Cath Staincliffe - Go Not Gently

‘Stop it, stop it,’ I yelled.

He was shaking her, her head snapping back and forth.

‘Leave her alone, you bastard, let go of her.’ I came up behind him. He swung round, threw Agnes from him. For a moment he had a startled, furtive look on his face, it melted and he snarled. I never saw his fist. Just felt it as he belted me square on the nose. The blow knocked me right over. I landed flat on my back, felt the breath punched out of my lungs.

Everything stopped.

I’m going to die, I thought. I’ve broken my back. There was a peppering of dead flies along the bottom of the fluorescent strip. Oh, God. Maddie. Mum. I was suffocating.

Panic made me gasp, in came the air and with that the pain. Searing, spreading from my nose up behind my eyes. I felt the hot trickle run down the back of my throat, tasted the sweet, iron scent.

I passed out.

I can’t have been gone more than a minute and my hearing came back before anything else. A new voice. ‘Ken? Good God, man, what on earth’s going on? Are you all right, my dear?’ The solicitous tone was addressed to Agnes. I don’t think he’d spotted me on the floor behind the door. ‘You sit down. Was it a fall?’

‘Matthew, she’s the one, the tablets, she took them, had them sent to a lab.’ Goulden spoke quickly, racing to explain. ‘The police have been to Malden’s. It’s only a matter of time

I opened my eyes. They hurt, all of me hurt. I could see two pairs of suit trousers, shiny shoes.

‘Calm down,’ Simcock said coldly. ‘What the blazes?’ He’d seen me. ‘Are you responsible for this?’ He flung the words over his shoulder at Goulden as he moved towards me. He was even taller than Goulden but round-shouldered and wiry. With his dark moustache peppered with grey he looked older too.

‘They tried to get away. She’s the private detective, she got us into this mess. We’ve got to stop them.’

‘You’d better go. You’ve done enough damage.’ The consultant knelt and checked my pulse, used one hand to raise my head and help me up to a sitting position. I leant back against the wall. Put my hand to my face, sticky, swollen. I could see Agnes, she looked dazed, mouth slightly agape, eyes bleary. Had he really hurt her? You could give people brain damage if you shook them too hard, or was that just babies?

‘Go? Are you off your head? We’re in this together, Matthew. Where the hell do you expect me to go?’

‘Go home.’ He sounded tired. ‘I’ll get someone to see to you,’ he said to me. He moved towards the phone.

‘Are you deaf? The police know. They’re probably waiting for me there. These two have been on to the coroner, there’ll be a full post mortem. It’s all going to come out. They’ll want to talk to you and Montgomery.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ There was enough icy fury in the denial to freeze hell but Goulden wasn’t cowed. Maybe Matthew Simcock just wanted to shut him up or maybe he wanted to save face in front of us. Either way it was too late as far as I was concerned. The phone calls between Dr Goulden, his wife and Douglas Montgomery had made it plain that they were all in cahoots. I didn’t trust any of them but at least Simcock wasn’t beating us up; we’d more chance of leaving here alive now he was here. Meanwhile I’d keep quiet about what we knew and what we suspected.

‘Aw, please, spare me,’ Goulden retorted. ‘I am not carrying the can on my own…’

‘You’re clearly upset.’ Simcock spoke brusquely. ‘I don’t know what all this is about-’

‘They know!’ Goulden blazed. ‘Don’t bother coming the innocent. These are the bitches that blew the whistle. You haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of walking away from this. The police already know I was doping her up to the eyeballs and claiming she had Alzheimer’s. Once they get the post mortem results they’ll see there was no haematoma. So they start talking to the theatre staff, they find out we weren’t evacuating anything, we were introducing tissue.’

I remembered Simcock’s pieces in The Lancet, his pleas for more research into Alzheimer’s. Stuff about cloning and biogenetics and the brain. And all along he’d been busy conducting his very own illicit research programme.

Goulden’s face was red with exertion. He lowered his voice, his tone intense and urgent. ‘It won’t take them long to find out about the others. They’ll start looking at the records, uncovering names, five, ten, twenty. All the patients I passed through to Douglas, the ones that came here for scans, the ones with Alzheimer’s who so kindly donated their organs. And the ones you operated on, bogus operations, false scan results. All those brains for the research project with Malden’s. We are fucked, Matthew.’

‘Shut up, you fool, you stupid fool.’

‘They know! Don’t you?’ Goulden jabbed his huge finger at me. ‘They bloody know. Tell him.’

Oh God. Did I? Yes? No? What would be the safest reply?

‘Lily wasn’t senile.’ Agnes spoke slowly, I could just hear her. ‘You made her act as if she was, with those pills, then you were able to take her to Kingsfield.’

‘Weren’t they Lily’s scans then?’ I sounded blurred, like talking after having work at the dentist. Only I hadn’t had an anaesthetic before Goulden bashed me. ‘He said there were plaques.’

‘Yes, there were,’ Goulden insisted, ‘eventually. But we did it you see, we cultivated the actual, physical changes, the lesions,’ he was jubilant now, ‘plaques in the hippocampus and in the cortex, clear signs of deterioration.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Simcock tried to silence him but Goulden carried on regardless.

‘She was clear as a bell when she moved into Homelea, had her scanned as part of the medical. We induced the disease and for the first time we got over the problem of rejection. A real breakthrough.’ He was triumphant.

‘Lily didn’t fall,’ I said. ‘She never had any haemorrhage. That was just to cover up what you were really doing, so you could operate.’

‘He did a fantastic job,’ said Goulden. ‘He’s one of the best, you know.’

‘You’re out of your mind!’ Simcock exclaimed. He knelt to pick up the phone from where it had fallen. ‘I’m ringing security.’

Goulden flew at him. The two men grappled together. It was probably a second or two before it dawned on me that this was the diversion we needed. I rose with effort, feeling giddy.

‘Agnes.’

We ran.

The main corridor was still deserted. We turned left. I saw the fountain mosaic, reassured we were going the right way. There was no one about. Then I heard someone running. Goulden!

Nowhere to hide out here. There was a door to the left. I opened it. A small passageway: two doors along the right-hand wall, a trolley along the left. Nothing else. A dead end. I tried the first door. Locked. The second. Locked. There was an old Tamla song, bright and brassy, something about running and hiding, dancing in lines, with our handbags laid out in front of us. I could feel the pulsing beat as it started…I heard him getting closer. My heart was thumping. I pulled the trolley towards us, created enough space for us at the far end.

‘Get down here, Agnes.’

She moved past me and into the gap. Carefully she edged down into a kneeling position. Hurry up, hurry up. I crouched beside her. The fire door swung open.

I held my breath. Heard his. Panting. How much did the trolley hide? Was he listening? I counted. One, two, like hide and seek but don’t giggle, three, no game this, please, help me, please, four, with a cut there is always that delay, the gap between the knife cutting the flesh and the brain realising, sending the messages, admitting the pain, spittle on his lips …