Хилари Боннер - Death Comes First

It mattered that Charlie had survived. She’d been aware of him arriving in A & E. For some reason she did remember that. Clearly. Everything after that was a blank. Perhaps she had been medicated. Later — she had no idea how much later — once she’d begun to come round, she’d asked a young nurse how he was. Medical staff had been buzzing around her like flies, as concerned about the state of her mind as of her body. But she had felt calm. Icily calm. She just wanted to know about Charlie. Straight away. He was her husband, after all, and it was possible that the nurse was not aware of the circumstances which had led to Charlie and Joyce being admitted to hospital. Nonetheless the nurse had told Joyce that she had no information about Charlie’s condition. But that was enough. It was enough to tell her that Charlie was still alive. And she found that fact unbearable. Her children were dead and the man who had murdered them, a man she had once loved so much, the man she had married, who had now totally destroyed her every bit as much as he had destroyed their children, was still alive.

She wondered where he was. She tried to think where he might be. It was hard for her. She was still not functioning fully. But then, she didn’t expect to ever again function fully. And this was important.

She looked around her. She was in intensive care. So would Charlie be, wouldn’t he?

She lay still. She concentrated on appearing calm and peaceful. She pretended to fall asleep again. Eventually the concerned nursing staff drifted away, having come to the conclusion that she was no longer a threat to herself or anyone else. Which had been her intention.

After a while she opened her eyes cautiously, and peered around the ward. There were nurses in attendance at a bed across the way. But nobody seemed to be taking any notice of her.

Joyce disconnected the two tubes attached to her arm. She had no idea what they were or what they did. Or what disconnecting them would do to her. She didn’t care.

She pushed herself into a sitting position, swung her legs over the side of the narrow bed and stood up. Overcome by dizziness, she had to lean against the wall until it passed. Then she set off down the ward, moving slowly and deliberately, looking from left to right, checking out the other patients. Nobody seemed to notice her. Not any of the staff, anyway. Or if they did they didn’t react. Strange, because a short while earlier they had been fussing over her, anxious about how she might behave. Perhaps there had been a change of shift. Perhaps the new staff on duty had not been told that they should be concerned for and about her. Maybe, if they’d noticed her at all, they thought she was going to the toilet. Were intensive care patients supposed to go to the toilet on their own? She had no idea. She realized her brain was all over the place, her thoughts incoherent.

However, her sense of purpose was absolute. It didn’t take her long to find Charlie. He lay in a bed close to the door. His eyes were shut. She assumed he was unconscious. In fact, although she didn’t know how or why, she was positive he was unconscious and not merely asleep. But that wasn’t good enough. She wanted him to be dead. He wasn’t dead.

She studied him for a moment. Various tubes and leads connected him to an array of hi-tech medical equipment. His chest was rising and falling rhythmically. He definitely wasn’t dead. Not yet.

She had no idea what Charlie’s prognosis might be. Maybe he wouldn’t pull through, whatever she did or didn’t do. On the other hand, he could recover consciousness at any moment. People did, didn’t they? Sometimes when they were not expected to. People came out of comas after months and sometimes years.

Joyce wasn’t prepared to risk that. She couldn’t. She wasn’t prepared to give Charlie any sort of chance, however slim, of living, when her children, her precious children, had died at his hands.

Charlie had to die. He had to die now.

Joyce stepped forward. She wondered if she dared switch off the machines that were helping to keep Charlie alive. Or pull out the tubes that were feeding him. Feeding the man she now thought of as an incarnation of pure evil. The fiend, the ogre, the beast she had married.

But surely someone would notice. In television dramas any such action was invariably followed by alarms bleeping and a major alert. In any case it was possible that Charlie might survive even without being connected to the equipment that surrounded him. No. Joyce decided that she would have to be more proactive than that. There was one narrow pillow beneath Charlie’s head. One pillow would be enough.

How quickly can you smother someone? she wondered dispassionately as she reached out to grab the pillow, pull it from under Charlie and take it in her hands. How long does suffocation take? How long would it take for the vile creature to die?

She had just grasped the pillow when she felt a firm but gentle hand on her arm.

‘C’mon, Mrs Mildmay, I think we’d better get you back to your bed, don’t you?’ said a voice she recognized.

It was David Vogel.

Vogel had known immediately what Joyce intended to do. He glanced at Clarke. The DCI’s expression was deadpan.

Like him, it seemed, she had decided not to notice.

In any case there should have been a police presence with her. PC Perkins had, perhaps a tad over-excitedly, chosen to leave Joyce Mildmay unattended in order to give Vogel and Clarke the news of her return to consciousness. He should not have done so. He should have waited for a replacement.

This was the kind of cock-up which could lead to shattered careers. Not to mention, in this case, yet another violent death.

Joyce returned to her bed meekly enough and by the time Perkins rejoined them, having excused himself to go to the toilet on the way back to intensive care, Clarke and Vogel had found a nurse to attend to her.

Neither officer passed comment on what may or may not have happened in PC Perkins’ absence, and Perkins himself was to remain blissfully unaware of the career-threatening incident.

Vogel looked down at the stricken woman lying on the bed. Was she relieved to have been stopped from fulfilling her intention? Was she in fact thankful to have been prevented from killing her husband?

Vogel thought not. He thought it more likely that she wished she had completed the act. He doubted that she would care about the consequences. Why should she?

Nobby Clarke asked a nurse to pull a curtain around the bed. It wasn’t much of a privacy barrier, but it at least gave the illusion of seclusion. In any case it was way past visiting time, and none of the other patients in intensive care looked to be in any condition to eavesdrop.

While Clarke apologized for disturbing her, Joyce stared unseeingly into the middle distance. She looked deranged, thought Vogel, but then who wouldn’t, given what she’d been through that day? He glanced at Clarke, who gave a brief nod to indicate that she wanted him to lead the questioning.

‘We need you to tell us exactly what happened when you were proceeding along the Hotwell Road alongside the Floating Harbour, Mrs Mildmay,’ he began without further preamble. ‘You told me earlier that your husband, Charlie, was driving. Is that correct? Can you tell us how your vehicle came to leave the road and be submerged?’

Joyce focused her newly mad eyes on Vogel.

‘I told you that too, didn’t I? I told someone, back on the quay, he wanted to kill us all,’ she said. ‘He tried to kill us all. My children are dead. And Charlie did it deliberately. Oh my God, yes. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and drove at the railings as fast as he could.’

Joyce, it seemed, needed no official confirmation of the death of her children. She had been in the car with them when it went under. She had probably watched them drown.