Chapter 4
What the Pathologist Could Not Say
Dunmarrow General Hospital kept its dead in the basement, as every hospital does, behind a pair of swing doors with round windows and a sign in blue letters that said, with grim institutional tact, Bereavement Services.
They sat in a waiting room that had been designed by somebody who had never grieved. The chairs were pale wood with mustard cushions. A low table held a box of tissues, a dish of foil-wrapped mints, and three leaflets fanned out like a hand of cards: When Someone Dies. Practical Matters. You Are Not Alone. On the wall hung a framed watercolor of a field of poppies. There was a water cooler that gurgled to itself every few minutes, a small and horrible sound, like something swallowing.
Amara sat with her hands folded in her lap and counted the poppies.
She had reached forty-one when the door banged open and Dera came in at a half run, still in her work scrubs under a green parka, with her braids tied up in a wet scarf and her face blotched and swollen. She stopped dead in the doorway. Then she crossed the room in three strides and dropped to her knees on the carpet in front of the chair, and put her arms round Amara's waist, and her face in her lap, and said, in a muffled voice, "Eight hours. I drove it in under four. I think I broke three laws."
"You shouldn't have."
"Shut up." She lifted her head. She was thirty-six, five years younger than Amara and a head shorter, with their mother's wide, mobile, expressive mouth and none of her patience. "Have you seen him?"
"Not yet."
"Do you want me in there?"
"Yes."
"Then I'm in there." Dera sat back on her heels. She looked at Martin, who stood by the window with his gloved hands clasped behind him, looking out at a car park in the rain. "Martin. Thank you for bringing her."
"Of course," said Martin, without turning. "I'll go and ring the office. Someone should tell them. Gail will want to know." He glanced at them, and there was something in his face that Amara could not read, a flat, tired, hunted look, as if he had been running for a very long way. "I'll be back in half an hour. Don't, don't let her do this alone."
"We won't."
He went out. The swing door sighed behind him. Dera watched it close.
"Poor man," she said, quietly. "He looks like death."
"He loved him."
"I know." Dera turned back, and took both Amara's hands in hers, and held them hard. "Tell me what to do."
It had begun, if it had begun anywhere, at a dinner party in Wexcombe in the summer of 1989.
She thought of it now, in that hushed ugly room, with Dera's warm damp hands around hers and the water cooler gurgling at the wall. It was a thing the mind did, she supposed, in the long minutes before an ordeal: it reached back for the oldest dry ground it knew and stood on it.
Martin had invited her. He had said, There's a man I want you to meet, he's nothing like the others, he reads, he's quiet, and Amara, who was twenty-four and had been stood up by a dentist two weeks before, had said that she would rather eat glass. And then she had gone, in a green dress and the wrong shoes, to a crowded terraced house in Ferndale Road, where Jo Ashby had made a plum tart that collapsed and a casserole that did not, and there had been twelve people at a table meant for eight, and a late arrival.
He had come in out of the rain at half past eight. She could see it still. A very tall man with a long, grave, rather tired face, soaked to the skin, his hair plastered to his skull and a trickle of water running off his chin, standing in the hall of the Ashbys' house with a bottle of wine in a carrier bag and an expression of utter, mortified apology. He had been trying to give someone directions. He had missed a bus. He had gotten off at the wrong stop, and walked, and fallen into the river. Not in it, he explained, to the delighted table. Beside it. Up to the knee, onto a mooring post.
"You'll want a towel," said Jo.
"I'll want a miracle," said the man, and sat down in the only empty chair, which was next to Amara's.
They had talked until two in the morning. She would remember it all her life, and she would remember, with a curious, sorrowful tenderness, that it had begun with an argument. He had asked what she did. She had said she was an archivist, and watched, with weary practice, for the glazing over of his eyes, the polite change of subject. Instead he had put down his fork. What sort? he had said. Parish registers? Deeds? Tithe maps? And when she had stared at him he had said, a little shyly, I like old paper. I like that somebody wrote it down. That somebody thought it mattered enough to put in ink.
Most people only like old paper when it's valuable, she had said.
Then most people are idiots, said Daniel Hale.
They had walked home along the Wex in the small hours, in the fine mist that comes off the river after a wet night, the lamps on the bridge hanging in it like drowned moons. She had told him about her father. He had told her, simply, that he did not have any family; that his parents had died when he was twenty, in a car, on a motorway, and that he had been raised after that by an aunt who had since died too. He said it without self-pity. He said it as a man reports the weather in a country he no longer lives in. And at the iron railing of the old bridge he had stopped and put his hand into his coat pocket and brought out a smooth gray stone, and looked at it for a moment, and thrown it far out into the dark.
What was that? she had asked.
A habit. He had smiled, sideways. So the river remembers.
Remembers what?
Whatever we leave.
He had kissed her at the war memorial, under the dripping bronze soldier, with the wet names of the dead of two wars shining in the lamplight above their heads. She had tasted rain and red wine and, very faintly, a trace of the old river. And she had thought, quite clearly, with her hand in the damp hair at the nape of his neck: Oh. It's you. I'd wondered when you were coming.
"Mrs. Hale?"
The man in the doorway was fifty or so, slight, silver-haired, in a gray suit and a pale blue tie, with the careful, courteous stoop of someone who spends his working life speaking to people who are not listening. He held a clipboard against his chest. He had gentle brown eyes and a tired, humorous mouth, and he spoke softly, in an accent that was partly Gujarati and partly the wet vowels of the north.
"I'm Dr. Khalid. I'm the consultant pathologist. I performed the examination this morning." He glanced at Dera. "And you are?"
"Her sister."
"Good. That's good." He nodded. "I'll take you through. You can stop whenever you like. There's no rush. There's never any rush."
The corridor beyond the swing doors was white and long and lit by a flat unflickering glare, and the air in it was cold and smelled of bleach and floor polish and something else, thin and faintly sweet, that Amara did not let herself name. Their shoes squeaked. Dera's hand was clamped around her arm. At the end of the passage, behind a glass screen with a pale green curtain drawn halfway across it, there was a small room with a trolley in the middle, and on the trolley, under a white sheet, a shape.
"We prepare them," said Dr. Khalid. "As far as we can. So that it is not, so that it is as little distressing as possible." He stopped beside the curtain. "I'll draw it back. Take whatever time you need."
She would never be able to say how long she stood there.
The curtain rattled on its rings. The light in the little room was soft and yellowish, a lamp, not the glare of the corridor. The sheet had been folded neatly down to the chest. And on the trolley, with his head tilted a little to one side on a small white pillow, and his large pale hands laid together over his stomach as if somebody had thought that he might be cold, lay her husband.
He was the wrong color. That was the first thing, and the thing she could not afterwards forgive. He had been brown, her husband, a warm tawny olive that went to bronze in July, and now his skin had the waxy, unlit pallor of candles. His hair was combed back from his forehead, damp and stiff. His eyes had been closed. His mouth, which had never in fifteen years been still, was a flat gray line, with a faint blue shadow at the lips. There was a small cut at the corner of his jaw, no bigger than a grain of rice, and a purple smudge beneath his left ear, the sort of bruise a man gets from a doorframe or a hand.
She said, "Yes."
"Mrs. Hale. I need you to say—"
"Yes. It's Daniel. It's my husband. Daniel Hale." She was surprised at how clearly it came out. "May I touch him?"
"Of course."
She moved to the head of the trolley. Dera stayed at her shoulder. She put out her hand, and laid two fingers on his forehead, and it was so cold that it was like touching a window in winter. And something happened in her then. She had braced for the wave and it had not come, not in the hall, not in the car, not in the corridor, and now, with her fingertips on that cold smooth brow, it came all at once from nowhere, from underneath, from the floor of her, a vast black rising tide that filled her chest and her mouth and her eyes. A sound tore out of her. It was not a word. It was the sound a thing makes when it is split.
"Mara," said Dera, "Mara, Mara," and held her up.
She did not know how long it took. When she could see again she was bent over the trolley with both hands gripping the edge of the metal and her cheek against his, and she was whispering something to him over and over in a language she had not spoken since she was nine years old. Biko. Biko, Daniel. Biko, nwanne m. Please. Please. Dr. Khalid stood a little way off with his head bowed. Dera was crying quietly into her sleeve.
When at last she straightened, she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and looked at him, and did what she had always done when she could not bear a thing: she began to notice.
"There's a mark here," she said.
She had drawn the sheet down further. She had not asked. Dr. Khalid had made a small movement and then, slowly, let her go on. The body was long and lean and white under the yellow light, the ribs showing, the pale hair on the chest flattened and dull. The Y-shaped incision had been closed with heavy black thread. She did not look at it. She looked at the arm.
"Mrs. Hale?" said Dr. Khalid.
"I didn't mean the shoulder."
"Here." She turned the thin pale arm over, gently. Dera made a small sound behind her. On the inside of the elbow, in the soft crease, there was a faint blue smear where a vein had been. "And here." She slid her hand down. Below the ribs, on the left side of the belly, a little to the front of the hip, about the width of two fingers from the navel, there was a mark.
It was small. It was no larger than a pinhead, a tiny dark pricked dot on the skin, ringed with a faint, yellowish bruise the size of a coin. If she had not spent nineteen years watching her father fold up his shirt beside the kitchen table, she would not have seen it. She would never have known to look.
Dr. Khalid was quite still. "You've a good eye."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. I noted it this morning. It could be a scratch, an insect bite, a skin reaction. There are a number of things." His voice remained courteous and unhurried, but something had come into it, something careful and slow, like a man laying a foot on ice. "I've taken a sample. I've sent a good deal of material away. Blood, urine, the vitreous fluid from the eyes. Hair. There are tests that take time."
"Tests for what?"
"For anything we can find."
"You don't know how he died."
"No," said Dr. Khalid. "I'm sorry. I will tell you the truth, Mrs. Hale, because I think you would prefer it. At present I can give you the negative findings. His heart was healthy. His arteries were clear. There was no hemorrhage in the brain, no embolus in the lung, no injury. There was nothing, in the ordinary way, that ought to have killed him." He put the clipboard down on the end of the trolley. "In a case like this, we would normally record the cause of death as unascertained, and the coroner would open an inquest and adjourn it pending further investigation. That is what I shall recommend."
"Unascertained."
"It means we haven't found it yet. It does not mean we won't."
"And if you don't?"
"Then it remains a question," he said, very gently. "I'm sorry. Some do."
She looked down at the long still body of the man she had loved. There was something under one of his fingernails: she saw it now, in the yellow light, a dark thin crescent of something, brown, or rust, or old blood. She bent and looked at the other hand, folded over it, and saw the same on two nails. A small scraping. Dr. Khalid, following her gaze, said quietly that the police had taken samples. That it might be the man's own skin. That a person who is in distress will often clutch at his own flesh.
"Or someone else's," said Dera, in a low, hard voice.
Nobody answered her.
They gave her his things in a clear plastic bag with a drawstring neck.
It was Quill who brought it to the waiting room, with a clipboard and a biro and a clear apologetic look, and made Amara sign for it on a line at the bottom of a printed form. Property of the deceased. Wallet (brown leather) containing cards, cash £43. Keys (3). Wristwatch, steel. Ring, yellow metal. Stone, gray, one. There was not much else. There was a folded handkerchief, an ironed white one, with D.H. embroidered in the corner in blue thread. Her own work. She had done it in the winter of their first year, on the bus, by the light of her phone.
She took the ring out of the bag. It was a plain gold band, worn thin on the underside from fifteen years of wear, and it lay in her palm as small and light as a shirt button. She turned it to the light. Inside, in thin engraved letters, it said: A. & D. 6.IX.91.
She slid it onto her thumb. It was too big. She closed her fist over it and held the fist against her breastbone and sat quite still.
"Mrs. Hale," said Quill, quietly. "Is there anyone you can think of who might wish your husband harm?"
"No."
"Anyone he'd quarreled with. Anyone at work. Anyone who owed him money, or to whom he owed it."
"No. He, he didn't have enemies. He ran a freight firm. He did paperwork." She heard how absurd it sounded and tried again. "He was a quiet man. He was kind. People liked him. People loved him. Everyone, all of them, Martin, my family, the whole street. He never had a fight in his life."
"Did he ever talk about Dunmarrow?"
"He worked there. The firm's yard is on the docks. He drove down two or three days a week, he stayed in hotels." Amara frowned. "Never a flat. He'd never take a flat."
"Did he have any history there beyond the firm. Friends. Old acquaintances. A past." Quill's tone was entirely neutral. "Most people have one."
"We've been married for fifteen years. I'd know." She stopped. "Why?"
"No reason. I'm just asking."
But there was a reason. She saw it. It sat in the square gray face like something small and sharp half-hidden under a cloth, and Quill, who had spent twenty-six years learning how not to let a face give her away, let it show for only a second, and then closed it.
"Mrs. Hale," she said. "You're going to want to go home. Get some sleep. See your family. The coroner will release the body in due course and the funeral directors will liaise with my office. I'll be in touch as soon as I know anything." She paused. "I'm going to ask you to do one thing. If you find anything, anything among his effects that surprises you, will you ring me before you do anything else?"
"What sort of thing?"
"I don't know," Quill said. "That's rather the point."
Dera, beside her, shifted in the mustard chair. The water cooler gurgled. On the wall behind them the framed poppies stood in their endless field, scarlet and still, and Amara, with her husband's ring in her closed fist and his gray river stone on her knee, looked at them for a long time without seeing them, with the clear, cold, rising certainty that the world she had woken up in that morning was already gone, and that behind it, like a house behind a painted flat, there was another one, and that she did not know yet how large.
On the way across the car park she glanced up, for no reason, at the long wall of windows above the hospital café. Behind the third pane from the left a figure was sitting still with its face turned to the glass, a gray parka with the hood up. Then the light changed on the wet window and there was only a reflection of the sky, and she told herself it was a visitor, someone waiting for news, someone else’s grief.
She got into the back of the green Volvo beside her sister. The doors closed with their soft heavy thud. And the car pulled out through the gates into the rain, taking her home to a house in which the man she had loved no longer lived, and in which, though she did not yet know it, there was already a room she had never entered.