well, as I explained, this is a murder investigation …’

‘Yes, they said something like that,’ says Doctor Straub carelessly, then laughs and adds: ‘I can’t imagine Anne’s a suspect.’

‘No, nothing like that,’ begins McAvoy, and then halts abruptly as he notices that the doctor has stopped by a door and is standing with her fingers on the handle.

Doctor Straub opens the door.

The room is lit by a glorious rectangle of light which scythes down from a high, undraped window set in a wall painted in deep crimson and adorned with black and white sketches in chunky gold frames.

In the centre of a wrought-iron, four-poster bed, lays Anne Montrose. Both of her arms rest above the smooth, cream and gilt bedspread and her blonde hair puddles on the pillowcase like a pool of molten gold.

The drip that feeds her, and the other that takes away her waste, are discreetly hidden behind two tall, rococo lamps, and McAvoy’s eye is drawn to a hand-carved, pine bedside table and matching bookcase that stand against the near wall, beneath a giant mirror which makes the room seem even bigger and more opulent than it is.

‘She looks like a princess,’ breathes McAvoy.

Behind him, Doctor Straub laughs. ‘The families of our patients sometimes like to decorate the rooms. Whether it’s for them or the patient, I couldn’t say, but this one is a definite favourite with the staff.’

‘The light that comes through …’

‘There’s a set of bulbs up there,’ explains Doctor Straub. ‘Even when the weather is shocking, it’s like a summer’s day in here. That’s how it was set up.’

‘Can’t have been cheap.’

‘Her bills are always paid very promptly, I’m led to believe,’ says Doctor Straub, cautiously, crossing to the bed and
smiling at the figure in its centre. ‘And there are never any problems when we want to try new techniques that may cost that little extra.’

‘I’m sure Colonel Emms is very generous,’ says McAvoy, staring into Doctor Straub’s eyes.

‘I wouldn’t be able to discuss that,’ she says with a smile that tells McAvoy all he needs to know.

Curious, he crosses to the bed and leans over Anne Montrose’s sleeping body as if leaning out over a ravine. Her skin is perfect. Her face unwrinkled. Her hair full of lustre and life.

‘It’s like she’s …’

‘Sleeping? Yes. That’s the difficult thing for loved ones to understand. They’re grieving for somebody who’s still here.’

‘Is she still here?’ he asks, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘Do they come back?’

‘We get some of them back,’ she says. ‘Not always as much as was there to begin with, but they can come back.’

‘And Anne? Will she …’

‘I hope so,’ says Doctor Straub with a sigh. ‘I’d love to get to know her. From her records we would appear to have lots in common, though I fear that the work she did abroad would have been beyond my generosity.’

‘You know about her charity work?’ asks McAvoy, stepping back from the bed.

‘I’m her doctor,’ she explains. ‘It’s my job to try whatever I can to get a response.’

‘You remind her of who she was?’

‘Of who she still is.’ She stops herself and purses her lips. ‘What’s this about, Sergeant?’

McAvoy opens his mouth and begins to tell her it’s just routine, but stops himself before he has made a sound. ‘I think somebody is killing people who have survived atrocities and disasters,’ he says, ‘and I think Anne is involved somehow.’

‘You think she might be in danger?’ asks Doctor Straub, pulling a face and raising a hand to her mouth.

McAvoy shakes his head. ‘Perhaps,’ he says.

‘But …’

McAvoy just shrugs. He’s too tired to go through it all, to explain the thought processes that have brought him into Doctor Straub’s world.

‘Does she get many visitors?’ he asks gently.

‘Her mother,’ says Doctor Straub, and there is more animation and excitement in her gestures now. ‘Her sister occasionally. Obviously, we have visiting doctors and students …’

‘I understand she was in a relationship at the time of her death,’ says McAvoy.

‘Yes, her personal effects were brought here when she was transferred to this facility and I have spoken to her family as much as I can to get some details of her life. She fell for a soldier she met while working in Iraq. I’m led to believe he may even have been a chaplain with his regiment. A grand passion, it seems. Such a tragedy to have it cut short.’

‘You use this in the therapy, do you?’

‘We use whatever we can.’

‘You read to her?’ asks McAvoy, nodding at the bookcase.

‘Sometimes,’ she replies. ‘I’ve read her the odd romance. Some poetry. Talked to her about the political situation in Iraq.’

She smiles at McAvoy’s expression of surprise.

‘Things she was interested in, Sergeant. I’ve got a patient downstairs who appears to become more withdrawn when we don’t tell him how Sheffield Wednesday got on. They’re still people. They’re just trapped in there. We’re looking for whatever it is that unlocks them. We’re trying to disentangle a miracle …’

McAvoy runs his tongue around his mouth. He looks again at the figure on the bed. Closes his eyes. Looks inside himself. Grits his teeth and presses his large hands to his forehead as he tries to make sense of what he thought he understood …

‘Sergeant, are you OK?’

His vision is blurring. The room is starting to spin. His legs feel weak, as though unable to support the weight of his thoughts.

‘Wait there,’ says Doctor Straub urgently, as she lowers him into a sitting position on the floor. ‘I’ll get you some water.’

The door swings open and McAvoy is left alone in the room, his huge body folded into a schoolboy pose, cross-legged, heavy-headed on the wooden floor.

He finds the strength to look up.

Focuses on the bookcase.

Romances and poetry, fairy-tales and myths.

He reaches out and takes a book at random.

The title swims in his vision. He blinks. Focuses.

Holy Bible.

Gives a half laugh and opens it.

The pages fall like leaves from a dead tree.

McAvoy finds his lap covered in pages of text, torn into confetti, ripped into angry strips and shards.

He stares at the hardback binding.

Scrawled in angry, jagged letters on the inside cover of the empty book he holds in his hands, McAvoy makes out five words, scrawled again and again; deep enough to be fatal if etched in human skin.

And in the centre of the mantra, amid the mass of angry letters and ferocious scribbles, a piece of scripture, dug into the page in the same furious hand.

On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed. Many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?’ (Deut. 31:17
).

McAvoy forces himself to his feet; torn pages of the scripture falling from his body as he yanks himself upright.

He is breathing heavily, trying to make sense of this rage, bitten deep into the Holy Bible.

He stares again at the figure in the bed.

He scrabbles through the pages; creasing and crumpling leaf after leaf of mania.

Holds up a page of artful lines. Another. More.

Among the scrawls, the furious words, are half a dozen pen-and-ink drawings; vague and abstract, beautiful and unreal.

The tears in his eyes, the blue tinge to his gaze, make the images suddenly swim into focus.

The pictures are all of Anne Montrose. Intricate, loving, detailed images of her laughing, smiling face.

He has seen such penmanship before.

He stares at the images in turn. They are poems to the feeling she has evoked in the artist. Smiling. Laughing. Sleeping …

McAvoy holds up the last image. It has been daubed on a torn-out page of a notebook.

It is a picture of Anne Montrose, asleep, in a wrought-iron four-poster bed; her arms above the bed-sheets, her hair puddled on the pillow.

It is smudged with tears.

McAvoy turns it over.

It is signed and dated a little over a week ago.

He runs for the door.

Pulls his phone from his pocket.

Calls the only person he knows with the skills to raise the dead.

Three hours later, and McAvoy is pulling up outside Wakefield Hospital. The snow hasn’t reached this outpost of West Yorkshire yet. It’s bitterly cold and the air feels like it has been breathed out of a damp, diseased lung.

McAvoy pushes his hair out of his eyes. He straightens his back and stands his collar on end.

He takes a last breath of outside air, then steps through the automatic doors and strides across the tallow-coloured linoleum. Somebody has made an attempt to put Christmas decorations up in reception, but they look somehow obscene against the peeling plaster of the walls or hanging from ceiling tiles mottled with brown damp.

He endeavours to look like he knows where he’s going. Passes the reception desk without a glance. Picks a corridor at random and finds himself following the signs to oncology. He decides that the direction feels wrong, and spots another corridor leading right. He takes it, and almost immediately has to pin himself to the wall as two burly female nurses with round backsides and bosoms that strain their blue uniforms
all but take him out as, side by side, they push two tall cages stacked with linens.

‘Coming through,’ says the older of the pair in a thick West Yorkshire accent.

‘Narrow squeak, eh?’ says the other, who has proper ginger hair and the sort of round spectacles that went out of fashion a decade before.

‘Well, if I was going to get run over today, I couldn’t have asked for a nicer pair of assailants. Can I just check, am I going the right way to ICU …?’

Five minutes later, McAvoy is stepping out of the lift on the third floor. His nostrils fill with the scent of blood and bleach; of flavourless food; of the squeak of trolley wheels and rubber-soled shoes on the scarred linoleum.

A fat prison officer is leaning back against the front desk, sipping from a plastic beaker. He has a head shaved down to guard number two, and small, slightly cauliflowered ears sit like teacup handles on the sides of a misshapen, potatoesque face.

McAvoy makes eye contact with the man as he approaches. For the first time since the rugby pitch, he tries to make himself look big. Hopes he looks like somebody to be reckoned with.

He pulls out his warrant card and the guard straightens up.

‘Chandler,’ says McAvoy, businesslike and official. ‘Where are we at?’

The man looks confused for a moment, but the warrant card and the managerial tone are enough to show him his place in the scheme of things, and he makes no attempt to ask McAvoy why he wants to know, or who has sent him.

‘On a private ward, yonder,’ he says in an accent that sounds to McAvoy’s practised ear as though it originated in the Borders.

‘Gretna?’ he asks, with an approximation of a smile.

‘Annan,’ says the guard, with a little grin. ‘You?’

‘Highlands. By way of Edinburgh and just about everywhere else.’

They share a smile, two Scotsmen together, bonding in a Yorkshire hospital and feeling like they’ve just enjoyed a taste of home.

‘Bad way, is he?’

‘Not as bad as thought at first. There was so much blood. Parts of his neck were just flapping off. He must have done it himself. He was in solitary. Nobody was near him.’

‘Is he conscious?’

‘Barely. He’s had an emergency op but there’s talk of microsurgery if the stitches don’t do the job. He was dead to the world a minute ago, face bandaged up like a mummy. I just popped out for a coffee. There’s another guard gone for his lunch will be back soon. Nobody said to expect visitors.’

McAvoy nods. Ploughs straight on through the other man’s growing cynicism.

‘I need five minutes with him,’ he says, eyes boring into the guard’s. ‘Asleep or not.’

The guard appears to be about to argue, but there is something in McAvoy’s gaze that seems utterly rigid in its devotion to purpose, and he quickly tells himself that there is no harm in stepping aside.

McAvoy thanks him with a nod. His heart is thumping, but he stills it with deep breaths and closed eyes. His shoes
are surprisingly quiet on the linoleum floor.

The silence is eerie. Grim. It makes him wonder about his own final days. Whether he will die amid noise, surrounded by bustle and chat. Or whether it will be a solitary gunshot, and then nothing.

He steps inside Chandler’s room.

The curtains are the same yellow as the drapes on the maternity unit at Hull Royal, but everything else is a washedout and joyless blue.

Chandler is lying pathetic and motionless on the bed. His false limb is propped next to the single bed, leaving his pyjama leg empty. Nobody has bothered to tie a knot below the severed knee, and the garment is twisted, slanting left, so that at first glance, it looks as though the leg is pointing at an obscene angle.