It wasn’t the fault of the medical staff, who were mostly quality people who worked their tired butts off – he had seen that with his own eyes enough times. He blamed the management, and he blamed the government whose policies had allowed healthcare standards to fall so low.
He went past the gift shop and the chintzy Nuovo Caff�nack bar, which looked like it belonged in a motorway service station, and sidestepped an elderly, vacant-faced patient in her hospital gown who was wandering down the sloping floor straight towards him.
And then his anger at the place rose further as he walked over to the curved wooden counter of the unmanned reception desk and saw the sign, lying beside a spray of plastic flowers.
Apologies the Reception Desk is Closed.
Fortunately, Eleanor had managed to locate his young officer for him – she had been moved out of the orthopaedic ward a few days ago into one called Chichester. A list on the wall informed him that it was on the third floor of this wing.
He climbed up a spiral staircase, on the walls of which a cheery mural had been painted, walked along a blue linoleum-covered corridor, up two further flights of wooden-banistered stairs and stopped in a shabby, grimy corridor. A young female Asian nurse in a blue top and black trousers walked towards him. There was a faint mashed potatoes and cabbage smell of school dinners. ‘I’m looking for Chichester ward,’ he said.
She pointed. ‘Go straight ahead.’
He walked past a row of gas cylinders through a door with a glass window covered in warning notices, and entered a ward of about sixteen beds. The smell of school dinners was even stronger in here, tinged by a faint, sour smell of urine and disinfectant. There was an old linoleum floor and the walls were filthy. The windows were wide open, giving a view out on to another wing of the hospital, with a vent from which steam was rising. Horrible curtains were partially drawn around some beds.
It was a mixed ward of what looked mostly like geriatrics and mental patients. Grace stared for a moment at a little old lady with tufts of hair the colour of cotton wool, matching the complexion of her sunken cheeks, fast asleep, her toothless mouth open wide. Several televisions were on. A young man in bed was babbling loudly to himself. Another old woman, in a bed at the far end, kept shouting out something loud and unintelligible to no one in particular. In the bed immediately to his right was a shrivelled little old man, fast asleep, unshaven, his bedclothes pushed aside, two empty bottles of Coke on the table that straddled him. He was wearing striped pyjamas, the bottoms untied, his limp penis clearly visible, nestling against his testicles.
And in the next-door bed, to his horror, surrounding by dusty-looking apparatus, he saw the person he had come to visit. And now, as he slipped his hand into his pocket and removed his mobile phone, storming past the busy nursing station, his blood was really boiling.
One of his favourite young officers, DC Emma-Jane Boutwood, had been badly injured trying to stop a van in the same operation in which Glenn Branson had been shot. She had been crushed between the van and a parked car, and suffered massive internal damage, including losing her spleen, as well as multiple bone fractures. The twenty-five-year-old had been in a coma on life support for over a week, and when she came round, doctors had been worried she might never walk again. But in recent weeks she had made a dramatic improvement, was able to stand unaided and had already been talking eagerly about when she could get back to work.
Grace really liked her. She was a terrific detective and he reckoned she had a great future ahead of her in the force. But at this moment, seeing her lying there, smiling palely at him, she looked like a lost, bewildered child. Always thin, she now looked emaciated inside her loose hospital gown, and the orange tag was almost hanging off her wrist. Her blonde hair, which had lost its lustre and looked like dried straw, was clipped up untidily, with a few stray wisps falling down. On the table next to her bed lay a crowded riot of cards, flowers and fruit.
Her eyes said it all before they even spoke, and something snapped inside him.
‘How are you?’ he asked, holding on to the flowers for the moment.
‘Never better!’ she said, making an effort to perk up for him. ‘I told my dad yesterday that I was going to beat him at tennis before the end of the summer. Mind you, that should be easy. He’s a crap player!’
Grace grinned, then asked gently, ‘What the hell are you doing in this ward?’
She shrugged. ‘They moved me about three days ago. Said they needed the bed in the other ward.’
‘Did they, hell. You want to stay here?’
‘Not really.’
Grace stepped back and scanned the ward, looking for a free nurse, then walked over to a young Asian girl in nursing uniform who was removing a bedpan. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for whoever is in charge here.’
The nurse turned around, then pointed to a harassed-looking nurse of about forty, with pinned-up hair and a bookish face behind large glasses, who was entering the ward, holding a clipboard.
In a few quick, determined paces, Grace cut her off, blocking her path. The badge hanging from her blue top read Angela Morris, Ward Manager.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘can I have a word with you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, in a brittle, distinctly hostile and haughty voice. ‘I’m dealing with a problem.’
‘Well, you have another one right now,’ he said, almost shaking with anger, pulling out his warrant card and holding it up to her face.
She looked alarmed. ‘What – what is this about?’ Her voice had suddenly dropped several decibels.
Grace pointed at Emma-Jane. ‘You have exactly five minutes to get that young woman out of this stinking hell-hole and into either a private ward or a women-only one. Do you understand?’
Haughty again, the Ward Manager said, ‘Perhaps you should try to understand some of the problems we have in this hospital, Detective Superintendent.’
Raising his voice almost to a shout, Grace said, ‘This young woman is a heroine. She was injured performing an act of supreme bravery in the line of duty. She helped save this city from a monster, who is now behind bars awaiting trial, and to save the lives of two innocent people. She nearly damn well sacrificed her life! And her reward is to get put in a mixed, geriatric ward, in a bed next to a man with his dick hanging out. She’s not spending one more hour in this ward. Do you understand me?’
Looking around edgily, the nurse said, ‘I will see what I can do, later.’
Raising his voice even more, Grace said, ‘I don’t think you heard me properly. There’s no later about this. You’re going to do this now. Because I’m going to stay here, in your face, until she’s moved into a bed in a ward that I’m happy about.’ Then he held up the phone and showed it to the woman. ‘Unless you’d like me to email the photos I’ve just taken of Brighton heroine DC Boutwood being stripped of all dignity by you cruel incompetents to the Argus and every damn newspaper in the land, you’re going to do this right now.’
‘You are not allowed to use mobile phones in here. And you’ve no right to take photographs.’
‘You’ve no right to treat my officer like this. Get me the hospital manager. NOW!’
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78
Thirty minutes later, Emma-Jane Boutwood was wheeled along a network of corridors, into a much more modern section of the hospital.
Grace waited until the young DC was installed in her sunny, private room, with a view out across the rooftops to the English Channel, then gave her the flowers and left, after receiving a promise from the hospital’s Mr Big, down a phone line from his ivory tower, that she would remain in this room until she was discharged.
Following the directions he had been given back to the front entrance, he stopped at an elevator and hit the button. After a lengthy wait, he was about to give up and walk down when suddenly the doors slid open. He stepped in and nodded at a tired-looking young Indian man, who was taking a bite on an energy snack bar.
Dressed
in green medical pyjamas, with a stethoscope hanging from his neck, the man was wearing a name tag which read Dr Raj Singh, A&E. As the doors closed, Grace suddenly felt stifling heat; it was like being in an oven. He noticed the doctor was staring at him curiously.
‘Hot day,’ Grace said politely.
‘Yes, a little too hot,’ the man replied in a cultured English accent, then he frowned. ‘Excuse me asking, but you look familiar. Have we met?’
Grace had always had a good memory for faces – almost photographic at times. But this man’s did not ring any bells. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.
The lift stopped and Grace stepped out. The doctor followed him. ‘In the Argus today, is it your photograph?’
Grace nodded.
‘That explains it! I was just reading it, a few minutes ago. Actually, I had been thinking of contacting your inquiry team.’
Grace, distractedly anxious to get on and back to the office, was only giving Dr Singh half an ear now. ‘Really?’
‘Look, it’s probably nothing, but the paper says you’ve asked people to be vigilant and report anything suspicious?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – I have to be careful about patient confidentiality, but I saw a man in here yesterday and he really made me feel uncomfortable.’
‘In what way?’
The doctor glanced around the empty corridor, looked sternly at a fire hydrant, then turned back to check the lift doors were closed. ‘Well, his behaviour was very erratic. He shouted at the receptionist, for instance.’
Nothing erratic about that, Grace thought privately. He was sure plenty of people got shouted at in here regularly, with good reason.
‘When I saw him,’ the doctor continued, ‘he seemed extremely agitated. Don’t get me wrong, I see plenty of people with psychiatric problems, but this man just seemed to be in a state of high anxiety about something.’
‘What was his injury?’
‘Here’s the thing. It was an infected wound in his hand.’
Suddenly Grace was paying a lot more attention. ‘From what?’
‘Well, he said he had shut it in a door, but it didn’t look like that to me.’
‘Shut it in a door?’ Grace queried, thinking hard about Bishop’s explanation for his injury – that he had bashed it getting into a taxi.
‘Yes.’
‘So what did it look like to you?’
‘A bite. I would say a human bite quite possibly. You see, there were marks on both sides of the hand – on the wrist, then on the underside just below the thumb.’
‘If he’d shut a car door or a boot lid on it, there would have been marks both sides.’
‘Yes, but not curved ones,’ the doctor replied. ‘They were semi-lunar upper and lower, consistent with a mouth. And there were puncture marks of varying depths, consistent with teeth.’
‘What makes you think they were human? Could they have been from an animal? A large dog?’
The doctor blushed. ‘I’m a bit of a crime fiction addict – I love reading forensic crime novels, when I get the time – and watch programmes like CSI on television.’ His beeper went. He paused a moment, then carried on, ‘But you see, there’s another thing I deduced.’ He paused again, looking stressed, to read the message on the machine’s display. ‘The thing I deduced is that if it was a dog bite, then why would he have denied it? If it was a human bite that he received during an attack, I can of course see why he denied it. Then, when I saw the horrible news about this murdered young woman, I sort of put two and two together.’
Grace smiled. ‘I think you’d make a good detective! But it’s a big two and two,’ he replied. ‘Can you describe this man to me?’
‘Yes. He was about six foot, very lean, with quite long brown hair, dark glasses and a heavy beard. It was quite hard to see his face clearly. He was wearing a blue linen jacket, a cream shirt, jeans and trainers. He looked a bit of a scruff.’
Grace’s heart sank; this did not sound like Bishop at all, unless he had gone to the trouble of disguising himself, which was always a possibility. ‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again?’
‘Absolutely!’
‘Would this man have been picked up on some of the hospital’s CCTV cameras?’
‘We have one in A&E, he’d be on that for sure.’
Grace thanked him, wrote down his name and phone numbers, then went off in search of the hospital’s CCTV monitoring suite, unclipping his BlackBerry and checking his emails as he walked.
There was one from Dick Pope, in response to the email he had sent him earlier this morning with the photographs he had taken in Munich. It stopped him in his tracks.
Roy, this is not the woman Lesley and I saw last week. We really are convinced we saw Sandy. Best, Dick
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79
It was nearly three thirty by the time that Nadiuska De Sancha had completed her post-mortem and left the mortuary, along with DCI Duigan and the Coroner’s Officer.
From the ligature marks on Sophie Harrington’s neck and the petechial haemorrhaging in her eyes, the Home Office pathologist was drawn towards the conclusion that the poor young woman had been strangled. But she would need to wait for blood toxicology reports and test results on the contents of her stomach, and the samples of fluids she had taken from the woman’s bladder to eliminate other possible causes of death. The presence of semen in her vagina indicated the likelihood that she had been raped either before or after her death.
Cleo and Darren still had several hours of work ahead of them. There was the post-mortem to be carried out on the ‘unknown female’ washed up from the sea. In addition they had the grim task of the post-mortem on the six-year-old girl who had been killed on Saturday by a car. And they had four other cadavers to deal with, including that of a forty-seven-year-old HIV-positive man whom they had earlier placed in the sealed isolation room for his post-mortem.
The parents of the little girl had wanted to come up to visit late yesterday afternoon, and Darren had let them in. They had come for a further visit a couple of hours ago and Cleo had seen them. She was still feeling upset now.
Dr Nigel Churchman, the local consultant pathologist, who would carry out these much less intensive post-mortems, was due here in half an hour. Christopher Ghent, the forensic odontologist, who had come to assist in the identification of the unknown female, was currently in the office, having a cup of tea, tetchy at being kept waiting.
Cleo and Darren removed the woman from her fridge and unwrapped her. The smell of her rotten body instantly permeated the place again. Then they left Ghent to get on with his work.
Ghent, a tall, intense, bespectacled man in his mid-forties, with thinning hair, had an international reputation on two counts. He had written a well-respected book on forensic dentistry, in an attempt to rival Montreal odontologist Robert Dorion’s definitive Bitemark Evidence, which had long been the profession’s standard reference work. He was also an accomplished bird-watcher – or twitcher – and a world authority on seagulls.
Fully gowned up in his hospital greens, Ghent worked swiftly but thoroughly, against the background sounds of Darren crunching the ribs and grinding away at the skulls of the other cadavers with the band-saw. The mood was particularly sombre in here, with none of the banter between the team that usually went on. The presence of a small child’s body subdued them all far more than that of a murder victim.
Ghent took a series of photographs, both normal and with a portable X-ray camera, then noted details of each tooth on a chart, finishing by taking a soft clay impression of the upper and lower sets. Acting on instructions from the coroner, he would later send his detailed records to every dentist within a fifteen-mile radius of the city of Brighton and Hove. If that failed to produce results, he would gradually broaden the circulation list until, if necessary, every registered dentist in the UK was covered.
There was as yet no international system of coordinated dental records. If no dentist in the UK coul
d make an identification, and fingerprints and DNA failed to produce results, the woman would eventually end up in a grave paid for by the city of Brighton and Hove, recorded for posterity as one tiny fraction of a tragic statistic.
Nigel Churchman had calculated recently that he had performed over seven thousand post-mortems in this mortuary during the past fifteen years. Yet he approached each cadaver with the same, almost boyish enthusiasm, as if it were his first. He was a man who genuinely loved his work, and believed that each person who came under his scrutiny deserved the very best from him.
A handsome, fit man, with a passion for racing cars, he had a youthful face – much of it concealed at the moment behind his green mask as he peered down at the unknown female – making him seem much younger than his forty-nine years.
He flapped away some bluebottles from around her brain, which was lying on the metal examining tray above her opened chest cavity, and began work. He sliced the brain carefully with a long-bladed carving knife, checking for foreign bodies, such as a bullet, or damage from a knife, or evidence of haemorrhaging which could indicate death by a heavy blow. But the brain seemed healthy, undamaged.
Her eyes, which had been eaten almost entirely away, yielded no information. Her heart seemed robust, typical of a fit person, with no scaling in the arteries. He was not able to gauge her age very accurately at this stage. Judging from the condition and colour of her teeth, her general physique, the condition of her breasts, which were partly gone also, he was guessing mid-twenties to early forties.
Darren carried the heart to the weigh scales and marked it up on the wall chart. Churchman nodded; it was within the correct range. He moved on to the lungs, cutting them free, then lifting them with both gloved hands on to the examining tray, dark fluid dripping from them as he set them down.