Acid Lullaby by Ed O'Connor Page A

he’s OD’d but I’m buggered if I know on what. He’s in agony and we’re not helping.’
    ‘Have you requested blood tests?’ Jensen asked.
    ‘Of course,’ Wells looked irritated by the question. He brushed sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his white coat, ‘but results take time to get in. He might not make it.’
    ‘What about the blood on his shirt?’ asked Dexter. ‘It looks like he’s been stabbed in the neck.’
    ‘That’s the other thing,’ Wells coughed wearily. ‘Someone, possibly Stark himself, has tried to cut his throat.’
    Ian Stark was screaming again, burbling something through the waves of pain. Dexter listened to what he was saying. This time she understood the words but they made no sense.
19
    He lay back naked on the cold roof. The dried blood on his hands and face was starting to itch. Fallon felt a profound sense of frustration. His attempt to rip order from chaos had been thwarted. His work had been interrupted by drunken voices emanating from the desolate factory buildings. He had not been able to remove the man’s head. He tried not to allow his disappointment to translate into anger. The demons came at him mostly when he was angry. The lights were at their most disconcerting when his mind was burning with fury. Instead, Fallon concentrated on the distant lights in the night sky; trying to distinguish stars from planets and trying to draw those planets into the plane of his consciousness.
    The moment was approaching. He would bring forth his progeny on earth. The ordered heavens would bear witness.
    Relaxing at last, he scratched the black blood from his skin.
20
    30th April
    The following lunchtime, Alison Dexter sat in her office listening to pathologist Roger Leach’s preliminary postmortem report on Ian Stark. DS Harrison and DC Jensen leaned up against the glass wall of the office. Leach sat in the chair opposite Dexter, flicking through his own notes and the hospital registrar’s report on Stark.
    ‘Ian Daniel Stark,’ he said. ‘Male. Thirty-five years old. Known heroin addict. Admitted to New Bolden Infirmary last night after collapsing outside New Bolden railway station. Suspected overdose. Registrar Dr Nicholas Wells gave him small initial dose of Naxolone at ten-fifty p.m. then repeated the process after patient failed to respond. Naxolone wears off faster than heroin so Wells was probably right to repeatthe dosage. He obviously made the assumption Stark was OD-ing.’
    ‘A reasonable assumption given Stark’s previous,’ muttered Harrison.
    ‘Patient deteriorated,’ Leach continued, reading the words without expression, ‘screaming, swearing, apparently hallucinating. The hospital started to suspect Stark had been poisoned. They received the results of their initial blood tests at about two a.m. The liver function tests – Prothrombin Time, Aminotransferases and Bilirubin – revealed extremely high levels of amatoxins. The patient finally lost consciousness at two-seventeen a.m.’
    ‘The Accident and Emergency staff injected Stark with four doses of Penicillin G and Silibinin. Both these drugs are designed to inhibit the amatoxins from penetrating the liver cells. Too little too late. Stark died at four a.m. this morning. Cause of death was massive and total liver failure.’
    ‘Goodbye and good riddance,’ Harrison added.
    ‘That does seem to be the consensus,’ Leach agreed. ‘However, there are two problems here.’ Leach was getting uncomfortable, aware that Dexter’s hard green eyes had been focussed intently on him since he had started speaking. She was like a lion watching from the undergrowth. ‘Problem One. The levels of amatoxins in his system were extremely high. Normally, after a severe amatoxin ingestion, liver failure is unlikely to occur within the first twenty hours. This was no ordinary overdose.’
    ‘Evidently,’ she replied.
    ‘We are working on a full toxicology report now. Initial findings show very high levels of