Dying of the Light (8 page)

Reading it, for a second she felt a wave of despair wash over her. The only supposedly rational species on the entire planet, the one with the fate of the rest of the natural world in its epicene hands, thought the matter so unimportant. The possible, not definite, loss of one of the billion upon billion of members of its own species merited four whole pages of newsprint, whereas
humanity’s
unthinking obliteration of an entire class of unique creatures deserved only a tiny footnote. Tomorrow more would be written about the boy’s abduction, but nothing further about the end of the baiji. Then again,
tomorrow
, like everyone else, she would consume the coverage
avidly. Possibly she would read it while eating a yellow-fin tuna sandwich from a polythene carrier bag and, certainly, having done nothing for the next species perched
precariously
on the edge of extinction. Like everyone else, she was too busy living her day-to-day life, her good
intentions
simply paving on the road to hell.

Sleep was hard to come by, but just as she dropped off the phone rang. Alice woke, and in her dozy state hoped that Ian would answer it before remembering that he was away, visiting his mother. She clamped the receiver to her ear.

‘Ali… eh, Alice?’ Miss Spinnell, her neighbour,
warbled
. ‘I need your help. Can you come down straight away?’

The World Service was still on the radio. Six pips at two o’clock.

‘It’s only two, Miss Spinnell. It couldn’t possibly wait until the morning?’

‘No. It’s a drama… an emergy… a crisis. We may even need a doctor.’

Dragging herself out of bed, head still longing for the pillow, Alice shivered in the cold, searching around in the darkness for a jersey to put over her nightie. The recent spell of plain-sailing in her dealings with her
elderly
neighbour had seemed too good to be true. After all, Alzheimer’s did not stop, had no second thoughts about the casual destruction it wrought on its victim’s mind and personality. She had watched as, before her eyes, it had transformed a bright independent old lady into a
suspicious
eccentric, obsessed with the theft of her possessions by unseen intruders. Alice herself was now treated as a
suspect, although her dog, Quill, remained the light of the old lady’s life.

The door had been left ajar by the time Alice reached her neighbour’s flat, but Miss Spinnell had returned to her bed and was sitting crouched on it, head down, knees against her chest, whimpering to herself. Alice came and sat on the edge of the bed. Seeing a wizened hand nearby she clasped it in her own, intending to comfort the
distressed
woman. Instantly the frail fingers were whipped away as if they had, inadvertently, touched lizard skin. The moaning, however, continued unabated.

‘What is it, Miss Spinnell?’

In response the crouched figure slowly straightened itself, and Alice was surprised to see that her neighbour was wearing dark glasses.

‘Blindness has come upon me! The lights have dipped… er, dimmed.’

Alice edged up the bed, watching Miss Spinnell recoil as she came closer, until she was able to lift the glasses off the ancient nose.

‘I think you have accidentally put on the wrong
spectacles
. You’ve been wearing dark ones,’ Alice said.

Miss Spinnell screwed up her eyes several times, as if accustoming herself once more to light and sight. She looked, briefly, sheepish before an expression of disdain transformed her face.

‘Accidentally! Accidentally! Ha! How simper…
simplistic
can it be. Can’t you grasp how they operate? Whilst I’ve been blind, blind I say, yet more of my artifice… arti… arti… things, will have been purloined. Kindly check the silver, Alice.’

‘But, Miss Spinnell, how could they have got in?’

‘Through the open door,’ the old lady said. ‘The door I opened…’ she looked hard at her visitor before
continuing
, ‘especially for you.’

To put her neighbour’s mind at rest, the tired
policewoman
opened drawers and dust-laden cupboards, all the while learning more about Miss Spinnell and the havoc the disease had left in its wake. On a high shelf, in among well-thumbed volumes of verse, were little reminders of the person she had once been. A medal dated 1995 from The Poetry Society, a barn owl’s wing wrapped
carefully
in tissue paper, and, most poignant of all, a faded photograph showing a young girl laughing uproariously with a boy in uniform, and an inscription on the back: ‘To Morag, the most beautiful of the Spinnell sisters, with all my love, Charlie.’ And over the writing in Miss Spinnell’s ancient trembling hand had been scrawled ‘PLEASE DO NOT TAKE’, a pitiful entreaty to a pitiless enemy.

As soon as the polythene bag had been removed the corpse resumed its human shape again. A boyish
photographer
began to prowl around the body, snapping it from every angle, issuing instructions as if at a fashion shoot and smiling ghoulishly at his own joke, until told off by the pathologist. Meanwhile, Alice eased the woman’s arms off her breast and down to her sides, lifting one of them up to remove the sleeve before rolling her over to release the material at the back. The final cuff peeled off without difficulty.

‘At least she’s cold,’ Doctor Zenabi said
conversationally
, while raising the body slightly to allow Alice to pull the coat from under it.

‘Does it make a difference?’ she replied, all her
concentration
on the task in hand.

‘Certainly does. Give me cold flesh, cold blood,
anytime
. I don’t like it when it’s still warm,’ he continued, ‘– the transitional phase. It’s horrid cutting them then. Far too close to life. I like my bodies to be… well,
thoroughly
chilled.’

Conversely, we want the body still warm, Alice thought. No time to have passed and the trail still hot. She felt in one of the woman’s coat pockets and pulled out its
contents
. A mobile phone, a purse and a packet of chewing gum. Putting her hand into the other pocket, she felt a sharp, stabbing pain and withdrew it instantly as if bitten
by a cobra. She inspected her palm, and saw a single, tiny puncture mark, immediately below the crease of the little finger. Fighting to contain the panic she could feel rising within her, and cursing her own stupidity, she shook out the contents of the pocket onto a nearby table, and felt her heart sink as the rounded cylinder of a hypodermic syringe rolled across its surface. As she picked it up by the plunger, light glinted on the uncapped needle protruding from the barrel. Things like this were supposed to happen to other people. Not to her.

‘Ahmed,’ she said lightly, but he did not hear her, still busy wrestling an obstinate baseball boot free from a foot while humming to himself in an eerie falsetto.

‘Ahmed, I think I may have been jabbed by something. A needle-stick injury, or whatever it’s called,’ she shouted, holding up the syringe for him to see. Doctor Zenabi looked up, flung the boot he was holding to a technician and rushed over to her. He grasped the hand she was extending towards him and examined it for himself. Blood had begun to ooze from the pinprick and he hustled her towards the sink, ran the cold tap and plunged her hand under its stream. Ten minutes later, her palm and fingers now white and numb from the icy water, the pathologist allowed her to remove it, binding the injury for her in clean paper towelling.

‘You need to go to Accident and Emergency right now, Alice,’ he ordered.

Still feeling shocked, her bandaged hand tucked
protectively
under her other arm, she asked, ‘What may I have picked up… from the needle, I mean?’

‘Probably nothing,’ he reassured her.

‘Yes, probably nothing,’ she repeated. ‘But if I were to be unlucky, what would the something be?’

Doctor Zenabi sighed. ‘The main possibilities would be HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, I suppose, but you’ll be OK. A and E will give you prophylactic treatment for the HIV. Preventative treatment.’

‘And for the Hepatitis B and C?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s available. But, don’t worry, I’ll take some blood from the body and get it cross-matched for infectious diseases. Much speedier than waiting for you to develop something. Which you won’t!’ he added quickly, his brown eyes fixed on her, no argument to be countenanced. As if the outcome of the risk has anything to do with our discussion, she thought bleakly.

‘How long before I’ll know… whether the body was clean or not?’

‘Two days at most. I’ll make sure the hospital gives it priority. And we’ll see if the woman’s medical records suggest she’s clean. And don’t forget, even if she isn’t clean, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have caught anything.’

Returning to Broughton Place from the Royal Infirmary in a taxi, plastic pill containers clinking in her bag, Alice found that she was no longer in control of her thoughts. They ran free, tormenting her, defining and refining her fears, exploring dreadful possibilities or, worse,
probabilities
, then ruthlessly following the chain of consequences to the most awful conclusions: chronic invalidity ending in premature death. She wondered what she should tell her parents, and Ian, before deciding that nothing should be said. Even if she was now on tenterhooks, there was no reason for them to join her swinging on them.

Examining his passenger’s anxious face in the
rear-view
mirror, the taxi driver said cheerily: ‘It may never happen, hen!’

Alice nodded, flashing a weak smile, unable to
summon
a suitably light-hearted response. It already had.

Back home in the flat, she rifled amongst her CDs for something to raise her spirits, lighten her mood,
eventually
settling on a collection of songs by Charles Trenet. The laughter smouldering in his voice would surely do the trick, and his French vowels would glide meaninglessly over her, soothing and relaxing as they flowed. Thinking about it coolly, dispassionately, here she was in the middle of a murder enquiry with two days off, and thus far, the threatened side-effects from the prophylactic drugs had not appeared. In fact, it was a perfect opportunity to take Quill for a walk, and in the high, blustery on-shore wind, the waves at Tantallon should be a sight to behold. And what could be more exhilarating, more life-affirming, than the sight of those endless breakers pounding the rocks, crashing skywards in all their bright majesty.

Pleased to have found a distraction, she walked towards the front door, intent on collecting Quill from Miss Spinnell, but found that she was bumping,
unexpectedly
, against the wall. She straightened herself up and took a few more steps, only to find herself colliding with it again. As she glanced down at the floor it began to incline upwards and then recede, then suddenly reared up once more. She shook her head forcefully, blinking hard,
trying
to restore normality and her balance with it. But the minute she opened her eyes again, the corridor began to revolve, enclosing her. She fell to her knees, edging on all
fours towards the bedroom, stopping every so often to catch her breath, shoulders flat against the wall.

Once in bed, eyes tightly closed, she tried to calm
herself
, slow her own heartbeat, breathing in and out deeply and deliberately. The spinning sensation continued
regardless
, its rhythm now becoming disturbed, unpredictable, lurching her with dizzying speed first in one direction and then another. Bile flooded into her mouth and, in
seconds
, she was violently sick.

Eight hours later she was woken by the sound of a key in the lock, accompanied by a series of thuds as Quill pranced exuberantly around Ian, celebrating his release from his eccentric custodian and his return home.

Ian bent over her as if to plant a kiss on her cheek, but hesitated momentarily, taking in her pale face and exhausted eyes. Looking at him she mumbled something about a virulent sick bug at work, remembering to tell him to keep his distance in case he should catch it. At once he recoiled theatrically, taking a few steps back from the bed, and the loss of his presence by her side, fleeting as it had been, brought tears to her eyes. His joke was not funny. If she had caught HIV from the corpse then this might be the pattern for any future that they might share. The thought of losing him, of the closeness, the intimacy that they had so recently found, dismayed her, allowing a sob to escape. Any one of those alphabetical diseases, never mind death, could do that.

‘Christ, Alice,’ he said, surprised by her reaction. ‘What on earth’s the matter? I was just joking.’

‘Oh, just this sick bug thing…’ she replied, unable to say more. But however hard she tried, she could not halt
the tears which continued to stream down her face,
wetting
the pillow and her hair on it.

‘Darling, it can’t just be that.’

Hearing the tenderness in his voice and the
unfamiliar
endearment, she sobbed again. He had never called her ‘darling’ before, and now joined the precious few she knew who meant the word. His concern undid her,
crumbling
her resolve so that when he repeated his question she told him the truth, managing a fairly clinical account of what had happened.

He listened, nodding occasionally, and then applied his mind to the problem. Doctor Zenabi had said he thought it improbable that she would catch anything, and he was the medical expert. He was the man they should trust and believe in. So she would not catch anything. But suppose, at the very worst, she had contracted HIV. Drugs were now available making the disease treatable, and its presence need make little difference to their lives. Couples all over the world lived with it. Also, he knew a few people with Hepatitis C and they appeared to lead completely normal lives too. He seemed so confident, so unperturbed, by her news that she began to wonder if it was, after all, so very serious. Perhaps she had been
melodramatic
, had overreacted. All might indeed, as he had predicted, be well; and they had faced the worst together and he had not run away.

With the subtlety of a practised butler, present but unobtrusive, he caused freshly laundered night clothes to appear, her jug of water was filled regularly and innocent enquiries from her parents were fended off. However, the lure of the studio proved as irresistible as ever, and once he returned from it clutching in his icy hands a sketch of Quill, done from memory, to appease her for his day-long
absence. But when, early on Monday morning, the phone rang and Ahmed Zenabi broke the news that the victim’s blood had shown nothing, Ian jumped onto their bed and hugged her, laughing out loud and, she noted, every bit as relieved as she was herself.

With the car idling at a red light, Simon Oakley peeled the silver paper from around his packet of Polos, rested the now unstable column of sweets on the dashboard and put four of them into his mouth.