Need You Dead

93 Saturday 30 April

It felt like he was swimming underwater. He could see light above him. The silhouettes of faces. His mind swam, too. He felt all giddy. Nauseous.

Momentarily he broke the surface. Saw a dog at the edge of the pool. A squat, ugly thing. It had different coloured eyes, one bright red, the other grey. It was a mutt. Part Dalmatian and part pug.

It was looking at him balefully. Reproachfully. Are you abandoning me? Just like my last owner?

‘Yossarian!’ he called out. ‘Yossarian!’

He cared about it. This ugly mutt that he had found on a Beverly Hills street was the only thing in his life he had ever cared about. It was standing, looking down at him, and hungry.

‘Yossarian!’ he screamed.

No sound came out of his intubated throat.

The ITU nurse at the Royal Sussex County Hospital ran across to Bed 17 and stared down at the small, shaven-headed man, who was connected to a forest of drip lines and a ventilator. He was thrashing around wildly, his eyes opening and shutting in rapid succession, as if he was fitting.

This patient, who went by the odd, single name of Tooth, was under special watch, and until recently there had been a police guard for him posted on a 24/7 rota outside the unit entrance. She did not know too much about the circumstances that had brought him here, in a persistent vegetative state, a month ago from the Tropical Diseases Unit at Guy’s Hospital in London, other than that he had suffered a series of bites and stings from a spider, a scorpion and a saw-scaled viper snake in a reptile house. Because of the police interest in him, she imagined he had been involved in a burglary at a zoo that had gone badly wrong.

She paged the duty doctor, urgently.

Ten minutes later Roy Grace was interrupted from his studies of the Jodie Bentley file by a call. The voice at the other end sounded foreign. ‘This is Dr Imran Hassan from the Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Sussex Hospital. We have a note on file to contact you if there is any change in the condition of one of our patients, a gentleman called Mr Tooth.’

This was all he needed right now, Grace thought. ‘Yes, thank you, Dr Hassan.’

‘He seems to be showing signs of emerging from his coma. He keeps trying to shout. We removed the tube from his throat and immediately he shouted out a name. It sounded like “Yossarian”.’

‘Yossarian?’

‘Yes, but now he seems very distressed about this Yossarian. His eyes remain closed but he screamed that Yossarian needs feeding. Does any of this make any sense to you?’

‘It does, yes, Dr Hassan. Yossarian is this man’s pet dog — he lives in the Turks and Caicos. Tooth is under suspicion of committing several murders, and the dog is being cared for. He doesn’t need to worry.’

But Grace was worried.

‘Good, we are regarding this as a positive sign that this patient is improving.’

‘To what extent?’

‘At this stage very minor. He is still totally incapacitated.’

‘Dr Hassan, if at any time you or your colleagues believe that Tooth is capable of standing and walking, I need to know immediately.’

‘Yes, this is on his notes, Detective Superintendent.’

Grace thanked him, then immediately sent an email to Pewe, updating him on Tooth’s condition. He did not suggest that the scene guard be reinstated at this stage, but instead covered his back by finishing,

He wasn’t expecting a reply. And didn’t get one.