The Betrayal of Trust (34 page)

‘Quite a few.’

‘Yes. And much to my surprise, I’ve been off out of those doors again. But not now. I’m a bit further gone. And that’s the way things are, you see. You get old, you die. If you didn’t how would there be room for the next lot coming on?’ She looked at Cat. ‘There’s one thing driving me mad, though, and I don’t see why I should put up with it as well as with dying.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Itching. My skin itches. It’s like creeping things all over it and I scratch until I bleed – look, here.’ Mary stretched out an arm. The yellowing loose skin was dry and flaking and there were marks where her fingernails had scratched through it and brought blood, which had then dried.

Cat lifted the arm and turned it gently. ‘Is this on your legs as well?’

‘It’s everywhere.’

‘Did
the nurses not give you any cream for it?’

‘Oh, I didn’t bother them. I thought I’d wait till you came round.’

‘Mary, that’s just silly … it’s what the nurses are for, they could have saved you scratching and making yourself bleed like this. It’s probably because of the drugs, I’m afraid, but I’ll give you some tablets and a cream and that’ll stop it in its tracks. You don’t have to put up with
this sort of thing, you know.’

‘I’ve put up with a lot worse.’

‘I dare say, but please let us do what we can for you, Mary – or are you up for some sort of bravery award?’

Mary laughed, showing half a dozen stubby teeth sitting like ancient tombstones between the fleshy gaps.

As they were leaving, Mary held out her hand to Molly. ‘Let me hold it,’ she said. Molly put her own hand into the
old woman’s. Mary stroked it. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘Lovely young soft skin. I like that. That cheers me up.’

She patted the back of Molly’s hand and let her go.

Outside, Cat said, ‘If everyone was like Mary …’

‘She’s very philosophical, isn’t she? She seemed to be almost happy to be dying, which can’t be true.’

‘Why not? She’s had a long life and I guess quite a hard one. She only has
one daughter who is crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and can’t really cope. She’s been in awful pain, her symptoms are making her uncomfortable – the itching, the nausea, the loose bowels, the cough, the backache … she’s had enough. She’s tired.’

‘Is she religious?’

‘No. We had a chat about that once. She says she isn’t looking forward to another life, one’s been quite enough. She’s ready
to go.’

Molly shook her head.’

‘Now, this is a difficult one. Roger Flynn. He’s thirty-seven and he has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His outlook is grim, the chemo made him very ill – he’s had severe allergic reactions to just about every drug in the book – he’s had a terrible time. He was married just under a year ago and he was diagnosed not long afterwards. It’s a bugger and he is very, very angry
– he’s
angry
with the illness, with himself, with me, with the nurses, with God … probably more than with the rest put together.’

‘I don’t blame him.’

‘No. But he’s an evangelical Christian, very born-again, converted in one of those mass rallies in a football stadium. He gave his life to Jesus and he became an evangelist himself, he’s a preacher, and then he started to heal people, or so it
seemed. He had a ministry at one of the evangelical churches in Bevham, laying on of hands, charismatic healing … you know the sort of stuff.’

‘Yes and it gives me the creeps. Actually, if he’s angry, I’d be angrier. I just don’t know how people can fall for that sort of thing.’

‘Discussion for another time but basically I agree with you. Mass hysteria is a dangerous thing. But now, of course,
Roger is up against it. He really expected a miracle. His congregations expected a miracle. Half the charismatics in the country have been praying and expecting Roger to be healed – and he hasn’t been.’

‘Well, of course he hasn’t.’

‘If you believe God is a magician up in the sky who favours only you and your kind then it comes as a nasty shock.’

‘But you’re a Christian, Cat.’

‘Yes. Only I
don’t think God is a magician.’

Roger Flynn was tall and lay straight as a felled tree trunk in the narrow bed, his head turned to the wall. He had a small fuzz of hair on his scalp, his skin was reddened and scaly, his eyes sunken down. His hands were clenched on the sheet.

‘Hello, Julie,’ Cat said. ‘Roger. This is Molly, she’s following me today. Do you mind her being here? You only have to
say.’

‘Of course not.’ Roger’s wife was pretty, round-faced, with bubbly curls, but her expression was lifeless, her voice flat, her eyes almost unseeing. She looked exhausted and as if she could not face anything else that might happen but fully expected it to do so, and then worse.

‘Thank you.’ Cat went round to the far side of the bed and took Roger’s hand. He let it lie in hers but did not
respond. ‘How are you today?’

‘Tired. So what’s new?’

She looked at his chart. ‘How’s the fever? They gave you some paracetamol in the night.’

‘Sweating like a pig. Do pigs sweat?’

‘I’ll look it up. Are you more comfortable now?’

‘Not really. But I’m not going to be, am I? How long is this going on?’

‘Roger …’ his wife said, but it was a token protest.

‘I don’t know, Roger. I know it’s
what I always say and that it isn’t very helpful but I’m afraid it’s true.’

‘Get me out of this.’

‘I wish I could.’

‘What use are you then?’

‘I understand.’

‘No, you don’t. Can’t you give me something?’

‘What’s it for? If it’s pain, I’ll check your dosage.’

‘No. Something to put me under. Like dogs and cats.’

‘Roger …’

‘If vets can why not you? Our vet put the cat down just because it
was old. I give you permission. I know it happens.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Happens every day.’

‘Not in this hospice it doesn’t.’

‘It should. Put the lot of us down. Nice injection, fall asleep, that’s what the vet did. Shit.’

A tear pushed its way out from under his tightly closed eyelid. He wiped it off angrily and went on wiping.

‘I’ll make sure you’re not in pain, though you’ll be sleepier.
Just go with it. Relax, Roger.’

‘Fuck off.’

Julie looked anxiously at Cat, who shook her head, then bent down and gave the young woman a hug.

As they left the room, a nurse came down the corridor and raised her hand to Cat.

‘Mary,’ she said. ‘I just popped in to see if she wanted anything …’

‘Oh no. She seemed fine.’

‘She’d just dropped her head down on her chest and gone. Not a murmur.’

Cat glanced at Molly. ‘All right?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Molly said. ‘I … We only just left her … I was planning to come and see her again. I don’t believe it.’

‘No,’ Cat touched her arm. ‘When death happens like that you don’t, quite.’

Two nurses were on a break in the staffroom. A chocolate cake had appeared on the table with ‘Thank You’ iced on it in cream.

‘Are you all right, Molly?’

‘Yes. I just couldn’t take it in. Mary. I still can’t.’

‘The difference is that you see the occasional death in a general hospital but mostly you’re dealing with the living at all ends of the spectrum. Here, we are only at one end and it’s relentless, there’s no balance. You have to learn to deal with it carefully or it affects you too much – it pulls you about emotionally working here and it’s
right it should. I wouldn’t want it to be any other way. But you have to look after yourself. Do you think you could do it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

The chocolate cake was sliced into, more coffee brewed. One of the nurses had a daughter getting married the following week. The talk turned to frocks and flowers. It was how they dealt with it every day, Cat thought, how they stayed sane. Coming in here,
leaving the ward and the patients, pain and distress and bereavement at the door, eating cake, chatting about everyday events, about the news or the weather or, as her mother would have said, ‘the price of fish’.

Her mother. She had tried to put what Simon had told her out of her mind, and while she was working, she could, but the moment she stopped thinking about a patient or a drug dose or
the effect of the day unit closure, she was back there, with Meriel, with a syringe of potassium, with her sister Martha. With killing. Mercy killing. But killing. And Si had known. When had he known? He had not said. If it had been before his mother had died, he might have taken action, but what action? Reported it. And then what? Arrested her? Of course not. For Cat, human life was sacred. For Simon,
it was all about bringing criminals
to
justice. Yet he had failed to make certain that justice was done when the perpetrator was his own mother.

Cat could not decide if she wanted to talk to her father about it or not, whether there would be any point at all. Ill feeling. Anger. Resentment. There would be all of that. Knowing Richard, he might even refuse to discuss the subject at all. He was
perfectly capable of remaining tight-lipped and silent. He had told Judith, without warning, and upset her considerably. Why? Judith had no reason to know. Now, it would be there for good, troubling her. What is known can never be unknown.

Unless everything else is, she thought suddenly. Dementia. The gradual dismantling of what you once knew. The unknowing of everything.

She looked at Molly,
fresh-faced and laughing now, chocolate icing round her mouth. Molly. Twenty-four. Facing a working life of dealing with dying and death, with unravelling and unknowing.

She shook herself. There was a lot more to it than that and much of it more positive. Watching people get better, relieving serious pain, preventing this or that serious illness, diagnosing something in time, helping a baby from
womb to world, saving a life in an emergency, confident of your skills.

‘Come on, Molly. We’re going to the pharmacy. The first principle of palliative care – appropriate and adequate pain relief.’

But the image was in front of her eyes as she opened the door. Her mother. Martha. A syringe of potassium.

There was no unknowing.

FREE LATER 2DAY
. Maybe we can meet 4 a drink
?

The text had come an hour earlier and he had still not replied. The case was opening out and at last he had the sense that something important was going to emerge, some new lead. Cat had only replied briefly to the message he had left on her phone, and in the cool, non-committal voice he knew, which meant that she was being distant with him.
And now Rachel. He sat in the Cypriot café with an empty coffee cup. He picked up the phone on the table in front of him.

‘Guv?’

‘Ben, I need you.’

‘I’m on this burglary, out at Pyrbeck. Another with the same MO, couple and a visiting daughter beaten up. You getting anywhere?’

‘Yes,’ Simon said.

Outside, he read Rachel’s text again. He wanted to see her but seeing her was never straightforward,
never just a drink or dinner for two people, it was full of emotional tension and frustration; unanswered, perhaps even unanswerable, questions hung in the air between them, messing things up, distracting them. Just now, he couldn’t afford it.

Sorry, up to eyes. Have to leave seeing you till case is wrapped up. Will be in touch. Miss you. S
.

He hesitated only for a second before clicking on
Send.

Message received
. Rachel had started to empty a drawer in the kitchen as soon as she had sent the text to Simon, to give herself a distraction, but emptying a drawer did not stop her thinking, imagining, wondering. Panicking. The drawer was on the table, beside it a carrier bag into which she was sorting the rubbish, the broken paper clips and dry biros, old labels and bits of string
and unidentifiable small plastic objects. She did it on autopilot, her mind on Simon. Kenneth was asleep in his chair beside the open sitting-room window. He slept a lot during the day and not always well at night and there was nothing she had so far been able to do to reverse the order of it.

Message received
.

She read it. Read it again. Zapped it.

Her hand shook.

She shouldn’t have sent
the text, shouldn’t have asked him, should have waited for him to make the next move, should …

Should. Shouldn’t. Ought. Must.

The text was perfectly clear. The subtext of the text that was. Yes, he was up to his eyes in his case but that was not the reason. Whatever he felt, seeing her was too fraught with difficulty. She was married, he was reluctant to involve himself further, and who would
blame him? He would be in touch when his case was closed. Except that there would be another case and then another. Of course he would not be in touch.

It was the right decision.

The decision she should have made herself if she had been principled enough. Strong enough.

She looked down at the small metal bottle opener in her hand. It was bent at the edge. Why had it been kept? Why had most
of this junk been kept?

He was in her mind, his tall frame, his features, his steady look, his hands. Beautiful hands. She had noticed his hands before anything else, as he had reached to pour something or hand her something, at the banquet. His hands and his extraordinarily fair hair.

What had happened between them had been as final and as definite as anything in her life, and it had happened
then, that evening, when they had sat next to one another and talked and
looked
with astonishment into each other’s eyes and quickly away, terrified.

He could not mean this. The words were not his words. He would not use such brisk, dismissive, polite words.
Will be in touch
.

She could not bear it and she could not wait.
Will be in touch
. When? In a week, or a month? How long? Cold cases took
years to solve and so might this.

Will be in touch
.

‘Rachel …’

She always got up automatically when Ken called her. He was awake, he was too cold or too hot, or uncomfortable in some way or other.