Knife Edge

Knife Edge - chapter 12

Ed Leeming was experiencing a nightmare, the scale of which almost unhinged him. He was dreaming he was alive. He had no recollection at this point of any previous incarnation. He found himself in a subdued, warmly comfortable, hospital room. He recognised nothing. He had no idea of his identity, or of where he was, although he was somehow attuned to its fundamental structures allowing him to experience odd feelings of familiarity. This was nightmare land. This had no reality, no solidity. Only his zone surfing experiences were real. He felt strong as he sat up and stood on the carpeted floor.

He pondered briefly on the phenomenon of being able to feel his own weight. And not just weight. There was such power in him. That power needed to be released. It could not stay penned in forever. It would destroy him if it remained bottled up. The world he saw was a strange one, similar to the one he momentarily became aware of from time to time and recognised as somewhere he had once been, once. His dark half peered out through the automaton eyes of Ed Leeming. Something was restraining him. There were cables attached to parts of his skull. If he moved he would detach them. He stood there in a nightmarish anguish. Such a simple decision was causing him untold pain. He knew he was not alive, not really alive. He was not fully vibrating within this waveband. He stood, by the side of the bed, not moving a muscle

The door opened and his night nurse entered, illuminated faintly by the strip lighting in the hall outside. The door closed softly behind her as her breath caught in her throat.

‘My God, it’s a miracle,’ she gasped as the spectre of the sleeping Ed Leeming loomed before her. She walked over to him, reaching out to help him. There was something wrong. His eyes were closed yet she knew he could see her.

‘I must go and...’

She turned to go, surprised and stunned by the sight of her patient seemingly alive. She was also nervous. There was something about the figure that didn’t seem right. She had taken only one step towards the door when a pair of hands reached for her throat.

*****

Ed Leeming was totally unaware of the commotion going on around him. St Anthony’s had never seen so many policemen. The hospital had never experienced this kind of trouble. It was bad for business. If a nurse can get herself strangled by some roving maniac, what price security? Director Jack McArthur was desperately trying to play down the incident while appearing grief stricken. He had been shocked to his roots when he was told that Mary Sullivan, one of his most experienced nurses, had been found brutally strangled in a patient’s room.

It had been a particularly brutal attack. Her neck had very nearly been pulled out of her shoulders. She had been found lying close to the door, some yards away from the recumbent figure of Ed Leeming. Nothing had been taken and there was no sign of a struggle. Lieutenant Virgo, who was in charge of the enquiry, had concluded that Mary Sullivan, in all probability, had known her attacker.

He was standing close to Ed Leeming’s bed with McArthur, just looking around the room, as if hoping that the equipment or the furnishings would yield some, as yet not revealed, clue. The hospital director had been largely unhelpful. He could not see any way in which an attacker could get into the hospital and kill one of his staff without being seen. Virgo could see quite a few ways this could happen. The mystery, as far as the police officer was concerned, lay in the fact that almost nothing in the room had been disturbed.

He looked down at the immobile Leeming, and gazed bleakly at the neural scanner as it moved through its programmed routine. Virgo was reminded of a fairground ride he used to love as a kid. He never tired of watching the patterns of lights as they flashed and moved in, what appeared to be, a random sequence.

He gazed more closely at Ed’s face, noticing the unsightly blotch on his cheek and the odd shaped teeth and the distorted eyebrows. Ugly bastard, he thought. And it all happened right in front of you. He turned to McArthur.

‘I suppose there is no way sleeping beauty here could tell us what happened?’

The director looked up at the detective and sniffed.

‘As I have already explained, this patient is in a kind of catatonic stupor. He has been now for just over a year. He may well have witnessed everything that went on here but we have no way of communicating with him. If you are prepared to wait until he snaps out of it, you’re more than welcome. But you could be in for a long wait, or it could happen tomorrow.’

Virgo sniffed. He detected a whiff of the bureaucrat about McArthur. He didn’t like bureaucrats. They thought all the world’s problems could be solved by having meetings. And so, while the foot soldiers like Virgo were out trying to stem the rising tide of sub-cultural crime, the consultants and the experts and the doctors and psycho-babble interpreters sat around in rooms, barricaded from the reality of the streets, issuing directives and advice notes and reports that no one ever read.

Virgo was frustrated. Lying before him was the perfect witness. This ugly son-of-a-bitch saw who killed Mary Sullivan but couldn’t tell him. Maybe he just needed a good shaking to snap him out of it. Something wasn’t right here. Virgo sensed it. Something didn’t fit. Look at the place. Nothing has been disturbed. He glanced across to the door, in front of which the nurse had been found with her face as black as a storm cloud. Must be all of ten feet or more. When Virgo had first seen her, she looked as though she had landed on the floor after being thrown. The police lieutenant could not rationalise or make sense of the impression he had had. It just stuck in his mind.

He looked down at Ed Leeming again. Could this piece of furniture have risen from his death bed and pitched a twelve-stone woman ten feet across a room then got back into bed without a hair on his head out of place?

Virgo knew he couldn’t take that proposition back to headquarters. It had to be an intruder. His team had scrutinised every inch of the place and had come up with nothing.

Another of Virgo’s instincts told him that this killer would strike again. You didn’t spend nearly a lifetime amongst the debris of society without learning to trust your instincts.

He was put in mind of another mental itch that just wouldn’t go away. The attack on that ex-model, while her brother was made to watch, claiming it was a Deadhead chapter. Hell, that stank to high heaven as well. Virgo had been assigned to the case and had read all the press reports and speculation about the relationship between Thomas and Holly Startz and thought, well maybe there’s no smoke without fire?

Virgo had a healthy dislike of the media and somehow didn’t trust the whole media web business. Too much news was invented while too little real news was reported. Maybe that flesh carver Startz ought to be made to divulge his origins? That wouldn’t help the investigation into the attack on his sister, but it might prove that she was, in fact, his sister in the first place. A woman like that could make a man forget himself. Virgo was not immune to female charms. He had lusted after Holly Startz himself, although to see her now, drooling in a sanatorium, without make-up or poise, reminded him of this poor bastard lying before him.

He accepted the offer of a cup of coffee from McArthur. It would be good to get out of this place and back onto the streets where the bad guys were recognisable. Soon, he predicted, the forces of law and order would have to admit defeat in the battle against low life drugs and crime. Already the rich were building ramparts around their neighbourhoods. Soon we would have mini-cities with private armies defending against the hordes outside in the wasted streets.

Pen pushers like McArthur would be all right, he thought as he sipped his coffee. The hospital director’s bulbous eyes had retracted into themselves. His sole concern was to get this heavy footed policemen out of the hospital and get back to normal. Fortunately, Mary Sullivan had no immediate family. There was a sister somewhere but there were no husband or children to contact. That made things nice and clean. He would have to advertise the post of course. Funny how it had happened, in Leeming’s room, shortly after a check from that anonymous donor had arrived. Can’t argue with money, thought McArthur, and there could be no possible connection. He hadn’t mentioned the fact to Virgo. He didn’t want the man around, following up the slightest lead, however vague. He smiled expectantly at the detective as he rose to his feet.

‘I might be back, Mr McArthur,’ said Virgo. ‘Meanwhile, if you think of anything at all, no matter how remote, which might give us some kind of clue here, call me.’

He left his card on McArthur’s desk. As soon as Virgo had left the room, he took it carefully between thumb and forefinger and dropped it in to his wastebasket.