Quite Ugly One Morning (7 page)

Accidental death.

Darren climbed back into his room and went back under the scratchy blankets with his clothes on, so that he would be warm enough with the window open to finally clear the place of that pong.

In the morning he awoke to find the room breezy and fresh, apart from the smell of dead dog wafting through the open window from next door’s garden.

This Parlabane was quite definitely trouble. She just had to look at him to see rules being bent, control slipping gracefully away, lengthy and tortuously complicated explanations to senior officers and a run-in with McGregor that would make the one over her most recent haircut seem a fond memory. He seemed to combine an air of conscientious honesty with a blatant, mischievous untrustworthiness, and the resultant effect was like hypnosis. He commanded your attention with knowledge and facts, but you felt you couldn’t take your eyes off him anyway because you feared what he might get up to. He dealt in truth like a drug, but you got the impression that he was cutting every score with about ten per cent bullshit.

And for all these reasons she was very glad he had appeared. He might well precipitate chaos and devastation, see her booted off the force and even drown her in a sea of flames, but at least whatever happened, it wouldn’t be boring.

She liked the way he had been so unflustered and unapologetic about either her finding him in Ponsonby’s flat or the fact that he had slept through such an obviously noisy and prolonged murder. Mind you, she had felt slightly hypocritical about scorning his failure to hear or see anything, as at the time of the killing she had actually been about fifty yards away in a flat in Annandale Street, having a delightfully squishy time with a shy and bespectacled young law student called Angela, who had lost her spectacles, shyness and eventually clothing after some extraordinarily good hash.

It had been a memorable evening all round, really, the frustrating rarity of which was why she kept her profession quiet among her social group. Parlabane had asked what the hell they talked about, and it was true she and Duncan usually did talk about the Hibees when they bumped into each other in the Barony, but she had to admit that she had always steered the conversation away from anything that might bring work into it. She didn’t know Duncan incredibly well, only from the pub and the Blue Moon, but she figured he had
picked up on her reluctance to mention what she did and been content never to ask.

It often felt like a guilty secret, but the bare fact was that it was not easy to get laid when everyone knew you were a cop, with the sole exception of a one-night stand with an Aberdonian pillow princess who had a uniform fetish. In fact, the only thing more difficult was getting some blow. It was a depressing fact that in the past, when no one would admit to knowing who they could score off, she had had to rely on knowledge accumulated through the job. Of course, the big fear was the embarrassment factor of being present on duty when they busted someone she regularly bought from, but mercifully it had only happened once, and he clearly valued her custom sufficiently to keep his mouth shut throughout.

The Angela thing was promising, and she knew that she would have to tell her soon, but the timing was critical. Too early and she might run off screaming, thinking she was being set up as part of a rather extreme undercover operation. Too late and you risked the question: ‘Why couldn’t you trust me with this?’, or, worse, her finding out herself and asking the same question, but in a much angrier tone of voice.

When Parlabane had called but refused to come to the station, she asked him to meet her in the Blue Moon, partly because the Barony’s real ales would have offered a great temptation to drink on duty, and partly because she hoped it might give her an edge – Parlabane was Duncan’s friend, but still, many straight men were less cockily assured in the context of a gay bar, pointlessly terrified that their usual attention-seeking behaviour would attract a string of burly, unwanted suitors.

No such luck. Parlabane had breezed in looking tired and vaguely rumpled, as if he had been neither into bed nor out of his clothes the night before, but showed no discomfiture about his surroundings whatsoever. He ordered an espresso, turned down her offer of a roll-up and sat back in his chair, pushing his hair back, yawning and opening his eyes wide as if the waking was not his natural state.

‘PM results through then?’ he asked.

‘I thought you had things to tell me, scoop, not questions to ask.’

‘Yeah. I’m just checking how much you’ve seen of this week’s exciting episode. Pro job, huh?’

‘Yes, our pathologists are all highly trained and fully qualified.’

But she knew what he was saying, and he could see that too.

‘Nice to still see quality craftsmanship in this day and age,’ he said.

‘Pathologist was impressed too,’ Jenny remarked. ‘And he believed such a standard of work required the finest of tools. How do you know all this?’

‘I told you the other day. I’ve seen a lot of such craftsmanship. I’ve seen the less refined amateur work too, enough to spot the difference.’

‘Why didn’t you say this before?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to prejudice an investigation with spurious speculation.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Plus I reckoned you suspected it too and I wanted to see if you drew the same conclusion without me introducing the idea.’

‘That’s better. Any other pieces of brilliant deduction you’re holding back?’

Parlabane sipped at his hot espresso and nodded.

‘It was too messy for me to be sure, but did the pathologist say whether the cut was right-to-left or left-to-right?’

‘Right-to-left.’

‘Then your boy’s a Southpaw. Right-to-left would make it a left-handed job.’

Jenny shook her head. ‘You don’t know whether he was in front of or behind Ponsonby when he did it.’

‘Well, I know this guy did wreck the place, but I doubt his fondness for mess would extend to getting sprayed with blood when the blade hit the carotid. It poses problems with anonymity on your way home. People sometimes remember that about you. “Yes, officer, he had black hair, sallow complexion, ear-ring . . . oh yes, and he was drenched in blood.” He tied the guy to a door, propped him up then went behind and . . .’

Parlabane had another sip at his coffee.

‘That finger came from his right hand, didn’t it,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘So the finger confirms it. I’m sure he lost it before he made the cut and it would have detracted from the quality of his work if he wasn’t left-handed.’

‘OK, scoop, very clever. But here’s the problem. If this guy’s such a professional, why the barney? How did he end up wrecking the joint and losing a finger struggling with Ponsonby? There’s a lot of ne’er-do-wells handy with a blade in this city who might bring one along as insurance when they’re screwing a house. How can we be sure that isn’t the explanation?’

Parlabane grinned that utterly unnerving grin. ‘I wasn’t, entirely, until about five minutes before I called you.’

‘Why do I get this feeling things are about to take a sharp turn for the worse here?’

‘The needle,’ he said, ignoring her mumblings.

‘What about it?’

‘Get it analysed? Apart from blood traces, I mean.’

‘Of course.’

‘Potassium chloride.’

Jenny’s eyes widened in increasingly worried surprise. ‘What, have you got a fucking spy camera following me? Have you bugged the station? How the bloody hell did you know that?’

Parlabane just smiled. ‘I’m sorry, but as a journalist I can’t reveal my sources.’

Jenny glowered threateningly.

‘Unless, of course, I get a guarantee that it goes no further than you and that no action is taken regarding the removal from Ponsonby’s flat of an object found discarded amidst a pile of broken glass.’

‘I haven’t heard a thing you’ve said all day,’ she said, her expression mellowing. ‘I’m not even aware that you’re sitting near me in this cafe.’

‘Good enough. Right. The source is the ex-wife. She had a key, she took a look around, she found a drug ampoule your boys had missed. She got it analysed – she’s a doctor too. Potassium chloride. Induces a heart attack in a matter of seconds, and leaves no trace in the body whatsoever.’

Parlabane sat upright in his chair.

‘I think what happened in Ponsonby’s flat was plan B,’ he said. ‘Plan A would have been much less messy and just as effective. But something went wrong, and your boy had to
improvise. Hence him not going for the big blade from the kick-off. Hence the free-form furniture rearrangement.’

Parlabane downed the rest of the rich, black but rapidly cooling espresso.

‘So,’ Jenny said, ‘you’re saying someone wanted him killed but didn’t want it to look like murder.’

‘He’d just have been found dead. PM would establish heart attack but there would have been no further explanation. Ex-wife says it would even have been a plausible method of suicide for a doctor. Killer could have wiped his prints from the syringe and stuck it in Ponsonby’s hand. Either way you’ve got a dead doctor and no apparent reason to suspect foul play.’

‘All of which rather rules out my initial drug-dealing idea,’ Jenny stated. ‘Hits in the drug world are usually intended to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the victim was purposefully murdered. If someone had Ponsonby killed, they weren’t intending to send anyone a message by it.’

‘Just a wee, quiet murder at home.’

Jenny rubbed a hand across her stubbly head.

‘So tell me, scoop. Why was the ex-wife snooping about? What did she suspect?’

‘Nothing. I was the one who introduced the idea that her ex-husband was killed. She was just sort of paying her last respects.’

‘Pish,’ Jenny snapped. ‘You have funerals for that sort of thing, Jack. If someone had Ponsonby shafted it was because he was into something they didn’t like. She must have sniffed something, even if only vaguely.’

‘Possibly. I don’t see her telling you anything, though.’

‘How could I ask her when we never had this conversation? But she might tell you, perhaps. I mean, she must have taken an instant shine to you to entrust you so quickly with what she has so far.’

‘Maybe that’s just part of my journalistic talent,’ Parlabane said dryly.

Jenny snorted. ‘No, believe me, Jack. She likes you. I mean, I’ve known you a few days longer than she has and I don’t fucking trust you.’

‘Yeah, but you’re paid not to trust me.’

‘I wouldn’t trust you in my spare time either.’

Parlabane laughed.

‘So what are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Need and trust are different things, scoop. I’ve checked out your background and I know how far you’re prepared to go to get to the bottom of a good story. It sounds like you’re on to something, but we both know you’re better placed to follow it up at this stage. So anything you offer I’ll gladly accept. The bigger mystery is what you want from me.’

‘I regard it as my civic duty to assist the police in any way I can,’ he said. ‘I also find it comforting to know that a cop owes me favours.’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I’ll do what I can, Jack, but no promises. I can’t turn a blind eye if you decide to get up to something naughty.’

That unsettling smile, more misanthropic than ever before.

‘Don’t worry, Jenny. If I decide to get up to something naughty, you can look with both eyes wide open through a space telescope, but you won’t see me.’

Jenny said nothing. She was sure she’d enjoy putting it to the test, but she had a worrying feeling he might be right.

Sarah wanted to marry Parlabane.

This was, of course, after she had recovered from a brief moment of (initially) fright and (secondly) wanting to kill him. Wanting to kill him was a reaction many people frequently had to Parlabane, although it had only been recently that anyone had attempted to put it into practice.

It was some vague time of night, that on-call temporal displacement vortex that she got trapped in after one a.m. and before five, when the hours disappear and the minutes stretch like strings of albumen. The evening had dissolved into white walls and theatre greens, time suspended and warped by the cumbersome labours of an infuriating, moustachioed Dutch orthopaedic surgeon named Joost van der Elst, or ‘Joost a couple of hours’ as the anaesthetists called him in reference to the time he took to carry out even the most minor manipulation.

The atmosphere had not been pleasant. Joost wasn’t the most sensitive of orthopods, which was a bit like saying he wasn’t the most sober of alcoholics or truthful of pathological liars, and Sarah was still furious with him over an incident that morning when he had refused to let her administer any analgesia to a patient undergoing a coccygeal manipulation. The girl was seventeen, scared and crying loudly and tearfully in pain, but the local anaesthetic would have taken ten minutes to work and Joost had a lunchtime ring-smooching session with a consultant that he didn’t want to be late for. He had to get his finger out of the patient’s arse and his lips to the consultant’s by twelve, as Sarah later explained to one of her colleagues.

So when Joost turned up (half-an-hour late) for the evening list of familiarly dubious ‘emergency’ ops, most of which could comfortably have waited until the next morning or even the next month, but which the orthopods wanted out of the way, Sarah was not in a tolerant mood. The first patient was seventy-nine with a fractured neck of femur, and Sarah wanted to make sure he was well under before letting Joost
loose on him with his bag of DIY home improvement tools. Joost had frowningly popped his head round the door of the anaesthetic room twice in the ten minutes since he had actually condescended to show up, and then on his third visit asked Sarah if he could have a word.

‘Dr Slaughter, I have several patients to attend to this evening,’ he said flatly in an accent that suggested he had learned English from watching Max von Sydow movies. ‘We cannot afford such a wait for all of them. We will be here all night. Why is this patient not ready? How long will he be?’

Surgeons chronically misunderstood the role of the anaesthetist. They thought he or she was there in an auxiliary, subservient capacity, to gas the patient and keep the awkward bugger quiet and still while they worked their little miracles. The anaesthetist saw his/her role instead as keeping the patient (a) alive and (b) comfortable while the surgeon did his/her best to ensure otherwise.

Sarah bit her tongue, took a deep breath and explained that the patient was old, frail, dehydrated, had a history of ischaemic heart disease and had been insufficiently prepared for theatre by the orthopaedic house officer. Consequently, he would not be ready for another fifteen minutes. Joost left the room.

Two minutes later his head was back round the door, and then again a whole ninety seconds after that. Sarah stopped what she was doing and slowly turned around, then walked to where Joost was loitering in the doorway.

She grabbed him around the upper arm and led him roughly over to the patient.

‘Mr van der Elst, while we’re waiting – patiently – for this anaesthetic agent to take effect, why don’t I demonstrate how one of our most vital monitoring systems works,’ she said. The simmering Joost looked uninterestedly at the various machines surrounding the trolley, then noticed that Sarah was pointing beyond all of them to the wall, where a large white clock was mounted.

‘You see that dial right there? We anaesthetists use that to measure time. I’ll explain how you read it. The patient will be ready in another ten minutes. You see that big hand pointing at the number one? Well, when that reaches the number three, that means the patient is ready. Understand?’

Joost just stared furiously at her.

‘Understand?’ she asked again, more sternly.

He nodded curtly.

‘Good. Now fuck off and let me do my job.’

After that, she was convinced Joost was going even slower than usual just to annoy both her and the Operating Department Assistant, who had so visibly enjoyed her outburst.

The canteen had long since closed by the time she had got the last patient round in Recovery, and the vending machine had swallowed the last of her cash in exchange for a grinding noise and no chocolate on her way back to the on-call room.

She opened the door and found that the light was on, which was less surprising than the fact that Parlabane was sitting on the edge of the lumpy bed next to a large, flat cardboard box.

That moment accounted for the fright part.

The realisation that he must have broken in was responsible for the wanting to kill him part, along with everything else that had happened today, with a special mention going to having only had an apple to eat since breakfast and being hopelessly hungry.

Parlabane flipped open the box to reveal a huge and lavishly decorated pizza.

That was where the marrying part fitted in.

Sarah was munching through her second slice before the questions of how he had got in and what he was doing there regained sufficient importance.

Parlabane held up a mangled paper clip.

‘It’s not much of a lock.’ He showed her a small black canvas wallet, the kind she had once kept her surgical instruments in back in first year at university. It contained a number of metal slivers and what looked like bent or awkwardly serrated steel nail files.

‘This is the heavy artillery,’ Parlabane explained. ‘I got in with a pop gun.’

‘You just picked the lock?’

‘Well, I had to circumvent the doctors’ on-call accommodation security systems first, which required the elaborate operation of asking someone where it was and walking straight in.’

‘No kidding. We keep finding tramps and all sorts wandering about or even kipping down in the corridors. We’ve
all complained about the risks but with the Trust’s money so tight, priority must obviously go to important things like new corporate logos and pot plants in the admin block.’

Parlabane reached for another slice of pizza. ‘Now that’s unfair,’ he said, swallowing a well-chewed mouthful. ‘It’s inevitable that there’s going to be no cash for security when they’ve obviously blown it all on your accommodation.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘That’s not even funny.’

She had a brief look at her immediate surroundings: the blistered and decades-peeled paint on the ceiling, the damp patches on the wallpaper, the sticky and threadbare carpet, the chipboard nailed to the frame in lieu of one window pane which a colleague confirmed had now been in place for four years. Sarah usually shut it all out of her mind and thought only of getting into the shower as soon as she got home, but occasionally the squalor of it could still depress her afresh.

‘So where did you learn to pick locks?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Of course you can tell me. I’m a doctor.’

Parlabane laughed.

‘No, I mean I can’t tell you where exactly because I was on a train from Glasgow to London at the time. I was down for an interview. Not a job interview, a me-talking-to-someone-important interview. I had this wee padlock on my travel bag, and we had just reached Motherwell when I remembered I had left the key for it on my bedside table and forgotten to pick it up when the taxi peeped its horn outside. I had a paper clip and a scheduled five – actually eight – hours with nothing else to do – my book was in the bloody bag. I picked the lock and was so proud of myself for managing it that I decided – with time on my hands – to have another go, prove that it wasn’t a fluke. I got so into tinkering about with it that I opened and shut it about a hundred times and forgot about the bloody book altogether.

‘For the return journey I bought a doorlock and a screwdriver, and spent the journey taking it apart, examining the mechanism, picking it with the back off and then picking it fully assembled. After that if I didn’t have anything particularly good or important to read I used to buy a different lock for every long train journey.’

‘Remind me not to give you my address.’

Sarah finished off her slice and washed it down with a
mouthful from one of the Irn-Bru cans Parlabane had also brought. ‘I felt like Abraham Lincoln tonight – thought I was never getting out of that theatre. Contrary to what you might have heard, not all surgeons are bastards. Some of them are slow bastards.’ She lifted another slice. ‘You have no idea how much this is appreciated. I can’t be the first doctor you’ve known. Either that or you’re psychic.’

‘I’ve had dealings with a few,’ Parlabane said. ‘Late-night food always makes you their friend.’

‘For life,’ Sarah added, mumbling with her mouth comfortingly full. ‘We’re easily bought at this time of night. We even forgive gross invasions of privacy.’

‘Yeah, sorry. Didn’t want to be hanging around the corridor with a hot pizza. Might get mugged by starving medics.’

Sarah was sated. She had a last gulp of Irn-Bru, wiped her mouth with a paper towel, screwed it up, expertly arced it into the bin and sat back against the ugly plastic headboard.

‘So what is it you want to know?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I think you’re a nice guy, Jack, but I can’t see you breaking in to deliver late-night pizza just in a bout of spontaneous beneficence. Either you fancy me or you want some information. So which is it?’

He folded up the empty box and placed it by the bin.

‘Who wanted Jeremy dead, Sarah? That’s what I want to know. The cops found traces of that potassium chloride stuff on a hypodermic in your ex-husband’s flat. It’s a fair bet the mystery guest intended to kill him with an injection, making it look like sudden death or, as you suggested, suicide. Someone wanted him dead but didn’t want anyone to know about it. Someone very dangerous had something to lose if Jeremy kept breathing, and I’m afraid I don’t believe you don’t have your suspicions.’

Sarah blanched. ‘Seriously, Jack. I just went to the flat because . . .’

‘I believe that much, Sarah. You didn’t specifically go there looking for evidence or even answers. But subconsciously I think you knew something was wrong. Despite your antipathy or even indifference towards Jeremy, I believe you were still aware that there was something suspicious about him, just a vibe that meant nothing at the time but kicked in retroactively when he died. You talked about almost expecting it, you
talked about him being self-destructive. What’s the deal, Sarah? What was he into?’

She was gently shaking her head and yawning.

‘I’m sorry, Jack’

‘Oh come on, there must be something you can give me. What vices did he have, who did he upset apart from you?’

‘No, Jack It’s not that I can’t tell you anything. It’s just that if I start I might tell you everything. It’s after two. I’m very tired and that bleeper could go off at any second anyway. Look, I’m free all day tomorrow. How about you meet me somewhere in the afternoon? I’ll buy you a drink and you can give me the third degree.’

Parlabane looked closely at her. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, her hair tangled and lank, having been stuffed under theatre caps for hours. Her white blouse looked crushed enough for her to have slept in it, and now that she had eaten all that pizza it looked like she was about to do just that at any second.

‘Well, to be honest, you don’t look capable of sustained rational thinking right now,’ he said.

‘I’m not,’ she groaned.

‘And unlike the police I don’t find sleep deprivation very conducive to interrogation.’

Sarah’s bleeper made its loathsomely familiar sound of peremptory interruption. She closed her eyes and banged her head gently against the wall in rhythm with its electronic notes.

‘Told you,’ she said, picking it up. She dialled a number on the bedside telephone and exchanged a few quiet words with someone in a ward elsewhere in the complex.

‘Emergency caesarian section, nineteen-year-old prim, theatre four. They’d like someone incapable of rational thinking to administer a very rapid general anaesthetic so that they can get the baby out in the next five minutes and hopefully keep the mother alive into the bargain.’

She stood up and, yawning, grabbed her white coat.

‘Don’t ever get sick, Jack’