Capital Offence

Chapter 23

Saturday 8th June

18 days left

The glass doors slid open as Vaila walked past a pathetic group of heavily pregnant teenagers, amputees in wheelchairs and grey looking women in faded pink candlewick dressing gowns, united by their shared need to smoke in the chill watery sunshine outside the entrance to one of the main blocks of Edinburgh’s gleaming new infirmary at Little France.

Vaila asked at the desk, and was shown to a ward through a gleaming sunlit aluminium area. What happened to the endless institutional Victorian corridors, painted in ‘let’s cheer the poor sods up’ shades of yellow and orange? Was good taste going to make people better?

Vaila was taken aback, on arriving at the ward reception for Neurosurgery, to be met by a man in a dark grey suit, who took her firmly by the elbow and asked her to step into a side room.

“Can you give me your full name and address, please.” No question was implied - this was an order.

“Who are you?”

“DI Andy McCullough of Lothian and Borders Police. Your details please.”

Vaila obliged.

“And why do you wish to see Mr Leonard?”

Vaila racked her brains for a legitimate sounding excuse. Because my ex-boyfriend’s accused of attacking him, and is about to be executed?  And I’m clutching at straws.

Not a chance.

“I’m an old family friend.”

DI McCullough didn’t react. Vaila pressed on regardless.

“Mr Leonard used to babysit for me,”  she lied. McCullough nodded. “I just happened to be in town. I thought I’d see how he was getting on. Has he regained consciousness at all yet?”

“He’s still making progress, but it’s very slow.”

“Can I see him?”

“Have you been in one of these wards before?”

Vaila shook her head. But she knew exactly what to expect. She’d been brought up on hospital soaps, from ‘Doctor Kildare’, through ‘Emergency Ward 10’, and more recently ‘Cardiac Arrest’ and ‘ER’.

“He won’t be able to talk to you. He’s off sedation now - for the first few weeks in ITU he had to be kept sedated to stop him pulling at his tracheostomy tube. That’s now been replaced with a smaller one, so he can make some faint sounds, but he still needs some assistance with his breathing for the time being.

“He keeps waking and sleeping just for a few minutes at a time. It’s not what you call conscious as opposed to unconscious. It’s more like he just drifts back and forward. You can’t be sure what he understands.”

Vaila started to realise how useless her mission was. She’d been hoping to see what progress if any the old boy was making, perhaps to try to get some information which had been missed so far. But this was hopeless with the law hanging around. If the old bugger could speak it would give the game away if he didn’t know who the hell she was. She backed off. “Look, I don’t want to be any bother. I can see this isn’t a good idea.”

“No. it’s OK. It’s no bother. Come on.”

And DI McCullough took her firmly by the elbow once more, this time to lead her out the door of the small room and towards the ward. Oh, fuck, thought Vaila. Shite and fuck.

McCullough was a sensitive individual, despite his professionally stern exterior, and genuinely wanted to help. But there was another reason for wanting Vaila to meet the old man. McCullough was convinced that there was more to this case than met the eye. He personally thought that the death penalty was not only abhorrent, but also pig-headed. Old Mr Leonard was showing some signs of recovery, so what was the point of topping the supposed attacker when there was still the chance of hearing evidence from one of the victims? OK, the chances of Pearson being innocent were zilch, but there was just a possibility that he wasn’t in this alone. What if next month the old boy managed to cast fresh light on the case? How the hell did you question Pearson then? Terminate Pearson and you blew your chances of ever fingering his mates.