Gallery Whispers

101

Olive Mcllhenney was watching the television in the corner of the living room, but with little interest. She knew that upstairs in her daughter's bedroom, Spencer and Lauren would be glued to the small portable set, expanding their encyclopaedic knowledge of Coronation Street, but since the onset of her illness the characters had seemed flat and the storylines boring, in comparison with her own real-life drama.

Still she watched it, though, for something to do while she waited, hoping all the while that her visitor would be on time, since she felt ill-equipped for the mounting tension which she was experiencing.

When Neil had wanted to call the visit off, her insistence that she had got over her earlier setback was a little short of the truth.

She looked at the clock as the doorbell rang, and saw that her visitor was in fact a minute early. Carefully, in the slow steady way which had been forced upon her, she rose and walked out to open the door. 'Ms dark,' she said. 'Good to see you; good of you to come.'

'Call me Penelope, please,' said the woman, as she stepped inside.

'It's no problem at all. I'm free every night for the rest of this week.'

'Come on through, then.' Olive ushered her through into the lounge, pointing her at the comfortable sofa. There was a coffee table between it and her chair, and on it sat a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

'Have a glass with me,' she insisted. 'My list of pleasures is a bit curtailed, but I'm still okay for sex and drink. I insist on quality in both respects, so this is pretty decent stuff.' She smiled as she filled both glasses most of the way to the top.

'Cheers,' said Penelope dark, taking a sip. 'I'm glad to hear that you're trying to live as normal a life as you can. That's very important.

Now, what exactly did you want to talk to me about; woman to woman, as you said?'

Olive took a breath, stopping short of the point of pain. 'I need some lifestyle advice, Penelope,' she began, cautiously. 'I have every confidence in Deacey and in my treatment, but I'm under no illusions that Neil and I will ever walk up another Munro together.

'When this thing,' she tapped her chest, 'is battered into remission, what will I be able to do? What plans can I make? Can I go back to the classroom, can I have another baby if I want? How physically fit am I going to be?'

The other woman looked at her, running her hand over her ashblonde hair, playing for time as she considered her answer. 'My dear,' she began, 'I don't think you should be under any illusions here. If you get some degree of remission, for a period of years even, you will never be fit enough to teach again. As for having a child, if you ever fell pregnant, you'd be advised to terminate.

'You'll have a life, oh yes. But in all honesty I can't say that you're likely to be able to do much more than you can now.'

Olive threw back her head. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'This is it?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'But I find this hard to take as it is.' Her fists clenched. 'I tell you this, Penelope,' she exclaimed, as if she had been goaded beyond endurance, at last, by her fate. 'If it got any worse, I could not stand it.

The idea of a slow steady decline, with Neil and the kids having to watch, with him having to do the most personal things for me… the thought of that appals me.

'I will do anything to avoid that. I tell you, if it happened, I'd climb into a nice hot bath and cut my wrists.' Her voice rose, until she broke off in a paroxysm of coughing.

'Ssh, ssh,' said her visitor, soothingly. 'Don't even think such a thing. That would be awful for them. Imagine Neil coming in and finding you: worse still, imagine if it were Spencer or Lauren. If they saw something like that it would mark them for life.'

'What else can I do?' Olive shot back, her breathing restored. 'The hospital never gives you enough drugs to off yourself. I've noticed; they're damn careful about that. But if it comes to it I'll find a way, suppose I have.to shuffle down to the Waverley Station and chuck myself in front of a train.'

Penelope dark picked up her glass and took another sip. 'There is a way,' she said, quietly, 'that would be less painful for Neil and the children; and most of all for you.'

'What's that? Neil has so much crap in the garage that I couldn't get the car in to do a hosepipe job.'

The woman on the settee shook her head. 'That's not what I meant.

Listen; I'm a doctor. Olive. If it did come to it, and you were really sure, I'd be prepared to help you.'

'How?' The word was slow and feather-soft.

'I'm about the hospital a lot. I have access to drugs; I could prescribe, or procure, something sufficiently powerful, painless and virtually instantaneous. If you could arrange for the children to stay with someone, as you've done before, and for your husband to be out one night, I could visit you.'

'But you'd get into trouble afterwards. You could go to jail, Penelope.'

'No, I'd arrange it so that it looked like you had committed suicide … which is, of course, exactly what you would have done.'

'Still,' Olive murmured. 'I don't know if I could let you do that.'

'That would be my ethical decision, not yours. All I would be doing would be offering you a better way to achieve something upon which you were already determined.

'You can spare Neil and your children from the thing you dread; you can do it humanely. I can offer you that choice. Olive. Whether you take it is up to you, but I think it's right that you should have it.'

'The trouble is, Dr dark,' said Neil Mcllhenney, as the kitchen door swung fully open, 'the law doesn't agree with you.' He stepped into the room, with Bob Skinner following behind. There was a dark bruise on the Deputy Chief Constable's forehead.

'I shouldn't apologise for setting you up like this, but I will,' the sergeant said. 'The truth is it was Olive's idea; when she heard what was at stake she insisted on doing this.'

Penelope dark looked at him, apprehensively. 'What do you mean,

"at stake"?'

'Deacey Simmers' reputation, and freedom. He was right in the frame for killing Gaynor Weston and Anthony Murray.'

She put her hand to her mouth. 'But I never meant that,' she gasped.

'I'm sure you didn't; and maybe when he was arrested you'd have come forward. But it would have been too late by then. The damage would have been done. You know how sensitive Mr Simmers is. The faintest whiff of something like this could have finished him.'

She nodded. 'You're right. He might have been your next suicide.

'How did you know I was involved in those deaths?' she asked.

'I found your name in Nicola Marston's notes. I knew you'd been to see Mr Murray too. So I went to see Joan Ball; she told me about your connection to Mrs Weston.'

'Did you help the Marston woman?'

She turned to look at Skinner as he spoke. 'Nicola asked me, hypothetically, how much insulin it would take for a fast-acting lethal overdose. Hypothetically, I told her. I wasn't there when she died though. I didn't know about it until Deacey told me.

'I felt terribly guilty about it, at first, but over the next couple of years, I thought about it more and more. Eventually, having been an opponent, I swung right round and became a member of the proeuthanasia camp.

'That was as far as it went though, till Gay told me about her illness and asked me to help her end it. She was a strong woman, she had made a firm decision, and in my view a correct one; so I agreed. I went out to Oldbams late at night, injected her, made sure she was dead, and went away. I didn't realise how many silly mistakes I'd made until Nolan Weston let something slip in conversation at the hospital one day.'

'So you were more careful with Mr Murray,' Skinner interposed.

'Yes, although not careful enough, it seems.'

'No. not quite.' The DCC smiled, faintly. 'Tell me this. When you helped Gay Weston to die, was Mr Simmers there?'

'No. He had been there earlier in the evening, for supper. Gay told me, in fact, that he'd been a bit disappointed when she asked him to go. He thought that he'd be staying the night as usual.'

Neil and Olive Mcllhenney sighed with relief, in unison.

'What about Mr Murray?' Skinner continued. 'Did he ask you to help him?'

Penelope dark looked up at him. 'No,' she said. 'I made the offer.

Anthony was such a lovely man, and he was struggling so hard to hold on to what was left of his dignity, that I couldn't stop myself. He jumped at the chance. When I put the bag over his head, the last thing he said to me was "Thank you".'

'And what did Gaynor Weston say? It wasn't "Thank you Mrs Futcher", was it?'

Neil Mcllheimey's jaw dropped, as he stared at Skinner.

'That's the one big problem I have, you see, doctor,' said the DCC, 'the fact that Gaynor Weston was your husband's girlfriend. When Neil asked me to witness this, and told me about you, I made some inquiries through a contact at the BMA. He checked the files and told me that although dark's your maiden name, the one you qualified under and the one you've always used professionally, you're also Mrs Terry Futcher.'

The woman jumped to her feet. 'Look,' she protested. 'You have to understand about Terry and me; we're happily married in our own way, but I have my life and he has his. I don't enjoy his attentions over much; never have. That's why we don't have a family, and that's why I don't mind his screwing around, although we keep up the pretence that I don't know about it.

'I love him though, and he loves me, and we agreed a long time ago that we'd stick together, come what may.

'I knew about Gaynor almost as soon as it started; Terry's careless with his diary and I knew who she was through her work for the firm.

But I'd never met her until that day that Joan introduced us. I liked her at once, all the more because I realised that she was no threat to my marriage. She was a hell of a sight more independent than Terry ever was, and I knew early on that he wasn't her only boyfriend.

'I know it looks bad, but Gay and I were friends.'

'Did she know who you were?'

'I never told her, and if she knew she never let anything slip. I have no idea if Terry ever showed her a photograph of me. But her relationship with my husband had no bearing on my decision to help her end her life. You have to believe that.'

'It doesn't matter whether I do or not,' said Skinner. 'If a judge saw malice there, though, that would matter, big-time.' As he looked at her, Penelope dark Futcher sat slowly back down on the settee.

'However,' the big DCC continued, fingering the bruise on his forehead and wincing as he did, 'it isn't going to come to that. Because, more by your luck than your judgement, we have no hard evidence against you, Dr dark, nor the prospect of ever finding any… and under Scots law a person cannot be convicted on the basis of an uncorroborated confession.

'All that I can do is have a quiet word with Home Support, and make sure that you are never again put in a position where you might be tempted to offer your special help to a terminally ill patient. Make no mistake, I will do that, unless you promise to resign. I'll do the same with the BMA too, unless you promise never to practise medicine again. Will you give me those undertakings?'

'Yes,' the woman whispered, after a moment's hesitation.

'In that case, you're free to go. And take this both as a request and a warning: don't ever be tempted to do such a thing, ever again.'

She had almost reached the door when Olive spoke. 'No, Penelope,' she said, 'please don't. Because you're not God, you're not the Pope, you're not infallible. With what you've been doing, you only have to be wrong once… and my dear, you were wrong about me, about us.

'You probably don't understand this, given what you've said about your own marriage, but my family's the driving force behind everything I do. I don't have a choice at all. I don't have the luxury of opting out. I have to go on, for Neil and the kids' sakes as much as my own, because I will not entertain the idea of our being parted before our rightful time.

'For them, I have to fight this thing: to my last breath, if it comes to that. And believe me, lady, I will.'