S Bolton - Sacrifice

It was nearly dawn when the tapping on the window woke me. I was cold, stiff and acutely aware that the moment I moved I would regret it. The worst hangover I'd ever experienced – and I've had a few bad ones – was going to feel like a Shiatsu massage compared with what today had in store for me. But there was nothing else for it. Dana's incredulous face was staring down at me and I had to move. I sat up. Oh boy, so much worse than I'd expected. I reached for the lock and then Dana opened the door.

'Tora, I've been at your house half the night. I've been seriously-'

I waved her away, turned and vomited over the rear wheel of my car. I stayed there, bent double, for some time. I coughed and retched, trying to dislodge those sickening bits that stick in your nasal passages at such times and decided that sudden death had an awful lot to recommend it.

The next thing I remember is being half led, half carried, through Dana's front door and deposited on her sofa. She gave me, on my instructions, an unwise dose of ibuprofen and paracetemol and left to make hot, sweet tea and dry toast. While she was gone I tried to steady my nausea by focusing on her living room. It was exactly as I would have expected: immaculately tidy and undoubtedly expensive. The floorboards were polished oak, partly covered by a rug patterned in squares of rust, oatmeal and pale green. The sofas were the same shade of green, whilst the roman blinds on both windows picked out the rust and oatmeal colours. The fabrics looked the sort you might pay £50 a metre for. A flat-screen TV was fastened to one wall and there was a Bang and Olufsen stereo system under the window. Dana came back with the food and left the room again. I heard her running upstairs. She returned carrying a large duvet and wrapped it around me, like a mother with a sick toddler. I took a bite of toast and managed to keep it down. Dana sat down on a leather footstool in front of me.

'Ready to tell me what happened to you?'

'I worked half the night, spent the rest of it in the car,' I managed. The tea was scalding and totally wonderful.

She looked at me, then down at herself. Her linen trousers were creased but clean and still looked pretty good, as did the pink cotton shirt and matching cardigan. Her skin looked daisy-fresh and her hair as though it had been combed ten minutes ago.

'So did I,' she said. She had a point.

'First, I need to tell you what I found out,' I said. I'd been toying with how exactly I was going to do that since we'd entered the house. Duncan has a particularly irritating habit when he wants to tell me something and, for some reason, it seemed strangely appropriate for the circumstances.

'Tor,' he'd announce, 'I've got good news and bad news.' It really didn't matter how I'd respond, he'd have some half-witted wise-crack to hand which he'd invariably find hilarious and was guaranteed to irritate the hell out of me. 'I'll have the good news,' I'd say, with heavy reluctance. 'The good news is: there's not too much bad news!' he'd respond. We'd been doing it for seven years now and it really wasn't getting any funnier. Not from my point of view anyway. Still, I definitely wasn't myself that morning because I had an almost irresistible urge to use it right now.

Do you want the good news, or the bad news, Dana?

The good news? I know who our lady from the peat was.

The bad news? No, you are really not going to believe the bad news. She was watching me closely. I realized she was very concerned and that I must look even worse than I felt. I took a deep breath.

'I found a match,' I said, watching the glint leap into her eyes and her face come alive. 'You'll need to get it checked, of course, but I am 98 per cent certain.'

She leaned forward and her hand brushed mine. 'My God, well done! Who was she?'

I took another gulp of tea. 'Melissa Gair,' I said. 'Aged thirty-two. An island woman; from Lerwick; married to a local man.'

Dana clenched her fist and made a little stabbing action with it. 'So why wasn't she reported missing? Why wasn't she on your list of summer 2005 deliveries? She wasn't, was she?'

'No, she wasn't…'

'Then how…'

'Because she was already dead.'

She stared at me. Three tiny furrows appeared between her eyebrows. 'Come again,' she said.

'I checked her hospital records. She was admitted on 29 September 2004, with a malignant breast tumour that was subsequently found to have spread to her lungs, back and kidneys. Her GP had spotted a lump just a couple of weeks earlier during a routine examination. She was transferred to Aberdeen for treatment but it didn't work. She died on the sixth of October, just three and a half weeks after being diagnosed.'

'Fuck!' I hadn't heard Dana swear before.

'You can say that again,' I said.

She did. And quite a lot more. She got up and walked across the room, stopping only when the wall made further progress impossible. She turned and walked back, again just stopping at the wall. Another turn and a few more steps. Then she stopped and looked at me.

'How sure are you about those dental records?'

At four in the morning I'd been pretty certain. Now…

'You need to have a proper dentist look at them but… I'm… I'm sure. They were the same.'

'Could she have been a different woman? Different woman, same name. Two Melissa Gairs living in Lerwick.'

I'd thought of that. I shook my head. 'Their birth dates were identical. So were their blood groups. It's the same woman.'

'Shit!' And she was off again, pacing the room and swearing. In a way, it was kind of nice to see the impeccable Dana losing control. In another, I wanted her to stop. She was making my head hurt more.

'It's déjà vu. It's déjà-fucking-vu. We went through this with Kirsten, convinced we'd found the right woman.'

'We have to forget about Kirsten. The dental records were totally different. It wasn't her.'

'I accept that. But it's still too much of a bloody coincidence. We find a body and a ring in your field. Both belong to young women who supposedly died in 2004. Except one of them didn't. One of them actually died – because our pathologists tell us so – almost a whole year later.'

'My head hurts!' I wailed.

'OK, OK.' She stopped pacing and came back to sit on her footstool. She lowered her voice. 'Now tell me what happened to you.'

I shook my head. 'It doesn't matter.'

She took hold of my hands, one of them still clutching an empty tea mug, and forced me to look at her.

'It matters. Now talk.'

I talked. I told her that, for the second time in two nights, someone had bypassed locked doors, not to mention considerable hospital security, to force their way into my presence. That for the second time, someone had watched me while I slept, that I had, once again, been completely at the mercy of someone who wished me harm.

'Nothing was left. No…'

'Little gifts? No. But he washed out my coffee mug and pot. Very thoroughly.'

'You think you were drugged?'

'It's possible. I haven't been feeling great the last few days, like I'm coming down with flu or something, but not this bad.'

'We need to get you to a doctor.' She saw the look on my face and allowed herself to smile. 'We need to do some tests,' she said. 'I don't know, blood tests or something.'

'Already done. I took some bloods before I left the hospital. They're in my office fridge; I'll send them off on Monday. But until we know for certain, can we just keep quiet about this, please? It's only going to be a distraction.'

Dana nodded slowly but her eyes were dull and unfocused. I recognized the sign that she was thinking hard. I wondered how to breach the subject of my going home. I hated to leave her with such a bombshell but knew I couldn't carry on any longer. I stood up.