Mystery Man (30 page)

'I'm
sure
,' I hissed.

I followed her through the swing doors. I tried to avoid breathing. I did not wish to pick up bugs. Hospitals were the home of MRSA and
C.difficile,
and those were just the ones with bad press agents. There were thousands more that would kill you as soon as look at you. Hospitals were greenhouses for bugs, superbugs, and super-superbugs. My huge intake of medication was no protection; all they did was reduce the effectiveness of my immune system. Walking into the Ulster Hospital behind Alison's wheelchair was like signing my own death certificate.

Yet I did it.

She was helped on to a bed. I gave as many details to the nurse as I could, and then the locum doctor tried to ask her some questions. Her responses were largely incoherent. She had hold of my hand and wouldn't let go.

Instead the locum asked me what had happened. I told him her drink had been spiked.

'Are you sure?' he responded. 'Because ninety-nine per cent of women who come through here saying their drinks have been spiked are just very drunk.'

'
Yes
,' I said, 'I'm
sure
.'

'You do seem sure.' He nodded. 'Do you happen to know which one – GHB, ketamine, roofies?'

His clear implication was that if I knew for sure she'd been drugged, then I was responsible for it.

'No,' I said, 'I have no idea. Just . . . fix her.'

He raised an eyebrow. 'Well,' he said, 'there's a simple enough test.' He plucked one of her hairs. 'I'll send it for analysis; in the meantime let's see what we can do to make her more comfortable. If she has been . . .
spiked . . .
it could be eight . . . maybe twelve hours before she's on her feet again.'

'But she is . . . she is going to be all right, isn't she?'

The locum gave me a long look. 'That depends,' he said, 'on whether she's been spiked or not.'

I could have throttled him.

Or, more likely, not.

I just shook my head and looked back down at my love. She was already asleep. And yet her grip had not loosened one iota. If the superbugs showed similar determination, I really was screwed.

There were no beds to be had elsewhere in the hospital, not because they were overcrowded, a big fat nurse gleefully told me, but because half a dozen wards were closed due to a
C.difficile
outbreak. So Alison remained on a curtained-off bed in A & E while I moved between a red plastic seat by her bed and the waiting room. Several times I approached the Coke machine but backed away because the thought of all the sick fingers that had pressed its buttons made me feel ill. That and the air-conditioning and the smell of disinfectant, which, clearly, wasn't strong enough. The locum doctor I'd seen did not return to update me, and every time I re-entered Alison's cubicle nurses looked at me suspiciously, apart from the big fat one who seemed to think I was quite cute. She was probably out of her head on purloined drugs.

An elderly man in a dressing gown and slippers sat down beside me in the waiting room, despite there being other chairs. I immediately felt uneasy. What if he collapsed and I was forced to give him the kiss of life? No, in fact, nothing would force me to give him the kiss of life. He could lie there until someone else noticed. I'd done all my saving for one day.

He said, 'Everything all right, son?'

'Yeah, fine.'

'You don't look fine. Waiting for someone?'

'Yeah.'

'I've a bed here in casualty because everywhere else is full, but there's no bloody TV. So I sit out here, annoying strangers.'

I nodded.

'Do you want a nut?' he asked. He offered me a plastic bag. 'My daughter brought them, but I don't like nuts.'

Ordinarily I would have told him to catch a grip, but I hadn't eaten since God knows when and I was starving. My mother used to say, 'You're not starving, people in Africa are starving. You're just hungry.' But no, I
was
starving. She knew nothing about Africa. I looked at the bag. I have been cursed with every allergy under the sun, except for a nut allergy. Ironic, you might say.

'What's wrong with you?' I asked.

'Slight stroke. Number five.'

Strokes, I thought, were not contagious. I took the bag. I opened it and put one of the nuts in my mouth. It tasted of nut, with something extra, quite sweet.

I was on my third when the paramedics came rushing in, pushing a trolley with the Creature from the Black Laguna on board. My locum came shooting out of another set of doors. He briefly examined the Creature's bloodied and bashed head and immediately instructed the paramedics to bypass A & E and to take him directly to theatre. The locum gave a slight shake of his head as the trolley zoomed away and in turning made eye contact with me. Briefly. He disappeared back through the doors.

The stroke victim said, '
He's
not long for this world.'

I nodded. And thought: good riddance.

I went to hand the bag of nuts back to the stroke victim, but he shook his head and told me to keep them.

When I stepped back into Alison's cubicle, the fat nurse was just finishing changing her drip. She smiled warmly on her way out. I sat down. I ate a nut. I closed my eyes. I wondered what the taxi driver would say to his wife when he walked through the door covered in blood. If he went directly to his next customer, the customer would climb in one side, and immediately climb out the other.

I drifted.

I was holding Alison's hand when she made a sudden lurch, which woke me. I glanced at my watch: three hours had passed. She blinked groggily, then looked around her, clearly disorientated. She focused on me, then away and back. 'Where . . . where am I?'

'It's okay. You're in hospital. You're safe.'

'Safe? Hospital? What's going on . . . where . . .?'

'You're all right. Max Mayerova slipped you a Mickey Finn.'

'Mickey . . . who?'

'He put something in your drink. GBH, Kitekat, roofties . . .'

'I don't under . . .'

'He spiked your wine, he took you outside, he handed you over to someone else, someone who was going to kill you. I followed, I got you back . . .'

She looked lost. 'Wine . . .? I remember, I remember . . . the restaurant . . . '

'I saved you.'

'No . . . no . . .'

'Yes, really . . .'

'No . . . you didn't . . .
no
. . .'

'He can't harm you now, sweetie, you're safe with me . . .'

'No . . .'

'You really are.'

'No . . . Brian, where's Brian?'

Oh
fantastic.
My moment of triumph and the bloody ex is once again her first thought. I had given her everything, or some small part of everything, and she had slapped it right back in my face. Christ. She had absolutely no idea which side her bread was buttered.

NO.

Wait.

I should give her time, space. She'd just woken up, she was still drugged, she was rambling. About
him
. They must have spent a lot of time together. Having sex. It was ingrained. It was none of my business.

Alison squeezed my hand. 'Please, where is he?'

I grunted. I poured her a cup of water from a jug a nurse must have left while we were sleeping. Ice cubes plonked down into the plastic cup. I hoped the nurse had been wearing disposable gloves. Alison drank it down greedily. When she was finished she handed me the cup and pushed herself up into a sitting position.

'I feel strange,' she said.

'Of course you do.'

'But I've missed you.'

That was more like it. 'I've missed you too.'

'But you wouldn't talk to me. You wouldn't tell me what you were doing. That wasn't fair. That wasn't nice. I thought we were partners.'

Never
partners, but it wasn't the time or place. I was constantly surprising myself – now I was self-censoring. I cupped my other hand around hers and patted it gently. I judged that she was now compos mentis enough to hear my news. My double whammy. Cracking the case
and
saving her life.

I was some pup.

'Alison . . .'

I paused for effect, but she leapt in.

'I didn't want to go behind your back,' she said, 'but you excluded me. I got angry. I wanted to show you what I was capable of by myself. That's why I arranged to meet Max Mayerova.'

'It was stupid and foolhardy,' I said, 'but also brave.'

'It was one of the most exciting things I've ever done.'

'If I hadn't been following you, you might be dead right now.'

She shook her head, and then looked woozy for several moments. She took a deep breath. '
No
,' she said softly, 'it wasn't like that . . . please believe me . . . I knew he was involved in the murders, do you think I was going to go out with him all alone and keep it a big secret? How professional would that be?'

Not very.
For a jeweller.

'You mean you left a note or—'

'No! For goodness' sake! I was never in any danger.'

'He
drugged
you.'

'I half expected it.'

'But what if it had been poison and you'd
died
?'

'I knew he wouldn't do that, or I guessed, or I supposed. He couldn't have me dropping dead on the table, and anything that was slow release would mean a possibility of escape and being able to finger him before I died. No, I pretty much guessed he'd find something just strong enough to knock me off my feet.'

I stared at her. 'This isn't a game, Alison, he drugged you, he passed you along to his killer friend and—'

'
No.
It wouldn't have happened. Brian was there to protect me.'

'He . . .
what
?'

She smiled sympathetically. 'Oh look at you, such concern, you're so sweet, but really, I was perfectly safe.'

'Tell me that bit about Brian again.'

'He's just so dead on. Even though I can't live with him, he's always there for me. Look, I would have wanted you to be there with me, or watching over me, but you were incommunicado, so I arranged with Brian to follow Max's car, and then to phone me at a prearranged time. I used the excuse of a family emergency and Brian came by to pick me up. And good thing he did, because I could hardly stand.'

'It was very kind of him,' I said.

'Well if you were watching as well, then I was in several pairs of very safe hands. But you must have seen him. Black Laguna?' I kind of nodded and shrugged at the same time. Alison yawned extravagantly, and for several moments seemed to forget where she was in the story. 'Oh yes . . . he came and got me . . . put me in the back seat, but I was so out of it I couldn't tell him where I was living now . . . I was very groggy . . . he must have given up on me and decided to take me back to his place out in the sticks . . . and . . . and . . . that's where it gets a bit hazy. You said you saved me, but I was with Brian . . . did he bring me here? Or did you go to his house . . . did something happen there? I'm confused, I can't . . .'

'You need to rest,' I said. 'Plenty of time to explain in the morning.'

Alison nodded vaguely. She nestled back into the pillow. 'Rest . . . yes . . . but don't go away.'

'I'll be right here,' I said.

Here, or Bolivia.

I sat in the waiting room, nervously chewing my nuts. I was unsettled, I was anxious, but I wasn't to blame. Brian was in the operating theatre, for all I knew fighting for his life, simply because Alison had made the cardinal error of not letting anyone know that she had dragged him into
The Case of the Dancing Jews.
Absolutely
nothing to do with me.
He had been attacked by a taxi driver who had probably watched
Taxi Driver
too often. Brian was the unfortunate victim of friendly fire. Now that I thought about it, I was surprised by his size, and couldn't understand how, if she now had me as a lover, she could ever have been attracted to someone of his proportions. Maybe all women go through a phase of loving brawn over brain. In my few brief glimpses of him I had deduced that he didn't have the intelligence to tie his own shoelaces. The problem of course was that now he probably never would.

It was typical of life in general that at my very moment of triumph, when I should have been carried around shoulder high for cracking the case and overseeing the vanquishing of a villain, it had been snatched away from me. Instead of luxuriating in righteousness, in the victory of good over evil, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room chewing on an old man's nuts and worrying that my bloody handshake with the mental taxi driver meant that Brian's DNA had transferred to me and could thus tie me to what some cynical cop would doubtless consider to be attempted murder. Vigilantes have never gotten a good deal from the forces of law and order. They object to being shown how it should be done. I shook my head despondently. It was amazing how quickly things could change. One moment a nodding acquaintance of
I,
The Jury
, the next it was
Me, The Scapegoat.

The elderly stroke victim came back into the waiting room, spotted me, and despite my deliberately looking away when we made eye contact, shuffled across to sit beside me.

'Still here?' he asked.

'Yeah,' I said.

I sighed. I offered him his bag of nuts back.

He shook his head. 'Told you, don't like them. The chocolate was nice, though.'

'Sorry?'

'I sucked the chocolate off them and put them back in the bag. I hate to see anything go to waste.'

I nodded for several moments, then stood up wordlessly and hurried to the toilets, where I threw up.

I stayed in the cubicle for an hour. He might as well have injected me with his phlegm. For all I knew I had caught diabetes and emphysema and malaria and clots. The MRSA and
C.difficile
I'd already picked up were probably complaining about the overcrowding. I was dying. I was Frank Bigelow in
D.O.A.
I would walk into the cop shop and say, 'I want to report a murder.'

'Who was murdered?' they'd say.

'I was.'

Except I wasn't the victim of some criminal conspiracy. I had been done down by old-man dribble.