Authors: Mark Roberts
It was getting on for half past nine.
‘It’s OK,’ said Rosen, pulling into a pay and display parking space. ‘The appointment’s minutes away and I’m just round the corner.’
‘If there’s anything else I can do to help, just give me a ring.’
‘Thank you, you’ve been more than helpful.’
‘No problem.’
Moments later, Rosen pumped coin after coin into a pay and display meter. He locked the car and moved as quickly as he could, weaving past people as he hurried, glancing at his watch with
mounting anxiety.
——
A
T THE ENTRANCE
of the North Wing of St Thomas’s Hospital, Sarah looked utterly anxious when Rosen arrived, red-faced and perspiring.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. They hurried towards the passenger lifts inside the building.
‘It’s just gone twenty to, and Dr Reid’s doing us a favour here.’
A handful of people emerged from the lift. Rosen followed Sarah inside and the doors closed. He pressed the button for the first floor, his heart still pounding from the journey from car to
hospital.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, feeling oppressed by the enclosed space. Sarah rechecked her watch and sighed as the lift ascended and slowed.
A computerized voice announced, ‘First floor, Haematology.’ The doors slid open and they stepped out.
Across the corridor from the passenger lift were broader metal doors, the service lifts. A pair of them eased open and a patient on a scissor bed was wheeled out, chatting to the smiling porter
who pushed her round the corner and out of sight.
The door of the clinic was visible from the lift area.
‘You’ll be fine, Sarah.’
‘Are you a doctor, David? How do you know I’ll be fine?’
He could feel a dry heat, the embers of a stupid row that could be fanned by tension into a stand-off, so he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I’m not a doctor.’
‘Turn your phone off,’ said Sarah.
‘I can’t,’ he replied. A heavily pregnant woman emerged from the clinic, a woman who at a glance looked like Julia Caton. ‘Tell me again what Dr Reid said on the
phone.’
‘ To wait by the main door of Haematology, and he said he’d send someone to collect me.’
‘Hurrying you through the system,’ said Rosen.
‘Look!’ snapped Sarah. ‘I’m just doing what I was told to do. I feel bad enough about this problem with my blood, so I’m just doing what I’m told to do.
That’s what you do with doctors, you follow their instructions. They’re doing me a favour, fast-tracking me.’
A junior doctor, a superannuated sixth former who looked closer to boyhood than maturity, passed.
‘Excuse me,’ said David, ‘is Dr Reid around?’
‘Yeah, yes, he’s around.’
‘Have you come to collect my wife?’
The junior doctor looked genuinely puzzled. ‘No, no, I haven’t. I’m a doctor, not a porter.’
‘Ignore him,’ said Sarah. ‘We’re fine as we are.’ She waited until the junior was out of earshot and spoke quietly as people brushed past them in white-coated ones
and twos, while patients in all apparent stages of health milled in and out of the Haematology department. ‘You turn up on the borderline of late – and I
understand
the
pressure you’re under – but you’ve done nothing since you got here late other than wind me up. Maybe you should just go, David.’
His silence was deep, hiding his hurt.
‘Please don’t say that.’
‘He could already have sent someone to collect me and I’ve been missed because you didn’t get here on time. DNA: did not attend, no second chances, get in the queue with
everyone else. That’s the attitude they’ll take.’ She turned her back on him and there was a lengthy pause. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. About you
going.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, but it wasn’t. ‘I made you late and I’m—’
At that moment, Rosen’s phone erupted in his pocket. He backed away a couple of paces to receive the call. ‘Carol?’
‘David, another woman’s gone missing. It looks like the sixth,’ said Bellwood, driving at speed.
‘Where?’
‘Wandsworth.’
‘Road?’
‘Picardie Road, number 19.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘No. Husband went to the supermarket, comes home, she’s gone.’
‘Domestic abduction, same as Julia.’
‘Same but different. She put up a fight. There’s blood on the walls. Got to go, David.’
‘Jesus.’ He ended the call.
‘I know,’ Sarah said. ‘Go on, go.’
‘I—’ The stairs would be quicker than waiting for the lift.
‘Go.’
‘Call me when you’ve seen the doctor.’ He hurried to the staircase.
‘David!’ He turned. Then, quietly, she spoke: ‘I shouldn’t have said that I wanted you to leave.’
He wished she hadn’t uttered those words, still feeling the visceral sting of them, but understood why. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I love you, Sarah.’
He threw open the staircase door and was gone.
——
S
ARAH FELT EVERYDAY
life flowing around her in the corridor and watched seconds tick away on her wristwatch. More than twenty years of marriage to David
rushed through her memory. She imagined a world in which they’d never met, in which their chance Saturday-night encounter in a grey nightclub had never been, and was visited by a piercing
emptiness.
He’d disbelieved her, thinking she was joking when she’d declined his offer of a date because she was away that following weekend with her TA unit. She’d enjoyed his
astonishment when he’d tried to picture her in camouflage fatigues.
What would her world be without him?
In the glass panel of the door to the Haematology department, Sarah saw the reflection of a white-coated doctor watching her.
‘Mrs Rosen?’
‘Yes?’
Sarah turned. She hadn’t met Dr Reid before. He extended his hand. Beneath his white coat, he wore a smart black suit.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said.
She shook his hand.
Dr Reid held on to Sarah’s hand a little too long and said, ‘I don’t think you should worry, Mrs Rosen. Dempsey’s one of the most cautious doctors I’ve ever worked
with.’
‘Is my baby in danger?’
‘We’ll sort this out and send you on your way. Would you please come with me?’
Sarah felt relieved and was unsure whether it was down to Reid’s relaxed manner, or Rosen’s absence and the aura of tension he’d brought along with him.
‘I thought you were sending someone for me?’
‘I was, but we’re short staffed and when I realized you’d been left standing there, I thought the least I could do is collect you. I’d like to retake your bloods just to
get a contrasting reading. I suspect the raised level of adrenalin was as a result of the stress of attending Mr Gilling-Smith’s clinic.’
Sarah felt better by the moment with Dr Reid’s calm reassurance. He eyed the passenger lifts and the wide-doored service lifts with the digital display above.
‘Passenger lift on six,’ said Reid, ‘Neonatal Intensive Care. Service lift, ground floor.’ Reid pressed the button for the service lift and smiled at Sarah.
‘Shouldn’t really use this lift, but it’s quicker. I’ll take you to Phlebotomy myself.’
A digital arrow showed that the service lift was on its way up. The service lift hauled to a halt and the doors opened slowly.
Inside was a wheelchair marked
Property of St Thomas’s NHS Trust
and, behind this, a scissor bed covered with a bunch of crumpled green blankets.
Reid smiled at Sarah and, with a gentlemanly gesture, indicated she should enter the lift before him. She drifted inside and he followed.
‘I’m going to call down to Phlebotomy and tell them to have a place ready for you at the head of the queue.’ He looked at his watch. ‘This hour of the morning, the wait
to give a blood sample can be half an hour to three-quarters.’ He reached into his coat pocket with one hand and with the other kept the lift door open. ‘I left my phone in
clinic.’ He spoke to himself.
Sarah moved further back inside the lift, closer to the scissor bed.
He looked directly at her. ‘Could I borrow your phone?’
She fished her phone from her bag, turned it on and keyed in the pin number, then handed it over to him. He keyed in digits, smiling at her.
‘I’m not getting a signal. Here. Let me try . . .’ He got out of the lift and dialled again, keeping the door open with his foot. She glanced away from him and at the
instructions in case of an emergency on the wall of the lift. He stepped away from the door.
Sarah looked up to see the doors closing in front of Dr Reid’s face.
‘Dr Reid?’ she said.
His face vanished. The doors shut tightly.
Sarah pressed the button to open them again but nothing happened. A knock came on the other side of the doors, followed by Reid’s voice. ‘See you down there, Mrs Rosen.’
She pressed the button for the ground floor and, as the lift started descending, she heard the sound of breathing. It was coming from beneath the green blanket on the scissor bed. She suddenly
noticed the shape of a body that at a casual glance she had thought was just a crumpled mass of NHS blankets.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
A hand fell from beneath the blanket, dangling down the side of the scissor bed, the face and head still covered by blankets.
‘I’m just going to lift the blankets,’ said Sarah. Newspapers were filled with tales of pensioners marooned on hospital trolleys, forgotten for hours on end.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, though she felt fear herself. The breathing beneath the blanket deepened, coarsened, as she turned back the material.
Jet-black hair, face down on the scissor bed, tiny little ears, a man, face down.
‘Try to turn over,’ she said, kindly.
‘Like this?’ he replied.
Teeth and eyes, that was all, a flash of darkness out of softly lit space and the sudden appearance of a hypodermic needle racing towards her hand. She froze. The needle pierced her flesh. She
stared at him for a moment and then reached out with her other hand to the metal wall where every button waited to be touched. The tight confines of the lift suddenly felt like a metal coffin. The
four walls appeared to push in on her as panic mounted rapidly inside her. Halfway to the buttons on the wall, her hand lost all momentum and fell away from its target.
The emergency phone, built into the wall, receded fast.
She tried to call out for her husband, David, as the display above her head span to the letter G for Ground. But it was too late. He set about manipulating Sarah’s liquid form into the
wheelchair.
Her head flopped back as he moulded her into the seat and the last she saw was the whites of his teeth and the whites of his eyes.
As she sank into the void, a voice trailed after her.
‘I did not come from darkness. I am darkness itself.’
——
W
HEN HE EMERGED
from the service lift, pushing a dozing patient in a wheelchair, the green-uniformed paramedic turned his back to an oncoming nurse and
adjusted his patient’s blanket with, ‘Nice and cosy for you?’
He pushed the wheelchair away from the lift and forced himself to smile, puckering his lips to whistle silently as he rolled the sixth and final carrier towards the front entrance.
‘Yeah,’ he said, to a question she hadn’t asked. ‘I was a medical student for two years. Happy days: learned a lot, I did.’
He kept his eyes fixed ahead as he passed the ward clerk returning from a break, the first person coming the other way. She didn’t react and neither did the nurses who cut across his path,
nor the anaesthetist who overtook him as he made his way to the exit and the ambulance bay beyond.
Sarah’s left eye wasn’t quite closed. A rim of white glistened up at him, an anaesthetised crescent.
The ambulance, his ambulance, was parked where he’d left it, next to another ambulance.
He opened the back doors and looked around. People were about, plenty of them coming and going. But no one appeared to be looking as he transferred the carrier into the back of his
ambulance.
A
s Rosen ran towards Royal Street, a marked police car sailed towards him down Lambeth Palace Road. He held out his warrant card with one hand and
waved the car down with his other arm.
‘DCI Rosen. I need to get to Picardie Road in Wandsworth.’ He climbed into the passenger seat and tersely explained, ‘Herod. Golden hour.’
The siren blared and, within three seconds, the car was clocking 60mph, the constable weaving through traffic.
Through a red light at a junction, the police car hit 80mph. On Victoria Bridge Road, Rosen’s phone rang. The constable steered through another red light, knocking the wing mirror off a
car that wasn’t quite far enough out of the way.
‘Yeah?’ said Rosen.
‘David?’
‘Where are you, Carol?’
‘On the way to the scene of the crime. Switchboard have a problem—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
Rosen weighed up the traffic immediately around them. There was some sort of blockage just after St George’s Cathedral where, just ahead, an ambulance took advantage of the delay and cut
out of Dodson Street.
‘What’s the problem with the switch?’ he asked.
‘Two problems. The mobile number that put in the Wandsworth emergency call. It’s been traced as a stolen phone. The phone was stolen this morning.’
The traffic shifted. The constable slid back to seventy and clipped the bumper of another car.
‘Has anyone arrived at Wandsworth yet?’
‘The locals.’
‘Our people?’
‘Not yet.’
At that moment, Rosen instinctively knew he was in the wrong place and that it was too late to turn back.
‘Carol, Picardie Road, Wandsworth: it’s a hoax?’
‘The locals can’t find a problem.’
‘It’s a hoax.’ In repeating the words, their significance dawned on Rosen. He wanted to scream.
‘It looks like.’
‘Carol, I’m hanging up.’
He called Sarah’s number. It rang as buildings flew by and streets flashed past. ‘The mobile number you’ve called is currently unavailable. Please try again later.’
She’s out of coverage
, he thought,
or she’s switched off
.