Don't Wake Up: A dark, terrifying new thriller with the most gripping first chapter you will ever read!

by Liz Lawler

  Laura approached her. ‘My name’s Laura Best. I’m with CID. Can you tell me what’s going on?’

  The woman went to shake hands and then, realising that she was wearing a surgical glove, she let it drop to her side. ‘Sandy Bailey. I’m senior theatre sister. We have a very bad situation here. One of the staff nurses has found a body.’

  ‘In that room?’ she asked, pointing to the open door by the pool of vomit.

  The theatre sister nodded. ‘Yes. It’s where we send our instruments for sterilisation and collect our new sets. She got a terrible shock when she went in there.’

  Aware that she was probably entering a crime scene, Laura told the woman to allow no one to leave the department or let anyone enter unless they were the police. She asked if she could have a pair of plastic shoe covers.

  The sister shook her head. ‘We don’t use them anymore. We all wear clogs now.’

  ‘Please don’t let anyone in here,’ she warned the sister.

  Slipping off her jacket she placed it on the floor with her handbag, far enough away from the vomit, against the corridor wall.

  Her first thought was that the room was small and that it didn’t look like a sterilisation area. Her second thought was that there was no body on the floor. Turning impatiently to the sister she saw on the left-hand side of the room an opening in the wall. A woman was curled inside it, her knees and thighs showing, drawn tightly up against her chest. Her right forearm was squashed in across her lap and her long dark hair was hanging loose, hiding her face.

  Using a pen from her shirt pocket, Laura lifted the hair up and saw the reason she had been stood up.

  Fiona Woods hadn’t been able to make it because she was dead.

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Maggie’s face showed pleasure and curiosity as she let her very happy and flushed visitor into the house. Alex was glowing and her energy was high, making it almost impossible for her to stand still and speak slowly. She thanked her friend for letting her in, thanked her for the beautiful painting and enthused about the beautiful day.

  Maggie’s eyebrows rose at this, as it was blowing a gale and chucking down rain outside. She eventually managed to squeeze a word in edgeways to ask the cause of this happy change in her new friend.

  Alex flushed a deeper red and her eyes brimmed with happy tears. ‘Nathan. He came to see me last night.’

  ‘Nathan Bell from A & E?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘And he’s absolutely wonderful.’

  ‘I gather he stayed,’ Maggie said drily.

  Alex’s face scrunched up guiltily, but her lips twitched gleefully.

  ‘Well,’ Maggie said, leading the way into her beautiful sitting room. ‘He’s certainly a fast worker.’

  ‘But he’s not,’ Alex replied in his defence. ‘He’s shy and reserved and amazed that any woman could ever want him. He’s beautiful, Maggie, and he doesn’t know it.’

  ‘If it wasn’t so early in the day I would say this is a cause for celebration, but,’ and she sighed here, ‘you and I have got something else to do. That’s if you still want to.’

  Alex’s happiness diminished a little. Everything was going well for her for the first time in ages, and the thought of what she must do filled her with fear. She could choose to ignore what she should do and go on with her life the way it was now, forgetting the past and even accepting that the terrible night with the psychopath was all in her mind. Richard Sickert had said as much. She could face the man who had attacked her last year by herself at another time.

  She could ignore her conscience and make herself believe that no other woman would ever be in danger from him again. She could even let him get away with it.

  When it first happened she had been unable to watch television for fear of seeing him, but then gradually she relaxed enough to allow herself to watch the occasional drama without reading the synopsis and checking the cast list. Fortunately, she had not had to suffer his face staring back at her from the screen, and had wondered not so long ago if he’d gone off to Hollywood or was doing theatre instead. She hoped not. She hoped the reason for not seeing him on the telly was because he was out of work and his profile was fading. The thought of actively seeking him out or looking him up on the Internet brought a sickness to her stomach.

  There lay her dilemma. He was still terrorising her and still controlling her life.

  ‘Will you help me?’

  Maggie nodded firmly. ‘You know I will.’

  Alex was shaking. ‘I can’t phone him, Maggie. I need you to sort it out. I’ll meet with him, but I can’t make the arrangements.’

  Maggie moved forward and hugged her. ‘I’ll do it. But remember, we are doing this together.’

  *

  ‘It was easy,’ Maggie said as she came into the kitchen waving sheets of paper in the air. ‘I googled him and I’ve just come off the phone to his agent.’

  Alex continued buttering the toasted bagels, stirring the scrambled egg, pouring water into the teapot. She didn’t ask any questions.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Maggie asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘He’s played bit parts in Holby City, Casualty and Lewis, and is now preparing to play a part in a period drama. Guess where the period drama is set, Alex?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘He’s in Bath, isn’t he?’ she said, laying down the wooden spoon and turning to face her.

  Maggie nodded. ‘He’s here right now. His agent has given me his mobile number and I’m going to ring him and set up a meeting for this evening.’

  ‘He might not meet with me.’

  ‘He will,’ Maggie said firmly. ‘I’ll leave him no choice.’

  The smell and sight of the food was making Alex nauseous and she moved away from the Aga. She wrung her hands and then folded her arms in agitation. ‘I’m not ready. I won’t know what to say.’

  ‘Stage it, Alex. Play the part. Take control. If what you went through is all in your mind – the abduction, the rape threat, a death threat – because of what he did to you last year, this could be your way of facing both situations. Face him, Alex. Don’t let this man control you any longer. Put yourself back in that car park. Wear the clothes you wore on the night. Look him in the eye and I bet you will quickly realise that he is your real nightmare and what happened to you in the car park several weeks ago only took place in your mind because of what he did to you. He made you vulnerable, Alex, and he made you afraid.’

  Alex smiled tearfully. ‘The only problem with this is I no longer have the dress. The police do. It hasn’t been returned to me yet. I have another dress that’s similar, my bridesmaid’s dress, but it’s still at the drycleaner’s. I’m not even sure I know where the ticket is for it. It’s been there since my sister got married, because I can’t bear to look at it.’

  Maggie crossed the floor and hugged her. ‘I’ll get it back. You don’t have to think about it. Go and lie down on my bed and sleep for the rest of the day. Watch telly or finish my crossword for me. I’m stuck on 13 down.’

  Alex smiled, looking more in control this time. She picked up the newspaper from the kitchen island and saw most of the cryptic crossword puzzle was filled in. She read number 13. ‘Rearing – becoming more incensed (7)’.

  ‘It’s an anagram,’ she said. ‘Rearing makes the word, Angrier. It’s what I should be. Angry. And then I wouldn’t be afraid.’

  Chapter thirty-nine

  The theatres were closed down immediately, operations cancelled and staff taken elsewhere for questioning. Nobody was allowed into the department other than the police.

  Greg had toured the area thoroughly, checking there were no other exits and entrances into the theatre suite. The killer had walked through the same door as he had, murdered Fiona Woods, and then exited the same way. He had CCTV footage immediately confiscated so that it could be checked. He’d organised a full-scale murder investigation, talked with numerous officers, met and briefed senior staff, and delegated junior staff tasks –
all the while with a heavy heart.

  Dr Taylor could not be found, and Peter Spencer could not locate her vehicle; officers headed by Laura Best had been searching for her for the entire morning. Her colleagues and family were being questioned at this very moment. Greg had got a call from one of the officers down in the emergency department with information about a doctor named Nathan Bell who had spent the night with her. His story was being checked and her flat was being searched for any evidence that would direct them to where she was now.

  The rumour circulating was that she had gone into hiding after brutally murdering her friend because she had discovered the planned meeting between Laura Best and the dead nurse.

  Laura had explained that she was supposed to meet Fiona Woods at the hospital the day before, at seven o’clock in the staff canteen. The nurse hadn’t shown, and when Laura checked with her colleagues she was told she’d gone off duty in the early evening and was due back on this morning. Laura was certain that Fiona Woods was going to tell her something important about Dr Taylor, relating to something that had happened to her a year ago. Fiona Woods had told Laura that the doctor was beginning to worry her. Their consultant, Caroline Cowan, had been brought into A & E yesterday after a car collision and Alex Taylor was trying to get the consultant to believe that the person who drove into the back of her car was the same person who abducted Alex from the car park. The driver in question had in fact reported the accident yesterday evening; his lame excuse for leaving the scene was that he had a meeting.

  Greg didn’t know what to think. He certainly couldn’t think of her as a murderer yet. More than anything he was worried about her, the warm and caring woman he had briefly got to know; he was concerned for her safety. If she was involved, and he prayed she was not, would she do something stupid to herself?

  Only two other officers were in the room when he arrived back at the crime scene – Peter Spencer and the police photographer. Fiona Woods was still wedged inside the lift, as the pathologist has not yet given permission to move the body. He was out in the corridor on his phone and had made a preliminary examination while the body was still in situ. He would be back in shortly.

  Before she was moved from the lift he wanted every bit of the room and the body photographed and videoed.

  The cause of death hadn’t been determined yet, but Greg had lifted her hair and seen the scalpel embedded in the right side of her throat. He was pretty sure from the massive amount of blood loss that she’d had a main artery severed. She was twenty-eight, unmarried with no children. She was an incredibly talented nurse, and someone had ended her life.

  His day out with Alex was still fresh in his mind, her laughter, when Seb Morrisey picked her up off the ground and swung her around, still sounding in his ears. He remembered her kindness and patience with Joe as he sat screaming and bleeding while she attended him, and the small, uncertain smile on her face when she invited him and Joe on the helicopter flight. He liked Alex Taylor. He wished he could be certain she was innocent.

  *

  Slowing down to a walking pace, Alex stared up at the black clouds above. They were heavy and low with a promise of more rain. The barges moored along the river were closed up, their owners inside in the warm. The bright colours – reds, blues and greens – were dulled and the wood on a few of them looked sodden and spongy. Bicycles and plastic chairs and small tables lay abandoned on the decks, and large sheets of brown tarpaulin covered the roofs of some of the barges.

  She normally saw a dog or two sprawled out on the decks or standing with stiff fur, barking at her as she walked or ran by, but today the owners were taking pity on them and had let them into the dry.

  Unclipping her water bottle, she took a long drink and then looked at her watch to check the time. She had four more hours before she met with him. The meeting place and time was set, and all she had to do was wait. She had decided the best way to spend the time was out running, the exercise distracting her from the evening ahead. It wasn’t working. Her mind could only focus on one thing. Of how she would be when she met him. Would she have the courage to face him? Sweat had wet the waistband of her running shorts and she was beginning to shiver as her skin cooled in the cold air.

  She had parked her car at Weston Lock on the western outskirts of Bath and had run as far as Saltford and back, an eight-mile route of grassy banks and shady trees that in the summer sheltered you from the sun and in winter, the rain. She was familiar with this route and had used it often to run when she lived onsite at the hospital. She didn’t want to be near home today and use the running path on her doorstep, otherwise she might bottle out. In a short while she would head back to Maggie’s and start preparing for the evening. She had no intention of going near her own home until after the job was done.

  By the time she returned there later tonight, he would have been dealt with and her home would be a place where she no longer thought of him. She would find the courage to face him somehow, and if she had to call the police and get him arrested she would do so. She intended that her life from now on would be positive and free of him. Even if she wasn’t believed she would be satisfied that she had done her best to bring this man to justice.

  She wished for the umpteenth time that she had her mobile with her. She couldn’t find it this morning and was beginning to think she must have left it at work. She wanted to hear Nathan’s voice. She wanted to tell him she couldn’t see him tonight and hoped he would understand. They had made love again before he left for work and she had never felt more adored than she did in his arms.

  Alex had seen the anguish in his eyes as he told her of his painful experience, and knew there and then that she would always love his face. Nathan, she believed, was a man who wanted to be loved for who he was, not for what he looked like.

  She would hate for him to think she was rejecting him by not being in contact.

  It was probably a good thing that she didn’t have her phone. She couldn’t call him. Today was something she had to deal with alone – a grubby, dirty situation which she didn’t want anywhere near her new life. She would tell Nathan about it at a later date, when there was no chance of it tarnishing what they had just begun.

  Filling her mind with only him – his voice, his image and his touch – she began the half-mile walk back to her car.

  *

  Greg stared at the tall, thin man and tried to keep his eyes from fixing on the birthmark covering the left side of his face. A part of his forehead, an eyelid, the side of the nose and cheek and a corner of his mouth was a deep purple. This was the man Alex had slept with last night. He was not the boyfriend. Laura had taken a statement from a man named Patrick Ford.

  Nathan Bell was a rare man; there was a humility and dignity in his manner. Greg sensed the challenges the man faced each day. His eyes were filled with a quiet despair at the thought of Alex being in trouble. Greg could give him no words of comfort.

  Officers found clear evidence that a man had spent the night at Dr Taylor’s flat, and Greg believed it was him. He also believed the times he said he arrived and left. None of it helped Alex Taylor, though. Fiona Woods’s death occurred before the time he had spent with Alex Taylor; the nurse was captured on CCTV on a corridor leaving A & E at 18.05 and the glass on her wristwatch had been broken at 18.35.

  Peter Spencer and the pathologist had worked out a theory that it got broken when the lift door was shut on her wrist. The tissue damage on her arm showed two parallel lines, which suggested the inner plate of the door had hit flesh as well as the watch. The killer then probably raised the lift door again and pushed her arm in properly.

  Nathan Bell could offer no alibi for Alex Taylor.

  What perplexed Greg was the time of the death. The theatres would still have been busy, and that lift could have been used at any time. Someone very confident had killed the woman. The pathologist thought that the nurse was still alive when she was bundled into the lift. The blood pattern on the lift’s ceiling and walls showed spurting
. She would not have been alive for long, but she may have been conscious and aware that she was dying as she sat imprisoned in the steel box. Someone very confident had walked away from the murder scene, someone who perhaps knew it didn’t matter if they were seen, he reasoned, wearing theatre clothing, paper cap and mask.

  ‘She didn’t do this,’ Nathan Bell said for the second time since Greg had entered the office. ‘She isn’t a killer.’

  ‘Has she been in touch with you today?’

  ‘No, not since I left her this morning.’

  ‘And have you tried to contact her since you found out?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to warn her, but her mobile is switched off, so I just left a message asking her to contact me. I want to be with her when she hears about Fiona.’

  ‘What did she say to you this morning?’

  ‘Nothing. We kissed goodbye. I expected to see her this evening.’

  ‘Did you make plans?’

  ‘No. I thought we’d talk later.’

  ‘When you went to her flat yesterday, you said she still had her coat on.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this was just gone half seven.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dr Taylor finished her shift at five thirty. Do you know what she was doing after that time?’

  ‘No. I have no idea.’

  The interview had ended there and the doctor had gone miserably back to his department. Greg sympathised. Neither of them wanted Alex Taylor to be in trouble. Every member of staff had been questioned, some of them at length, and the worrying thing was that although they were shocked by the death of Fiona Woods, none of them showed surprise that the police were asking questions about Alex Taylor’s whereabouts. There were several who volunteered information about the doctor, telling officers that they had been concerned about her for a while, that she hadn’t been herself lately.

  Greg had two home interviews to do which he wanted to conduct himself. The first with Alex’s ex-boyfriend – he was assuming he was an ex if she was in another relationship – and the other with her boss, Caroline Cowan. These two knew her well and he hoped one of them could verify her whereabouts and her well-being.