The House of Women Page 4

  ‘What wasn’t?’ The doctor spread his hands. ‘He had one illness after another, and all I could do in the end was give him attention, because he’d exhausted the limited resources of medical knowledge. The consensus among the countless consultants he’d seen was of a neurotic hypochondria of epic proportions. In other words, he’d driven himself half crazy.’

  ‘Is there a history of mental illness?’

  Turning to the computer to search the medical record, Ansoni said: ‘He was admitted several times to Denbigh Hospital with depression, and even sectioned once when he went completely crazy, and he spent a good part of his childhood and adolescence in one hospital or another. Tonsils, appendix, joint pains, chest pains, ear trouble, balance problems, headaches, gastro-intestinal problems, virulent mouth ulcers.’ He took his finger from the keyboard. ‘No physiological cause emerged, so a psychiatric conclusion was inevitably drawn, and indeed, such diffuse symptoms often indicate depressive illness.’

  ‘Did you think he was a suicide risk?’

  ‘Not really, although there were times when he seemed near the end of his tether.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The last time we spoke.’ The doctor ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Osteo-arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis are common conditions at Ned’s age, and he had both, together with low blood pressure, and he often experienced minor loss of sensation in the extremities, but he’d convinced himself that something perfectly normal was extremely sinister, and would necessitate amputation of his legs in the not too distant future. I said he was talking nonsense and he told me to stop patronizing him, because as he knew his bodily workings better than any doctor, he knew these new pains and strange changes heralded disaster.’

  ‘You’re on a hiding to nothing in that kind of situation,’ McKenna commented.

  ‘Which is probably why I subscribed too easily, if not wholly, to the psychiatric diagnosis and consequently never went out of my way to shape a therapy for him.’

  ‘You can’t treat what isn’t there.’

  ‘He had real pain, even if it was the product of inner turmoil.’

  ‘But you didn’t prescribe pain-killers?’

  ‘Most strong pain-killers are highly addictive, and we have enough junkies courtesy of the NHS, without making more. Anyway, he never asked.’ He smiled again, fleetingly. ‘He was always on the edge of a psychological abyss, and he stopped himself from toppling over by sheer strength of will, so he dealt with his pain the same way. He once told me he even derived satisfaction from it, because it enhanced his awareness of the world.’

  ‘People on the borderline of insanity often have heightened perceptions and instincts.’

  ‘And which causes which?’ asked Ansoni. ‘He said he experienced pain in varying degrees day after day and night after night. He was helpless inside a body constantly threatening to kill him, from which, as he put it, he had to have prior permission for every breath he took, so I’m not surprised he became obsessed with its rhythms and workings and almost paranoid about his physical self.’ He paused, gathering his memories. ‘He used to clip articles from newspapers and magazines, and he’d come across one about aneurysms in the abdominal aorta, so he lay in the bath watching the throb of his own aorta, thinking an aneurysm would be like a bomb in his guts, but he wouldn’t know when the timer was set for detonation.’

  ‘Sickness is an existentially precarious condition,’ McKenna said, ‘whatever the reasons. He was intensely conscious of the dichotomy between mind and body, and perhaps his mind just caved in to the pressure from time to time. I suppose you could say his social body never separated itself from his natural body.’

  ‘To me, he simply personified the unbridgeable gulf between the sick and the well, but now his natural body’s dead, you can be sure his social body was somehow the cause of it.’

  ‘Have you any idea what he could have taken?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘You’ll have to wait on the toxicology report, but I’ve seen people near death after eating a few strawberries. It could be an idiosyncratic response to any number of things, but he certainly had no suspect medication because there’d already been a rather worrying reaction to antibiotics I prescribed last year for a chest infection.’

  ‘What kind of reaction?’

  ‘A lower level of the one that killed him, which made me wonder if there was some malfunction of the adrenal cortex. The tests I arranged were negative, so Ned got himself a bracelet, and I filled in the details for him.’

  McKenna frowned. ‘A bracelet?’

  ‘An SOS bracelet. A waterproof capsule on a chain, with a long strip of paper inside to write down important data about medical conditions, drug sensitivity and so forth. He said his life might depend on it, so he wore it all the time, and I’m just beginning to realize how much I’ll miss him, for all he exposed our limitations and upset the balance of power. He was a good man, and he didn’t deserve the suffering he had.’

  9

  Rowlands felt slightly sick after being bounced for mile upon mile along the pot-holed lanes twisting between one run-down village garage and another. ‘Are these people we’ve seen paid informants?’ he asked, sucking a mint.

  ‘No, sir,’ Dewi said. ‘I just know most of them, as you do.’

  ‘And have they told you anything interesting yet?’

  ‘You heard as much as me, sir.’

  ‘I heard a gabble of Welsh, so I didn’t understand a word.’

  ‘Really? You should’ve said. We’re not into language fascism, which is lucky for Inspector Tuttle, ’cos all he knows in Welsh are a few swear words.’ Taking a blind bend without reducing speed, he added: ‘Does Ms Bradshaw speak Welsh?’

  Rowlands felt the seat belt lock tight across his chest. ‘I doubt it. She’s from Manchester.’

  ‘How long’s she been with our force?’

  ‘Two or three years, I think.’

  ‘Is she married?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Any children?’

  Rowlands tried to ease some slack into the seat belt. ‘D’you always ask so many questions? Doesn’t McKenna mind?’

  ‘He lets me know if I overstep the mark. He’s straight.’

  ‘And you’re so confident you could almost be called brash.’

  ‘I like to be straight, too, sir. And having my own opinions isn’t disrespectful. Mr McKenna encourages us to use our initiative, under the right supervision. So did Superintendent Griffiths.’

  ‘If that’s a coded message for me to take back to Ms Bradshaw, you’re wasting your time. I never met her before today.’

  *

  The car showroom, straddling a bleak hill above the Rhiwlas road, was an ugly ramshackle structure tacked on to the side of an old stone dwelling which now served as offices. Parking on a patch of gravel by the roadside, Dewi went first to peer through the glazed showroom doors, then to the other building. Opening the office door, he walked in, Rowlands in his wake. ‘This is Geraint, sir,’ he announced, nodding to the young man behind the desk, whose face blossomed with acne. ‘Geraint and his dad got done by Trading Standards for dishonestly flogging a vehicle, but they coughed up their fines without so much as a squeal of protest.’

  ‘Was that the Tigra clocked from 33,000 miles to 14,000?’ asked Rowlands.

  ‘It was.’ Dewi sat on Geraint’s desk. ‘I don’t think Geraint and his dad did the deed, but they won’t tell us who did.’

  His glance flicking from one to the other of his visitors, Geraint said: ‘Can’t you leave it be? It’s over and done with.’

  ‘Only till the next time,’ Dewi said. ‘I want to buy that car I looked at on Friday, but how can I trust what you tell me? For all I know it could be two halves out of fatal accidents, welded together in the middle, like the red coupe that poor woman bought from your pal Dervyn.’

  ‘You’ve had an HPI check on the car you were drooling over,’ Geraint said. ‘You even checked the engine number.
’

  ‘I know I did, because somebody’s stealing engines, regrinding the block, and stamping on a fake number.’ He turned to Rowlands. ‘It makes you wonder if there’s an honest dealer in the whole of Wales, and when you look at the records of the likes of Dervyn, you begin to think criminals must be fatally attracted to dealing cars.’

  ‘Who’s Dervyn?’

  ‘Geraint’s old school chum, except neither of them spent much time in class. They used to go twocking, and now they’ve taken to clocking.’

  ‘Stop showing off your language, Dewi Prys!’ Geraint snapped. ‘I don’t have any truck with that Dervyn.’

  ‘There’s a remarkable incidence of small-scale criminal enterprise in the area,’ Rowlands observed. ‘In my experience operations like this are usually part of a ring.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to get through Geraint’s thick skull. To give him his due, this is his first clocking offence and he says he was conned when he bought the car, but I don’t quite believe him.’ Noting Geraint’s scowl, Dewi added: ‘Which isn’t surprising considering some of the other tricks he’s turned, like sticking a loose nut behind a hub cap, then saying the clanking noise was a knackered drive shaft.’

  ‘I only did it once!’ Geraint whined, spots livid against his pasty skin. ‘And if you don’t leave me be, I’m going to report you! This is police harassment.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ Rowlands showed his teeth. ‘Not yet.’

  10

  As McKenna went in through the back door of the police station, the duty sergeant reported on Diana Bradshaw’s half-hourly attempts to locate him. Irritated, he walked slowly up the staircase, the heat within the building stealing his breath. Hearing his footfall in the corridor, she opened her door. ‘There you are!’ Her smile was brilliant. ‘I expected you back ages ago! Did you really need to spend half the day with the old man’s doctor?’

  He leaned against the wall, sweat running down inside his shirt, feeling transient and insecure, like a bystander in an alleyway. ‘I think that’s a slight exaggeration, ma’am.’

  Looking rather hurt, she invited him into the office, and sat behind her desk, her arms folded. ‘I hoped we’d be friends, you know, and there’s really no need for all this formality, except in front of the rank and file. I’m sure you didn’t always address Superintendent Griffiths as sir.’

  ‘We’d known each other a long time,’ he said. ‘People here take a while to feel at ease with newcomers, and in any case, a measure of formality often avoids the embarrassment of getting in too deep too quickly.’

  ‘Really? Well, thank you for the advice, chief inspector. Now, the pathologist wants to see you. Quite urgently, I understand.’

  11

  A blue haze softened the distant mountain peaks behind the hospital, and, locking his car, McKenna felt the vicious afternoon heat almost as an entity. A young man sat on the kerb outside the psychiatric unit, the sun beating down on his head, a cigarette clutched in his shaking hands, and as McKenna approached, he lurched to his feet, and staggered blindly towards the casualty department.

  The grass around the pathology laboratories was bleached and patchy, the shrubs tinder dry, and McKenna wondered if this weather, freakish even by local standards, was really the fall-out of nuclear tests in the South Pacific, as people were wont to suggest. When he pulled open the door, cooler air slapped him in the face, and the smell of the death-house wormed into his nose and settled at the back of his throat.

  *

  ‘I think Edward Jones is trying to tell us something,’ the pathologist said. ‘It’s what you might call an unfinished dialogue between us and his corpse.’

  Supine under the bright lights, Ned seemed smaller than McKenna remembered, almost as frail as a child on the huge steel table. Tracing his gloved finger along the autopsy incision, he said: ‘Tidy work.’

  ‘I was particularly careful. I didn’t want to damage the torso any more than necessary.’ Leaning over the body, plastic apron crackling, the green-gowned pathologist pointed to a riddle of welts and marks. ‘See the scratches all round his neck? There was a lot of skin under his nails, which is probably his, so I assume he clawed at his neck when he couldn’t breathe, as people do when they’re panicking for air. Now, I thought at first those thin red lines of congestion on his chest were random, but there seems to be a pattern, and it became much clearer when the weals and swellings from the allergic reaction began to decay.’ He lifted Ned’s hands, and showed them to McKenna, first the finger ends, nails trimmed neatly and spotlessly clean, then the palms, slightly roughened and patchy with old calluses. ‘Hands often toil a life history, but he’s still holding back on me. I hear he spent his time shuffling paper and reading books, but these hands have done a lot of hard labour in their time.’

  ‘He was brought up on a farm,’ McKenna was suddenly touched by a sense of loss. ‘Are you absolutely sure an allergic reaction killed him?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve never seen such elevated levels of histamine and bradykinin, and most of this discoloration is urticaria factitia. Wholly consistent with, as it were.’

  ‘Could he have been saved?’

  ‘Only by performing a tracheotomy within minutes. Now then, if you look carefully at the thin red lines on his chest, what can you see?’

  McKenna leaned over the body, the scent of death strong in his nostrils, staring at the mottled flesh around the neatly closed incision which would never heal. ‘Letters, I think.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘An “F” and an “E”, and both back to front.’

  ‘They’re more distinct in the pre-autopsy photographs.’

  ‘Nothing was mentioned when he was examined at the scene on Friday.’

  Going back to the office, leaving Ned exposed on the table, the pathologist said: ‘I wouldn’t bother tearing a strip off the attending physician, because but for those marks, this would look like straightforward natural causes.’ He sat behind the desk and opened a drawer, extracting a bagged shirt and a sheaf of photographs. ‘Where the skin’s been sensitized by allergic reaction, it can be marked with something sharp and thin, like a fingernail, producing what’s called dermatographia, or, in plain language, skin-writing. The condition’s also called tache cerebrale, but that’s more specific to meningitis.’ Spreading out the large coloured prints, he said: ‘The letters are quite clear, but as they’re the wrong way round, they could be mirror writing after da Vinci, or, as he was in extremis at the time, they could mean nothing.’

  ‘Which hand did he use?’

  The pathologist shrugged. ‘Natural right-handers can sometimes do mirror writing with the left hand, so presumably, southpaws can do the same with the right. The pressure variations suggest he wrote from left to right, but don’t take it as gospel.’ He dropped another photograph on the pile, of Ned dead in his chair, dressed in his old fashioned clothes. ‘But you can be sure somebody tampered with the body. That’s taken at the scene, and he was still all neatly buttoned up in collar and tie when we got him.’ Showing McKenna the white shirt, frayed around collar and cuffs, he added: ‘You can see where he almost tore off the buttons, and there were shredded fibres from the tie under his nails, which according to the label, is made of Macclesfield silk, so it must be quite old.’

  ‘When will you know what caused the reaction?’

  ‘As soon as the toxicology results come back, which should be within days, but I expect he ingested an antibiotic, despite the known allergy. The reaction was very typical.’ Stacking the photographs, he added: ‘I know he hadn’t been prescribed antibiotics since last year, but he could easily have swallowed a couple of left over tablets thinking they were something else. People get very careless with drugs.’

  ‘He was careful to the point of neurosis, according to Gabriel Ansoni.’ McKenna lit a cigarette, trying to chase away the taste in his mouth. ‘And he wasn’t senile. How was his general physical condition?’

  ‘There’s little to substantiate all the ills he compl
ained about, apart from an interesting inflammation in the colon, so he could’ve looked forward to his three score years and ten, given the usual creaky joints and chronic backache. He badly needed a new set of false teeth, because the ones I took out of his mouth must be nearly as old as his tie, which is probably why he had a mouth full of ulcers.’ The pathologist put the photographs in a large plastic wallet. ‘You can take these, but I haven’t finished with the clothing yet.’

  ‘Did you find his SOS bracelet?’ McKenna asked.

  The pathologist shook his head. ‘Not even in the lining of his jacket. Perhaps you need to search his room again.’

  12

  Diana Bradshaw glanced at McKenna, then at the photographs he had placed on her desk. ‘Isn’t it rather fanciful to suggest the old man scratched a message on his chest?’

  ‘Not necessarily, and it’s obvious he tore at his shirt and tie, and even more obvious that someone tidied him up before the doctor and Janet arrived at the house.’

  ‘Well, yes, but perhaps the person wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘Or perhaps the person was trying to obscure those tell-tale marks.’

  ‘But what tale do they tell?’ She smiled again, a gesture McKenna had decided was an obfuscation in itself, and said: ‘“F—E” and “E—F” don’t make any sense, whichever way around they are.’

  ‘Clearly, Ned died before he could finish, but there are issues here which need investigating.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t agree more! But until we know the cause of death, it wouldn’t be wise to decide what those issues actually are. For the time being, just soft-pedal, and keep the questions discreet. Mrs Harris is well-respected, and not without connections, so it wouldn’t do to upset her.’

  ‘And if he ingested antibiotics, as the pathologist suggested?’

  ‘Obviously, you’ll have to find out where they came from.’

  ‘And who might have given them to him?’