Trauma (15 page)

'Yes sir.' Sarah went on to explain what she had found out from the brain function tests.'

'Has Dr Logan had a chance to see your results?' asked Tyndall.

'No sir, he delegated the patient to me.'

'I see,' said Tyndall. Sarah could sense that Tyndall doubted the values she had obtained but was too polite to say so straight out. 'I think I can explain sir,' she said. She told Tyndall how she had come to the conclusion that damage to McKirrop's brain had been minimised by the odd angle of his skull and how she had confirmed this by reference to newer X-rays.

Tyndall seemed much happier with this. 'Well done Doctor Lasseter,' he said. 'An alert mind is the physician's most valuable tool.'

'Thank you sir,' replied Sarah, feeling better than she had done since she started at HTU. The world was suddenly a much nicer place thanks to John McKirrop and his recessed frontal lobe.

'From the values you read out it sounds as if we can expect Mr McKirrop to regain consciousness in the not too distant future,' said Tyndall.

'Yes sir,' said Sarah.

'Thank you for letting me know.’

'My pleasure sir.'

The conversation with Tyndall had imbued Sarah with new reserves of energy. She resolved to stay in HTU until McKirrop came round. It had been quite a day, all things considered. Freeing herself from the tyranny of Derek Logan had made it one to remember but seeing John McKirrop regain consciousness would be the icing on the cake. She could not keep it to herself; she went to chat to the night Staff Nurse.

'With that head wound?' exclaimed the nurse when Sarah predicted that McKirrop would recover.

Sarah explained how it looked worse that it actually was.

'If you say so,' shrugged the nurse.

'Bet you fifty pence?'

'You're on. I'll call you if he stirs . . . Or maybe I won't. Fifty pence is fifty pence!'

Sarah went back to the doctors' room and carefully wrote up her notes on John McKirrop for inclusion in his case notes file. Her hand-writing was good and she favoured a Schaeffer drawing pen filled with light blue China ink. Making sure that her notes were always clear and legible was almost a fetish with Sarah. It was born of an intense dislike of the way people made stereotypes of themselves. Many of her colleagues seemed obliged to write badly simply because they were doctors and it was expected of them. For the same reason she could confidently predict what kind of cars they would drive, what clothes they would wear, what kind of houses they would aspire to and in certain cases what their answer would be to any given question. Her father had once explained kindly that his profession - and now hers, had to conform to certain standards because the public expected it of them but Sarah was prone to wonder.

* * * * *

John Main lay awake and heard the fridge in the kitchen trip out leaving the flat in absolute silence. He glanced at the clock at the side of his bed and saw the green digits register three in the morning, an hour he had seen a lot of in recent times. There was something about the wee sma' hours that intensified fear and loneliness. Was it the quietness or was it the darkness? Maybe the latter. Perhaps the absence of light allowed the forces of darkness access to the fearful and vulnerable who lay unprotected by sleep. The loss of Mary and the fact that she was gone for ever was never more poignant than in these hours after midnight when the dawn was still a long way off. Loneliness could be transcribed into actual physical pain.

But even this pain took second place to the agony of not knowing what had happened to Simon's body. It was something he could not properly understand, perhaps because it was a situation he could never have prepared himself for: no one could. The nearest analogy he could think of was a woman he had once seen on television. Her daughter had been murdered but the body never found and she now spent all her time looking for it. He had not forgotten the look in her eyes. Now he knew the feeling.

The meeting with the newspaper people that day had not gone well; he had failed to persuade them to run the story again in any form other than a brief report saying that the police had as yet failed to make an arrest. The journalist he’d spoken to had been polite and sympathetic but the affair was yesterday's story as far as the paper was concerned. Main’s daily call to the police had only attracted the now routine reply about enquiries continuing. Father Lafferty meant well and had done his best but had failed to come up with anything so where did that leave him? What was he to do?

Main got out of bed and padded through to the kitchen to switch the kettle on. The coldness of the kitchen floor on his bare feet was a welcome distraction to what was going on inside his head. He lingered there in the darkness - he had not switched on the light - gazing out of the window at the silhouetted roof tops, periodically testing the metal of the kettle with his fingertips until it became hot and the pain of doing so provided even more distraction. The kettle boiled and switched itself off: the spell was broken. Main took his coffee into the living room and turned on the television.

The film was in black and white. After a few minutes, he recognised it as being a Denis Wheatley story though he couldn't remember the title, something to do with the devil, he thought. This was definitely not going to be a distraction; he clicked the channel changer. Although the screen changed to colour and noisy pop music, the black and white images from the film stayed in Main's head. He remembered reading Wheatley's books some years before and enjoying them at the time. There was something morbidly fascinating about the world of the occult, even to the disbeliever.

Perhaps that was what he should do next, take a personal interest in the occult, read up on it, find out about it? On the other hand that's what Lafferty was doing. He had even consulted a colleague about witchcraft and devil worship. But there again, the man was a priest. His knowledge would be academic. He would probably be the last person to actually know about its practice in the community.

So what sort of people would he be looking for? There was no immediate answer to that one and no obvious line of approach. The best he could hope for was to find someone who might know these things. This thought took him into the world of spiritualism. If the police didn't know of any organised practice of the occult and the Catholic Church didn't either maybe he should concentrate on a more indirect approach and try to pick up some gossip or rumour on his own.

His experience with the woman and the OUIJA board hadn't given him much to be confident about but as long as he realised that he might be treading on the stamping ground of the charlatan he might be able to pick up a useful lead in the spiritualist community. It was worth considering.

He clicked the channel back to the Wheatley film. The villain was about to get his come-uppance. A demon summoned up from the pit of hell was chasing him along a railway track and there would be no escape. He shivered and realised that he had not turned the fire on in the room. It was icy cold.

* * * * *

Ryan Lafferty was deeply troubled, so much so that he rose in the middle of the night and went into the church to pray for guidance. An hour on his knees in the damp and cold had done little to help him physically and he was very stiff but he felt a little better inside his head from having spoken his doubts and fears aloud. So far he had failed in his intention to help or bring comfort to John Main over the exhumation of his son's body and his efforts at helping the O'Donnell family had been similarly ineffectual. What was more, he had been unable to get what Mary O'Donnell had said to him about the Church out of his head. Try as he might, he could not dismiss her angry outburst as being completely groundless and this worried him.

Could it be a test of faith? Was God testing him? If he was, he was not doing very well. What had started out as a concern about his efficacy as a priest had escalated into a full-blown consideration of whether or not he should be a priest at all. He had gone through crises before of course, and suspected he was not alone in that, but this time . . . Looking back, his own first crisis had been during his third year at the training seminary but it proved to be youthful panic and he had come through it with the aid of some kind words from the head of the college who had seen it all before and knew just how to handle the situation. 'No one ever said being a priest was easy Ryan. It isn't, it's bloody hard; it's meant to be.'

The second waver had been more serious. He had fallen in love with Jane Lowry, a widow after only three years of marriage when her husband, an RAF pilot, crashed into a remote hillside on a training exercise. She had sought solace from the Church and Lafferty had been her priest. She had recently moved out of her service home and had returned to the town where her parents lived. St Peter's, their local church had been Lafferty's first charge.

Despite the fact that he and Jane were practically the same age and he was painfully inexperienced at the job, Lafferty had been able to guide her through the anger and despair she felt at her loss. Looking back on it now, it had been more like a brother looking after his sister than a priest parishioner relationship but it had worked for them and Jane had come to accept her loss and to keep her faith. Unfortunately for him the pity and compassion he felt for Jane turned into something deeper as time went on and he had seriously questioned his vocation. He suspected that Jane felt the same way but his love for her had remained undeclared and she, thankfully, had not made the first move. After a desperate struggle, he had gone to his bishop and confessed all.

For the second time in his young career, Mother Church had lent a sympathetic ear. 'You may be a priest, Ryan, but you're also a man. God knows that. God intended it that way. He’ll help you through it.’

Lafferty’s bishop assured him that his vocation would prevail but it would be helped by a move to another town. As a consequence he had come to St Xavier's and the bishop had been right. The love he felt for Jane mellowed to affection and he had been pleased some time later to hear from an old parishioner who still sent him Christmas cards, that she had remarried and now had two children named Carol and Ryan. Just why the parishioner should have chosen to relay this information, Lafferty had been unable to fathom. Perhaps his face had betrayed more than he had imagined at the time.

Feeling that sleep would still be impossible, Lafferty returned to the church to pray. This time he prayed for Mary O'Donnell and also that John McKirrop might be allowed to recover so that he might shed some light on the disappearance of Simon Main's body.

Sarah had fallen asleep in the doctors' room; she was sitting at the table with her head on her folded arms in front of her where she had cleared away a little hollow among the paper. Just before half past three she was wakened by the night Staff Nurse who gently shook her right shoulder.

'Dr Lasseter?'

'Mmmm?' said Sarah sleepily.

'I think Mr McKirrop is coming round.'

The name brought Sarah to full awareness. She got up, rubbed her arms and said, 'Right, lead on.'

The nurse had already turned on the lamp above McKirrop's head so he was caught in a stage spotlight in the otherwise green auditorium. Sarah saw him move his head before she reached the Alpha 4 bay. He seemed to be in some distress, as if in the throes of some bad dream.

'Can you hear me John?' Sarah asked, bending over him.

McKirrop stopped moving his head and Sarah felt encouraged by the response. She nodded to the nurse. 'I think he can hear.'

'John, can you hear me?'

McKirrop grunted weakly and moved his head to the left.

'You're in hospital John, the same one you were in last week after you were beat up in the cemetery. I'm Dr Lasseter. Remember me?' Sarah spoke each word slowly and clearly.

McKirrop said his first word, a slurred attempt at 'cemetery'.

'You've had another knock on the head. Can you remember anything about it?'

'Cemetery ...' mumbled McKirrop. 'Yobs ... beat me up.'

'That was last time John,' said Sarah.

'Coffin ... boy's coffin ... empty ... body gone ...'

'That's right,' said Sarah. She was pleased to hear that McKirrop did not appear to be suffering from any obvious brain damage. 'They took the boy's body John. You tried to stop them.'

McKirrop moved his head again as if frustrated at the struggle to get words out. 'Coffin empty ... coffin empty.' His voice began to trail off as the effort of speaking tired him out.

'That's right John. That's excellent. You remember what happened. We'll have you right as rain in no time. Rest easy now. Get some sleep and we'll talk in the morning.' Sarah got up and stood beside the nurse, looking down at McKirrop as he sank back into sleep.

'That's fifty pence I owe you,' said the nurse.

'I'd better call Tyndall,' said Sarah.

'At this time?' exclaimed the nurse.

'He wanted to be informed when McKirrop came round.'