The handful of blockers she snapped into her neck after getting rid of Stephen’s body have left her blissfully relaxed, but she longs to get away from this dungeon, with its racks of bedpans and piles of plastic sheets. She wants to feel sunlight on her new face.
She slides out onto the storeroom floor and peels off Stephen’s old surgical gown. He doesn’t need it anymore: he’s all burned away.
The clothes Kris wasn’t wearing when she and her boyfriend were caught in flagrante delicto are clean and disinfected: washed by hand in the little sink. The lacy confectionary pretending to be Kris’s undergarments is a bit cheap and tarty for Dr Westfield’s tastes, but she slips into them anyway. The bra hangs on her, its cups empty and sad. She hasn’t got breasts any more, just a pair of U-shaped scars where the surgeon hacked them off-de-sexing her so no one would be tempted to live out their filthy fantasies by screwing a serial killer. She cheers the bra up with a few handfuls of toilet paper. The panties are slightly more disturbing: her catheter makes a tiny tent in the front, like a little erection. As soon as she’s taken care of business here she’ll go somewhere new and book herself some more surgery. She will be a woman again.
Dr Westfield pulls on Kris’s green trousers, T-shirt and white trainers. They make her look like an intern, but there’s nothing she can do about that. So she throws the white labcoat over her shoulders and examines her reflection again.
Her new face makes her look…odd, unfamiliar. It’s not just the swelling, or her old nose-it’s the bottom jaw. She hasn’t had one for six miserable, brain-dead years. Carefully she pulls back her top lip and exposes her teeth. That’s what she’s used to, that hideous parody of a human face.
She slips her new credit cards into her pocket-Kris, her dead boyfriend, and Stephen won’t be needing them any longer-along with one or two medical supplies that’ll come in handy later. Then Doctor Fiona Westfield says goodbye to the storeroom that’s been her home for the last five days.
She doesn’t look back.
Will stood in the rain with his collar turned up and his mouth turned down. On the other side of the ‘CRIME SCENE’ tape half a dozen of Glasgow’s finest were slowly picking their way through a mountain of rubbish skulking beneath the Kinning Park flyover.
Agent Brian Alexander was knee-deep in filth, directing the search with all the joy of someone who’s just found a jobbie in his bathtub. Will ducked under the yellow-and-black tape, trying not to think about what he’d just stood in. It was brown and it squelched, and that was more than he really wanted to know.
‘Why is it,’ he asked, dragging his shoe along the side of a pile of sodden paper, ‘that you always end up with cases like this, Brian?’
Brian grunted. ‘Because the Bitch Queen hates my guts, that’s why. I mean look at this!’ He waved a fat arm at the vast pile of rain-soaked garbage. ‘Why does this need real people? I could’ve grabbed a bunch of halfheads to grub about in the shite, but no! That would be too easy. What we want is some poor Network bastards up to their knees in pish!’
Will stood with his back to the wind, watching a Behemoth from Dis-Com-Lein drift across the leaden skies towards Glasgow Central, and wondering what the cloned publishing executive he’d slept with all those years ago was doing now. Probably not wading through stinking mounds of garbage.
At least here, under the expressway, they got a little shelter from the rain. All they really had to worry about was the dirt, the germs, and the disease-carrying vermin.
Will pointed at the team going through the unofficial landfill site. ‘What’s the story?’
‘Two Bluecoats, missing since Friday.’ Brian dug his hands into his pockets. ‘Station commander didn’t do anythin’ about it till Saturday afternoon. Says he’s no’ got enough manpower to do a proper search. Tosser. He finally gets round to tellin’ us about it and we have to fight him all bloody weekend to get their coffin dodgers turned on. He says they’re only used as a last resort. Like PC Douglas and MacDonald’re out there eatin’ chip butties and skoofin’ Irn-Bru!’ Brian sniffed back a drop hanging on the end of his nose and spat it out into the rubbish heap. ‘Anyway, we broadcast their ident codes first thing this morning and bingo. Both signals are comin’ from this pile of shite under the expressway. So now here we are, diggin’ through it by hand, lookin’ for them.’
Will nodded, looking out over the mound of mouldering debris. ‘How come there aren’t any Bluecoats helping?’
Brian grunted again. ‘Station commander couldn’t spare any. Can you believe it? No’ even to look for his own people! Unbe-fuckin’-lievable.’
Will had to agree.
They walked the perimeter of the rubbish heap, Brian bemoaning his fate and Will making distracted soothing noises, not really listening. He was going over the chewing out he’d got from Director Smith-Hamilton instead. She’d taken what was pretty damning evidence and dismissed it out of hand. It wasn’t like her at all.
And she had the cheek to say he was the one acting irrationally.
‘You know,’ he said, watching a Network trooper in a filthy grey jumpsuit digging through a multicoloured pile of trash. ‘Director Smith-Hamilton thinks I should go get some therapy. Thinks I’ve got “issues”.’
‘There’s a fuckin’ shock. You’ve no’ really been the same since that cow Westfield turned up burnt tae a crisp. I mean I’m no’ surprised: what with her deid and all the shite goin’ on at Sherman House…’
‘Don’t you start.’
‘Look, you’re only babysittin’ me today cos Her Majesty tore a strip off your arse.’ He turned and poked Will in the shoulder. ‘She used to think the sun shone out that very hole. People are beginnin’ to think you’re a born-again bamheid.’
Will laughed. ‘You know something? They might be right.’
Something crackled and sniffed in his ear followed by George’s voice: ‘Will, Brian, is that you? Hello? Hello?’
‘You don’t have to shout George, we can hear you.’
Brian’s response was a bit more to the point: ‘Quiet down ya snotty wee bastard!’
‘Oops, sorry. I’ve got some bad news…and some worse news. The labs have lost the samples I sent them.’
‘Soddin’ hell, that’s just bloody typical.’
‘Never mind,’ said Will, ‘we’ve still got the original bodies right? We can just take more samples and-’
‘That’s the worse news.’ A loud sniff rattled their eardrums. ‘Services came by while I was out at a meeting and picked up the wrong bodies-they were meant to take the two jumpers we scraped up last week-but they took the Sherman House ones instead. They’ve gone to the great barbecue in the sky. I only found out when I went to get another slice of brain to send off.’
‘Tell me we still have the SOC recordings!’
‘Oh…I didn’t check. You want me to?’
‘Please.’
The pathologist’s voice clicked off and Brian shook his head. ‘They’ll be gone too, you know that don’t you?’ He spat another glob of phlegm onto the garbage at his feet. ‘We’re fucked: we’ve got no evidence left.’
‘We’ve got one last bit, but I don’t know how it fits in yet.’
Brian raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh aye?’
‘Peitai wanted me to keep my nose out of the PsychTech files, so I went digging. I’ve got a team going through everything I downloaded, looking for something that implicates the weasely little shite. Something we can use.’ He gave that same bitter laugh again. ‘Not that Her Royal Highness will do anything about it-Governor Clark’s been on the phone again. They’re putting serious pressure on her to bury the whole thing.’