Free [PS & GV #6] Death on Demand by Jim Kelly Page A

Copon. Is there any reason why she’d have her friend’s death certificate. She died last year. Any idea?’

    Copon looked at Gail. ‘No. Beatty died at home, I think, in her bed. A house in Lynn. She was a good age too, mid-eighties, maybe more. I don’t understand.’
    ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted Ruby Bright dead, Mr Copon?’
    ‘She had no enemies,’ said Copon. ‘Very popular. Full of life, still.’
    ‘We’ll need a statement,’ said Shaw, looking back down the track towards the sea. The rhythmic fall of the breakers was clearer now, the percussion just discernible through the sand.
    Copon caught Shaw’s eye. ‘If the tide is right, and the waves, I swim, surf. Always. One day I will be too old. Or death will come early. I know this. One day I will be gone. So I take each day’s waves as they break. The sea is god – yes?’

EIGHT
    P ushing out through the revolving doors of the West End Community Health Centre, Dr Gokak Roy felt an immediate sense of relief: the night air was cool, the car park deserted, while behind him lay a pressure-cooker of stress and responsibility. At one point in the shift he’d had to immunize a four-month-old child; inserting the needle into the vein had required a clinical magnifier and the steadiest of hands, the wrist was less than thirty centimeters in circumference, the vein as narrow as a fibre-optic cable. The child – Bibiana – was being monitored by her father, who sat, masked, rigid with anxiety, his face so close his breath left the ghost of condensation on Dr Roy’s glasses, so that he felt his own stress levels climbing, the blood rushing in his ears. He’d taken his break in the canteen and had actually started awake, even though his eyes were open, to find himself watching a silent TV.
    And this was his day off. It followed a ten-day stretch as a GP. The workload here was crushing and chaotic. He’d always wanted to be a doctor, and he’d always worked hard. In a real sense he was living his dream, but in an equally real sense it had become a nightmare. The frenetic schedule was shredding his health. But he’d found a way to cope, although, cruelly, that only meant he had to work even harder to afford his special remedy.

    That afternoon he’d slipped into a toilet cubicle at the health centre at four o’clock and taken a codeine tablet, two temazepam and an upper. For thirty seconds he sat on the toilet seat and looked at the four walls. Each day now he passed through a room like this, a kind of portal, linking his life on one side (anxious, stressed, panic-stricken) to the life on the other side (relaxed, omnipotent, heroic). In a humdrum way such cubicles had become a symbol of his survival. After twenty seconds he felt the codeine hit his nervous system, so that his neck muscles were able to slip from the tendons at the top of his spine, relieving the pressure on the base of his brain stem. Within a minute the stress had pooled in his feet, then bled into the floor, which was a blue-grey lino flecked with colours. As he stood he was conscious of his body, of the bones in their skeletal frame, his blood pumping smoothly now, like a power supply.
    The rest of the shift had been serene until six thirty when the codeine had begun to falter, so that during that last hour he’d been jumpy and brittle, manically completing the paperwork for a new drugs trial. A slamming door made his joints contract as if he’d been stricken by a seizure; the jangling music in the overhead speakers frayed his nerve ends. When his shift ended he’d had to stop himself actually running for the lift to the basement. Its blue walls, winking buttons and reflective mirror walls always provided an instant haven. Alone, he popped a pill. He caught a glimpse of himself then in the mirrored walls; European bone structure, from his Goan Portuguese grandfather – dark, sub-Continental skin, as dry as parchment. Only, perhaps, his eyes betrayed him, the