The Stone Gallows (5 page)

Nobody would have believed me. Nobody would have
wanted
to.

The inquiry lasted for three months. Grierson was questioned. As a fine, upstanding member of the community, he was shocked to learn that he had been under surveillance. He stated that there had only been two people in the car that night – himself and an employee he was giving a lift home. There had been no gun, no henchman in the back seat. His story was confirmed by his secretary. It was dark, argued his lawyer. The detectives concerned had made a terrible mistake.

And because we all knew that Grierson was a lying sack of shit, nobody believed him.

The taxi-driver was questioned, and footage from traffic surveillance cameras was studied. Both concurred: Maria McAusland had wandered into the middle of the road without looking.

Blood tests showed that I was completely sober at the time of the accident, and nobody thought to test Coombes. The reports of a smell of alcohol raised a few eyebrows, but the fire brigade had managed to destroy most of my clothing cutting me free from the wreckage, and nothing was ever proved. The police did what they did best when the news was bad but the inquiry was inconclusive: closed ranks.

It was decided that due to the lack of evidence, it would be wrong to hold any individual party accountable. The accident was the culmination of a series of events that could not have been prevented.

The press screamed blue murder, but the book was closed. After extensive rehabilitation, I was free to return to work.

I tried. I really did.

1.

The woman walked quickly along the corridor, her heels clicking quietly
on the tiled floor. In one hand was a clipboard, and she studied the
papers on it with a frown that suggested to anybody who was interested
that she was terribly busy and could not be disturbed.

Not that there were many people who were interested. It was the
middle of the night and the hospital was quiet. Most of the patients were
asleep, and those that weren't, drowsy. Staff drifted from one place to the
next like somnambulists, usually alone, sometimes in pairs. Some looked
at the woman, but the confidence of her stride, and the laminated
identification badge that hung from the pocket of her white coat, implied
that she had every right to be there. It was a big hospital, too big to
question the presence of one unfamiliar face among hundreds.

She had deliberated for a long time over her appearance. Her hair,
dyed chestnut brown especially for the occasion, was scraped into a severe
bun. A pair of glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, the frames absurdly
large for her face. On her feet was a pair of stiletto heels, their height
concealed underneath a pair of trousers that were so long that the hems
brushed the floor. The time spent in preparation had been worth it; if
anybody saw her – really saw her – the description provided to the police
would be of a tall, short-sighted woman with brown hair of in-determinate length.

She stopped briefly when she came to a junction in the corridor, tilting her head down so that she could read the sign over the rims of her
too-large glasses. The hospital was a maze. Satisfied she was heading in
the right direction, she moved off again. It was two minutes past three
in the morning.

2.

Ellen Drysdale looked at her watch; four minutes past three. Two
hundred and sixty-six minutes before she could go home. Twenty-one
thousand, nine hundred and sixty seconds before she could slide between
a set of cool, clean sheets and close her eyes.

She was a pretty girl with dark blonde hair that had been yanked
behind her head in a clump. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep, and her
fingertips were swollen and raw from where she had bitten the nails
down to the quick. Night-shift did not agree with her.

Yawning, she tried to focus on the folder in front of her. It was hard to
believe that a ten-bedded unit could develop so much paperwork. Care-plans, risk assessments and reviews. Memos to be filed, but only after all
staff had signed to confirm they had read them; the trust directors did
not believe in taking chances. In the past twelve months there had been
ninety-four separate court actions raised against employees, all for
abuse, misconduct or negligence. Of those, seventy-three had been dismissed. Twenty had been settled out of court. One had resulted in a
spectacular loss in which the trust was forced to pay over two million
pounds to the parents of a child who had suffered irreversible brain
damage after an asthma attack. The child collapsed in the street after
being discharged from Accident and Emergency with borderline
symptoms. The junior doctor who had signed the discharge slip was now
training to be an estate agent.

Correction, ninety-five complaints. One of them was still waiting to
be heard.

She hadn't even been on duty when it happened. She had managed to
buy tickets for Boyzone's reunion tour only to find that she was meant to
be working on the day of the concert, so she had stopped briefly at work
to ask a friend to swap shifts. As she walked across the hospital car-park,
a man had collapsed in front of her. Of a heart attack, later tests
confirmed.

Ellen had saved his life.

And cracked his rib while resuscitating him.

It's not as easy as it looks on television, where a nurse who still
manages to have all her make-up in place despite having been on her feet
for a ten-hour shift manages to magically restart the victims' heart after
putting about five pounds of pressure on the sternum. Actors do it by
moving their wrists, the power coming from the elbow. That's all very
well for TV, but try that in the real world and the patient will be dead in
about sixty seconds. For success, the motion must come from the
shoulders, the rescuer driving down on a vertical plane, elbows and forearms locked. Anything else just isn't strong enough. To force blood out of
an arrested heart means squeezing it like a sponge, and as the heart is
protected by the rib cage, the only way to do this is by compressing the
ribs.

Hard.

Too hard, in Ellen's case.

In a growing circle of onlookers, she worked on him for twelve cycles,
five compressions for each breath, shouting for help all the time. The
bone had given way with a damp crack, and she had felt the snap vibrate
sickeningly through the heel of her hand. At that point, two staff from
Accident and Emergency made it to the scene and took over. She watched
as the man was wheeled into casualty on a trolley, where they zapped
him back to life with three hundred and sixty volts of electricity.

Then it was time for the paperwork.

Incident Reports. Accident Reports. Practice Statements.

All in triplicate.

And, of course, after the paperwork came the interviews.

Why had she been wandering around in the car park on her day off?

How did she know the man? Why did she feel it was her responsibility to
intervene? When did she last attend a heart-start lecture? Did she feel it
was appropriate to begin treatment when there were more qualified
people less than one hundred and fifty yards away?

Was it possible that by attempting resuscitation in the car-park, she
had shown poor judgement?

Ellen was honest and told them everything. Her argument was clear
and persuasive: there hadn't been time. Her actions had probably
brought the man just enough time to receive treatment in a more appropriate environment. She also pointed out that had she not attempted to
resuscitate the man, she could have left herself and the trust open to
charges of professional negligence.

But what about the rib she broke?

Ellen shrugged. Small price to pay.

Unfortunately, the man didn't agree with her and wasted no time in
engaging the services of a lawyer.

She was angry. Furious. How dare he? How dare they? Disgusted with
the ingratitude of human nature, she would have quit, except she had
bills to pay, and nobody hires a nurse who is currently being sued for
incompetence.

Which was the reason she transferred to nightshift in one of the
quieter departments of the hospital.

3.

Five minutes past three. The woman stopped at the double doors that
lead into the maternity unit. She had been there during visiting hours
less than two weeks ago, pretending to read the flyers on the notice board,
actually watching the numeric keypad that would open the doors. Half a
dozen members of staff had entered the unit during the ten minutes she
had hovered; only one of them had bothered angling their hand to hide
the code.

One Zero Six Six.

She tapped it in quickly. There was a tiny click as the electromagnet
that controlled the lock disengaged.

4.

Ellen yawned, coughed quietly into her hand. Of the ten beds, only
eight were currently occupied. Sketched onto the whiteboard behind her
was the diagrammatic layout of the unit; the names of each individual
patient directly adjacent to the corresponding room number. Four names
were written in red felt tip; they were ones that the consultant hoped to
discharge in the morning.

She wasn't supposed to be alone. The powers that be had set the
current staffing levels at one auxiliary and one staff nurse, but
the auxiliary had phoned in sick at ten minutes past six. Something
about having stomach ‘flu. No replacement could be found at such short
notice. Ellen didn't mind. There was no heavy lifting, and none of the
patients were that sick. They were all strong enough to attend to their
own basic care, and once she had finished the night time medicine
round, she could spend half the night doing paperwork and the other half
secretly reading her Dan Brown novel.

Officially, the unit was part of the Maternity Wing, even though all
the action – the birthing suites, the crèche, the pre-admission assessment
clinics – took place upstairs. The unit was called the South Wing, and it
was used primarily as a short stay ward for new mothers who needed just
a couple of extra days to recover, usually because they had lost enough
blood while giving birth to necessitate a blood transfusion. The four
planned discharges had all received transfusions in the past twenty four
hours, and once their blood results confirmed they were fit, they would
all be sent home with their little bundles of joy in tow.

Six minutes past three. Ellen yawned again, a real chin-strainer that
left the muscles of her jaw feeling like a rubber band that had been
stretched far enough to lose its elasticity. It was her fourth night in a row,
and she could feel exhaustion digging its blunt claws into her soul. It was 
unnatural to be awake at this time; scientific research had proved that
nightshift workers were more prone to kidney problems, strokes, heart
attacks and cancer, not to mention the old favourites: nervous breakdowns and suicide. She found it vaguely ironic that some of the people
most likely to suffer ill-health as a result of continuous night-shifts were
those in the medical profession.

Coffee time.

In the tiny kitchen was a tiny kettle, and in the cupboard over the sink
was a selection of tins. Teabags, sugar, coffee whitener. Some out-of-date
skimmed milk in the fridge. The tin that usually held the coffee was
empty. . . well, almost empty. Some sticky black residue was caked at the
bottom, the remains of a thousand different jars of instant. Ellen tried
scraping at it with a teaspoon without success. Probably just as well.

Bloody dayshift, she thought. They could have at least left me something to drink. She checked the fridge again, hoping to spot a previously
unnoticed carton of Ben and Jerry's. No such luck. All there was was the
skimmed milk. She lifted the carton to her nose and inhaled: nasty.

Down the sink it went.

There were vending machines downstairs. Crisps, chocolate. Coffee.

Cans of Coke. Even – praise Jesus – a Pot Noodle.

She shouldn't leave the unit.

Yeah, but she shouldn't be on duty alone, either.

She would only be gone five minutes. She could nip to the toilet as
well; her bladder had been pressing for the last hour. Kill two birds with
one stone. It wouldn't matter. If any of the patients needed anything they
could hang on for a few seconds.

Back out to the nurses' station, one quick dial of the phone. When she
spoke, her voice was low. No point waking people up. ‘Joyce? Yeah, it's
Ellen… it's like Siberia down here. I'm just nipping downstairs to get a
drink. The sods never left me any coffee. . . five minutes, alright?'

Alright.

5.

There was a linen cupboard just inside the door to the unit. The
woman crouched in the darkness and listened.

Five minutes, the nurse had said.

A lot could happen in five minutes.

There was the clunk of the telephone receiver being placed into the
cradle. Seconds later it was followed by the soft shuffling squeal of rubber
soles. Four quick taps, one for each digit of the door code, then a minute
squeak of hinges.