Читать книгу Once, Two Islands - Dawn Garisch - Страница 14

Chapter Eight

“This is monstrous!” paced the mayor. “Right before the elections!”

Nelson stared at his boots, which were peeling a rim of drying mud onto the mayoral office carpet. Dorado closed the blinds and wished that Clarence would keep his voice down. She had never seen Clarence’s younger son like this – struck weak by a vision, run through with shock.

“I’ll get Mannie to come with me, and the doctor,” she said, feeling ill at the thought of collecting blood and bone, at the thought of the spirit of mad, wild Astrid forever gone. “You go home and get some rest, Nelson.”

“Stupid, stupid girl!” Clarence pulled hard at his lower lip, reining himself in. “Look, my boy, you did the right thing, coming to me before the rumours get going. What’s happened has happened. The autopsy will set things straight. I’ll have a word with Orion.”

Clarence tugged open the blinds with such force they jumped and jangled. “Only one grave left,” he worried, glaring at Elijah Mobara trundling past with his barrow.

“We’ll look into opening up ground for the new cemetery,” consoled Dorado. “I’ll add that to tomorrow’s agenda.”

“You better,” Clarence warned, “Or the dead’ll be buried at sea.”

Across the road, a tall woman in black appeared, striding towards the hospital, her greying hair swept back into a knot, several children pulled into her wake. He swung on Dorado. “It’s that Sophia,” he railed, “causing trouble again, obstructing the peace! If she hadn’t defied the doctor’s instruction, none of this would’ve happened! That girl needed professional help.”

“She should’ve gone to the mainland,” agreed Dorado, trying to placate.

“Sophia is an obstruction! A remnant of the old days. Remember that business with old Rozi Bagonata? This damn woman dealing in boiled herbs and charms had a nerve, brazenly telling the doctor it was Rozi’s time to die!”

Nelson expelled a sudden, disparaging chestful of air, relieved the focus was not on him, eager it should remain so. “The doctor put her right. Sophia hasn’t midwived a baby at home or anywhere else in years.”

Clarence’s brow smouldered round the problem. “With Astrid, she’s gone too far.”

“You heard, she was going with that girl,” Nelson stoked.

“Imagine!” Something flared in Clarence’s face that terrified Dorado. “That a middle-aged woman would seduce an unstable girl! There was a time she could’ve had pretty much any man on the island.”

“Perhaps that was her problem all the time,” offered Nelson. “You know. Lesbian.”

The conflagration leaping in Clarence’s features made a small explosion in the back of his throat. His hand moved underneath his cardigan and fiddled with his navel. There was a way of salvaging the situation. He took a deep breath. “Now there’s a death on her hands,” he noted quietly. “Dorado, you’ll be with me on this in the council meeting. She has to go.”

* * *

Orion looked at the young woman lying on the mortuary table, at her face stark beneath her matted red hair, slivers of glass-green eyes showing beneath the drape of her pale eyelids. Her jersey was tinged with blood from the laceration in her scalp and her right foot lay at an unnatural angle. He put his gloved palms on her iliac crests, pushed down with the weight of his body and felt the give. Pelvic fracture. She had fallen from a height onto rocks. Accidental death caused by bleeding into a pelvic fracture and/or head injury. No need to look further.

He pulled off the gloves. Nothing more required here except to get Nelson in to do the necessary. It bothered him, this crazy mixed-up island where the butcher doubled as undertaker. Wouldn’t be allowed in a civilised place. But Nelson was the mayor’s son and Jerome’s brother, and thereby related to two of the most influential men on the island; there was nothing to be done about it.

He filled in the death certificate. It made him angry. This girl should have been in one of the institutions on the mainland. She could have done well. With recent advances in psychiatric medication, bipolar disorder was not the problem it used to be. This was a tragedy. But what could one do? To commit her required parental consent, and the mother would have none of it. He wondered how she felt now, having chosen to put her psychotic daughter in the care of a charlatan. That choice should not have been there in the first place. That’s why, in civilised countries, there were peer-review councils, medical boards, licences to practise. Guardians of the basic standards were essential. People needed to be protected against fraudsters taking advantage of a primitive propensity for magical thinking. Rule and science prevented anarchy and quackery, they allowed people to sleep peacefully in their beds.

He looked again at the body. Death looked so extraordinary, so unnatural. One moment the body animated, responsive, electrical circuits firing and in order; next, this bag of flesh and bone. He could never get used to it. It was a failure, a giving up. He felt a sudden anger towards Angelique. She had given up on him, she had reneged on her responsibility to bring up their child, to be a partner to him into his old age.

He knocked a cigarette out of the packet and lit it. He wanted a drink. There was one more smoke-inhalation patient waiting for him in the casualty department, but he had time enough to go there via his office, where there was a bottle of whisky and one of breath freshener in a locked desk drawer. He washed his hands, noting again the puckers in the skin of both palms, then rubbed them roughly as was his daily habit, hoping this could stop their progression. Then he closed up the mortuary and strode down the corridor.

With some ambivalence he saw two women related by marriage, Rumer and Cyn Peters, waiting for him outside his office. “Good morning, ladies,” he said, noticing how Cyn, the older one, pivoted, holding her body towards him, her contours softening. He must tread carefully, for she was a good-looking woman, troubled frequently by mysterious gynaecological complaints, whose husband the mayor’s attention had wandered elsewhere. Rumer, on the other hand, irritated him by stubbornly refusing to notice he was a man at all. “Get John to draw your folders and I’ll see you in the casualty. I’m on my way down there now.”

“Oh no, Dr Prosper, there’s nothing wrong with us,” said Cyn, flushing. “There’s just something . . .” She glanced at her daughter-in-law.

“There’s something you need to know,” Rumer said firmly.