Sacrifice (22 page)

‘Poor Melissa.’

He nodded agreement. ‘Thirty-two years old.’

With a new life just beginning inside her. How sad was that?

Except . . . ‘No, fuck it.’ I was on my feet again and shouting. I couldn’t believe I’d nearly fallen for that shit. ‘Melissa did not die of cancer. Melissa died when someone took a chisel, rammed it between her breast bone, forced open her ribcage and then
systematically hacked through five principle arteries and several smaller ones and pulled her heart, probably still beating, from her body.’

‘Tora.’ Gifford was also on his feet, coming towards me. I was breathing too fast and starting to feel light-headed.

‘She died because some sick fuck decided she was going to and a whole load of wankers are lying about it. Probably you, too.’

He put his hands on my shoulders and I felt an immense flood of warmth wash into me. We looked at each other. Slate, his eyes were the colour of slate. He was breathing heavily and slowly. I found my own slowing down to fall into sync with his. The fuzziness in my head faded. There was a knock on the door.

‘Is everything OK, Mr Gifford?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ Gifford called back. ‘Can you give me a minute?’

Footsteps retreated outside.

‘Feeling better?’ asked Gifford.

I shook my head, but more out of stubbornness than honesty. I was, a little.

Gifford lifted a hand and stroked it down over my head. It came to rest on the bare skin of my neck.

‘What am I going to do with you?’ he said.

Well, a few things sprang to mind because, in spite of everything, it felt very nice to be standing there with Gifford, in that ridiculously furnished room, being held – almost – in his arms.

‘I hate long hair on men,’ I said.

Don’t ask me where that came from; or why I thought that particular moment, of all possible opportunities, was the time to utter it.

He smiled. A proper smile this time, and I wondered how I could ever have thought him ugly.

‘So, I’ll get it cut,’ he said.

I took a step closer, dropped my head and stared at the fabric of his shirt, knowing the situation had strayed way beyond the bounds of what was appropriate and that I really, really, needed to snap out of it.

‘Now comes the bit you’re not going to like,’ he said.

I looked up again sharply, even took a step back. What was it, exactly, that I was supposed to have been enjoying so far?

‘You’re suspended on full pay for a fortnight.’

I backed away. ‘You are fucking well kidding me.’

He said nothing. He wasn’t kidding.

‘You can’t do that. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

He laughed and walked back over to the window. Turning his back on me made me want to kick him, but I didn’t move.

‘Technically,’ he said to my reflection in the windowpane, ‘I think you’ll find you’ve done quite a lot wrong. You’ve interfered in police investigations, you’ve broken any number of hospital regulations and you’ve disregarded some direct instructions from me. You’ve broken patient confidentiality and you’ve upset some senior members of the community
and the hospital.’ He turned round again. He was smiling. ‘But that isn’t why you’re suspended.’

‘Why, then?’

He held up his index finger. ‘One – if you stay, you’ll carry on exactly as you have been and I can’t protect you for ever.’

‘I won’t. I’ll leave it to the police now.’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t believe you. Two – as you so eloquently put it over in the dental unit, the shit is really going to hit the fan here in the next few days and a lot of people will be very unhappy. I don’t want you being seen as the focus – or even the cause – of all that.’

‘I don’t care what people think of me.’

‘Then you should. When this is all over, you’ll still have to work here. You won’t be able to do that if everyone dislikes you.’

‘They won’t like me more for running away. They’ll think I daren’t face them. Hell, if you tell them I’m suspended, they might even think I’m involved.’

‘I’ll tell them you’re exhausted and deeply upset by what’s been going on. You’ll be the object of sympathy, not resentment. Three – I’m going to have a whole lot to do in the next few days to minimize damage to the hospital, not to mention my own reputation – I don’t want to hear it, Tora,’ he said, as I started to interrupt him. ‘I’m not a policeman. The well-being of the hospital is my priority and I don’t want you around distracting me.’

I didn’t have an immediate answer to that one. Something that, had it not felt so completely out of
place, I would have said was happiness was twisting around in the pit of my stomach.

‘Four,’ he said, startling me. There was a four? ‘I want you where you’re safe.’ Happy feeling gone! I had completely forgotten, amidst the heady rush of discovery and vindication, that – to use a cop-show cliché – there was a killer about; and I had been poking my nose in where someone – maybe even someone at this hospital – didn’t want it.

He stepped forward and he was holding me again, upper arms this time. ‘You need some serious time off,’ he said. ‘You’re obviously exhausted, you’re white as a sheet, your hands won’t stop shaking and your pupils look like you’ve taken drugs. Exposure to anything infectious right now would knock you flat. I can’t have you working in a hospital.’

I had taken drugs, albeit unwittingly. Was it really so obvious? Or did Kenn know more than he was letting on? I wondered again how anyone could bypass my locked office door. Kenn had done it the previous morning. He’d claimed a cleaner had let him in, but . . .

There was a rush of cold air through the room as the door was pushed open. Kenn was no longer looking at me but at whoever was standing in the doorway. I spun round and my day was complete. It was Duncan.

‘Hands off my wife, Gifford,’ he said calmly. His face looked anything but calm.

For a moment, Kenn’s hands remained on my shoulders and then the warmth was gone. I moved
forward, away from him and towards my husband, who was not, it had to be said, looking particularly pleased to see me.

‘What kept you?’ said Gifford.

‘Delayed flight,’ replied Duncan, glaring back at him. Then he took a step into the room and looked round. He gave a short, unpleasant laugh. ‘What are you – a Harley Street gynaecologist?’

‘Glad you like it,’ said Gifford. ‘But my predecessor designed this room.’

Beside me, I sensed Duncan stiffen.

‘I just can’t justify the funds to change it,’ said Kenn. ‘What? Did he never invite you in?’

I looked from one man to the other. Duncan was furious and I could only imagine it was with me. But, Christ, wasn’t he over-reacting a bit? Gifford and I may have looked more intimate than the average husband would like but we’d hardly been caught bonking on the sofa.

‘What’s going on?’ I said, thinking I was using that phrase far too often these days.

Gifford turned to me. ‘My predecessor. Medical director here for fifteen years before his retirement. Something of a mentor for me. Give him my regards, won’t you?’

I looked at Duncan.

‘Wake up, Tor,’ he said irritably. ‘He’s talking about Dad.’

OK, really not keeping up here. ‘Your father worked in Edinburgh. You told me.’

Shortly after we’d met, Duncan had told me his
father was a doctor, an anaesthetist, and naturally I’d been interested. He’d also told me that he’d worked away from home for most of his childhood, coming back only at weekends. I’d always assumed it went some way towards explaining why Duncan’s family are the way they are.

‘He came back,’ said Duncan, ‘round about the time I went to university. Where’s your car?’

‘Haven’t a clue,’ I responded. Things had been moving pretty fast lately and I’d lost track.

‘Parked outside Sergeant Tulloch’s house,’ said Gifford. ‘Safe enough – one would hope.’

I fell asleep minutes after Duncan started driving. My dreams were strange, disjointed ones about being in theatre with no notes and no proper instruments. The patient was Duncan’s father and the face of the scrub nurse peering at me over her mask was that of Duncan’s mother, Elspeth. We were in one of the original anatomy theatres, with a central operating table and circles of seats rising ever higher around it. Every seat was filled by someone I knew: Dana, Andy Dunn, Stephen Renney, my parents, my three brothers, friends from university, my old Girl Guide leader. I didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to recognize a classic anxiety dream. I jerked awake at one point when Duncan braked hard to avoid a stray sheep. We were not on the road home.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Westing,’ he replied. Westing was his parents’
home on Unst, the place where he’d been born and brought up.

I thought for a moment. ‘Who’s looking after the horses?’

‘Mary said she’d come over.’

I nodded. Mary was a local girl who helped me with feeding and exercising on my busy days. She knew the horses well and they knew her. They’d be fine. My eyelids were sinking again when I wondered if I should tell Duncan what had happened the night before. I also wanted to ask him what he knew about Tronal.

I glanced over. He was staring straight ahead, face muscles tight as though he was concentrating hard, even though he knew this road well and it wasn’t nearly dark. Mind you, he was driving far too fast. Didn’t seem like a good moment to talk. Maybe later. I closed my eyes again and drifted off. I woke briefly during the ferry crossing to Yell.

‘Gifford phoned you, didn’t he?’ I asked. ‘He told you about the break-in at the house.’

Without looking at me, Duncan nodded. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling. Duncan and Gifford might dislike each other but they were working together to manage me. Or were they? Maybe the intimate little encounter Gifford and I had shared had been staged for Duncan’s benefit. Was Gifford playing both of us?

It doesn’t take long to drive up Yell and by nine o’clock we were on the last leg of the journey.

Having known Duncan for seven years and
been married for five of them, I could still say with complete honesty that I did not know his parents. For a long time I found it strange, even a little distressing, coming, as I do, from a large and noisy, frank and nosy family, amongst whom talk is plentiful and secrets in short supply. That was until I realized that Duncan doesn’t know his parents all that well either and that it wasn’t something I should take personally.

Duncan is an only child. One who arrived relatively late into the marriage when, presumably, the certainty of children had long since given way to a half-resigned, half-resentful acceptance of something that may never be. One might have thought he would be all the more precious, all the more loved because of that, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

They had never been a close family. Whilst his mother was as doting as one would expect an older mother of an only son to be, there was no comfortable familiarity in their relationship. I’d rarely heard them joke together or share memories of childhood. Still less frequently had I heard her scold him. Polite seemed to best summarize the relationship between Duncan and his mother, although occasionally one could have called it uneasy.

The relationship between Duncan and his father was easier to describe, although not to understand. It was formal, courteous and – to my mind, at least – distinctly cold. It wasn’t that they didn’t talk. They talked quite a lot – about Duncan’s work, the economy, current affairs, life on the islands – but
they never touched on the personal. They never went sailing together, or for walks over the cliffs. They never sneaked off to the pub while his mother and I were preparing dinner, they didn’t fall asleep together in front of the TV afterwards and they never, ever quarrelled.

On the fifteen-minute ferry journey from Yell to Unst I asked, ‘Did he retire early?’ I had no idea how old Richard was but he barely looked seventy. Yet he hadn’t worked in all the time I’d known him. I hadn’t mentioned Richard the whole journey but Duncan knew immediately whom I meant.

‘Ten years ago,’ he replied, looking straight ahead.

‘Why?’ I asked. If Richard had left his post under some sort of cloud, that at least could explain why he was so reluctant to talk about his former profession.

Duncan shrugged without looking at me. ‘He had other things to do. And he’d groomed his successor.’

‘Gifford.’

Duncan was silent.

‘What is it between you two?’ I said.

Then he looked at me. ‘Do I need to ask you that?’

‘He said he stole your girlfriend.’

The light disappeared from Duncan’s eyes and for a moment the face looking back at me was not one I recognized. Then he gave a sharp, angry laugh.

‘In his dreams.’

The ferry was docking and the three other cars
making the late crossing had started their engines. Duncan turned on the ignition. As the ferry engines roared up and the heavy harbour ramp slammed down, he muttered something under his breath, but I didn’t dare ask him to repeat himself.

18

UNST, LYING ON
the same latitude as southern Greenland, is home to around seven hundred people and fifty thousand puffins. The most northerly of all the inhabited British islands, it measures roughly twelve miles long and five miles wide, with one main road, the A968, running from the south-eastern ferry port at Belmont up to Norwich in the north-east.

Two miles after leaving the ferry we turned left along a single-track road and started to drive up and down the shore-edged hills. At the end of the road, just about literally, you find the handful of buildings that is Westing; and the cold, grand, granite house that is Duncan’s family home.

Elspeth hugged Duncan and pressed her cold cheek against mine. Richard shook hands with his son and nodded to me. They led us into their large, west-facing sitting room. Drawn by the colours I could see outside, I walked over to the window. Behind me, a short silence fell; I bristled at a sense of
being stared at, and then I heard the sound of a cork being pulled.

The sun was almost gone and the sky had turned violet. Close to the shore at Westing stand several massive lava rocks, all that remain of ancient cliffs that in past days withstood the might of the Atlantic. These rocks were black as pitch where the light couldn’t catch them, but their beaten and jagged edges glowed like molten gold. The clouds that had been thick and threatening all day had become soft, dusky pink shadows and the surf bounced at the water’s edge like sparks of silver.