Flatline

by Robert Innes

  “Hey, don’t you worry.” Blake smiled. “You’re better at English than I am at Spanish.”

  Maria bit her lip as she brushed her hair out of her face. “Si, I remember. He cough, very bad.” As if to enunciate her point, Maria let out an exaggeratory hacking sound.

  “He had a bad cough?” Blake clarified.

  “Si, si, very bad,” Maria replied, nodding. She let out another couple of coughing sounds. “I go to ask him if he okay, should I get Doctor, but he had gone in lift and doors closed before I could.”

  Blake nodded. He had heard all he needed to, and things were finally starting to make sense. “Thank you Maria, you’ve been very helpful.”

  Maria smiled broadly at him and fluttered her eyelashes as Blake walked back to the lifts to meet Gardiner by the car. He needed to do some research, but he was starting to piece together exactly what had happened to Joe in the time leading up to his death. First, he needed to gather as much information from Kevin as he could.

  He entered the lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. But as he was standing there working through all the theories he had in his head, he was suddenly hit with the sharpest pain he had felt yet. It was like someone’s hand had reached inside him and was twisting his internal organs about. As the lift opened on the ground floor, Blake cried out in agony and dropped to his knees. As nurses rushed to him, Blake’s insides writhed, and he continued spasming with pain as he felt himself begin to move back into the lift again.

  14

  I told you that you weren’t ready to go home,” Gloria Nicolls told him as she stood over Blake’s bed. “Your wound has become infected. It can happen if you’re not careful after an operation, and I’m very willing to bet you weren’t careful whatsoever.”

  Blake groaned as the place where his appendix used to be continued to throb. “It’s worse now than it was when I had the bloody thing inside me. I haven’t got time to be here. I need to be back at the police station.”

  “You’re going down to theatre as soon as they have a window so they can sort out what you’ve done to yourself,” Gloria told him sternly. “And then, you’ll be staying in here until we are satisfied that you’re ready to go home. I’m sorry, but it’s for your own good. You’re very lucky it wasn’t more serious. Any more antics like you’ve been up to and it may well still be serious unless you get some rest.”

  Blake sighed and nodded. He had made sure that Gardiner had been told about what had happened and had been assured that he had taken Kevin back to Harmschapel to interview him.

  Gloria glanced around her and spoke quietly to Blake. “While I’ve got you here, is Kelsey alright? She rang me. She said she’d been arrested, but she wouldn’t let me come down. Has something happened?”

  Blake sat himself up in bed with some difficulty. “I can’t discuss that at the minute. Trust me, I’d like to. You’ll be asked about it soon enough though.”

  Gloria shook her head as she studied Blake’s case file. “I knew that Joe was trouble. It’s about that, isn’t it? She’s lashed out and killed him? I knew she was struggling, I could see it in her.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Blake said as he flicked through his phone to distract himself from the pain. He had found an article to read that was giving him the final answers he needed to send to the station so Gardiner could wrap up the case.

  “You better have some morphine,” Gloria said as she fiddled with his catheter. “The pain will calm down soon.”

  “That’d be great, thank you.”

  Before long, Blake had been given a dosage of morphine and soon the words on his phone started to come a blur. The pain began to fade slightly, and he leant his head back on the pillow. As the strength of the drug began to take over, a wave of contentedness washed over him and he closed his eyes.

  The next thing he knew, a voice was breaking into his consciousness. “Mr Harte? I’m going to take you down now.”

  He slowly opened his eyes, blinded by the light. Chloe Prendergast was stood over him, a serious expression on her face.

  “Now?” Blake said drowsily.

  “Let’s get you down there,” Chloe said. She walked around Blake’s bed and Blake felt himself begin to move. The florescent lights above him hurt his eyes as they went past one after another. He moved his eyes to Chloe, who was pushing the bed down the corridor from behind Blake’s head. Then, the lights disappeared, and Blake recognised the pattern on the lift ceilings as he was pushed inside.

  “You’ve arrested Kelsey,” Chloe said. “I’ve just heard it from one of the nurses. It’s gone ‘round the hospital like wild fire. Is this about Joe’s death? I told you, she wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “No,” murmured Blake. Through the fogginess of the drug, Blake could sense that the lift wasn’t moving, meaning Chloe had not pressed any of the buttons.

  “Joe was a danger to Kelsey, you know,” Chloe said. “She’s better off without him.”

  “Is that why you attacked him?” Blake asked. He was aware that he needed to try and stay lucid enough to listen to what Chloe was saying.

  Chloe looked down at him. “Attack him? I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Yeah you did,” slurred Blake. “How does a man get soaking wet before he goes out in the rain? Be honest Chloe, did you and Joe have a little water fight the day before he died?”

  Chloe stared at him as Blake’s eyes began to close. He felt like the morphine was relaxing him to the point where he wanted to sleep, but he knew from Chloe’s face that the theory he had landed on was right. He needed to stay awake, so he could hear everything she had to say.

  “How did you know about that?” Chloe asked fearfully. “There was only me and him in the room. He didn’t report me, I know he didn’t.”

  “What happened, Chloe?” Blake asked, his head dropping to the side.

  Chloe leant against the lift wall. Blake could still feel that they weren’t going anywhere. She looked hurt, as if insults were being flung at her. “He was mocking me. Mocking me about Kelsey.”

  “Because you like her,” Blake said quietly. “You like her a lot.”

  “Like her?” Chloe repeated. “I don’t like her. I love her. It’s like I said to you, when I first came to this hospital, I was alone. I’d been bullied for years at school. When I got this job, I thought ‘finally. Finally, my life is changing and I can pick myself up from the ground.’ I’ve tried to have friends over the years, but none of them were interested. Even my mam says I’m too clingy. I scare people off. People don’t know how to deal with me. I get these obsessions. I’m just lonely, that’s all. Other lonely people get sympathy, so why don’t I?”

  “What happened?” Blake asked again.

  Chloe sat down on the bed, pressing the button on the lift at last. “I was running a bath for a patient. I’d just overheard Joe and Kelsey having an argument and he was saying some horrible things to her. Why would she stay with someone who spoke to him like that? I’d never have treated her that way, I’d have looked after her and made her happy. And I told Joe that. I took him in that bathroom, away from everybody and told him that he was out of order for speaking to her like that and he should treat her better.”

  “And what did he say?” Blake asked.

  Chloe kicked the wall of the lift in anger. “Horrible things. He said that I didn’t know what I was talking about. He called me a weirdo and a freak and asked me what I knew about relationships when nobody would ever come anywhere near me. He told me Kelsey couldn’t care less about my opinions and that I needed to mind my own business. So I argued with him, I told him Kelsey was my friend and he just sneered at me and told me that nothing I could say would ever make Kelsey give me anything other than pity. And I just saw red.”

  “What did you do?” Staying awake was becoming harder but Blake was hanging on for all his worth.

  Chloe looked down at her hands. “I lost it. I just grabbed him by the neck. I
’m a lot stronger than I give myself credit for. My mam says it all the time. All I wanted to do at that moment was shut him up and stop him from thinking he could talk to anybody how he liked.

  “I didn’t know I’d done it until a few seconds in,” she continued sadly. “I just grabbed his head and dumped him into the bath, holding him down. He struggled for ages and I couldn’t stop myself, all I could think in my head was ‘shut him up, shut him up, shut him up.’ Then there was a knock on the bathroom door and it sort of brought me to my senses. I realised what I was doing and let him go and he sort of landed on the floor, gasping and choking. Honestly, I thought I had killed him. He didn’t move for a few seconds and there was still someone at the door, and they couldn’t get in ‘cause I’d locked it. Then, Joe sort of spluttered a bit, coughing like mad, but he was alive. I’ve not lost my temper like that in a few months and I’ve not got control when I’m in that place, so I was just glad that he wasn’t hurt.”

  “A few months? Last time you were in the bar in Clackton?” Blake asked, digging his fingernails into his palms to keep himself conscious.

  “Our ward sister was at the door,” Chloe said. “Once I’d seen Joe was alright, I let her in. She took one look at the water everywhere and went mad. She told me to get a mop to sort it out and told Joe that he better get out of her sight as well, and stormed off somewhere. Joe was looking at me with this fear on his face, like he was scared of me, and to be honest, I was pleased. Good! I wanted him to be scared of me. He was lucky I didn’t drown him in that bath.”

  “You did though,” Blake murmured, watching her carefully. “I had to do some research for what had happened to him. I knew something was going on, then I remembered. I’d seen this interview on the telly when I was here in the daytime. On one of those chat shows, about a little boy who died when he was on holiday. I was so bored, it didn’t stick in my mind, but he had drowned in the sea. I found the article again just now, because something from that interview was sort of in my head and I didn’t know why. Look at this.”

  He passed Chloe his phone and showed her the article he had found on the interview he had been half paying attention to when he had been complaining on Ward 7A about the wait for his operation. She read through the article and stared at him in horror. “This kid, I read about him. He didn’t die in the sea?”

  “No,” Blake said, shaking his head drunkenly from side to side. “He nearly drowned. But then died twenty-four hours later. It’s called secondary drowning, or delayed drowning according to that interview. It’s rare, but it happens. Someone can have a life-threatening incident with water, and enough water can enter your system to begin to have a really bad time with your body. Nobody saw Joe after you attacked him, apart from Stan. And Joe was soaking wet, because you’d just been holding his head down in a bath. He went home, and he would have spent the night coughing and having chest pains. It can make you disorientated – a bit like I feel now – but sometimes, like with that kid, it can take up to a day to actually kill you. Kids die from this because they can be acting relatively normal after a close call in water and their parents are none the wiser, until they start getting symptoms again, and by then it can be too late.

  “The next day, Joe comes to work and he’s starting to feel a lot of pain. Then Kelsey rings him. I’ve got a witness that puts Joe on the tenth floor, about to go in this lift, coughing his guts up. He was dying, and he didn’t even realise what was happening to him. But fate was cruel. He might have been alright if he had got down to the ward, but the lift breaks down. It had nothing to do with any amazing mechanics. Just timing in all the wrong places. Only a few percent of drowning cases go like this. It normally only happens with children apparently, but Joe was a rare, but perfectly possible case of it happening to an adult. And you did that to him.” The drugs were now fogging Blake’s brain, and he could not stop himself from resting his head back on the pillow.

  “You wanted to make him shuddup,” he murmured, his words feeling like they were falling out of his mouth. “And you did. Just not when you meant to.”

  Throughout all this, they were still inside the lift. The doors had opened to the ward Chloe had taken them too, but Chloe had not moved them, so the doors had closed again. Now, through the murkiness that was his brain, Blake could feel the lift starting to move again.

  “You killed him,” Blake muttered, his head loping downwards as he tried to stay awake. “That’s how Joe died.”

  Chloe stood back against the wall, horror across her face. “I’m no killer. That’s made up. You’ve made that up!”

  “I have to tell them,” Blake whispered. “The station…Have to.”

  He opened one extremely heavy eye lid and looked straight at Chloe. “You’re telling nobody.” She lunged towards him with an insane glint in her eye.

  Before Blake could stop her, she had taken a hold of his face and placed her hands over his mouth and nose, gripping tightly. He struggled wildly, but she was far too strong for him in his weakened state.

  “You died on the way to theatre,” she thundered, squeezing tighter on Blake’s nose. Blake couldn’t breathe, he began to convulse wildly on the bed as she continued to squeeze the life out of him. “Happens all the time,” he heard Chloe say. “A tragic battle lost on the way to theatre, that’s what I’ve heard the surgeon say when it happens. You’re just another victim. You can’t tell Kelsey!”

  The lights began to fade away as Blake’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, he could feel his chest bursting as his head became lighter and lighter. He could feel his life ending, his final thoughts of Harrison, and how the last thing Blake had ever said to him had been a lie. It could not end like this. Harrison did not deserve this ending.

  Suddenly, a huge rush of air automatically filled his lungs and he could hear shouting and struggling as if it was happening at the end of a long corridor. Blake gasped and choked, tears in his eyes as he slowly opened them to see the blurred sight of two bodies wrestling on the floor. As his vision became clearer and his head started to feel closer to normal again, he could see Gardiner and Mattison pining Chloe down on the ground while Patil pulled her wrists together to cuff her, Chloe screaming like a wild animal. When she was finally restrained, Gardiner stood up, looking breathless. “You owe me one, Harte,” he said. “Good job one of us worked out that there was a danger at this hospital.”

  Blake could not respond, he could only inhale much needed air that he had thought was never going to enter his lungs again. He looked at Gardiner with an intensity that he hoped was capable of passing on what he was feeling. Gardiner gave him the tightest of smiles, and nodded, before leading Chloe away down the corridor.

  15

  One Day Later

  When Blake opened his eyes, he found himself, yet again, waking up from an operation surrounded by the staff of Harmschapel Police Station.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” said a familiar voice to his immediate right. Blake turned and he smiled weakly as the familiar face of Harrison came into view. “How are you feeling?”

  “I don’t know,” Blake replied. “I’ve had a bit of a strange day. Is my operation done, am I fixed?”

  “They’re happy with your progress,” Harrison told him. “They’ve said that they’re keeping you in for a few more days and I am telling you now that that is an order. You are not leaving this bed until I have had express permission from the head of the NHS that you are ready to come home.”

  The officers around the bed chuckled. Blake gripped Harrison’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” Harrison said, looking slightly annoyed. “We can talk about that when you’re out.”

  Blake turned his head to the officers. Gardiner was standing right in front of him with his arms folded.

  “You’re alive, then?” Gardiner asked dryly.

  Blake nodded. “Yeah. Sorry. Thanks to you.”

  “Sergeant Gardiner was amazing, Sir,” Patil said, looking at Gardiner with what seemed like relucta
nt admiration. “After he’d interviewed Kevin Browning, he realised that the killer and The Watcher had to be two different people.”

  “I realised what he was saying didn’t make any sense,” Gardiner conceded. “If he really didn’t kill Tilsley, then who did? Why confess to everything that The Watcher did and not the murder if he knew he was caught?”

  “What about Kelsey Richards?” Blake asked. “I know she was still involved in a hit and run, and she made a lot of very stupid decisions about that boyfriend of hers.”

  “Yes, the main one being giving him the time of day in the first place,” Gardiner muttered. “She’s still going to have to face the full brunt of the law. Like you say, whatever else was going on, she was still involved in a hit and run, and she failed to do anything about it. Admittedly though, it’s not her fault she got dragged into it all. She was a victim of circumstance more than anything. But she’d have made her life a lot easier if she just came forward in the first place. Maybe a court of law will be lenient with her.”

  “You were brilliant though, Sir,” Patil said to Blake. “With how you worked out that whole drowning thing. Delayed drowning. I’ve never even heard of that.”

  “Neither had I until I actually started paying attention to what that chat show was trying to tell me,” Blake conceded. “But it occurred to me that if there was absolutely no trace of water in that lift, apart from in his mouth and hands which he’d have coughed up when he was choking just before he died, then there must have been something else going on. The Watcher seemed only to be scaring Kelsey. He had the opportunity to kill her when he had her cornered at home, and he did nothing. That made me start thinking, mixed in with that lily, which Chloe obviously sent Kelsey, that there were two things going on and we didn’t realise it because the whole thing was so bizarre.”

  “Well, now that’s all over, hopefully you can actually rest and get yourself better,” Harrison told him.