Life Sentence Read online

  ‘More patients than you ought, I can see.’ Fran jerked her head in the general direction of the noisy toddler. ‘But I’d have thought this particular one might stick in your mind. Elise. The PVS case.’

  Kilvert nodded.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me about the first time you saw her. You must have been the first of the medical staff to examine her?’

  Another nod. ‘I thought she was dead. I even wrote “dead on arrival” in her notes. But she wasn’t.’

  ‘Or was, depending on your outlook. Could you just describe her?’

  ‘Why?’ she demanded, like a petulant child. ‘Everything you need’s in the file.’

  ‘Not quite everything.’ And much she had yet to decipher. ‘I want to know what she looked like.’

  ‘I’m a doctor, not an artist!’ she flounced.

  But the haircut and indeed the face, now Fran came to think of it, were pure Modigliani. ‘In my experience, medics are the most observant of human beings, and the most interested. Think Dr Watson,’ she added bracingly and hating herself for doing it. What was wrong with all these medics?

  The allusion fell flat. Kilvert was all too obviously wracking her brain for a live colleague. Fran puzzled too: the doctor’s surname was strangely familiar, but she could not place the context. Not medical, she was sure of that. Nor police. Verity Kilvert: what a name for the Scrabble board, were proper nouns permitted, of course.

  Trying to hide her asperity, and then wondering if she should bother to, Fran prompted her, ‘Apart from her terrible injuries, what can you tell me about her?’

  The toddler embarked on an ear-splitting tantrum.

  ‘Dr Kilvert, why don’t we find somewhere quiet to talk? Even my car’s better than this.’

  Verity conceded that the staff canteen might be quieter, and would provide a decent fix of caffeine. It seemed to Fran that the young woman was pickling herself from the inside with the stuff but she didn’t argue. She too was in need of some and of the sort of buzz that comes with disgusting doughnuts dripping with pink goo. But she was surprised to see them in a canteen frequented by people who should know better.

  At last, Kilvert drawing on her drink as smokers inhaled the very last of their fag, Fran began again. ‘Elise. Tell me what she was like as a person, not a patient.’

  ‘There was terrible trauma to the head—’

  ‘No,’ she insisted patiently. ‘As a person. Imagine you were trying to describe her to a man on the bus.’

  The young woman shrugged, as if in disbelief at both the elementary concept and the impossibility.

  ‘You mentioned her head injuries. Did you have to cut away hair to deal with them? Think back. What colour was it?’ After a moment she prompted, ‘Did it go with her eyes?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s got brown eyes, hasn’t she? And grey hair? Did she have grey hair then?’

  Kilvert grimaced. ‘That’s funny. She had blonde hair. One of the nurses said it was a sin to cut it all off because it looked as if she’d just spent a lot of money on it.’

  Fran scribbled. But if a doctor couldn’t remember a patient, how would a hairdresser remember a customer? Answer: if she’d been a regular, very easily. But you couldn’t go round asking all the hair salons in Kent if they’d missed a client.

  ‘Mascara. Quite a lot of mascara,’ Kilvert declared. ‘More than you’d expect in a woman her age.’ She looked critically at Fran.

  Damn: she still hadn’t fixed a hair appointment. ‘So she was my age?’ An age for dyeing your hair and taking pills, by the sounds of it.

  ‘Late fifties, early sixties – we couldn’t say exactly, of course. But the funny thing was, apart from the newly-varnished nails, she had really bad hands. The nails were actually quite ugly and coarse, the cuticles all over the place. As if she’d done a lot of manual work. Not dirty. But the skin certainly didn’t get a regular dose of cream.’ Verity stared at Fran’s.

  So did Fran, still burning at being thought so much older than she was. She never remembered to wear gardening gloves in Teignmouth, however carefully she gauntleted herself at home. A keen eye could pick out dirt under the dried, cracking cuticles. A manicure was in order while her hair was being coloured. If Suzanne could fit her in, of course, which was increasingly unlikely as the day pressed on without a call to make an appointment.

  She chivvied herself back to the present, trying to ignore all the criticism coming her way, but finding it hard to warm to Kilvert. ‘Elise’s background: a woman who had to work for a living, and not an easy one at that? Or one rich enough to chose to stay at home and indulge a passion for gardening?’

  ‘A working woman tarted up for the day,’ Verity summed up, her accent grating again.

  Like herself no doubt, Fran fumed. No, she must ignore the pejorative language. She tipped her head encouragingly on one side. A bird hoping for a crumb, Mark had once said, charmingly if without great originality. At the thought of him, she flushed again. Perhaps Verity, now staring into her empty coffee mug as if it were a crystal ball, hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Yes, and contact lenses. She wore contact lenses! Now, where’s that come from?’

  ‘The coffee, I should imagine. Can I get you another?’ She watched temptation flit across the younger woman’s face, to be replaced with will power.

  ‘Mineral water, please.’

  She said nothing about not wanting a doughnut, so Fran produced two more.

  ‘You really shouldn’t be eating crap like this at your age,’ Verity observed. ‘Whole foods, lots of fish. Phytoestrogens. Boost your Omega oils.’

  Damn all these medics and their pertinent advice. ‘What about Elise? Would you say she was pre- or-post menopausal?’

  Verity pulled a face. ‘At her age, post. A bit irrelevant now, anyway. She could hot flush for England and be none the wiser. And X-rays – specific ones – to tell if she had osteoporosis.’

  Any moment now she’d suggest that Fran needed them, wouldn’t she? Sharply, Fran turned the conversational steering wheel. ‘You say she wore mascara. Earrings?’

  ‘No, no jewellery that I recall. You’d be able to check with Admin of course. Or all her property may be with you people. I wouldn’t know.’

  What was the term she’d once heard? De haute en bas? How the nobs spoke to the plebs? Fran had long since earned enough to consider herself classless, but somewhere deep inside a grammar school girl wanted to stick her tongue out. She asked, in the quiet voice she used to alarm her junior officers, ‘Did you see the man who tried to resuscitate her?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, off-hand. The voice hadn’t worked. ‘Whoever it was he didn’t do a very good job, did he? He’d have done better to save his breath to cool his porridge.’

  It was normal for Fran and her colleagues to cover their emotion by using brutal language, either at the crime scene or in the canteen – normal and necessary. The same no doubt applied in hospitals. But it disturbed her to hear callous thoughts spoken in such cultured tones, with a curiously old-fashioned expression to round it off. And if her colleagues spoke like that of the dead, this woman was referring to a living person. Face impassive, Fran merely nodded.

  Checking her pad, though she would have been the first to admit that there was precious little jotted there, she said, as if recapping, ‘So we have a woman in her fifties, “tarted up” for the day, but unable to conceal her regular manual work. Did you see her clothes? I know they’ll have been bagged as evidence and I can check them myself, but did they make any impression on you?’

  Kilvert raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re quite good at this, aren’t you?’

  Patronising bitch. Fran smiled back, encouragingly.

  ‘They were new. And they still had those little plastic threads in, the things that attach the price tags. At least the ones I saw. Blouse and jacket. I only noticed those because she had minute scratches on her neck, as if something had irritated her and she’d kept brushing at it.’
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  ‘Blouse and jacket?’

  ‘Yes, as if she’d bought something new for some do she wasn’t sure about.’

  ‘Not her favourite Maxmara.’

  Kilvert didn’t notice the irony. ‘Lord, no, Eastex or some such. Brand new, as I told you. You know, the sort of thing some mums buy for little Jimmy’s graduation day.’

  ‘You think that’s where she might have been going?’

  ‘How could she? Drat,’ she added, quelling her pager, which had chosen that moment to trill. ‘RTA – serious head injuries. Have a son, I mean. When she was a virgin until she was raped?’

  As an exit line, it would take some beating.

  Fran didn’t go after her. Let the dead bury the dead. It was Kilvert’s job to save the living, and, as Mark had observed, Elise wasn’t going anywhere. In any case, she had to deal with the information so casually imparted. Poor Elise. What a way to be initiated into sex – a roadside rape. Did she need to see the gynaecologist who’d treated her? Not, she decided, till she’d rechecked the file, which meant bearding Penn in his lair once more.

  ‘Private practice? He’s left the NHS, just like that?’

  Penn shook his head. ‘Favours us with his presence one day a week. It just happened to be his day when they asked him to see Elise. And I’m not surprised you can’t read his handwriting – not exactly the best calligraphy, is it? And all these abbreviations.’

  ‘Could you interpret?’ Fran asked humbly. She didn’t wish to wear out her welcome, but Penn was showing his sunny face again, and might add in asides more than Fran could glean from the transcript back at the office.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s an examination room free. These aren’t the sorts of conversation you’d want everyone to overhear. Yes. In here, please, Chief Superintendent.’

  ‘Fran, please. Too many syllables in the title,’ she added.

  ‘You know, I’ve always wanted a few more. Penn. I always prefer to be called Michael, but you know what people are like: Mike it has to be. And you – you’ve got a nice Christian name too. Only we’re supposed to called them first names, aren’t we?’

  Fran laughed. ‘Except mine’s my second name. I never could be doing with Belinda. Frances got me too many letters addressed to “Mr Harman”. So Fran it became.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Are you due for a break? I could shout you lunch in your canteen.’

  ‘Senior nurses are paid quite well, thank you.’

  God Almighty! What had she said this time?

  Penn’s pager bleeped. ‘You can see I’m busy. But thanks for the offer. Now, unless there’s anything else I can help you with, I must be off. Actually, maybe you should talk to Mr Roland-Thomas himself. His real name’s Thomas, but he hyphenated his Christian name to it to make it posher.’ And he was gone.

  Fran used an ironic index finger to push her jaw back up into position.

  She’d hardly settled herself in the car, pondering her next move, when her mobile rang.

  ‘Pa?’ It was a good job she hadn’t had any lunch: she could have been physically sick.

  ‘You’ll have to come down. It’s that woman. She’s stolen all my money.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘I know it’s not my usual time, my dear, but I thought it might help if I were to vary the pattern – change the routine. The thing is, most people are tired in the evening, aren’t they? I thought perhaps you’d be more receptive during the day. So here I am. I can’t stay long, I’m afraid. There’s a departmental meeting about restructuring this afternoon. It threatens to be interminable. Well, restructuring is a euphemism for mass-redundancies, of course, so we’ll all be wanting to put in our three-penn’orth. The government has this idea that fifty per cent of young people should have a university education. Wonderful. But they don’t give us fifty per cent more funding. That’s what all this argument about tuition fees and top-up fees is about. Except you wouldn’t have heard any of it, would you, apart from what I’ve told you? When you wake up, what a different world you’ll find. Because you really must wake up, Elise. Make an effort. And make it soon. Otherwise it will be too late.

  ‘They’re trying to bring in a law to stop parents hitting their children. I never understood why anyone would want to hit anyone. Not until the other day. I still can’t believe I did it. But it was frustration, Elise, sheer frustration. I had to get through to you, had to. And nothing I could say or do made any difference. It must be like that with recalcitrant children, mustn’t it? Only they’re worse in a way because they’re noisy, too. You should see them in Sainsbury’s when they want sweets. Of course, the management make it worse by displaying confectionary at such tempting, such accessible heights. But that’s nothing new, of course. You must remember that. Like the song, eh?

  ‘Put it another way, Elise. You must remember that. Or something. Anything. And soon. For my sake as much as your own. I can’t go through the rest of my life knowing I’ve reduced you to this. Look at you, face stretched as if you were smiling at something, though I know it’s just a random rictus. I think I know.

  ‘Goodbye, my dear. I promise, absolutely promise, I’ll be back soon.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘But you’ve only been back in Kent about eight hours!’ Mark observed from the far side of his desk, making a huge effort not to explode at the outrageous demand. ‘You can’t turn tail and go back to Devon now! I don’t mean your work: I mean—’

  ‘I know. That’s what I told Pa. I haven’t even been home yet, as is happens. Which makes this all the more welcome.’ Fran gestured with her mug of tea and allowed the chair opposite his to take even more of her weight. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So are you going down?’ He was trying to sound casual, but even he could hear the anxiety in his voice.

  ‘No. Big flat no.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘I’ve phoned their care worker, who says Pa sacked the woman I’d got in to sleep over every night on the grounds that she snored. Oh, and he had to make her an early morning cup of tea.’

  He let himself laugh with her as he imagined the scene behind the bald summary. ‘It sounds a very reasonable response, in fact.’ Then he remembered something. ‘But what’s this about his money?’

  Shaking her head, she touched the side of her nose. ‘I have power of attorney and pay all the bills. It’s only a small town and still has some local shopkeepers, who all deserve sainthoods for their patience. They even deliver without charging, would you believe. So if any money were stolen, it would be peanuts.’

  ‘All the same – stealing from the old is about as low as—’

  ‘Stealing money is Pa’s cry for help. He accused my brother-in-law of stealing his treasure last time he and Hazel went to visit – and I don’t need my pocket Freud to work that one out. So I think I shall have to go down this weekend for all I was hoping for just one to myself.’ He could see the effort it cost not to let herself sigh. She even tried to smile, but her face was too stiff for her smile to be convincing. Stiff with fatigue and disappointment. Yes! He almost came round the desk to clasp her: they’d been talking of going to the coast this weekend, and she’d been looking forward to it. Dare he risk it? Dare he risk a ploy – hell, it was a lie! Did he look as shifty as he felt?

  She was waiting.

  Clearing his throat and fiddling with the corner of a file, he asked, ‘How far from Teignmouth is Salcombe? Because I have a friend who’s always on at me to mess about with him on his yacht, and I thought – you know, if the logistics worked out – we could share a car. I’m afraid we might have to head back on Sunday evening – I’m not one for getting up before the crack of dawn.’ He’d book in at some hotel near Teignmouth, phone her to tell her his plans had fallen through and at least shoulder some of her burden. With luck he might lure her back to sleep with him in a clean bed in a clean room.

  Yes and yes and yes. Her eyes gave her away. So did a tiny tremor as she swallowed a mouthful of tea and said coolly, ‘It might
mess you around horribly. Every time I’m due to set out for home, they find another little job for me to do.’

  ‘You never know, I might do it for you.’ He added quickly, before she could change her mind, ‘It’s a deal, then? Split the driving if you like – or you can sleep all the way. So long as you don’t expect more than a service area cup of tea,’ he added with a severe frown. ‘Or snore.’

  She laughed. ‘I have been known to sing “Ten Green Bottles” very loudly indeed to stay awake.’

  She meant it as a joke. But he knew as well as she the dangers of fatigue. Hell, exhaustion, more like. After an obliging smile, he leaned forward, almost senior officer to underling, but not quite, he hoped. ‘That’s another thing I’m afraid of. Your falling asleep at the wheel. Or taking on board so much caffeine that you don’t sleep even when you should. The T-shirt’s hanging in my wardrobe. And the sweatshirt, come to think of it.’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve been through this squared. And you lost a lovely woman with years ahead of her. I can’t imagine what it was like, seeing her suffer. At least Ian’s heart attack was – very swift.’

  One day they might be able to talk about their bereavements – this was the first time he recalled her bringing that tutor of hers into the conversation – but not now. He had a point to make. ‘There’s a difference between wearing yourself out caring for the man or woman you love, and prostrating yourself for your parents – who must be how old?’

  ‘Ninety. Both of them. I told you I was the afterthought. But just because they’re old doesn’t mean I don’t love them, Mark.’

  He had to screw honesty out of himself, however much he’d rather not. At last he looked her straight in the eye. ‘You come to love people…differently…when they’re chronic invalids, their personalities distorted by pain and suffering. Not less. Differently. All the demands: no matter how reasonable they are to them, they sometimes get to you. And it seems to me your parents are making – on a regular basis – totally unreasonable demands.’