She was not there. He knew it. Felt it.
Then where?
He gritted his teeth, his breath coming in short gasps.
Where was she?
He looked across at the photo on the dressing table. She smiled back at him.
Scott shouted and hurled the glass across the room. It hit the wall and shattered, spraying shards of crystal in all directions. Vodka dripped from the wet patch on the paper.
He wondered how long it took for loneliness to become despair.
TWENTY
16 APRIL 1977
The tumour was as large as a man's fist.
Dexter looked at it lying in the metal dish, a huge collection of dead cells, darkish brown in colour, tinged a rusty red from the congealed blood which coated it. It had been taken that morning, from the skull of the dead man they had found in Ward 5 the previous day.
Now Dexter observed the tumour and tapped a pen gently against his chin, his thoughts running pell-mell through his mind.
'What about the others?' he asked.
Colston sighed and shrugged his shoulders, pulling up a chair beside the desk.
'Four out of the five are exhibiting similar symptoms to those of Baker,' he said. 'I checked them over this morning before I did the autopsy.'
'Damn,' snapped Dexter, getting to his feet. He crossed to the window of his office and looked out over the well-manicured lawns and the tall trees that swayed in the wind.
'Is there anything we can do?' he asked, without looking at his companion.
'If the tumours are developing at the same rate then I could operate, try to remove them. We'd at least save their lives,' Colston told him.
Dexter watched as an intern led two patients across the, lawn, one of them kicking a football ahead of him like an excited child.
'You said four out of the five were exhibiting similar symptoms,' he said quietly. He turned to face Colston. 'What about…'
The other doctor shook his head, cutting him short. 'So far no change,' he said.
A slight smile creased Dexter's lips.
'Then we're doing something right,' he said, clutching this small piece of optimism as a drowning man clutches the proverbial straw.
Colston sucked in a deep breath.
'And we're also doing something very wrong,' he said. 'That's the third death in as many months. If the tumours in the other four continue to develop…' He allowed the sentence to trail off.
Dexter returned to his desk and tapped the five files stacked in front of him.
Each one bore the note: WARD 5 in its top right hand corner. Below that was the name of the patient.
'What do we do?' Colston wanted to know. 'Stop?'
'Certainly not,' said the other man indignantly. 'It will work, Andrew. I'm sure of it.'
'Then at least modify the process until we see the progress of the other five.'
Dexter shook his head again.
'The other four,' he interjected. 'You said one of them was still all right.'
'It might just be a matter of time before a tumour develops there too…'
Dexter interrupted again.
'No,' he said with conviction. 'It won't. I just believe it won't.'
'Because it's what you want to believe.'
'Do you blame me?' he snapped.
There was a long silence, finally broken by Colston. 'No, I don't blame you,' he murmured. 'And don't worry, I'm not going to back out on you. Not now.'
Dexter smiled appreciatively and picked up the files marked Ward 5.
He flicked through the first four relatively quickly.
It was the last of them that interested him.
TWENTY-ONE
The needle, almost six inches long, had been pushed through the girl's nipple, inserted with clinical efficiency through the fleshy bud.
George Kinsellar turned the page of the magazine and proudly displayed another double spread, this time of a young girl with several metal rings through her vaginal lips.
'What about that?' Kinsellar said. 'Be like shagging a scrap-metal yard, wouldn't it?' He chuckled his throaty laugh which ended as usual, with him hawking loudly, chewing thoughtfully on the mucus for a moment and then swallowing it again.
Kinsellar was a thick-set man in his early fifties, his face pitted, his hair thinning.
'How can anybody get their rocks off to something like that?' said Scott, shaking his head, taking the magazine from the older man and flipping through it. He finally dropped it into the supermarket trolley he was pushing and continued walking up the long aisle between the high shelves.
The warehouse was in Holloway and Kinsellar had owned it for the last six years. The bulk of his business was done with Ray Plummer's organisation, although he supplied a number of the other firms in the capital with videos, books, 8mm films and appliances. Fifty per cent of what he sold was illegal but business was booming. He followed Scott around, making notes on his pad of what the younger man was ordering.
The magazines were stacked up to three feet high on shelves that reached almost to the tall ceiling of the warehouse. Light struggled to penetrate a skylight which was so filthy it was nearly opaque. Inside, the place smelt of newsprint. As he pushed the trolley, Scott couldn't help but smile to himself. Whenever he visited this place (usually once a month to check up on new stock and place his order) he couldn't shake the feeling that, pushing his trolley around amidst shelves piled high with books featuring every kind of sexual perversion, he was like a shopper in some depraved branch of Sainsbury's.
'Some of this new stuff that's been coming in is fucking ace, I tell you,' Kinsellar said, making another note. 'Especially the German stuff. The krauts certainly know what they're doing when it comes to porn.' He chuckled, hawked and swallowed. 'I got a load of videos in the other day. You've never seen anything like it. Birds eating each other's shit. I was fucking amazed.' He smiled. 'I just kept thinking, "I hope they got it right on the first take". I mean, it's difficult enough getting an actress to cry on cue, isn't it? But to shit on cue.' The sentence disappeared beneath that mucoid chuckle.
Scott continued pushing the trolley, his mind elsewhere.
Carol wouldn't be in until eight that night.
He had another nine hours before he could ask her where she'd been last night when he was trying to call her.
They rounded a corner and began down another aisle.
