He has seen such penmanship before.
He stares at the images in turn. They are poems to the feeling she has evoked in the artist. Smiling. Laughing. Sleeping …
McAvoy holds up the last image. It has been daubed on a torn-out page of a notebook.
It is a picture of Anne Montrose, asleep, in a wrought-iron four-poster bed; her arms above the bed-sheets, her hair puddled on the pillow.
It is smudged with tears.
McAvoy turns it over.
It is signed and dated a little over a week ago.
He runs for the door.
Pulls his phone from his pocket.
Calls the only person he knows with the skills to raise the dead.
CHAPTER 26
Three hours later, and McAvoy is pulling up outside Wakefield Hospital. The snow hasn’t reached this outpost of West Yorkshire yet. It’s bitterly cold and the air feels like it has been breathed out of a damp, diseased lung.
McAvoy pushes his hair out of his eyes. He straightens his back and stands his collar on end.
He takes a last breath of outside air, then steps through the automatic doors and strides across the tallow- coloured linoleum. Somebody has made an attempt to put Christmas decorations up in reception, but they look somehow obscene against the peeling plaster of the walls or hanging from ceiling tiles mottled with brown damp.
He endeavours to look like he knows where he’s going. Passes the reception desk without a glance. Picks a corridor at random and finds himself following the signs to oncology. He decides that the direction feels wrong, and spots another corridor leading right. He takes it, and almost immediately has to pin himself to the wall as two burly female nurses with round backsides and bosoms that strain their blue uniforms all but take him out as, side by side, they push two tall cages stacked with linens.
‘Coming through,’ says the older of the pair in a thick West Yorkshire accent.
‘Narrow squeak, eh?’ says the other, who has proper ginger hair and the sort of round spectacles that went out of fashion a decade before.
‘Well, if I was going to get run over today, I couldn’t have asked for a nicer pair of assailants. Can I just check, am I going the right way to ICU …?’
Five minutes later, McAvoy is stepping out of the lift on the third floor. His nostrils fill with the scent of blood and bleach; of flavourless food; of the squeak of trolley wheels and rubber-soled shoes on the scarred linoleum.
A fat prison officer is leaning back against the front desk, sipping from a plastic beaker. He has a head shaved down to guard number two, and small, slightly cauliflowered ears sit like teacup handles on the sides of a misshapen, potatoesque face.
McAvoy makes eye contact with the man as he approaches. For the first time since the rugby pitch, he tries to make himself look big. Hopes he looks like somebody to be reckoned with.
He pulls out his warrant card and the guard straightens up.
‘Chandler,’ says McAvoy, businesslike and official. ‘Where are we at?’
The man looks confused for a moment, but the warrant card and the managerial tone are enough to show him his place in the scheme of things, and he makes no attempt to ask McAvoy why he wants to know, or who has sent him.
‘On a private ward, yonder,’ he says in an accent that sounds to McAvoy’s practised ear as though it originated in the Borders.
‘Gretna?’ he asks, with an approximation of a smile.
‘Annan,’ says the guard, with a little grin. ‘You?’
‘Highlands. By way of Edinburgh and just about everywhere else.’
They share a smile, two Scotsmen together, bonding in a Yorkshire hospital and feeling like they’ve just enjoyed a taste of home.
‘Bad way, is he?’
‘Not as bad as thought at first. There was so much blood. Parts of his neck were just flapping off. He must have done it himself. He was in solitary. Nobody was near him.’
‘Is he conscious?’
‘Barely. He’s had an emergency op but there’s talk of microsurgery if the stitches don’t do the job. He was dead to the world a minute ago, face bandaged up like a mummy. I just popped out for a coffee. There’s another guard gone for his lunch will be back soon. Nobody said to expect visitors.’
McAvoy nods. Ploughs straight on through the other man’s growing cynicism.
‘I need five minutes with him,’ he says, eyes boring into the guard’s. ‘Asleep or not.’
The guard appears to be about to argue, but there is something in McAvoy’s gaze that seems utterly rigid in its devotion to purpose, and he quickly tells himself that there is no harm in stepping aside.
McAvoy thanks him with a nod. His heart is thumping, but he stills it with deep breaths and closed eyes. His shoes are surprisingly quiet on the linoleum floor.
The silence is eerie. Grim. It makes him wonder about his own final days. Whether he will die amid noise, surrounded by bustle and chat. Or whether it will be a solitary gunshot, and then nothing.
He steps inside Chandler’s room.
The curtains are the same yellow as the drapes on the maternity unit at Hull Royal, but everything else is a washedout and joyless blue.
Chandler is lying pathetic and motionless on the bed. His false limb is propped next to the single bed, leaving his pyjama leg empty. Nobody has bothered to tie a knot below the severed knee, and the garment is twisted, slanting left, so that at first glance, it looks as though the leg is pointing at an obscene angle.
Chandler’s throat is wrapped in bandages. A tube connected to a bag filled with clear fluid runs into a needle in the back of his right hand. Another, thicker tube runs into his mouth and down his throat. It has been taped to the side of his face, and already a crust of drying salvia has begun to form over the adhesive strip.
McAvoy reaches inside his coat and removes the bottle from his inside pocket. Roisin had warned him to put gloves on while handling it. Had said that the stink would eat into the skin of his fingers and never wash out. He pulls down the cuff of his shirt. Wraps it around both hands. Holds the vial in one hand and carefully unscrews the lid with the other.
The stench is extraordinary. Even at the remove of an arm’s length he feels his nostrils flare, grows instantly dizzy as the raw ammonia courses into his brain.
He crosses to the bed in three strides. Holds the bottle under Chandler’s nose.
One …
Two …
Three …
The bandaged figure on the bed begins to thrash. There is movement beneath the wrappings as his eyes fly open and what’s left of his face begins to contort. His hands fly to his mouth and begin tearing at the breathing tube, at the bandages, as muted, rasping coughs escape his lips with a hiss.
His solitary leg kicks out and drums on the mattress.
McAvoy leans forward. Takes the breathing tube in one hand and pulls. It emerges wet and vile from his open mouth and McAvoy drops it to the floor.
Chandler hauls himself upright and heaves bile into his own lap. Coughs and begins clawing at the bandages.
McAvoy’s face is impassive. He merely watches. Allows Chandler these few moments of panic. This agony of fear and confusion as he awakes in the dark.
He listens as Chandler finds his voice. Watches the serpentine tongue lick dry lips beneath the sick-stained
