Trauma

Six

Lafferty took a chance on finding John Main at home and went round to his flat. He had decided that a personal meeting would be better than a telephone call, and he didn’t want to wait another day for Main to come back down to St Xavier’s. At first he thought Main was out, but after the second ring of the bell he heard sounds from inside. The door opened and a groggy looking John Main stood there. He was wearing a sweat shirt with ‘Merchiston School’ emblazoned on the front and a pair of denim jeans. His feet were bare and his hair unkempt. The heaviness of his eyelids said that he had been asleep.

“Father Lafferty? This is a surprise. .”

“I was passing. I thought I’d pop in and tell you how I was getting on?”

Lafferty thought the white lie justified in the cause of defusing the look of expectation that had quickly appeared in Main’s eyes.

“Come in,” said Main, stepping back and opening the door wider. “You’ll have to excuse the mess, I’m afraid.”

“If only I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that,” Lafferty replied lightly.. He walked into the living room then realised that Main had not been joking.

Main started to tidy things away or, rather, to concentrate the mess so that it was all in one place. Unwashed plates, cups, glasses and cutlery were collected and piled up on a coffee table and Lafferty was invited to sit down. He did so, regretting that he had come without any good news to report. The empty gin bottle in the hearth and the glass standing beside it with a dried-up piece of lemon in the bottom explained why Main was looking so dishevelled.

“Can I get you something?” asked Main. “Tea? Coffee?”

“Coffee would be nice but I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” said Lafferty.

“No trouble, I could use some.”

The comment made Lafferty’s eyes stray back to the bottle in the hearth. Main noticed.

He said, “I hope you are not about to give me a lecture on the evils of drink.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” replied Lafferty. “Drink can be an absolute blessing.”

The comment surprised Main: it had been made so matter-of-factly. He felt his liking for Lafferty, born at their first meeting, grow a little more and he went to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

Lafferty looked around the room, noting all the signs of an unhappy man living on his own. And then his gaze was caught by what he saw on the dining table. A circle of white cards, each bearing a letter of the alphabet, and an upturned glass sitting in the middle. He got up slowly and walked over to the table. He was still there when Main came back. “OUIJA?” he asked, turning to face Main.

Main seemed discomfited. He had obviously forgotten about it. “Yes,” he said, trying to recover his composure. “I thought I’d give it a try.”

“A try?” asked Lafferty gently.

Main’s composure started to show cracks. He supported himself by putting both hands on the back of a chair and looked down at the table. He was obviously having difficulty in getting the words out. “I wanted to... I needed to... I had to try getting in touch with Mary and Simon. I need to know what happened. I need to know that Simon is all right.”

Lafferty could read the pain in Main’s eyes. It brought a lump to his own throat. “You need more than one person for this business, I understand.”

Main nodded. “I met this woman in a pub who told me that she’d been in touch with her mother through a OUIJA board. I asked her if she would show me how it worked, and she did.”

“What happened?” asked Lafferty.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Oh, there was some nonsense about Simon ‘being at peace’ but I knew she was moving the glass.”

“It can be a dangerous game they tell me,” said Lafferty.

“When you’ve nothing to lose the stakes don’t matter,” said Main.

Lafferty noticed that there was an extra card lying in the centre of the table. He could read, SIMON MAIN, HTU, BETA 2. There were some reference numbers and a Greek letter in the bottom left-hand corner.

“It was the card from the end of Simon’s bed,” whispered Main. “I took it the day they decided to switch of the machine. I thought it might help to have something connected with Simon on the table.”

Lafferty nodded and then asked, “You said something about coffee?”

“I’ll get it.”

“Did you manage to get in touch with the wino?” asked Main a few minutes later as they sipped their coffee.

“That’s really why I came,” admitted Lafferty. He told Main about the previous evening. When he’d finished Main threw back his head and laughed bitterly. “There’s irony for you,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” said Lafferty.

“McKirrop, ending up in HTU with brain damage. That’s where Simon was before he died.”

“Oh, I see, I’m sorry.”

“Life’s rich pattern. What are the chances of McKirrop pulling through?”

“Not good, I’m afraid. His injuries are pretty serious. They don’t think he’ll make it.”

Main shook his head resignedly and said, “Well, it was a long shot anyway that he might be able to tell us anything more, wasn’t it?”

Lafferty nodded. “But it was all we had.”

The look of emptiness that appeared in Main’s eyes made him wish that he hadn’t added the last bit.

The two men drank their coffee in silence until Lafferty broke it by asking, “Have you thought about a return to work? You might start to feel better if you had more to occupy your mind.”

Main smiled but there was little humour in it. He said, “I know you mean well but I have to find out what these bastards did to my son. Going back to work isn’t going to help with that.”

“So, what are you going to do? Do you know?”

“I’m going to try the newspapers,” replied Main.

Lafferty looked puzzled.

“I’m going to try to persuade the newspapers to take up the story again so that our glorious police force will feel the pressure and start to get their bloody finger out.”

Lafferty opened his mouth to say something but Main interrupted. “And if you are about to say that they are doing their best, don’t bother! It isn’t good enough!”

“Fair enough,” said Lafferty.

He put down his empty cup and got up to leave adding, “If McKirrop should come round and I get a chance to speak to him I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, I’ll pay another visit to the library and see what I can come up with.”

Main relaxed a bit as he followed Lafferty to the door. He said, “Don’t think I’m not grateful. I am, I really am.” He held out his hand and Lafferty shook it.

“If you need me, you know where I am.”

When Lafferty got back to St Xavier’s, his cleaner, Mrs Grogan had made him lunch. This wasn’t part of her duties, but she had a strong mothering instinct and often added to her cleaning and shopping with the provision of an occasional cooked meal. Lafferty was grateful He disliked cooking and his diet suffered accordingly. The downside to this kindness was that Mrs Grogan, being a woman of strong opinions, insisted on giving him her views on world affairs while he ate. Today she chose to expound her views on the common market. She was not in favour.

After lunch, Lafferty checked his diary. He had remembered the two home visits he had to make, but had forgotten about the meeting with the engaged couple, Anne Partland and her young man. It was pencilled in for three thirty. He liked Anne; she was a bright girl who had never caused her parents a moment’s anxiety all through her teenage years and on through her course at teacher training college. One of the few, he thought. He had not met her fiancée but Anne and her parents wanted the marriage to take place in St Xavier’s, so he had suggested a meeting. The boy was a Catholic so there would be no need for the usual “mixed marriage” talk about the future upbringing of the children.

Sarah was relieved to find that, as the day wore on, Logan was actively avoiding her. She was pleased she had stood her ground earlier, but her stomach still had butterflies over the incident. Although she had not said anything to the nursing staff, it was clear that they knew of her altercation with Logan and seemed to be going out of their way to be nice to her. It helped build her confidence to have them on her side.

She completed brain function tests on the six patients she had been assigned and plotted their progress, or lack of it, on their daily update charts. Four remained on a plateau; one had actually shown some loss of function but the last, a patient named Trevor Brown in Beta 2, was showing a definite improvement in terms of electro-pulse readings. Brown had been in a coma for the past thirteen weeks but Tyndall had predicted that he would recover. Many consultants were reluctant to make such predictions about coma patients, but the state of the art equipment that HTU was blessed with enabled them to detect the slightest of changes in brain function and base prognoses on them. In particular, the Sigma Scan apparatus — which Murdoch Tyndall had played a major role in developing — was proving itself in the field trials it was undergoing.

Unlike the other monitoring probes, which only needed the attachment of exterior electrodes, Sigma scan required that two electrodes be surgically implanted in the patient’s skull. The procedure was not suitable for all patients, but in those who had had them implanted it had been possible to achieve an incredibly sensitive estimation of brain activity. Tyndall had worked out a table for the readings and, from that, a formula that could be applied to predict a patient’s recovery potential.

Sarah applied Tyndall’s formula to the figures for Brown and came up with the prediction that Brown would surface from the coma at some time during the next thirty-six hours.

Sarah was taking her work sheets back to the duty room when she passed through Alpha and noticed that John McKirrop’s admission sheet was still hanging on the end of his bed. She was puzzled. She thought that Logan would have wanted to carry out the tests on McKirrop himself — especially as Tyndall had asked to be kept informed. She looked for Logan and found him examining an electro-encephalogram with the aid of a magnifying lens and a ruler. She coughed to attract his attention.

“Yes, what is it?” said Logan without turning round.

“It’s about Mr McKirrop’s tests...”

“You do them. The tramp’s all yours.”

“But Dr Tyndall specifically asked to be...”

Logan turned round and said coldly, “He was being polite. But you’re the blue-eyed girl of the moment so you do them and inform him of your findings. As far as I’m concerned, McKirrop is a lost cause. A waste of my time. He’s going to die. With a bit of luck we’ll get permission to use his organs for transplant.”

Sarah bit her tongue, believing that Logan was deliberately trying to goad her into speaking out of turn. She ignored his callousness and simply said, “Very well, Doctor.” It was important not to lose the ground she had gained with regard to Logan and she had resolved to be cold and curt in her dealings with him. She returned to the duty room and asked Sister Roche if she could have a nurse to help her with the tests on McKirrop.

“Of course,” said Roche. “I’ll give you Nurse Barnes. She’s on the console at the moment. She could do with a change.”

The ‘console’ was a computerised monitoring station that sat outside the entrance to Beta with Alpha on one side and Gamma on the other so that the duty nurse could see into all three from the swivel chair she sat in. In front of her, a bank of VDUs gave her a read-out of the vital signs of all twelve patients. A bank of red warning lights sat along the base of the unit ready to flash along with an audible warning buzzer should any patient falter in their tenuous grasp on life. Sister Roche herself relieved Nurse Barnes herself at the console.

Having established that McKirrop’s blood pressure was acceptable and his pulse rate steady, Sarah set about adorning his head with a series of electrodes. First, she and the nurse had to make sure that as good an electrical contact as possible was achieved. This they did by depilating and cleaning the relevant areas of McKirrop’s skull and rubbing on high conductivity jelly before taping the electrodes into position. The injuries to McKirrop’s skull had ruled out the surgical implantation of Sigma probes.

“This always reminds me of these awful experiments we had to do in biology at school,” said Nurse Barnes. “You know, the ones with the frogs.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Sarah, screwing up her face. “What a bunch of sadists we all were. How are we doing?”

“All ready I think,” replied the nurse.

Sarah made some last fine adjustments to the oscilloscope controls, getting the wave form as clear as possible on the screen. “Will you check the recorder settings?” she asked the nurse.

Nurse Barnes moved away from the patient to stand by the roll-chart recorder. “Shoot,” she said.

Sarah read out the settings on the oscilloscope. “X-axis, 5.”

“Check.”

“Y-axis, 5.”

“Check.”

“Amp 4”

The nurse moved a knob one click to the right before saying, “Check.”

“Gain, 10.”

“Check.”

“Let’s go for it.”

Nurse Barnes pressed the green START button on the recorder and the chart pen started to make its trace over a set time course. The nib made a scratching sound as it rose and fell on the rolling chart, leaving a thin red record of where it had been. A buzzer sounded and the pen fell to the base line. Sarah removed the completed chart and set up the next test. It took forty five minutes in all to gather the information she needed for McKirrop’s first condition appraisal. On completion, she thanked Nurse Barnes and took her file of graphs and read-outs to the doctors’ room to begin a detailed analysis of them.

The ‘doctors’ room’ sounded much grander than it actually was. In reality, it was one of the original ward side-rooms which had not been modernised at the time of the creation of HTU. It was close to the front door leading to the main corridor and lifts and was sparsely furnished with a table, three chairs in varying states of decay and a coffee percolator which Sarah switched on as soon as she went in.

There was a calendar sponsored by a local garage up on the back of the door and various charts supplied by pharmaceutical companies pinned up on the walls here and there to break the monotony of vast areas of pale green paint. The only thing the room had going for it was that it was quiet, apart from the gurgle of water when it rained — there was a drain pipe situated immediately outside the window. At the moment it was fair. There was an unwritten rule in the unit that no one would disturb you there unless it was really necessary. For that reason the room had been dubbed, “The Ivory Tower.”

Sarah lost track of time as she analysed McKirrop’s tests. The conclusion she was coming to was not what she expected so she was forced to double-check everything. The fact that Tyndall had asked to be personally informed of the results had put an added burden on her. She mustn’t make a fool of herself over this. She remembered the mug of coffee that was growing cold at her elbow and took a sip. “Well, John McKirrop,” she said quietly. “Unless I’m very much mistaken you’re not nearly as badly injured as everyone thought you were. The question is, why not?”

Sarah stared thoughtfully at the papers in front of her on the table for a few more moments before deciding to take another look at McKirrop. She met Sister Roche in the corridor as she was going off-duty.

“I didn’t realise you were still here,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be off-duty?”

“I won’t be long,” smiled Sarah. “Besides, I’m on call tonight.”

“Have a quiet one.”

“I wish.”

Sarah nodded to the night staff nurse who had taken up station at the console and walked through to Alpha 4. She took her pencil torch from her top pocket and opened McKirrop’s eyelids, first right and then left, to shine the light in them. “Well I’m blowed,” she murmured, putting the torch away again. She stood at the foot of the bed for a moment, watching McKirrop’s face as if looking for clues, but the tubes and electrodes had stolen any sense of personality.

The tramp, as Logan had dubbed him, had obviously been a good looking man in his youth. He might still have been had he not been living rough for some time; wind, weather and alcohol had taken their toll. He still had high cheek bones but his cheeks had hollowed below them and his eyes had sunk back into deep dark sockets. But the fact that the nursing staff had cleaned him up, and the wound in his forehead was hidden by pristine white bandaging had given him some semblance of quiet dignity.

“I wonder...” she said as an idea occurred. She went to the X-ray room and searched for McKirrop’s skull pictures. She found the one that had come up from A&E with the patient — the one she’d shown Tyndall that morning — but she had a vague recollection of seeing another envelope arriving from the X-ray department an hour or so later.

After a brief search she found the X-rays still in their delivery envelope. Now she remembered. She had seen the porter bring them in but had assumed that Logan was going to be doing McKirrop’s tests so she had put them out of her mind. It looked as if Logan hadn’t bothered to look at them.

Sarah pinned them up on the light box and adjusted her spectacles on her nose. One of the X-rays did not add anything to what she knew but the other confirmed exactly what she had begun to suspect. The slightly unusual angle of McKirrop’s forehead had decreed that the frontal lobe of his brain was further back than normal in most patients. The injury that had appeared so horrific at first glance, although still very bad in terms of associated shock and trauma, would not have caused nearly as much brain damage as they had been assuming. This was why the tests she had run had given such optimistic readings.

With a bit of luck, John McKirrop might actually survive his latest adventure and still be able to do the seven times table. In fact, there was a possibility that he might even recover consciousness before morning. This put Sarah in a quandary. Should she wait with the patient until he did come round and thereby witness the proof of her theory or should she call Tyndall right now with her diagnosis and prediction? She decided on the latter despite realising how furious Logan was going to be. If he had opened the X-rays himself he would have seen what she had discovered and he would have been counting the brownie points instead of her.

Sarah called Tyndall from the duty-room after laying out the relevant charts in front of her on Sister Roche’s desk in anticipation of any question Tyndall might ask. She also had the X-ray beside her on a chair. She felt her mouth become a little dry as she waited for Tyndall to answer.

“Dr Tyndall please,” said Sarah when a woman answered.

There was a short pause before Tyndall came on the line.

“It’s Dr Lasseter here sir,” said Sarah. “You asked to be kept informed about Mr McKirrop’s condition.”

“So I did,” said Tyndall pleasantly. “He died I suppose?”

“No sir, far from it. I think he might pull through and quite possibly without any significant brain damage.”

“We are talking about the same patient, Doctor?” asked Tyndall. “The down-and-out from the canal?”

“Yes sir.” Sarah went on to explain what she had found out from the brain function tests.

“Has Dr Logan had a chance to see your results?” asked Tyndall.

“No sir, he delegated the patient to me.”

“I see,” said Tyndall. Sarah could sense that Tyndall doubted the values she had obtained, but was too polite to say so straight out.

“I think I can explain sir,” she said. She told Tyndall how she had come to the conclusion that damage to McKirrop’s brain had been minimised by the odd angle of his skull and how she had confirmed this by reference to newer X-rays.

Tyndall seemed much happier with this. “Well done, Doctor Lasseter,” he said. “An alert mind is the physician’s most valuable tool.”

“Thank you sir,” replied Sarah, feeling better than she had done since she started at HTU. The world was suddenly a much nicer place thanks to John McKirrop and his recessed frontal lobe.

“From the values you read out it sounds as if we can expect Mr McKirrop to regain consciousness in the not-too-distant future,” said Tyndall.

“Yes sir,” said Sarah.

“Thank you for letting me know.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

The conversation with Tyndall had imbued Sarah with new reserves of energy. She resolved to stay in HTU until McKirrop came round. All things considered, it had been quite a day. Standing up to Derek Logan had made it one to remember, but seeing John McKirrop regain consciousness would be the icing on the cake. She could not keep it to herself; she went to chat to the night staff nurse.

“With that head wound?” exclaimed the nurse when Sarah predicted that McKirrop would recover.

Sarah explained how it looked worse that it actually was.

“If you say so,” shrugged the nurse.

“Bet you fifty pence?”

“You’re on. I’ll call you if he stirs... Or maybe I won’t. Fifty pence is fifty pence!”

Sarah went back to the doctors’ room and carefully wrote up her notes on John McKirrop for inclusion in his case notes file. Her hand-writing was good and she favoured a Schaeffer drawing pen filled with light blue China ink. Making sure that her notes were always clear and legible was almost a fetish with Sarah. It was born of an intense dislike of the way people made stereotypes of themselves. Many of her colleagues seemed obliged to write badly simply because they were doctors and it was expected of them. For the same reason she could confidently predict what kind of cars they would drive, what clothes they would wear, what kind of houses they would aspire to and, in certain cases, what their answer would be to any given question. Her father had once explained kindly that his profession — and now hers — had to conform to certain standards because the public expected it of them. Sarah didn’t accept that for a moment.

John Main lay awake and heard the fridge in the kitchen cut out, leaving the flat in absolute silence. He glanced at the clock at the side of his bed and saw the green digits register three in the morning, an hour he had seen a lot of in recent times. There was something about the ‘these hours’ that intensified fear and loneliness. Was it the quietness or was it the darkness? Maybe the latter. Perhaps the absence of light allowed the forces of darkness access to the fearful and vulnerable who lay unprotected by sleep. The loss of Mary and the fact that she was gone for ever was never more poignant than in these hours after midnight when the dawn was still a long way off. Loneliness could be transcribed into actual physical pain.

But even this pain took second place to the agony of not knowing what had happened to Simon’s body. It was something he could not properly understand, perhaps because it was a situation he could never have prepared himself for: no one could. The nearest analogy he could think of was a woman he had once seen on television. Her daughter had been murdered but the body never found and she now spent all her time looking for it. He had not forgotten the look in her eyes. Now he knew how she felt.

The meeting with the newspaper people that day had not gone well; he had failed to persuade them to run the story again in any form other than a brief report saying that the police had as yet failed to make an arrest. The journalist he’d spoken to had been polite and kind, but the affair was yesterday’s story as far as the paper was concerned. His daily call to the police had only attracted the now routine reply about enquiries continuing. The priest, Lafferty, had done his best but had failed to come up with anything, so where did that leave him? What was he to do?

Main got out of bed and padded through to the kitchen to switch the kettle on. The coldness of the kitchen floor on his bare feet was a welcome distraction to what was going on inside his head. He lingered there in the darkness — he had not switched on the light — gazing out of the window at the silhouetted roof tops, periodically testing the metal of the kettle with his fingertips until it became hot and the pain of doing so provided even more distraction. The kettle boiled and switched itself off: the spell was broken. Main took his coffee into the living room and turned on the television.

The film was in black and white. After a few minutes, he recognised it as being a Denis Wheatley story though he couldn’t remember the title, something to do with the devil, he thought. He clicked the channel changer. Although the screen changed to colour and noisy pop music, the black and white images from the film stayed in Main’s head. He remembered reading Wheatley’s books some years before and enjoying them at the time. There was something morbidly fascinating about the world of the occult, even to the disbeliever.

Perhaps that was what he should do next, take a personal interest in the occult, read up on it, find out about it? On the other hand, that’s what Lafferty was doing. He had even consulted a colleague about witchcraft and devil worship. But there again, the man was a priest and his knowledge would probably be academic. He might be the last person to actually know about its practice in the community.

But what sort of people would he be looking for? There was no immediate answer to that one, and no obvious line of approach. The best he could hope for was to find someone who might know these things. This thought took him into the world of the spiritualist. If the police didn’t know of any organised practice of the occult and the Catholic Church didn’t either, maybe he should concentrate on a more indirect approach and try to pick up some gossip or rumour on his own.

His experience with the woman and the ouija board hadn’t given him much to be confident about, but as long as he realised that he might be treading on the stamping ground of the charlatan he might be able to pick up a useful lead in the spiritualist community. It was worth considering.

Something made Main click the channel back to the Wheatley film. The villain was about to get his come-uppance. A demon summoned up from the pit of hell was chasing him along a railway track and there would be no escape. He shivered and realised that he had not turned the fire on in the room. It was icy cold.

Ryan Lafferty was deeply troubled, so much so that he rose in the middle of the night and went into the church to pray for guidance. An hour on his knees in the damp and cold had done little to help him physically, and he was very stiff but he felt a little better inside his head from having spoken his doubts and fears aloud. So far he had failed in his intention to help or bring comfort to John Main over the exhumation of his son’s body, and his efforts at helping the O’Donnell family had been similarly ineffectual. What was more, he had been unable to get what Mary O’Donnell had said to him about the Church out of his head. Try as he might, he could not dismiss her angry outburst as being completely groundless — and this worried him.

Could it be a test of faith, he wondered. Was God testing him? If he was, he was about to be found sadly lacking. What had started out as a concern about his efficacy as a priest had escalated into a full-blown consideration of whether or not he should be a priest at all!

Lafferty had gone through crises before, of course, and suspected he was not alone in that, but this time... Looking back, his own first crisis had been during his third year at the training seminary but it had proved to be youthful panic and he had come through it with the aid of some kind words from the head of the college who had seen it all before and knew just how to handle the situation. “No one ever said being a priest was easy, Ryan. It isn’t: it’s bloody hard and it’s meant to be.”

The second waver had been more serious. He had fallen in love with Jane. Jane Lowry had been widowed after only three years of marriage when her husband, an RAF pilot, had crashed into a remote hillside on a training exercise. She had sought solace from the Church and Lafferty had been the priest she had come to. She had newly moved out of her service home and had returned to the town where her parents lived. St Peter’s, their local church had been Lafferty’s first charge.

Despite the fact that he and Jane were practically the same age and he was painfully inexperienced at the job, Lafferty had been able to guide her through the anger and despair she felt at her loss. Looking back on it now, it had been more like a brother looking after his sister than a priest-parishioner relationship but it had worked for them and Jane had come to accept her loss and to keep her faith. Unfortunately for him the pity and compassion he felt for Jane turned into something deeper as time went on and he had seriously questioned his vocation. He suspected that Jane felt the same way but his love for her had remained undeclared and she, thankfully, had not made the first move. After a desperate struggle, he had gone to his bishop and confessed all.

For the second time in his fledgling career, Mother Church had lent a sympathetic ear, this time in the form of Bishop Patrick Morrison, who had noted Lafferty’s anguish and told him that he, too, had gone through a similar crisis at one time in his priesthood. “You may be a priest, Ryan, but you’re also a man. God knows that. He intended it that way.”

Morrison had persuaded Lafferty that his vocation would prevail, but it would be helped by a move to another town. As a consequence, he had come to St Xavier’s and Morrison had been right. The love he felt for Jane mellowed to affection and he had been pleased some time later to hear from an old parishioner, who still sent him Christmas cards, that she had remarried and now had two children named Carol and Ryan. Just why the parishioner should have chosen to relay this information, Lafferty had been unable to work out. Perhaps his face had betrayed more than he had imagined at the time.

Feeling that sleep would still be impossible, Lafferty returned to the church to pray. This time he prayed for Mary O’Donnell and also that John McKirrop might be allowed to recover, not least so he might shed some light on the disappearance of Simon Main’s body.