The Malcontenta

17

If it hadn’t been for Rose, Brock would have abandoned his afternoon therapy session. The morning osteopathy had left his back aching, barely able to bend. Worse were the headaches and nausea which had been recurring in waves over the past days, and he was convinced he was going down with flu. His stomach felt as if it belonged to someone else and his vision kept blurring. The thought of another acupuncture session filled him with dread, but if Rose was going to talk to him, he would have to be there. Beamish-Newell had brought the time of his session forward to two o’clock, during the rest hour for the other patients, and he suspected that this was to avoid alarm and inconvenience if he passed out again. His sense of gloom was heightened by the darkness of the day, the light of the sun overwhelmed by a motionless mass of black cloud.

Rose was waiting for him, looking nervous. She avoided his eyes as Beamish-Newell swept in and went through the preliminaries. He seemed distant to Brock, even abrupt, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Rose had asked for the meeting, he might have wondered if she had complained to the Director about him. Perhaps his wife had.

He said conversationally, trying to get Beamish-Newell to talk, to hear the intonation of his voice, ‘How many needles today, Stephen?’

Beamish-Newell took a long time to say anything, and when he did the reply sounded ominous. ‘Let’s see how many you can take. It’s probably time we stopped mollycoddling you.’

Brock rolled on to his front and closed his eyes, feeling dizzy even before the first needle went in.

When he opened them again he was completely disoriented. He groaned inwardly. I’ve blacked out again.

He blinked, trying to make out what had happened, but it was so dim. My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me. His head was spinning, half waking, half trying not to. He felt an agonizing cramp in his legs, but when he tried to move them he couldn’t. They’ve paralysed my spine, for God’s sake. He struggled desperately to make them work, and suddenly there was a thump and the trolley shifted slightly and he found he was able to move them at last. Thank Christ for that. He realized that it was so dim because the overhead light was off, and although it was only mid-afternoon it was so dark outside that little light was coming through the small high window. Or was it mid-afternoon? He really had no idea. His back was so bad after the manipulation that he could hardly raise his head and turn his wrist to look at his watch. When he finally managed it he saw it was only two-forty. He’d been out for twenty minutes or so.

Where was everybody? Surely they wouldn’t have left him to come round by himself? Or had Beamish-Newell finally given up on him? Rose too? He lowered his head down on to his forearms again and waited. Faintly, in the distance, he could hear some music. An exercise class perhaps, or relaxation. Maybe just cook in the kitchen, preparing another lentil souffle. Nausea swept through him, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to stay lying there. At least they could have left the bloody light on.

He sat up with difficulty, cursing his back, and swung his feet to the floor. When he tried to put his weight on them they buckled from the cramp, and he leaned back against the trolley, but only for a moment as he felt the sharp stab of a needle in his back. Oh shit. He reached behind him with a tentative hand and felt ten or a dozen needles, maybe more, in two neat rows down his lower back.

He waited for a moment for his legs to recover, moving his weight from one to the other, then reached for the towel lying across the end of the trolley. It felt heavy — and odd somehow. Everything felt odd. He shuffled to the door, and found it was locked. A large key was sticking out of the mortice. He turned it and opened the door, blinking from the sudden bright light of the corridor.

Waiting there a moment in the doorway, shaking the cotton wool out of his head, he saw two elderly ladies approach from the direction of the west wing. They stopped and stared at him, open-mouthed. One of them began to scream, the other crumpled to the floor in a dead faint. A moment later a male therapist came running down the corridor in response to the shrieks and saw Brock. In his subsequent statement to the police he described how he had noticed Brock’s posture, stooping as if he had been in an accident, and the small acupuncture needles covering his back. But before that he saw the blood, lots of it, all over Brock’s hands, drenching his legs, dripping from his towel, staining the carpet around his feet.

18

Word of another killing at Stanhope rippled through County Police divisional headquarters at Crowbridge, running fast through some parts of the building, more slowly through others. Kathy was sitting in an office on the fourth floor typing up her fifth report on the tyre-slasher, when the word reached the level below her. A uniformed WPC picked up a pile of papers and headed for the stairs, intending to speak to her friend in the next room to Kathy, but at the same moment Kathy’s phone rang. It was three-thirty, perhaps an hour after Rose’s throat had been sliced open.

‘Kathy, have you heard? There’s been another killing at Stanhope Clinic,’ Penny Elliot told her. ‘It looks as if war’s broken out on the second floor.’

‘No! I hadn’t heard. What’s happened?’ Kathy felt her heart start thumping with panic, as if she already knew the worst.

‘Hang on.’ Kathy heard her talking to someone nearby, then, ‘Apparently, someone’s been found down there with their throat cut.’

‘Oh God! Brock!’

‘What’s that?’

But Kathy had already jammed down the receiver and was running for the door, just as the woman in the next office looked in and said, ‘Have you heard …?’

Kathy skidded to a halt under the trees before the car park, full of marked and unmarked police vehicles. An ambulance had backed across the grass verge by the west wing and was standing with its rear doors open beside the door to the basement. The two ambulance men were waiting, smoking, chatting to a uniformed constable who challenged her when she got out of the car. She opened her wallet for him, barely slowing as she came down the steps, and raced along the corridor, sensing her way to the epicentre of the disaster from the increasingly strained expressions on the faces she met along the way.

Scene-of-crime and forensic were already well into their routine as she came to a halt, eased her way around a knot of crouching men and looked into the room from which the photographer’s light was flashing. She saw the dark blood everywhere, across the trolley, the walls, and all over the white coat of the body on the floor. She recognized the sheen of Rose’s black hair, wedged into the angle between the floor and wall.

She stepped back and took her bearings, looking around her, heart racing. Further up the corridor a man in blue overalls and wearing surgical gloves came out of a room carrying several plastic bags containing blood-stained items. She walked quickly up the corridor and looked inside. Brock was sitting motionless on a metal chair facing the door. He was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, originally white but now stained, like most of his body below the elbows, with blood. His face was as grey as his beard and his eyes seemed to be looking at something far, far away. One man was taking scrapings from his finger-nails, another swab samples from the blood on his feet, and another — she recognized Professor Pugh squinting through his glasses — was removing acupuncture needles from his back. For a moment Kathy was struck by the image of a grotesque beauty parlour.

‘Ah, Sergeant Kolla! How nice to see you again!’ Professor Pugh beamed at her. Brock looked up and his eyes met Kathy’s. Almost imperceptibly he shook his head, then lowered his eyes again.

‘I wondered if you might be coming along to the party,’ Pugh went on, stooping to retrieve a needle from Brock’s lower back. ‘I thought Chief Inspector Tanner must be calling upon your extensive experience of this place.’

As if on cue, a voice, low and cold and hard, growled in Kathy’s ear. ‘You — outside!’

Kathy turned and he indicated the corridor with a jerk of his head. She started walking and sensed him following half a step behind and to one side. She retraced her steps back below the west wing until the door at the end came into view. The uniformed man standing there straightened up as he saw them. Tanner’s hand on her arm stopped her and she turned to face him.

‘Go back to Division, clear whatever you’ve got on your desk in ten minutes, no more.’ He was speaking quietly, his face less than a foot away from hers. Round his shoulder Kathy could see the constable looking curiously at them, straining to hear what they were saying. ‘Speak to no one. Then go directly home and wait to be contacted. As from this moment you are suspended from duty.’