Lafferty was sitting thinking about Joe when the phone rang. It was John Main and he sounded revitalised.
“I thought you’d like to know, I found them, Ryan. I found them last night.”
Lafferty had to think for a moment before he realised what Main meant. “You mean, the people who took Simon?” he exclaimed.
“Yes. I found them, all four of them.”
“How in God’s name did you do it?” asked Lafferty.
Main explained the thinking behind his pub crawl and what had happened when he had put the theory into practice. “They were in the very last one I visited. I’ve just been down at police headquarters with their descriptions.”
“Descriptions?” asked Lafferty.
Main told him about the fight in the pub and how he’d nearly lost his sight.
Lafferty frowned and asked, “Are your eyes all right?”
“Still a bit sore but I can see,” said Main. “I’ll survive.”
“So who are these people?” asked Lafferty. “Did the police have any idea?”
“I had a look through their mug shot books but I didn’t recognise anyone. They seemed like plain, ordinary yobs to me,” said Main. “But the police are confident they’ll find them now they know where to look.”
There was that word again, thought Lafferty. ‘Yobs’.
“How can you be sure these are the men?” he asked.
“They didn’t deny it,” answered Main.
“You mean they admitted taking Simon’s body?” exclaimed Lafferty.
“They didn’t go that far,” said Main. “They tried to suggest I’d got it all wrong but they knew McKirrop, all right and they admitted being there in the cemetery that night.”
“Thank God. I’m afraid I’ve been getting nowhere at the library. I hope the police pick these men up soon; this has all been a nightmare for you.”
“You can say that again,” agreed Main. “But we’re nearly there. It may be that these four were acting on behalf of someone else, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Indeed we will,” said Lafferty. “Keep me informed.”
“I will.”
Lafferty replaced the receiver and put his hands to his cheeks. He massaged them gently while he thought about what Main had said. McKirrop had used the term ‘yobs’ in his semi-conscious ramblings and it had registered with him as being incongruous. Now Main had described the four men in the pub as ‘yobs’. This meant that it hadn’t been just a bad choice of word on McKirrop’s part. The grave robbers really had been young tearaways. He returned to his earlier hypothesis that yobs didn’t steal bodies. So what did it all mean?
Main’s idea could be right. They could have been doing the dirty work for someone else, but it sounded as if they hadn’t suggested that themselves when Main confronted them. According to Main, they had said he had ‘got it all wrong’.
That was interesting, thought Lafferty. When an accused said something like that it was usually a precursor to a plea of innocence, but if the men admitted being there in the cemetery that night how could they possibly hope to plead innocence?
Ten
Sarah decided to stay for the tests on Mary O’Donnell although, in theory, she could have gone off-duty after Tyndall’s departure. She was present when Logan completed the final scan. He sighed deeply and said, “She’s not even borderline; there’s no activity at all.” He handed the results to her and she started sifting through the untidy bunch of papers, first separating the chart graphs from the print-out rolls. It did not take long to see that Logan was right; there was no doubt. To all intents and purposes, Mary O’Donnell was dead. Even the Sigma Scan, the most sensitive test of all, was flat-lining. The young girl in the bed whose chest moved up and down to the rhythm of an electric relay valve was just an empty shell with no more living substance than a photograph.
“I’ll call the Dr Tyndall,” said Logan. “Maybe you can get the parents to come in this afternoon? The sooner we get this over with the better.”
Logan went to the doctors’ room to phone; he returned after a couple of minutes and said, “Dr Tyndall can manage this afternoon, it now depends on the parents.”
“I’ll call them,” said Sarah.
“Dr Tyndall will be here at two thirty. Ask them if they can come at two, will you? I’d like to have a word with them first.”
Sarah looked at Logan who met her stare without flinching. “Very well,” she said.
“By the way, Dr Tyndall would like you to be present when he sees them. Part of your training.”
Sarah walked towards the duty room with a heavy heart. She knew that the O’Donnells would have spent all night hoping and praying that their daughter would pull through. Their nerves would be stretched to breaking point, and when the phone rang, it would be snatched up with anxious hands. She tapped out the numbers with her index finger, slowly and deliberately, unwilling to initiate a train of events which would lead to such unhappiness. The phone was answered at the first ring.
“Yes?” said Jean O’Donnell’s voice. It was filled with anxiety.
Sarah swallowed hard and said, “Mrs O’Donnell, It’s Sarah Lasseter here at the Infirmary. I wonder if you and your husband could come in this afternoon to have a word with Dr Logan and Dr Tyndall?”
“What’s happened? Is she worse?” asked Jean O’Donnell.
Sarah could hear Joe O’Donnell in the background asking what was going on.
“We’ve had the chance to run some tests now and it’s now a question of discussing the results with you.”
“Discussing,” said Jean O’Donnell slowly.
“Dr Tyndall will explain everything this afternoon,” said Sarah gently.
“I see,” replied Jean distantly.
Sarah knew that Jean O’Donnell had understood the implications of the meeting. She no longer sounded anxious. Her voice had lost its animation. Something had left her. Sarah knew it was hope.
“Would two o’clock be all right?”
“We’ll be there.”
Sarah was glad that Tyndall always made a point of speaking to relatives himself when there was bad news to impart. He was good with the patients; he was equally good with the relatives. He had the great advantage of looking the part and at times like this it was important. He was the kind of man that relatives would want to see, a reassuringly establishment figure, well-dressed, silver-haired, sympathetic, understanding. She suspected that Logan could be pretty awful and worried about why he wanted to see the O’Donnells first. Surely he could not be considering pre-empting Tyndall in asking for permission for organ removal?Dealing with grieving relatives was an aspect of her work that she had so far managed to avoid thanks to Tyndall’s habit of seeing them himself but it couldn’t be avoided indefinitely. She suspected that Tyndall had asked her to be present at the meeting with the O’Donnells today for that very reason. Death was a constant visitor to a unit like HTU.
As two o’clock came with no sign of the O’Donnells, Sarah noticed that Logan was becoming anxious. He started looking at his watch at half minute intervals. At quarter past the hour he was clearly losing patience.
“Where the hell are they?” he demanded.
Sarah, not sure if she should reply or not muttered something about them being delayed. She was secretly pleased that it was beginning to look as if the O’Donnells would not be seeing Logan after all. This proved to be the case when Tyndall arrived early at twenty past and the O’Donnells had still not appeared. Sarah heard Logan swear under his breath as he himself disappeared.
The O’Donnells arrived at twenty-five past with Joe apologising for having to change a wheel on the car.
“Bloody kids,” he muttered but didn’t elaborate.