Cry of the Needle Read online

  Cry of the Needle

  by Roger Radford

  Copyright © Roger Radford 2013

  The right of Roger Radford to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him 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.

  E-book ISBN 978 0 9518998 5 4

  Parados Books

  72 Redbridge Lane East

  Ilford, Essex IG4 5EZ, United Kingdom

  radford46.wordpress.com

  Cover Design by

  Suzanne Fyhrie Parrott

  eBook Formatting and Design by

  First Steps Publishing

  About the Author

  Roger Radford is also the author of The Winds of Kedem (international bestseller), Schreiber’s Secret (film rights sold) and High Heels & 18 Wheels: Confessions of a Lady Trucker (with Bobbie Cecchini). A former war correspondent in the Middle East, he now lives with his wife in London.

  I dedicate this book to the many silent victims harmed by invasive spinal procedures. Their voices deserve to be heard.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  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

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ‘Medicine used to be simple, ineffective and relatively safe. It is now complex, effective and potentially dangerous.’

  The dean of one of Britain’s leading medical schools.

  CHAPTER 1

  London, 2001

  The wife whose husband had murdered seven men screamed in agony.

  ‘Just a bit more, there’s a good girl, I can see the head,’ Martin Townsend cajoled. The consultant obstetrician-cum-anaesthetist was worried. He could see Teresa Kelly was in pain and he knew she shouldn’t be. He swept the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, and cursed under breath that still bore the imprint of a night on the tiles. The bloody epidural had gone desperately wrong. He’d had to jiggle the damn needle around before it finally went in. The good doctor silently chided himself for not having left it to a junior, somebody to whom he could pass the buck.

  ‘Why am I hurting so much, doctor?’ Teresa gasped. Beads of sweat began to meander down from the damp red hairline and across the myriad freckles adorning her soft Celtic features. Most women did not look their best in the throes of childbirth, but despite her pain, she retained the prettiness that would soon be enhanced by the first flush of motherhood. She gripped her husband’s hand more tightly and smiled thinly at his worried face. ‘Don’t fret, Kieran,’ she mouthed silently. After all, childbirth was no big deal for an Irish Catholic. They were born to raise big families. She was twenty-seven and had already spawned three kids. All had been relatively difficult births. Sian, the first, had been a forceps delivery. She could never forget that labour. Excruciating, it had seemed to take forever, and she’d vowed never to go through it again. Three daughters later, she was going through it again. Only this time, and against her better judgement, she had consented to have an epidural. She had never liked confronting the laws of nature, but they had assured her the procedure was safe. This time, it just had to be a boy. Kieran wanted a boy. Kieran was desperate for a boy, someone for whom he could have dreams and aspirations; a boy with whom he could play football over the local park; a boy who would one day captain his club and country, a United Ireland. As long as he was there to carry the Kelly line. It was a Celtic thing.

  Kieran Kelly looked on, a familiar anger burning within him. He knew enough about modern medicine to understand that an epidural was supposed to anaesthetise the pain of childbirth.

  ‘Why is she in pain, doc?’ he said threateningly. ‘You said she wouldn’t feel a thing.’

  Townsend grunted noncommittally. He hated it when the husbands insisted on being present.

  ‘Can’t you do something, doctor?’ The Irishman hated the desperation in his voice, for he abhorred being beholden to any man.

  ‘Oh, Kieran,’ Teresa gasped again, curtailing his musings with troubled, confused eyes. She gripped his hand more tightly as the contractions increased. They’d said she wouldn’t feel any pain with the epidural. Then why was she hurting so?

  The Irishman could sense that scant attention was being paid to his wife’s pain by the medical menagerie surrounding her. He began feeling the familiar pounding in his head that in the past had presaged physical violence. He was a man of black and white. Once committed, whether to kin or to cause, he remained dedicated to their welfare. Ever since the end of The Troubles, the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland, Kieran Kelly had worked all the hours God gave in order to provide for his family. Despite an IQ of 152, he was a man of thwarted ambition, desperately seeking to escape the drudgery of his job as a security guard and the working class suburb in which he lived. Peace in Northern Ireland, religion and a fourth child were conspiring to prevent him from realising that aim, although he would be the last to admit it. God’s grand design could not be questioned. It had once commanded him to become a hit-man for the Provisional IRA’s Internal Affairs. Now it was God’s wish that he lead a life of relative anonymity, to forsake his native Belfast for the comparative safety of the sprawling metropolis that was London. Memories were still long back home, and there were plenty of enemies who might seek to exact the sort of revenge he himself had meted out in the heyday of The Troubles.

  Teresa saw her own pain reflected in her husband’s eyes. She must not let him see how much she was suffering. She must be brave. It wasn’t the contractions; she could hardly feel those. It was her back, which felt as if it was splitting in two, and the rivers of fire that were running down her legs.

  He stroked her moist red hair. ‘Nearly there, now, a gradh mo croidhe,’ he said soothingly. She was indeed the light of his heart.

  Teresa suddenly became aware of the antiseptic aromas in the delivery room. The white tiles, pristine and frigid, glared at her as if affronted by her whinnying. Those tiles had witnessed so much pain and joy that maybe they had a right to be disdainful. The insistent bleeps of the monitoring equipment seemed to be shrieking like a demented mobile phone. For the first time in all her pregnancies, she felt a sense of total vulnerability, albeit mixed with the thrill of expectation that this was to be Kieran’s moment. Indeed, her very raison d’être was geared to this moment. There, with her legs splayed immodestly on stirrups and the very quick of her revealed for all the world to see, Teresa Kelly was about to give birth to the most beautiful boy in the universe.

  ‘The baby’s coming now, my dear,’ came the lilting voice of the West Indian nurse, plump and motherly. ‘Start pushing.’

  Teresa winced as she put all her effort into the task. She wanted to scream but she knew she wouldn’t. It was not her way. She looked
beseechingly at the obstetrician. Everyone had told her to have faith in the doctors and nurses. ‘You’ve been through it all before, Teresa,’ they had said. ‘This time you won’t feel any pain. Trust me, I’m a doctor.’

  Martin Townsend could see the baby’s head begin to part the labia. Its dark hair was besmirched with blood and faeces released by pressure on the rectum. The bleeping cardiotocogram gave no hint of complications. The obstetrician/anaesthetist placed his right hand on the perineum, the area between the anus and vagina, and then applied gentle pressure to prevent tearing. Two contractions later and he was cupping the head of the baby, its face turned from him. Technically, it was still an ‘it’. Aided by moderate downward pressure into the bed, the anterior shoulder began slipping under the symphasis, where the two bones of the pelvis join. Almost at the same instant there was a ‘plop’ and baby Kelly entered the world. Weighing in at five pounds, and with full cheeks and brackish dark hair, was the one gift from God that Kelly desired above all others. His lineage was safeguarded, but at a terrible price, for although Teresa Kelly was not dead at the point of her son’s birth, she might just as well have been.

  It was three months later when Townsend, still affected by the Kelly birth, entered the portals of the Royal Society of Medicine at number one, Wimpole Street. It was the last Friday in the month, the occasion for a gathering of consultant obstetricians and gynaecologists. There were usually twenty or so who could make it on a regular basis. Most others, including Townsend himself, were infrequent visitors to this venerable institution. This time, however, he felt an urge to discuss the matter with some of his illustrious colleagues. There were always a few leading surgeons present, those who operated in the major teaching hospitals and had lucrative private practices in nearby Harley Street.

  A familiar voice called out as he entered the bar. It was Len Jameson, an old college pal who was currently working at Guy’s under the tutelage of the great Sir John Peabody.

  ‘Long time no see, old boy,’ said Jameson, pumping Townsend’s hand. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, Len,’ replied Townsend unconvincingly.

  ‘It’s a good thing you’ve come tonight,’ his colleague enthused. ‘Peabody is here. He’s giving a talk.’

  Townsend could not share in the enthusiasm, and his companion sensed this immediately. ‘What’s up, Martin? Your face is as long as a kite.’

  ‘It’s been a rough few months.’

  ‘Nothing that a couple of shots wouldn’t fix, eh?’ said Jameson. ‘Your usual?’

  Townsend nodded and leaned against the bar, while his colleague ordered a Scotch and dry for both of them.

  ‘Now,’ said Jameson, handing Townsend his drink, ‘tell all to Uncle Len.’

  Townsend sighed deeply. He had kept his own counsel about the Kelly birth. His marriage had ended in acrimony two years earlier. Not that being still married to Jane would have made much difference. First it had been separate beds, then separate rooms, and, finally, separate homes. As usual, most of the angst was about who got what. He was thankful that there had been no progeny to further complicate matters. After fifteen years of living a sham, he had found himself alone. Most of his friends had been hers originally, and naturally they had taken her side. He had compensated by ploughing into his work. He knew he was a workaholic, but there was nothing else. Medicine was his life. He saw himself as a perfectionist, which made the Kelly fiasco even harder to bear. He thanked God he could find some semblance of peace at the bottom of a bottle.

  ‘Well,’ said Jameson, ‘it can’t be the end of the world, can it?’

  Townsend circled the rim of his whiskey glass with his forefinger. ‘I delivered a baby a few months back,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Lost it, did you?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. The poor woman had an epidural, and I think it went wrong.’

  ‘These things happen, Martin,’ said Jameson soothingly. ‘It’s down to the anaesthetist or whoever. It’s not your fault. Does she know?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The last I heard, she’d been to some doctor who told her there was nothing wrong with her, that it was all in her head.’

  ‘Well, that’s okay.’

  But the look on his colleague’s face told Jameson that all was not okay.

  ‘I gave her the epidural myself,’ said Townsend, his voice barely audible. ‘I think I’ve fucked up her central nervous system.’

  Jameson clasped his colleague’s shoulder consolingly whispering into his ear, ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Forget it mate. You win some, and you lose some. Just remember what the insurance companies tell you: admit nothing.’

  A world away from the illustrious portals of the RSM, Kieran Kelly wiped away the residue of another sleepless night. He stared blearily at himself in the mirror. The piercing blue eyes that had once struck fear into his adversaries now bore a patina of pain and incomprehension. It was all about control. During The Troubles, he had been in control. He had called the shots. He had decided which traitor was to be executed and the manner in which that execution would be carried out. Some might have called him a professional killer, but he disdained that label. A professional was usually paid for his work, but he, for one, never killed for money. He killed to protect a cause. Meticulous in the planning, each killing, seven in all, had not been accompanied by torture. It was not his way. There were plenty of psychopaths out there who had killed for fun. He was not like Kenny McClinton, the latter day fundamentalist preacher who had become a celebrity, yet once advocated beheading Catholics and impaling their heads on railings in the Shankill. Clinton and his ilk had tortured young and old alike. Poor sods like Thomas Madden, an inoffensive middle-aged Catholic who was uninterested in politics, was ritually carved into a gargoyle. None of the hundred and fifty stab wounds to his body was sufficient to kill him, and he had died of strangulation, suspended from a beam by a slowly tightening noose. This was the sort of thing that made him hate them still. In his personal war, there had been rules of engagement. He despised those who had carried out sectarian killings. Each of the men he had killed had been guilty of crimes against his own people. They had deserved to die, but they had not suffered. Not like the love of his life, who was now too ill to get out of bed, too sick to lift their new baby. She was suffering, oh, how she was suffering. Her spinal cord was shot to pieces and nobody cared. For the first time in his life he felt totally helpless.

  ‘Kieran, Kieran,’ whimpered Teresa, her plaintive voice puncturing his morbid thoughts. He splashed some more cold water on his face, dried himself off quickly and entered their bedroom. Teresa smiled at him wanly. ‘Did you get the children off to school okay?’ she rasped.

  ‘Yes, my darling, don’t worry.’ He leaned over the bed and kissed her dank brow. He knew that she’d had another rotten night, despite the plethora of painkillers she took to try to alleviate the pain. Nothing seemed to assuage this illness with no name.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Kieran.’

  ‘What do you mean, darling?’

  ‘I’m so sorry for being such a burden to you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll never be a burden to me, Terry. We’ll beat this thing together, I promise you.’

  Kelly could feel the doubt creeping into his voice. They had tried alternative therapies. Osteopathy and chiropractic had made her worse, while acupuncture had made no difference. Two faith healers had lightened their patient’s pocket rather than her agony. Meanwhile, the great National Health Service meant that they would have to wait six months before Teresa could see a specialist neurologist. Their own GP had given them the referral reluctantly. The ignorant pig thought that all Teresa’s symptoms were psychosomatic. Post-natal depression, the man had called it. His wife was depressed all right; anyone in her position would be.

  ‘I can’t stand to see the kids watching me suffer, Kieran. I can see the pain in their eyes. They want their mammy back.’ Tears began to meander down into the corners of her mouth, their salti
ness almost a comfort.

  The Irishman kissed her mouth gently. ‘I had a word with them. Believe me, they understand. They’re brave, just like their mammy.’ He was thankful that his job permitted him to work nights, thus allowing him to be home in the mornings in time to prepare breakfast for their three daughters and drive them to school. He then usually cooked something for Teresa before climbing into one of the children’s beds to get some sleep. The girls were aged seven, five and four. Sian, the eldest, had taken her mother’s illness the hardest. She couldn’t understand why having a baby should leave her mum bedbound and whimpering in pain.

  She was old enough to feel guilt and perceive rejection, while Sinead and Kerry were still too young to fully comprehend what was happening. Teresa had now been ill for three months and he felt drained. She could barely walk. He had had to attend to her every need, while keeping the children and the house clean, cooking for them all, and at the same time holding down an overnight job that played havoc with his metabolism. Hard as he tried, he could not understand what Teresa was going through. When she spoke of her body feeling as if it was being cremated, he could not really imagine what that was like. At one point he had thought of running a blowtorch up and down his own legs. Such was his love for her that he was prepared to do the unthinkable: maim himself in order to feel what she was feeling. Yet he knew that while burns would heal, whatever had been pumped into his wife’s spinal cord had caused the sort of damage that could never be repaired.

  She motioned for him to help her. He knew how much of an effort it was for her to even reach the toilet when he was not there. She clung to him and groaned as he lifted her gently from dampened sheets that stood testament to a night of torture. ‘Try to walk, my darling,’ he said, gently lowering her legs onto the floor. ‘It’ll be good for your muscles.’

  She stood up gingerly and leaned against his sturdy six-foot frame. How she adored him. She had fallen for Kieran within a week of their meeting at a pub in the Falls Road. Once most men had the demon drink in them, they either became violent or silly. But Kieran was different. He was always the quiet one in his circle of friends; quiet, yet incredibly strong. He was the proverbial icon: tall, dark and handsome. Unlike most Celts, his hair was jet black, and his square jaw was set beneath high cheekbones that lay astride a nose that was ever so slightly hooked. But it was his eyes that captivated her. They were pools of azure in whose depths lurked a mystery that she had found utterly irresistible. Their courtship had lasted six months before he spoke the words she had longed to hear. The ten-year difference in their ages had mattered little. Although she had barely turned seventeen, she was mature enough to know what she wanted. During those first six months they had barely been apart. Only on a couple of occasions had he left her for a few days, each time travelling to Dublin to visit some relatives. She’d been wise enough not to tie him down against his will, always believing that the looser the chains, the tighter the shackles. She sighed at the irony of the phrase. The shackles were tight now all right, and however loose the chains, her illness was strangling him with them. Everyone tried to behave as if their lives were normal, as if ‘her upstairs’ was the same woman who had laughed and danced her way through life, the same woman about whom others would say, perhaps with a trace of envy, ‘she’s got a marriage made in heaven and kids to match.’ One lousy injection had ruined all their lives, and, of course, everyone kept saying that no one was to blame. But Teresa Kelly knew who was to blame. She was. She was overwhelmed by guilt for what she had done to her loved ones. It weighed on her like a leaden Belfast sky. But this was London, not Belfast, and any Irish sky was better than the one above the English capital.