Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [8]
Harris listened silently to her account, taking slow, deep breaths to try to suppress the mounting frustration he felt. He had rather hoped that Sister Martin would provide a clue to the identity of the boy, but it was clear that 13
she knew little more than the young doctor he had interviewed. Sister Martin had been guiding a seven-year-old girl with a broken wrist to what she had assumed was a vacant curtained bay in casualty, only to discover it occupied by a man and a boy. Her account was strangely incomplete. Although she could remember exactly what the man had said and done, she had no memory of what he looked like. It was as if that information had been plucked from her mind.
The man, now faceless in her memory, had looked up from tending to the boy, and said: ‘Ah, Nurse, there you are at last. We’re going to need at least four pints of blood, fresh dressings, sterile instruments and you’d better put whatever provision you have for cardiac arrest on standby – just as a precau-tion you understand, but we can’t be too careful.’
At this point in her story, Sister Martin had paused and swallowed painfully before continuing. For the faceless man had dipped a finger casually into one of the open wounds on the boy’s neck, licked it and – as if identifying a good wine – had announced: ‘O Rhesus negative, if I’m not mistaken. At the rate this young man is losing the stuff, I think you’d better make that five pints.
Now be a good person and hurry. There’s an outside chance that we might save this young fellow’s life.’
Fighting back her shock and nausea, Sister Martin had ordered the man to stand away from the boy before he did any more damage, and then had called for assistance. After trying in vain to persuade her to let him stay and help, the man had darted off when he spotted two orderlies hurrying down the corridor towards him. By the time they had arrived on the scene the intruder had completely disappeared.
Despite every effort by the casualty staff, the boy had died twenty minutes later. He hadn’t regained consciousness.
‘Nothing like this has ever happened here before,’ the sister concluded. ‘I still can’t believe that it could happen in this department, and whilst I was on duty. I’m responsible for that lad’s death, Chief Inspector. If I’d only been more vigilant, then that lunatic would never have got near him and we might have been able to provide proper treatment.’
Harris silently indicated to Bridle that the interview was at an end and he watched his sergeant gently guide the middle-aged woman from the room. A question formed in Harris’s mind as they reached the door, and he’d voiced it before he realized how crazy it was.
‘Sister Martin. What did the boy’s blood type turn out to be?’
‘O Rhesus negative, Inspector,’ she managed, before bursting into tears once more.
∗ ∗ ∗
14
The morgue was tucked away at the back of the lower-ground floor of the Middlesex Hospital. It took Chief Inspector Harris a good ten minutes to find the long cool room; hospitals are not in the business of publicizing the existence and hence the locations of their mortuaries. Marble-topped benches were spaced regularly throughout the room which was in semi-darkness. The morgue had a distinctive odour: Harris recognized the stale sweet scent of death that no amount of cleaning and disinfectant could scrub away.
The room was windowless. The outlines of the bare bricks of the walls were visible despite layers of thick creamy paint. The only source of light came from a single lamp which burnt above one of the benches. A naked human shape lay on top. Someone was working late this evening. Harris paused in the doorway unsure whether he wanted to disturb the worker from their grim trade. If it hadn’t been for the matter of the boy’s missing personal possessions Harris would have turned on his heel and left.
The sound of water running from a tap came from a small door beyond the slab. Harris walked over to the corpse. There