The Ashes of an Oak (12 page)

Saturday

Chapter 13

‘What happened last night?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you remember anything?’

‘I got up to take a leak.’

‘And then?’

‘And then nothing.’

‘The nurses said that you were shouting, crying, screaming. They said that your door opened and they heard you. When they came in, you were on the floor, between the window and the bed.’

‘Then we’d better take their word for that, Doc. I don’t remember.’

‘You shouted something about being dead by Tuesday. Who were you shouting at?’

‘I don’t recall shouting.’

‘Did you have another hallucination? Did you see anything? It’s important, Frank. I’m not sure we can wait until Monday. Not now. Things are happening too fast.’

‘Good. Good. Cut it out. Stick those fine fingers of yours in my fucked up brain and get that fucking tumour out. I want my life back. I feel like I’m going mad.’

‘How’s the pins and needles?’

‘Up to my shoulder.’

‘Open your eyes wide. I want to shine a light into them.’

‘That’s bright. That’s too bright, Doc.’

‘Squeeze my hands. Come on. Squeeze tightly. Use all your strength.’

‘That is all my strength. Christ! I’ve seen people in the morgue with more strength than this.’

‘Now try to lift your leg. Push against my hand. As much as you can, Frank.’

‘I am. That’s as much as I can do.’

‘That’s quite a bit down on yesterday, Frank. You had a seizure last night, in case you hadn’t guessed. You caused quite a scare. The medic on nights was quite concerned.’

‘As concerned as I am?’

‘No, not as concerned as you. It’s nine-thirty now. I want to fit you in for three o’clock this afternoon. How would you feel about that?’

‘I’d feel…I don’t know. Jesus! I don’t know. Is it that bad?’

‘If it impacts upon the area of your brain that controls respiration, which it seems to be, we may not be able to get you back next time. I won’t lie, Frank.  You were a few litres of oxygen and a dose of Dexamethasone away from leaving us. I’m not sure you’ll get through the next one. And there will be a next one.’

‘What’s the chance I’ll live through it?’

‘Better than you have now. Listen, we’re getting good at this. We’ve had a lot of practice. A whole bunch of research is being done. The bigger risk is post-operatively. There’s the risk of infection. There’s the risk of neurological damage. You may have memory loss, word-finding difficulties, some loss of movement. You may have none of these.’

‘Can I still be a cop?’

‘I don’t know. But there’s a damned good chance that you can still be a husband for another thirty years. That’s assuming you don’t get run over or the cigarettes don’t kill you.’

‘I was thinking of putting in for retirement this week.’

‘Well, there you go. Maybe this is the push you need.’

‘I want to retire, not be invalided out. You ever think of that word, Doc? Invalid? Society will deem me invalid. I want to go out on my own terms. I don’t want people to see me for the last time in a wheelchair or leaning on a stick.’

‘Then let’s work towards that. We’ll get the physical therapists in as soon as possible. Get you up and about as quickly as we can. This is the easy bit. You’re going to have to do all the hard work. We’ll know pretty quickly after surgery how successful things have been.’

‘And if I ask you a question, you won’t bullshit me?’

‘You have my word.’

‘Look at me! I’m like a fucking baby, tears in my eyes.’

‘It’s big stuff, Frank. It’s your life we’re talking about. You have a right to be emotional. My job is to try and cut through that emotion and give it to you straight.’

‘Okay. Let’s do it. Would you ring my wife? Would you explain it to her? She’s seems tough, she is tough, but…’

‘I’ll talk to her, Frank. I’ll talk to you together. Team effort. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Anything else? I have to go and book you a space in theatre.’

‘Make sure I get a good seat.’

‘Front and middle, Frank. Anything else?’

‘No. Nothing else.’

‘Fine. I’ll see you later then.’

‘Doc?’

‘Yep?’

‘There’s a guy I need you to ring. I need to see him. It’s kind of urgent.’

‘Write his number down.’

‘Tell him to come in. Now.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘Thanks, Doc.’

Milt knocked on the door and waited for the response.

‘Christ, I hate these places,’ he said.

‘You’re a doctor,’ said Frank.

‘So I am and you’d never catch me in one of these places. All that death and dying. It gives me the creeps. You won’t hear my patients moaning and complaining.’ He sat down, his long thin frame swallowed in the wide, worn chair. ‘What’s up?’

‘They want to cut me open this afternoon.’

‘That’s good.’

‘You think so?’

‘Sure. Why would you want to spend the rest of the weekend staring at these four walls when you can be unconscious? Give me a coma any day compared to these places.’

‘You’re a comfort, Milt.’

Milt lit a cigarette. ‘You didn’t make me cancel my golf game to come in here and stroke your hair. What’s up?’

‘I need to ask you something a little weird.’

Milt puffed out his cheeks. ‘Wow. After what I see in my line of work, you’re gonna have to go some. Never mind, give it a try.’

‘Is it possible that this thing in my head could be causing hallucinations?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it possible that…’ Frank felt foolish. He’d dragged a friend in off the golf course, on a Saturday, to ask him a bunch of fool questions, half of which he already knew the answer to. ‘Is it possible that I could’ve done things because of the thing in my head?’

‘You don’t like the word tumour, do you, Frank?’

‘No, Milt. I don’t like that word. I find it disturbing.’

‘It is what it is, Frank. It is what it is. What kind of things? You mean like swearing and being overtly sexual, that sort of thing?’

Frank screwed his face up. ‘No. I mean, is there any way I could have killed those people without knowing it was me who killed them?’

Milt’s face fell. He had been prepared to come in and talk to a friend who was about to undergo the biggest event in his life. He was never going to play golf. He was going to have an early lunch and then spend the afternoon in one of the places he hated most in this world – a hospital. He wished he’d cancelled breakfast and come straight here.

He’d talked to Emmet the previous evening and been brought up to speed, gone round to Mary, got an earful and left with a bag of clothes. He even had the tools in his pocket to take some scrapings from under Frank’s nails, but he thought it was all bluster, humouring a sick guy.

‘For real?’

‘For real, Milt.’

‘No. I don’t.’ He rubbed his chin and scoured his memory. ‘People have had mood swings. Those bits of nastiness in all of us can become exaggerated to quite some degree by this kind of illness but, if you’re asking me about a split personality or something then, no, I don’t believe so. Or should I say, there’s no evidence for that as yet, but with all the research that’s going on, who knows? People have attributed head trauma to changes in personality that have made them do some bad things, but not so as they were unaware of it, so to say. They are aware of their actions at the time and for all intents and purposes are acting normally, within the boundaries of their physical and psychological makeup at that time.’

He opened the window so that his smoke had somewhere to go. It just let the outside heat in. The smoke drifted lazily past his head and floated outside the sixth storey window, then slowly began to descend as, like a wraith, it became absorbed by the air and disappeared. The rains of Wednesday night were as distant as Noah’s flood.

He leaned on the sill and looked down at the people milling below. How like ants and bees we are, he thought. How set we are upon our journey, so that no stick nor upturned leaf can pull us off course but for more than two heartbeats worth of time. For all our inventions and insights and discoveries, we are still ants and bees and still tied to destiny.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Do you think you could have done it?’

Frank raised his hands hopelessly. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t get how I can be following a hallucination around town and ending up with bodies. I don’t get it.’

‘It’s weird, Frank. People pick up subliminally on things and log them away. It could be, with your condition, that you were a little more susceptible to these things. You chased this guy into the empty factory and found a body in a furnace. Maybe your subconscious led you there. You knew in the depths of your memory, as you drove along, that there was a deserted factory there, but instead of pulling over like anybody else would, your brain overcompensated by creating a situation. It was your way of expressing yourself at that moment in time. You created urgency, got a reaction from your partner and investigated a place that you believed may be connected with the crime. It’s the way we work in abnormal or stressful situations. You still got the same end result. Stop looking so hard.’

Frank sighed and crossed his arms. He wasn’t allowed now to eat, drink or smoke and it was killing him. ‘Do you have a name for the girl yet?’

‘No. We’re working on it.’

Frank held back. Should he reveal what he knew and bring it all down on himself? Or should he let the girl’s parents suffer a little longer? They’d find them eventually, just not today. Maybe not even this week or this month. Eventually.

He put his head back on the pillow and stared hard at the ceiling. He didn’t want to see his friend’s eyes. ‘Her name was Jennifer Hamblett. She was nineteen and lived in Brownsville. She was a nurse. Her parents live in Long Island. He’s a doctor. Her mother works in a department store.’

He put a hand across his mouth as if to deny to himself that he had ever spoken. His breath stuttered as he tried to control his emotions.

Milt didn’t answer immediately. His eyes narrowed and he took a long slow drag on his cigarette, as if it hadn’t quite registered yet what he had heard.

Eventually the silence became too much.

‘How do you know?’ he asked.

Frank bit his lip. He didn’t feel it. The numbness was creeping.

‘He told me.’

‘Who?’ asked Milt. He leaned forward, concern etched into every crease in his face. ‘Who told you?’

‘The man in the suit,’ said Frank. ‘The man in the goddam suit!’

Sunday

Chapter 14

Steve Wayt sat upon his sofa and gazed blankly at the TV. He had a beer in his hand which hadn’t passed his lips. The ashtray next to him was full.

The doors to the yard were open and he could hear the distant, happy screams of neighbourhood kids. The shadows in the garden had started to grow with the turning of the day.

Val, his wife, had stayed out of his way and gone to her mother’s. It wasn’t petulance on her part, not by a long way. She had learned to recognise those spells when her husband needed some alone time, some thinking time. He did the same for her. They knew that living in each other’s pockets wasn’t natural, that everyone needed, once in a while, to breathe their own air.

Frank was fine. Steve had telephoned six times between five o’clock yesterday and now. The nurses had begun to get a little pissed off with him. He was willing to bet that Emmet and Milt had also phoned in, especially Emmet. Frank, with ten years on Emmet, was almost like a father to him out of work. At the precinct, Frank was nothing but that crusty old bastard who liked to stir the pot once in a while, but he’d learned a lot from him and Frank had respected his position from the off. The job meant more to Frank than his ego.

Emmet and Milt had come to see him at eleven that morning. Milt spilled the beans on what Frank had told him. He had listened, despite a desperate need to interrupt, because he knew that Milt always had something worthwhile to say.

When he told him what Frank had said, he didn’t react. He looked at Emmet, who had linked his fingers and twirled his thumbs and said not a word.

‘What about his clothes?’ he asked Milt.

Milt, for the first time, looked uncomfortable.

Emmet broke in. ‘He has specks of the girl’s blood on his shirt.’ He threw a quick glance at Milt who in turn looked through the doors into the sunshine. ‘And her skin under his nails. Milt was up half the night checking and double-checking.’

He sounded about as down-hearted as it was possible to be. He wasn’t talking, he was reciting, reciting words that he had gone over a hundred times in his head on the journey to Steve’s place. It sounded to him as if it was someone else delivering the news. His voice had lost every ounce of the positivity he that usually tried to keep in it. He was glad. He didn’t want to sound like himself. He wanted a stranger to give this news.

‘So do we conclude from that that Frank at least killed the girl?’ asked Steve.

‘It’s circumstantial evidence, Steve, you know that. It’s not exactly a blood-soaked knife in his hand but, combine that with what Frank told Milt and the concerns he expressed to me and it paints a pretty grim picture.’

‘Remind me at what time the girl was killed, Milt.’

Milt brought himself back into the room. ‘That’s a nice yard,’ he said. ‘You and Val ought to have some kids.’

‘We occasionally try,’ smiled Steve.

‘You’d make a great Dad, and Val…’

‘The time,’ pushed Steve. ‘What time did she die?’

‘Best estimate, six to eight hours before Frank found her.’

‘Was found next to her,’ corrected Emmet.

‘Yeah,’ said Milt. ‘Like he said.’

Steve did some mental maths. ‘And the gunshots were reported at fifteen to midnight.’ He put his hand over his eyes to block out the world while he thought. ‘Frank said he parked up outside his house at about ten-thirty, which means he left work at about nine forty-five, give or take.’

‘That’s late,’ said Milt.

‘He’d been working,’ said Steve quickly. ‘We don’t all keep office hours you know.’

‘Was he seen to be working?’ asked Emmet. He raised his eyebrows as if to say the question had to be asked.

‘I didn’t check.’

‘Christ,’ said Emmet. ‘You’d better.’

‘So, she was killed,’ continued Steve, ‘between four pm and six pm on the day her body was found.’

‘I’d say so,’ agreed Milt.

‘Was there blood on the floor at the scene, Milt?’

‘Not a drop, Em.’

‘Damn it.’

‘Yeah, but I didn’t leave work until just after six that day, so I can vouch for Frank up to then,’ said Steve with a grain of hope in his voice.

‘So, where was Frank after you left?’ asked Emmet.

‘I don’t know,’ said Steve.

‘Then we’d better check with the guys on shift that day.’

Steve lit his tenth cigarette of the morning. ‘You’re not falling for this are you, Emmet? You said yourself that he was working with me at the time Mrs Dybek was killed…’

‘I’m not saying he killed the Dybek woman,’ said Emmet firmly. ‘I’m saying that we need to exclude him from the Hamblett murder.’

‘You’re not linking them?’

‘I’m keeping an open mind, Steve, as you should do. I don’t know enough about this tumour stuff to discount the possibility that Frank may have gone off the edge on this one.’

‘Come on, Emmet,’ said Milt. ‘I told you already…’

Emmet held up a finger to stop him. ‘You told me that there were no known cases. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, Milt. It’s a funny thing the brain, you know that. We know that personalities can change with brain trauma. We know that it can accentuate the good and the bad within us. How much don’t we know? For all we know we could all just be part of some massive dream in the brain of a giant being from Mars.’

‘That’s stretching it a bit, I’d say,’ said Milt testily.

‘Really? Prove otherwise.’

Milt turned away again, shaking his head. ‘You’re being absurd.’

‘No, Milt. I’m being open to possibilities. You and Steve should be the same. If there is the remotest possibility that this girl was a separate killing to the others and that Frank may have done it…’ ’

‘We are,’ interrupted Steve, trying to keep the peace. ‘We are open to possibilities. It’s just difficult to conceive, that’s all.’

‘No argument here,’ said Emmet. ‘Let’s just do what we’re paid for and see where it goes, but keep it under the radar. We don’t have to advertise our thoughts. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ agreed Steve.

Milt was reluctant to admit that there was even the slightest chance that Frank could have committed murder, but he also had to concede that the possibility existed. He had the evidence and Emmet was right. The human brain was an undiscovered country; who knew what terrors lay in wait.

Emmet stood up and lit a cigarette. He wandered towards the garden. The sun fell brazenly upon it, the shadows high, some hidden beneath the solid counterpart that gave them life. Soon it would cross the yardarm and the shadows would begin to stretch and fall to their inevitable deaths as slowly, slowly, another night seized hold of the world.

‘Milt?’ he said. ‘You with us?’

‘Of course I am, Em. Two investigations, one of them decidedly low key. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped at you like that.’

‘You should hear the mayor when he gets all twisted up!’ Emmet walked onto the grass. It felt brittle beneath his feet, in desperate need of more rain. ‘Forget about it. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.’

Steve sat and stared at the TV. All these channels and each one of them shit, he thought. We get more use out of a mountain.

Part of him hoped that tomorrow would bring another murder, a murder that would, once and for all, take Frank out of the equation.

It was an awful thought, to wish for such a thing; the death of another to spare the one, but he didn’t know the other. Frank he knew. Frank he cared about. Frank was real. The other would be just one more meteor skimming the edge of his life, then squirting off towards dark horizons, never to be seen again.

He sipped the beer. It had grown warm and flat.

He drew back his arm and flung it angrily through the doors towards the garden.

As it rolled, a spume of beer flew in its wake and reminded him of the tips of a white, wild sea.

WEEK TWO:

Monday