The Narrow Bed
Contents
Also by Sophie Hannah
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Origami by Kim Tribbeck
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Acknowledgements
Also by Sophie Hannah
Little Face
Hurting Distance
The Point of Rescue
The Other Half Lives
A Room Swept White
Lasting Damage
Kind of Cruel
The Carrier
The Orphan Choir
The Telling Error
The Monogram Murders
A Game for All the Family
About the Author
Sophie Hannah is the internationally bestselling author of ten psychological thrillers, as well as The Monogram Murders, the first Hercule Poirot mystery to be published since Agatha Christie’s death and approved by her estate. Sophie is also an award-winning short story writer and poet. Her fifth collection of poetry, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award and she won first prize in the Daphne du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for ‘The Octopus Nest’. Her psychological thriller The Carrier won the Crime Thriller of the Year award at the 2013 Specsavers National Book Awards, and The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives have both been adapted for television as Case Sensitive. Sophie lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, where she is a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College.
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Sophie Hannah 2016
The right of Sophie Hannah to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 77612 6
Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 77608 9
Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 77609 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
For Paul Pagett, who almost guessed the right answer to the Liv and Gibbs question
From: inessa.hughes@goochandhughes.com Sent: 10 February 2016 11.41:24
To: Susan.Nordlein@nordleinvinter.co.uk Subject: Origami by Kim Tribbeck Dear Susan
I am thrilled to be sending you the latest (and, we hope, final) incarnation of Origami by our wonderful Kim. Yes, I’m afraid she’s still determined to call it that! Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I have put your case to her as eloquently as I know how, but she refuses to entertain the idea of calling it Kim Peculiar, Kim Ha Ha. She is of the view that it’s undignified, and I must admit I can see her point. I don’t know if people in France or Japan ask one another if something is funny peculiar or funny ha ha. Do you think they do? It feels very English to me. I suspect it’s a title that would travel badly, and since Kim is one of the few British comedians of her generation who’s starting to make a real impact internationally, I’d like her book’s title to have broader appeal. And as Kim pointed out (and of course she’s quite right), she’s hardly a ‘ha ha’ kind of comedian. She’s far too dark and subtle for that, and endlessly under fire from the ‘Why can’t you just tell funny jokes?’ brigade. To put ‘Ha Ha’ in her title would, I fear, give rise to a few ‘Ha ha? There’s not a single good punchline in the book!’ sort of reviews.
I also think this book will sell not because it’s a comedian’s memoir – a flagging genre, I suspect – but because it’s essentially a true crime book: the story of Kim’s involvement in the Billy Dead Mates murder investigation. For this reason, I wonder whether we might do better with a title that sounds more crime-ish? I think I can persuade Kim to relinquish her cherished Origami if you will, at your end, agree not to mention Kim Peculiar, Kim Ha Ha again. What about something referencing Billy and his books directly? The Billy Dead Books? Or is that too oddball?
Since the book will form the basis of Kim’s tour later in the year (and I’m afraid the tour is called ‘Origami’, whatever the name of the book ends up being) we will need at some point to talk about a special edition of the book to be sold only at Kim’s gigs, perhaps with some extra content. I’ve attached a full list of tour dates as requested.
I think that’s all for now. I am on the very edge of my seat, and likely to bounce off it in excitement as I await your reaction to this stunning book!
Warmest regards, Inessa
Kim Tribbeck in Origami – Autumn 2016 Tour Dates Newcastle/Theatre Royal – 2 September Newcastle/Metro Radio Arena – 3 September York/Grand Opera House – 4 September Harrogate/Royal Hall – 5 September Scarborough/Scarborough Spa – 10 September Durham/Gala – 11 September
Huddersfield/Town Hall – 12 September Southend/Cliffs – 13 September
Wimborne/Tivoli – 19 September Stoke/Regent Theatre – 20 September Coventry/Warwick Arts Centre – 21 September Nottingham/Playhouse – 22 September Warrington/Parr Hall – 23 September Ipswich/Regent – 29 September
Scunthorpe/Baths Hall – 30 September Folkestone/Leas Cliff Hall – 1 October Birmingham/Genting Arena – 2 October Bournemouth/International Centre – 5 October Stevenage/Arts and Leisure Centre – 8 October Aylesbury/Waterside Theatre – 9 October Hayes/Beck Theatre – 10 October
Chatham/Central Theatre – 11 October Northampton/Derngate – 16 October
London/Southbank Centre – 17 October Cambridge/Corn Exchange – 18 October Aberdeen/Music Hall – 24 October
Dorking/Halls – 29 October
Swindon/Wyvern – 30 October
Carmarthen/Lyric Theatre – 31 October
from Origami by Kim Tribbeck
For Elaine Hopwood, the mother
I never met but always loved
1
My tip for anyone under scrutiny from the police: as soon as you try to hide something, you make it glaringly visible, like the buildings and bridges that are sometimes wrapped in white cloth by artists, making everyone stare and point at them. Pull off the cloth and you’ve got an unremarkable office block or a congested commuter route across water; people walk past with their heads down, oblivious.
Tell the police the truth, immediately and in detail – all your sleazy lies, all your unsavoury personal habits – and no one will pay a scrap of attention. It’s kind of obvious: when you hide, people seek, whereas when you talk about something that matters to you, no one listens. Ever. This is the main way i
n which human beings are reliable.
Standing before detectives, I decided straight away that I mustn’t appear to be a mystery. For as long as I was one, there was a danger I’d look like one, so when I first went to the police, I held up my secret and waved it around ostentatiously like an ID card in a wallet: ‘Here’s my secret, now let me pass.’
I wouldn’t have minded, except I only had the one. A solitaire. It wasn’t even current – it was the memory of a secret. Nevertheless, it was my most treasured possession and my best friend. (I’ve had human best friends in the past. They’re overrated.) I preferred my secret to my home, my work, my remaining blood relatives. Giving it up was a significant sacrifice.
I don’t regret telling the police the truth. To do anything but reveal all would have been daft. As a real person, I understand this. Only fictional characters in TV crime dramas think, ‘Here come the cops, investigating a series of brutal slayings – I’d better tie myself in elaborate knots to make sure they don’t find out I watched a pirated movie in 1997. Who cares if it hampers their efforts to prevent the garotting-with-piano-wire of yet another apple-cheeked schoolboy? Just nobody mention The English Patient. I know nothing about that. I’ve never seen a burnt English guy in a hospital bed in my entire life, I swear.’
The TV-crime-drama police are just as puzzling in their behaviour as the civilians they interview. Aren’t they? The minute they twig something’s being kept from them, they launch into their passionate ‘We, the detectives, don’t care about most crimes’ routine. ‘Look, sir, we’re investigating a murder here. That’s all we care about: catching this killer. We don’t give a toss if you’ve parked illegally, or partaken of the contraband English Patient video. Just tell us what you know about this murder. If you’ve kerb-crawled, or lied about your age to buy booze or ciggies, we’re very chilled about that. Drugs? Do me a favour! Shoplifting, carjacking – all fine with us. Have you mugged an old lady, leaving her with severe head injuries? Try not to bore us, yeah? Like we could give a shit about some irrelevant old boiler.
‘Despite being employed to keep society safe from harm, we only actually want to solve one crime. We’ve decided, for some peculiar reason that is never elaborated upon, that none of the others count. We’re the police equivalent of a lollipop lady who’s determined to usher one kid safely across a road while ignoring the dozens falling under the wheels of SUVs nearby. Tell you what, I’ll cut you a deal: give me something, anything, that’ll take me one step closer to catching this killer – the only criminal on the planet I care about, even though that’s utterly irrational – and I’ll grant you immunity for all your other crimes, like the baby you strangled, and the fire you started in which eight nurses died.’
‘I still can’t risk telling the truth,’ thinks the narcissistic suspect with no sense of perspective. ‘I’ve been assured by the most eminent superintendent in the land that I could have melted my neighbour in a cauldron of boiling wax and he’d totally let me off, but there’s still no way of predicting how annoyed he might be about the whole English Patient thing. Nope, that’s a tough one to call. Better play it safe and say nothing.’
In my first real-life experience of this kind of situation, I gleaned a perverse satisfaction from giving up my shocking secret straight away. Truth is, I felt a little bit ashamed to be involved with the police in the role of boring goody-two-shoes who’d done nothing wrong, so I decided to try and annoy them. A detective’s job is to ferret out what people are hiding, so how irritating must it be for them when someone’s opening gambit is ‘Let me tell you everything’? Imagine how furious Jamie Oliver would be if he opened his oven on Christmas Day and found a perfectly cooked turkey with all the trimmings in there that someone else had prepared earlier; it must be like that.
I shared my solitary secret with the detectives investigating the Billy Dead Mates murders as if it were a great gossipy anecdote. It was. I said, ‘I don’t know where to start. Oh, wait! Yes I do!’ And laughed.
There was only one place I could start: in the middle in every sense, with the symbolic object that stood at the centre of it all, a solid barrier between one half of my life and the other – an unpainted wooden door with a silver handle …
Tuesday, 6 January 2015
Ringpull. I think the word as I swallow the object.
It happened too quickly: a hard snag in the orange-flavoured Fruit Rush in my mouth, then gone. Nothing to be done. Unless …
No, I didn’t imagine it sliding down. It was too small to hurt, but I felt it: a lump in liquid. And the visual evidence tells me I swallowed it: its absence from the top of the can in my hand. I must have worked it loose and dropped it in – plucking and twisting, my fingers barely aware of what they were doing. My only aim was to fill time with physical activity. Although (I realise, now that I’ve swallowed metal) it’s a habit I have even when I don’t need to distract myself: I work the ringpull loose, snap it off and drop it into my drink to get it out of the way of my mouth.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: only one item to dispose of if it’s inside the can. And – I’d have said before today – there’s no danger of it ending up in your stomach. Only a fool would swallow a ringpull.
Did I do it on purpose? Because now I have a problem, maybe, and it occurs to me that might be exactly what I wanted. Another distraction: what to do about the foreign object inside my body? Is it dangerous? If it is, I have to do something about it, which means I’ll need to leave this ward and go to another one.
Did I mention how efficient I am? This will impress you: when I need, unexpectedly, to find out if swallowing a ringpull is likely to do me any harm, I’m already in a hospital – the Rawndesley General Infirmary. You can’t get much more ergonomic than that.
I’d never been inside a hospital until last Saturday apart from when I was born, but I’ve watched my fair share of medical dramas and I’ve never heard anyone mention the ringpull ward. At the moment I’m in Ward 10, the cancer ward. This is where my grandmother is dying. I have to stay until she dies, unless I can come up with a really good excuse to leave.
A sharp-edged metal object that might slice my gut open from within sounds like a brilliant excuse to me, but then I’m not an expert. And I’m not sure if the edges were sharp. They probably make them rounded so nobody cuts their fingers. I’d better ask someone. The nurses and doctors on Ward 10 are bound to be more interested in cancer, but anyone working on the world’s top illness must first have been trained in the basics of Fruit Rush can-component ingestion, surely. I just need to catch someone’s eye … although ideally not hers.
Too late. The nurse with square-cut grey hair and tortoiseshell glasses on a chain around her neck is approaching. ‘You’re still here?’ she says.
‘Yes. Marion’s still dying,’ I say with a shrug. ‘Can’t really leave halfway through.’
I don’t want to discuss the ringpull situation or anything with this woman – Bridget, according to her badge. I already know she doesn’t have my best interests at heart, or else she’s not bright enough to work out that they might differ from her imaginary version of them. She hasn’t left me alone since I decided to sit in the ward corridor. She wants me tidied away, next to the deathbed. So far this morning she’s tried, ‘Has the doctor sent you to wait out here?’ (No) and ‘You can take that chair into Gran’s room if you like.’ (No, thanks. Actually, I only just brought it out.)
‘I know it’s hard, but you’d probably feel better if you were in there with Gran,’ she says now.
Stop calling her that. She’s not your gran. Why not try calling her Marion like I do and always have?
Bridget extends her neck to peer sympathetically down at me. It makes me think of those sticks with pincers on the end that council workers use to pick up litter in public places.
This has been happening ever since Marion was admitted to hospital: the people who work here keep reminding me of inanimate objects, even as they move around freely, and
the things on the ward remind me of living creatures. The shiny silver hand-sterilising unit on wheels makes me think of a pelican every time I walk past it.
I walk past it a lot. I leave Ward 10 as often as I can – for an extra bar of mobile phone signal for all the calls I’m not making; a drink when I’m not thirsty; painkillers from the hospital shop when I don’t have a headache; a magazine I can’t focus on; extra-strong mints. Any excuse. It doesn’t do me much good, though; I still have to come back here, to Ward 10. A dying grandmother isn’t like a crap movie at Cineworld – you can’t decide to sack it and leave halfway through.
‘I’m sure your brother’d appreciate the support too,’ Bridget adds.
‘I don’t support him,’ I tell her. ‘He’s asked the doctors to continue treatment – more transfusions, more oxygen. He wouldn’t let them catheterise Marion because a nurse I’ve never met said she might get a bladder infection, so instead they have to keep going in and changing her, and you can see in her eyes that she hates it.’
My voice sounds increasingly hoarse as I say what I’ve said a dozen times already. I don’t know why I’m bothering. No one listens. The staff here have things they’ve been trained to do – treat patients! Avoid infection! – and they’re determined to do them.
‘It’s crazy,’ I tell Bridget. ‘My grandmother is twenty-four, forty-eight hours away from death at most. Stop rolling her around like fucking scone dough! She wouldn’t want it. Put in a catheter, now. Stop listening to Drew when he talks about moving her back to her house with medical support, and maybe with daily transfusions she can regain some quality of life, and maybe she can listen to audiobooks. Who knows, maybe she can learn to play the clarinet and join a brass band!’ I blink back tears. ‘She can’t. Just go in there and look at her eyes. She desperately wants it to be over. Drew doesn’t care. All he cares about is him not losing his grandmother. If you had any decency you’d give her a morphine overdose. I know you can’t. But you should be able to, because this is ridiculous!’