The Devil's Staircase (20 page)

Once inside, I put the sauna key down beside the copper bucket of water and spooned some water on top of the coals. They sizzled, then steamed. I stood over the glowing coals rubbing my hands, until a creaking noise frightened me – it was like a sinking ship. As I crept out of the sauna, a rat scuttled past my feet. I screamed, ran back past the body-scrub room and showers, up the stairs by the plunge pool, through the relaxation area, out of the double doors, past the kitchen, and into reception.

I dialled my home number. The numbers seemed beautiful, familiar, safe.

‘Ursula!’

‘Bron, how are you? How’s London?’

Oh dear, my voice was getting shaky. ‘I love you. I just wanted to hear your voice.’

‘You sound flat.’

‘I wish I was. I’m over nine stone. It’s the peanut butter and lager.’

‘You have an accent.’

‘I do not.’

‘I’ll wire some money. Email me the bank details.’ ‘I miss you!’

‘You’re upset! Bronny, talk to me.’

‘I’m fine. It’s just, I don’t know.’

Suddenly everything inside me churned. I felt confused. Thoughts and images whirled in my head. Had all this really happened? Had I really fallen in love with a man who killed people? Had I really ignored the screams of a tortured woman? Did I really have a fifty–fifty chance of dying?

Of course, Ursula and Dad only knew about that last whirling query, and assumed it was only this that was making me upset.

‘Bron, you need to ring Dr Gibbons. This is ridiculous. Get it over with.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘We’re here.’

‘I feel worthless.’

‘You’re worth more to us than anything. We love you. Listen to me, Mum had a good life. She and Dad loved each other, and us. You’d cope, we’d all cope, together.’

‘But for twenty years I’d be dying.’

‘In the worst-case scenario, for twenty years you’d be living, which is more than you’re doing at the moment . . . Dad wants to speak to you.’

He must have been sitting on Ursula’s lap . . . ‘Bronny, I have something for you. Have you got a fax there?’

I checked and beside the computer there was a fax machine. ‘Yes.’

‘What’s the number?’

‘I looked on the sticker on the machine and read it to him, then switched the machine on.’

‘I was supposed to give it to you after the result, but you ran away . . . It’s from Mum.’

I was silent, waiting. Mum was about to speak to me. She was going to say something I’d not heard her say before, from a single piece of white paper. I gulped, and watched the fax’s ‘on’ button flash red. She’s coming, she’s coming . . . she’s here.

The sheet of paper oozed out of the machine. I could see the shadow of her ghost-writing as traces of it appeared line by line through the other side.

‘She wanted you to read it afterwards, after you’ve got the result,’ Dad said.

I wanted to yell: ‘Don’t give me this dead woman’s letter, it’s fucked up!’ I wanted to yell: ‘No! This has nothing to do with the spinning coin. I’ve just escaped from a psychopath!’

But the whole page had landed face down in the paper holder. Dad waited for me to say something, but I didn’t. ‘Bronny?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you okay?

‘Yeah.’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too . . . I’m going to ring the hospital now.’ ‘Call us straight after.’

‘Yeah.’

I hung up and looked at Mum’s letter. She’d wanted me to read it after the result. Dad wasn’t supposed to give it to me till then. But here it was, words from my dead Mum, the person I’d thought about each hour, each day, who’d left me alone to endure a terrible wait. I’d been waiting ever since. I’d done enough of it.

I took the letter from the machine and read it.

Hey Winster,

I’m sitting on the veranda watching you ride your trike up and down. We’ve just worked out together that you’re going to be four in 79½ days! You have curly hair and a huge toothy smile.

I’m the petrol-station keeper and when you stopped to fill up, I grabbed your happy chunky cheeks and kissed you.

I’m not with you now, am I? I’m not there to help you with this. I’m so sorry.

I was eighteen. My Mum took me because Dad wasn’t feeling well. I remember how it felt to this day. The before and after, and you know I’m not sure if before was better than after. Was it? I was devastated. But then it felt as if I’d been given a new set of legs. You learn to walk again – different, but again.

Was it wrong for me to fall in love with your father? I hadn’t planned on it, but when he walked me home from the Chocolate Association Ball there was nothing either of us could do about it.

Was it wrong getting pregnant that first time? Seeing Ursula’s bright eyes smile at me (I was sure of it) long before they were supposed to be able to?

And having you?

. . . Sorry about that, you fell off your trike and I had to put a Band-Aid on your knee. You’re riding even faster now. I do hope you never lose that wild spirit of yours.

I’d thought about doing a video, but then I imagined you watching it over and over, rewinding and fast forwarding, and I didn’t like the idea of you doing that. So I’m writing this instead so that you can feel me with you when it’s time. I’m with you, my little girl. I’m with you. And it’s going to be okay.

I am a lucky person. Blessed. I love you.

Forever your Mummy

XXXXXXX

I folded the letter and put it in my pocket. Then I googled the hospital, and dialled the number.

‘He’s not in yet . . .’ the nurse said.

I read out the digits on the Porchester telephone, replaced the handset, and turned off the computer. Dr Gibbons would ring me back in an hour.

In an hour, the twenty-cent piece would land.

Room 1, Celia’s room, was at the end of the second floor, just beside the fire escape. It was the Intensive Care Unit, lined with seven rooms on each side, with a nurse’s station in the centre. No police guarded Celia because the perpetrator was behind bars and there was nothing to worry about. There was only one other patient on the entire floor so it was quiet and empty except for the occasional phone-answering and drip-checking of one beefy nurse.

The beefy nurse wore a uniform a size too small. As a result, the button at the front of her hefty bosom was permanently undone. The patient in room 12 had the privilege of seeing down and into her GG bra as she bent over him to change his dirty hospital gown. It wasn’t only the greying bra that made the patient unlucky, but the gush of air that wafted from it, a stale bosom smell the recovering heart attack patient had never smelt before, and which made him wonder if his ticker might just go again. She adjusted his fresh white gown, smiled, and left him to try and sleep.

It wasn’t long since Greg had left the hospital. He’d dithered about, coming in and out, in and out, afraid to go, and in the end the counsellor from floor seven had practically pushed him into the lift.

‘Promise you’ll ring!’ Greg said, as the counsellor pressed the lift button behind the nurse’s station.

‘Promise,’ the beefy nurse and the tall counsellor said in unison, watching the lift doors close behind Greg’s large unkempt hair.

‘Tea?’ Beefy asked Tall.

‘Home,’ the lanky counsellor said, taking the stairs, which she always did to avoid awkward patient-client lift silence – or worse – chat.

The nurse drank her tea in peace, flicking through
Heat
magazine, taking special interest in a story about breast reduction. She put her magazine down when she heard a whimper coming from room 1.

Celia had opened her eyes. It had been so long since she’d opened them to anything pleasant – the ceiling of her happy bedroom, the faces of her happy sons, the direct light of a happy sun – that she assumed it was either a dream or death. Each time she’d woken recently, there had been a moment of unawareness, where she did not know where she was, and then the smell and the pain had brought the reality to her, that she was a tied, dying sexual plaything.

There was a large nurse standing over her. Was she imagining her, as she had imagined Greg so often over the last five weeks? She’d conjured her husband’s kind eyes and loving smile, imagined the gentle comfort of his hand on hers, the smooth deep sound of his lovely Scottish voice. She managed to smile at the face of the nurse. She moaned a soft, happy moan; still thinking this was not real.

‘I’m going to ring the doctor, and Greg. I’ll get him and the boys. They’ll be here any minute. Oh my goodness!’

The nurse ran out of the room to ring several phone numbers.

The beefy nurse did not return, but after a while a doctor did, dressed in surgical mask and gown. Still unsure as to whether she was awake or indeed alive, Celia looked down to check herself. She saw white sheets. She lifted the top sheet with her bandaged hand and saw her bandaged body. She felt her face with her hand, covered in cloth except for eyes, nose and mouth. Then she looked up at the doctor again. This was real. She had made it.

Things came into focus better. The room was filled with flowers and cards. The window had a view of the city. The floor was clean and bright, except for the unconscious nurse lying in the doorway.

‘You almost had a lucky escape, didn’t you?’ the man said.

After the initial scare of being arrested and questioned, he was allowed to leave the police station, free to go. He smiled as he walked out of Paddington Green, sure he had it all sorted. Kill her before she talked, then head off. He’d found a car and bought a ticket and just had this one thing to do before leaving for a fresh start. He felt so confident and relaxed that he took his time walking up to the second floor. But somewhere between ground and first he remembered the blood and sperm. She may have been wiped or washed a little, but he was probably in every frigging nook – nose-blood from when she’d kicked him, sperm from the many times he’d ejaculated on or in her. Shit. He was usually so thorough – took care to clean things up – and even though they’d taken his fingerprints and DNA, he felt confident that the two dead ones in the cling-film would reveal nothing. But he’d had no time to do that with this one, what with Bronwyn finding her the way she had.

He realised the woman would lead the police to him alive or dead. And even though he’d found a car and bought a ticket, they’d track him down eventually, put in all their resources, because they would have more than enough evidence.

He thought on his feet, sneaking into a vacant operating theatre on the first floor for some materials, then heading back up to IT.

It was the nurse’s fault, questioning him like that.

‘Doctor?’ she’d said, hanging up the phone at her nurse’s station and waddling up behind him. ‘That was quick! Excuse me, isn’t it wonderful, Doctor!’

He excused her all right, with a wallop that sent her impossible cleavage to the floor.

He moved the nurse inside and shut the door to room 1 carefully, marvelling at his ex, whose eyes were open but staring blankly, as if she didn’t believe she was seeing anything at all. It had been over for a long time, he thought, as he placed a layer of thick surgical tape on her swollen mouth, which he then covered with a cloth mouth guard. Encouraging her to stand up with a scalpel to the eye, he ripped the drips from her arms, put her in a wheelchair, and pressed the down button of the lift, with the scalpel firmly pressed against the back of her neck.

When the doors opened, there was a young nurse in the lift. His heart stopped for a moment, realising he looked odd with his surgical mask on. Also, his patient was wriggling in her chair, but he wheeled it inside and said: ‘Yes, I know, the painkillers will kick in soon,’ while making an incision in Celia’s neck that was big enough to stop the wriggling.

‘Poor thing,’ he said to the young nurse through his cloth mask. ‘She’s been like this for hours.’

He said cheerio on the ground floor before heading down to the car park. It was quiet, and he had parked out of sight of the security cameras, so he felt fairly confident that no one had seen him bundle her into the boot and smash her over the head with the jack.

Problem was, once in the car, he had no idea where to take her. She was dead, or near as, he was sure of it. He just had to find somewhere to clean her up, then he could leave as planned.