“Three?”
“Chris, Lowe and Eliza Chapman. A long shot, but she’s mad enough.”
“All the more reason to talk to Clarke,” said Anita. She looked at her watch. “I suppose he doesn’t work late?”
“He’ll get my message and call me, I’m certain,” I said. I yawned. “If he doesn’t ring back by nine, I’ll try again. For now, I think we should try not to think about all this and enjoy dinner and a movie. What do you want to watch?”
“Anything as long as it’s not a romantic comedy,” said Anita. “No happy ever after, no cute but awkward scenes where everyone except the girl knows the boy’s going to get the girl. Nothing with kissing in it.”
I squeezed her arm. “Love really isn’t that bad, you know.”
“Your dad isn’t trying to set you up with an ‘appropriate’ suitor. He never stops. Really, he’s turned it into a bloody full-time job. Amin, Ash, Atri. We’re still on the A’s and we’ve got twenty-five more letters to go. I’ll have lost the will to live by the time Z comes around. Then Dad can marry my corpse off to poor Zev or Zulfikar.”
She unzipped her boots and threw them behind the sofa. I’d always gone around cleaning up after her when we shared a flat. “We had another dinner week this where I couldn’t swallow a mouthful because I was so nauseated by the whole process. Maybe I’ll end up expiring of malnutrition.”
I wished Anita wouldn’t joke about dying. It made me feel queasy, so I stood up to go finish dinner. “Find the remote and look for a movie,” I said. “Let’s stick to a classic. No violence, no terrorists, and definitely nothing creepy. My nerves won’t take it.”
“Then I think we’re going to end up with Sesame Street reruns,” she said.
I heard Anita’s phone ring while I was pouring pasta into a pan. A minute later, she rushed into the kitchen, pulling on her boots. “I have to go to the hospital. The nurse on duty said to get there quickly.”
“A patient emergency?” I asked.
“Probably. She said something about Dr. Reid, but I didn’t really catch it.” She bent down to zip up her boots. When she straightened up, she looked worried. “She sounded a little panicked, which is really unlike her.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said, turning off the gas under the pasta.
“Don’t be daft. There’s nothing you can do. Finish making dinner and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I hesitated. Anita was probably right. There was nothing I could do at the hospital, but her mention of Dr. Reid had alarm bells ringing in my head.
“You’ll need to get a taxi. I’ll come to keep you company on the ride.” I was counting on her being in too much of a rush to argue. With a slightly exasperated sigh, she nodded. We grabbed our coats from the hall cupboard and ran down the three flights of stairs. I lived on a quiet residential street without much chance of a taxi going by, so we sprinted to the corner of Bayswater Road, my heeled boots threatening to turn my ankle at every contact with the rain-slick pavement. Almost immediately, an empty taxi approached. Anita flagged it down. “London General,” she said. “Fast as you can. It’s an emergency.” She held up her ID badge.
“Will do, doc,” the driver responded, pulling into traffic.
“What else did the nurse say?” I asked.
“Nothing. It was Pauline. She’s a good soul and a great nurse. But it must be something important or she would have just paged me.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My stomach was in knots. I stared at the blurred lights blinking red and amber through the rain-soaked windscreen, jiggling one leg up and down. Anita shifted closer to me on the bench seat, taking my hand in hers.
“Kate, you should have stayed home. You don’t need to deal with whatever this is. I can see it’s unnerving for you. We’re trained to handle this kind of stress. You’re not.”
I didn’t answer. Anita had no idea how much stress I suffered when I saw an aura over someone. My first reaction was always guilt. Guilt that I knew something incredibly personal about that person. What could be more intimate than knowing that death is hovering, ready to strike soon, often far sooner than anyone could imagine or expect? Following guilt, I ran through a gamut of emotions, from outrage and anger to anguish and despondency.
Self-hatred raised its head occasionally as well, when I thought about how I could be proactively using my gift to save more lives. If I tried harder, surely I could stop awful things happening to innocent people. I could travel the world, watching for signs that would foretell a mass disaster, like tsunamis in Asia, terrorist bombs in the East, train crashes, plane crashes, school shootings in America. But I also knew that thinking that way could quickly drive me crazy, certifiably insane. So I stuck to merely coping with my gift. Enough trouble came my way without my going to look for it.
This wasn’t the time to explain any of this to Anita, so I remained silent, wanting the ride to be over. When we reached the hospital, there were several emergency vehicles, including a police car, parked outside. That was perfectly normal for a hospital with an emergency facility, of course, but they made me even more uneasy. We took the lift to the fourth floor, which was awash with lights. Four nurses, gathered at the reception desk, were talking with a uniformed police officer. I saw that, further along the hallway, all of the patient room doors were closed.
A tall brunette in pink scrubs looked in our direction and came to meet us, her shoes squeaking loudly on the lino floor.
“Pauline, what’s going on?” Anita asked.
“I’m really sorry.” Pauline’s eyes brimmed with tears.
“What happened?”
Pauline held her hand to her mouth, not answering.
I was ready to strangle Pauline. “What happened?” I asked, repeating Anita’s question.
“Dr. Reid’s dead,” she said.
Anita blanched. “What?”
“They’re saying he committed suicide.”
“Never,” breathed Anita. “Dr. Reid would never take his own life.”
“No,” said Pauline. “I don’t think so, either.”
“Where?” Anita asked.
Pauline looked confused. “Where is he? They rushed him down to Emergency to see if they could resuscitate him but…” Her voice broke as tears spilled down her cheeks.
“No, where was he when he was found?”
“He was in one of the examination rooms, 2B, I think. The janitor found him.”
My lungs were having trouble functioning. They felt as though a heavy weight were lying on them. Dr. Reid had an aura. Now he was dead and I hadn’t done anything to stop it happening. All that guilt and helplessness welled up inside me, stopping my breath.
“I have to go. The nurses are all upset but they need to get back to work.” Pauline turned back towards the reception desk. I grabbed Anita’s hand, but she shook it free and walked down the hall. I followed close behind.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. We came to a stop outside Dr. Reid’s office. The door was open and blocked by a uniformed policeman. Peering around him, I saw two men in white jumpsuits. They seemed to be dusting for fingerprints. The chair behind the desk was pushed up against the wall but everything else looked as tidy as when I’d visited Reid a few days earlier.
“Who are you?” The policeman’s voice was gruff and unfriendly.
“I’m Dr. Anita Banerjee. I work here and I need access to Dr. Reid’s computer.” She took her badge out of her purse and showed it to him.
“You can’t go in there,” he said.
“I have to. I have sick children to care for and will need to check on Dr. Reid’s patients.”
“I thought it was a suicide,” I said, wondering why the police were there at all.
“We’re obliged to review all instances of unattended death,” he said. “Just routine.”
With a final glower at the officer, Anita turned away, walking fast in the direction of her office. I hurried after her. Cl
osing the door behind us, she sank into her seat, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving. I knelt down next to her chair, putting my arms around her, feeling her tremble. We stayed like that for a couple of minutes until the shaking subsided. She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. I stood up to grab some tissues from a box on the credenza behind her desk.
“He wouldn’t have committed suicide,” she said. “That would go against everything he believes in. He was dedicated to making kids better. He’d never abandon his patients. The children mean everything to him.”
I pulled out the visitor chair and sat, elbows on the desk, facing her. “But everyone seems to think he did. Kill himself.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”
“Okay, maybe it wasn’t suicide,” I said. “Maybe it was an accident. Perhaps he was having a heart attack or some other health issue. Was he on medication? Maybe he overdosed by mistake. Won’t the autopsy show if he had a serious medical event? There’ll have to be an autopsy, won’t there?”
Anita nodded. “Yes. God, this makes no sense.”
The lights in the ceiling buzzed gently in the silence that followed. I didn’t know how to comfort her.
“And I’m scared,” she said.
I swallowed hard but couldn’t shift the lump in my throat.
“Kate, you said he was going to die and he did.” Anita’s voice shook. “And you say I’m going to die too. I don’t want to die. I want you to make the aura go away.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was terrified too of what might happen to her, and the risk seemed all the more real now that Dr. Reid was dead.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Finally Anita seemed to collect herself. She stood up, bent her head from side to side as though working kinks out of her neck, and walked to the small washroom adjoining her office to splash water on her face and comb her hair.
“Let’s find out what’s going on out there.”
Back at the reception desk, she stopped to talk with Pauline. While they discussed Dr. Reid’s patients, I wandered along the corridor to see that the men in white jumpsuits were finishing up in Dr. Reid’s office. Closing the door, they pinned yellow tape across it. There was no sign of the policeman we’d talked to earlier.
Unsure what I could do, I walked back to the nurses’ station.
“There’s nothing on my schedule this evening,” said Anita. “Everyone is tucked in and sleeping. We may as well go home.” She looked at Pauline. “I’ll come in first thing in the morning. Call me, though, if anything at all comes up, okay?”
When we got home, I suggested Anita take a bath to relax. To my surprise, she agreed. Relaxing wasn’t usually high on her priority list, but she was moving slowly, as though her muscles were tired and tight. Hot water would be good for her.
I gave her a pair of my PJs and went to the kitchen to make chamomile tea, while thoughts of Dr. Reid swirled in my brain. A bath suddenly seemed like a bad idea; I imagined Anita drowning or falling and hitting her head on the tile floor. Leaving the tea to brew, I went to the bathroom door to listen for any sounds of trouble, then sat down, leaning against the door. Over the last year, I’d developed an arsenal of techniques to keep myself calm when faced with an aura and all its implications. Taking some deep breaths, I felt my heart rate slow down.
Encounters with the dead and visions of auras that predict death have made me realize that there are forces that humans don’t understand. I don’t pretend to know more about the mysteries of existence than anyone else, but I do believe that coincidences are always worth investigating. Dr. Reid and Anita both had auras. Now Dr. Reid was dead and I was certain that Anita’s fate was connected to his in some way.
When I heard the water draining. I stood up and moved away from the door, waiting until Anita emerged with a towel wrapped around her. She looked at me suspiciously. “What are you doing in the hallway?”
“Just cleaning up,” I said, adjusting a framed photo of my parents on the wall. “That’s better.”
“Good, because I’d hate to think you were listening out for sounds of drowning or anything like that,” she said with a hint of a smile. “You can’t protect me, Kate, and I don’t want you to try. I can look after myself. Death is not going to lay its ugly hands on me just yet.”
We took our tea into the living room. I turned on a lamp, its soft glow warming the room.
Anita settled on the sofa, pulling a throw up to her shoulders. “Kate, I want to know everything about the auras. I need to understand them so that I can deal with them. They say ignorance is bliss, but not for me. The more I know, the better I feel.”
It felt good to talk, to tell Anita everything that had happened, starting with how guilty I’d felt about my mother’s death a year ago. I’d been texting with her when she was run over in a pedestrian crossing by an elderly motorist. Everyone said it wasn’t my fault, but I’d always had a predisposition to guilt. My baby brother, Toby, had drowned in a pool when I was supposed to be watching him. The burden of thinking I could have saved him had weighed on me for the last seventeen years.
“I sometimes think now that if I’d seen an aura over Toby that afternoon, I would have known to pay more attention,” I told Anita. “I’d never have been distracted or left him alone even for a second.”
“You think that’s why you can see auras now?” Anita asked. “As a way of compensating for losing Toby? Or your mum perhaps?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know why I could see auras. I only knew that my life had been turned upside down for the last year.
Anita sipped her tea. “Have you ever wondered if seeing an aura is what actually causes death?” she asked.
“What? You think I make the danger appear? That’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe, but think about it. There’s something called the observer effect in physics. The very act of observation changes the object being observed. Like, if you measure the temperature of water in a beaker, the presence of the thermometer affects the temperature. Or, say, if you want to measure an electron, you have to shoot a proton at it.”
“And of course, the proton changes the position and movement of the electron. I did physics in school too,” I said.
“It’s worth considering,” Anita went on. “It’s just statistically unlikely that you see so many people about to die.”
“No, it’s not. Wait here.” I went to the kitchen to get my laptop. Coming back to sit next to Anita, I opened a local news website. “Look at this,” I said, scrolling through the headlines. “Teen stabs man to death on bus. Motorcyclist killed in collision with car. Toddler killed by stepfather. Multi-car crash on M25 kills four. Man dies after falling through open window.”
I closed the laptop. “That’s just one day, Anita, all here in London. And it doesn’t include the hundreds of non-newsworthy deaths from heart attacks and other diseases, accidental falls, or overdoses. Most people don’t choose to acknowledge that death is so pervasive. I have no choice.”
She put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to imply you were responsible. I just find the idea of a physical manifestation of impending death so—”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
She nodded.
Further conversation was, thankfully, interrupted by the ringing on my mobile. It was Detective Clarke. For a moment, I was confused, wondering why he was calling me. Then I remembered the message I’d left about Chris, and the twenty-pound note we’d left at the police station. All that seemed like a long time ago now, completely overshadowed by Dr. Reid’s death. But it would be rude to brush him off.
He asked me for more information and asked if I’d heard anything at all from Chris. I’d tried calling Chris a couple of times since his abrupt departure from the tearoom. He wasn’t answering.
“Call me if you hear from him,” Clarke said. “We’re doing what we can to trace him.”
I promised I would.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was hard for me to watch Anita leave the next morning. I wanted to stay close to her, to protect her from whatever threat was out there, but I couldn’t follow her around all day. She had to go to work, to be with her patients and their families. Nobody wanted me hanging around, getting in the way. After working on some illustrations for my dad’s book for a couple of hours, I was relieved when Anita texted me, asking me to bring sandwiches for three and to meet her in the hospital lobby. When I got there, she was waiting. She looked tired.
“Are you doing all right?” I asked.
“Well enough,” she said. “It’s been so busy, I’ve barely had time to think. But I’ve got a break now and want to go down to talk with Grace Trillo. She’s head of the Forensic Pathology department.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to meet a pathologist.”
“Come on, Kate. She’s fun. You’ll like her.”
I wouldn’t have put the words “fun” and “forensic pathology” in the same sentence, but I followed Anita to a bank of lifts at the back of the building. Using a keypad where the call button would usually be, Anita entered a number. The doors immediately opened to reveal a large cabin, big enough to hold a gurney or two. The metal walls were dinged in multiple places and the overhead light flickered ominously. I tried to ignore the creaking and jolting of the battered cage as it lurched downwards. When we reached the basement, we stepped into a corridor with green walls and tan lino floors, lit by buzzing fluorescent lights. I followed Anita to a set of double doors, where she pressed buttons on another keypad.
“I can’t imagine that the security is to stop people getting out,” I joked, clutching the sandwich bag closer to my chest. I’d seen my first dead body a year ago and I wasn’t relishing the thought of seeing any more.
We entered an autopsy room dominated by two stainless steel operating tables. Steel cabinets lined the walls. The floor and ceiling were covered in white tiles. A strong smell hung in the air, sharp and sweet. My knees began to shake.
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