Kitson readjusted the mirror then looked back towards Gavin Slater’s house. ‘His youngest’s inside, isn’t he?’
Holland nodded. Following in the criminal footsteps of both his father and elder brother, Wayne Slater was serving four months in a YOI near Manchester for breaking and entering.
‘So there might be something useful there, right? Someone in that YOI knows someone in Barndale, you know how it works.’ Kitson moved out into the traffic and turned towards the main road. ‘It’s not beyond the realms of possibility, is it?’
Holland shrugged, said, ‘I suppose not.’
Thinking that the only thing they could usefully do would be to turn the car round, pick up that piece of dog shit he had almost stepped in and pop it through Gavin Slater’s letterbox.
ELEVEN
Prisons smelled bad enough, but hospitals were a lot worse. Blood and bandages or maybe just the stink of the stuff they used to sterilise everything, but whatever the source, it always triggered bad memories and made Thorne uncomfortable. Oddly, he was far more at home in a mortuary, less affected by the stench of the bone-saw at work and the freshly harvested organs than he was by bedpans and rotting fruit.
Perhaps it was because the only people suffering in a mortuary were the ones throwing up over their shoes.
From McCarthy’s office near the main doors, they walked past the prison hospital officers and nurses’ station, an examination room, a surgery and a large storage cupboard that had been converted into a small tea room. The dispensary was at the far end, opposite another set of doors.
Thorne stopped and searched for the CCTV camera Dawes had mentioned. Unable to see one, he asked McCarthy where it was.
‘There was one, yes. We’d had a few thefts from the DDA cupboard.’
‘DDA?’
‘Dangerous Drugs Act. Morphine, methadone, what have you.’
‘And that camera was moved there from somewhere else just before Amin died, yes?’
McCarthy thought about it. ‘That’s right… a couple of months ago, somewhere around there.’ He sighed, exasperated. ‘And now it’s been moved again.’
‘Because?’
‘Because some bright spark suggested we might be better off putting the camera inside the dispensary. That way we might see the culprit coming in. From the front.’ He smacked the side of his head. ‘Clever, eh?’
‘Caught anybody?’
‘Not as yet,’ McCarthy said.
‘So where are the monitors?’
‘In the nurses’ station.’
Thorne nodded and looked around. ‘There’s another camera at the main doors.’
‘Right.’
‘And inside one of the rooms?’
McCarthy nodded, grim. ‘The room next door to the one Amin was in.’
‘Why just that one?’
‘That’s what’s so bloody ironic,’ McCarthy said. ‘It’s the room we put any patient in who’s on suicide watch.’
The medical officer used his pass-key to take them through the set of white metal doors on to the first of two interconnecting wards. Each ward contained half a dozen beds, three on each side. All were occupied.
‘You always this busy?’ Thorne asked.
‘God, yes,’ McCarthy said. ‘And seriously understaffed. Even if I’m here I’m usually up to my neck in medical reports for parole hearings, organising rehab programmes, all that stuff. So I need locum GPs to come in for the daily sick parades or to dole out the Ritalin and we still have a contract with the local primary healthcare trust to provide extra nursing staff. The PHOs do a good job, don’t get me wrong, and even with them we’re run off our feet, but most of them have only had very basic medical training.’
‘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.
