Quite Ugly One Morning (6 page)

‘Removing evidence from a sealed police crime scene. You’re showing prodigious potential. So what is it?’

‘It’s a plastic drug ampoule. NHS standard. The label’s been removed. I can get it analysed to find out what was in it.’

‘Jenny Dalziel mentioned that naughty doctors have been known to deal drugs, but that looks to me more a receptacle for prescribed rather than proscribed substances. What’s the deal? He was a doctor. Don’t you have these things around?’

Sarah shook her head. ‘Not at home, you don’t. You get glass ampoules which you have to chuck straight in the sin bin – the sharps bucket – when you’ve emptied them. The plastic ones can just go in any bin, but you still wouldn’t stick one in your pocket or anything. The lack of a label is very suspicious. I want to know what this was and what he was doing with it at home.’

‘The police found a needle but no syringe, so they figured the missing syringe was taken by the killer. What if the ampoule was his too?’

‘Then he’s no junkie,’ she said. ‘Smackheads don’t shoot up mid-burglary, I don’t imagine. And heroin doesn’t come in these.’

‘So what’s your angle on all this, Jack. Is it just a good story? Is that all it takes to get you involved?’

They were sitting on the bare floor in the living room, their backs to opposite walls, drinking more coffee. The room was lit by streetlights from the open-curtained window, as the only alternative was the bare bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling, which was a little oppressive and hurt the eyes at this time of night. It was almost pleasantly conspiratorial. They had grown tired of standing in the kitchen, and although the living room had no furniture either, it felt a more natural place to squat down.

Sarah was interested, concerned, maybe even excited, but too tired to exhibit strong symptoms of any of the above. She stared across at Parlabane in the half-light, that shock of fair
hair occasionally falling over his eyes in a way that seemed to be irritating him too much for it to be an affectation.

He had scored high marks for not saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you had to be a doctor to do that’ when she said she was an anaesthetist, and had trumped it by failing to remark at all when she told him her surname, which made her professional title Dr Slaughter.

He seemed sharp, attentive and perceptive; he listened not only to what she was saying, but what she was telling him. However, when he stared at her with those mischievous hazel eyes, she had an uncomfortable feeling of being robbed. She had no idea who he was, where he came from, what was in his past, which had made it strangely easier to talk to him initially, but there was an inescapable feeling that he was hiding something.

‘Is a good story not enough?’ he asked. ‘It’s my raison d’être, remember.’

‘I don’t know,’ she stated flatly. ‘I’m not sure who you’re asking. Is a good story not enough to explain your involvement to me, or not enough to explain your involvement to yourself?’

Parlabane shook his head and smiled, hiding.

‘Now that’s a whole other mystery: he said.

But Sarah wouldn’t back off.

‘Oh no. You don’t get to be the stranger with a past here. You’re asking me to trust you, but I don’t know anything about you. You’re sitting here in a flat without furniture, for God’s sake. What are you actually doing here?’

‘I’m here because it wasn’t wise to stay in LA any more.’

‘And why were you in LA?’

‘Because it wasn’t wise to stay in London any more.’

‘And what were you doing in London?’

‘Wasting my time.’

Sarah smiled, but it was not a happy smile. ‘You know, every day I find myself running round in circles with a patient because there’s something they don’t want to tell me. But I get it out of them eventually through tedious perseverance. I have to. It’s my job. I’d imagine yours is a lot like that too.’

Parlabane nodded.

‘Then you of all people should be giving me a fucking straight answer.’

It was a very fair point.

So he told her.

‘My grandfather always maintained that where there was muck, there was brass,’ Parlabane said. ‘If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty and put your back into your work, you’ll get a fair reward. However, throughout the tenure of our present government, I discovered a valuable reciprocal to be true: where there’s lots of brass, there’s usually muck, and I’ve made a career out of looking for it.

As Michael Portillo fearlessly said, in this country, as opposed to those wog-ridden foreign sties – I’m paraphrasing here, although only slightly – if you win a contract, it’s not because your brother is a government minister or you blatantly bribed an official. Of course not. That would be corruption. In this country, you win contracts because you are “one of us”, you went to the right school, give money to the right party, and have awarded an executive post to a member of the cabinet’s family, or have promised a seat on the board to the appropriate minister when he resigns to spend more time with his bankers.

‘We don’t have anything as vulgar or primitive as a bribe. It’s a matter of trust. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. For every contract, there’s a kickback. It’s more noble, more gentlemanly. A matter of mutual understanding. And very, very British.’

Sarah stared across, unimpressed. ‘Once again, hot-shot, this much I know. Not an exclusive. Cut to the chase.’

‘Fair enough. I got a bit of a reputation for myself through in Glasgow, sniffing out scams, investigating dodgy deals. But what I really wanted was to go after the big game down south, and I was head-hunted by one of the big broadsheet Sundays. I thought it would either make my career or turn out to be the worst move south by a promising young Scot since Charlie Nicholas. In the end it was both.’

‘What went wrong? Did the stories dry up?’

‘No, quite the opposite. It took me very little time to establish my contacts and get stuck in. I seemed to be notching up another big-splash story every month or so. I wasn’t operating as autonomously as in Glasgow, so I was often following up a lead from the head of the investigative team, with back-up and resources like I had never imagined. Up north I usually had
to fish around on my own, chasing down a few blind alleys before I found something worth really going after, and even then I was pretty much a one-man show.

‘I felt like the star striker justifying his big transfer fee by enthusiastically flogging my guts out, turning on all the style and getting results. And like the star striker, I had been brought in to finish off the chances being created by the rest of the team. I was so hungry for it that I barely stopped to look around myself for the best part of a year. Or maybe I was believing in my own myth too much to want to see what must have been in front of me all the time.’

‘You were being used,’ Sarah stated with a dry smile.

Parlabane sighed. ‘It’s a sight easier to notice from the outside looking in. I stumbled across something, just as a small follow-up on a big story I had done. There was a very unpleasant land deal going down in East Anglia somewhere . . . I can’t even remember the name of the shithole. Lots of public protest over the proposed use of the site, industrialisation of what had been a public park that the council had suspiciously let fall into dereliction, that kind of thing. I was doing a hatchet-job on the environmental record of the chemical company that was trying to buy the land. I even found out that one of the local authority planning players had an undisclosed interest in the company concerned.

‘Thought I was Mr fucking Green Hero. Expose the polluters, local authority throws out proposal, land stays a park. I could see it all. Christmas card from Jonathon Porritt, environmental journalist of the year award and probably the fucking Nobel prize thrown in.

‘And it worked. The planning department guy resigned, the plan got junked. But the land didn’t stay a park. It was sold instead to Woodford’s, a major housebuilder whose proposals were considered more palatable by the locals, still worrying over what might have been. They were building a whole load of yuppie flats with a tiny new swing-park thrown in to sweeten the neighbourhood residents.

‘I did some checking, looking for another link between the authority and this time Woodford’s. Instead I found that the chairman of Woodford’s was a close business associate of my newspaper’s proprietor and owned a sizable share of the controlling media group.

‘I checked back on all of my big splashes, and every time
I had buried someone, there was an anonymous winner, someone in the background quietly doing very nicely thank you from the fall-out from my story. In most cases I could establish the link with the proprietor, but where I couldn’t it was even more interesting, as clearly no one else knew of a connection between these figures.’

‘And what did you do with what you found?’

‘Nothing, at first. I kept it all quiet and then waited for my next major assignment. Then instead of investigating what I was supposed to, I sought out the intended beneficiaries and dug some dirt on them instead. I filed the story and appended my resignation to the end of it, then went to the pub for a couple of pints.

‘When I got home I found my flat burgled. The place had been torn apart, and every computer disk, every file, every folder, every notepad taken. In fact, they even gutted the fucking computer itself.

‘I called the police immediately, but as soon as I had put the phone back down I was struck by a paranoid but understandable thought. Anyone organised enough to break in and steal all my research as quickly as that would not be beyond stitching me up as well, and an old favourite was planting class-A drugs then tipping off the police. Except I had called the police for them.’

‘Setting your own time-bomb.’

‘Well, let’s just say it was the world’s fastest and most high-stakes game of hunt-the-thimble. Colombian dry white, recent vintage, big package, stuffed out of sight underneath my reservoir water tank. It was a lot of stuff – I took it as a back-handed compliment that the proprietor was shelling out so much to get me sent down.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘Climbed up on to the roof of the building with it and put it under a bird’s nest. It’s probably still there.’

‘And that’s why you left London?’

‘Not entirely. My decision was made easier when the cops arrived. It wasn’t some Operation Bumble Bee soco and a flatfoot. Half-a-dozen beat bobbies and two trenchcoats. And they didn’t do a convincing impression of investigating a burglary. One of the trenchcoats made a B-line for the watertank, a rather idiosyncratic place to start any new investigation, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

Sarah pretended to dither, then nodded, mock-reluctantly.

‘He rammed his hand under the tank without even looking, and got a disappointing surprise.’

‘No drugs.’

‘Well, partly that, and partly that when he rapidly brought his hand out there was a mousetrap attached to three of his fingers.

‘He told me my card was marked, but we both knew I’d foxed them that time. However, I wasn’t waiting about for the rematch if the bad guys had bent cops on their team.

‘I made a call to an ex-colleague in LA who had once approached me about doing a stint out there as a crime reporter, giving an outsider’s perspective on the kinds of atrocities Angelinos had come to accept. I was out there in a matter of days.’

‘And who did you upset out there? The Cripps?’

Parlabane laughed. ‘No. I played it straight for a long time. I had some fun, made some very good contacts on the LAPD, one of whom I owe . . .’ he looked briefly, blankly out of the window . . . ‘a lot.

‘I saw lots of crime scenes, lots of bodies, wrote lots of worthy prose about the decreasing value of human life, the too-high price of America’s gun culture. Pissed off the NRA on a regular basis. Learned that you don’t need a southern accent and a pick-up truck to be a redneck. You also don’t need a brain to be a gun-owner.

‘But the old
reportage
thing could only take me so far. My instinctive, fundamental, primal need to cause trouble inevitably kicked in. I still kept my head down, let the cops put the two and twos together when I followed up a murder. But I suppose I noticed a pattern emerging among certain of the resulting fours, and I believed there might be a motive to a number of apparently motiveless killings. I had nothing concrete to go on, just a gut feeling, the kind that used to serve me in Glasgow before I got duped into being hand-fed in London. I had very little, not even a theory. Just the feeling I get when I’m sure there’s something wrong with the picture. I was just fishing around, but I had no idea how deep I was casting, which makes investigating either very hard or very risky. When you ask someone a question, you don’t know who he’s going to run off and tell about it.

‘And in LA the baddies don’t burgle your apartment and
plant some marching powder. As is common with Americans, they tend to be a bit more direct.’

‘Someone tried to kill you?’

‘Someone
paid
someone to kill me. You wanted to know what my angle was here? Wasn’t a good story enough? Well, you’ve got it now. Someone I didn’t even know paid to have me killed. Just like that. A simple business transaction. And someone who had never even met me was prepared to murder me just for money. Believe me, you can’t even begin to imagine how angry that makes me.

‘So I know I can’t get to whoever was responsible in LA, but I’m prepared to make do with a couple of surrogates.’

Maybe it would all blow over.

Maybe the cro-magnon moron had actually pulled it off. Maybe the sheer, breathtaking stupidity of his actions had indeed thrown the police off the scent. They had no witnesses, no descriptions, and they did seem to have believed that it had been a burglar who had killed Ponsonby. In fact, they had brought one in for questioning, according to the paper.

Still, they had to sit it out for the time being, and that bloodthirsty oaf would have to stay where he was until the coast was definitely clear. His initial thought was to get him the hell out of the city, back to Dagenham on the first train, but the thought that things might be about to get tricky and complicated meant that it was best to have Darren at his immediate disposal.

He couldn’t afford any more slip-ups, any more risks. Killing Ponsonby was supposed to tie up the last loose end, but it also had the potential to unravel and fray the whole thing.

So near and yet so far.

The visionless, the ignorant, the blinkered – the clinical staff and the general public, basically – had said it was madness, that it was entirely wrong to place the Trusts in the hands of people with no medical experience. What could people who had run biscuit factories and textile firms possibly know about running hospitals, they asked. This isn’t about profit and loss, but about medical care, they bleated.

They just couldn’t see, could they. It was people who had medical experience who were precisely the wrong candidates for NHS senior management, as they brought along so much obstructive sentimental baggage. They didn’t have the experience to deal in hard facts and harsh realities, and couldn’t help letting their hearts rule their cheque-books. For God’s sake, what kind of doctor had any knowledge of real decision-making?

But now they would be forced to see, now they would be forced to sit up and take notice, because the Midlothian NHS
Trust – ‘We’ve got a heart in the Heart’ © – was about to go into the black.

When he had first arrived, the situation had seemed so horrifying and desperate that he thought for a moment he had been stitched up, and was almost about to ring the bank and find out whether his Party contribution cheque had bounced for some reason. To secure Trust status, as was very much the norm, the hospitals’ books had been cooked so complicatedly that Delia Smith would have been proud of the recipe. Debts and liabilities had been hidden, or their impact deferred, just waiting to loudly declare themselves throughout his first year in charge.

However, a closer look at the figures revealed to him the massive potential for improvement, as well as for the private endeavours he had envisaged.

The first important action was to declare the Trust’s true financial position, as it wasn’t as though Trust status would be withdrawn by the health ministry once the truth was known, and it meant that any savings he managed to make would be more visible.

There had to be radical change. Right away he purchased a small fleet of company Mercedes, to attract the right calibre of management staff to undertake the stiff measures needed to turn the place around. There was the inevitable whining about why such perks weren’t required to attract the right calibre of doctors, but it was such a juvenile comparison. You had to think of the responsibility that would be in the hands of these people, for a start. If you wanted people who could handle that responsibility, you had to show them that they would be valued as much as if they worked in industry or in the City. And what the moaners didn’t appreciate was the commitment and loyalty that such perks engendered in staff, things impossible to put a price on.

The Trust covered the massive, city-centre Royal Victoria Infirmary and a small geriatric hospital, the George Romanes. The administration department was based at the RVI, and was a run-down, shambling basement, totally unsuitable for its intended purpose.

On a first tour of the sprawling, gothic monstrosity that was the RVI, Stephen Lime was most taken by the light and city-wide view afforded by the massive windows in the East wing, and within a month had moved the administration
department there, closing two wards and moving the others to where admin had previously been. However, it couldn’t just be a matter of moving all that tawdry old Seventies office furniture up the stairs. Top-quality administrators had to feel they were working in a top-quality department. Massive refurbishment had to be undertaken immediately, and when it came to something as important to the hospital as that, no expense could be spared. New carpeting, proper wall-coverings, pot plants, a marble floor for the atrium lobby, new PCs, new desks, new chairs, new filing system, the works. Because when you really came right down to it, people’s lives were depending on the work done in there.

Of course, savings desperately had to be made, and his successes in that field followed recovery from a major early setback. He had looked at the pay and conditions of all domestic and auxiliary staff, and the cumulative cost of their employment. Ideally, if he had a blank slate, he would have put their whole field out to tender, bringing in private firms who could do the job for half the current outlay, with some of the spend quietly trickling back to him from the chosen contractors as a mark of appreciation. However, the reality was that he was saddled with this unwanted, overpaid workforce. Then the idea hit him, so simple he really hadn’t been able to see it for looking at it. When the hospital became a Trust, these people’s employer effectively folded, which in other circumstances would have made them all redundant. The Midlothian NHS Trust – ‘We’ve got a heart in the Heart’ © – had continued their employment on the same terms and conditions. This was insane.

The plan was simple. He would announce that they had indeed been effectively made redundant, but were generously being re-employed by a new company, Midlothian NHS Domestic. However, the new company, to remain viable and competitive in the marketplace, could not pay them what they had earned before, so wages would be cut by an average of twenty-five per cent. And as new employees, they would have to work at least a year before they had any holiday entitlement.

It was genius. The trust was about to save millions per annum at a stroke.

Unfortunately, about a week before he was due to make the big announcement, the kilty media exploded with indignation
over one of his counterparts in Glasgow attempting to pull off a similar coup. There was strike action, widespread condemnation, and even the Department of Health spokesmen wheeled out were disappointingly limp-wristed about the whole affair. The Glasgow thing went down in flames and he quietly wiped all trace of his own plans from the records.

On the plus side, one cloud on the horizon, the New Deal for Junior Doctors, did turn out to be a blessing in disguise. The talk of an across-the-board, statutory reduction in junior doctors’ hours had been fairly terrifying, as the only way of bringing it about seemed unavoidably to employ more of the buggers.

However, this proved to be far from the case. His administrators were soon able to assure him that juniors’ rotas could be reduced with no increase in staffing whatsoever, by putting them on-call on fewer nights, but having them cover more wards per doctor. It would concentrate their workload, making their on-call nights busier and more stressful, but what the hell, they weren’t paying the bastards to sleep.

They also explained that what had to be reduced was not the number of hours the juniors actually worked, but merely the number of hours they were officially contracted to work. With no tangible alteration to the total workload, this meant in practice that – to get the job done properly – the doctors would still have to work well over the new limits and thus the hours they were contracted for,
they just wouldn’t get paid for it.
The Trust could then let the media report – as was happening across the land – that no junior doctor in its employ was working beyond the new legal limits – and could save money into the bargain!

Some of the stuff he had found in the books was terrifying. There was an instance of £57, 000 having been spent in one month on
one patient.
When he investigated further, it turned out the cash had gone on some extortionate drugs for a cancer-sufferer who had died a few months later anyway. In a time when resources had to be pro-actively channelled according to needs and merits, this amounted to a shocking misappropriation of funds. In fact there were
millions
being spent each year on expensive treatments for terminal cancer patients.

Then there was the George Romanes Hospital, a whole group of buildings full of coffin-dodgers with nothing specifically wrong with them other than age, haemorrhaging funds
to give some old grannies a few more years of drooling and incontinence. But that wasn’t even the half of it, as the GRH’s bedspace was massively congested with long-stay geriatric cases, screaming, shrieking dements, some of whom had been there for over a decade.

It was all very daunting at first, but he quickly saw that money could be saved, and money could be made. It just took the vision to see it and the nerve, damn it, the
balls
to carry it off.

The smell was really beginning to get to Darren, and he was sure Mrs Kinross was becoming suspicious. It was getting on for a few days now, and he had spent most of the time in this fucking crappy little guest house room, waiting for Lime to either give him the all-clear or at least give him something to be getting on with. He had taken the odd walk round the block to get away from it for a while, but that made it seem all the more pungent when he had to go back in.

He had tried to open the window, but not only was it freezing cold and raining, but this fucking Jock city seemed to have a permanent gale blowing through it. The only other alternative had been soaking hankies in Brut and putting them over his nose and mouth, which worked for a while, but was giving him a sore throat.

He would have to do something. The last time he had returned from a trip into the fresh air, he had noticed the smell from halfway down the stairs on his way back in. She was a batty old trout, but she might still put two and two together if she was given enough time.

He hadn’t even meant it, really. He had been half asleep at the time, but to be perfectly honest he really fucking hated dogs. Bane of his existence when he was a burglar, and he had never forgiven the cunts for the bother they had caused him. Two separate stretches inside and fuck knew how many bites and scratches.

On the other hand, he might not have learned to handle his knife so well had it not been for the dogs. He had tried to avoid screwing places that had them, but when he found he’d made a mistake – or a place looked just too tasty to pass over – he made his first procedure to slaughter the fucking mutt. He made a special cuff out of two plastic shin-guards he shoplifted from a sports store, and wore that over his right
wrist like a falconing glove. When the mutt went for him, he would let it sink its teeth into that, then whip the blade up under its exposed neck.

It had been the morning after the job, lying there sore and knackered, having had a frustratingly restless night. He had drifted in and out of a light sleep, and started having this horrible dream that the stump of his severed finger was being swarmed over and eaten by ants and maggots. He had opened one cloudy eye to see that his arm was hanging off the end of the bed, and the ravaged stump was being solicitously licked by Ruffle, the landlady’s miserable little white Scottie.

In semi-conscious malice he had slowly reached under the pillow for his knife, then leaned over and stuck it between the fluffy little twat’s eyes. Then he had rolled over and slept peacefully for six more hours.

The thought of infection struck him belatedly when he awoke, and in the absence of Dettol or any other recognisable antiseptic, he had to make do with sticking the stump into a cup of bathroom bleach. The pain brought tears to his eyes and made him doubly glad he had killed the yappy little mutt.

That afternoon, through the window on to the back garden, he had heard Mrs Kinross ask her neighbours with increasing anxiety whether they had seen Ruffle. He had kept the room locked when he was in or out, but he knew she would be wanting in to clean the place at some point that day, so he had bought a canvas sportsbag, placed the deceased Ruffle in it and gone out looking for a skip to dump it in.

He had walked for bloody miles and seen nothing but narrow-mouthed litter bins, and on a couple of quiet streets had attempted to stuff the bag through the gap when no one was looking, but the fucking thing just wouldn’t fit.

He had thought about leaving it in a garden or a park, but with the luck he had been having lately, some cunt would see him dump it and come forward with a description when the contents were discovered. He had read about American serial killers getting caught because they were picked up for speeding. He did not want to be the first hit man to get caught because he was picked up for having a dead dog in a sports bag.

In the end he had to bring the fucking thing back to the guest house and stick it on top of the wardrobe, where the old cow wouldn’t disturb it.

However, with Lime hopping about on hot coals after this doctor business, it was looking like he might have to stay in this place for at least a few more days, and he just couldn’t cope with the smell any longer, or the danger that Mrs Kinross might want to come in and find out what was causing it.

Bollocks.

He took the bag down and, covering his mouth and nose with another Brut-soaked hanky, pulled open the zipper. Ruffle was stinking and very stiff, but he was still acceptably fluffy, apart from the big bloodstain over his muzzle. He zipped the bag up again. What would the old bat know about dead dogs.

Darren was woken by the alarm on his digital watch at three in the morning. His initial response was to roll over and go back to sleep, but upon turning away from the wall, he got a couple of nostrils full of the reason he really had to get up.

He opened the back window and climbed down quietly with the Ruffle bag slung over his shoulder. It was a clear night and there was a big moon, but there was no real choice but to go ahead with it. He hopped over the hedge into the garden next door and placed Ruffle out of sight between a row of conifers and the dry stone wall at the back. Then as an inspired afterthought, he removed a large boulder from the top of the wall and placed it on top of Ruffle’s head.