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  I can also remember.

  Funny the order it all comes back, he thought. First childhood, apparently. All sorts of strange things he didn’t even know he had a memory of. Being in a pram. Then falling off a swing and banging his nose. The first time he’d ever seen blood. It was all so vivid, that at first he’d been confused, and even thought for a moment that he was still a child. But then other memories came, in a great rush, like pieces of a jigsaw being furiously fitted together by an unseen hand: school, homework, rugby, a girl with blonde plaits laughing at him, names and faces, on and on, into medical school, a woman smiling at him and taking his hand – Isabelle! – the first time he held a scalpel – his hand steady as a rock – faster and faster as he got nearer to the present, a blur of images, the Victory, Nurse Vale mopping his brow under the lights, a patient, a woman, unconscious . . . then a final furious fast-forward that left him dizzy – and the picture was complete. He was whole again.

  He felt an immense sense of relief.

  He wanted to breathe. He so wanted to breathe. But he couldn’t feel air passing through his mouth or nose. Why not? No matter. He knew who he was. Now he needed to find out where he was and how he’d come to be there.

  Don’t panic, he thought. Be logical. That was what he was good at. Go back into your memories and fast-forward to the very last one, the thing that happened before ending up here. That would explain everything.

  *

  Trenchard threw his surgical scrubs to the floor, slipped the silk suit jacket from the hanger in his locker and strode from the changing rooms. All he wanted now was that glass of claret. He’d been thinking about it all day.

  The storm that had been threatening all afternoon had now begun its assault on the Victory hospital. As Trenchard made his way through the empty halls, the distant squeaking of a ward trolley was drowned out by shrapnel-bursts of rain slamming the skylights above, like rice being flung at tin trays. It would be a dreary journey home tonight – but, then, Trenchard had no intention of making the journey, not yet. Isabelle would be waiting and he couldn’t bear the thought of forced television and empty talk. Better his own company than that.

  Besides, the claret was waiting.

  Trenchard’s office might have been in the basement of the outpatients block, but there was nothing dingy about it. The mahogany desk was decorated with a simple crystal decanter, a sheaf of papers awaiting Trenchard’s name – and, in pride of place, a small bust of Socrates, a gift from a suitably grateful patient, next to a box of expensive cigars. He opened the box and took one out, slicing off the tip with his silver cutter – another gift – before holding a match to the end. He sucked the aromatic smoke deep into his lungs. In the background, the coffee maker gurgled – but that could wait. Instead, he opened the decanter and permitted himself a glass of the rich, light-filled claret.

  On the ceiling above, the smoke detector flashed a desultory warning but made no noise. Trenchard had disabled it long ago. For some, rules should not apply.

  Lounging in a cloud of rich smoke, he wondered what music would best match his mood. It had been a long day. He’d known that he should never have tried to bypass the arterial narrowings in the old fart’s legs. The pipes below were no more than threads themselves. But colleagues elsewhere had pronounced the patient inoperable. And as much as he’d wanted to help the man, he also wanted to prove the upstarts wrong. The grafts had failed almost at once and he’d had to resort to some heroics to get them going. Which he had. The ache in his arms and back was a small price – and one that could be numbed with wine.

  He was sliding Holst onto the turntable when he heard the door begin to open. ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ was already rising out of the speakers when he turned.

  The door was two thirds open, and it was dark in the corridor outside. The figure standing there was little more than a silhouette, framed in the dull office glow. Trenchard tried to adjust his eyes, but all he could see was the trench coat covering the body, the dark hair tucked down into the collar.

  ‘Michael.’

  That voice – almost unrecognizable. But then the figure drew back the hood.

  ‘Oh,’ Trenchard ventured, with just the hint of a smile, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘Who else?’

  The figure stepped into the office and, in moments, the door was locked behind her. One by one the trench coat buttons came undone. Inch by inch, the body beneath was revealed as she held Trenchard’s gaze. She was just the same as he remembered from last time, every inch of her.

  Trenchard ground out the last of his cigar, drained his glass and drew himself up, towering over the new arrival. With his eyes still on her, he loosened his tie. She would do the belt. It was what she was here for. There could be no other reason.

  When she stepped toward him, his breathing deepened. He could see her milky flesh appearing, glowing in the lamplight. Mastering himself, he took a step back. The woman stepped slowly past him, reached for the record player and turned up the volume. Holst roared, and the desk shook. He watched as she turned to face him. Somehow, when she was looking the other way, the trench coat had slipped open even further. A dark triangle of hair revealed itself below her waist, just where the folds of the coat still touched.

  ‘Sit down, Michael.’

  So it was to be like this. She liked the charade, pretending she was the one in control. He would let her have her way, if only for a little while. Trenchard returned to his chair and lay back. Now she was on top of him. Her finger was tracing his jaw, a bright-red nail sliding under each of his shirt buttons, slowly, deliberately popping open each one. Her coat fell like a blanket between them – and now she was on her knees, tracing that same sharp finger around each of his nipples, down the ridge of his stomach, exploring the knot of his navel and further, further down.

  Trenchard held his breath. Soon, his belt was undone. Then the buttons on the waistband. Her hand closed around him. When her lips enveloped him he lay back and closed his eyes. One hand groped for the decanter. With the glass too far away to pour, he drank straight from the crystal. With the touch of her lips every nerve in his body quivered.

  This is going to be one to remember, he thought.

  21

  ‘He laughed. He literally laughed.’

  Kash took a sip from his bottle of lager, briefly noting that he had been all but teetotal only months ago. The alcohol had done nothing to calm him, his pulse racing all the more as he relived the moment. Tiff and Claire sat together on the other side of the table, which had already accumulated a decent number of empties, the buzz of a Friday night crowd in the Balti ebbing and flowing around them.

  ‘Bastards,’ Tiff said, simply, taking a deep pull of her own beer.

  Kash wasn’t sure if she meant the police or just men in general. Now that he’d spent a bit of time with her in Claire’s company, he’d got used to her generally sour feelings about the male sex. But it still made him feel uneasy. If all men were bastards, that included him. Which meant she could hardly be happy that he and Claire were together.

  Not for the first time, he wondered about Tiff’s feelings for Claire. They had a bond, that was clear to see. And Tiff did seem genuinely protective of Claire. But was there more to it? After his interview with DI Lambert he was wondering if he was in fact hopelessly naive about sex, about men and women and what they did together. Did everybody have a secret life, like Michael Trenchard, that no one else knew about? Was it even obvious to everybody but him that Tiff and Claire were lovers? That would at least explain why random people kept asking him ‘How’s it going?’ with a smirk.

  Well, right now, he wasn’t at all sure how it was going. He’d expected sympathy if not actual outrage at DI Lambert’s treatment of him, but didn’t seem to be getting it from Claire.

  ‘It was very unprofessional of him,’ Claire soothed. ‘No doubt about that. I mean, you can’t just laugh at people who are trying to help.’

  ‘It wasn’t just that,’ said Kash
. ‘He didn’t even listen to what I was telling him.’

  ‘About Trenchard injecting himself?’

  ‘Yes, he just dismissed it.’

  Claire and Tiff shared a look.

  ‘Well,’ Tiff began, ‘you can sort of see where he’s coming from. I mean, maybe Trenchard was ambidextrous.’

  Kash was getting fed up with people talking about Trenchard in the past tense. ‘He isn’t!’ he said too loudly.

  Tiff sat back. ‘Wow, steady, Sherlock.’

  ‘I just mean,’ Kash said more evenly, ‘that it would have been more natural to inject himself with his left hand. That’s all,’ he added sulkily.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure you can exactly call injecting yourself with morphine before putting a noose over your head natural, can you?’ Claire countered. Beside her, Tiff tittered.

  ‘Fine,’ Kash said, knowing he should try and chill out, but finding it impossible. ‘Now everybody’s laughing at me.’

  Claire gave Tiff an admonishing look. ‘Nobody’s laughing at you, Kash. We’re just trying to be objective. I’m sure the police have considered all the facts. If they found evidence there was someone else involved, they’d be pursuing it. Or maybe that detective was just embarrassed you’d shown him up, because they hadn’t thought of it themselves. He’s probably looking into it as we speak.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Kash grumbled.

  Tiff shrugged. ‘Either way, there’s nothing else you can do, is there?’

  ‘You’ve done your best. And I think it was very brave, actually,’ Claire said.

  Kash didn’t think she sounded very sincere. He had meant to tell them – well, tell Claire, anyway – about the tap. Just to see what she thought. But now he was glad he hadn’t. No doubt she would have dismissed it as just one of those things that happen in any busy hospital. Just as DI Lambert had dismissed his theory about Trenchard being injected by someone else. He needed something more solid. Something no one could shrug off as a coincidence or an accident.

  ‘Come on, Doctor,’ Tiff said brightly. ‘I get enough gloom and doom from nine to five in my job. It’s Friday night and I, for one, intend to get pissed.’

  She and Claire clinked bottles, and Tiff held hers out for Kash to do the same. Reluctantly, he complied.

  ‘Right,’ said Claire. ‘Let’s call it an education, Kash. Where are we going to go after this?’

  22

  How strange. To remember what he had experienced so intensely, every sensation almost unbearably vivid, when now his body felt as if it was somewhere else, a million miles away, unreachable. Unplugged. He thought about what had happened next.

  *

  He was still concentrating on the mounting ecstasy, eyes closed, when he felt her hand pressed into his. At first he thought she was clinging to him, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the tiny plastic bag around which his fingers were closing. He lifted it up. A familiar smell. Amyl nitrate? And . . . something else? Something sweet.

  He reached down to run his fingers through her hair. How did she know? She just did. She knew everything he wanted and more. He brought the bag to his nose and inhaled deeply. Instants later, the rush hit him. The world receded, leaving him alone with his pleasure.

  One of her hands was around his buttocks. She gripped him, taking him deeper, and suddenly he was lost. Hypnotized. His world was only the pleasure of her lips, the exquisite pain of her fingernails raking his flesh. He breathed in again. At that moment, not a thing in the world could have wrenched him out of his reverie. The hospital might have burned down around him and Michael Trenchard would not have cared.

  The pain, when it came, was so little different to her fingernails that, at first, he barely noticed. Just a pinprick of discomfort in the constellations of pleasure through which he sailed. The pleasure and the pain were inseparable, intermingled, echoing and amplifying each other. But then that one point started burning more fiercely than the rest. He looked down – just in time to see the 2 ml syringe dropping out of her hand, back into the small leather case she had open at his feet. But the pleasurable sensations were so overwhelming that he paid no attention.

  His breathing quickened. His tension mounted. It had never felt like this before. It would not be long. He started to gasp – gasp with pleasure, gasp with anticipation; then, finally, to gasp . . . for breath.

  Something had changed. This faintness he was feeling, it was not ecstasy. He could feel his heart. It was hammering, not with excitement – but with panic.

  Trenchard knew at once. He’d seen the effects enough times, the way it made a body flutter then freeze. He was becoming paralyzed – not just metaphorically. The needle had been her own poisoned dart. Curare?

  Suxamethonium.

  Trenchard had often watched anaesthetists at work through the small round window in the door separating the anaesthetic room from the operating theatre. To take over the breathing in an emergency, the muscles had to be rapidly paralyzed, and there was something strangely exhilarating about watching someone’s power being sucked from them. In his panic, he tried to remember. There must be something he could do? Suxamethonium was a powerful drug. It raced remorselessly around the bloodstream, reaching the tips of each nerve, wherever they met the body’s muscles. There, where specialized connections carry nerve impulses across to the muscle, the drug caused the connections to short out, showering off small electrical impulses until they ceased to conduct at all. That, Trenchard knew with terrifying clarity, was what was happening to his body now. His connections were being fried. The messages sent from his brain to his muscles were being cancelled along the way.

  He tried to take a breath. The effort was immense. Just like the patients on his operating table, he was losing all power. Without an anaesthetist to take over their breathing, the patient draws no breath. They go blue. Two minutes, and irreparable damage to the cerebral hemispheres – the thinking part of the brain – begins. Much longer, and the brainstem itself begins to die. The connections between the thinking brain and the peripheral nerves are destroyed. Finally, the brainstem gives up. The heart slows and stops. The patient is dead.

  He repeated that last thought to himself, locked immobile and powerless in his personal prison. He was about to die.

  With that realization came a strange kind of calm – but it was not acceptance; it was only the suxamethonium infiltrating the deepest parts of his body. Even the muscles of his middle ear were becoming weaker. The sounds of his own breath grew louder, then softer, then distorted. In that same moment his body tumbled forward, no longer able to keep itself upright. He slumped in the chair, sank to his knees, tried to reach for the desk to steady his fall – but the muscles of his arm simply refused to respond.

  Her arms were around him now. Her naked breasts pressed up against him. She supported him as he sank downwards, laying him quickly and efficiently upon the neatly splayed coat. No breaths came now. His vision was fading to black, the storm of blood pounding and pulsing in his ears. He slipped from the surface and sank beneath the waves.

  23

  Over the next week, Kash had resolved to just carry on as normal, to stop obsessing about Mr Trenchard and concentrate on impressing his new boss, Dr Carney, which felt as if it was going to be an uphill struggle. Carney gave the distinct impression, without actually coming out and saying it, that Mr Trenchard, for all his surgical brilliance, had been too much of a showman, and had recently been focused more on polishing his image than on the current needs of the hospital – which as far as Kash could tell, meant meticulously following procedure, filling in paperwork promptly and trying not to overspend the hospital’s budget. Kash, Carney seemed to feel, was guilty by association: as Mr Trenchard’s favourite, he must surely be liable to the same deficencies. His message had been clear: now that Mr Trenchard was out of the way (he referred, through pursed lips, to his ‘unfortunate accident’), things were going to change, and brash young whippersnappers like Dr Devan would be quickly put in their place
if they didn’t knuckle down. With Dr Carney’s angular face, still pocked with acne scars, blade-like nose and piercing eyes, Kash couldn’t help thinking of a Soviet Commisar, gleefully running the palace now that the Tsar had been deposed.

  ‘I appreciate that you have spent much of the last six months working for Trenchard.’ There it was. Just a surname on a register. No longer a person. ‘It’ll be odd to have now to care for him. I trust that you have the necessary . . . fortitude? That you can remain professional, whether you view him as hero and mentor, or distasteful deviant.’ He smiled coldly.

  It felt as if he was being tarred by association. He was a tainted product. But he’d show Carney. He’d be the doctor he always wanted to be. The doctor Michael Trenchard had tried to train him to be. Exceptional. Kash nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  *

  When he entered the ward, he made a point of stopping at Liz Murray’s bedside first and only quickly glanced over at Mr Trenchard, who was slumped sideways in his chair on the opposite side of the six-bedded bay, a couple of spaces down.

  He looked at Liz’s chart, then felt her calves for clots and checked her lungs. Physically she seemed to be in fine fettle, apart from the fact that she was dying. But she definitely wasn’t her normal cheery self.