The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (12 page)

Hassan conceded. ‘On the other hand I suppose they
might’ve done it. If Kingston and neighbours chased them off once too often. If
they were drunk
and
high.’

Will examined the tiny white pills and the
envelope. ‘Yeah well I’m pretty sure they weren’t high on this. I’m pretty sure
I know where it came from. Crystal meth it ain’t. It’s a legal high, only it
wouldn’t work and it shouldn’t be legal. I think a certain homeopath we both
know is the source of these.’

 ‘How did Scotty get that though? They’d not pay
for Erica’s services.’

‘Well there’s no label which there normally would
be. I think we should get these analysed, just to cover ourselves. And if they
are one of Erica’s useless remedies, we’ll find nothing in them but sugar. I
think I’ll keep these in reserve, there may well be a time for tackling her to
our greatest advantage.’

‘I’ll buy you a fluffy white cat for your next
birthday Will.’

‘And an underground lair. Don’t forget that.’

Erica jogged to the
hospital to visit the unvisited Mrs O’Rourke. The late autumn sun cut through
the atmosphere almost horizontally, rather than down onto the trees, picking
out the rose hips in the hedges so they gleamed like beads of blood, and making
the leaves glow like stained glass. The yellow ones looked like translucent
half-sucked lemondrops, a vivid colour which stung the eyes.

A jar of ginger marmalade bumped her back
rhythmically as she went, her small rucksack bouncing with her stride.

She reached the hospital, a crouching monstrosity
of fairly recent vintage, yet already with some of it marked for closure, and
went in through the main entrance. Other visitors were beginning to arrive,
clusters of people holding magazines, flowers and boxes of chocolates and
bearing that guilty look of reverence, fear and boredom which hospitals
inspire.

Uniformed staff bustled past, their gaze fixed
above the suitably humbled visitors’ heads to show that they were in a parallel
but superior universe. By contrast, a woman who was indeed ‘excellent’ in a
print overall smiled brightly from a small kiosk run by the same group of volunteers
as the trolley in the fracture clinic. Real flowers were outlawed these days,
increasing the sensory deprivation of long-stay patients, so Erica bought a
bunch of artificial purple daisies with built-in pot as the safest option before
heading down miles of bland and featureless corridor, shedding visitors as she
went. Ward Five didn’t seem to get many; broken hips mostly afflicted older people
whose families lived miles away and whose friends were too old to face the
Byzantine complexities of the bus journey. The car park had to be paid for with
a mortgage, and was still as hard to get into as Roedean.

Ward Five consisted of a row of bays with about
ten beds in each. Some were all men, some all women. She tracked down the bay
where Mrs O’Rourke was stowed. Two short rows of beds faced each other. Old
women lay asleep or dozing, some of them with sun-starved faces as pale as the
sheets but greyish. A couple of beds were empty. Their occupants sat in plastic
armchairs beside the beds. Progress back into real life, Erica hoped.

Mrs O’Rourke’s bed was high, with a cage of bars
around the sides. The old lady who lay dwarfed by all the tubular steel didn’t
look capable of falling out of bed. Erica could almost see through her, she was
so wasted. Her hair was white and wispy amid a rockery of massive pillows. The
bed was next to the window. Through it, Erica could see the rosy sunshine
lighting up the remains of broom and cotoneaster, a few ragged mophead asters
and dahlias. Mrs O’Rourke just lay there, her eyes open, letting time pass. She
was unable to look out of the window herself because of the way the bed was
positioned, with the casual sadism typical of institutions.

Erica put her face in the range of vision of its
occupant.

‘Mrs O’Rourke?’At the sound of her name, it was as
if her face had been turned on by a switch. One minute she was blank, absent,
the next minute she was there. Her pale blue eyes focused sharply.

‘I brought you these,’ Erica waved the lifeless flowers.
At least they’d be a splash of colour.

‘Thank ye, hinny.’ She had a faded, soft voice
with a hint of an Irish accent behind her Geordie one. ‘Those are pretty, mind.
Can you just put them on me locker, pet?’

‘They’re nice aren’t they Tilly?’ called a nearby
knitting woman whose locker, that barometer of a patient’s status, bristled
with photos, bottles of exotic juices and piles of fruit.

‘I’m Gill Webster,’ she told Erica. ‘My visitors
are coming tonight. Tilly never seems to get one.’ She spoke louder. ‘Me and
Tilly O’Rourke have been the longest in here. Eh, Tilly?’

‘In for life, and me innocent as a newborn babby -
and about as much use,’ came Tilly’s soft voice gamely. She was obviously
mentally fit, if nothing else.

She was thrilled with the ginger marmalade.

‘Eee thanks pet, there’s nothing like it for
keeping you regular.’ The jar looked too heavy for her delicate hands. ‘It’s
like amber.’ Tily looked into the sunlit depths of the jar. ‘I had an amber
brooch once. You’ve got bonny hair, flower,’ she added. ‘Lovely and long. I
used to be able to sit on mine. Now I cannot even sit!’

She said this jokingly, rather than complainingly.
She never asked why Erica was there, or even who she was. She had been in a
long time - fracture, hip replacement which went wrong, deep seated infection
in the joint, then a chest infection caused by being in bed for weeks leaving
most of her lung capacity unused, and now she was almost institutionalised, her
muscles atrophied, washed up on those white sheets. Erica noticed her call
button had been put out of reach. As she moved it back near Tilly’s hand, she
glanced round and saw that every old patient’s button was also out of their
reach.

‘Some nurses do that, accidentally on purpose
like,’ said Gill. ‘Saves them having to come in so often.’

‘But that’s terrible! What if they need a bedpan?’

‘Not all the nurses are like that,’ she excused, ‘and
I can keep an eye on the old folk.’

Erica went round the bay moving all the buttons
within reach, asking casually, ‘What are the doctors like then?’

‘Mr Rohan did my op,’ said Gill. ‘He’s very good.
Such a gentleman...’

‘Yes, I’ve met him. Charming man. I expect you knew
Mr Kingston?’

"Oh, terrible that was. Yes, some of these
were his patients, most of his have gone home by now though. They don’t keep
hips in long these days unless summat goes wrong like. Oh, you should have seen
him doing his round, those students of his shaking in their shoes bless them.
But he could do his job alright. He did Tilly’s hip.’

‘The one that went wrong?’ Erica scented
negligence. But she knew that the replacement joints did go wrong sometimes. All
surgery was risky.

‘Took good care of me,’ said Tilly. ‘He’s dead
now, you know. Who’d have thought he’d go before me! He was a bit hoity toity,
but I just did as I was told. Doctor knows best.’

‘Course he does. And there’s a few others -
anaesthetists, what have you - and the young Chinese doctor, the one they all
call Jamie. Even the nurses use his first name. I suppose he’s still in
training.’

‘He’s a lovely lad, for all he’s Chinese,’ said
Tilly.

‘He is that,’ said Gill. ‘Mr Kingston used to
tease him, like. When he did his rounds and Doctor Lau was with him, he’d say
things like, ‘I expect you’d stick a lot of needles in her, Jamie. Or give her
a bit of ground up tiger bone.’ And all the students would laugh though they
looked dead embarrassed. I didn’t think that was right, mind. Because the lad
couldn’t very well answer back, could he?’

That bastard Kingston. How much unexpressed resentment
was the young doctor harbouring?

‘I bet he felt like sticking needles in Mr
Kingston,’ Erica said as if jokingly, though the image was horribly like her
memory of the death scene.

‘Well I wouldn’t go that far. He never said
anything, but I saw him look daggers at Mr Kingston when he thought no one
could see. They say the Chinese are inscrutable, but he wasn’t then! You’ll see
Doctor Lau any minute, he’s coming down to check on Mrs Hilton’s painkillers a
bit later. He’s always on duty somewhere it seems.’

Erica stuck around a while, chatting and getting
to know any other patients who seemed conscious. She wanted to see more of
Jamie Lau. He was definitely a suspect. Not only had Kingston humiliated and
baited him in front of everyone, but referring to acupuncture, he had used the actual
words about sticking needles in people. Could that have led to nails, pins, like
big needles, being hammered into the hated head? Young doctors worked long
hours. He must be under great stress - sleep deprivation was a torture, after
all. People could be made to confess to terrible crimes that way - perhaps they
could be brought to commit them too.

Just then Jamie Lau came in with a nurse. He went
straight over to Mrs Hilton. Erica noticed the nurse was very familiar and
informal with him, and behaved as if she was indulging him when, after a quiet
consultation with Mrs Hilton, he gave fresh instructions for her meds. He
turned and gave a general smile and nod of greeting to the ward, pausing as his
eyes rested on Erica. She did stand out rather with her lycra and bare arms, not
to mention her hair. He gave a half-smile of recognition and headed out of the
bay.

Erica went after him. The nurse had gone on to the
nurses’ station where she was talking to a colleague.

‘Doctor Lau?’ She had overtaken and was blocking
the way. He was taller than Erica, but then just about everyone was. He looked
pale and drawn. Dead tired. But he was still cute. Cute as a facebook kitten.

‘Did you wish to see me about Mrs O’Rourke? Are you
a relative?’ His voice was soft but clear, with a trace of some kind of accent.

‘Oh, no, just visiting... I really wanted to talk
to you. I’m writing a feature on Mr Kingston for the local paper, kind of an
extended obituary...’ She watched him for any reaction to the name of his
persecutor and possible victim. Was it her imagination, or did he flinch at the
name? It was hard to tell, because he put his hand up over his face to push his
hair back in a weary gesture.

‘I saw you in Mr Rohan’s room,’ he said. ‘I can’t
think why you want to talk to me; it’s not that I don’t want to help but I’m
very busy. ‘

‘You look exhausted, I wouldn’t expect you to talk
to me now when you’re on duty. Why don’t I take you out to dinner if you are
allowed out of here for an evening? ‘

He looked a bit startled. She could see he was
tempted, by her or the food she didn’t know, but unsure, perhaps about discussing
the hospital with an outsider.

‘Well, thanks, that sounds great, but...’ he
began.

She pressed home her advantage. She had no qualms
about asking a guy out.

‘Come on, don’t tell me that’s not the best offer
you’ve had all day! It’s just a chatty piece for the local rag health page; do
I look like a paparazza? I’ll even feed you if you’re too tired to hold a fork.’

He laughed, reassured by her small, harmless appearance
and her flirtatious manner. Just another girl who wants to play doctors and
nurses, he thought maybe. Well, she could live with that for now.

They agreed to meet in a couple of evening’s time
at a little restaurant right on the beach which served brilliant veggie and
carnivore food in terrifying quantities. The wine and decor was Mediterranean,
the menu cosmopolitan. He said he had never been there. Or anywhere much, he
basically lived in the hospital.

‘Just think of it as care in the community,’ she advised
him, and let him go.

When she got back to Tilly and Gill, they were
grinning significantly.

‘I was just asking Doctor Lau to talk to me for
the paper; you know, I write the
Guardian
health page.’

‘We believe you, thousands wouldn’t,’ said Tilly.

‘That lad could do with a break.’ Gill counted her
stitches. ‘He was up in the night, and now he’s still here; and I’m sure he was
on duty yesterday. He really cares about patients you know. He spends ages
checking meds, and he’s so careful about lowering beds and so on to look at
people in traction and so on. Some of them let the bed bounce off the floor,
and that’s no fun when you’ve got broken bones or whatever. I think that’s why
Mr Kingston got at him; thought he was too soft, needed to toughen up a bit. ‘

Cute and caring? What a killer combo. Killer? Could
someone so compassionate drive nails into a living head? But then again, how
sensitive could a surgeon afford to be? They did stuff like that all the time. What
a mess. Hoping Tessa wasn’t guilty, and now Jamie. Someone had to have done it,
for god’s sake.

The man on the table.
You remembered the feeling of the rock hitting the pins into his head, the
resistance of his skull transmitted up your arm, the give when they broke
through into the softness of his brain. The way his fingers curled inwards
round the nails that held them helpless. Those hands, surgeon’s hands, so
skilfully causing pain, carving people up like meat. That’s how they operate.
Doctors. Surgeons. Making incisions and decisions, and nobody questions them.
Until it’s too late, but even then, they all protect each other from their
mistakes or misdeeds. All the clever-clever golf-playing back-slapping smug
surgeons with money and status and the power of life or death. Or a life not
much better than death. All in the same club. They’re all in it together. Yes,
he wasn’t the only one. There are others. Someone should operate on them. It
would be a public service. A crusade.