Ward 19 (A Parva Corcoran Suspense Thriller)

by John L. Probert

  Ward 19

  John Llewellyn Probert

  © John Llewellyn Probert 2012

  John Llewellyn Probert has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Extract by Scott Griffin

  1

  There are a million different ways to die. Tricia Leonard, staff nurse in the emergency department of St Margaret’s Hospital, knew many of them from the three years she had spent working there. She had seen young men brought in having bled so much from road traffic accidents that not even the fastest expert surgery could save them. She had seen young women who had been knifed by abusive husbands finally dragging themselves along three days after the actual injury, when the pain from their punctured guts leaking into their insides could be borne no longer.

  She had seen old men die of strokes, and young men too - their last words the feeble mumbles of those with no control over their lips and tongue. She had seen deaths from heart attacks and seizures, from burns caused by fire and by chemicals, from inhalation of toxic gases and from the most mundane of household accidents.

  None of what she had seen, however, could have prepared her for her own death that Thursday evening.

  Admittedly she was young, and unless faced with it the last thing the young wish to be reminded of is their own mortality. She was also late, and nothing was more distracting than leaving work half an hour after you were supposed to, especially when your boyfriend had told you that this was the last time he was going to wait more than a quarter of an hour at the restaurant he had booked.

  Tricia strode down the exit corridor and past the ambulance bay, her head down, cursing Sister Evans for keeping her longer just because Wendy bloody Jennings hadn’t turned up for the night shift. She sniffed. Wendy was always late, and it was always because of trouble with the latest of Wendy’s never-ending stream of boyfriends. Well, this was the last time she was going to agree to cover, never mind what that old Welsh dragon said. Tricia had been late leaving work every night this week because of Wendy’s prolonged and increasingly crazy bedroom sessions (which the girl insisted on boasting about in the changing room as they swapped over shifts) and Tricia’s Richard was less than pleased about it - hence tonight’s ultimatum.

  One more late appearance and she was going to have to seriously reconsider her position in their relationship, he had said, in the kind of voice that had made her wonder why she was bothering in the first place. But he was better than nothing, she thought, and that was what she would be left with if she didn’t get a bloody move on.

  The glass doors labelled ‘Staff Exit Only’ slid noiselessly apart only for her to find the daytime staff car park in darkness. Tricia groaned. Works was supposed to have fixed the lighting three days ago, especially after all that fuss about what had happened to one of the secretaries last week.

  Tricia stood at the exit, suffused by the neon glow of the hospital lights. Their startling brightness only made the darkness beyond seem all the blacker. She took out her mobile, thinking for a minute that perhaps she could text Richard, apologise profusely for being late again, offer him the prospect of something really filthy in bed and perhaps persuade him to come and pick her up. Then she remembered she’d run out of both minutes and texts for the month and that the phone was next to useless. So much for modern technology coming to the rescue, she thought, as she slid it back inside her handbag.

  She jumped as two porters pushed past her, wheeling one of the rectangular metal boxes that she knew would contain the body of someone recently deceased. The white sheet draped over the white painted aluminium fooled no one, or at least no one who worked there. The two men made a left turn and began to trundle their burden past the parked ambulances and over to the mortuary. Tricia smirked. In most hospitals the place where the dead were taken wasn’t signposted, and St Margaret’s was no exception. Anyone who needed to know its location was already aware, or was soon told.

  It was also emphasised that they shouldn’t broadcast that knowledge, so to avoid problems with the sorts of weird people who liked to hang around them. In most places, because of the stigma attached to it, staff usually referred to the mortuary by an appropriate nickname. At St Margaret’s it was Ward 19. There were eighteen actual wards for living patients and, as the mortuary was the next step for a certain percentage of them, some wag had deemed it only fitting to continue with the numerical labelling. The nickname had stuck.

  Right, said Tricia to herself, that’s quite enough stalling. Time to get to your car or there’ll be no nice warm boyfriend to keep away the chills tonight. She took a deep breath and stepped out onto the tarmac.

  All that gossip and speculation about that secretary not falling but being attacked was probably rubbish anyway, Tricia thought as she made for her car. At this time it would probably be the only one parked where she had left it and she crossed her fingers that security hadn’t locked the gates like they sometimes did.

  That girl probably tripped and fell, she kept saying to herself as she crossed the car park. She probably hit her head on the concrete and died that way.

  Tricia was about halfway there, the outline of her little Ford Fiesta in sight, when she thought she heard a noise.

  She stopped and looked around her. The hospital staff exit she had just come from looked miles away now, a distant oasis in the desert of darkness in which she now found herself.

  There it was again, a hollow, scraping noise that she could just make out over the thumping of her own heartbeat.

  Well don’t just stand still, girl, Tricia could hear her late mother saying in the tones she had always used to berate her daughter. She began to walk faster. She was almost at her car when she heard the noise again, coming from just to her left.

  Screw this, she thought. If it’s someone trying to have a laugh I’ll make sure they get bloody reported for this tomorrow. She took out her phone that, while useless for communication, could still be used as a pretty good torch.

  “Fuck off whoever you are,” she said, pointing the pale blue beam in the direction of the scraping sounds.

  From the top of the skip - which was now illuminated by the cold glow of her phone - a blue-black rat emerged, gave an indignant squeal at having been thrust so rudely into the spotlight and plopped back into the rubbish where it had plainly been having such a good time.

  Tricia gasped a sigh of relief and was about to snap the phone shut when a hand tightly gripped her wrist.

  She tried to cry out but her assailant was too fast, covering her mouth with a swab that smelled sweet and had her head reeling before she had a chance to fight back. “Don’t worry.” The voice that whispered in her ear was so guttural that she could barely make out what it was saying. “You’ll be awake again soon. I need you awake.” Then her head was swimming, she felt sick and after that, for a while, she felt nothing. There are a million different ways to die. The way in which Tricia Leonard met her end was, slow, painful and very prolonged.

  2

  Parva Corcoran always wore black. Good black, mind you. Fashionable black. Stylish black. The suit she was wearing this morning for example, while unostentatious, was well cut and showed off her tiny slim figure to its best advantage. Her shoes were flat heeled because she had never wanted to give the impression to her superiors, or those around whom she worked, that she was
trying artificially to create an aura of superiority.

  One of her bosses had suggested to her before she had taken on the job that, according to him, if she was a bit taller it might ‘help cultivate respect’. She had replied as politely as possible (it had been more difficult to cover up the tired smile that went with it), that if she wasn’t up to the job no one would respect her anyway, and an added few inches wasn’t going to make much difference.

  Her shoes today were a pair of last season’s Manolo Blahniks. Her sister had given them to her as a birthday present and right now they were Parva’s favourites. As a consequence she always made a point of wearing them in situations where she might feel a bit uneasy. Like post mortems.

  Dr David Morton, the pathologist conducting the morning’s examination, was new, or at least Parva hadn’t seen him before. He eyed her with a slight trace of bemusement as he went about his business, probably wondering why CID had sent the tiny girl with dark hair tied back in a ponytail to record his findings. Well, she could put him straight quickly enough if he asked.

  “As you can see,” he said as he had pulled back the sheet, “what we have here is a twenty-two year-old girl, name of...” he was about to consult his records when Parva filled in the missing details for him.

  “Patricia Leonard,” she said, “staff nurse at St Margaret’s for three years. Left her department at around nine thirty on Thursday evening...”

  “...and wasn’t seen again until late on Friday night when her body was found unceremoniously dumped close to where she was presumably abducted.” Dr Morton examined his instrument tray.

  “Presumably,” Parva said, her face betraying not a hint of emotion as she beheld the body of the young girl lying on the cold metal.

  “She obviously used to be pretty,” said Morton with a grimace.

  “I just need your factual observations, doctor,” Parva replied.

  “Do you?” said Morton with a scowl. “Well, you may be used to working on weekends, Miss Corcoran, but I don’t enjoy having to do this kind of thing on a Saturday morning, particularly when I’ve promised a blood oath to take my two lads to football practice.” He pointed at the body stretched out before them. “The officer who called me this morning didn’t seem to appreciate that either. Are all of you people born with the same lack of social skills or do they teach you it in training school?”

  “I’m not police,” said Parva quietly but firmly. “I told you I’m...”

  “...I know, I know,” Morton looked as exasperated as he sounded. “You’re another police consultant cluttering up the chain of command.”

  “I’ve already explained.” Parva knew the best way to handle this sort of situation was to remain calm, but it wasn’t always easy. “I’m advising on cases that display characteristics suggestive of the work of a highly intelligent killer. I also explained that I hold a medical degree, have received training in pathology up to a point but not sufficient to perform my own examinations.”

  “So why not finish your training?”

  It was no secret. In fact it was the reason she was in her current job, for better or worse. Parva just preferred it if not everyone knew. She gave Morton a steely look. “I was training under Professor Edmund Cottingham,” she said.

  It took a moment for that to register. Then it was all Morton could do to stop his mouth from hanging open in astonishment. “I remember that,” he said. “My God - you were training under him when all of that was going on?” Parva nodded. “And you suspected nothing?”

  Parva shook her head. “He was...and is...a very clever man, Dr Morton. Once everything was over CID offered me a position. I think they were hoping that some of his influence, possibly even some of his thought processes, might have rubbed off on me. Now, can we get on with this?”

  Morton looked down at the torn body on the table. “Sorry, yes...yes of course.” He looked back at Parva, obviously itching to ask something else. “Isn’t he in Broadmoor now, or one of those sorts of places?” he said.

  “One of those ‘sorts of places’, yes,” she said, allowing herself her first smile of the morning. She rapped a blood-free corner of the post mortem table. It resonated with a metallic clang. “Shall we get on with this so your boys can perhaps get to some of their football practice?”

  Morton looked down at the body of Tricia Leonard, naked, cold and bloodless. The deep stab wound in the left side of her throat had seen to that. “Death appears to have been by a deep penetrative injury to the left side of the throat.” He placed the tip of a gloved finger in the wound. “Judging by the skin edges I would suggest that the injury was caused by a very sharp pointed instrument such as a kitchen knife, or even a scalpel. The site, size and position of the wound, combined with the absence of any other obvious severe injury, suggests the killer had sufficient medical knowledge to know to go for the carotid artery, and that the incision of one would be sufficient to exsanguinate the patient. A right-handed individual coming from behind could have caused the wound but of course they would have needed to know exactly where to stab without looking. My guess is it’s far more likely that this wound was inflicted deliberately with the assailant coming from the front, possibly even with the victim lying on a surface like this. Now, as to these other external injuries...”

  Morton paused. As well he might, Parva thought. Because it was the presence of those ‘other external injuries’ that was Parva’s reason for being there. That and the fact the previous victim had had them. Morton looked up at her. “I’m not quite sure how to describe this,” he said.

  “Just say what you see,” she said.

  Morton took a breath. “Sections of skin have been taken full thickness from over the patient’s right cheek, right breast and left flank,” he said, taking a steel rule from the instrument tray. “Dissection has been to a depth of three millimetres and, owing to the slim nature of the subject, in most areas this has been sufficient to reveal the muscle tissue beneath.” He stopped and looked at Parva. “She looks like off cuts of cloth once a tailor has finished with them.”

  Parva nodded. The other girl had been the same, except that different areas of skin had been taken. She had also been killed by a penetrating injury to the left carotid artery. “Once you’ve finished can you let me have a copy of the transcription of your full report?” she said.

  “Of course,” said Morton, picking up his scalpel and preparing to make an incision over the girl’s sternum. “Aren’t you going to stay for the rest?”

  Parva shook her head. “I’ve a feeling you’re not going to find anything else very interesting, but if you do, you’ve got my number.”

  3

  “Everyone employed here considers themselves very fortunate to work at St Margaret’s.”

  Parva stifled another threatening burst of indigestion as she paid polite attention to the man seated on the other side of the desk. Breakfast had not been kind to her and she shouldn’t really have been surprised. None of the hospital canteens she’d experienced had ever been repositories of haute cuisine and the scrambled eggs she had quickly forced down had been distinctly off yellow.

  Not that the diatribe from Dr Malcolm Williams, acting Head of Medicine, was helping. She had hoped the food would fortify her for this unnecessary meeting, where she knew that all she would hear would be the insistence that she and the police clear up ‘this little matter’ as quickly as possible.

  “We can’t shut down a hospital, you know.” Williams’ affected air of superiority did little for Parva. His dark suit with the pale blue pinstripe made him look more like a game show host than a head of department.

  “I can assure you that we are doing everything in our power to identify the perpetrator. I know it’s a huge inconvenience having even a small area of the hospital roped off while forensics go about their work so we do appreciate you and your staff’s patience.”

  “Just as long as they get on with it,” he said, getting to his feet. He crossed the room and gazed out of his office wind
ow. In the fields beyond one of the cows that dotted them lifted it head and gazed back at him. “Like I said, St Margaret’s has always had an excellent reputation and some of the people we have on our staff are world class at what they do. I don’t want them to be scared off by any of this.”

  “Hopefully they’ll be intelligent enough to realise that this is the kind of thing that could happen anywhere,” Parva replied, trying to sound reassuring.

  “Yes it could, so why does it have to bloody well happen here?” Williams said indignantly. “Do you know how many major hospitals in the United Kingdom exist out in the country like this, just a few miles away from a major city?”

  Parva knew all too well. “Not many,” she said.

  Williams nodded. “Exactly. And the very thing that will have attracted many of our staff to work here may well help contribute to them leaving in droves. It’s one thing to have a killer on the loose in an urban metropolis. But out here we’re much more isolated.” Williams paused. “Plus it’s much more likely that the killer could be...one of us.”

  “It’s one of the many possibilities we’re considering at the moment,” said Parva, not wanting to admit for now that she thought it was highly likely. “So I hope you will continue to assist us in our enquiries, and that you will encourage all your staff to do so as well.”

  Williams nodded. “Of course,” he said, turning back to the window. “Look out there,” he said. “It’s just beautiful, and once the contractors move in to demolish those old outbuildings it will look even better.”

  Parva joined him to see what he was talking about. “I don’t recall the mention of any ‘outbuildings’ on the hospital plans we were given,” she said.

  “Probably because they’re not long for this world,” said Williams with a wry smile. He pointed to the left. “See over there?”

  Parva squinted and gradually, as she looked beyond the branches, she realised she could see patches of crumbling red brick, just discernible through the foliage.“They don’t look too much of an eyesore to me,” she said.