HE DID NOT HAVE TO SHOW THE BLACKENED, SCARIFIED CLAW THAT WAS HIS LEFT HAND
ALISON WORTHYWOOL CHEWED NERVOUSLY at a strand of hair that had escaped from beneath her cap, it was a habit she had had since she was a child, the same thin strand which was never cut but chewed whenever she felt anxious or uneasy.
DI Yarrow had returned to the hospital to continue his enquiries. After leaving the distraught parents, he had inspected the murder site and the sad remains of little Emily with the pathologist and agreed with uniform that more police be assigned to keep the site secure and away from the morbid gaze of the public and, more especially, to keep Arnie Muckraker at bay.
Only now, several hours after being called from his bed, was he able to interview Nurse Alison Worthywool, who had been on duty when the little girl had gone missing. He rubbed away the gritty soreness in his eyes, yawned suddenly, cupping his burnt hand about his face to hide the jaw-creaking yawn. He looked up at Alison with a smile, “Sorry, it’s been a long day. And for you, of course,” recalling that she had been on duty throughout the night and probably had had even less sleep than he had had.
It was obvious that the nurse was distraught with worry and guilt, and Yarrow knew that he could not question her too harshly, but he needed to get to the crux of the situation.
“Alison, it is Alison, isn’t it?”
She nodded fearfully. They were sitting in the matron’s office, a small cubbyhole barely big enough for the two of them, Yarrow sat at the matron’s desk whilst Alison Worthywool sat in a hard chair before the desk.
“You were on duty last night, in the children’s ward?” he asked, an obvious question to which he already knew the answer, but he needed for her to relax and feel at ease.
“Yes, I came on at 11.30, my shift was due to start at midnight. But I relieved Paula Swainscot early, she was anxious to get away, her new baby is teething and fretting, and she wanted to get home to him so… I came in …early, as I said.”
“And you were the only nurse on duty in the ward?”
“Yes, well, the Night Sister, that’s Beryl Blackleigh, she came in at intervals, but yes, I was on my own.”
“Is that usual, a single nurse on night duty?”
“On this ward, yes, it’s always quiet, well mostly, the little ones settle down with no bother, they might wake up with a cough or to go to the toilet but it’s not like an adult ward. I love being on the children’s ward. I just love children, I suppose.” She smiled softly, her moon face lighting up.
Slowly, gently, Yarrow coaxed Alison’s recollections of the previous night, the night when the little girl had gone missing. Was it only last night he thought, it seems so very long ago even now. As the nurse slowly told her tale, stopping every so often to wipe away an errant tear, Yarrow watched her face, the soft bloom on the skin around her cheeks, the fullness of her lips and unaccountably suddenly felt conscious of his own burnt and scarred face, the stiffness of the grafts, the purpled flesh, the scarified ruin of his ear. He felt like Quasimodo. Certain that the girl, for she was no more than that in his eyes, must despise him for his hideously disfigured gargoyle of a face, wishing that he had recalled Harding from the murder scene to carry out the interview.
But he had a job to do and the girl’s repulsion at his ruined face must not interfere with his duty. “You came on duty at…” he checked his notes, glad that he was right-handed so that he did not have to show the, wondering why, after all these years he was suddenly so conscious of his injuries and scars. His deceased wife Marie-Helene had taught him that it was the man inside the skin that mattered, not the outside envelope. “At 11.30?”
“Yes, I told you.”
“And did you leave the ward at all?”
She had gone to make tea at about 2 o’clock, she said, having checked that all the children in her charge were asleep. No, she had seen nobody suspicious, nobody hanging around, no one who looked out of place. Beryl Blackleigh had come for a cuppa at the same time, as did the duty doctor, the same doctor with the flapping coat that had first accompanied Yarrow to the ward.
“I don’t know,” she said in answer to Yarrow’s request of her opinion of him, “he seems lost somehow, oh, I’m sure he’s fully qualified and all that, but…it’s as if, as if, he still has his mother checking to see if he’s washed behind his ears properly. He’s a loner, doesn’t seem to fit in somehow. Sorry, I’m not making much sense, I’ve nothing against him, Leonard, Leonard Draper that is. I’m sure he’s perfectly harmless.”
Yarrow wasn’t so sure; he would be checking out Dr. Draper very thoroughly indeed, it was his belief that crimes such as the abduction and murder of children were normally carried out by loners, men with no friends or social niche within the community.
“How long were you away from your station when you made your tea?” he continued.
“Not long,” she said hurriedly, guilt etched across her face. Deep inside she castigated herself for leaving the ward for even a minute. “Not long. 10, 15 minutes possibly.”
Yarrow said nothing, letting the silence drag on. “Maybe 20, 25 minutes,” she said after a long minute or so. “Beryl and I had a chat, girl stuff, you know, and she’d brought some Sally Lunns from Parkinson Bakers,” she saw the confusion on Yarrow’s face, “you know, a bun with icing on the top, shouldn’t really,” and she patted her stomach in admonition.
“Dr. Draper, he was with you all the time? Whilst you were having your girl talk and bun?” he asked, making another note.
“Yes, of course. He didn’t join in or anything, just sat there with his tea, which he drinks without milk or sugar, can you believe, and read a magazine, Reader’s Digest, I think. But yes, he was there all the time.”
After her tea and bun, Alison had gone to the toilet and then back to her ward, to make her rounds, only to find a child had gone missing. At first, she said, she had not been too worried, assuming the little girl had gone to the toilet; she was old enough for the cot side not to be raised and was easily able to climb out of her cot and make her way through the darkened – but not totally dark – ward to the toilet down the corridor. But after five or maybe ten minutes, Alison “began to get a bit concerned.”
“I mean; she’d been gone long enough to do what she had to do – even to poo if she needed. So, I made my way down to the toilets, thinking maybe she’s had an accident, you know, maybe messed herself but nobody. Nothing. No Emily. That’s when I got really worried and called Beryl and we had another look around. I ran on down the corridor, all the way to the front entry, asked the night porter if he’d seen a little girl in her nightie wandering around but Bert the porter, that’s Bert Appleby, said no, he’d seen nothing. Neither had any of the other staff I saw. I was really panicking now; how could I have left her. How could I have lost her?”
Thick tears rolled down her cheeks, her eyes already swollen from previous jags of weeping, and Yarrow had to resist a sudden urge to reach over and comfort her. “It’s all my fault. My fault. I shouldn’t have left her,” she repeated. “My fault,” sobbing into her sodden hankie. Yarrow pulled his own handkerchief, clean but un-ironed, and passed it over. She nodded in thanks, wiped away her tears, and nodded for Yarrow to continue his questioning.
Fearful dread knotting her stomach, Alison made her way back to the children’s ward, met up again with Beryl who also had asked everyone she saw – and there were surprisingly many – even at that time of night – but no one had seen the little girl. Dr. Draper had seen nothing, but he had been attending to an elderly man brought in with chest pains – it turned out to be heartburn and indigestion, but it had occupied his time from when he left the kitchen with the two nurses.
“Finally, we got Matron in and she wasn’t none too happy I can tell you and after another look around decided we’d best call in the police, Call you in, well not you personally.” And she suddenly blushed and looked down intensely at her feet.
“Thank you, I know it hasn’t been easy, re-living it like this.”
‘I should never have left her; it’s all my fault,’ she repeated, a mantra of guilt worn like a hairshirt, and Yarrow knew that the feelings of guilt would never leave her, no matter whatever he or anyone else might say.
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself; the guilt lies with the man who took her,’ he said, trying in a clumsy way to give the distraught nurse some comfort as he got up from the desk and came round to her side.
‘Easy enough to say,’ she answered, ‘but it’s what I feel inside. Deep inside I know if I hadn’t taken so long…’ The words trailed away. They stood side by side, acutely aware of each other, the tears still streaming down her face, Yarrow wanting to comfort the girl; she, aware of this, wanted only his arms about her, to wipe away her tears. Knowing that he would not do so unless she initiates the action, despite her own sorrow and guilt, she instinctively senses his loneliness and feels the ache of her own.
Then the dam of her own guilt and grief about the murder of little Emily Black burst apart, a torrent of tears and sobs wracking her body, and she turned and buried her head in his chest. He could feel her tears, trickling cold against his skin, the warmth of her body, the press of her breasts. He stood there uncertainly, his hands hovering about her back before, with a deep breath of resolution, he gently patted her back before allowing his arms to lightly clasp her to him. He closed his eyes and then raised them to the ceiling in supplication, and then, to his acute embarrassment, found that he had an erection and he pulled away from her so that she would not feel it against her.
For a minute or two only, they stood like that, two lonely ships adrift in a sea of misery and self-abasement; she, for her part, knew with sudden absolute certainty that she wanted this man, that this man, burnt and disfigured as he was, vulnerable and lonely, in grief for his dead wife, knew with total conviction that he was the man destined to be her man, her soulmate.
She wanted him in every way, physically, mentally, wholly, and completely; wanted him physically with a passion that seared through her loins in white heat; but despite the surge of coruscating ardour, she could sense a reserve and restraint from Yarrow, a hollow dread seeping through her that her feelings, so suddenly intense and so powerful, so unexpected, might not be reciprocated.
As for Yarrow, he was conflicted; he felt pity for the girl but more; his wife Marie-Helene had died more than two years ago and since then he had not held a woman or been even close to a woman (apart from Iris Porter, a predatory widow who had dragged him onto the dance floor at the annual West Garside Cricket Club Ball for a stumbling waltz), and he never thought he would ever do so again.
But Alison Worthywool had roused in him an understanding that he could not live the rest of his life alone with only his memories to sustain his emotional needs, and he felt attracted to her in a way he had not felt for many months; not just in a physical sense, it was more than three years since he had last made love to Marie-Helene. During the later course of her illness, intercourse had been too painful and uncomfortable, and for the last few months of her life, there had been no sexual contact, but now he realised that he wanted, needed, the comfort of a woman, not just for sex, but to hold and to talk to, to tell her of his day, to discuss their lives together.
As he held her, he could smell the faint fragrance of lavender-scented soap, the smell of rose-scented shampoo in her hair, suddenly fearful that he might smell of stale sweat and body odour, he bathed every week and washed himself thoroughly down each morning with a flannel and Cussons Imperial Leather soap but he had hurried up the pathway to the murder site and had felt the sweat trickling down his neck and body from his exertions in the heat. He wanted to sniff at his armpits to check, but could not, he still had an erection.
A large clock hung over the door of the matron’s office ticked loudly, building on the tension between them. He was acutely aware that he was the investigating officer into a horrific murder, she a key witness of the events leading up to that murder. Any sort of relationship other than that of police officer and witness breached every code of professional ethics; it might even be such a serious breach as warranting dismissal, but the conflict still raged within him. He squeezed her more tightly to his body for a second or two before he lifted his hands away from her back, found himself breathing heavily through his nose, his heart pumping, his lungs wheezing; too many cigarettes, he told himself but not believing it.
Slowly they broke apart, Alison clinging to him for one last second, both acutely aware they could be interrupted at any moment and for them to be discovered in an embrace, even one of comfort for a distraught witness would, at the very least, be most embarrassing. He brushed at the teary wet patches on his white shirt, as if trying to brush away the evidence of her tears against him. He pulled his jacket more tightly about his chest to try and hide the dampness.
She wiped her eyes again on his now damp and crumpled handkerchief, pushed the errant strands of hair back under her nurse’s cap, and straightened herself, breathing deeply to overcome the conflict she felt; a conflict she could also readily sense in Yarrow.
‘I must look a mess.’
He shook his head in denial. ‘No, no. You look very… pretty. Very.’ The words awkward and clumsy, he was not used to complimenting women; even Marie-Helene used to chide him about that.
‘I …I don’t feel …pretty, the very opposite, fat and ugly,’ recalling how she had felt when rejected by her fiancé Alan, all those months ago, a fat cow, an ugly fat cow, it’s an embarrassment to be seen with you; he had said, the hurtful words seared into her memory forever.
‘No, no, don’t think that… never ever think …that.’ the words trailing away in confusion, a distraction from the investigation. He swallowed hard. ‘I must go, find the bastard … sorry… find the evil swine that did this to poor Emily.’ But he did not move, suddenly reluctant to leave her.
‘Will I see you again?’ she asked tentatively, suddenly afraid of what the answer might be.
Yarrow was conflicted, the policeman in him said no, it cannot be, the man in him desperately wanting to say yes. ‘We cannot, it’s,’ he was going to say ‘unethical,’ but the words stuck in his mouth. ‘Yes, yes, we can. When all this horror is over and done with.’
‘When all this horror is done? Will it ever be done?’
‘We’ll find him. Have no doubt, we will find him, and he will pay for his crime.’
Alison blinked away her tears again and then slowly reached up to stroke his ravaged burnt face. “So sad,” she said, and Yarrow knew not whether she meant his disfigurement or the murder of poor Emily. At that, she let her hand trail down to his neck and rest briefly on his shoulder before she turned away and left the room, leaving his thoughts in turmoil.