Life Sentence (5 page)

‘Hang on a mo’.’ A weedy young man ran a finger down a chart. An agency nurse? At least the staff back in Exeter had known exactly where her mother was located. Perhaps it was because they’d expected some sort of positive outcome. ‘Way down there on your left. Far as you can go. Stop by the fire doors. She’s there.’ He gestured vaguely, and turned back to the others.

Some eyes turned incuriously at Fran as she walked along the corridor, beds in bays on one side of her. Other patients were involved in animated conversations with their neighbours or with visitors. But as she stopped by the bed marked simply
Elise. Nil by Mouth.
Mr Taverner,
she had a sense that she was arousing interest, perhaps because of her height and air of authority. Her outdoor clothes would tell anyone caring enough to work it out that she wasn’t another
hospital-based
neurologist. Nor, of course, was she accompanied
by a team of students as likely to be as worried by their debts as by the consultant’s testing questions.

Elise. It was a pretty enough name, and some part of Fran expected a sweet-faced doll-like figure to be lying like a child asleep. What she found was a gaunt spectre of a woman, topped by uneven tufts of streaky grey hair, deep scars and cheeks and mouth collapsed. The medical report had mentioned broken teeth. Clearly a set of dentures to fill the gaps would have been inappropriate. Fran’s tongue ran round her own mouth, checking on the crowns and bridgework that maintained her own oral elegance.

Tubes went into and presumably came out of the tortured looking body. A conscious patient would have been bullied into physiotherapy to repair damage after surgery. Elise’s tendons and muscles were doing whatever they wanted, irrespective of their proper functions, it seemed, with a life of their own, unconnected with reality. They were anchored with splints.

Aware of a presence beside her, Fran remarked sadly, ‘A broken puppet pulled by a drunken puppet master.’

‘With the drips and drains as badly connected strings,’ agreed a man about her own age. He might have been younger: he had compensated for balding by growing a beard Fran would have thought might be unhygienic. His shoulder tags should have told her his rank, which she presumed was senior. What she would have welcomed was a good old-fashioned, navy-blue 
uniformed ward sister. Instead she had Charge Nurse Mike Penn, according to his name-badge.

‘Are you here because you’ve caught the man who did this to her?’

Fran shook her head. ‘Not yet. But I will. I promise you I will.’

‘Promise this poor creature, not me. Assault. Rape. Leaves her for dead but doesn’t bother to make sure. Bastard. Catch him and string him up, Chief Superintendent Harman.’

So the lad at the nurses’ station had been more alert than he’d looked. She could have done without the slightly ironic emphasis on
Chief
however.

‘Ms Harman will do,’ she said. ‘Locking up and throwing away the key is the best I can manage. And to do that I’d need the cooperation of twelve good jurors, not to mention a judge. Have you been nursing her long?’

‘Since she came on this ward.’ Penn seemed ready to bridle.

Fran gave a placatory nod. ‘So it’s your responsibility to make sure she’s turned and fed and whatever.’

‘My responsibility. She’s turned to prevent sores, cleaned, powdered. All the palliative care we can offer.’

‘I’m sure.’ But Fran had lost interest. It was the very first person to have seen Elise that she wanted. Initial impressions – it was those that were vital. ‘Poor woman,’ she continued, as much for something to say as anything. ‘Trapped inside there. Totally at the mercy of strangers. No friends, no visitors—’

‘You’re wrong there. She does have a friend. A visitor. A middle-aged man. He comes by at least once a week. Sometimes more. Talks to her a bit. Kisses her forehead. Goes.’

‘Really!’ And why, for goodness’ sake, had no one deigned to tell her colleagues about him? ‘What does he say?’

A shrug prompted her, but hardly encouraged her to continue, ‘Any idea who the man might be?’

Penn shrugged again. ‘We can’t check up on all the visitors, Ms Harman. Few of my staff are here long enough to get to know their patients, let alone any chance visitors.’

Much as she wanted to throttle him she’d try a gentler approach. But why was the man so firmly on the defensive? ‘Of course not. It must be quite a problem, running a busy ward like this with so many agency staff?’

‘It plays havoc with our budgets but they’re all good nurses.’

She tried again, reminding herself it was easier to question someone on your side. ‘But – like my colleagues – so very young!’

‘The doctors too. And orchestral musicians.’

That was a surprise. But before Fran could ask about it, Penn’s pager beeped and he set off at a brisk walk, Fran in tow. Neither, Fran noticed, said goodbye to the patient. A double step brought them level.

‘Is it possible to check Elise’s medical file again? I
could go through all the official palaver—’

‘No need to do that. If you come to the nurses’ station I can give you her file – so long as you read it there, of course. She’s still an ongoing case so it hasn’t been archived.’

The scribbles didn’t mean much to Fran. She might have done better to reread the transcript or even the summary in the police file. But she wanted to get a sense of any urgency in the initial treatment from the writing, the punctuation – even the spelling mistakes, if there were any. DOA seemed pretty bleak. But there were all sorts of details of drugs, each initialled. It was the names behind the initials she wanted.

And the name of the solitary and affectionate visitor.

Mike Penn was the obvious source of information, so Fran waited, trying to close her mind to other waits in other hospitals, till he reappeared. She blew a mental kiss in Mark’s direction: how long was it since she’d passed half a morning without worrying what might be happening in Devon? She’d always told underlings with problems that worrying never did any good and could well do harm.

Mark had done better then tell. He’d filled her mind with other things. Not least with him, even if he hadn’t meant to. Was she just grateful for being cared for? No, the emotion felt stronger than gratitude. Lust? No, there were too many years of simple friendship and now days of kindness for that to be all.

She rubbed her face: if only she weren’t so tired all
the time. Two years ago, she’d have been winging her way to the next part of the investigation; now all she wanted was a cup of strong coffee. What might do her good was a hairdo – a colour, if she could persuade Suzanne to slot her into the last appointment of the day. Yawning, she summoned the number from the phone’s memory.

‘No mobiles in hospitals, Chief Superintendent, if you don’t mind.’

Penn must simply be making a point. A glance into the ward showed at least five women texting or chattering away. To flare up or not to flare up? Fran compromised with an ironic smile and replaced the mobile in her bag.

‘But we might as well make use of modern technology,’ she said. ‘Would you or one of your colleagues page me the minute he appears?’

‘This is a busy hospital, not a dating agency.’

Fran was puzzled. She’d thought they might become allies. If they weren’t, she wasn’t going to play games. ‘In that case, simply ask Elise’s visitor his name if he turns up.’

‘Against all our rules, Superintendent,’ he said flatly. No, there was an edge to it, as if he wanted to be challenged.

She registered the demotion. So the man wanted war. He could have it. ‘This is a serious assault investigation, Mr Penn, likely to become a murder inquiry. I could simply post one of my officers here all day every day,
but, like yours, my resources are limited. And I fancy six foot two of indisputable police flesh might cause a stir on the ward.’ As she got into gear, to her fury she started a flush. A burning, scarlet affair.

Penn watched, with what looked like sour amusement. ‘The sooner you get some HRT inside you the better you’ll be.’

How dare he! If her face was red, her voice was icy. ‘Here’s my mobile number. Next time he comes, I want to know.’ She flicked her card on to the desk. ‘Now, I need to identify some of these people.’ As, bridling, Penn hesitated, she added, ‘We both want justice for that poor creature. I want to interview the people who treated her on day one. Yes, they’ll already have talked to my colleagues till they were blue in the face. But I shall be a new set of ears to hear their responses to what may be a new set of questions. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ She managed the smile that had wheedled information out of people more intractable than Penn. Would it work now?

Just about. Penn’s face was still sour and grudging as he leant, stiff-necked, to take a sideways glance. ‘JT: Jim Taverner’s the consultant neurologist in charge.’ He pointed with an index finger with a surprising nicotine stain. ‘Those are his registrar, his senior reg, a houseman. That’d be the A and E senior reg, Verity Kilvert – she’s still there now, as far as I know. You might catch Taverner in his Outpatients’ clinic or on his rounds.’

Any of them might be less grudging than Penn, Fran reasoned. Had she done something to rub up Penn the wrong way? Or was he simply unpleasant by nature? There was no point in pondering it now – the answer would come if Penn called her when the unknown visitor appeared.

Fran was surprised to find A and E almost calm. To be sure, she’d spent most of her time there either at peak time when it was full of drunks or when there’d been a major incident. A labourer still muddy from a building site was sitting quietly with a blood-soaked rag round a finger. A toddler was neither sitting nor quiet, his dazed looking mother making no apparent effort to stop him strewing the tired magazines on the floor and noisily shaking each unoccupied chair. Fran retrieved a fistful of the magazines, slamming them down on the low table with sufficient force to rouse the labourer, who smiled ironically, but not the mother.

‘You could do with a cage for them,’ Fran suggested to the receptionist, her usual line – not quite a joke – drawing a smile. ‘Which is the sick one, the mother or the child?’

‘The child, though you’d never believe it, would you? And if he is ill, he should be at his GP’s. But you know how it is,’ she sighed. ‘How can I help you, Chief Superintendent? You’re a bit elevated for a personal
visit, aren’t you? We usually get lowly constables, maybe a sergeant on a good day.’

Fran returned her grin. ‘I needed a day out of the office.’

‘So do we all.’ She winced as the toddler burst into furious howls. ‘But I’d go for a blow on the beach, if I had any choice. Along that new promenade at Hythe, maybe. And I’d treat myself to some goodies at Waitrose.’

However much Fran preferred honesty in all her dealings, she preferred not to join in the game of confessions with the information that she’d have spent it in bed. With or without Mark.

Cue for another flush.

Before she could speak, the receptionist eyed her. ‘Black cahosh and red clover,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget your calcium. We see far too many fractured wrists and femurs here.’

Fran nodded. ‘I’m here about a patient who passed through A and E. Do you still have a Dr Verity Kilvert working here?’

Verity Kilvert, apart from looking almost as weary as Fran, clearly wanted to be elsewhere, perching on the extreme edge of a desk tucked behind a curtain in the corner of the treatment room and constantly checking her watch throughout Fran’s explanation of why she was there. She was terribly thin. Her wrist was so bony that the watch slopped from side to side. It would have
driven Fran mad in ten minutes flat: why hadn’t the woman had the bracelet made smaller?

‘We do see a lot of patients here in A and E, Superintendent.’ She had the remnants of the
upper-class
drawl that Fran found as appealing as fingernails on a blackboard. Perhaps the thinness was a fashion statement, rather than as a result of overwork: beneath the white coat, her bone and sinew feet sported ballerina pumps Fran could price almost to the pound. Ferragamo. She’d always longed to wear them, but her feet, after years of uniform lace-ups, simply refused to find them comfortable. She shivered: how long before she succumbed to the comfortable flatties with elasticated gussets that had preceded her mother’s decline into permanent slippers?

‘More patients than you ought, I can see.’ Fran jerked her head in the general direction of the noisy toddler. ‘But I’d have thought this particular one might stick in your mind. Elise. The PVS case.’

Kilvert nodded.

‘I’d like you to tell me about the first time you saw her. You must have been the first of the medical staff to examine her?’

Another nod. ‘I thought she was dead. I even wrote “dead on arrival” in her notes. But she wasn’t.’

‘Or was, depending on your outlook. Could you just describe her?’

‘Why?’ she demanded, like a petulant child. ‘Everything you need’s in the file.’

‘Not quite everything.’ And much she had yet to decipher. ‘I want to know what she looked like.’

‘I’m a doctor, not an artist!’ she flounced.

But the haircut and indeed the face, now Fran came to think of it, were pure Modigliani. ‘In my experience, medics are the most observant of human beings, and the most interested. Think Dr Watson,’ she added bracingly and hating herself for doing it. What was wrong with all these medics?

The allusion fell flat. Kilvert was all too obviously wracking her brain for a live colleague. Fran puzzled too: the doctor’s surname was strangely familiar, but she could not place the context. Not medical, she was sure of that. Nor police. Verity Kilvert: what a name for the Scrabble board, were proper nouns permitted, of course.

Trying to hide her asperity, and then wondering if she should bother to, Fran prompted her, ‘Apart from her terrible injuries, what can you tell me about her?’

The toddler embarked on an ear-splitting tantrum.

‘Dr Kilvert, why don’t we find somewhere quiet to talk? Even my car’s better than this.’

Verity conceded that the staff canteen might be quieter, and would provide a decent fix of caffeine. It seemed to Fran that the young woman was pickling herself from the inside with the stuff but she didn’t argue. She too was in need of some and of the sort of buzz that comes with disgusting doughnuts dripping with pink goo. But she was surprised to see them in a
canteen frequented by people who should know better.

At last, Kilvert drawing on her drink as smokers inhaled the very last of their fag, Fran began again. ‘Elise. Tell me what she was like as a person, not a patient.’

‘There was terrible trauma to the head—’

‘No,’ she insisted patiently. ‘As a person. Imagine you were trying to describe her to a man on the bus.’

The young woman shrugged, as if in disbelief at both the elementary concept and the impossibility.

‘You mentioned her head injuries. Did you have to cut away hair to deal with them? Think back. What colour was it?’ After a moment she prompted, ‘Did it go with her eyes?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s got brown eyes, hasn’t she? And grey hair? Did she have grey hair then?’

Kilvert grimaced. ‘That’s funny. She had blonde hair. One of the nurses said it was a sin to cut it all off because it looked as if she’d just spent a lot of money on it.’

Fran scribbled. But if a doctor couldn’t remember a patient, how would a hairdresser remember a customer? Answer: if she’d been a regular, very easily. But you couldn’t go round asking all the hair salons in Kent if they’d missed a client.

‘Mascara. Quite a lot of mascara,’ Kilvert declared. ‘More than you’d expect in a woman her age.’ She looked critically at Fran.

Damn: she still hadn’t fixed a hair appointment. ‘So she was my age?’ An age for dyeing your hair and taking pills, by the sounds of it.

‘Late fifties, early sixties – we couldn’t say exactly, of course. But the funny thing was, apart from the
newly-varnished
nails, she had really bad hands. The nails were actually quite ugly and coarse, the cuticles all over the place. As if she’d done a lot of manual work. Not dirty. But the skin certainly didn’t get a regular dose of cream.’ Verity stared at Fran’s.

So did Fran, still burning at being thought so much older than she was. She never remembered to wear gardening gloves in Teignmouth, however carefully she gauntleted herself at home. A keen eye could pick out dirt under the dried, cracking cuticles. A manicure was in order while her hair was being coloured. If Suzanne could fit her in, of course, which was increasingly unlikely as the day pressed on without a call to make an appointment.

She chivvied herself back to the present, trying to ignore all the criticism coming her way, but finding it hard to warm to Kilvert. ‘Elise’s background: a woman who had to work for a living, and not an easy one at that? Or one rich enough to chose to stay at home and indulge a passion for gardening?’

‘A working woman tarted up for the day,’ Verity summed up, her accent grating again.

Like herself no doubt, Fran fumed. No, she must ignore the pejorative language. She tipped her head
encouragingly on one side. A bird hoping for a crumb, Mark had once said, charmingly if without great originality. At the thought of him, she flushed again. Perhaps Verity, now staring into her empty coffee mug as if it were a crystal ball, hadn’t noticed.

‘Yes, and contact lenses. She wore contact lenses! Now, where’s that come from?’

‘The coffee, I should imagine. Can I get you another?’ She watched temptation flit across the younger woman’s face, to be replaced with will power.

‘Mineral water, please.’

She said nothing about not wanting a doughnut, so Fran produced two more.

‘You really shouldn’t be eating crap like this at your age,’ Verity observed. ‘Whole foods, lots of fish. Phytoestrogens. Boost your Omega oils.’

Damn all these medics and their pertinent advice. ‘What about Elise? Would you say she was pre- or-post menopausal?’

Verity pulled a face. ‘At her age, post. A bit irrelevant now, anyway. She could hot flush for England and be none the wiser. And X-rays – specific ones – to tell if she had osteoporosis.’

Any moment now she’d suggest that Fran needed them, wouldn’t she? Sharply, Fran turned the
conversational
steering wheel. ‘You say she wore mascara. Earrings?’

‘No, no jewellery that I recall. You’d be able to check with Admin of course. Or all her property may
be with you people. I wouldn’t know.’

What was the term she’d once heard?
De haute en bas
? How the nobs spoke to the plebs? Fran had long since earned enough to consider herself classless, but somewhere deep inside a grammar school girl wanted to stick her tongue out. She asked, in the quiet voice she used to alarm her junior officers, ‘Did you see the man who tried to resuscitate her?’

‘No,’ she replied, off-hand. The voice hadn’t worked. ‘Whoever it was he didn’t do a very good job, did he? He’d have done better to save his breath to cool his porridge.’

It was normal for Fran and her colleagues to cover their emotion by using brutal language, either at the crime scene or in the canteen – normal and necessary. The same no doubt applied in hospitals. But it disturbed her to hear callous thoughts spoken in such cultured tones, with a curiously old-fashioned expression to round it off. And if her colleagues spoke like that of the dead, this woman was referring to a living person. Face impassive, Fran merely nodded.

Checking her pad, though she would have been the first to admit that there was precious little jotted there, she said, as if recapping, ‘So we have a woman in her fifties, “tarted up” for the day, but unable to conceal her regular manual work. Did you see her clothes? I know they’ll have been bagged as evidence and I can check them myself, but did they make any impression on
you
?’

Kilvert raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re quite good at this, aren’t you?’

Patronising bitch. Fran smiled back, encouragingly.

‘They were new. And they still had those little plastic threads in, the things that attach the price tags. At least the ones I saw. Blouse and jacket. I only noticed those because she had minute scratches on her neck, as if something had irritated her and she’d kept brushing at it.’

‘Blouse and jacket?’

‘Yes, as if she’d bought something new for some do she wasn’t sure about.’

‘Not her favourite Maxmara.’

Kilvert didn’t notice the irony. ‘Lord, no, Eastex or some such. Brand new, as I told you. You know, the sort of thing some mums buy for little Jimmy’s graduation day.’

‘You think that’s where she might have been going?’

‘How could she? Drat,’ she added, quelling her pager, which had chosen that moment to trill. ‘RTA – serious head injuries. Have a son, I mean. When she was a virgin until she was raped?’

As an exit line, it would take some beating.

Fran didn’t go after her. Let the dead bury the dead. It was Kilvert’s job to save the living, and, as Mark had observed, Elise wasn’t going anywhere. In any case, she had to deal with the information so casually imparted. Poor Elise. What a way to be initiated into sex – a roadside rape. Did she need to see the gynaecologist
who’d treated her? Not, she decided, till she’d rechecked the file, which meant bearding Penn in his lair once more.

‘Private practice? He’s left the NHS, just like that?’

Penn shook his head. ‘Favours us with his presence one day a week. It just happened to be his day when they asked him to see Elise. And I’m not surprised you can’t read his handwriting – not exactly the best calligraphy, is it? And all these abbreviations.’

‘Could you interpret?’ Fran asked humbly. She didn’t wish to wear out her welcome, but Penn was showing his sunny face again, and might add in asides more than Fran could glean from the transcript back at the office.

‘Let’s see if there’s an examination room free. These aren’t the sorts of conversation you’d want everyone to overhear. Yes. In here, please, Chief Superintendent.’

‘Fran, please. Too many syllables in the title,’ she added.

‘You know, I’ve always wanted a few more. Penn. I always prefer to be called Michael, but you know what people are like: Mike it has to be. And you – you’ve got a nice Christian name too. Only we’re supposed to called them first names, aren’t we?’

Fran laughed. ‘Except mine’s my second name. I never could be doing with Belinda. Frances got me too many letters addressed to “Mr Harman”. So Fran it became.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Are you due for a break? I could shout you lunch in your canteen.’

‘Senior nurses are paid quite well, thank you.’

God Almighty! What had she said this time?

Penn’s pager bleeped. ‘You can see I’m busy. But thanks for the offer. Now, unless there’s anything else I can help you with, I must be off. Actually, maybe you should talk to Mr Roland-Thomas himself. His real name’s Thomas, but he hyphenated his Christian name to it to make it posher.’ And he was gone.

Fran used an ironic index finger to push her jaw back up into position.

She’d hardly settled herself in the car, pondering her next move, when her mobile rang.

‘Pa?’ It was a good job she hadn’t had any lunch: she could have been physically sick.

‘You’ll have to come down. It’s that woman. She’s stolen all my money.’