Dust and Desire (36 page)

* * *

I got home around seven. I fed Mengele and tossed a screwed-up bus ticket into my boot for him to retrieve until he got fed up and went off to lick my stack of
Empire
magazines. I checked my answerphone messages but I never give my number to anybody so there weren’t any.

I thought about what Jen had told me and felt my insides slop around heavily against each other. Jesus Christ. Some people. I retrieved the Grey Goose from the freezer and poured myself a shot. I watched the glass frost over and downed the vodka in one. Booze on an empty stomach. Not a good idea. But hey, now there was vodka in there so it was no longer empty. So it was okay to have another.

You get to thinking, after a while of walking with them, that monsters are made, created like golems from dust and clay and tears (by their parents more often than not): moulded by time, and a drip-feed of resentment and violence. The inevitable counter-measure to it all. The retaliatory strike. And some are. And I reckon those are the ones that can be saved, if they want to be. You can come back from most kinds of bad. It’s still in our nature to forgive and, if not necessarily forget, then move on in some way.

But there are some monsters that are shot through with… I won’t say ‘evil’, I don’t believe in it. There’s
something
that runs through them, some noisome strain that has been there since that moment in the womb when the dots of their hearts fluttered into action. And they are ice. They are mask people. They are mirrors. Any emotion they display seems to have been learned, or copied. It doesn’t reach their eyes. Everything about them might gleam – their clothes, their hair, their teeth, their skin – but hit their eyes and you could be looking at something with all the lustre of dust. Occasionally, on cold, regretful days when the light fails to reach the pavements and people scuff around in a gleaming kind of dusk, soggy, spent, curved by fatigue, you’ll hear the determined stride of a man or woman who seems utterly disconnected from their surroundings. There’s no effect. They are dolls of their own imagining bent into shape, forced into an approximation of what it is to be human, to be normal – whatever
that
means.

I don’t know what it is in them that shifts them towards violence. Everything is deflected, though. Everyone else is to blame. And there are reasons galore, usually jaw-droppingly banal, like the guy who took a meat-cleaver into a roller-rink in Altrincham and tried to hack the feet off a girl he had once been involved with. When he was asked later why he did it, he said that he’d always been irritated by the way she failed to tie up her laces properly.

* * *

I came to sitting on the floor with the glass warm and sticky in my fist and an album of photographs I’d vowed I’d never peruse again open on my lap. Me and her. Me and her. The three of us. The two of us.

I put the photographs away, trying – failing – to not see my wife’s broken body, no matter how many photographs I had of her smiling or laughing or loving us.

I showered and went to bed, appalled to see that it was nearly 7 a.m. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been able to sleep without the help of alcohol, which meant it wasn’t really sleep at all. My face in the mirror looked like congealed porridge. I suffered unremembered bad dreams despite only sleeping for an hour, and took another shower, as hot as I could bear it, but it would not drum out the feeling of being pursued, or somehow dismantled.

At Casey’s on Crawford Street I grabbed a bacon roll and managed just one bite before I had to throw it away. Coffee didn’t help. All I could think of was my daughter, wrinkled and warm, swaddled in towels, wadded into the crook of my arm – no weight at all – and Rebecca being helped up from the bed to take a shower, sweaty, crumpled, and looking more beautiful than any woman I’ve ever seen in my life.

And something moving around in the ward outside, something blind and hungry and massive, with the scent of my child in its twitching nostrils.

It was cold. St Josephine’s was not far. I put my head down and walked.

I thought I’d forgotten most of what happened that day – or those days; Rebecca was in labour for something like 72 hours. A deficiency of prostaglandins, apparently, which meant her contractions weren’t occurring when they ought to. I remember one of the midwives was a New Zealander. I remember taking a hit of Rebecca’s gas and air. Little else. But as soon as I walked through the swing door entrance of Praed Street, I recognised the smell and the pattern of the floor tiles and I had to sit down suddenly because I was close to tears. It’s one of the few places where you can have a cry and nobody will intrude; it’s kind of expected. As opposed to a butcher’s, say. I pulled myself together and walked up to the delivery rooms. Security was pretty tight; I had to give my name at two checkpoints where members of staff opened locked doors from the inside. When I called that morning I’d been put through to the consultant obstetrician, a tall guy with iron-coloured hair that gleamed and put me in mind of smart American salesmen from the 1950s.

‘Dr. Fellowes? You weren’t here fourteen years ago,’ I said.

‘Mr. Sorrell,’ he said, holding out his hand. I shook it. It was warm, dry and firm; a good handshake. ‘Call me Seb. Fourteen years ago I was Senior House Officer at a hospital in Manchester. Where were you?’

‘Joel,’ I said, jerking a thumb in my own direction. ‘I was in here, waiting for my daughter to be born.’

‘I suppose it’s a little late for congratulations.’

‘A little. But thanks anyway.’

I heard a long, low groan – bestial, you might describe it – from one of the delivery rooms, and further memories came back: Rebecca on all fours, slicked with sweat, sucking on the gas and air tube, begging me to get this damn thing out.

He followed my worried gaze to the door; blades of his hair swung across his eyes.

‘Follow me. I can give you five minutes of my time.’

I followed him to a small office, sparsely decorated. He closed the door. On the wall was a board covered with greetings cards; grateful messages from new mums and dads. He rolled up his short sleeves and spread his hands. ‘How can I help you?’

There was no way I’d be able to get back in here without his say so. I had to tell the truth. I asked him about the allegations Jen had made. He shrugged. ‘We’ve had our security compromised in recent weeks, yes, and it was serious. But that’s all been cleared up now. As you saw yourself, our doors are impregnable, we have new closed circuit cameras working 24/7 and we have new security staff.’

‘Have they been vetted?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘How about all staff?’

‘Yes. All staff in the hospital, never mind neo-natal, have to be checked and cleared. Excuse me…’ he was frowning, he seemed confused. ‘You’re from the police, right?’

‘After a fashion.’

‘I’m sorry?’

I spread my hands, like him. ‘I used to be in the police force, when I was younger. But I’m no good with authority. No matter what Sarge used to tell me to do, it always came out sounding like: “Kick me till I bleed”.’

‘I don’t understand. We had a full enquiry. We had the police here before, when little Gael went missing…’

‘Was she harmed in any way?’

‘He.
He.
Gael is a boy.’

‘Was he harmed in any way?’

‘No. No he wasn’t. Thank God.’

Dr. Fellowes demeanour had changed. His face had darkened, his body language was no longer as expansive. ‘Do you know how many babies I’ve helped to deliver, Mr. Sorrell?’

‘Joel. I’d imagine a fair few. More than I’ve had hot dinner ladies at least.’

‘Four thousand, give or take. I’ve performed over 500 Chorionic villus samplings and over 800 amniocentesis procedures with an associated loss of less than nought point five per cent. I’m good at what I do.’

‘I don’t doubt it, doctor. Nobody is pointing the forceps of blame at you.’

‘And my team.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Then what is it you know, or think you know, that the police don’t?’

‘You have an employee here who came to me–’

‘Name?’

‘–in strictest confidence because she didn’t want the police involved. She told me that there might be someone on the payroll at the hospital, not necessarily directly under you, but someone who has access.’

‘A cleaner?’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps someone who has access but who shouldn’t.’

He mulled this over, shifting the blade of hair back behind his ear as he did so. ‘But now you’re talking about a team.’

‘Am I?’

‘I already told you that the doors here won’t open from the outside unless you have the code. And the code changes every day.’

‘Who decides the code?’

‘A computer. It’s randomised.’

I felt frustration gnawing at me; we seemed to be drifting further from where I wanted to be. ‘I’d need to speak to some people, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Mr. Sorrell. Joel. This sounds like a police matter. I’m uncomfortable allowing a… what is it you do exactly?’

‘I’m a Private Investigator. I have a licence.’

‘I had no idea that line of work was regulated.’

I sighed. ‘It isn’t. Look. We can call the police, but they’ve already been here. They’ve taken statements. No arrests were made regarding Gael’s attempted abduction. All I want to do is talk to a few people – your tech guy, the cleaners, a porter or two – and I’m gone. Just to give peace of mind to one of your colleagues who doesn’t trust the police, that’s all. Would you rather have a twitchy member of staff on your hands failing to concentrate on an important job, or someone who has been reassured by an old friend that everything’s on the up and up?’

‘The “up and up”. That’s an American thing, isn’t it? Don’t you get sick of that? That invasion of ridiculous phrases?’

‘I’ve not really given it much thought. It’s hardly at the level of “awesome sauce”, is it?’

He winced, and I knew I had him. ‘I suppose not. Look, we’re relatively quiet today, so far. Can you do what you need to do this morning? And I’ll have to post a staff member alongside you at all times. You understand, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’d expect nothing less.’

* * *

Bizarrely, he asked Jen to accompany me. She looked so pink and nervous when she scurried back from his office that I thought he must have sussed her straight away as his mole, but he’d been distracted while he delegated the task, flicking through medical charts, barely making eye contact.

‘He called you a plod-lite,’ she said, giggling nervously.

‘Charming,’ I said. ‘Where’s Carl?’

‘He’s not in yet. Anyway, you should talk to some other people first. Make it seem less obvious.’ She plucked at the elbow of my jacket, tugging me towards an open door at the far end of the suite of delivery rooms. Cartoon light flickered and spilled to the glossy floor outside. This was a combined technical support office and security hub; one side of the room was devoted to closed circuit camera screens, the other host to a desk with a computer and a server and an enormous bag of tortilla chips. A guy in a suit and glasses with matte grey frames was tapping at a keyboard, his brow furrowed as he stared at a streaming page of, what looked to me, unintelligible code.

‘This is Andy Sowden, IT wizard.’

We shook hands. His skin was soft and cool. He wore the kind of anaemic tinge to his flesh that suggested most of his light came from a monitor. Handshake-wise, it was like being lightly fondled by an empty Marigold glove.

‘I understand the doors can only be opened by a randomly-generated code. Is that done here?’

Sowden raised his eyebrows at me and nodded, as if it was some kind of trick question.

‘What happens then?’

‘It’s circulated on a need-to-know basis. The only people who have access to the code are employees, Mums-to-be and their wingmen.’

‘Wingmen?’

‘Well, you know… husbands, boyfriends, birthing cheerleaders.’

I didn’t like his glib little labels. I didn’t like his micro-expressions. I didn’t like him, I decided. But he was no Burke and Hare trainee. I couldn’t be sure about that, obviously, but sometimes you can just tell. You look into a pair of eyes and you see too little going on behind them, or too much. This guy spent his downtime fannying around with his Raspberry Pi or flaming people on PC versus Mac forums. I doubt he’d ever seen the inside of a proper boozer in his life.

‘Do you have the code too?’

‘I am employed here. So yes.’

‘All employees get the code?’

‘Well, no. Just this department. Reception sees who’s coming and going too, and we have CCTV.’

‘Reception isn’t always staffed though, is it?’ I asked.

‘If we’re busy, or quiet, there can be times when the desk is unstaffed, yes. But you’d be better off asking Reception about that. I am but a lowly ones and zeroes kind of guy.’

Jen took me to the reception desk. A woman behind a door begged for Jesus. Another woman behind another door swore to God. One nurse was sitting behind the desk writing notes in a large book.

‘Hi Jen,’ she said without looking up. ‘Who’s your new bodyguard?’

‘It’s someone who’s come to follow up on the Gael case,’ Jen said. ‘Kind of a security consultant.’

‘Jolly good,’ she said, finishing off her work with a flourish and closing the book. She looked up at us with tired, very green eyes. You could tell she couldn’t give a flying fanny fart who I was. She was coming to the end of her shift. Her mind was on bed.

After she’d gone I turned to Jen. She had been chewing her lip constantly for the past ten minutes. Her mouth was reddening.

‘Lot of tired people in here,’ I said. ‘People miss a lot when they’re on their last legs.’

We swept around the ward and I asked questions that were batted back to me politely, all the while keeping my eye on the door and waiting for Renfrew to walk through it with a baby between his teeth. After a while, the scrubbed floors and damning light began to scour away at my good nature and I felt a headache begin to grow, like two sticks pushing into the backs of my eyes. The memories of being here with Rebecca were anxious and gnawing. Much of what I’d forgotten was coming back. Going for a walk with her in Hyde Park to try to induce labour. Sitting under the shade of a tree with sandwiches – I remember I had prawn and mayonnaise and she was grumpy because she wasn’t allowed shellfish – and a frosted bottle of Sicilian lemonade. We talked about names. We had decided we didn’t want to know the sex of our child before it was born.