‘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.
4
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.