Mark Billingham - Good as Dead

‘Like the one who thought Amin was asleep, right?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

They walked slowly up and down the two wards. Each had its own small toilet and shower block at the far end. There were glass walls and no locks. Passing each bed, the looks Thorne received from those patients who were not asleep or reading magazines were considerably less aggressive than he might expect from the boys in the main body of the prison. Out there, if you weren’t wearing a uniform of some sort you were almost certainly a solicitor or a copper.

And Thorne did not look like a solicitor.

Perhaps the kids in here were just too drugged up to care, he thought. Or maybe he made a more convincing doctor than he did a brief.

He was sure that Phil Hendricks would have something to say about that.

Somebody turned a radio up and was quickly told to turn it down as Thorne nodded towards the bunch of keys in McCarthy’s hand. ‘Who has keys in and out of here?’

McCarthy looked at him as though it were a very inappropriate question.

‘I need to ask.’

‘You think so?’

Thorne looked at him. ‘Didn’t DI Dawes?’

McCarthy nodded slowly, which made Thorne think that the man who had led the original inquiry might not have been quite as much of an idiot as he’d taken him for.

‘Well, myself, obviously. The PHOs. All the officers… ’

They walked through an open doorway at the far end of the second ward, on to the corridor that contained the wing’s three private rooms.

‘And the pass-key opens these as well, does it?’

McCarthy shook his head and lifted his keys up, selecting two different ones for Thorne to look at. ‘The pass-key is for all the main doors, but you need this one to open any of these cells.’

‘Cells?’

‘ Rooms, I mean.’ He reddened slightly and waved his embarrassment away. ‘Room, cell. Patient, prisoner.’

Thorne understood. Boy, little bastard. It all depended who you were talking to and what kind of mood they were in.

‘Which one was Amin’s?’

McCarthy pointed and moved to open the door furthest to their left. While he was doing that, Thorne took a few paces towards the room next door to the one being unlocked. The room reserved for potential suicides in which the remaining CCTV camera was installed. Once past it, he turned and walked slowly back towards the door McCarthy had opened for him, taking care to stay as close as possible to the wall.

McCarthy watched him, but Thorne saw no need to explain what he was doing if the doctor was not bright enough to work it out. He would stop off at the nurses’ station to review the footage on his way out.

‘Here we are,’ McCarthy said.

The doctor’s indecision as to what to call it was understandable, as the space with which Thorne was confronted was somewhere between a room and a cell, albeit one of those on the Gold wing. Ten feet by eight, with plain white walls, an alcove cordoned off containing toilet and sink. The room was dominated by a traditional hospital bed with sides that could be raised if necessary, an IV stand on one side and a small melamine-topped table on the other. There was no window, save for the one in the metal door through which a PHO had looked, though for not quite long enough to establish that the room’s occupant was not breathing.

‘Not exactly BUPA, I know,’ McCarthy said.

Thorne walked across to the bed. It smelled clean but there was a yellow-brown stain on the pillow. He wondered if anyone had slept in it since Amin Akhtar. ‘Well, if it was any nicer you’d only get stick from the “prisons are holiday camps” brigade,’ he said. ‘You’d have the Daily Mail complaining that your patients were too comfortable.’

McCarthy nodded, gave a small laugh. ‘A few months back, our head of PE ordered a pitch-and-putt set for the boys and a week later one of the papers claimed that we were building an eighteen-hole golf course.’

‘So what kind of dosage was Amin on?’ Thorne asked. He walked across to the far wall. Just a few steps. ‘The Tramadol.’

‘Two fifty-milligram tablets, four times a day. It’s a medium-strength painkiller.’

‘And nothing else?’

‘Only a low-dose antibiotic. A drip, you know?’

‘And how many tablets would he have needed to OD? Just roughly.’

‘I don’t know, thirty or more at least.’

Thorne thought for a few seconds. ‘Plus the few you said got spilled on the floor, right? So that’s thirty-something tablets he somehow managed to avoid taking during his routine medication and stashed away. Does that sound about right?’

McCarthy nodded, said, ‘More or less.’

‘Right, and he’d been in here four days, so in order to get enough to do the job properly, he would have had to be palming virtually all his pills almost every time he was given them. Sorry, I’m just thinking out loud here… but the staff are supposed to watch and make sure medication gets taken, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, they’re supposed to.’

‘Well, someone screwed up rather badly by the sound of it.’

‘I gave him several doses of the tablets myself,’ McCarthy said, ‘and I certainly didn’t screw up.’

‘I wasn’t trying to say you had, but can you think of any other explanation?’ Thorne walked slowly back across the room, turned and leaned against the door.

‘Perhaps someone brought them in for him,’ McCarthy suggested.

‘From the outside?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that would mean Amin had suicidal feelings even before he got attacked.’ Thorne shook his head. ‘It would have to have been after he was admitted to the hospital wing. Was he allowed visits from other boys while he was in here?’

‘Yes, at least one lad came in, I think. I can get you the name.’

‘That would be helpful,’ Thorne said. ‘But we’ve still got the same question to answer. Where did whoever gave Amin enough tablets to kill himself get them from?’ Thorne had already figured out the most likely answer, but waited for McCarthy to catch him up. It only took a few seconds.

‘What about the thefts from the dispensary?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Thorne said.

The doctor nodded, looking highly delighted with himself and his powers of deduction. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem to find out if and when any Tramadol tablets were taken. Everything is noted down in the DDA book, so-’ He stopped at the noise from Thorne’s pocket. ‘Is that yours?’

Thorne was unsurprised at McCarthy’s shocked expression when his mobile rang. They were strictly forbidden inside the prison and that applied to members of staff every bit as much as to prisoners themselves. It was another protocol Thorne had been obliged to ignore, and dispensation had been granted after a senior officer at the Yard had spoken to the governor by phone and made it clear that they were dealing with a serious live-time incident.

Thorne took the phone from his jacket and saw who was calling. ‘I need to take this,’ he said.

McCarthy stayed where he was, then seeing that Thorne was not about to answer while anyone was around to listen, indicated that he would wait outside and stepped into the hall.

Thorne pushed the door shut after him and answered the phone.

‘Helen?’

‘He wants to know what’s happening.’

Thorne pressed the handset to his chest and swore quietly. He could still hear the radio that was playing on the ward across the corridor. ‘Tell him I’m doing what he asked me to do,’ he said. ‘I’m working as quickly as I can, all right?’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘That this might take some time.’

There was a pause. ‘I’ll tell him… ’

‘I’m talking to all the people I need to talk to.’ He looked down at the bed in which Amin Akhtar had died. He reached out and touched the metal bedstead. ‘I’m in the right place. Tell him we’re taking everything he said very seriously, OK?’