The Night Clock Read online

  Trevena said, “Textbook paranoia, Zoë. Religious delusions with persecutory ideation.” Zoë was looking at him intently, the fragment of Bible still held loosely in her hand. She’s lapping this shit up, thought Trevena. I could make her fall in love with me. Here, in this grotty, flyblown hovel.

  The curtains were shut front and back and the room was warm. Trevena had grown quickly accustomed to the dusty smell and now thought he could pick up a few conspicuous motes of Zoë’s subtle perfume. The curtains at the back were thin, red material and the weak sunlight that shone behind them tinted the room with fragile pink shadows. Zoë’s soft brunette hair, tied up in a ponytail, gleamed for a moment like polished mahogany.

  Trevena swallowed. And a voice in his head whispered. You want to eat her pussy.

  Trevena felt his heart beating with hot, heavy thuds high in his chest. He turned fast, hoping to hide his arousal and said, “Let’s go upstairs, Zoë,” in a voice that sounded hollow and dry. He caught her expression as he said it, too, and saw her lips part, just slightly, shiny with wetness she put there with the tip of her tongue.

  He went upstairs.

  TREVENA WAS TRYING to find something resembling toiletries on the shelf in the bathroom. There was a foamy sorbet of excreta unflushed in the toilet. He wadded up a few pieces of toilet paper and pushed the handle down to get rid of it. It left a rusty tonsure around the neck of the bend, but at least it was gone.

  Zoë was in Les’s bedroom filling a bin bag with clothes and shoes.

  Trevena looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink. He squeezed his eyes shut then reopened them. He looked tired. What the fuck just happened down there? He thought. His heart rate had returned to normal and he had shed that odd, suspended feeling he had had for the few seconds he and Zoë had held each other’s gaze. I’m tired but I’m horny. She’s pretty and she’s probably got a bit of a crush on me I could exploit if I was that kind of bloke. It’s normal to fantasize and sometimes the fantasies come without warning. Especially when you haven’t had it for bloody ages.

  This analysis seemed to satisfy Trevena. He stepped out from the bathroom and crossed the landing to Les’s room. “How you doing?”

  Zoë held out the bin bag. It bulged with musty clothing. “This stuff’s filthy,” she said. “It’ll need washing when we get it up to the ward. And there isn’t much. He’s hardly got any pants. You?”

  “I’ve got lots of pants,” Trevena said. Zoë giggled.

  “How are you getting on in the bathroom?” she said, enunciating each word slowly.

  Trevena held up a Bic razor and a tube of toothpaste curled up like an ammonite and just as fossilized.

  Trevena looked around. He’d never been up here before now. Just a bare mattress with a grey sheet balled up at the foot of it and a couple of deflated pillows against the wall. A crooked bedside cabinet with nothing on it but a disconnected digital alarm clock. No cupboards or wardrobes, just a clothes drier by the storage heater beneath the window. A proper heart-sink, he thought.

  “That’ll do,” he said. “We can get him a few bits from the shop.”

  Zoë tied a knot in the top of the bag and toted it to the stairs. She smiled at Trevena and indicated for him to go down first. If there was any residue left of that earlier uncanny arousal, Trevena certainly couldn’t detect it. He must have imagined it, he thought, with the joyless and ambivalent disappointment of the forty-six-year-old.

  He started down and the phone in the hall by the front door began to ring.

  He was startled and felt his heartbeat ramp up again. He nearly missed his step and had to throw an arm out to grip the banister. Zoë bumped him.

  The phone was old; faun coloured and shaped like a wedge of cheese. What were they called? Trimphones? It made an insistent, electronic warbling sound.

  Trevena steadied himself and continued to the bottom of the stairs. He paused, in two minds whether to answer it or not. Zoë reached the hallway and put the bin bag down by the living room door. Trevena shrugged and picked the handset up.

  “Probably just his mum,” he said. “She forgets when he goes into hospital.”

  But it wasn’t Les’s mum. “Hello! Hello! Phil? Is that you? Are you there, Phil?”

  Trevena pulled the phone away from his ear, wincing. He put it back slowly, keeping it about an inch away from the side of his head.

  “Les?” Trevena said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s me, Phil. Listen.”

  “Mate, we’re just on our way back with your clothes. We’ve got to stop at Balv’s and get you some stuff but we’ll be back—”

  “No. No, no. Listen. You have to go straight to Daniel. Get out of there. Get out of there now and go to Daniel. You’re not safe, Phil. There’s something there with you. I think it’s looking for you, Phil. I bricked it in. But it’s destroyed all my Bibles. Get out now and go to Daniel.”

  Trevena was trying to make sense of what Les was saying. “Who’s Daniel, Les?”

  “Phil?” Zoë said.

  “He’s my friend. He’s visiting the estate. He has things to do here. Very important things. We knew each other a long time ago.” Les was still shouting, his voice hoarse with urgency. “From our time in the bins.”

  “Phil!” Zoë said, this time with more than a hint of fear in her voice.

  “What?” Trevena snapped, pulling the handset away from his ear again. He could still hear the metallic scratching of Les’s voice captive in the moulded plastic earpiece.

  Zoë was standing close, her left side pressed almost against Trevena. She was staring into the front room. The door was ajar and obscured most of the room, but they could both see, strewn across the floor, a thousand pieces of shredded paper. No draught had done that. And then they both heard something from upstairs, from above. The spare room, empty of anything functional, but which shared the chimney with the lounge beneath it.

  It was the sound of something falling dead to the floor; something going from vertical to horizontal in the instant it takes gravity to drop it to thinly carpeted floorboards. But not dead. Crawling and scraping.

  Trevena glanced up the stairs. He indicated with a flick of his hand for Zoë to get out. She gathered up the bag and opened the front door and went outside. Trevena backed around the door, still holding the phone, his eyes riveted on the gloomy landing at the top of the stairs. He put the phone back to his ear. Silence. Les had gone.

  “Les?” Trevena hissed. Les hadn’t hung up. There was no dial tone, just silence. And then a dog barked somewhere on the estate behind him and Trevena jumped again and let go of the phone, which flew out of his hand and around the door on its tight little springy lead, to clatter against the skirting board. And he was backing out and closing the door, that bloody neck wound of a door, against the shadows, and the rickety substance of them that had stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs.

  THEY MADE THE journey back to the ward in their separate cars and parked up next to each other in bays outside the main entrance. Trevena was glad of the time alone so he could think.

  He had pretty much shooed Zoë into her car outside Les’s house, shoving the bin bag full of clothes onto her passenger seat. Their eyes met again, and Trevena noticed how pale Zoë’s complexion was, how scared she looked. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I expect we disturbed something up there and it fell over.” But they hadn’t gone into the spare room, just given it a glance, and it had been empty, just a cold, neglected space in the house, and Zoë’s expression told Trevena she knew it, too.

  On the way back to the ward, Trevena immediately started the process of engaging denial, a useful tool to dumb down and cope with the full force of existential dread. He hadn’t really seen anything coming onto the landing. He had been distracted by Les’s phone call, that’s all. He was tired and under stress and although it wasn’t a nice thought, he might well have suffered a brief hallucination brought on by recent events. Or misinterpreted the whole thing: an illu
sion (much more palatable than an hallucination, because that was really a bit psychotic and Trevena wasn’t going to admit that he had lost touch with reality). And there was definitely an atmosphere in that house, an ambient sickness, a morbid history of psychic distortion, whatever you wanted to call it, and he had been susceptible to its effects because he was drained. Yes, he thought, that’ll do for now. He glanced into the rear view mirror as he undid his seatbelt and couldn’t help feeling slightly aggrieved that his reflected expression did little to support his cunning refutation of the truth. He knew very well what he’d seen, and so did Zoë.

  “Bollocks,” he said, and climbed out of the car.

  AND THERE WAS awful news for them when he got up to the ward.

  Les had died.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” TREVENA asked. He was sitting in the nursing office talking to Cherry Something, an agency nurse he didn’t know, who was in charge of the shift that morning. She was sitting opposite him behind a desk and she was trying not to burst into tears again. Trevena had sent Zoë home telling her he’d catch up with her later. The bag of clothes Les would never wear was leaning against Trevena’s chair. He could smell the fusty odour of the contents through the plastic. Absurdly, Trevena felt a sudden urge to pat the bag, to comfort it as though it was an obtrusive old pet nobody wanted to fuss. You just wanted to be washed, he thought. Now you’re going to be incinerated. A bit like Les. What a fucking day.

  “We checked on him at quarter to eleven,” Cherry said. “He was fine. He was sitting on his bed looking out of the window and drinking a cup of tea. He was doing so well, too. He was getting better every day.”

  Trevena nodded encouragement. Outside in the corridor someone was kicking off. Three nurses ran past. A big-boned woman in her fifties approached the office door scowling, and tapped on the glass. She mimed smoking by holding up two fingers in the traditional form of abuse and tapped them against her pouting lips. Cherry ignored her.

  “And then at eleven o’clock we checked to see if he wanted to join the Mindfulness group and… and…”

  “He’d cut his throat with a shard of broken teacup,” Trevena finished for her. He’d read the incident form but felt an obligation to help this poor girl debrief. No managers seemed to be forthcoming.

  Cherry concurred with a snort she buried in a handful of Kleenex. Her wide, watery eyes regarded Trevena over the spray of tissues and Trevena saw more guilt in them that he would have liked.

  “What time did you say you found him?” Trevena asked.

  “Eleven.”

  Trevena shook his head. “I spoke to Les about twenty five past eleven. He rang his own home. He sounded agitated.”

  Cherry pulled an observation list from the wall above her desk. She slid it over to Trevena. Leslie Branch, fifteen minute obs. All signed off right up to quarter to eleven. No one had bothered to sign the eleven o’clock box.

  “Might it have been a bit later than that? Maybe someone missed a check?” Trevena said. He tried not to sound critical.

  Cherry shook her head. “Mindfulness group starts at eleven. It was eleven o’clock.” She was filling up again. Trevena discontinued his line of questioning. He wasn’t investigating anything here. There was a discrepancy and it may or may not be uncovered but it wasn’t up to him to do the uncovering. He’d have to make a statement, though. Shit. Well at least it wasn’t on his watch, like Leftley. That sounded mean but it was a hell of a relief. Two of his patients within twenty-four hours of each other. Hell of a thing. Les must have killed himself within moments of speaking to Trevena on the phone. He was still lying dead in his room on the ward. Two nurses were sitting outside while they waited for the men to pitch up from the mortuary. This was as fresh as it comes. Bit of an eye-opener for young Zoë, there. Perhaps he should comfort her later. Come on her. Come in her lively little twat.

  Cherry was sobbing. Trevena snapped back from his thoughts. Where had he been going there? What was wrong with him today?

  “Look,” he said, wanting to put a lid on this and get away. He was feeling cramped in the stuffy little office and claustrophobic. The warmth of the room and his fatigue and a need to urinate had all combined to give him a niggling partial erection and its impatient winching against the cloth of his underpants had become tiresome. “These things happen. People get tired of being unwell all the time and sometimes, during recovery, they get a glimpse of two things. What the illness has taken from them, and what the future holds. And neither thing is good, and they decide to bail out. I know this probably doesn’t help, Cherry, but he’d clearly made up his mind. He’d have done it sometime. I’m just sorry it happened here. On your shift.”

  Cherry muttered a snotty thanks and Trevena got up and left.

  AND THEN HE went back to his office, which was just along the corridor from the ward, and really wished he hadn’t, because the expressions on the faces of his colleagues when he walked in, and the awkwardness of the silence, and the shuffling of paperwork and tension in the postures, told him that, unfortunately, there was still more shit to come.

  “Phil.” Stibbs said, stepping out from his office as Trevena walked in. “Can we have a conversation?”

  “OH THIS IS just un-fucking-believable,” Trevena said. “When? How?”

  Stibbs sat back in his chair and laced his fingers over his paunch. He looks like he’s just finished a good meal, Trevena thought. Incredulity was amassing and he felt defenceless before it, light-headed and at the mercy of something gargantuan; a stumbling, idiot Fate opening its bowels all over his life.

  Stibbs had informed Trevena that another of his patients had taken their own life, and yet another had been brought into Accident and Emergency just ten minutes ago having tried to drown himself in the Invidisham River half a mile away from the estate.

  “Dean Brazil’s an idiot,” Trevena said. “The only reason he didn’t drown is because he can swim. But Sally Cross? I can’t believe she’d kill herself. She’s been well for ages. Suicide was never discussed. She wasn’t depressed.”

  “Evidently she was, Phil,” Stibbs said. He picked up a slim green file from his desk and opened it. He didn’t hang about, this bastard. Stibbs had already been through all her notes in order to start compiling yet another investigation. He handed the file to Trevena. “Look at your last entry.”

  Trevena took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to get reeled in here, manipulated into saying something he’d regret later. Think, man. What was Stibbs’ point here?

  Sally has recovered well from her hypomanic episode and is now caring for her children fully and without intervention from Social Services. She is managing her medication without issue and is thinking about going back to work part-time. I will review in one month.

  Trevena looked up from the page. He raised his eyebrows at Stibbs, not wanting to commit, wanting Stibbs to spell it out. Trevena was trying to get a grip on what was happening, on losing Sally, on the others, so he missed the essence of what Stibbs said next.

  “What?” said Trevena.

  Stibbs frowned and snatched the file from Trevena’s hand. He held it up and pointed at the hand written note, jabbing the tip of his short, narrow index finger at the date. You have child’s hands, thought Trevena. Probably hung like a grain of rice. Explains a lot.

  “What?” Trevena said again, more sharply. He was starting to lose patience in a very big way. He glanced over his shoulder to see whether Graham was back in the office yet. If he was, Trevena was going to get him in here as a witness to what could rapidly become a nasty situation. There was a stench of harassment about all this, a stitch up.

  “Can I have your attention, Phil,” Stibbs said. “This is a very serious matter.”

  Trevena turned to look at Stibbs. He felt his fists clench around the ends of the chair’s armrests.

  Stibbs soldiered on, “The date was five weeks ago, Phil. You’ve missed her review.”

  Trevena shook his head. “That’s not a legal requirement. It’
s not a 117 meeting. It’s informal. It’s up to me when I see her. For God’s sake, man, you know how busy we all are. She was fine.”

  Stibbs drew breath through his teeth. He seemed to be making up his mind about something. “Ok,” he said. He slapped the file down on his desk. “I have no choice but to send you on leave, Phil.” He saw Trevena’s expression and raised his hands palms outwards. “It’s not a suspension, Phil. Just a bit of Gardening Leave. You need a break. You need to get onto your Union, too. You can’t be expected to work with all this going on.”

  Trevena got to his feet. He felt wobbly.

  “John,” he said, and it sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of bubble gum. “I don’t want to go off. Not now.” And he realised as he said it how utterly pathetic he sounded. He felt the horrible, unmanning sensation of tears pricking his eyes. None of this was his fault. He knew with total conviction that he had done nothing clinically wrong. He felt like he was being slowly and remorselessly assassinated. Later, he thought, please let this all hit me later. Just not here, not now, in front of Stibbs. He blinked and cleared his throat.

  Stibbs was watching him. There was a nasty caution in his expression. Trevena knew he had to be seen to be doing the right thing as a manager, ticking all the right boxes so that if and when Trevena finally imploded it would appear he had managed the situation effectively. But Trevena also knew right there in the very centre of his being that Stibbs wanted him gone. It was his remit, after all. It was why he was there: out with the old, in with the new. An avenging managerial mantra Stibbs might as well have put on one of his chipper motivational posters. Get rid of the old team, the change-resistant, experienced ones and bring in a tame and cherry-picked crop of low-grade yes-people. Cheaper, compliant and grateful for their jobs. A narcissist’s dream assignment.