Living Death (53 page)

‘So you saw two men there? What were they doing? Were they arguing?’

‘Not at all, by the looks of it. They was standing close together, face to face, as if they was having what you might call an intimate conversation. Very close together.’

‘Can you remember what they looked like? Would you recognise them, if you saw them again?’

‘One was wearing a grey coat, and he had this curly grey hair. I couldn’t see his face because he had his back turned to me. The other feller was big, much bigger than the grey-haired feller, but I couldn’t see his face, either, because the grey feller’s head was in the way.’

‘What about the cars? You say there was a black one. What about the other one?’

‘I can’t recall, to be honest with you,’ said Mr Byrne. ‘Maybe silvery, or silvery-blue.’

‘And the ambulance? Was that a regular ambulance, yellow with green squares on it?’

‘Not at all, no. It was white, white all over. It had some lettering on the side of it but I didn’t have the time to read it. I did see a picture on it, though – like a monk holding on to some kind of animal, and the animal had an arrow sticking out of it. I remember that, because I thought that was kind of a quare picture to be painted on the side of an ambulance.’

Katie stood up, went over to her desk and switched on her PC. She Googled an image of St Giles, nursing an injured hart. Mr Byrne stood up, too, taking out a pair of half-glasses. He put them on and peered at the computer screen with his head tilted back.

‘Spot on,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly the same picture almost.’

‘Thank you, Mr Byrne,’ said Katie. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful.’

‘Did something happen to one of them fellers?’ asked Mr Byrne. ‘Is that why you was asking for witnesses?’

‘Yes. A short time after you saw them, one of them was run over by a truck and killed. The big one.’

‘Holy Mary. That’s terrible. May his soul rest in peace.’

Detective Dooley escorted Mr Byrne out of the station, and then immediately came back. ‘Would you believe it?’ he said. ‘St Giles’ Clinic rears its ugly head again. And the Grey Man, too. Or another grey man. Or do you think that’s just a coincidence?’

‘You know that I don’t believe in coincidences, Robert. All I want to find out now is what that ambulance was doing there, and what the grey-haired man and Martin Ó Brádaigh were discussing so intimately, and whether the grey-haired man stabbed him or not, and how Martin Ó Brádaigh came to be run down by a Paddy’s Whiskey truck.’

She lifted her raincoat off its hook and said, ‘I’ll be going over to CUH now with Pádraigin Scanlan to make that video of poor Siobhán O’Donohue. Once we have that, I think we’ll be more than ready to go to a judge for a search warrant for St Giles’ Clinic, and arrest warrants for Dr Gearoid and Lorcan Fitzgerald.’

*

‘Bridie!’ called John. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of porridge in front of him which he had barely touched, and a mug of tea.

Bridie came in from the living-room and said, ‘What is it, John? What’s the matter? Don’t you care for the porridge? I put cream in it so.’

‘I’m not very hungry, Bridie, to be honest with you. I’m feeling too tense. Katie wants you to take me to this private clinic this morning to have an assessment.’

‘What? What are you talking about? She never said nothing to me.’

‘I expect she forgot. She has her hands full at the moment and I’m the last of her worries.’

‘So you don’t want that?’ Bridie asked him. She took his bowl of porridge away, ate a spoonful of it herself, and then turned on the tap and washed the rest of it down the sink.

‘It’s because of yesterday, the pills and all,’ said John. ‘She thinks that my medication may be wrong. Maybe it’s making me depressed when I shouldn’t be. I mean, you know me, I’m always looking on the bright side, aren’t I? As soon as I have my prosthetic legs I’ll be nearly the man I used to be, and Katie and I will get back together. So she’s suggested that I have some blood tests, and my reflexes checked, and maybe even a brain scan.’

‘Well, that’s news to me,’ said Bridie. ‘Where does she want you to have these done?’

‘St Giles’ Clinic, it’s on Middle Glanmire Road, in Montenotte. They specialise in taking care of people with severe disabilities. People like me.’

‘And she wants me to take you there this morning? Has she made an appointment?’

‘I don’t think you need one. You just walk in and they assess you on the spot.’

Bridie said, ‘I’d best ring her, you know, just to make sure.’

‘You won’t get through to her, Bridie. She’s in court all morning and most of the afternoon. I’m really surprised that she didn’t tell you about it, but I know that she wants me to have it done.’

‘Well, all right, then,’ said Bridie. ‘I suppose that it’s a good idea. I don’t want to come back from getting the messages one day and find that you need your stomach pumping, or that you’ve gone to meet your Creator.’

John said, ‘Grand. I’ll just go to the jacks and then I’ll put on my coat and we can go.’

*

They drove through the mizzle in Bridie’s ten-year-old Ford Galaxy, and all the way to the outskirts of Cork Bridie never stopped talking. John remained silent. He was too busy thinking about what he was going to say to the owners of St Giles’ Clinic to persuade them to take him in.

‘How long is this assessment going to take?’ Bridie asked him, as they turned off the main road and drove up between the high stone walls of Lover’s Walk. ‘If it’s hours, like, I could go into town and look round the shops, couldn’t I? I haven’t had the chance to do that for ages. I could really do with some new bras, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘We’ll have to see,’ said John. He had come up with the idea of having himself admitted to St Giles’ after Katie had told him last night about her investigation into Dr Fitzgerald, although his plan was still only half thought-out. He hadn’t been at all sure that he would be able to convince Bridie to drive him here, but she had obviously relished the opportunity to get out of the house for a few hours.

‘Here it is,’ she said, turning into Middle Glanmire Road and up the steep-sloping driveway into St Giles’ Clinic. She stopped outside the front porch and pulled on the handbrake. There was nobody around except for a mechanic in a grubby blue boiler suit, who was tinkering with an ambulance around the side of the house. There were two ambulances parked right behind it – one with plastic sheeting over the windscreen to protect it while it was being resprayed, and one yellow ambulance with green Battenberg squares on it, and the lettering
Emergency: Lifeline Ambulance Service
.

‘You can wheel me inside, Bridie,’ said John. ‘Whatever you do, though, don’t mention Katie’s name or who she is. Tell them a friend of yours saw the St Giles’ Clinic website, and suggested you bring me here to be taken care of. If it gets out that Katie’s been second-guessing the doctors at the University Hospital, or that she’s been having trouble with a suicidal boyfriend... well, you can imagine what the
Irish Times
would make of it.’

‘So what do you want me to say?’

‘Tell them that, up until now, you’ve been looking after me yourself, but now it’s becoming a bit too much of a burden for you, so you’d like them to assess me to see if I’m eligible for care at St Giles’. Tell them that I have no living relatives, which is true, but also say that they can send their invoice for their assessment and any other treatment to Caremark. Katie’s told me that she’ll pay for any new medication and any therapy, if I need it.’

‘But doesn’t that sound like I’m asking them to take care of you permanent-like?’

‘It does, yes. But if they think that I might be coming here to live, they’ll give me a very thorough assessment. They look after people who don’t have any hope of recovery, so when they see that all I need is a change in my medication, that’s what they’ll tell me. Give them your mobile number when you go in, and when they’ve finished assessing me they can call you and you can come and collect me.’

Bridie looked dubious about this, but then she shrugged and said, ‘All right. If this is what Katie wants. She’s footing the bill, after all.’

She lifted John’s wheelchair out of the back of her Galaxy and brought it around to the passenger side so that he could swing himself into it. Then she pushed him up to the clinic’s front door and rang the bell.

Nobody answered, so she rang again. Immediately, Grainne opened the door. She looked flushed, as if she had been interrupted in the middle of an argument. She stared at John, and then she raised her eyes to Bridie and said, ‘Yes? What is it? What do you want?’

‘We’ve, ah – we’ve come for an assessment,’ said Bridie. ‘Well, John here – not me. He’s come for an assessment.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Grainne. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. What kind of assessment?’

‘To see if you could take him in, like. A friend of mine said she’d seen your website and that’s what you do. Take in people like John – people with the serious disabilities.’

John deliberately didn’t say anything, and didn’t look up at Grainne.

‘Well, yes, we do,’ said Grainne. ‘But it depends on their background. We only take in severely disabled people who can’t find care from anywhere else. People with no family to take care of them. People with no funding. We’re a charity, really.’

‘John has no relatives. I work for Caremark and I’ve been looking after him, but he’s been very depressed because of his disability. It’s reached the point where he’s been thinking of ending it all, if you know what I mean. If you could give him an assessment to see what’s the best way that we can take care of him – well, that could even save his life.’

Grainne didn’t answer immediately, but even though he was pretending that he was staring blankly at nothing at all, John could see from the way that her eyes were darting from side to side that she was thinking very hard.

‘Dr Fitzgerald isn’t here at the moment,’ she told Bridie, after a while. ‘It would be up to him to assess whether your John was suitable for us. But – what time is it? – he’ll be back in less than half an hour, I expect. He’s only seeing his bank manager. Is it possible that you can wait?’

‘Could I leave John here, and then you can ring me when he’s been assessed?’

‘Well... all right. I don’t see why not. He doesn’t have any special needs, does he? I mean, he’s continent? And he’s not carrying any communicable diseases?’

Grainne bent down and spoke to John very slowly and clearly. ‘Are you happy with that, John? If you wait here for a little while for Dr Fitzgerald?’

John glanced up at her and whispered, ‘
Yes
.’

Bridie gave Grainne her mobile number, and then she said, ‘G’luck, John, I’ll see you after.’ She walked quickly back to her Galaxy, climbed into it and reversed down the driveway. It was then that John realised how pleased she was to have some free time away from him. All that nursing, all that sympathetic listening to his feelings about Katie – she had done that only because she was paid to do it, and not because she really cared about him. In a strange way, it made him feel worse than walking into Katie’s bedroom in the middle of the night and finding her asleep with another man.

‘What’s your name, then?’ Grainne asked him. ‘We’ll be filling in the proper registration forms for you if Dr Fitzgerald decides that we should assess you.’

‘John,’ said John, in a slow, thick voice, as if his tongue were swollen.

‘Yes, I heard John. But John what?’

‘Meagher. John Meagher.’

‘And how old are you John?’

‘Thirty-six. I think so, any road.’

‘Where have you been living, John?’

‘With Bridie. In Cobh. She saw me at the hos – she saw me at the hospital – and she took pity on me. Because of my legs. Because of my
no
legs.’

‘What happened to your legs, John? How did you lose them?’

‘Accident. Fell – fell off my motorbike. Hit my head too.’ John pointed to his left temple and said, ‘I had a bleed. Now I can’t remember things so good.’

Grainne patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘That’s grand altogether, John. I think that Dr Fitzgerald may well want to give you some tests, so that we can admit you.’

John gave her a sloping smile as if he didn’t really understand her. She released the brake on his wheelchair, turned him around, and pushed him down the hallway and into the large reception room. The window into which Gerry Mulvaney had thrown himself was still boarded up.

‘I doubt if Dr Fitzgerald will be longer than a half-hour,’ said Grainne. ‘Can I fetch you anything in the meantime? A glass of water maybe? How about today’s paper?’

Grainne’s initial reaction to John’s appearance at the front door had been bordering on the outright hostile, but now it seemed that she couldn’t do enough to make him feel welcome. This was just what he had been hoping for. With any luck, it might give him the opportunity to look around the clinic and see if there were any more patients who had been deliberately mutilated like Siobhán. How grateful Katie would be, if he could. Not only would it save her from having to mount an expensive Garda search of the premises, it would prove to her that even without his legs he was still a man, with strength and initiative. When they had first become lovers, she frequently used to tell him that he looked like a Greek god. Maybe the god had been cut down to size, but everything else about him was intact.
I could still make love to you, Katie, like I used to, if only you would let me.

After about ten minutes, Grainne came back into the reception room and said, ‘Dr Fitzgerald just rang me. He’ll be back in about twenty-five minutes. Are you still okay for the moment? I have to pop around to the shop but I won’t be long. If there’s anything you need urgent shout out for Dermot. He’s in the kitchen at the back, clearing out the wastepipe. The things that people tip down the sink, you wouldn’t credit it.’

She went away again, leaving the door a few centimetres ajar. John waited for a while, and then wheeled himself up to it, and listened. At first he could hear nothing except a water-tank rumbling somewhere. That was probably caused by Dermot, whoever Dermot was, flushing out the wastepipe. Then, very faintly, he heard somebody howling.