Control, p.25
Control, page 25
‘Deny it? What is there even to deny? I’ve been helping you, Kash. The man I thought I loved. The man I thought loved me. The man who now looks me in the eye and tells me I’m a murderer – or worse! I’ve been . . . I told you, long ago, how much I wanted to find my mother. My true mother. What it felt like, growing up and not knowing where I was from, who I was. When Anna found me, well, it was . . . it was like finding a missing piece of me. I felt complete for the first time in my life. All the more when I learned that I had a brother. A half-brother. But then that was taken from me. But did we get together and try to destroy Michael Trenchard? Are we getting together on a Saturday night to gloat over it?’ She shook her head sadly. ‘All I wanted from Anna, one day, was a mother. And she wanted a daughter. So we met. An awkward coffee in a café. I sent her a letter. A picture. She sent me one. Told me about her life. And that’s it. No plots. No conspiracy. No murder . . .’
For a moment he wavered. He wanted so much to believe her. ‘What about Liz Murray, Claire? Let me see your arms, Claire.’
*
She gave him a look of incomprehension, then slowly pulled up the sleeves of her dressing-gown and held out her arms. Her skin was pale, flawless apart from a splash of freckles. No marks, no scratches. She was sobbing now.
‘Oh, Claire. But it wasn’t Anna, and it wasn’t Ange. If it wasn’t Doug, or you . . .? No one else knew. That Trenchard was about to tell. No one . . .’
She closed her eyes for a moment. Her hands were clenched tightly, her knuckles showing white. She looked up. ‘There is someone . . .’
‘What?’
Realization hit him. ‘You told somebody . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Kash,’ she said, putting a hand to her mouth. ‘I just didn’t think.’
‘Who?’ Kash demanded. ‘Claire, who did you tell?’
Claire pushed past and snatched her coat from a hook on the wall. ‘Oh my God, Kash,’ she almost shouted, ‘we’ve got to go. We’ve got to go now. It might already be too late . . .’
53
Trenchard was just drifting off when he distantly heard someone arrive. ‘I’ve come to change his dressings. Yes, I know, such a bore! But it’s four times a day, I’m afraid, until we’re certain infection hasn’t set in. Why don’t you take a break, go and get yourself a cuppa?’
Trenchard had been put in a private sideroom ‘for his own protection’, a police officer officially standing guard outside. His view was limited, but the window blind was up just enough for him to see her. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform, and played the part well. The police guard was resisting, determined to stand sentry according to his orders, but she gently brushed her fingers against his forearm.
‘I won’t be long.’
‘Bring me one too, would you love? I could murder a coffee. White, one sugar?’
Murder. She’d said that word with relish. So, he thought, finally we get to it. What is it has spooked you, girl? Why not continue the torture? Somebody’s close, aren’t they? Somebody’s close to finding you out. What you did last night, not to me, to poor old Liz Murray, oh I heard all about that. Wouldn’t it be ironic if that’s the one you go down for; some silly, interfering old biddy who couldn’t keep her nose out.
He heard the door to the left open, followed her ballerina footsteps. Her petite frame had been one of the things that first drew him to her, its surprising strength and vigour the features that made him come back. But his feelings had changed, lust traded for terror. And now? What did he feel now? Resigned. At peace. Almost. For one question still remained.
‘Michael, it’s time. I wish you could have lasted a little longer, Michael.’ He heard her soft chuckle. ‘Not what a man ever wants to hear. But in the same way, it was about my pleasure, not yours. I wanted to be able to awaken every day of a long lifetime with joy, knowing that you were suffering. So a matter of months has been nowhere near enough. We could have gone on, of course, if you hadn’t got some movement back in that finger. And if that damned Kash hadn’t interfered.
‘You see, nobody saw me. Not once. I was the invisible woman. Nurse’s uniform, head down and busy, and you become just another worker bee. Poor Claire helped with that – not that she knows it, of course. Her uniforms aren’t exactly my size, but you can’t have everything. So I’ve flitted in and out of this hospital as if it’s my very own and not once have I been stopped.
‘And then that naughty finger of yours almost put a spanner in the works. Until I sorted it out for you. I really thought I did a pretty thorough job there. You might even say too thorough. But it’s never enough, is it? Even after all that, there was something nagging at me, I just didn’t know what. But it’s your eye, isn’t it? I saw a little twitch. Look! There it goes again. If it’s not one thing, it’s another! The truth is, I just can’t trust you, Michael, which is why, I’m afraid, the fun is finally going to have to stop.’
She made it easy for him to see, standing directly ahead of him as she held a pen torch between her teeth and flicked the side of the syringe theatrically with the nail of an index finger.
Still, there was one more thing he needed from her. But would she give it to him?
He willed her to listen to his own internal voice, strong and confident, as in his old life, the one she had taken, booming out into the silence of the little room.
‘What did I do? What did I do to deserve all this?’
He heard the rustle of fabric as she kneeled closer. He saw the syringe in her hand.
By pure force of will, she seemed to have understood. Perhaps there was such a thing as telepathy.
‘I hoped you’d work it out for yourself, Michael. I thought that would be . . . a project for you. Something to take up your time. But I wouldn’t want you to go without knowing, so in case you haven’t already twigged, let me tell you . . .’
54
Their feet pounded the clay tiles of the floor as they tore down the Victory’s main corridor, then up the stairs to ward fourteen.
Kash was the first to hurtle through the doors, past the office and onwards, Claire followed just behind. The ward was dark, the only illumination coming from the dim emergency lights that ran along the ceiling, and the lone bed-lamp of a patient.
He swivelled on the ball of his left foot, swinging into the bay where the side rooms were. Of the four doors here, only one was ajar and only one spilled out light. His worst fears were confirmed by the sight that greeted him: the police guard was gone. Kash kicked through the door – and there was Mr Trenchard, his sallow features once flaccid, now gaunt, almost skeletal, his head lolling to one side, a mucoid slick of drool spilling from the right-hand corner of his mouth and down his chin. Over his left shoulder, the wall-mounted anglepoise lamp was on, casting his right side into even deeper shadow. The dribble glinted like wet seaweed in moonlight.
He was not alone.
The nurse bending over him was frighteningly familiar. Kash would have recognized that beguilingly petite frame, the jet-black hair whose dye he had seen staining the bathroom sink in Claire’s flat. He could even see the row of piercings in her left ear, where the lamplight made the dangling silver glitter. She was wearing a Victory uniform, but she did not belong to the Victory. She turned, and only then did Kash see the syringe gripped tightly in her hand.
‘Tiff,’ he said, breathlessly. ‘My God, Tiff . . .’
Claire shouldered her way in beside him. ‘Tiff – Tiffany – for God’s sake put it down. Tiff, please . . .’
Tiff’s face was blank, drained of all expression. ‘I don’t think so,’ she whispered. ‘Claire, it’s better you weren’t here. Kash, stay or go, I don’t care – but it’s better that Claire isn’t a witness. I don’t want her name being dragged through the—’
Kash leaped forward, clasping Tiff’s wrist and forcing her back.
At first caught by surprise, she fell back against the bedside locker which smashed into the wall behind it, but then she seemed to bounce back with a ferocity that caught Kash off guard. He could feel the power in her tiny frame as she pummelled him back, wrenched her hand free, still holding tightly to the syringe with which she had come to end Michael Trenchard’s life.
Kash staggered, managed somehow to stop himself falling as the tip of the syringe caught his forearm. A single bead of blood swelled up and trickled through the hairs of his arm. For a moment he panicked – but then saw that the syringe was still full. Tiff had not had time to depress the plunger.
He found himself between Tiff and the bed. They stood facing one another, breathing hard and fast. Claire was somewhere behind. ‘Get him out of here, Claire,’ he gasped. ‘Get him somewhere. Push the bed. I’ll hold her off.’
‘Don’t you dare fucking move him, Claire,’ Tiff warned. ‘He deserved everything and he deserves this. Get out of my way, Kash. I’ll kill you too, if I have to. But I swear to God, Michael Trenchard is going to die and you’re not going to stop it.’
Kash kept his eyes on Tiff, bracing himself for the moment she would thrust herself forward, drive him bodily out of the way and sink the syringe deep into Mr Trenchard’s chest.
‘Come on, Claire,’ he urged. But Claire was not moving, doing nothing to disentangle Trenchard from his feeding tube and hustle him out of the room. He dared not look back but he could feel her standing there, rooted to the spot. ‘Claire?’
She was trembling. She looked straight past him, into the black pools of Tiff’s eyes.
‘Maybe we should let her do it,’ she said quietly.
‘Claire?’ he said.
‘Well, why not? It’s all gone on too long. It’s time it was over.’
Kash knew she must be thinking of her mother. Thinking of Anna Chaloner and the child she had been forced to give up for adoption, and another piece of the jigsaw suddenly slotted into place.
How could he have been so stupid?
Trenchard was Edmund’s father. Susan Vale wasn’t the only pretty young nurse Trenchard had seduced and then abandoned when she got pregnant. I’m not going to make you a list, Isabelle had said. That was why Anna Chaloner had been so bitter. It was Edmund’s own father who had let him die. Did Claire know that?
‘But Claire,’ he said, ‘it’s murder.’
She was still rooted to the spot. He turned back to Tiff. She remained immobile, resolute, the syringe gripped tightly in her fist.
‘Why?’ Claire whispered, behind him. ‘I don’t understand, Tiff. Why you?’
55
It was shortly before her thirty-eighth birthday when the pain started. Sarah Craven had never felt anything like it before, and knew at once that it must be serious. It began suddenly and, rather oddly, as a tearing sensation between her shoulder blades which then spread to the front of her chest. She called her daughter’s school, and then for an ambulance which delivered her to the nearby emergency department. The morphine helped to dull the pain, but not completely, and she would still grade it as six out of ten as she was being wheeled into the CT scanner. The injection of contrast – to show up the blood vessels on her scan, they said – felt like a hot flush and, for a moment, she was worried that she had wet herself. But then the sensation passed, and she was wheeled back down the corridor again.
Sarah lost track of time, but it appeared to be early evening when the diagnosis was confirmed. Her long limbs – the pride of the corps de ballet in her teenage years – were due to Marfan syndrome. This made the blood vessels prone to tearing, or dissection. The aorta, they explained, was the body’s main artery, carrying blood to pretty much every organ. Her aorta had developed such a tear. It was possible that she would need an operation to repair the damage. They had called the newly appointed vascular surgical consultant for his opinion. He was on his way now.
The wall of the aorta, they explained, is made up of layers of muscle and of elastic material. If that wall weakens – perhaps due to longstanding high blood pressure or to an inherited condition – it can tear. Blood can then force itself between the layers, the inner portion blocking flow inside the artery itself. Caught early, an operation can fix the tear. Left untreated, and the tear ‘runs’ – blocking key branches of the aorta.
What arteries? Well, those to the arms and legs, and to organs like the kidneys – and also the brain. The brainstem was part of a twenty-watt machine, vulnerable to any interruption to its fuel and oxygen supply. And those supplies were carried in the blood of just two pencil-thick vertebral arteries which arose from the aorta.
Sarah had a vague recollection of the consultant. She could hear him talking with the doctor outside. He seemed to speak with authority. Her doctor returned. The good news was that surgery could be avoided. She would go the high dependency ward where she would be given medicines to control her blood pressure. All would be well.
But all was not well.
Overnight, the tear extended. It first blocked the left carotid artery, removing the blood supply to the left cerebral hemisphere and, with it, the capacity to speak or to move the right side of the body. And then the vertebrobasilar artery followed. The brainstem infarcted, and Sarah’s brain became disconnected from the rest of her body.
She was locked in.
For the next five years, Sarah’s teenage daughter Tiffany became her carer – helping hoist her in and out of bed, changing the linen and the bags of feed which were attached to the small tube in her stomach. All this she did while studying at school, without complaint, but not without resentment. For she knew the truth.
Tiffany had received the message that her mother was unwell. The hospital wasn’t far, and she went home briefly to drop off her school things and to collect a washbag and nightdress for her mother before heading for the bus stop. The weather was bad and the traffic heavy, and there was some delay before she arrived at the emergency department. Unfamiliar with hospital process, she walked in through the doors and started looking for her mother.
Just ahead of her, using a telephone, stood a serious-looking man. He was tall and handsome. A man in charge. She stood patiently to one side.
He glanced at his watch. ‘About six forty-five. Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Of course I’m coming. Nothing would stop me. Nothing.’ A pause. ‘Aortic dissection. Or I’d have been there by now.’ Another pause. ‘No. We can take a chance on that. She won’t know. It’s all about priorities, right?’ He smiled again. ‘Then I would have been a very naughty boy and you would have every reason to express your displeasure.’ He nodded, and then again. ‘Seven thirty. I promise. No later. Promise. Bye.’
Sarah’s daughter was just about to step forward and say something, when another man appeared.
‘Sir – just checking. Prusside and labetalol infusions and analgaesia. No surgery? I know you are the consultant, but it is a type I . . .’
The surgeon smiled. ‘Indeed. But this is a complex case. Marfans and a dilated root. We’d be much better placed to see if we can temporize. Much in her best interest, you know. Let it settle and review in the morning.’
And with that, he had turned his back. Off to quite a different sort of theatre, and a non-hospital bed.
In time, of course, she had looked up the correct management. Surgery would have carried its risks, but there was no doubt that this would have been the right course of action. Five years on, and her mother died. Leaving Tiffany alone. And bitter. And scarred. She lost control of her life, just as her mother had lost control of hers. But always, deep down inside, she had a plan.
‘And that’s why. That’s why I turned myself around, after those years I had on the street, living rough. That’s why I trained to be a nurse when they wouldn’t take me for a doctor – and all because of who I was. That’s why I studied every night and got to work as close to Michael Trenchard as I could, but not too close. The hospice was perfect: caring for other people with no hope. But I needed to be close, and I needed a uniform. Someone my size. So I found Claire, and her flat. That couldn’t have worked better, too. She started going out with you! A pipeline of all I needed to know.
‘Anyway. After that, it was easy enough. I stalked him, I suppose, until one night he was alone in a bar, a bit drunk, and I introduced myself. A man like him can be easily led. No matter how vast his intellect, there’s only one thing that really matters to men like that. So I led him on. It didn’t take much except enthusiasm and availabilty. Soon I was a regular at the Dorchester suite he kept, especially for fucking grateful little mistresses like me. So when it came to that night in the basement, he hadn’t a clue. You should have seen him, Claire!’ For the first time Tiff laughed, loud and shrill. ‘Begging for it like a little puppy – and then I stuck it in him. You know, after all the planning, the waiting, I still could never have dreamed that it would work as well as it did. But just thinking about him, locked in there, just like my mother, never to get out . . . a fate worse than death – and I did it. I did it! You can’t imagine how I felt.’ She sighed. ‘I’d hoped he’d suffer so much longer. But now it has to end. Thanks to you, Kash. I also hoped not to get caught. But – hey! Thanks again.’ She shrugged. ‘So.’ Matter of fact, now. ‘I’m going to kill him. Kash, get out of my way.’
Silence settled on the room.
At last there were no more secrets.
‘No,’ Kash said at last. ‘No. I won’t.’ Slowly, he went on. ‘What he did was terrible. He should have been locked up – in prison. But this is murder. I can’t let you—’
‘I thought if anyone would understand, it would be you,’ Tiff said, looking at him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your mother, Kash. All those letters you write. Don’t look so surprised – I’ve been in your flat, remember? I found them all, Kash, tucked away behind some books where you didn’t think anyone would find them. Why did you never send them?’
‘What’s she talking about?’ Claire asked, her eyes flitting between them.
