Mark Pearson - Death Row

‘I was. The sergeant and I were on our way back from a domestic call and found him unconscious off the road. If a slightly drunk young lady hadn’t tried to take a pee in the alleyway there we might never have found him.’

The young doctor nodded. ‘You probably saved his life.’

‘He’s going to come through?’

Doctor Hake gave his shoulders the slightest of lifts. ‘I don’t know. That’s why I said “probably”. You don’t know how long he was out there before you found him?’

‘No idea.’

‘He lost a lot of blood and there were hypothermia complications because of it. We’re trying to stabilise him, but there are internal bleeding issues — together with the wound, the shock, the possibility of serious infection.’

‘I know the score, doctor. I was a forensic pathologist for quite a number of years.’

Hake looked at her, puzzled. ‘You were? And now you’re a police surgeon?’

‘Not just that. I work here on the teaching staff and in the students’ clinic.’ Kate smiled. ‘I’m a multitasker. The police-surgeon work is just the odd shift here and there.’

‘Voluntary.’

‘More or less.’

‘So isn’t that …’ He hesitated. Trying to find the right words.

‘A backward step?’

‘Well, yeah. I’m looking to make consultant by the time I’m your age.’

Kate laughed. ‘Good luck. And yeah, in career terms maybe it is a backward step. But I prefer working with people when they still have a chance to make it, if you know what I mean,’

Timothy Hake smiled back. ‘Yeah, I can see how that works.’

‘So. If you had to make a call …’ She nodded towards the patient in the room. ‘He going to make it?’

‘I could give you all the statistics, my medical background, my professional analysis …’

‘But?’

‘You might as well flip a coin.’

He nodded apologetically and moved off, the nurse ahead of him like a linebacker running defence.

Bob Wilkinson ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Fifty-fifty. I’d take those odds on the dog track sometimes.’

‘You would on a red-hot favourite. But you wouldn’t bet your mortgage on it. Or your life.’

‘True.’

‘We know who he is yet?’

‘Nope. No ID on him. No one’s come forward to report him missing.’

‘And what’s the new DI doing about it?’

‘He’s got uniform canvassing the vicinity but this is Camden Town we’re talking about. North London. Monkeyland.’

Kate shot him a quizzical look and Bob Wilkinson put his hands over his ears, eyes and mouth in succession. ‘Only not so wise,’ he said.

Kate looked back at the patient. The steady beat of the heart monitor like a grandfather clock counting down.

‘Did you read the story last year about the chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden?’

‘No. What about it?’

‘Called Santino. He started throwing pebbles and bits of concrete he’d shaped up like discs at visitors.’

‘So?’

‘So there were no stones in his compound. The keepers couldn’t work out where he was getting them from.’

‘And where was he getting them from?’

‘From the moat that surrounded his compound. He had a stockpile of rocks at the ready.’

‘I’m sure you’re going somewhere with this.’

‘He had them ready to throw at human visitors.’ Kate nodded through the window at the stabbed man. ‘It seems that premeditation is not now a solely human trait.’

‘So what’s your point?’

‘Maybe Planet of the Apes got it right. Maybe our time on this planet is coming to an end. Maybe it deserves to.’

‘You know what I think?’

‘Enlighten me, Bob.’

‘I think you spend too much time with miserable bleeding Irishmen.’

Kate laughed. The warmth of the sound should have been a tonic to the unconscious man in the intensive-care bed but he was now in a place beyond human emotion and a long way from home.

*

Jennifer held her hand out at the bus stop. Technically, she didn’t need to. Technically, buses were supposed to stop automatically. Technically, we were still in an ice age, according to her English teacher, who thought he knew everything. It was bleeding cold, she knew that sure enough. Last year there might have been an Indian summer, this year England seemed to have skipped autumn altogether and headed straight into winter. So technically it was still autumn, technically the bus should halt at a designated stop but if Jennifer Hickling had learned anything in her fifteen long years on this Earth it was that ‘technically’ didn’t mean shit, not in this city.

The single-decker hopper bus pulled up and the doors swung open with a mechanical clang and a hiss of compressed air. Jennifer flashed her bus pass at the twenty-something-year-old African-English driver, who smiled at her with perfect teeth and genuine good humour.

‘Nice day for the ducks,’ he said.

But Jennifer ignored him and headed down the bus as it pulled away from the kerb and into traffic. What the fuck has he got to be so pleased about? she thought to herself. The bus was nearly full but halfway down on the right a seventeen-year-old youth wearing baggy jeans, a hoodie and a fatuous smile plastered across his pale white face winked at her, spreading his legs wider, and patted the vacant seat next to him. She flipped him the finger and walked to the back where an elderly woman was sitting tight against the window staring out at the rain. She had a loose canvas shoulder bag in her lap, was wearing a smart raincoat and had her hair covered in a floral scarf.

Jennifer sat down next to her and the woman looked across at her for a moment, blinking as if to pull her eyes into focus. Then she smiled at her.

‘You going to be late at school?’

Jennifer shrugged dismissively. ‘It’s a field-studies day.’

‘Oh, I see.’ The woman nodded and looked at her again.

‘Vampires is it, dear?’ she asked.

Now Jennifer blinked herself. ‘You what?’

‘What with the hair and the make-up. What do you call yourselves? Geemos. I know you’re all into it now. I have a granddaughter your age Kirsty.’

Jennifer didn’t have a clue what the daft old bat was going on about. ‘Whatever.’

‘Stephanie Meyer, isn’t it? She’s all the rage. I have to get one of hers for Kirsty for Christmas. Maybe you can tell me what the latest one is?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘In my day it was Errol Flynn.’

Jennifer sighed, exasperated, and turned to her. ‘What?’

‘That had all the girls swooning. Mind you, he just wore green tights and the like. Maybe he should have dressed in black and gone out at night.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I wouldn’t have minded him biting my neck. That’s for sure.’

Jennifer’s lips curled. ‘Yeah, too much information.’

‘I wasn’t always old, you know,’ said the woman, smiling, lost a little in her nostalgic reveries. ‘Like they say, tempus fugit .’

Jennifer would have responded, pretty sure that she had just been dissed by the old woman, but she stood up before Jennifer could say anything.

‘Anyway, this is my stop.’

As Jennifer shifted her legs sideways to let the woman pass, the bus swerved to the side and came to a sudden stop, throwing the old woman against her and causing her to drop her bag. Jennifer muttered under her breath and bent down to pick it up, sweeping the contents back into it. She stood up, handed it to the old woman and let her pass.

‘Thanks, dear, and good luck with the undead.’

Jennifer watched her go and waited for the doors to close and the bus to pull out into the traffic again. Then she opened her left hand and looked at the small purse that she had neglected to return to the old woman’s bag.