Читать книгу Night Sisters - John Pritchard - Страница 14

Six

In that claustrophobic tunnel, the noise of our footfalls on the linoleum floor swelled and rebounded and echoed around us, effectively masking any sound from up ahead. Maybe she’d already reached the lifts, of course, or was fast approaching them; but perhaps she’d paused, and was lying in wait for any pursuers – especially ones as reckless as us. That thought occurred to me just before we reached an angle of the corridor, where it bypassed the plant room, but I was going too fast to stop now, and with the breath rasping in my throat I couldn’t even voice a warning. Mike went round the corner first, and the adrenaline surged through me as I lost sight of him. But a moment later I’d followed suit, and had him back in view, still running, his white coat-tails flying – and beyond him a straight stretch of empty corridor, with the lift area at its end.

We ran for it, reached it, and skidded breathlessly to a halt, our eyes scanning the indicator lights. There were four lifts serving this end of the building, and two were still on our level, empty and unused. The third was out of order, which was par for the course.

The fourth was on its way up.

The indicator still showed our floor, but that was just the mechanism catching up. Even as we watched, it clicked up to the next level. Mike swore, and made for one of the waiting lifts; but I already had the door to the main stairway open, and turned to shout.

‘Stairs! Come on, it’s quicker!’

It is, too. This end of the building might be relatively modern, but the lifts are fast approaching the end of their natural, with a tendency to judder and grind and stop at floors you have no wish to visit. Whenever I’m in a hurry, I take the stairs.

So up the stairs we went: clattering, panting, grasping the banister rails to swing ourselves around the corners; passing the doors to the first floor, and going faster all the time. Reaching the second floor, we fairly burst through the fire-doors into the deserted reception area – and saw the lift we’d been racing standing empty before us. As we stood there, gasping to refill our lungs, the door slid smoothly closed again, an automatic function that seemed almost mocking.

‘Oh … sod,’ I murmured, ‘she’s up here.’

Mike walked quickly to the set of doors leading through into the central corridor, and pushed them open. The thoroughfare beyond was in semi-darkness: just doctors’ offices and storerooms, all deserted at this hour. To left and right at this end, more fire-doors sealed off the access corridors to the first two Medical wards, Harvey and Radcliffe. Likewise at the far end, for Lipscomb. And Jenner.

I moved up to follow him through; still a bit unsteady on my feet after our sprint up here. Still short of breath, too – but I struggled to keep my panting as shallow as possible as I peered into the gloom ahead of us. Where nothing stirred.

We went on down the corridor, quickly and quiet. The door to the seminar room was slightly ajar, and Mike paused and pushed it open; I watched with my heart in my mouth as he reached in to switch on the light and survey the room – but it was empty. We hurried on.

Welcome to Jenner Ward said the sign over the closed double doors that came up on our right. Through their wired glass panels I could see on down the dark passageway, dimly-lit beneath the tubular hoods of the night-lights; past bays and side-rooms asleep in shadow, to the single desk lamp at the nurses’ station. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Warily, I pushed the doors open, and we slipped through.

With no idea of which bay our would-be suicide was in, we made straight for the desk; drawn also, instinctively, by the warm glow surrounding it, for the dreaming darkness of the ward was unsettling; unquiet. I heard ragged breathing in the gloom, and coughs and mutters; the ghostly respiration of the sick. Of course I’d worked my share of night shifts on inpatient wards and was familiar with the atmosphere. But I’d never quite got used to it, and always found it eerie. Tonight, with the prospect of a deranged intruder with a knife lurking somewhere in the shadows, the restless dark was positively scary.

We reached the station without incident, having glimpsed nothing untoward in the bays we’d passed, nor in the sluice room either. I reached over for the nursing cardex, a ringbinder of notes on all the ward’s patients, and had started leafing through it before realizing I’d forgotten her name. ‘Bloody hell … Jones … ?’

‘James,’ Mike prompted calmly, still glancing round. ‘Angela James.’ He’d obviously been browsing through our admissions register as well. I quickly found the relevant entry, and saw she’d been put in one of the side-wards, the four single-bedded rooms back near the doors. We’d already passed her by, without knowing it. I had the sudden, sinking feeling that her pursuer might not have overlooked her so easily.

We turned to retrace our steps, and one of the nurses was just emerging from the end bay, pushing a commode. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Hi … can I help you?’

I hesitated for a moment; then, trying not to make it sound too melodramatic, I said: ‘We’ve had a patient-emergency down in A&E … think she might have found her way up here. She was talking about one of your patients, Angela James, and … er … she’s got a knife.’

That took the colour out of her cheeks somewhat, but she retained her composure admirably. ‘Have you bleeped the porters?’

‘Not yet – none of our phones were working …’ And no fault of mine, but I still felt myself flush at her disbelieving look. She went over to the desk and turned the phone around towards me. ‘You’d better do it now, then.’

Smarting, I moved to do so – while Mike turned to the distinctly unimpressed-looking Staff Nurse. ‘I think we’d better check that Angela’s okay, right now,’ he suggested evenly, and the two of them set off down the corridor. I watched them go, tucking the receiver under my chin as I punched in the number. There was a crackly pause; then the dull whine of number unobtainable. Fuck, I mouthed, and tried again; frowning in disbelief as I got the same result. It seemed the phones were playing up everywhere. I slammed the receiver down – belatedly realizing there were people trying to sleep all around me – and was wondering what to do next when there came a rustle of movement from right behind me. I spun round.

The girl who stood there looked about fifteen – though she must have been older, or they’d have put her on the kids’ ward. She was wrapped in an overlarge hospital dressing-gown that made her seem even frailer than she was. Her face was pale, with dark shadows around the sunken eyes, and her fair hair hung in strings. She looked as if she was feeling really awful.

‘I’ve been sick again, nurse,’ she reported miserably; and as I stared at her, I realized who she was, who she must be.

‘Angela,’ I ventured, ‘we___er, thought you were asleep.’

She actually smiled at that – if smile was the right word for the rictus that spread across her thin features. ‘No …’ she almost whispered. ‘No, I’ll not be sleeping again. Not safe to sleep …’

I gave an understanding sort of nod. ‘Where were you? The toilet?’ I glanced down the corridor to see if Mike had re-emerged from her room yet. And as I did so, something caught my eye – a shift of shadow in the darkness of the bay beyond her. Someone was on their feet in there, and coming out. Another patient needs the loo, I found myself hoping with surprising fervour – but in vain. Because the figure who emerged was fully-dressed, in dirty black. And wearing shades.

Angela might have sensed the movement at her back; she certainly saw the horror on my face. She turned quickly – and recoiled against me with a stifled sob. And the woman who’d called herself McCain stepped fully into the corridor – her clothes still blending with the gloom, but her face as calm and pale as a cadaver’s – and extended a gloved hand towards the girl. Palm open, like an offer to a drowning man.

‘Angela. Come with me now. It’s not too late …’

Me she ignored completely, as if I wasn’t even there: although Angela was rigid against me, and my hands had instinctively gripped her shoulders. The two of them might have been alone here in this darkened ward: sharing in a secret tryst while the lesser world slept. But as I slowly eased the terrified girl backwards, away from her visitor’s slow-paced advance, I glimpsed something slip into McCain’s dangling left hand – and a moment later, with a sinister click, the blade of her knife licked out and locked.

‘Never too late to follow me,’ she breathed, her blank stare still not acknowledging my presence.

I risked a fast, frantic look down the corridor – but it was empty: no sign of Mike or the Staff Nurse, though they must surely have discovered that Angela was out of her bed by now. At any moment they’d reappear, and see, and come sprinting to my rescue; but I knew that even the very next second would be one too many.

Spinning Angela round, I grasped her wrist, and ran.

Round the corner we went, and on down the link corridor towards Radcliffe Ward, feet thudding on the carpet, dimly-glimpsed doorways and bed-bays veering madly past on either side. Just like a crash-call, I thought breathlessly; and an old nursing phrase flashed with idiot incongruity through my mind. A nurse should only run in cases of fire or haemorrhage …

Behind, McCain was coming at a walk. My fleeting look saw her stride increasing. When I next glanced back a moment later, she was running.

… haemorrhage …

We fairly crashed through the set of fire-doors separating the wards and raced on through Radcliffe. A Staff Nurse and a student were sitting at the desk, writing quietly by dusky lamplight. Both heads jerked up as we appeared, the unison so perfect it should have made me laugh. No time to explain, of course; nor to call for help, nor even shout a warning. We just kept running – Angela stumbling now, but even if she’d fallen I’d have dragged her – and the woman with the knife was at our heels. So let them call the porters. Let them find a phone that fucking worked.

Please, God. Jesus. Please.

Round the next corner and back towards the central corridor now – and suddenly there was someone in our path, shuffling across from toilets to bed-bay. A grey-faced old man in a faded dressing-gown, mobilizing laboriously with a walking frame. His head was slowly coming round, but nothing had time to register. I slowed for just a second, and swerved past him, and yanked Angela with me through the gap.

McCain hit him full on.

The two of them went down together, with a rattle of metal and a sickening thud. The sound made me wince: despite myself I slowed again, glancing round. My every nursing instinct cried out against leaving the poor guy gasping there on the floor, his rheumy eyes rolling as he fought for breath. And even as I hesitated, I saw Mike appear at the far end of the corridor, pushing past one of the stunned ward nurses, and come racing towards us. There was surely no need to keep on running; we could corner her here; restrain her. But McCain had already struggled to her knees, her knife still glinting through the gloom, and now she lifted her head and looked at me, and bared her teeth in a vixen grin.

We kept on running.

Through the next set of doors, and the next, and we were back in the Medical Unit reception area. That left us with a choice of the main stairway up or down. For a moment I could think of nothing but Mike back there, maybe tackling that mad bitch, struggling to disarm her – and then I saw that one of the lifts was open wide and waiting.

Someone must have just used it – maybe a nurse trailing back from the fag-end of Break, or returning from delivering specimens to the lab, or whatever. It didn’t matter. We ran for it, as behind us we heard the doors of Radcliffe Ward burst open.

Over the threshold, past the photoelectric beam, and I jabbed the button, any button, and held it down.

Nothing happened, of course.

Wrong button, I realized after a stupefied pause, you’re pressing for this floor, shit. And I put my thumb to the ground-floor button with all my weight behind it as Carol McCain shoved her way through the last set of doors into the reception area, and saw us.

The door began to close, so painfully slowly that for a horrible moment I thought it would fail to connect properly and automatically reopen. And McCain came running anyway, aiming to get her foot into the narrowing gap and block the beam. I shrank back against the far wall, pulling Angela with me, and the last I saw of McCain was a glimpse of her frustrated snarl as the door closed in her face.

Stillness for a second. Then the lift lurched, and started to descend.

I let my breath out in a gasp that left me drained. My legs were suddenly kitten-weak, and I had to slump back against the wall to save my balance. Beside me, Angela James was weeping silently, the tears rolling down her hollow cheeks; but I sensed she still had all her wits about her – primed with adrenaline, and ready to run again.

But who the hell was she was running from?

I’d ask her later, to be sure; but right now, as the lift reached ground level, we both had other things to think about. I knew there was no way I could stop the doors opening. If necessary, if she was already waiting down here, I’d punch the button for the top floor and throw myself against her, forcing her back until the doors had closed behind us and Angela was safely on her way. What that might cost me I didn’t pause long enough to consider: I knew my hesitation would be fatal for both of us if I did.

The lift steadied itself, lined itself up; there was another pause. I thought I couldn’t get any more keyed up – but my stomach still lurched as the door slid smoothly open, and I saw –

Nobody there.

Nobody in sight, anyway. I glanced at Angela, and swallowed, and moved slowly forward to peer out.

The foyer was empty.

And even as we hesitated, unsure what to do next, I heard footsteps from down the corridor – several people, walking quickly; and voices I recognized.

They reached the lift area a moment later: Adrian, who was clearly chargehand porter for tonight, and three of his lads – including Danny from our department. His eyes widened as he saw us.

‘Rachel – we just got a call from A&E, said you’d gone off chasing some nutter with a knife …’

Well at least the phones were working again. I nodded urgently. ‘Yeah, some woman got up on to the Med floor, she must still be up there now. Have they called the police?’

They had. The Duty Nurse Manager as well. All the wards were in the process of being alerted. I nodded again, thankfully, and gestured to Angela, who was keeping close beside me, hugging herself in that outsize dressing-gown.

‘This is Angela. The girl she was after. I want to get her sat down and with a cup of tea, can someone come with us?’

It was Danny who volunteered, and the three of us went back down the corridor towards Casualty; my arm round Angela’s shoulders now, soothing her as the shock began to set in. I reckoned it would be more private round by us, rather than in the canteen or wherever. Part of my mind was still very much on what must be happening upstairs – that woman still loose, still armed and dangerous; and what had happened to Mike? But I realized that right now this girl needed all my attention, so I forced the other thoughts and fears from my mind and concentrated on her. Speaking softly. Guiding her steps.

A cup of hospital tea. I’d just been looking forward to one when all this had started. Maybe ten minutes ago. Maybe a lifetime.