After a while she looked up at me, turning the sheaf of documents so that the top sheet faced me.
‘Incised wounds,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Is that what this is about? Incised wounds?’
I was momentarily at a loss. ‘There are a lot of woundings in there, Nurse Ryall,’ I acknowledged. ‘But as you can see, there’s no pattern. We’ve got every weapon under the sun, including some that came as news to me, and every variation on murder, suicide, self-harm and lethal ambush. It’s hard to think of a kind of wound that isn’t in there.’
She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Are you serious?’ she demanded at last.
‘I thought I was.’
‘Then you really needed to ask an expert.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The ones that aren’t in there? Blunt-instrument trauma. Crush and impact trauma. Abraded wounds. Gunshot wounds. Not to mention, if you widen the field a bit, burns, fractures, dislocations, concussions and sprains, strangulation, suffocation–’
I held up my hands, partly in surrender and partly to rein her in a little. ‘Okay, fine. What does that leave?’
‘I told you,’ Nurse Ryall said, with slightly exaggerated patience. ‘Incised and puncture wounds — and you’ve got one of each of them up in that ward. Almost all these cases fall into one of those two basic types: the damage was done either with a point or with an edge — or sometimes both. Stabbing and hacking, basically. Hurting people with things that are sharp.’
‘You must be a lot of fun at playtime,’ I said sardonically. It was either that or break into full applause, and I didn’t want her to get too cocky at this early stage in our relationship.
‘Nursing diploma — BSc equivalent. I’m studying four nights a week.’ She said, stiffly on her dignity. ‘So I don’t get much playtime, Felix Castor. But I do get to know everything there is to know about wounds. Or did you think that was just prurient curiosity?’
‘Fix,’ I said.
She bridled. ‘What is?’
‘My name. It’s Fix. Short for Felix.’
‘Oh.’ She looked only slightly mollified. She stood up, briskly, as if she was suddenly conscious of other things she ought to be doing. Her break must have ended long ago. ‘Well, you can carry on calling me Nurse Ryall. It shows respect.’
‘Good enough,’ I agreed. ‘And since you’re the expert, can you do me one other favour?’
‘Possibly.’ Her tone was cold. The playtime remark had gone badly awry. ‘Depends what it is.’
I gave Nurse Ryall another one of my rare and precious business cards, having palmed one from the pocket of the paletot earlier. ‘Keep an eye on Kenny for me,’ I said. ‘And an ear. If he says anything else that you can make out, or if anything else happens that strikes you as weird, or even if he just gets better or worse, will you keep me clued in?’
She took the card, but she looked disapproving. ‘Why?’ she demanded.
‘Because it’ll be another fact,’ I said. ‘And I’m collecting them.’
‘Wide range of wounds,’ she scoffed. I took that as a positive sign: she wasn’t saying no.
‘So sue me,’ I said, with a comic shrug. ‘I bet you don’t know anything about medieval grimoires.’
‘I can see what’s in front of my face, though.’
Her breasts were on a level with my eyes. ‘Me too,’ I said.
‘Don’t push it, Castor.’ She dropped Nicky’s printouts onto my tray table with an audible thud. The top sheets sloughed off in a loose concertina.
‘Thanks,’ I said, sincerely.
‘You’re welcome. And thank you too, I suppose. At least now I know that I’m not going mad. You should get some sleep.’
‘Yes, nurse.’
‘And I should get over to casualty, or I’m going to be on report.’ She started to walk away, got halfway to the door and then turned back.
‘You didn’t pick me up on the almost,’ she said.
‘Almost what?’ I asked.
‘I said almost all the cases on your printout were incised or puncture wounds,’ she said. ‘But the odd one out is a big one.’ She clearly wanted me to ask, so I obliged — mainly to make up for the earlier off-colour innuendo.
‘Big in what way?’
‘It’s Mark,’ Nurse Ryall said. ‘Mark thingumajig. Mister Seddon’s stepson. You said he fell, didn’t you? From high up. So that’s a crush injury.’
As exit lines go, it wasn’t all that punchy, but it left me staring at the door long after it swung to behind her.
Wounds. Points and edges. And one long, lonely fall to the ground. Or two. There would have been two if I hadn’t stopped Bic from stepping off the ledge the other night.
What the fuck did it all mean? And where did I go to fill in the gaps?
14
The next day dragged on like a wounded snake across a barbed wire entanglement. It still hurt me to breathe, and I still couldn’t walk very far without resting up every few steps to let my lungs reinflate. I could have checked myself out of the hospital, but I was stiff and sore enough to find the prospect daunting, and I wasn’t sure yet where I was going to go. Something was crystallising in my mind, but it was taking its own time coming.
A junior intern changed the dressing on my ribs, giving my fingers a cursory examination along the way. I asked her how soon I could expect to play the tin whistle again: she looked at me like that was meant to be a joke, and then suggested that I take up comb and paper. Later on, a nurse came round to inspect my stitches and declared that they were doing nicely.
‘Then I can expect to leave soon?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, I should think so. We’ll be needing the bed for someone else.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘When the doctor says.’
On and off through the day, I read through Nicky’s downloads and transcripts, looking for insights that didn’t seem to be there. Nurse Ryall’s hunch about the wounds played out strongly across the board. The dense, dry prose was full of people puncturing each other and themselves, carving and slicing and severing human flesh in every way imaginable. And in the middle of all this, one boy jumped off an eighth-storey walkway and kissed the concrete.
Or rather, not in the middle: Mark Seddon’s death predated everything else on Nicky’s list. It was as though he’d opened the door to something that had come spilling out like toxic waste across the entire estate.
Feeling restless, and enervated from doing nothing else but lie or stand or sit up on the ward, I went for a walk around the rest of the wing. Inspiration didn’t come, and if anything the ghosts with their alarming array of stigmata and their disregard for walls and floors were even more of a distraction than the kid with the headphones. But it felt good, in some obscure way, to be moving — even if I was going round in circles.
In the evening, when I was sitting up in bed again with the notes spread out in front of me, chewing over random horrors until they were bland and flavourless, I had a visit from Detectives Basquiat and Coldwood. Basquiat said she wanted to ask me a few more questions. She was carrying a black leather document wallet which looked disturbingly full of something or other: also a micro-tape recorder which she switched on and put down on my bedside table. Gary seemed to be there purely to act as chaperone, which probably didn’t bode well for me at all.
‘What happened to your face?’ Basquiat demanded, after she’d cued in the tape with date, time, people and place. There was a glint in her eye that was far from solicitous: she was interested because she didn’t believe there was an honest way to come by bumps and bruises on such a heroic scale unless you were in police custody at the time.
‘Cut myself shaving,’ I said.
Gary opened his mouth, probably to tell me to do myself a favour and stop pissing about, but Basquiat signalled for him to let it pass. ‘I’d like to come back to the question of your movements on the night when Kenneth Seddon was attacked,’ she said.
‘What I told you last time still stands,’ I said.