The Night Count

At two in the morning, Beaumont Row Pharmacy hummed. The fridge for the insulin hummed, and so did the strip light over the dispensing bench. Frank Farnsworth had stopped hearing either of them years ago.

He took the key from his lanyard and opened the controlled-drugs cupboard. It was steel, bolted to the wall, with a door that always stuck at the last inch. He put his hip against it, as he did every night, and it gave.

The register lay open on the bench. He ran his pencil down the page. Diazepam, correct. Oxycodone, correct. Methadone, correct. He counted each box aloud, softly, because the habit kept him honest. His own voice was company at that hour.

Then he reached the bottom shelf. A single blister pack sat behind the tramadol, a flat white card with a pharmacy label on it. Morphine sulphate, ten milligram tablets. The register said nine remaining.

He tipped the pack under the light and counted the cells. Eleven tablets.

"No," he said.

He counted again, touching each cell with the end of his pencil. Eleven. Two more than the book. Two more than he had any right to hold.

Frank sat down on the stool. Shortages happened. Everyone knew the cure for a shortage, and it was paperwork and a phone call to the superintendent. Nobody had a cure for a surplus. Surplus meant that something had come in, and nothing had come in.

He read the label. The print was the old type, from the printer they'd thrown out when the new system arrived. Patient: Mallory, Victor. Dispensed by: F. Farnsworth. The date was six years ago this month.

He remembered nothing about the man. That bothered him more than it should have done. He remembered most scripts. He remembered the regulars and the odd ones, and the woman who always paid in coins. But Mallory, Victor was only a name on a card.

He went to the back office and found the old collection ledger. It was a ring binder with a green spine. He turned to the right month and found the line. Mallory. Morphine sulphate 10 mg. Not collected. Stock returned to cupboard. His own initials sat beside it.

So the pack had been there six years. Nine tablets, written off and forgotten. He had checked this cupboard on hundreds of nights and never once questioned the card behind the tramadol.

"Nine," he said, back at the bench. "It was nine."

He counted a third time, slowly, saying each number aloud. At eleven his voice stopped.

Then he did what the regulations required. He wrote the figure he could prove. He signed the register, Farnsworth, 2.07 a.m., and beside the line he wrote nine, because nine was the number that closed the book. Then, in smaller writing, he added eleven in brackets, and did not like the look of it.

He lifted the pack to slide it back onto the shelf. That was when he saw the foil.

One cell near the corner was empty. Its foil was sealed flat and silver, the way it should be. Only now it wasn't flat. It stood up very slightly in the middle, a faint blister of metal, as if something beneath it was pressing out.

Frank held the pack still. The fridge hummed. The foil did not move again.

He put his thumb beside it, not on it, and found he was waiting to feel it breathe.

• • •

The next night, the count was twelve.

Frank did not touch the pack at first. He stood at the cupboard with the door open and read the label from where he was. Mallory, V. Morphine sulphate 10 mg. Twelve in the cells, and the register said nine. He had written nine himself, in ink, twenty-four hours before.

He checked the lanyard. The key sat against his sternum, on its steel ring, where it had sat all shift. He had not taken it off to eat. He had not taken it off to use the toilet.

The following night it was thirteen. The night after that, fourteen.

On the Thursday morning he rang Elsie Ebdon at home. She answered on the fifth ring, with a radio going behind her.

"Frank. You're meant to be asleep."

"Elsie, who else has a key to the CD cupboard?"

"Me. You. That's the list, love. You know that." A kettle clicked off. "Why?"

"There's a pack in there that's gaining tablets."

She laughed. It was a warm, easy laugh, and it made him feel foolish. "Gaining. Frank. It's a stock transfer. We took that batch from the Alder Street branch in the spring, and somebody will have booked half of it in twice. I'll look at it Monday."

"The label's six years old."

"Then somebody's reused a card. Go home. Eat something."

She rang off. Frank stood in his kitchen with the phone in his hand. Elsie had not asked which pack. He had not told her.

That night he came in at nine and went straight to the dispensing bench. He tore a sheet from the A4 pad, laid it flat, and set the pack on top of it. Then he drew round the blister card with a pencil, cell by cell. Fourteen tablets, fourteen small circles, each one shaded in. The empty cells he left clear. He wrote the time in the corner. 9.20 p.m. He put the sheet and the pack back in the cupboard, turned the key, and hung the lanyard round his neck.

He did not sit down all night. He answered the hatch twice. He filled a methadone script for a man who called him "chief" and smelled of wet dog. At every hour he went to the cupboard door and stood with his hand flat against the steel, listening. There was nothing to hear. The fridge hummed.

At 2 a.m. he took the pack out and laid it on the sheet.

It fitted the pencil lines exactly. Fourteen shaded circles, fourteen tablets. Then he saw the fifteenth.

It sat in a cell he had drawn clear. He had left that circle white, and there it was, filled, white on white. He picked the pack up and tilted it under the lamp. The tablet was ordinary in shape. But the stamp on its face had gone. The letters had been rubbed smooth, the way a coin goes in a pocket, or a step goes under a thousand shoes.

Frank turned it over. The back was worn the same.

Somebody had held this a very long time.

• • •

Frank put the tablet down on the sheet, on its pencil circle, and did not touch it again.

The dead-records room was a cupboard behind the consulting booth. It smelled of toner and old carpet. He took the lamp in there with him and pulled the lever-arch files for the year in question. Six years back. The prescription had a number on the pack label, and the number led him to a green box file marked UNCOLLECTED, with a rubber band gone brittle round it.

The script was on top. He read it standing up.

Victor Mallory. Morphine sulphate, 10 mg, one tablet every twelve hours for seven days. Fourteen tablets in all. The prescriber's stamp was from the hospice. Under the patient's name, in the address box, someone had written: Night Caretaker's Flat, Beaumont Row.

Frank read that line twice.

Beaumont Row was this building. The pharmacy took the ground floor. The flat was above it, and had been empty since before he started.

The date on the script was a Tuesday. He remembered nothing of it, and that bothered him. He remembered most things. Under the script, folded small, was a death notice cut from the parish bulletin. Victor Mallory, aged sixty-eight, for eleven years night caretaker at Beaumont Row. Died on the Friday of that week. Someone had pinned it to the script with a staple, and the staple had rusted a brown ghost onto both pages.

He went back to the bench and laid the pack beside the script. He worked it through with a pencil. The course began with two tablets a day. The pack had given him one, then two, then a pair on the second night. The pack was not growing at random. It was keeping to the script, dose by dose, and in the right cells.

Fifteen tablets. Day eight of fourteen would be next.

He rang Elsie at ten to three. She picked up on the sixth ring, thick with sleep.

"Frank? What's happened?"

"Nothing's happened. I need to ask you something. Who cleared out the old basement dispensary, when the building was refitted?"

There was a long gap on the line. He could hear her breathing. Then a lighter click, though she had given up smoking years ago.

"Why do you want to know that?"

"Because Victor Mallory lived upstairs. You must have known him."

"I didn't." She said it flatly. "Frank, I've managed this branch eleven years. I've signed every day sheet in that drawer. I have never once seen Mr Mallory's name on one."

"Then he wasn't on days."

"No. He's on the night ones." Another pause. "In a hand that isn't mine, Frank. Or yours. I always took it for the locum's."

Frank looked at the night register, shut on the bench under the lamp.

"Elsie," he said, "what does the hand look like?"

She did not answer. Behind him, very faintly, the cupboard door ticked against its frame.

• • •

"What does it look like?" Frank said again.

"I'm not doing this at three in the morning," said Elsie. "Go home. Leave the cupboard."

"I can't leave it. I'm the one who's on."

She put the phone down. He heard the line click and then go flat.

He took the night register from the bench and opened it under the lamp. It was the long ledger with the green spine. Each night had a row. Date, opening count, closing count, signature of pharmacist, signature of checker. He turned back through it. Last week. Last month. Last year.

His own name sat in the pharmacist column, night after night, in blue ink. In the column beside it, the checker's column, there was a second hand. Small and upright. The pencil had been pressed hard enough to dent the page.

V. Mallory.

He had never worked with a checker. Nobody had. The pharmacy ran one person on nights, and he had always taken the second signature to be a formality that the system filled in. He had never looked at it.

He went back further. Two years. Four. Six. The hand did not change. V. Mallory, on every one of his shifts, from the first night he had ever been given the keys.

Frank took the sheet with the pack's cells drawn on it and laid it open on the register. Then he turned to the last page of the book, where the checker had a margin for notes. There were pencil lines there. Ruled boxes in rows of fourteen. Dots in some of them, none in others.

He held the sheet beside the margin. The dots matched. Every one he had pencilled, in the same cells, in the same order, and three that he had not drawn yet.

He sat for a while. The lamp hummed. Out in the shop the fridge cycled on.

Then he understood it, and it was plainer than he wanted. The pack was not filling. It had never been filling. Somebody had dispensed a course six years ago and it had never been handed over, so the count could not close. The tablets were not arriving. They were being brought back, one at a time, to the only person who stood at that cupboard every night.

He picked the pack up from the bench, where it had lain beside the script, and put it in the cupboard. He turned the key, and it turned easily. Then he took it out again and held it in his palm. The foil over the ninth cell was bulged, a little more than before.

In the drawer under the bench was the collection slip, still clipped to the script, the box at the bottom blank for six years. He took his pen. His hand was steady, which surprised him.

"If I sign," he said, to the empty shop, "it's closed."

Nothing answered.

He wrote: received, F. Farnsworth, 3.05 a.m. Then he signed his name under it and pressed the pen down hard.

The cupboard door, which he had left open, swung slowly shut behind him.

• • •

The shop was very quiet after that.

Frank stood with the pack in his hand and listened. The fridge had cycled off. The lamp had stopped humming, or he had stopped hearing it. He went to the register on the bench and opened it to the night's page. His own handwriting sat above the line. It gave the count of nine. Beneath it, in pencil that was not his, was the count of eleven, struck through. Then twelve. Then the figure he had been dreading, and it stood there plain. Fourteen. A full course, and the line ruled off beneath it.

It balanced. He had wanted that for four nights, and now he had it, and he did not want it at all.

He looked at the clock over the door. Three-oh-six.

"That's that," he said. His voice sounded thin in the room. "It's closed."

Nobody answered. He walked the pack back to the cupboard. The door had shut itself. He took the lanyard from his neck and found the key, and he turned the key, and the door opened with its usual small complaint. He raised the pack to the shelf.

Then he read the label. He had not read it again since the slip. There had been no need.

The printing was the same plain black. The pharmacy name, Beaumont Row. The drug, the strength, the quantity of fourteen. But the name above it had changed. It said Farnsworth, Frank. Beneath that was his date of birth, correct to the day. The instructions were the old instructions, one tablet every twelve hours. And at the bottom, where a dispenser prints the start of a course, it gave tomorrow's date.

He did not shout. He would have liked to say he did. He stood there with the pack at shoulder height and read it twice, because he could not believe a printer had done it, and there was no printer in the cupboard. Then he closed the door on it, and locked it, and put the key back inside his collar.

He thought of calling Elsie. He thought of the telephone and her voice going quiet. He did not call. What would he have said to her? That he had signed? She would only have told him what he already knew, that nobody else had.

The door was open again.

It had swung out an inch, and the pack lay on the shelf where he had not put it, label outward. He took it out. He did not remember deciding to. He carried it to the dispensing bench and sat down on the stool, the one with the torn vinyl, which Victor Mallory must have sat on for six years of nights. It was still warm.

The foil on the first cell had bulged. It strained very slightly, as though something were pressing from beneath, patient and polite. He slid his thumbnail under the edge and tore it back.

It came out into his open palm without being shaken. One small white tablet. He turned his hand to the lamp. The stamp on it was worn clean away, smooth as a pebble from a river, as if a great many hands had held it before his.

Behind him, in the dark of the shop, the cupboard key turned in the lock.