“So, who’s coming to Ben’s party tomorrow? It’s at this haunted theatre, supposedly. I’ll be able to tell, I mean I am a very spiritual being. . .”
Oh, for God’s sake. I head out into the corridor, equipped with the only information I really need. Tasha is awake and at St. Mary’s Hospital, wherever that is. I need to go and see her. I march away from the studios and back towards the foyer.
Jess isn’t here yet. I fumble for my phone (which, to be quite honest, gives me the heebie jeebies now, but I can’t afford to replace it) and start to text her. I’m only halfway through a message when she appears in front of me.
“Jess!”
“Woah, hi.” She looks down at her arm and I realize I’ve grabbed her.
“Sorry,” I grimace, unclenching my fingers.
“Has something happened?”
“Yes!” Her face tenses and I rush to explain, “Nothing bad, but yes, something has happened.” She listens carefully, rolling her eyes as I recount Jasmine’s nasty speech.
“Why would that horror bag go to visit Tasha?” she says when I finish.
“I dunno, I wondered that too.” Just so she could brag about it? Guilt? Or for a more sinister reason?
“Well, let’s keep an eye on her, shall we? Anyway, back to Tasha: if she’s just woken up, I bet she’ll still be in ICU.”
“What’s ICU?” I ask.
“The Intensive Care Unit.” Jess glances at her watch. “Visiting used to be six to eight in the evening. It’s probably the same.”
“How do you know that?” Jess shrugs so I tap the details into Google and see that she’s right. “I thought you could just go at any time?”
“No, some wards have certain hours. Do you reckon they’ll let us in to see her?”
“Who knows? It’s worth a try though, right? Maybe she saw something when she was attacked.”
Jess nods. “Let me just run back to the library and tell Mum we’re going to the cinema or something; I don’t want her worrying.”
“OK.” As she runs back towards the library, I feel a seed of unease start to bloom. I don’t like lying to Ruth after everything that has happened, especially if it gets Jess more involved in whatever the hell is going on. I start to go after her, but when I reach the library she is already shutting the door behind her.
“Done.” She smiles, linking her arm through mine. “C’mon. Let’s go and get you some answers.”
A tall – well, actually not that tall for London, but huge by County Kilkenny standards – building stands in front of us. It makes me feel depressed just looking at it.
“I know Jasmine is a proper snob, but I see what she means. It’s kind of a dump.”
“Yeah, it is a bit grim from the outside, I guess,” Jess agrees. “Inside’s not bad, though, and the staff are amazing. Jasmine clearly doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Anyway, all the Royals have their babies here.”
“Seriously?” I follow her around the side and we duck under the small blue porch at the main entrance. It drizzled all the way here and I refused point blank to get on the Tube, making poor Jess walk. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“Mum was in here for a bit.”
“Oh, God, Jess I’m sorry!”
“Don’t be silly.” She waves a hand and her nail polish sparkles in the dim light under the scaffold, all silver and gold glitter. “It was a while ago. In fact, it was when Kate Middleton was in having the second kid. Or maybe the third one, I can’t keep up. Didn’t get to see her though. Mum’s got epilepsy and sometimes her medication can interfere with it and cause fits, but she’s been stable for a while now.”
“That’s good,” I reply. Wow, profound of me.
“Yeah.” Jess consults her watch. “So, ten past six – you ready to give it a go?”
I hold up the shopping bag crammed with sweets and trashy magazines. “Yep.”
We enter through the sliding glass doors and approach a curving reception desk. A large, formidable woman sits behind a computer. She completely ignores me.
“Um, hi.” Nothing. I clear my throat nervously and she looks over the top of her glasses. “Excuse me, I’m looking for the ICU. Please.”
“Ninth floor,” she barks, and I’m invisible again.
“Ninth floor,” I roll my eyes and repeat to Jess.
The hospital is bustling with people walking in and out of different doors, some chatting, some grim-faced and sobbing, others making earnest phone calls. I’ve never really been in hospital. There was that time my cousin tried to pick me up when I was a toddler. He dropped me straight on my head and split my eyebrow open. I don’t remember it at all, but it’s gone down in family history and we take a photo to recreate it every year. Families are weird.
We walk towards the lifts and a little kid presses the button excitedly. I smile and let my attention wander as we wait. My gaze snags on a slim figure in a baseball cap, leaning against the wall behind us, watching me. His (or is it her? Don’t assume gender, Niamh) face is in shadow, so I can’t make out their features, though I can feel the piercing gaze from here. I nudge Jess.
“Don’t look now, but that person in the hat is giving me the creeps.” To her credit, Jess does a half decent job of not looking too conspicuous as she turns to look.
“Where?” she murmurs.
“Th. . .” The word dies in my throat as I look around. There’s no one behind us at all.
The kid in front of us cheers as the lift arrives. We shuffle in behind his family and Jess asks him to press our button. He beams.
I say quietly, “There was someone watching us.”
“You need some sleep.” Jess gives my arm a squeeze. “I’m sure they weren’t watching you. You’re just on edge.”
“Yeah.” Even to my own ears I sound pretty unconvinced. “Maybe.”
We emerge from the lift and approach yet another desk in silence. There’s a nurse behind this one and I’m glad to see she’s smiling as we approach.
“Can I help you?” she says. I wonder what it would be like to work here every day. I don’t think I’d be so cheerful.
“Hi, yes, we’re here to see Tasha.” She tilts her head to one side, smile frozen.
“Tasha?”
“Sorry, um Natasha. Natasha Moss.”
“Family?”
“No, just, er, friends. I’m on the drama course she was on, I heard she’d woken up and. . .”
“Oh.” Her smile has dropped completely. “You’re one of those.” She clearly met Jasmine yesterday; she hadn’t been lying about visiting, after all. “I’m not sure your visiting would be a good idea.”
“Please!” I plead. “I’ve been awful worried about her. I brought some magazines and stuff.” I brandish the bag and try for puppy dog eyes. They work on Daddy.
“All right,” she relents. “Just for a few minutes.
“Thank you! Erm, where is she?”
“Room 4, second door on the right.”
“Thanks a million.” I turn to Jess, who’s pumping antibacterial gel on to her hands from a dispenser on the wall. “Ready?”
“Yep.” She holds her hands in the air, like a surgeon about to go and operate. “You should do yours, too.” I follow her lead, rubbing the gel into my hands, wearing the plastic bag around my wrist like a bracelet.
Room 4 turns out to be a ward. The paper curtains are closed around most beds – I count six, altogether – but a couple are open and I can just about make out human forms under the starched white sheets. It’s deathly quiet, bar the odd mumble of families visiting loved ones inside the makeshift cubicles. A whiteboard on the far wall matches names to numbers, all scrawled in a marker on the verge of running out. I go and look at it and see that Natasha Moss has been allocated to cubicle five.
We pause outside her closed curtain. Jess is playing with her hair again.
“What’s up?” I whisper.
“I’ve never met Tasha. Maybe I should wait out here until you see how sh
e is?” she says awkwardly and I nod. Awkward is a new look on Jess.
“Um, hi, Tasha?” I call lightly through the curtain. No answer. “Tasha? Are you awake? It’s Niamh.”
“Niamh?” A faint voice croaks from behind the curtain and I take it as an invitation to find the gap and peek my head through. She is awake.
That’s about the best thing I can say for her.
“Hi.” I force myself to plaster a smile on. “I was so glad to hear you were awake! How are you feeling?”
“Not great.” She wheezes a laugh and pushes herself up to sitting. “Could you hand me another pillow?” I grab one from the nearby chair and give it to her. The bandages on her arms blend into the white pillowcase seamlessly and she takes it, tucking it behind her head. She winces at the movement. “Thanks. Sit down.”
I do.
“I . . . sorry.” She frowns at me. “My memory is all over the place. But I know you, right? You were the girl who spilt the Coke on me.”
Great.
“Er, yeah. It’s Niamh. Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be daft, least of my worries, wasn’t it?” She tries for a smile but her bottom lip is split and she winces as it pulls at the delicate skin. “I remember the name. Did you lend me the top I was wearing?”
“Yeah, that was me!” If she remembers that, maybe she could help after all.
“They took it off me when I arrived. The nurse said she left it here but she can’t find it now. Sorry. I can replace it when I get out, if you. . .”
I knew Jasmine was wearing my cardigan.
“Hello?” Jess’s head pops in through the curtains and suddenly I have two pairs of eyes on me. “Can I come in?”
“Er. . .”
“Sure, why not,” Tasha sighs. “Pull up a chair.”
“Oh, sorry, I don’t want to intrude. I’ll leave you to it.”
“No, no, stay,” says Tasha. “Sorry, my moods are a bit all over at the moment. I’m on a tonne of morphine.” Jess inches in and settles on the opposite side of the bed. “It’s not as good as they say it is, but I did wake up thinking I had a lion’s mane this morning.”
Jess starts to giggle and soon all three of us are smiling.
“Tasha, this is Jess,” I say. “Her mum works at the library in our building.”
Tasha’s smile vanishes and her face drains of blood. She was pale before, but now the scratches that drag from her temple into her hairline are stark, prominent red weals in otherwise porcelain skin. “The library?” she whispers.
“What’s wrong with the library?” I lean towards her and hesitate. Her right arm is broken, the bandages covering up a heavier plaster cast.
“It’s where he works,” Tasha whispers.
Jess sits bolt upright. “Who?”
“Him. That creepy guy I kept seeing around the drama school.” Tasha’s voice drips with fear and she fixes me with pupils that have retracted to tiny black dots. “Wait. You said your name was Niamh.”
“Yes?” Something is crawling under my skin as she looks at me with real terror.
“I knew I remembered your name.” Her voice is low now, small and quiet in the sterile room. “Niamh. That’s what he said.”
She raises a trembling finger and points it at me, and for the first time I notice her bare, bloody nail beds, where the nails have been ripped away. “The guy from the library. I could smell him. Kind of woody . . . mossy, almost.” She pauses, takes a deep, gulping breath. “He followed me. He grabbed me by your top and whispered your name in my ear. Right before he attacked me.”
“Will? He was the one who attacked you?”
I can tell Jess is trying to sound shocked, but neither of us are, not really. After getting locked in that horrible little room yesterday, it wasn’t going to take much to convince us he was the one responsible for all these attacks.
“Yeah.” Tasha nods, wincing in pain. “I went into the library earlier that day and then I kept seeing him around the building.” She shudders and pulls the crisp, white sheet tighter to her body before carrying on. “I didn’t really think anything of it, just thought he was on another course or something. But then I noticed him again, and again.” She frowns with the effort of remembering. “I went to a dance class. I was walking home after, and that’s when. . .”
“It’s OK, you don’t have to talk about it.”
“No,” she interrupts me. “I do. There have been more attacks, haven’t there? Since me, I mean.”
“Err. . .”
“How many?”
“Two.” I admit. “A girl at a Tube station, her face was. . .” I gesture weakly to the red score lines engraved in her face. “Well, y’know. And then me, yesterday.” I fill her in on the details of my own encounter and she watches me with wide eyes, barely blinking.
“The girl at the Tube,” Tasha says slowly. “How do you know about her face?”
“I was there.” The words barely make a sound in the room, but I swear if she was a cartoon character, a big, yellow lightbulb would be springing out of the air above Tasha’s head right now.
“So, let me get this straight.” Tasha uses her good hand to tick off the fingers on her bad one and I try not to grimace at the sight of her mangled nail beds. “First, you swap rooms with a girl on our course and she dies – is murdered – minutes later. Then you lend me your top and I’m attacked and put in hospital. You get on the Tube and a girl is mauled. And finally, you’re ambushed in the library where this guy, Will, works.”
“Yeah,” I mumble.
“Niamh, what did the other girls look like?”
“Um.” I mumble again. My shoes are suddenly pretty interesting.
“They looked like you,” Jess supplies quietly. “Or Niamh. Long, straight, dark brown hair, tall. I’d easily confuse them in the dark.”
“Enough!” I say. “I know, I know, the victims all look like me, but I’m not the link here.” Jess and Tasha exchange a meaningful glance and frustration pours out of me. “I’m not! Believe what you want, but the first attack happened two weeks before I was even in the country. Check the newspapers if you don’t believe me!”
“Niamh, it’s OK, we believe you.” Jess’s voice is soothing, like she’s talking to a little kid. It would usually annoy me but I’m too tired to be annoyed. Tasha is looking exhausted, and I feel guilty.
“I’m sorry,” I say. They glance at one another as I make eye contact with them both, try to prove I’m not a total psycho.
“Don’t be sorry.” Tasha speaks gently. “It’s not us who should be sorry.”
“She’s right.” Jess leans over the bed, takes Tasha’s free hand and offers me her other one. I take it. A hot tear runs down my cheek. “If it is Will, we can do something about it. We’ll go to the police, tell that detective everything we know. Tasha can identify him as the one who attacked her.”
She squeezes my hand. “Maybe we can stop him before he does it again.”
“Yeah.” I squeeze her hand back, my fear slowly retreating. I look Tasha in the eye and there’s a glimmer of hope reflected there. “Yeah, maybe we can.”
“I think we’ve gone the wrong way.”
“Really, you think?” Jess mutters sarcastically. She looks around at the maze of corridors. “I’ve never been down here before. We must’ve taken a wrong turn when we left Tasha’s ward.”
I hang back as she wanders back down the passageway towards a multicoloured sign. We’re in a much older part of the hospital here, the floor chipped and dirty brown, the lower walls lined with that shiny green tile you sometimes see in public toilets – or in a Tube station, I realize. I let my eyes drift along the old door frames, each one a large arch with a little Art Deco plinth on the top. The whole place is saturated with a decaying air of grandeur and sadness ... definitely sadness.
“Back this way, I think.” Jess is only a few steps away but her voice echoes like we’re at opposite ends of a cavern. I follow her, aware of how quiet it is, our footsteps f
alling into a steady rhythm when I catch up. “We’re going straight back to the police station, right?”
“Right,” I reply, distracted by the wooden plaques hung above various entrances. They’re all carved with names, the gold paint faded, a ghost of its former glory. We pass the Sir Lawrence Fortescue Ward, the Lady Pembroke Neonatal Unit, the Jane Alsop Children’s Unit.
“Wait.” I stop dead.
“What’s up?” Jess follows my gaze and her eyes clear with comprehension. “Jane Alsop, no way! She was that rich girl whose family owned the factory – the girl who died. Geoffrey told us about her.”
I nod slowly. “The one I dress up as.”
“I wonder why the unit was named after her? They must’ve been real high society types.”
“Why?”
“You had to donate a load of money to have somewhere like this named after you, especially back when this was built.”
“When was that?”
Jess points at the Art Deco arch I spotted earlier. “That’s around 1900 or so.”
“That’s too late,” I mutter. “Geoffrey said Jane died in 1838. This would be almost seventy years later.”
Jess shrugs. “Maybe her family organized it? A remembrance thing? Better than those weird brooches we—”
I hold up one hand. “Yep, I remember. Thanks.”
“Or maybe another, later relative had the same name? Or she had a memorial unit in an older building and they kept the name when they moved to this one?”
“I guess.” I feel a pinprick of, I don’t know, something. I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems like we got lost this way on purpose. “Jess, do you, ah. . .”
“Do I what?”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
Jess hoots a laugh and links my arm to pull me gently onwards. “Come on. We want to get to the station before Detective Moran finishes for the night.”
I give myself a little shake. She’s right; we need to see Detective Moran and tell him what we know. I let Jess pull me back down the corridor and over the threshold into the newer building, leaving the spectres in the dark.
Last One To Die Page 10
