The Taste of Blood

Book 16: Inspector Carlyle

by James Craig

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Victim or assassin - the lines are blurred...

A badly beaten woman walks into A&E and is promptly arrested by the Home Office on suspicion of being an illegal alien. However, she is neither illegal, nor a victim. After she escapes detention, the bodies of her attackers start to pile up.

Commander Carlyle faces a race against time to find out who she really is - and to stop her from killing again.

Praise for James Craig

'A cracking read' BBC Radio 4

'Fast paced and very easy to get quickly lost in' Lovereading.com

Release date: February 3, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘Hm.’

‘I’ve been doing this a long time now. I’ve never seen anything like it happen before.’

‘No.’

‘It’s very … unfortunate.’

‘I can imagine.’ What did the doctor expect her to say? Charlotte Monkseaton squirmed in her seat, wanting the conversation to end as quickly as possible. A young male nurse walked slowly down the corridor, carrying a bedpan as if it was an unexploded bomb. Grimacing, he nodded at them before ducking into a disabled toilet. There were some unpleasantly loud sounds, followed by a cistern flushing. She scrutinised the medic, who was avoiding eye contact. ‘Was my father asleep the whole time?’

‘Your father didn’t notice a thing,’ he insisted. ‘Didn’t even stir. The nurses cleaned him up in no time.’

Charlotte liked to think she was not the type of person to make too much of a fuss about things. Plus, all these NHS people were heroes and you shouldn’t have a go at heroes. ‘I suppose it could’ve been worse,’ she said.

‘It definitely could’ve been a lot worse.’ Running a hand over the stubble on his chin, Dr Declan Brady bit his lower lip so hard it started to bleed. The poor woman was taking the news with an almost unnatural calm and Brady didn’t want to blow his grovelling apology by bursting into gales of hysterical, sleep-deprived laughter. ‘That’s certainly true.’

Brady was surprised she hadn’t called PALS already. Patient Advice and Liaison Services liked nothing better than kicking the shit out of junior doctors at every opportunity. And this was certainly an opportunity. He tasted the blood in his mouth. ‘It was all sorted out very quickly.’

In all honesty, the doctor didn’t see how he could be deemed personally at fault for the assault on the woman’s hapless father. Apart from anything else, he hadn’t even been on the ward at the time. But Philip Monkseaton was his patient, as was Mr Monkseaton’s attacker, one Samuel Fisher. Should PALS get involved, Brady would be the obvious scapegoat. ‘We’ve moved Mr Fisher away from your father, put him in another ward, so there’s no chance of it, erm, happening again.’ Another bubble of nervous laughter bloomed in his throat and he had to fake a minor coughing fit to keep the giggles at bay.

‘Are you all right?’ The woman offered him a small plastic bottle of water from her bag.

‘I’m good.’ Brady waved a finger in the air. ‘Just a frog in my throat, so to speak.’

She put the bottle back into her bag. ‘Must be tough doing your job. Working all hours. The lack of resources. The pressure.’

‘We just have to get on with it, but it has its moments, right enough.’ Like now, for example. ‘I knew what I was signing up for.’ More or less. ‘And I knew what I was getting myself into.’ Up to a point. ‘There’s lots of medical experience in my family. My mum’s a GP and I have a cousin who’s a consultant at Guy’s.’

‘Still, it must be hard.’

Her feeble smile prompted him to agree. ‘This is my third night shift on the trot. I reckon I’ve had about four hours’ sleep this week, in total.’ A minute ago, he was explaining how her vulnerable, elderly father had been assaulted in his hospital bed and now he was angling for sympathy. You bad lad, Declan. He bit his lip harder.

‘You guys do such an amazing job. If it wasn’t for all your hard work and dedication, the NHS would probably collapse.’

Look around you, love. The NHS collapsed a long time ago. ‘Very kind of you to say so.’ Brady felt the pager on his hip start to buzz. ‘Sorry.’ The doctor was on the move before he’d even checked the message. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back to check in on your father, later on.’

By the time he found a moment to slip outside for a fag and a can of Red Bull, the misfortunes of Philip Monkseaton were but a distant memory. A bunch of drunken yobs had landed in A and E; it had taken the best part of three hours to attend to their injuries, while trying to avoid the impressive array of bodily secretions decanted at his feet. By four in the morning, Brady had entered a kind of dreamlike state, which made him wonder if what he was experiencing was real or just the figment of his imagination.

Philip Monkseaton was real enough. The eighty-nine-year-old had been the victim of a bizarre assault by the man in the next bed. Samuel Fisher, ninety-four, suffering from severe dementia, had mistaken Monkseaton for his late wife, Agnes. Showing impressive agility, not to mention a healthy sex drive, the nonagenarian had clambered onto Monkseaton in search of his conjugals. By the time Brady and two of the nurses had managed to pull him off, Fisher had ejaculated over the poor bastard’s face.

Brady waited for the uproar to ebb. ‘Who’d have imagined the poor man had so much juice in him?’

‘Tsk.’ A no-nonsense Polish nurse called Anna quickly cleaned up the mess. ‘It’s not a joke, Declan. We could all get into big trouble for this.’

‘You’ve gotta laugh, Anna,’ the doctor counselled, ‘or you’re gonna cry.’

‘Big, big trouble.’ Anna quickly removed all traces of the assault from the victim’s face. Amazingly, Mr Monkseaton had slept through the whole thing. Then again, the guy was currently so heavily medicated he was sleeping about twenty-two hours a day.

‘There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.’

‘Why do you always talk such nonsense?’

‘It’s not nonsense,’ Brady insisted. ‘It’s the Bard.’ Going to university, it had been a toss-up between medicine and English literature. Much to his parents’ delight, he’d given medicine the nod. ‘Literature may be good for the soul,’ as his father liked to put it, ‘but it won’t pay the bills.’

You were right there, Da. Then again, the NHS’s largesse didn’t exactly stretch far.

‘All done.’ Anna dropped a handful of sterilised wipes into a clinical waste bag and peeled off her latex gloves. ‘Have you spoken to the next of kin?’

‘I was thinking,’ Brady looked around conspiratorially, ‘we could forget this happened.’

‘You can’t do that.’ Anna seemed genuinely outraged.

‘Why not?’ Brady lowered his voice. They were the only two people on the ward who were (a) below eighty, (b) awake and (c) compos mentis, but why take the risk of being overheard proposing a cover-up? ‘What they don’t know can’t hurt them.’

Anna watched the victim, snoring peacefully in his bed. ‘What happens if he complains?’

‘The man can’t even remember his own name,’ Brady reasoned. ‘Doesn’t know what year it is. He’s sound asleep. Worst-case scenario, he thinks he had a bad dream.’ He watched a range of competing thoughts scroll across Anna’s face. The nurse would want the unfortunate incident to be forgotten, but her dark Catholic soul would refuse to believe they could possibly get away with it. And they both knew the penalties for an unsuccessful cover-up could be far more severe than for the original offence.

‘What happens if Mr Fisher does it again?’

Now that is a very good question, Brady conceded. No immediate answer came to mind.

The debate was ended by the reappearance of the second nurse, a big-boned Geordie girl called Laura.

‘I’ve put Mr Fisher in one of the empty beds in the Wenger Ward and given him another sleeping pill.’

Brady approved of this course of action.

‘And Mr Monkseaton’s daughter’s on the way,’ Laura announced cheerily. ‘You’d better get your story straight.’

Brady intercepted the daughter before she reached the ward. Visiting hours were long since over but, under the circumstances, he wasn’t going to show her the door. The woman looked almost as tired as he felt. She apologised for being late and gave him a story about one of her kids being sick. Brady dialled up the sympathy and found her a seat. Taking a deep breath, he offered the most colourless account possible of the incident.

For several moments, Charlotte Monkseaton stared off into the middle distance, as if struggling to process the information. ‘I suppose it could’ve been worse.’

What a great woman.

What a great line.

I must write that one down, Brady thought. Like a lot of junior doctors, he fancied he had a book in him, if not multiple books. And a comedy tour. Maybe a TV show. Definitely a podcast. Hospitals were a great place for drama, and who better to chronicle the toxic brew of hope and despair than a dashing young doctor on the front line?

As well as a notebook half filled with anecdotes, he had a title for his proposed page-turner: Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches. It was a shameless lift from the Happy Mondays – an eighties Manchester band he’d discovered through raiding the CD collection of his elder brother, Brian ‒ but imitation was the highest form of flattery, right?

The original title for his memoir had been This Is Going to Hurt. Unfortunately, another scrubs-wearing scribe had nicked it, an English doctor who’d packed in medicine after losing a patient and gone off to work in television.

Despite his literary aspirations, however, Brady had no plans to quit. Forget the insane hours, the crap pay, the stupid punters, the lazy consultants and the nurses who wouldn’t even consent to a quick hand job in a quiet moment on shift, being a doctor rocked. It was all he had ever wanted and more. Nothing could beat playing God, day in, day out. It was like being a stand-up comedian, but with the power of life and death over the audience.

Even God, however, couldn’t survive on nothing but tobacco and energy drinks. Listening to his stomach rumble, Brady calculated that the last time he’d had a proper meal – which he defined as something hot, served on a plate – was five days ago. He’d gone round to see Ellen, his girlfriend’s mother, and she’d microwaved him a chicken pie and chips. Suzie, the girlfriend, was currently in Madrid, on a four-month secondment for her employer, one of the ‘big four’ accountancy firms. Ellen, a single mum with only the one kid, wasn’t very happy about the situation, but Brady was philosophical. Their long-distance relationship basically boiled down to a random selection of text messages and the occasional FaceTime call. Once you got your head round that, it had its advantages. At a distance of a thousand miles, it was almost impossible to fuck things up. You couldn’t miss a dinner date if you were in a different country.

What was he rambling on about? Brady recognised the point in a shift where his brain was shutting down, going off on tangents and generally refusing to work normally. Flicking the stub of his cigarette into the gutter, he breathed in deeply, pulling the chill night air down into his lungs as he readied himself for one final push. Six more hours, then breakfast, then bed. It was almost like a half-day.

Heading back inside, Brady registered movement at the edge of his field of vision. Squinting past the glare of the car park’s sodium lights, he watched a figure coming towards him. It was a woman, head bowed, arms folded. As she came closer, he saw she was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of knickers.

Unusual, but doubtless capable of explanation.

The woman passed within ten feet of him, without acknowledging his presence. At this distance, it registered that her face was caked with blood and she had large bruises on both legs.

‘Excuse me,’ Brady called out to her, ‘are you okay?’

The woman spat a gobbet of blood onto the tarmac before disappearing through the automatic doors.

It was turning into one of those nights. A battered woman emerging out of the darkness wasn’t quite up there with Philip Monkseaton being sexually assaulted by a ninety-four-year-old sex pest, but it had potential. Finishing his Red Bull, Brady followed his latest patient inside to see what he could do to help.

The downstairs neighbours were arguing again. Yawning, Bruno Soutine shuffled into his kitchen, opened a cupboard above his head and pulled out a box of breakfast cereal. Filling a plastic bowl with muesli, he added flaxseed, a handful of blueberries, a chopped-up banana and some soya milk. Moving to the postage-stamp-sized kitchen table, he began methodically eating while checking his phone messages. Of the four clients booked in for this morning, one had cancelled, and another was looking to reschedule. Bruno texted the latter with a couple of possible slots later in the day and dropped the phone on top of a pristine copy of yesterday’s Standard, which he hadn’t got around to reading.

The argument under his feet died away, lost beneath the hum of the traffic outside. Bruno finished his food and made himself a cup of instant coffee. Black, no sugar.

His first mouthful was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell, harsh, flat and insistent. Resting his backside against the oven, Bruno made no move to answer it. Must be a delivery for the couple next door, he thought. It was annoying that they were forever using him as a free concierge service.

What to do with the time released by his unreliable clients? The temptation to go back to bed was considerable. On the other hand, his cleaning lady would be here in an hour. All in all, it would be best if he vacated the premises.

The bell went again, a series of short staccato bursts, which translated as Answer the damn door. I’m not going to take no for an answer.

Grumbling to himself, Bruno placed the mug on the draining board. ‘All right, all right, I’m coming. Calm down.’ As he entered the hallway, the doorbell went again, louder and longer than ever. ‘Merde.’ He unhooked the chain and pulled open the door to find no one there. ‘Hello?’ He looked down to see a brown envelope sitting on the doormat on the landing. ‘What’s wrong with using the letterbox?’ As he bent down to pick it up, a sharp blow behind his ear brought stars to his eyes. He pitched forward, and a second blow sent him down and out.

‘This is a nasty one.’ Sergeant Laura Nixon kept one eye on the young Irish doctor as she scribbled her notes. ‘Not good.’

‘Sexual violence is always nasty,’ Declan Brady said earnestly. His shift should have ended more than an hour ago, he was starving and he could barely keep his eyes open. However, neither hunger nor tiredness stopped him noticing just how attractive the cop was. Tall, slim, blue eyes, blonde hair, the whole caboodle. And no sign of a wedding band either.

‘Presumably you want to keep her here for a few days, for observation?’

‘Definitely.’ Brady stared at the cop, grinning like an eejit. His brain started playing tricks on him again, flooding his mind with images of Sergeant Nixon in his bed, naked as Nature intended. He tried to replace her with Suzie but his subconscious wasn’t playing ball. ‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ he hissed, ‘get a grip of yersel’.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ Looking up from her notes, the cop blushed slightly. Oh, feck, she can see I fancy her rotten. ‘Been a long night,’ Brady offered lamely. ‘Sometimes you start losing it. Talking to yourself and stuff.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Nixon’s smile made him go weak at the knees. Then she surprised him by saying, ‘My shift is pretty much over. Wanna grab some breakfast?’

Bruno Soutine came around, bound to the kitchen chair with thick black tape. He had the nasty taste of blood in his mouth and a monster headache. To his dismay, he’d also pissed himself. His only clean pair of jeans too. The last thing he wanted to do with his free time – assuming he had any left ‒ was to visit the launderette.

A hand appeared on one shoulder, then on the other. Both were sheathed in latex, the kind of gloves worn by doctors. ‘Relax.’ His attacker stood behind him, out of Bruno’s line of sight. ‘Keep breathing. Nice and slowly.’

‘What do you want?’ Bruno tried to sound composed rather than scared.

‘What do you think?’ the man replied. ‘I want the money back.’

‘What money?’ Bruno giggled nervously.

‘You think it’s funny?’

‘I think you’ve made a mistake.’

‘You’re Bruno Soutine?’

Bruno considered lying, but what was the point? There was plenty of proof of his identity scattered around the flat. ‘Yeah.’

‘Then there’s no mistake, my friend.’ The man stepped in front of him: nothing unusual about him, nothing particularly athletic. Bruno was surprised the guy had been able to drag him back into the flat and sit him on the chair.

The man dropped a transparent plastic shopping bag onto the kitchen table. ‘You tell me where the money is, right now, or the bag goes over your head.’

The flimsy bag was full of holes. Bruno imagined he’d die of old age before he suffocated. This was just a performance, an act designed to scare him. He felt a modicum of confidence return to his voice. ‘Tell me about the money.’

‘Don’t fuck about.’ The man was clearly English, but his accent gave no further clues about his identity. ‘I’m not here for a chat. Give me the money you nicked and you get to live.’ He pointed at the bag. ‘Suffocation is very unpleasant. Not to mention slow.’

‘You’ve made a mistake,’ Bruno repeated. ‘I haven’t stolen any money.’ If the guy wanted to stick the bag over his head, let him. Just get him out of the flat before Uloma turned up. Absolute worst case, the cleaning lady would get the bag off his head and call the police, see if they could work out what the fuck this was all about.

‘Last chance.’

‘Look, honestly, if I had any clue about what you were talking about, I would tell you. I don’t owe anyone any money ‒ I don’t even have an overdraft at the bank.’

‘If that’s the way you want it.’

Bruno felt his confidence shatter into a billion pieces as the man placed a bottle of pills on the table. ‘What’re those?’

‘Zopiclone.’ The man turned the bottle around so he could read the label. ‘Heavy-duty sleeping pills.’

‘And what’re they for?’ Bruno almost choked on the question.

‘To make sure you don’t mess up your suicide.’

The breakfast rush at Romanov’s Café was still some way off and they had a four-top to themselves. Pleasantly full, Declan Brady settled back in his chair. ‘Quite a night, huh?’ He had spared Laura Nixon the Philip Monkseaton story. It was a good tale, but not necessarily to everyone’s taste and he didn’t want to alienate the pretty cop. Over the years, Brady had learned the hard way that he had a niche sense of humour. Anyway, Monica Seppi, the woman who had appeared in the car park in nothing but a T-shirt and knickers, had given them more than enough to talk about.

The police sergeant had established the woman’s back story with a minimum of fuss. Seppi was a twenty-eight-year-old Romanian who had worked in the UK for almost ten years. She told Nixon how she had been chatting to a couple of guys in a pub and then things went woozy. She suspected her drink had been spiked. They took her back to a flat and gave her more to drink. She blacked out. When she woke up, she was alone, on a dirty bed, covered with cuts and bruises. The smell of bodily fluids had made her gag. Crawling out of the place on her hands and knees, she had fled down the street.

‘These assaults are far too common,’ Nixon declared.

Brady gave a carefully calibrated response: not too empathetic, not too jaded. ‘She didn’t know the men who attacked her?’

‘She says not.’ Nixon looked doubtful.

‘You don’t believe her?’

Nixon wasn’t totally convinced by the woman’s story. ‘But, then again, why would she lie? It wouldn’t make any sense.’

How many people who end up in A and E can make any sense? By Brady’s estimation, a pretty small minority.

‘I need to go and write up my report.’ The sergeant finished her coffee and signalled at a passing waiter for the bill. ‘And I’ll run a check on recent date-rape cases.’

Reaching for his wallet, Brady prayed his credit card would work. He had a vague sense of last month’s bill not getting paid and his limit being breached. ‘Isn’t your shift over?’

‘I can get overtime.’

‘Handy.’

‘I’m lucky. My boss’ll approve it.’ The bill arrived. Nixon scanned it while Brady dropped his card on the tip tray. ‘We’ll go halves,’ she said briskly, not looking at him. ‘I always pay my own way on the first date.’

‘What about the second? Does the same rule apply?’ The words were out of his mouth before his brain had time to engage.

‘It depends.’ Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a card of her own.

He had to ask. ‘Depends on what?’

Nixon kept her face expressionless. ‘On whether it’s any good or not.’

Out on the street, Brady basked in the euphoria of his card having not been rejected. ‘Shall I give you a call?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I know where to find you. I’ll pop by tomorrow to see how Monica’s doing. Victim Support will be in touch, too. Hopefully, she’ll remember a bit more about what happened, like where the flat was.’

‘It couldn’t have been too far from the hospital,’ Brady mused. ‘Her feet weren’t so bad.’

‘I think her feet are the least of her worries.’ Nixon started off down the street. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Brady tried to remember his rota pattern. ‘If I’m not there, get them to page me.’ Exhaustion mixed with lust as he watched her disappear. Whistling a tuneless approximation of ‘Step On’, he strolled back to the hospital to pick up his car.

In the act of paying the extortionate parking fee, Brady was collared by Anna. The nurse was in a state of some agitation. ‘It’s terrible,’ she cried. ‘You have to stop it.’

Oh, fuck, Brady thought. Mr Fisher’s gone and done it again. PALS’ll rip me a new arsehole.

‘They’ve handcuffed her to the bed,’ Anna sobbed, ‘like an animal. Why? What has she done?’

‘Back up a minute. My brain’s in shutdown mode.’ Brady retrieved his amazingly still functioning credit card from the ticket machine. ‘Who are we talking about here?’

Anna said something in Polish that Brady imagined might be questioning his intellectual capacity. ‘Monica, the woman who came in last night, the police have just arrested her. They say she’s an illegal. You need to come and sort this out.’

‘But I’ve paid for my parking.’ Brady looked hopelessly at the ticket sticking out from the machine.

‘Come,’ Anna repeated, taking him by the arm. ‘You can get your car later.’

‘All right, all right.’ Grabbing the ticket, Brady let himself be led back inside. They took the lift in silence to the third floor where Anna pointed him in the direction of the Crespo Ward.

‘She’s in one of the rooms at the far end.’

‘Aren’t you coming too?’ Brady’s tone made it clear he didn’t want to do this alone.

‘I have to get home.’ Anna pointed at a clock on the wall. ‘The kids.’

Kids are the greatest excuse ever invented, Brady reflected. I must get some.

‘I have to go.’ Anna retreated into the lift, pressing the button for the ground floor in an attempt to prevent any further debate. ‘Text me with how you get on.’

The main Crespo Ward was empty. It had been closed for more than six months as a result of the hospital administration’s inability to keep a vomiting bug under control. The Crespo’s private rooms, however, were still in occasional use. Brady found Monica Seppi in the first he came to, handcuffed to the bed by her ankle. Doped up since Brady had gone off shift, sh. . .