by Helen L Lowe
Lizzie saw Charlotte in Casualty and they hugged each other in tears. When Julian was taken to theatre, they both waited in the corridor for five hours before the surgeon, Mr Cousins, came out to them. Lizzie searched his face for signs of good news.
‘We’ve stopped the bleeding,’ he said, ‘but he’s lost a lot of blood and there’s internal damage. If he survives the next few days and is strong enough, we’ll operate again.’
‘What are his chances?’ Lizzie said.
‘Fifty-fifty at best – sorry I can’t give you better news. We nearly lost him on the table but he’s a fighter – and if he won’t give up without a fight, neither will we.’
‘Can we see him?’
‘Wait here – I’ll get a nurse to bring you in when he’s in recovery.’
Lizzie paced the floor while Charlotte sat on a chair looking as white as a sheet. Lizzie couldn’t allow herself to even think of him dying. He had to survive. It had taken sixteen years for them to find each other and it was just too cruel to lose him now. Twenty minutes later, they were led into the recovery room and left alone by his bed.
Charlotte held his hand with tears streaming down her face. ‘I’ll go now,’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow - let me know if there’s anything you need.’
Lizzie had prepared herself to be upset when she saw him after surgery but, despite being a trained nurse, she was distressed at the sight of him. He had an endotracheal tube in his mouth and was attached to a respirator. There were two intravenous infusions, and one of those was a blood transfusion. He also had a nasogastric tube attached to a pump, a catheter, drainage tubes in his chest, right side and abdomen, and a tube from his left chest wound was attached via tubing to an underwater sealed bottle on the floor.
A nurse who had just taken his observations smiled at her. ‘We’re keeping him heavily sedated.’
Lizzie nodded and sat down on a chair by the bed. It was then that she became aware of the weird red tattoos on his chest, his arms and on his scalp. And by lifting the sheet covering him, she could see they were also on his thighs.
She stayed at the hospital all night and the next day, only taking a break when Charlotte took a turn. Sally came in with the children and they met up in the hospital canteen. It was good to see them and it reminded her that she had a lot in life to be grateful for.
Sally gave her a big hug before she left. ‘Don’t worry about the girls – just come home when you can.’
On the second night, Julian was moved back to Intensive Care, again just a few feet from where Sam lay. Lizzie was offered a bed in a room nearby. On the third day, Sam regained consciousness and was transferred to a medical unit.
At 3 a.m. on the third night, she was woken up and asked to help when Julian started hitting out at the nurses and pulled out all his tubes. She couldn’t help but smile at the sight of four nurses trying to hold him down on the bed. She squeezed her way through them and gently put her hands on his shoulders pressing him back against the pillows.
‘Julian – you must calm down.’
‘They told me she’s not dead.’ He was frantically looking around the room.
‘That’s right, Johnson recovered - Harry and Harriet were the same person but he was arrested and you’re safe here in St Mary’s – you’ve had an operation.’
He stared intently into her eyes. ‘I thought I killed her – killed him.’
‘I know but he regained consciousness and his stab wounds weren’t serious.’
‘Where’s Sam?’
‘They’ve transferred him to a medical unit.’
‘How is he?’
‘He’s better than he was. He’d been given a massive morphine overdose.’
‘I have to see him.’ He tried again to get out of bed.
‘You must calm down – if you want to be here for Sam, you need to get well.’
Julian lay down again but still looked wary of all the staff around him. There was a sound of steps behind her and she turned to see the surgeon, Mr Cousins.
‘Julian, I hear you’re giving the nurses hell.’ He picked up a chart off the end of the bed and nodded approvingly. ‘It looks good so far but you’ve got a long road ahead of you – we won’t have to sedate you again, will we?’
‘No, please, I don’t need sedation.’
Julian’s grip on Lizzie’s hand was stopping her circulation.
‘You won’t need the endotracheal tube anymore but we need to put the others back - are you alright with that?’ The surgeon looked at Julian’s anxious face. He beckoned Lizzie aside. ‘Can you stay by his bed? You seem to be the only one who can get through to him.’
‘Yes, of course but you do know what’s happened to him, don’t you?
‘Yes – the DCI filled me in – he was lucky to get out of there alive.’
The next thirty minutes were very stressful while the nurses and doctors replaced the drips and the drainage tubes. When they tried to replace the nasogastric tube, Julian was reduced to tears and they had to stop. The sight of a trolley laid up for catheterisation was the final straw. He got out of bed wearing an open-backed hospital gown that failed to provide adequate coverage. He demanded the right to discharge himself.
Lizzie tried to talk to him but all she managed to do was get him back in bed. Mr Cousins came back into the unit and called Lizzie to one side.
‘He needs the catheter and the nasogastric tube back in. We’ll have to sedate him, I’m afraid – he could start bleeding internally again if he doesn’t calm down.’
Lizzie nodded and looked over to Julian who was trying to get out of bed again and was being blocked by two nurses. ‘I can’t bear to see him forcibly held down – can’t you put the sedative in the drip cannula and pretend its antibiotics?’
‘I don’t like doing anything against the patient’s wishes. Let me talk to him again.’ He walked over to Julian and spent a long time talking to him.
Eventually, Julian got back into bed and Lizzie returned to his bedside.
Julian’s face was ashen. ‘They’re going to sedate me.’
‘Are you ok with that?’
He shook his head.
She sat down and took hold of his hand.
‘I’m sorry to put you through all this,’ he said.
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself - you’ve been through a terrible ordeal.’
A doctor came up to the bed with an injection.
‘What is it?’ Julian said.
‘IV Diazepam 10 mg – it will only sedate you for a short time.’
Julian was out within seconds and Lizzie left him to the care of the staff while she went off for a strong cup of coffee.
CHAPTER 56
Sussex House
Saturday 15 April
Chase had come back to Sussex House with one thing on his mind. They had found the heads of the victims in various tubs and plant pots in the garden. There were six heads; all of them had been shaved and ancient Greek numerical symbols were tattooed on the scalps. A dismembered body was discovered in an old blue ford escort van parked in the back access road next to the garage. No doubt, the two missing torsos would eventually wash-up in the U-bend of the Thames around the Isle of Dogs; bodies tended to accumulate there from all sections of the river.
Harry Johnson said his victims were young men, often the homeless he met at the soup kitchen and new tenants at Sussex House. They were in the process of identifying the victims from dental records but after interviewing Harry Johnson for hours, Chase had the overwhelming feeling that there were still more victims to find.
Chase believed that Johnson was quite mad. The psychiatrists, no doubt, would give his condition a fancy name but it wouldn’t change the facts. When they had searched the house, they found an attic room that seemed to be a shrine to his mother, and her skeleton was in the bed. After hours of questioning, Johnson confessed to the murders of two men in 1958, and six victims whose bodies had been dumped in the Thames but his
whole demeanour was one of secretive gloating. He looked directly at Chase with a smirk on his face that said I’ve won.
The crime team had taken all the prints and photographs they needed in the house and they told Chase they had finished but he didn’t share their confidence. Johnson had lived in the house all his life and when talking about his childhood and his father, he became very agitated. Chase couldn’t shake off the idea that the house held secrets within its walls; Johnson’s family secrets. It was Chase’s obsessive attention to detail, his belief in justice, and his own gut feeling that drove him on in this difficult job. Every nerve in his body was telling him that they had only just scratched the surface in Sussex House.
He walked around the big brick wall in the cellar which he had discovered was actually a chimney breast for a fireplace hidden behind boards. He imagined that the cellar could have been used as servants’ quarters back in the day or it was the kitchen and the servants’ quarters were at the top of the house.
He took another look at the fireplace in the cellar. It wasn’t particularly large and didn’t look like it needed such a large chimney. The final piece to the puzzle, as far as Chase was concerned, was the difference in the bricks between the chimney and the other walls in the cellar.
Chase was excited when he ran upstairs to use the phone in the hall. The crime team and a couple of builders arrived thirty minutes later. They found the skeletons of three male victims in the chimney breast, and Chase gave the order to dig up the concrete floor before he went back to the station to update the Superintendent. It was interesting that these victims had not been dismembered like the more recent ones but Chase would leave the psychiatrists to work that one out. All he was interested in was finding all of Johnson’s victims, so their families could give them decent burials with the respect they had been denied for years.
* * *
St Mary’s Hospital
Monday 24 April
Julian lay back on his pillows and watched the staff in the Intensive Care Unit as they worked. It was his fourth post-operative day from his second operation and he had his own dedicated nurse only a few steps away whenever he needed her. Her name was Janet. She was more mature than most of the nurses and, although not particularly pretty, she wore enough makeup to create an impression of attractiveness and styled her blonde hair in a neat bob.
When he first woke up from the second operation he thought she was Harriet standing over him. He remembered little more than that but Lizzie told him that he had freaked out and hit the poor woman. He had apologised to her later and she had smiled and said he didn’t hurt her but there was a bruise over her right eye all the same.
He still had an intravenous infusion running and two drainage tubes in his wounds but his nasogastric tube had been removed and he was drinking clear fluids. To his disappointment, Mr Cousins had insisted on the catheter staying in. He was transferred to a side room on the surgical unit on his fifth post-operative day.
Lizzie still came in every afternoon to see him and when she was there he usually nodded off to sleep. When they did talk, she didn’t mention Harry Johnson or Erikson once and Julian admired her skill at benign conversation. At night, when the lights were dimmed and his door was closed, he slept for short periods only so that he could reassure himself that he was still in a real hospital and not Harriet’s hell hole.
On the sixth post-operative day, Charlotte came in while Lizzie was reading to him. The sound of the door opening woke him up.
‘Hello stranger,’ Julian said.
She looked from Lizzie to him. ‘Am I interrupting anything?’
Lizzie shut the book. ‘No - only me, reading aloud while the patient sleeps.’
‘Was I asleep?’
Lizzie looked at him reproachfully. ‘How can you sound so innocent?’ She stood up and gestured for Charlotte to sit down. ‘He’s all yours.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Charlotte sat down as Lizzie left the room. ‘It’s so good to see you looking more like yourself.’
‘Lizzie told me you took turns to sit by me when I was out of it.’
She nodded. ‘How’s Sam?’
‘He’s coming on well. They’ve agreed to help him with his heroin addiction.’
‘Poor Lizzie must be exhausted visiting both of you. I’m told she spent days not moving from your side.’
Julian smiled ‘Apparently, I was such a difficult patient they gave her a room to persuade her to stay.’
‘I doubt she needed much persuading – she clearly loves you.’
He nodded but said nothing.
‘Anyway, have they said how long they’re keeping you in?’
‘I need another operation, and they might do skin grafts to get rid of the tattoos.’
‘So it could be weeks?’
‘Possibly – I’m trying not to think about it.’
‘By the way, the students have vacated your flat so you’ll be able to move straight in when you’re discharged.’
‘Really? Well, that’s good news.’
‘If you give me the keys to Sussex House and your flat, I can get all your stuff moved over.’
‘That won’t take long – according to Lizzie all my things have gone. Harriet . . .’ he stopped and took a deep breath. ‘Johnson got rid of them all.’
‘Everything?’
He nodded. ‘Even my Buddy Holly albums.’
‘What about your typewriter – we saw that in the sitting room downstairs.’
‘Chase said it’s needed for evidence but I’ll get it back eventually.’
‘Do you want me to buy you some clothes?’
‘I think Lizzie’s onto it.’
‘Yes, of course – how about the flat. I can give it a clean, make sure it’s ok. You know what tenants can be like, especially students.’
He could see she was desperate to be involved and he couldn’t bear to knock her back again. Lizzie had already mentioned doing work at the flat but she hadn’t started it yet. ‘That would be great – thanks.’ He tried to reach over to the drawer in the bedside cabinet but Charlotte stopped him.
‘I’ll get them - think of your stitches.’
She passed him a bunch of keys and he removed the spare key to the flat and passed it to her.
‘You can drive through the double gates and park inside. I’m hoping the tenants left their sets of keys with the letting agents – Steadman & Co, on Bayswater Road.’
‘What about your car – the police told me they found it dumped somewhere – by Hammersmith Bridge, I think.’
‘It’s in a police lockup at the moment – there’s a number to call in the drawer.’ He reached over to the drawer again and had his hand slapped away. ‘For God’s sake, woman, don’t you think I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.’
They both burst out laughing and he had to hold his tender stomach as the muscles contracted.
She stood up and lent over to kiss him gently on the lips. ‘I’ve waited so long to be able to do that.’
‘I want to thank you for risking your life,’ he said.
‘It was a completely selfish act - I would be lost without you.’ She ran her fingers over his scalp where hair was already starting to grow. ‘Julian, what I said in the cellar – I meant it – but I know you don’t feel the same way.’
‘Charlotte, I have very strong feelings for you but . . .’
‘I know - you still love Lizzie.’ She smiled. ‘But I’m hoping if I stick around you’ll eventually get to me.’
‘I can’t promise . . .’
‘I know - please, don’t say anymore.’ She kissed him again.
Julian gently pushed her away. ‘It’s not a good idea to get me excited – I’ve still got a catheter in.’
Her forehead wrinkled in a very cute frown. ‘Is it bad to have an erection with a catheter in?’
He smiled. ‘Not particularly but it’s an experience I could do without.’
‘Ok – I’
d better read to you.’ She picked up the book Lizzie had been reading and looked at the title. ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare – blimey, no wonder you fell asleep.’
‘It happens to be one of my favourites.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘That explains a lot.’
CHAPTER 57
Saturday 29 April
It was the end of April when Lizzie had to say goodbye. The children’s Easter holidays were coming to an end. Julian was recovering from his last operation and it had gone well. For the first few days he had an intravenous infusion and a catheter but he managed to stay calm.
On the day Lizzie left, Julian was looking and feeling a lot better and he was able to walk around for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. He walked with her down the long corridor to the lifts. They stood in silence for a while, neither of them wanting to say the last goodbye. When a group of people had just gone into the lift and the doors closed leaving them alone, Julian took her in his arms.
‘I can’t bear to see you go,’ he said.
She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. ‘I’m always telling Sally I’ll visit her more often. Perhaps you’ll have time to see me?’
Their lips touched lightly at first and then came back again and again until they were in a long passionate kiss. When they pulled away from each other they were surrounded by visitors and staff waiting for the next lift. Stifling laughter, they walked away from the lifts and along the corridor to stand by a window looking out over the railway lines leading into Paddington’s mainline station.
‘Is there any real future for us?’ Julian asked.
‘I’m hoping there is?’
‘Do you still love Peter?’