Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

Sam pointed out, “Most people who love someone don’t help them to die.”

“There is no greater love. I gave away that which I prized above all else.”

“Which is a jolly useful excuse for a killer.”

Reed made a disgusted noise at the back of his throat, refusing to respond. It was Hannah who asked, “What happened when you realized that things had changed?”

“For the next six months a kind of truce prevailed; no written terms, but in the back of our minds, I think, was the fear that another such skirmish and we might go too far for redemption. For my part, at least I knew that I still loved Kate with just as much conviction as before, and after last night, I know that she still felt the same about me. It was just that we had different needs, wanted different things from our relationship.

“Then her water broke just before Christmas. She was only twenty-five weeks. Until then we had dared to hope that everything was going to be all right, that we would at least be spared a difficult pregnancy.”

“But you weren’t,” guessed Hannah.

“Fat chance.” He took a long breath. “She had to be induced, for fear of infection. What came out was a girl, not obviously deformed…”

“But?”

“Alice was a weak and pathetic thing, which made it worse. The intensity of Kate’s love for her was difficult to witness…”

“Why difficult?” Sam’s question interrupted his intense reverie.

“Have you ever been in love, Sergeant?”

“Well…”

“Of course you have, and you should appreciate this terrible thing called jealousy. Jealousy, not envy, although perhaps there was some of that as well.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Envy is the desire to possess. Jealousy is the fear of losing something precious. When I looked at Kate, at how she became completely encased by her relationship with Alice, I saw no room for me, saw that I had lost her. In turn, I envied the love that Alice received, wanted a share, thought that I was entitled to one.”

“Yet you’ve stayed with Kate, even after Alice died.”

“Oh yes. You see, jealousy is born of love; the stronger the love, the greater the jealousy. When Alice died, only the jealousy was gone.” He paused to reconsider. “But not, I see now, the guilt.”

“Guilt?”

But Reed did not hear. “It soon turned out that Alice had terrible internal abnormalities. Her lungs failed to develop as they should, and she was functionally blind, probably also deaf although they could never be sure. She had cardiac abnormalities too. She could breathe, but only on near-pure oxygen. She had one kidney, and most probably malformation of her genital tract… In the six weeks that she lived, she had five bouts of pneumonia.”

“Is that what killed her?”

Once more, Reed failed to hear, or at least react. “I knew the neonatologist in charge of her care-have done since medical school. I could see that when he took me to one side, sat me down in his office, he was having a hard time. His voice trembled slightly as he told me that he doubted Alice would live much more than another four weeks, that even if God granted us a miracle, Alice’s quality of life would be intolerable…” Reed seemed to become lost in the past. Certainly he seemed to be disoriented because his next remark was disjointed. “It was the swirling patterns, I remember best…”

Sam breathed. “Swirling patterns again.”

Hannah silenced him angrily, but it didn’t matter because Reed wasn’t listening. “I know the reason for them. It’s because you’re mixing two liquids of different densities and one flows through the other for a short while before they become totally and perfectly mixed. But it’s the beauty of the patterns that I can’t get over. Benoit Mandelbrot described it mathematically, talked about partial dimensions, fractals, making it sound like science fiction, as if there were creatures from another place doing something to make them.”

“What about the swirls, Phil?”

But Reed was a long way back in his past.

The music of critical care, symphonic variations on life and death, on dying and surviving, on fading into and coming out of a coma. He’d never felt comfortable in an intensive therapy unit, even one decked out with tinsel and with a Christmas tree in the corner. As a pathologist he was of the opinion that what the medical staff did was too far removed from normal medical and nursing practice. Here, it wasn’t patients that were treated, but measurements; they worried about the central venous pressure, the blood gas levels, blood biochemistry. The patients were often deliberately sedated, the victims of multiple puncture wounds where tubes entered wounds in the neck and the feet and even in the groins. The patients became not human, but manufactured entities, biomedical organisms, human fused with machine. In a neonatal intensive care unit, however, the victims fought back. Despite being almost overwhelmed by the enormity of the medical intervention to which they were subjected, their humanity was, if anything, magnified. They evoked even greater compassion because they were so small, so apparently incapable of overcoming this adversity.

Alice was intubated again because of the pneumonia, her breathing dictated by a machine. She was still so small, still so sickly, so raw. The nurse and doctors were at a hand-over session, their attention as usual on readouts and test results.

Reed stopped in front of the incubator, a small bag of saline dripped slowly into a tube extending from his dying daughter’s right ankle. It was nearly nine o’clock at night, and as far as Kate was concerned, Reed was working late, another bloody postmortem.

He looked around. No one was paying attention to him-they were used to one of them (usually Kate) hanging around, getting in the way, unwanted but unassailable, given their part in the drama-and it was all over in ten seconds.

“What was over?” Hannah could sense something terrible and needed to break through Reed’s cage of recollection.

“I was planning to turn, walk out at once… certainly not hang around…”

“What was over?”

“They caught my eye. They were so beautiful, I had to stop and watch them…”

“What was over, Phil?”

“It’s obvious when you know. Two liquids of different densities…”

“What did you do?” She remained patient, though God knew that it was difficult.

“So beautiful, yet so deadly.” His voice had taken on a singsong quality.

“Was it the bag of saline? Did you do something to that bag of saline?”

He came to, saw her again. “She was going to die, Hannah, and her death would not have been good. She had nothing to look forward to, no memories to comfort her. She was in limbo…”

“What did you put in the bag?”

But Mandelbrot’s patterns had caught him again. “The patterns were translucent, like liquid crystals, precious jewels that were slowly dissolving as they moved, dissipating, becoming another small part of the whole.”

“I know why, Phil. I need to know how.”

“And having done it, I walked away. I went to the desk, told them how grateful I was, told them to ring if anything happened, then walked out, past Alice’s incubator, past the bag of saline, now looking as clean and pure as it had before… I hated myself for that, for the hypocrisy and the lies that I had to tell those doctors and nurses, for pretending not to know what I knew.” He paused for breath, then, “The phone call came an hour later, and all hell broke out…”

Hannah would have kept asking the question until doomsday. “What was it? What did you put in the bag of saline?”

He looked at her, challenged her almost. “Potassium chloride. Just a 20 ml ampoule, but quite enough…” He frowned. “We need potassium, but not too much. A dangerous thing to play with. Too much and the heart stops. No PM will find it, not given those clinical circumstances, and there was no puncture mark, at least none that the medical staff hadn’t made.”