*****
Ward C.
There’s no one around as I push open the double doors and walk into the place. I’m not sure who designed this hospital, in fact I wonder if you can get a job as a hospital designer, that must be a kind of strange place to end up, but anyway. Whoever did decided to paint the walls of each ward a different colour, maybe to make up for the fact that they didn’t have proper ward names, just numbers like A, B and, well, C. The walls of Ward C are a deep red, blood red, and it gives the corridor a dark, claustrophobic feel as I make my way down the corridor, passing the different room numbers left and right, until, there it is, room 12, on my left. The door is closed, there’s no window, I can’t see inside. Maybe I should just turn back and tell Jane that I’ve done it, but then, if I want to stand any chance with her, I need to show her I’m a real man and get this sorted properly. I glance around to see if anyone’s there, and have a quick smoke to calm my nerves, I even drop the stub into my pocket to avoid littering the ward. Then quickly, before I can change my mind, I knock tentatively and turn the handle.
Room 12.
Has a huge window on the far side, making it airy and bright. Pot plants are scattered around and there’s even some trendy furniture. There’s a bed on one side, but it’s empty, because Vanessa is sitting in a leather armchair, by a coffee table, in the middle of this huge room. She’s talking and laughing with a man, sitting in an identical armchair opposite, and my heart sinks when I recognise it’s Detective Justin Dredd.
They both glance up as I enter, and their expressions change. Vanessa’s face falls visibly, the laughter almost instantly turning to sadness, and Dredd gets a nasty smile, his eyes tight. They both sit, turned to me, waiting for me to say something. Vanessa’s wearing a flowing white robe, and the sunlight catches her hair and she actually looks really attractive, but it’s in a kind of predictable, boring way. The bandage wrapped around her ear kind of suits her, too.
“Hello” I try.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in” snarls Dredd. “How are you, Mr Forth?”
“What do you want?” asks Vanessa, and for a dreadful moment I think she’s going to burst into tears, but she manages to compose yourself.
“Well, I, erm, just wanted to see how you were?” I ask. “Can I sit down?”
“No” they both say, in unison.
I nod. “Can I smoke?” I ask, hopefully.
“For Christ’s sake” mutters Dredd.
“Oh, come on, Mark” sighs Vanessa.
“Sorry” I put my hands out. “Look, er, Vanessa, can I speak to you in private for a moment, please?” I ask, looking down at the carpeted floor. It’s really very plush in here.
“No” says Dredd.
Vanessa glances at him. “Oh, all right” he sighs and heaves himself out of his chair, making a show of being unhappy. He walks towards the door and brushes past me, strongly, making me stumble.
“That’s police brutality” I say.
“Report me” he whispers, then “But I want a word with you afterwards. Seems like some of your alibi didn’t check out”. He slams the door as he leaves.
I walk over to Vanessa and stand as close to her as I dare. We both look away. “Well?” she asks.
“Look, I’m sorry about the other day. The thing is, I, er, well, you know, I lied to you. I’m not seeing Jane.” I mumble, and her eyes brighten and she looks up.
“No?”
“Well, no, it was just, you know, it was, well, an excuse…”
“An excuse?” she’s staring intently at me, “what for, Mark?”
“Well, the thing is, you know, the thing is, we haven’t really been getting on for a while, and, well it seemed like an easy way…”
“An easy way?”
“Yes, you know, the thing is, really, I should have been honest with you. I should have told you, you know, we should have confronted it, but it’s true, neither of us were happy…”
“I was happy!” she shouts, her eyes dancing. “I was happy! And so were you! I don’t know what happened, Mark, I don’t know what happened to you, it just seems like a week ago, two weeks ago, you just… changed? What happened? What happened to you, Mark?”
Yeah, well that one would be kind of hard to explain, and so I just look at her.
“Did you… make a mistake?” she asks, tentatively.
“A mistake?”
She nods, sadly. “Yes, a mistake. You know what I mean.” I wish I did. “You know, did you, did you, kiss someone else? Go to bed with someone else? Make a mistake?” she’s almost whispering now.
“Well…” think quickly, John, “well, yeah, I did. I’m sorry.”
“Who was she?” she whispers.
I shake my head. “Does it really matter?” I’m doing well I think, crack out as many clichés as I can and hopefully that will be an end to it.
“I think it does. It’s important. It’s important to me.” Mind you, she’s doing pretty well herself. I start wondering whether we could get a game going, some sort of sweepstake around the ward, bet on the best or the most clichés. But probably too hard to organise and, come to think of it, Vanessa may not agree, she seems to be taking this quite seriously.
When I don’t answer, she says “You haven’t even asked me.”
“I haven’t?”
She sniffs and I think she’s crying. “You haven’t even asked me how I am. About my…”
I shake my head. “Your…?”
“My ear!” she screams. “My fucking ear! The one they cut off and wrote Ask Mark in my blood on my wall. Remember that? Do you remember, you bastard?”
I take a step back, it never ceases to amaze me how women can change their mood so quickly. Women. Can’t live with them. Can’t… never mind. But I manage to hide my emotions, thankfully.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, your ear, yes of course, how is it?” I say soothingly.
“Like you care” she half screams, half sniffs, and turns away, brushing her hair and revealing, on purpose I guess, a large white bandage over her left ear.
She sits there for a while, her back to me, sniffing, and I figure I have to wait a couple of minutes, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other, until I can talk. “Okay, well then, erm, I hope your ear gets better. I guess I’ll see you around at some…”
And of course I can’t get away with just that, she swirls round and gets up and gets very very close to me, I can smell her, and she smells good, and her breasts touch against my chest and her face is so close to mine I can only see her eyes, her brown fiery eyes and I catch my breath.
“Look at me, Mark” she whispers. “Look at me and remember me. You’ll regret this.” And maybe I will, as she holds my gaze and holds my arms, as her fingernails dig deep into my flesh, I can feel the flesh break, I can feel my blood ooze out slowly and soak through my white doctor’s uniform, and maybe I will regret it, she seems different now, harder, more demanding, more extreme, and I feel like I want to touch her, to throw her roughly on the bed, but she’s holding me too tight, she holds me, like it’s never going to end, and then she’s gone, turned away, gazing out of the huge window.
“Er, Vanessa” I whisper, but she doesn’t look around, she just holds up her left hand like she’s dismissing me and I can only shake my head. Like I said, can’t live with them.
As I step out of the door I feel, at least, well that’s cleared up, except for a moment of madness, I can tell Jane it’s sorted. Some work to do there too, but not lost yet, I’m thinking as I rub my arms distractedly, studying the drying red stains on my uniform. As I shut the door behind me, an arm grabs me and turns me round, and Oh Christ, I think, something I forgot, yes, too right, someone I forgot.
“All sorted then?” smirks Dredd.
Oh God. “Well, erm, kind of, I guess” I shrug.
“Too good for you, she is. Don’t know what she sees in you. Just because you’re a doctor. Mind you, you don’t much act like a doctor. You ask
me, you act like a loser most of the time. But people don’t ask me that, they don’t ask me to judge someone’s character, that’s not my job, is it?”
He stares at me, waiting for me to answer, so I shrug, “I guess not.”
“You guess not” he chuckles nastily. “You guess not. You’ll make a great philosopher one day. Well, let me tell you, it’s not my job. No, my job is just to work out who did what, and if it’s against the law, so much the better, but if it’s not, nothing I can do about it. Nothing at all. Nada. You get that?”
“Yeah” I say warily.
“Even if it’s cruel. Even if it’s evil” he continues. “Doesn’t matter. So long as you don’t physically hurt someone, then that’s fine. No problem. You can be as much of a bastard as you like, you can spit and shout and be a little shit” he whispers, “but if you don’t actually do anything, I can’t do anything to you. You get me?”
“I think so” I whisper. He’s still holding my arm, over the place where Vanessa wounded me, and it’s beginning to hurt.
“Little shits go unpunished every day. They do what they want, and they walk away. It’s a cruel world, isn’t it? It’s a cruel fucking world. Isn’t it a cruel world?” he breathes on me.
“I guess it is.” I’m feeling really uncomfortable. I really need a cigarette now.
“Perhaps” he says coolly, “perhaps someday we will put some laws in place that punish emotional violence, and not just physical violence. Maybe I should do it, maybe I should spearhead it, take a stand, make it count.” He pauses and gazes at me through his ice green eyes. “You know why it’s so hard to do, Mark?”
“Erm, well, maybe, erm, no, not really”
“It’s hard because it’s hard to prove, hard to quantify, and hard to measure. I mean, you can measure physical violence, can’t you, that’s easy, right. You know, murder is at one end of the scale, and, say, breaking a finger is at the other end. So you can make the punishment fit the crime. You understand? You’d have to do the same for emotional violence, wouldn’t you. You’d have to build a scale of some sort, a way of measuring it. From, at one end, say, just a mild argument about something trivial, to, at the other end, I don’t know, being a complete bastard and leaving your girlfriend for no reason at all, a complete wreck. You get me, Mark?” He stares at me but doesn’t seem to be seeing me. “You get me? Perhaps I could invent it, I could call it the Dredd Index. What do you think? Where would you stand, Mark? Pretty much on one end, I would guess. Maybe not a Dredd Ten, maybe not quite so bad. But an eight or nine. Don’t you reckon?”
“Well, erm, maybe not quite so…”
“Yeah, an eight or nine, I would say. No question. But unfortunately that’s not the way things are done, and until we can get there, then no matter how much of a shit you’ve been, I can’t touch you, because you haven’t done anything.”
I let out my breath. “Erm, could you let go of…”
“Unless, of course, you have done something. Or, let me put it this way, unless there is enough evidence to point at you having done something. It’s a funny thing, evidence. If there’s enough evidence that all points in the same direction, then it may be beyond reasonable doubt that you’ve done something. Even if it is circumstantial. If there’s enough evidence to say, oh I don’t know, for instance, that someone like you may have chopped the ear off an ex-girlfriend, and if your character points to the fact that you’re a little piece of shit who may do something like that, for instance, then, maybe, who knows, if the evidence was presented in such a way to a sympathetic jury, then…” and he gets really close to me, again, “then,” he whispers, “whether you did it or not, you could find yourself in jail. Just by way of example.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” I ask but Dredd ignores me. “What do you think?” he asks.
“Erm… about what?”
“Do you think you deserve to go to jail, Mark?”
“Erm, well, no, I mean, I haven’t done anything…” I manage to say. “If you just let go of my arm, I could get my cig…”
He lets go of my arm and gratefully I step back. My hands are trembling as I reach into my pocket and get out my packet, shaking a cigarette loose and placing it in my mouth. It’s hard to get the lighter to work, it keeps slipping out of my grasp, the little wheel won’t turn under my thumb, it’s so wet with my sweat as I keep trying and eventually Dredd grabs it, with a look of disgust on his face, lights it first time and holds it up for me.
“Thanks” I say, relieved, as I feel it hit me and calm myself down a little.
“So… you don’t think you deserve to go to jail” he says quietly. “Well, let’s see, shall we.” He gets out his notebook, opens the black leather cover and looks at it intently. He’s staring at a blank page.
“Let’s start from your alibi, shall we. When we interviewed you on Saturday, you were clear that you were at the pub, which pub was it, ah yes, the Five Stars, you were clear that you were at the pub alone. Am I right?”
“Yes?” I answer, tentatively.
“Well, Phil and I went for a friendly chat with the landlord. Decent bloke, he bought us a pint each, decent beer on tap there, but we had a chat, and, as luck would have it, he did remember seeing a scrawny, jumped up, false doctor looking guy on Friday night, around tennish. Isn’t that lucky?”
“Brilliant” I answer, not smiling.
“Funnily enough, though, he remembered you being with a few people, first a well-dressed chap and a good looking, if slightly severe, woman, until they left. And then another guy comes along, quite furtive, and you and he spend a long time looking at some, well, documents, and discussing things intently, until you both left, around, erm, let me see” he says, studying the blank paper intently, “around midnight. Ring any bells, Mark?”
“Well…” I stammer, feeling hot.
“Interesting isn’t it. You see, when what you tell us doesn’t match up with what actually happened, then we start to want to ask more questions. Especially when there are already question marks around your character. Are you following me?”
I look down.
“Interesting, that we also had a look around Vanessa’s flat. Lots of fingerprints there, oddly enough. We also managed to lift some fingerprints close to where the bloody message was, erm, inscribed on the wall. Perhaps that may give us a clue as to who wrote it? Don’t you think?”
“Well,” I gulp, “it depends…”
“Ah! Yes!” laughs Dredd. “Phil thought you were quite the amateur detective didn’t he. Perhaps you have a theory about this. Perhaps you have a theory about why your fingerprints were all over Vanessa’s flat….”
“How do you have my fingerprints?” I ask, surprised.
“Answer the question!” shouts Dredd into my face.
“Well, she was my girlfriend…”
“She was. She was. Until you dumped her.”
“So I would have been at her flat?” I ask.
He studies me. “We’re running some DNA tests. Comparing samples found around the zone where she was attacked, and of course, on the wall, to see if it matches yours. And if it does…”
“How do you have my DNA sample?” I manage to ask.
Dredd looks at me, and reaches his arm forward, putting his right hand on my cheek. He talks very softly. “When people have done bad things, they lose the right to ask questions, Mark. They lose the right to be able to crawl away like some worm. You understand me? Whatever happens, we will find a way of making you responsible for this.”
“But…? I didn’t do it?” I whisper.
He smiles broadly. “Well, Mark” he whispers, “maybe you didn’t, but maybe in the eyes of the law you did. You’ll have to wait and see.” He takes a step back from me and gives me a nasty smile. “Be seeing you.”
I feel myself stumble backwards away from him, it takes me a couple of seconds to regain my composure as I light another cigarette. I wonder if Fat Chef has any vodka he can put in my coffee, I think I
’ll go and ask him. I take a deep breath and turn to go.
“Oh… almost forgot” comes the voice behind me and I turn back to look. “Get yourself down to the station in the next couple of days please. We need to interview you formally. You may want to bring a lawyer.” He winks at me, then knocks gently at Vanessa’s door.
The corridor seems very long and very dark, and it’s a relief to push through the double doors and step out into the dark and dingy central hall that leads to everywhere else. My hands are still shaking as I check my watch. Eleven thirty. When did I say I’d meet Jane? I’m sure I’ve got some time, and so I head back to the canteen.