The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Natural Causes: Episode 103
Another piece of the puzzle slotting into place, a picture emerging that he really didn’t want to see
The hospital had a sad familiarity for him. McLean had visited his grandmother here too many times to count. The nurses all smiled and said hello as he walked the corridors; he knew most of them by name. Walking beside him, DC MacBride blushed at the attention.
A junior doctor, looking tired and harassed, walked up to them as they strode down the corridor. “Inspector McLean?”
McLean nodded. “What’s the story, doc?”
“It’s hard to say. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Mr Callum’s a very fit man, young, too.
“But his organs are packing up one by one. If we can’t stop it, or stabilise him, he could die in hours.”
“Hours? But yesterday he was fine. Better than fine, I’d say.”
McLean felt his bruised ribs, remembered the muscled man he’d fought with not 24 hours before.
Another piece of the puzzle slotting into place, a picture emerging that he really didn’t want to see.
“We’re working on the hypothesis that it’s some form of steroid reaction.
“He didn’t get the size he is just by pumping iron, and whatever he was on might have made him oversensitive to something we’ve given him.
Restrained
“But I’ve never seen anything come on so quickly before. I treated him for his damaged eye yesterday evening, and apart from a little hyperventilation, he seemed fine.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“What? Oh, no. He didn’t say a word.” “Didn’t struggle, didn’t try to kill himself?”
“No. But he was restrained, and there were three constables with him at all times.”
“Where is he now?”
“We’ve put him in one of the single rooms up by the coma ward.”
“So that if he becomes too violent, no one will be disturbed?”
“Well, yes. But we’ve got all the intensive care monitoring kit up there as well. Here, I’ll show you the way.”
“That’s all right. I know where it is. I’m sure you’ve got a hundred and one things more important to worry about than a murderer who’s going nowhere.”
They left the doctor behind, looking slightly puzzled.
McLean led the way through the miles of faceless corridors, MacBride trotting at his heels like a faithful hound to keep up.
“What are we doing here, sir?”
“I’m here to interview our only surviving murder suspect before this mysterious illness kills him,” McLean said as they approached the room he had been seeking.
A bored-looking PC sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair outside, reading an Ian Rankin novel.
“You’re here because Grumpy Bob’s developed a talent for hiding when he knows I’m about to do something the chief superintendent won’t approve of.”
“Inspector. Sir. No one told me . . .”
The constable stood to attention, trying to hide the book behind his back.
“Don’t panic, Steve. I just want a word with the prisoner.
“Why don’t you go off and get yourself a cuppa, eh? DC MacBride’ll keep an eye on things.”
“What do you want me to do?” MacBride asked as the relieved policeman scurried off to the canteen. “You stand guard here.”
McLean opened the door and stepped through. “And don’t let anyone in.”
The room was small and soulless, a single narrow window opening onto a view of sun-blasted concrete and glass.
Bewildering
Two plastic chairs lined up against the wall, and a narrow cabinet had been pressed into service as a bedside table.
Jethro Callum lay at the centre of a bewildering array of humming machinery.
Tubes pumped noxious-looking fluids to and from his body.
He looked nothing at all like the fit bodyguard McLean had wrestled with just the afternoon before.
Propped up in a mound of pillows, his face was sunken and pale, his eyes dark hollows.
Most of his hair had fallen out, some still lying on his pillow in dead heaps. The skin on his scalp was mottled with vivid red spots.
His arms lay on top of the blankets, fat with muscle but all the tone gone.
He still had his bulk, but now it hindered his breathing, pinning him down far more effectively than the leather restraint straps that tied him to the bed frame.
“You came. I knew you would.”
Callum’s voice was barely audible above the hum of the life-support machinery. But it wasn’t the voice of the bodyguard. This was the other one, the voice that had threatened and promised.
The voice that had a strangely hypnotic power behind it.
McLean picked up one of the chairs, wedging it under the door handle.
He took the emergency cord and looped it out of reach.
Then he leant down to study the machines for a moment. Wires trailed from an ECG to a slim sensor attached to one of Callum’s fingers.
McLean slipped it off, pushing it swiftly onto his own. The machine gave a few hurried bleeps then settled back down into a steady rhythm.
He inspected the other machines, but only the ECG seemed to be plumbed into the emergency monitoring system.
He searched for the switches and turned them off, one by one.
Ceremony
Medical science kept the body alive, but Jethro Callum had really perished the moment he had killed David Brown.
Whatever it was that had taken hold of his soul then had been slowly devouring his flesh ever since.
“Tell me about the girl.” McLean settled himself into the other chair.
“What girl?”
“You know who I’m talking about. The girl they killed in their sick ceremony.”
“Ah, yes. Her.”
Callum sounded oddly distant, like an emphysemic ventriloquist’s dummy, but the pleasure in his voice was sickening.
“Little Maggie Donaldson. Pretty little thing. Can’t have been much more than sixteen.
“Pure, of course. That’s what attracted me to her. “But they soiled her, all of them. One after the other. The old one, he knew what he was doing.
“He trapped me inside her and then they split her up. Took a part of me each.”
“Why did they do it?”
“Why do your kind ever do anything? They wanted to live for ever.”
“And you? What happens to you?”
“I go on. In you.”
More tomorrow.