by Abbie Taylor
‘Danielle?’ Dawn’s voice bounced off the tiles. There was a strong odour of vomit and faeces. On the floor outside the furthest cubicle was a puddle of greenish liquid. A bare foot stuck out from under the half-closed door.
‘Go away,’ a shaky voice called from the cubicle.
‘It’s Dawn. The Matron.’
‘I said, go away.’
Dawn picked her way across the tiles. The smell grew stronger. The greenish puddle had blood mixed in with it. In the end cubicle, Danielle sat slumped on the floor, her arms resting on the seat of the toilet. The hem of her dressing gown was spattered with the foul-smelling liquid.
‘I didn’t make it.’ Her eyes were red and swollen. ‘I’m sorry.’
Dawn touched her shoulder. ‘It’s OK. Just rest for a moment.’ She was horrified at the state the girl was in. She would have to get her up from there but not just yet. She was exhausted, too weak right now to stand.
Danielle began to sob. ‘Look at me. I’m disgusting.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am.’
Dawn said nothing. Danielle put her head on her arms and wept. ‘What’s happening to me? What’s happening? I hate this.’
‘Shh. We’ll sort it out.’ Dawn stroked the hair that hung in sticky ropes around Danielle’s face.
‘How? How can you sort it out? No one can. That horrible doctor – the weird one …’
‘Dr Coulton?’
‘Whatever.’ Danielle flicked a hand. ‘Dr Death, I call him. All he needs is a black hood and one of those sickle things. He said it was all my fault for not taking the steroids. I told him I would take them now, if only they’d help, but they won’t stay down. I tried to tell him but he wouldn’t believe me … he said I wasn’t trying, but I am, they won’t work, they won’t stay down—’
The words degenerated into another storm of sobbing. Dawn waited for it to pass.
‘What did Dr … er … Dr Coulton say about the operation?’
‘He said it was my only chance. But I don’t want an operation.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because … because … I haven’t got the time. I’ve got work to do … exams I’ve got to pass …’
‘Is that the only reason?’
A tap dripped, the sound echoing around the bathroom.
Dawn said gently, ‘Is it?’
Danielle cried. ‘I’m scared, Sister. I’m scared I might die.’
The anger had burned itself out. All that was left was despair. Danielle’s defences were flattened, her arrogance crushed. She was a frightened child, as all truly sick people were. Dawn crouched down in the brownish mess and took Danielle in her arms.
‘You won’t die,’ she said.
Danielle clung to her, as she probably hadn’t clung to anyone since she had been very young. She was used to being in control of her life, but here she was not. She was learning a hard lesson: no matter what you had, if your health went, it was worth nothing. Dawn held her and stroked the sticky ropes of hair.
After a while, Danielle sniffled.
‘If I did have the operation,’ she said. ‘And I’m not,’ she added angrily, ‘saying I will.’
‘Of course not.’
Danielle sniffled again. ‘You’d look after me? You’d be there?’
‘I’ll be there.’
This privilege, not lightly won. The distraught girl on her arm, the sense of a crisis passed. Even the smells of vomit and faeces, so redolent and familiar. Dawn’s jaw hardened. This hospital needed her. And she needed it. Why should she lose everything? She might have badly misjudged things but she had acted out of mercy and compassion. The only things this Well-wisher person was acting out of were spite and selfishness and greed.
She tore a sheet of loo roll from the dispenser and handed it to Danielle. The girl blew her nose.
‘Feeling better?’ Dawn asked.
Danielle nodded. She looked very tired. Her arms were like pale strips of ribbon, much too thin and flimsy for her height.
‘Come on, then.’ Dawn helped her to her feet. ‘Let’s get you back to bed.’
Behind the curtains of her cubicle, Dawn helped Danielle to remove her soiled clothes and put on a clean gown. She cleaned her hair as best she could with a towel and got her in to bed.
‘I’ll call the doctor to put a drip in,’ she said. ‘We’ll give you some fluids. You’ll feel better with some hydration on board.’
She put a sign on the door of the toilets saying Out of Order and phoned Housekeeping to let them know. Then she headed to the locker room to change out of her ruined uniform. Ahead of her, she spotted Dr Coulton about to leave the ward.
‘Excuse me,’ she called. ‘Dr Coulton!’
Dr Coulton paused but he continued to look at the doors for a moment in a way that made it clear he wasn’t happy to be interrupted. ‘Yes?’
Dawn caught up with him. ‘It’s about Danielle Jones. Before you go, would you mind putting in a drip?’
‘I haven’t got time,’ Dr Coulton said. ‘I’ve got somewhere I need to be.’
He began to walk again. Dawn walked right after him. ‘If you could do it now,’ she said firmly, ‘it would be extremely helpful. She really needs the fluid.’
Dr Coulton stopped again, his eyebrows dipped into a V of irritation. ‘Perhaps when I was with her a few minutes ago,’ he said, ‘she should have been more cooperative.’ Clearly he wasn’t the slightest bit pleased to have been called Dr Death by one of his patients.
Dawn said, ‘Well, perhaps if you had been more understanding—’
‘About what? If she’s not interested in taking my advice, there are plenty of other patients who are. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.’
He put his hand on the door. Dawn said sharply, remembering the weeping girl, ‘Don’t you think she wouldn’t rather be at work right now?’
Dr Coulton paused again. His gaze travelled down the length of Dawn’s uniform. Near the hem of the dress, was a large brownish stain. She thought he was going to comment on it but instead he looked over at the side room.
Seemingly for no reason at all, he said, ‘I see you got that blind fixed.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, I see you got that blind fixed.’
‘Of course I got it fixed.’ What was he on about? ‘Blinds provide privacy for the patients.’
‘Privacy for the staff, too,’ Dr Coulton said. ‘Excuse me?’
Dr Coulton didn’t reply. He pushed the doors open and strode off down the hall. Dawn stared after him, baffled. What had that been about? What did the side room blind have to do with anything? She looked at the little window. The blind was drawn all the way up to the top. Through the glass, facing the door, she could see Lewis’s ECG monitor, blipping away above his bed.
Suddenly her throat was dry.
That day in the canteen. Dr Coulton coming up behind her in the queue. I admire what you did …
She needed to hold on to something. The wall or a table or even the floor. The stock room was empty. She went in and leaned on her arms on the counter. Easy, she told herself. Easy. She was overreacting here. She was as jumpy as a nerve because of that morphine e-mail. Dr Coulton hadn’t meant anything by his comment. How could he have seen her with Mrs Walker? He hadn’t even been on the ward that day.
The feeling returned to her legs. She stood up again. From this angle, she had a perfect view of Lewis’s side room. The brown plywood door; the rectangular window in the centre. And then, as abruptly as if she had climbed a hill and gained a panoramic view of the landscape, she noticed something else. Right next to the side room were the main doors to the ward. If anyone happened to walk through those doors, the ECG screen over Lewis’s bed would be almost the first thing they saw.
Dawn recoiled as sharply as if a snake had just slid out from under the gauze packs. I admire what you did. Dr Coulton’s air of astonishment when she had told him that Mrs Walker was dead
. But he was on Mrs Walker’s surgical team. How could he not have missed her on the ward round that morning? How could he not have known? And surely – surely if Dr Coulton had come through the doors that day, if he had seen what Dawn had done, he would have confronted her. Reported her. A senior doctor like him! He’d have to be crazy to jeopardize his career over something like this. Anyway, he of all people would know how much an ampoule of morphine cost.
Dawn leaned on her elbows again and pushed her hair back with her hands. It just showed how unsettled she was, jumping to conclusions over a simple comment about a blind. The best thing to do, if she was going to start obsessing about this, was to confront Dr Coulton. Go after him right now; ask him what he had meant.
But almost immediately, she backed off. If Dr Coulton wasn’t the blackmailer, her marching up and asking questions might make him wonder why she was so concerned. The last thing she needed was for people to start making connections between her and the side room.
From behind her came a soft, scraping sound. Dawn turned. In the darkness of the stock room, something was moving towards her. A grey, wraithlike shape, creeping over the floor. Dawn sprang backwards, knocking her elbow hard off the corner of the counter.
‘Aah!’
The grey shape cried out too. Then the overhead light came blinking on. The wraithlike figure assembled itself into the solid, everyday figure of a nurse in a white ITU uniform.
‘Crikey, Dawn.’ Francine stood with one hand on the light switch, the other to her throat. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I just came in to borrow some Labetolol. I didn’t expect to find anyone hiding in here in the dark.’
‘No, I … I was just looking for something.’
Francine gave a rather high-pitched laugh. ‘Look at the pair of us. We’re turning into a right couple of mad old bats.’ Her smiling gaze, moving over Dawn, hesitated at the brown stains on her dress. The smile faded. Dawn remembered suddenly what she had been going to ask her.
‘I was thinking, Fran,’ she said. ‘I was wondering about taking next week off. For a holiday.’
Francine’s smile reappeared. ‘That’s brilliant, Dawn. I’ve said it to you before, I really think you could do with the break.’
‘The only thing is,’ Dawn said, ‘I’ll need someone to cover. There won’t be much to do, but just in case. I know it’s short notice, but—’
‘Ah, ah.’ Francine had her hand in the air. ‘Don’t say another word. You just go ahead and plan your break and have a lovely time. Are you going somewhere nice?’
‘Well … maybe …’ The original plan had been to spend her holidays at the Lakes. She couldn’t now, of course. Not while all of this was going on.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. The relief was enormous. One more hurdle dealt with. Francine didn’t seem to mind in the least helping her out. Only one more day shift to go. Then the two night shifts, which would be easier, and after that she would be free; out of here until all of this was over.
‘Thanks, Francine,’ she said.
On the bus home, Dawn sat with her jacket on over a set of theatre scrubs, her soiled uniform in a plastic bag on her knee. Every time the bus jolted, a sour smell of vomit wafted from the bag. Danielle had finally settled on the IV steroids. She had been asleep by the time Dawn had left, lying on her back with her mouth open, her tear-blotched face like a child’s. Dawn’s neck and arms and shoulders ached. She had been standing to attention all day, like a bird in the winter, watching its back every time it snatched at a crumb.
The realization had finally dawned on her. If Dr Coulton could have come through those doors that day on to the ward, then so could anyone. Any one of the pharmacists, bed managers, dieticians. Trish the physio. Professor Kneebone himself. Anyone at all. How naive had she been, to think she could narrow her list of suspects down to just three people. Dawn pressed her forehead on the window, feeling her head bump hard on the glass. The vibration numbed her lips and nose. In spite of all the possibilities, her mind kept returning to Dr Coulton. Standing there with that contemptuous expression on his face, looking over at the blinds. Privacy for the staff too. Why would he have said that unless it meant something? And now that she thought about it, the morphine e-mail wasn’t so hard to explain. Doctors were notoriously naive. Despite the fact that they met patients from all sorts of backgrounds every day, they tended to just treat the disease, then scurry back to their journals and their rugby clubs and their circles of all-medical friends. She and Francine had often commented on how easy it would be to fleece them. Dr Coulton might well be under the impression that ten ampoules of morphine would net him a fortune down the side streets of Brixton.
She had no way, for now, of knowing. But lifting her forehead from the window, she was buoyed by a sudden feeling of determination. Whoever Well-wisher was, she had no intention of going along any further with his nasty little games. Stealing the morphine – yes, it would be tricky. But he was right: she could think of a way. It was such a small amount; stealing it would not compromise patient care in any way. But it would compromise him. His demanding cash was one thing. If she ended up being charged with murder, the police may or may not care so much about that. But stealing drugs from the hospital … The hospital authorities would be extremely anxious to know who was involved. And she had plenty of evidence to hand to the police: the morphine e-mail, the accommodation address in Essex, which the police could use to track the person down.
Another waft of vomit rose from the plastic bag. Dawn’s nostrils constricted. She had been working at St Iberius for almost twenty years. Dr Coulton – if it was him – had been there for a matter of weeks. How dare he think he could push her around like this, turning her into his cash cow, his petty thief! She twisted the neck of the plastic bag, trapping the foul air inside so tightly that no more of it could possibly escape.
‘If I go down,’ she said grimly, aloud, ‘so will you.’
Chapter Twelve
By the following day, however, despite having been awake worrying about it for most of the night, Dawn still hadn’t figured out a way to steal the morphine.
On the face of it, it seemed easy enough. There was plenty of morphine on the ward, sitting right there in the stock room. The difficulty, however, was getting her hands on it. Two nurses had to be present to act as witnesses every time the safe was opened. It had occurred to Dawn that she could take charge of the keys herself. Sneak in to the stock room when no one was around and whip a box from the shelf. But ward sisters very rarely held the safe keys. And it would seem doubly suspicious for her to have insisted on taking them on the very day the morphine was found to have disappeared.
She hadn’t reached the stage yet of panicking. Given time, she was sure she would come up with something. The problem was, she didn’t have that much time. Today was Wednesday, her last day shift before she went on leave. Perhaps the night shifts would provide more of an opportunity. Nights were when most emergencies happened in a hospital. Some incident or other might occur that would give Dawn a chance to grab the keys and nip in to the safe while the other staff were distracted. But it wasn’t much to pin her hopes on.
One thing that struck her was how easy it was to focus on the problem now that she no longer had to watch her back all the time. She had her ward back to herself, and that was a very good feeling. Not that she knew for sure that the blackmailer wasn’t one of her nurses – but somehow none of them had ever fitted the profile, and now that there were so many other possibilities it felt natural to exclude them. The thing was, Dawn knew people. You didn’t spend eight years as a ward sister without learning to read people. Dawn was long used to judging within minutes of working with them which nurses would be good and which mediocre, to gauging from a patient’s body language and expression what they needed when they were too ill or frightened to speak. And time and again, her assessment had proven to be accurate. She stood at the nurse’s desk, looking around the ward. Down at bed six, Mandy was washing the hair of a
n elderly woman with a liver abscess. The patient lay with her eyes closed, clearly enjoying the feel of the warm water sluicing over her head. Mandy sang softly to her as she rinsed out the shampoo. Watching her, Dawn thought: I always knew it wasn’t you.
Mandy was just too soft-hearted for blackmail. Plus she would never have been organized enough to go about setting up the fake postal and e-mail addresses, all the while having to keep her mouth shut about what she’d seen. Anyway, unless she had exceptional eyesight, the day ward was too far from the side room for her to have been able to read the ECG. Further up the ward, in the stock room, Trudy was unpacking a new delivery of central lines. Her small, pointed face was serious as she cleared a space on the shelf. Trudy, too, Dawn had never seen as a significant candidate. In fact, recently Trudy had started to come on really well as a nurse. A lot of her earlier wobbliness seemed to have evaporated; she was developing more confidence and initiative. Look how good she had been with Danielle the previous day, showing compassion in the way she had stood up for a patient who had been so difficult and hostile towards her.
No – the one person in all of this who ticked all the boxes was Dr Coulton. Despite having no proof, Dawn couldn’t help thinking of him as the blackmailer. His personality fit. He was cold and calculating enough to go through with it and to take whatever precautions were needed not to be caught. And he was just patronizing and arrogant enough to have dropped that comment about the blind – probably thinking it was too subtle for Dawn to know what he was talking about. And if she did, so what? He was so sure he had her in his power. And just because he was a doctor didn’t mean he didn’t need the money. Hadn’t Mandy mentioned something about him doing research? Research posts at St Iberius, despite being highly sought-after, paid very little. Dr Coulton could have debts that Dawn didn’t know about. He could be into all sorts of things she didn’t know about. She knew next to nothing about the man. No one did. The only topics of conversation he ever engaged in with any of the staff were to do with lab results and fluid drainage and blood counts. Any attempts at small talk were met with a blank stare. Even his age was hard to gauge. He was a registrar, which normally would make him at least a couple of years younger than Dawn, but his dour face and receding hairline made him seem older. Dawn pictured him trudging home in the evenings to a bare basement flat, lit by a single bulb, with sterile books and piles of papers everywhere instead of furniture. And, she remembered, he had been on the ward the other day, the day she had felt she was being watched. He had been one of the doctors gathered around the nurse’s desk, examining the CT scan.