The House of Women (35 page)

10

Diana Bradshaw came instead of Edith, and, stripped of her garb of office, had no more distinction, McKenna thought, than any woman of indeterminate years he might pass in the street, and was no less inept in the face of near disaster. In a side room in the casualty department, she and Phoebe huddled together, while he paced the floor.

‘
She’s done it before,’ Phoebe offered. ‘She took an overdose, but I’m not supposed to know.’

‘
Why on earth should she do that?’ Diana asked. ‘She’s got everything to look forward to.’

‘
Because she’s not normal!’ Phoebe snapped. ‘So even if she has got everything to look forward to, she won’t see it that way.’ She jumped up and smoothed her clothes, then her face blanched as she saw the bloodstains on her own garments, and she fell back into her seat. ‘Mama won’t know what to do,’ she said dully. ‘She’ll go back on her pills.’ Then she swore, as her mother and sister had done. ‘Minnie’s a selfish, stupid bitch! She doesn’t care who she hurts!’

‘
Perhaps she cares too much,’ McKenna said, something falling into place of its own accord amid the chaos left over from Ned’s death. ‘Perhaps she’s running away from the harm she’s done, or even trying to make sure she does no more.’

He went outside into the stultifying heat of an August afternoon turned rancid and enervating. Leaning against the nobbled brick wall, he lit a cigarette, and ordered the arrest of Jason Lloyd, then smoked the cigarette to its tip, thinking of the two lovely young women shut inside the building behind him, both beguiled by some guilt or arcane need into a letting of their own life blood.

He lit another cigarette and took out his mobile telephone to dial Iolo Williams’s number, waiting an age for an answer.

‘
Yes? Who is this?’ The voice was slurred and despondent.

‘
Michael McKenna, and I’m at the hospital, where the doctors are trying to save your daughter’s life. She cut her wrists.’

‘
What?’

‘
I said —’

‘
Why should she want to do that?’ A whine crept into his voice. ‘Why cause such a fuss?’

‘
I don’t know,’ McKenna said. ‘Are you going to come?’

‘
Me? Why? What good would that do? Edith’ll cope.’

‘
Like she’s always done? She certainly backed a loser with you, didn’t she?’

‘
Talk’s cheap,’ Williams commented, and McKenna heard the chink of glass against tooth.

‘
Drinking again, Professor?’

‘
Bullying people again, Chief Inspector? Why don’t you mind your own sodding business? You’d drive a bloody saint to drink!’ There was a pause, a deep intake of breath, then he said, the whine back in his voice: ‘I’ll wait for my wife to come home. She’ll decide what’s to be done. She knows Mina best.’

‘
Isn’t she back from her shopping spree yet?’ McKenna asked. ‘She spends an awful lot of your money, doesn’t she?’ He, too, paused. ‘One of my officers keeps asking me how you support your life-style, and I must confess I’m at a loss for an answer.’

‘
Yes, and he had the sodding cheek to ask me!’ Williams snarled. ‘Bastards! What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

‘
Maybe nothing, but on the other hand, maybe a lot. It all depends.’

‘
On what? Who’s next in line for persecution?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Don’t waste your time! I’m up to my bloody neck in debt, and sinking fast! I’ve got problems you’ve never even dreamed of.’

‘
You’ll survive, as long as the currency of your reputation doesn’t suffer the devaluation it warrants,’ McKenna commented. ‘But you don’t disappoint, do you?’

‘
What d’you mean?’

‘
I rang out of courtesy, to tell you about your daughter, even though I didn’t expect you to break the habit of a lifetime by showing compassion. As I said, you don’t disappoint.’ He disconnected before the other man could answer, then threw his cigarette to the ground and stamped its fire to oblivion.

*

Phoebe and Diana seemed suspended in the same time in which he had left them.

‘
There’s no news yet,’ Diana said quietly.

‘
There won’t be, will there?’ Phoebe added. ‘He was only gone fifteen minutes.’ She turned her hands this way and that, scrutinizing their shape and colours, then held them palms up, and bent forward, peering at the matrix of veins on her wrists.

‘
What is it, dear?’ Diana asked. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘
I’m trying to imagine the pain,’ Phoebe told her, and drew her nails viciously across the thin skin on her wrist.

Diana lurched away towards the toilets.

‘I can’t do it,’ Phoebe added, as if there had been no interruption. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

Sitting beside her, McKenna took the clawing fingers in his own.

‘I should pity her, shouldn’t I?’ Phoebe asked. ‘She was probably trying to write what she feels, the way I can, but she had to do it with a razor. She used Uncle Ned’s cut throat, the one his father left him. She must have pinched it from his room, and she’s made such a mess of the handle. It’s mother of pearl, and the blood soaked right in. Will it clean off, d’you think?’

‘
I expect so,’ McKenna said.

She began to fidget.
‘Will you take me home? I’ve got to clean the bathroom before Mama gets back. I couldn’t bear her to see it like that, especially if Tom’s in there, wallowing. He used to lick off the blood when I fell and cut my knees.’

‘
Is there no way of contacting her? Has Annie got a mobile?’

Phoebe shook her head, wisps of hair sticking to her cheeks.

‘What time will they be back?’

She shrugged wearily.
‘Sixish? What time is it now?’

‘
Ten past four.’ McKenna glanced at the wall clock, and rose. ‘Wait here while I find Mrs Bradshaw.’

He roamed the unit, peering into curtained bays, and was about to ask a nurse to check the women
’s toilets when he found her in a small office, beside a desk stacked with X-ray films and cartons of syringes.

‘
I’ve seen her,’ she said. ‘They’ve almost finished stitching her up.’ Her eyes were bemused. ‘It’s her, you know. I said I’d know her if I ever saw her again.’

‘
I beg your pardon?’

‘
Mina Harris.’

‘
What about her?’

‘
She’s the girl who sprayed my car with brake fluid.’

*

Sutured and bandaged, Mina was moved to a small ward overlooking the expressway which swept through a man-made ravine behind the city. Phoebe at his side, McKenna looked at the tangled disarray of Mina’s wondrous hair, and the ugly little ear on show to the world, then Phoebe rearranged the hair, covering the ear and creating new shadows on the grey skin. Under the closed lids, Mina’s eyes moved sluggishly.

‘
Has she been put to sleep?’ Phoebe asked the young nurse fiddling with clips and bags and tubes.

‘
She had a local anaesthetic,’ the girl said. ‘While they stitched her wrists.’

‘
Doesn’t she need pain-killers?’ Phoebe nagged. ‘Won’t she be hurting dreadfully?’

The nurse nodded.
‘I expect so.’ Giving the apparatus one final tweak, she moved away. ‘So maybe she’ll think twice next time.’

*

Torn between mother and sister, Phoebe decided Edith’s need was greater and went home with Diana, leaving McKenna to watch over the would-be suicide, who slept fitfully, mouth slightly open. Through the window beyond her bed, he watched an endless stream of cars, trucks and vans on the road below, and a dirty mist of exhaust fumes creeping slowly up the hillside to join the shadow falling behind the building as the sun dropped towards the horizon. He went outside several times to smoke hurried cigarettes and make short telephone calls, but returned anxiously to his post, only once pausing at the WRVS canteen for a cup of strong tea.

Drowsing in his chair, he was dragged awake by a whimpering, as Mina struggled wildly to free herself from the sheet over her chest and the drip fastened into the back of her hand.

‘Don’t!’ He held her flailing arms, and felt the heat and chill and tremors in her flesh. ‘You’ll hurt yourself even more.’

As she gasped for breath, he loosened the sheet and helped her to sit up. She flopped against him, then fell
backwards on to the pillows, and stared at him without blinking, her eyes bloodshot.

‘
Phoebe’s gone home, to be there when your mother gets back.’ He poured a little water into the plastic beaker on the bedside cabinet, and held it to her mouth. Her lips were desiccated, like an old woman’s, and she gulped the water, matted hair tumbling over his hands, then pushed him away. Faint streaks of dried blood, brown against the grey flesh, smeared her hairline and bare arms, and on her scalp, little red pinpricks defined a small bald patch of swollen skin.

‘
What happened to your head?’ he asked.

She lifted her right arm as if it were made of lead, and touched the wound.
‘Jason pulled my hair.’ Her voice was uncertain.

‘
Why?’

Her arm dropped, inert on the sheet.
‘He was angry.’ She screwed up her eyes. ‘He said he’d cut it all off.’ Then, fearful of betrayal, she turned her head away.

He watched the rise and fall of her chest as breath hissed in and out of her lungs, and thought of the harrowing shock awaiting Edith when she saw the reality of what her daughter had become. Without the camouflage of make-up and underpinnings, Mina had the look of a child who cried too often and too heart-breakingly, her little breasts cleaved by a spur of breastbone, her young flesh sagging like hag
’s skin.

‘
Why was Jason angry with you?’ McKenna persisted.

‘
His sister rang his mobile because someone’d been to his house.’ She turned her head to look at him again, eyes muddy with distress and incomprehension. ‘He said I must’ve told, but I haven’t. I haven’t said a word, but he won’t believe me.’ She wept quietly. ‘He says I’ve ruined everything, and his friends’ll slash my face when they find out, then everyone’ll know what I did to Uncle Ned, and I’ll be put away.’ Her left hand clawed its way across the bed, and clutched his arm. ‘I didn’t hurt Uncle Ned! I swear I didn’t!’ She tore at the bindings about her wrists. ‘Oh God! I can’t bear it! I can’t!’

Another nurse materialized, in a flurry of pale uniform and crackling plastic apron.
‘Stop that this minute!’ Holding Mina’s arms, she favoured McKenna with a look of absolute disgust. ‘What have you said to her? Can’t you see what state she’s in?’

‘
She needs a doctor,’ he said. ‘Or better still, a psychiatrist.’

‘
She needs to be left in peace! You’ve no right pestering her.’

The smile which had so entranced Dewi broke suddenly and grotesquely over Mina
’s face, and her voice wheedled: ‘He isn’t pestering me. He’s just talking. He’s a policeman. They’ve got to talk.’

Snapping her teeth in irritation, the nurse walked away, soft-soled shoes whispering on the lino.

‘Stupid cow!’ Mina muttered.

He watched as her face was transfigured and refigured by a tide of expressions, until it settled again into pinched misery.
‘Do you want some pain-killers?’ he asked.

‘
What for?’

‘
Your wrists. They must hurt.’

She regarded the bandages, frowning.
‘They ache, a little bit.’

An old saying gabbled in his head, reminding him
that where feeling was absent, sense was also missing. ‘I didn’t do anything bad,’ Mina added. ‘I don’t understand why he’s so angry. It was just a joke.’

‘
What was?’

‘Jason gave me some powder. It’s named for a race-course, and he said it’d make everybody go to the bog.’

‘
A racecourse?’

‘
One of those famous ones, where the Queen goes.’

‘
Epsom,’ McKenna said.

‘
That’s right.’ She smiled again, pleased with him. ‘Epsom. White stuff in a little plastic bag.’ She giggled. ‘He said the police’d think it was drugs if they found it in his car.’ Another memory re-formed her expression into peevishness. ‘And he said Uncle Ned had to be paid back for being so nasty.’

‘
Why? What had he done?’

‘
He shouted at me!’ She shivered. ‘He was horrible to me! And he called Jason an evil little crook, and even though Jason laughed when I told him, I could tell he was really furious.’

‘
When did Uncle Ned shout at you?’