Control Page 9

  And now he’d paid the price.

  15

  There was nothing more contagious than a secret, even in a hospital. Hospitals were generally very good at keeping secrets from those outside. Celebrities came and went, and many inside knew. But the press rarely ever did. And when they did, the leak usually lay outside the Victory’s walls. But inside, it would have been easier to keep cholera confined – because, in the next twenty-four hours, there wasn’t a person in the Victory, from lowly porter to respected oncologist, from ward sister to radiologist, who hadn’t heard the sorry story of Michael Trenchard’s bizarre night of misadventure. Chris’s admonishment to the porters about confidentiality had a Canute-like quality to it in retrospect. Did he really expect them to keep a piece of gossip as juicy as this under their hats? In any case, plenty of people must have seen the trolley on its way to ICU and even if they hadn’t recognized Mr Trenchard lying on it – or simply hadn’t believed what they were seeing – word would soon have got out.

  Not that you would have had to rely on the hospital grapevine for all the gory details. The next day, there it was, splashed across the front page of every newspaper, from the most sensationalist tabloid to the most serious-minded broadsheet. Mr Trenchard had timed his indiscretion particularly badly, as there seemed to be no more substantial or attention-grabbing news to fill the front pages, and the Trenchard story expanded to fill the vacuum. Not that much expansion was needed. After a brief paragraph outlining his eminence in the medical profession, all the papers took varying degrees of pleasure, from unashamedly gleeful at one end to morally outraged at the other, in describing every last detail of his fall from grace. If he had been a celebrity or a politician, a household name, perhaps it would have been a bigger story. But then, if truth be told, it might have actually been less shocking. Unusual sexual shenanigans were, at the end of the day, what you expected from such people. For a doctor, on the other, hand – a surgeon who dedicated himself to saving lives, a paragon of virtue toiling away in the bowels of the NHS (at least for the most part) – to botch his own autoerotic asphyxiation in the very hospital where he had performed his miraculous cures, that was truly bizarre.

  In the doctors’ mess, there was a feeling almost of being under siege from the outside world. Geoff had been phoned at home and offered a substantial sum of money in return for a first-hand account. Max had been stopped on the street and offered the same. Security had to be called when it was revealed that two journalists had tried to sneak onto the ICU, claiming to be relatives. One – a woman – was even sobbing convincingly. A third had brazenly appeared with a white coat and stethoscope, thereby demonstrating that his knowledge of hospitals came mostly from TV, as nobody wore a white coat on the ICU any more. The discovery that Mr Trenchard had once operated on a minor royal only seemed to make the papers’ thirst for first-hand accounts of his demise even more frenzied.

  And the journalists weren’t the only ones pressing the medics for their stories. The police had quickly become involved, led by a cadaverous detective called DI Lambert, and everyone had to be interviewed, or ‘interrogated’, as Max put it. How well did they know Michael Trenchard? Had they been aware of his sexual predilections? Had there been any previous incidents of this kind of behaviour? Kash had had his own interview, of course, and as far as he could tell gave the same answers as everyone else: ‘not very well’, ‘no’, and ‘I have no idea’. As one of the first responders, they’d dwelled on him longer than most – and all the more when they learned somehow that he’d been Trenchard’s ‘protégé’, a charge – or it seemed like a charge, from the way it was put to him – that he denied. It was a blur now. He couldn’t really remember what he’d told them. Still working through that same night covering the wards, it had frankly begun to seem like a bad dream. And life – or, rather, life and death – went on without pausing to take in the news. Mr Trenchard might not be operating, but others had taken that work on, and Kash still had to care for the patients.

  ‘What about you, Kash?’ Geoff said, with a grin. ‘All those nights you were slaving away in his office. He never came back and whipped you if you hadn’t finished his patient studies?’

  Kash felt the blood rush to his face. Less than a week ago, they wouldn’t have dared to joke about Mr Trenchard. Now, it seemed, he was fair game for every kind of bad-taste quip imaginable. He got to his feet.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re talking about him as if he’s dead. He’s still here, in this hospital.’

  But if Michael Trenchard wasn’t actually dead, what other word was there for the condition he was in? To his shame, Kash had not been to see him since the drama in the outpatients basement.

  ‘Christ, Devan,’ Max said. ‘We’re only pulling your leg. Come on. Sit down. Finish your coffee.’ Kash slowly unwound, and seated himself. ‘Still, you have to say, it doesn’t look too pretty.’ He picked up a tabloid from the floor beside him, and opened it to the double-page spread in the middle. There was a picture of Trenchard, obviously taken at some charity bash, immaculate in his pinstripe suit, smiling for the camera, his arm round a woman in a demure black cocktail dress who Kash assumed was his wife, Isabelle. On the facing page, a charming tableaux had been arranged: a noose, a black silk bra and panties, a syringe and a magazine, the cover of which had been mostly blacked out, but which still clearly showed a naked man on his knees being whipped by a woman dressed from head to toe in black leather.

  Were these the actual things he’d been found with? No, surely they’d be in a police evidence locker somewhere. Kash went cold, thinking of the holdall still under his bed, untouched since he’d put it there. He didn’t even know everything that was in it. Perhaps it, too, was evidence.

  He should never have taken it.

  But since he had, should he now hand it over to the police? What would he say, though? How could he explain himself without getting into worse trouble?

  No, he’d worry about the police later. Right now he had to worry about Claire.

  16

  Michael Trenchard wondered where he was.

  All around him were astonishing blooms of iridescent colour, bursting into sudden life, then just as quickly fading away, against a backdrop of emptiness as black as pitch. After a while (though he had no sense of time) the fountains and flashes died and didn’t return. He was left swirling inside blackness, detached from his body, adrift in the vacuum, his only sensation one of boundless space and emptiness.

  A thought occurred: perhaps this isn’t a ‘where’; it’s a ‘what’. Could this be death, this endless nothing he was drifting in weightlessly, a leaf in the wind?

  Well, that would certainly be a surprise. He had always assumed death to be the termination of everything; something by definition that you couldn’t experience. And yet here he was, apparently conscious. Conscious enough, at least, to ask himself questions. So he was alive, then.

  Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Which meant . . .

  He tried to remember where he’d been, what he’d been doing, before . . . before he entered this new state. He recalled music. One of his favourites: ‘Mars, The Bringer of War’. Was that the smell of a cigar? Yes, he’d been smoking. Smoking and . . . enjoying a glass of claret. In his office. Sitting back in his chair, feet up on his desk. It must have been evening, then. The end of a long day.

  He made an effort to remember more, but nothing else came, and then the rest started to fade: the music, the smell of the cigar, the taste of wine. He was left in the void again.

  Not dead, then, he thought. But for some reason he had a feeling he almost had been. That he’d been snatched from the brink. He’d experienced it so many times from the other point of view, sensing a patient under his knife reeling away, tumbling off a cliff top only to be hauled back by a needle in their arm, a flood of some drug or other. There was, unashamedly, a thrill to be had in that – in holding the thread that could lead a person out of the abyss, and back – like Odys
seus, from the land of the dead. One little snip and they might go spinning; one little pull and they would come crawling back to life and be grateful, ever after, that you had been there, the only one who could save them, who could grant them the chance to see their loved ones again, never knowing that (if only for a split second) you had wondered what it would take to simply step back, do nothing, walk away, and let them fall. Not that he’d ever seriously considered it. Except once, perhaps. And then the gratitude, the lifelong gratitude. How can I thank you enough, Mr Trenchard? I thought I was going to die, I really did. A smile: it’s nothing, really, just doing my job. And now someone, it seemed had done the same for him, had tugged on the thread and reeled him back from the abyss.

  Well, thank you very much, whoever you are. I’m alive. In which case why can’t I feel anything? Why can’t I see anything? Perhaps I’m asleep. Perhaps I’m dreaming. The thought of sleep seemed to suddenly make him very tired. The effort of thinking any more was beyond him. Just the idea of it seemed to weigh a thousand tons. And then he was drifting again, beyond thought, beyond words, a tiny pinprick, awhirl in a sea of nothingness.

  17

  ‘Slow down, Kash, for God’s sake. I’m not going to run away. And I’m not going to bite your head off, either. Just start from the beginning.’

  They were sitting at a corner table in the Balti with two bottles of Cobra and a dish of poppadoms in front of them. Kash’s bottle was already half empty. Despite her protests, he was convinced that if he couldn’t convince Claire he hadn’t done anything wrong here and now, then she would walk out and he would never see her again. Except that he would actually see her every day, which would be infinitely worse.

  He paused to compose himself. ‘So you know what happened to Mr Trenchard?’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Sorry, yes, obviously. The whole world knows. And you know I was there. I got the call. So I saw . . . everything. And then when they took him to ICU I just had this thought – I don’t know why – that if he had these magazines and . . . things, then he must have kept them somewhere, and he certainly didn’t keep them in his office because I’d have seen them, definitely, so that left his locker in theatres, so, I went up there as fast as I could—’

  Claire put a hand on his arm. ‘But why?’

  Kash frowned, trying to put it into words. ‘I’d just seen him so . . . vulnerable, so humiliated. I mean, I was shocked. I didn’t really know . . . . But I just thought that if there was more of this stuff in his locker, then I wanted to get to it before anyone else, and – I don’t know – stop people from seeing it.’

  ‘To protect him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wasn’t it a bit late for that? I mean, they found him wearing women’s underwear with a noose round his neck.’

  Kash frowned. ‘Yes, I suppose. It was silly. But his locker was open, which was odd.’

  ‘The whole thing was odd. To put it mildly.’

  She took a sip of her beer. Kash picked up a poppadom and started breaking off tiny pieces, making a little pile on the tablecloth in front of him.

  ‘That’s the thing. It didn’t make sense. I mean, if you’re into that sort of thing, wouldn’t you do it in private? Wouldn’t you do it at home?’

  Claire shook her head. ‘Not if his wife’s not into it, you wouldn’t. And if you went to some sort of club, then you might be spotted going in. Or coming out. Or worse, you might meet someone else from the hospital.’

  Kash’s eyes widened, trying not to imagine Carney, or . . .

  ‘So maybe here was the logical choice,’ Claire continued. ‘A controlled environment.’ She shrugged. ‘Except it went wrong.’

  Kash thought it through. Logically, what Claire was saying made sense. And yet . . . something still niggled at him.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe you’re right. I’ll admit I don’t know the first thing about this kind of stuff. But at the time I suppose I couldn’t quite believe it. And so I was trying to cover for him.’ He sighed. ‘I know it doesn’t really make sense.’

  Claire looked at him with a warm expression and he felt his stomach turn over. ‘Yes, it does. You’re loyal. You liked him. You felt you owed him. There was nothing else you could do for him. You couldn’t undo what you’d just seen, so you did the only thing you could. And now you’ve got a holdall full of kinky paraphernalia stashed in your room.’ She laughed. ‘Just don’t ask me to stay over, Kash. I don’t think I could get to sleep with that lot underneath me.’

  ‘I promise,’ Kash said. ‘And I promise I’ll find a way to get rid of it. I just need to work out how best to do that.’

  ‘Cross that bridge,’ Claire agreed.

  Kash slowly reached out and took her hand. ‘So we’re OK?’

  ‘Yes, Kash. We’re OK. Just, the next time you happen upon an autoerotic asphyxiation victim, promise you won’t go rummaging in their personal effects, OK?’

  ‘Promise. Absolutely.’ Relief flooded through him. He drained the rest of his beer in one gulp, and suddenly felt light-headed.

  ‘So how is he, Mr Trenchard?’ Claire asked.

  Kash shrugged. ‘Still in ICU. He seems to be stable.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Claire ventured.

  ‘He’s alive. Technically. But he’s never going to recover, I’m afraid. At least that’s what they tell me. PVS. Persistent vegetative state. At best. Not brain dead – his basic life-support systems work – but the thinking parts seem gone. That bit that made him Michael Trenchard.’ He paused. ‘I hear they’re going to move him up to ward fourteen.’

  Claire shivered. ‘How awful. I mean, to end up there.’

  ‘The end of the line,’ Kash muttered. ‘Still, that Liz Murray – you know I mentioned her? Crazy old bird but still full of beans. Only met him once, but she loves him.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Now she can gaze at him all day long.’

  Claire had never heard him talk this way. Hospital humour was one thing, but this was properly bitter and twisted.

  ‘Oh, Kash.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And what about Sister Vale? She was devoted to him, too, in her way. It must have been an unbelievable shock.’

  Kash felt bad. He’d been so consumed with his own feelings about Mr Trenchard, he hadn’t really considered anyone else’s. Sister Vale had told him she’d worked with Trenchard for years. In fact, she must have known him better than anyone. Had she had an inkling, during that time, about his secret proclivities? Or could she even have . . . He had a sudden image of Sister Vale dressed in leather and brandishing a whip. He blinked it away, hoping Claire couldn’t read his mind.

  ‘To be honest with you, I’m dreading seeing him up there,’ Kash admitted. ‘He’s not dead, but he’s not really alive, either. It’s not like you’re visiting him, spending time with him.’

  ‘More like his corpse?’

  Kash had a flash of a long-buried memory. He nodded. ‘Something like that.’

  Claire sighed. ‘Well, I’m just a lowly nurse. I just wash them and feed them and give them their medication. I don’t ask if they’re alive or dead. I leave that to you lot.’

  18

  Anyone in medicine knew that 1st August and 1st February were the most dangerous days in the health service. For junior staff, it was ‘all change’, and nobody had the faintest idea what they were doing in their new jobs. For Kash, this had meant moving up to long stay and ‘COOP’ – care of the older person. And that meant following Sister Vale to ward fourteen.

  As he entered the ward, he realized he was more nervous than he had been on his first ward round. Trenchard was on the far side, directly opposite Liz Murray, who seemed to be asleep. Kash took a deep breath and walked over.

  A tracheostomy tube stopped saliva running into Trenchard’s lungs, but not onto the front of his white hospital smock. It hung in a tenacious column from the corner of his lip; a slick of paperhanger’s paste which occasionally snapped and re
tracted. He breathed, in effect, through a plastic pipe in his neck. A fine-bore feeding tube entered his abdomen and ran directly into his stomach. Connected to it, a growbag of fawn liquid hung above his head. A catheter ran into his bladder, draining orange urine into a nearby urometer. Kash could see that the tip of his penis was already becoming slightly ulcerated where it entered. No doubt someone, perhaps even Sister Vale herself, had performed what would become his weekly enema, manually evacuating his bowels with long uncomfortable fingers and inadequately lubricated gloves.

  Trenchard now sat, propped up but listing to one side, shoulders rounded, in a large Parker Knoll chair. Even in this semi-death, Kash thought, Michael Trenchard was an imposing figure. Like a living Lincoln Memorial: seated, huge, immobile and stately.

  And he could live for decades like this, or so they had said – his body was healthy, his heart and lungs strong – if, of course, you could call a persistent vegetative state a life. Kash felt an immense wave of pity, thinking how full of vigour Trenchard had been. How full of energy. A man who always seemed to be on the move, never sitting still for a moment. And now look at him.

  He wondered how many of his colleagues would feel the same way, seeing the great man reduced to this dribbling wreck. Would they feel pity and sorrow, or would they think he simply got what he had coming? A man who dresses in women’s underwear and puts a noose around his neck and nicks morphine to get his kicks. Would they feel, not pity, but contempt? And disgust? Was this pathetic shell – a victim of his own perverted lusts, as others might see him – the real Trenchard? Or was it the brilliant surgeon, admired by all?

  He recalled a long-ago psychology course. What he was currently suffering from in regard to Mr Trenchard was ‘cognitive dissonance’: he was trying to hold onto two opposing ideas that both seemed to be true at the same time.

  Kash looked into Trenchard’s eyes. What was the phrase? ‘The windows of the soul’. But Trenchard just stared fixedly ahead, seeing nothing. No help for Kash there. Kash had to admit, he didn’t know who the real Michael Trenchard was, but his gut told him that the man he had admired was not a complete sham.