In the Still of the Night

by Charlotte Lamb

  Seven! She should have been up an hour ago. She slid out of bed and went into her own en-suite bathroom, one of the few changes they had made to the house over the past few years. She had insisted on it so that she should not disturb her mother when she got up at crack of dawn.

  She got downstairs as Harriet was making coffee. ‘What are you doing up?’ demanded Harriet and Annie grinned at her.

  ‘Going to work.’

  ‘Oh, no, you’re not!’

  Annie opened her mouth to argue but a loud ring on the doorbell made her jump.

  ‘Sean! He’s giving me a lift!’ Harriet said, and went to let him in. Seeing Annie, he shook his head at her impatiently.

  ‘Go back to bed. I’ve rewritten today’s scenes to cut you out. I want you to stay quietly at home. Don’t brood over Derek. You’ll never have to worry about Derek again.’

  Annie gave him an agitated look. ‘What have you done? You don’t know him – he can be vindictive, really nasty. He’s full of resentment because he was a star, now he’s just a bit player and …’

  ‘That’s not your fault,’ Harriet said furiously, immediately up in arms in defence of her, as she always was with any of the team who worked for her. Any maternal instincts Harriet possessed came out in the way she took care of the people she worked with, and sometimes Annie had resented the mothering bossiness. Perhaps because she had a powerful mother at home, or simply because she had a deep instinct of her own – the instinct to be free to make her own decisions, fight her own wars.

  Harriet’s eyes blazed. ‘In fact, if it wasn’t for you he wouldn’t be working at all. Don’t you worry about Derek, you just stay in bed and get plenty of rest. When does your cleaner get here? She can take care of you.’

  Not answering that, Annie asked Sean, ‘But what did you mean – I’ll never have to worry about Derek again?’

  Those level, cool eyes of his met her stare without blinking. Did all policemen have those observing, distancing eyes? Annie wondered. Sean seemed to stand off from life, watching it, all the time. She knew he had few real friends among the actors in the team, although they seemed to like him well enough. Maybe that was because he was a writer, used to working alone, but she had learnt from working in the series that policemen tended not to have friends outside their work; it could lead to problems. A policeman needed to be prepared to put up with unpopularity, to be something of a loner.

  ‘I’m writing Derek out of the script. I’m going to see Billy Grenaby for lunch this week – I’ll talk to him then and get his agreement.’

  Harriet stiffened. ‘I don’t recall you discussing it with me.’

  ‘I was going to do that today,’ Sean quickly said, realising he had stepped on her toes. Harriet was fiercely possessive of anything to do with the series. Although Sean wrote the scripts, Harriet regarded the series as her property, not his. If they fell out she could always get another writer to carry on; her position in the company was stronger than his, her eyes reminded him.

  ‘Well, good, don’t forget to do that,’ she sarcastically said.

  Annie was conscious of the little battle between them and with her usual dislike of scenes, hurriedly said, to distract them both, ‘But I want to visit my mother today, I can’t stay at home all day.’

  She had rung the hospital a few minutes ago, from her bedroom, and been told that Trudie was much better, but she had picked up, as Harriet had done last night, something odd in the ward sister’s manner; things were not being said, questions not being answered entirely frankly. Annie was afraid the hospital were hiding something about her mother’s condition; she wanted to see for herself.

  Harriet frowned uncertainly. ‘Take a taxi there and back, but don’t stay too long.’

  There she goes again – ordering me around, Annie thought resentfully. I get pretty tired of it.

  But she hid the reaction because she knew in her heart that Harriet was trying to protect her, so she smiled, nodded like an obedient child. ‘OK.’ She was a good actress; she could always hide behind the mask of whatever character she was playing. She fooled Harriet now. Harriet smiled approval at her.

  ‘Good girl.’

  Good girl, thought Annie, her teeth grinding together. Good girl? How old does she think I am? I’ve spent most of my life being manipulated and ordered around by my mother, now it’s Harriet doing it, and, however good their intentions, I wish to God they would stop it!

  She felt Sean watching her, his expression wry, as if he had picked up on her secret feelings. She lowered her eyelashes and tried to look blank.

  Looking at her watch, Harriet groaned. ‘Got to rush! See you later. Come on, Sean, we must go now.’

  Annie didn’t go back to bed; she ate a boiled egg and toast for breakfast, drank orange juice and then coffee, sitting at the red and white gingham covered table by the window in the kitchen overlooking the long back garden with the bird table right outside, on which a few brown sparrows industriously pecked at the crumbs of her toast which she had sprinkled there.

  She heard Mrs Singh, who lived in the house on the right, singing tunelessly to her radio as she got her two sons off to school. Trudie rarely talked to any of their neighbours except Mr Harris, who had lived across the street for twenty-five years. Trudie had always believed in keeping herself to herself. When they still had the shop that hadn’t mattered; Trudie talked to people all day long in the shop. Since she stopped working, though, she must often have been lonely, yet she still did not encourage any of the neighbours to call.

  Annie got up, ran the tap over the dishes, slid them into the dishwasher for Tracy to deal with later, and was about to order a taxi when the phone began to ring.

  Almost tripping herself up in her haste, she ran to answer. ‘Hello?

  ‘Annie?’ The voice was husky and uncertain, but she knew it instantly, her heart skidding.

  ‘Johnny?’ She had been waiting for him to ring; she had thought he might ring last night, had been listening for the phone all the time, yet now that he had she was overtaken by shock and surprise, as if she had never quite believed he really had come back to her. ‘Is it really you?’

  He was silent for a second, then said, ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  Her heart lifted in happiness. ‘I thought you might ring last night, Johnny.’

  ‘I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure you would want to …’ He broke off.

  ‘Want to what?’ she whispered.

  ‘Get involved.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have given you my number if I hadn’t wanted to see you, Johnny!’

  His voice deepened. ‘Annie … aren’t you working today? I mean … I thought you began very early in the morning. I rang on the off-chance, thought I’d leave a message on your answerphone if you weren’t at home.’

  ‘I’m taking a day off, I was just going to visit my mother in hospital.’

  ‘I expect you’re very busy, but if you had time I’d like to see you, Annie – we didn’t have a chance to talk properly yesterday.’

  ‘I haven’t got any plans for the rest of the day,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just going to take a taxi to the hospital and back, then I’ll be free.’

  ‘I could collect you from the hospital – what time will you leave there, do you think?’

  ‘Around ten-thirty, I expect. I never stay long. Poor darling, she often doesn’t know me. And it tires her, too much talking.’

  Johnny was silent. She felt his anger and sighed. He was still brooding over the discovery that her mother had kept them apart all this time – and Annie knew how he felt, only too well. She had always been able to sense what Johnny was feeling. Right from the beginning, they had shown their secret selves to each other, the passion hidden inside them.

  ‘I’ll wait for you in the car park, at ten-thirty, then,’ Johnny said, and rang off.

  When he rang off, she put a call through to a taxi firm and was waiting for the cab to arrive when her cleaner unlocked the front door and paused, looking sur
prised to see her.

  ‘Thought you were working today. Nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘No, I’m just taking a day off – I’m going to the hospital to see my mother.’

  ‘Give her my best wishes,’ Tracy said, studying Annie in her white jeans, white shirt and dark blue sweater. She hadn’t put on much make-up, just a light film of foundation and a pale pink lipstick. Annie wore so much make-up when she was filming that she preferred to leave it off whenever she could. ‘Are you sure you’re well enough to go out? You’re very pale.’

  ‘I’m naturally pale,’ Annie said drily. ‘I’m a washed-out blonde, that’s what a critic wrote in one of the tabloids, anyway. He said I was an anaemic, washed-out blonde with all the sex appeal of a piece of English cheese.’

  ‘Why are they always so vicious?’

  Annie gave her a wry look. ‘It’s what they get paid for. If they’re too complimentary they get fired. Oh, here’s my taxi! See you, Tracy.’

  When she got to the hospital, she found her mother still drowsy, but Trudie’s hand felt towards her across the counterpane and Annie covered it with her own, bent to kiss her mother. ‘How do you feel today?’

  ‘I’m fine. Take me home, Annie. I want to go home, I don’t like it here.’ The fingers under Annie’s coiled round, clutched, like ivy strangling a tree, the short nails dug into her flesh, making her start with a gasp. ‘Take me home,’ Trudie wailed. ‘They’re trying to kill me here, they tried last night, they injected me with something that made me throw up, and I had pains in my chest, I nearly died, ask them, ask them, they know it’s true. I nearly died last night, and it was the injection that did it.’

  Annie sat in the sister’s office and watched the long ward through the glass window. She could see her mother’s bed, the curtains pulled half-round it as the nurses attended to Trudie.

  ‘She’s convinced someone tried to kill her last night.’

  Today, the sister in charge was someone Annie hadn’t seen before, a tall, graceful young woman with long, silky brown hair plaited and then wreathed on top of her head in a coronet on which her white cap sat like a crown.

  Her brown eyes thoughtfully surveyed Annie, as if she was trying to make up her mind what to say in reply.

  At last she said in a quiet, level voice, ‘Someone nearly did kill her.’

  ‘What?’ Annie sat up in the chair, her eyes wide open in shock. ‘You’re kidding!’ When she had told the other woman that her mother believed someone had tried to kill her Annie had not suspected for an instant that it might be true. She had assumed that Trudie was dramatising, again, half inventing, half elaborating what had really happened to her.

  ‘We don’t know if it was an accident or a deliberate mistake, but someone gave her an injection of digitalin.’

  Annie’s brows met. ‘I’ve heard of that – isn’t it used for heart problems?’

  ‘It is, yes, it’s extracted from foxglove leaves, which, as you probably know, are highly poisonous. Like most drugs, it all depends on the dosage – given in a very small amount it can be useful as a heart stimulant, but if enough is given it can cause, as it did with your mother, vomiting and a disturbance in the heart rhythm. It was fortunate that the woman in the next bed saw your mother throwing up and rang for help. We were able to deal with it rapidly, and she hadn’t had a fatal dose. But it could have resulted in death if it hadn’t been dealt with quickly.’

  Worried and angry, Annie said, ‘My mother said a nurse gave her the injection.’

  ‘Yes, I know – or someone wearing a nurse’s uniform. But she’s so confused we can’t trust her description.’

  ‘But obviously, it has to be someone who works in the hospital. Who else could walk into a ward and inject a patient, not to mention have access to a poisonous drug, and know how much to administer?

  ‘We’re making enquiries, of course. All the nurses on duty on this floor have been seen, none of them admit to being in here when the injection must have been given. There was an emergency on the ward next door; a fire started in one of the treatment rooms – a patient, probably. It’s a male geriatric ward, and the men are always starting fires, it happens all the time. The two nurses on this ward ran to help in there, leaving this ward unattended, just for for a few minutes. During that time someone walked in here, injected your mother, and walked out again, but nobody saw who it was.’

  Angrily Annie broke out, ‘You have called the police, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course. They’re seeing everyone who was on the roster last night, but so far it’s all a bit of a mystery. It may be that someone made a genuine mistake, injected the wrong patient – there are patients on the ward who are having digitalin. That could be the explanation.’

  ‘Well, surely it must be easy to check that out!’

  ‘Not really. Having made such a terrible mistake, the nurse might be too scared to admit what she had done.’

  ‘Is any digitalin missing?’

  ‘That’s the odd thing – no, none at all. It was the first thing we checked. All our digitalin is accounted for. In fact, that’s why I’m inclined to think it must have been a mistake; someone who should have had an injection last night didn’t get it, your mother did.’

  ‘If it was one of her regular nurses, surely my mother would have recognised her – but she seems confused about that, she couldn’t tell me who had done it.’

  ‘That’s the trouble – in her mental condition we don’t want to press her for answers.’

  ‘No, of course – but what worries me is that it could happen again, and next time it could be fatal!’

  ‘It won’t happen again. We’re on our guard.’

  When Annie walked out of the main entrance, she found Johnny standing on the steps, staring out at the traffic edging past the open gates of the hospital. He was unaware of her; she could watch him unobserved.

  Staring at the width of his shoulders and the long, lean back under his dark blue denim jacket, Annie felt her ears buzzing with hypertension.

  She still couldn’t believe he was back in her life. It made the years disappear. She felt eighteen again – all the years of working and living, growing into the person she was now – all that vanished every time she looked at him and she became the girl she had been, wide-eyed, innocent, head over heels in love, seeing the world through a rainbow of colours.

  And yet … was this really Johnny? Oh, it looked like him, she’d have recognised him anywhere, in an instant. But although the features and the colouring stayed the same, this wasn’t the Johnny she remembered. This man disturbed her; he was a stranger in many ways she couldn’t exactly define. At first she had just thought the changes physical, but it was deeper than that – how could he not have changed under the bitter pressures of life in prison?

  She sighed, and Johnny swung round at once. His face intent, he looked into her eyes. ‘Hello, Annie.’ His voice was low, husky.

  ‘Hi,’ she said shyly, and for a second it was the old Johnny again, his dark blue eyes shining, his smile gentle, almost pleading.

  ‘I was thinking about my grandmother’s house – do you remember?’ he asked her, and she caught her breath.

  How could he even ask? Her mind instantly flooded with memories of them there together and her colour glowed hot, her lashes flickered self-conciously.

  ‘I’m going to have to sell it,’ he said, face sombre. ‘I held on to it all these years, I couldn’t bear to lose it, it was my last link with … with happier times, but now I’m having to face reality. I can’t afford to live there, it’s too far out of town, and I need money to live on. I’m only working freelance as a writer – I have to take part-time jobs on the side to survive, and it’s ridiculous to keep the house. I’ll sell it and buy myself a small flat. The rest of the money will help me survive until I get somewhere with my writing.’

  ‘Oh, Johnny, that’s terrible!’ she said, her own face distressed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He watched her eagerly. ‘Wo
uld you like to see it again? I thought I might drive out there this morning and take a look at it before I get it valued. Would you like to come?’

  She didn’t even hesitate.

  ‘Where the hell is Derek?’ Harriet raged, looking at her watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. Sean had done his rewrite and left to catch up on his sleep. They should have started work long ago. ‘Don’t tell me he’s doing a Mike Waterford? I can’t have two drunks turning up late whenever they feel like it. I have to put up with Mike because of the ratings, but I’m damned if I’ll put up with it from Derek bloody Fenn.’ She gave her assistant a glare. ‘Ring him, and keep on ringing until you get an answer. When you do get him, tell him to get over here right away or I’ll strangle him with my bare hands. And in the meantime I’ll set up for Scene 7. I’m not wasting a location shoot hanging around waiting for Derek Fenn. The actors in Scene 7 are all here. We might as well get on with that. Where’s Benny and the cars?’

  They were filming in St Paul’s Piazza, the modern square surrounded with office blocks and shops built just behind the seventeenth-century cathedral. On this chilly spring morning the square had turned into a wind tunnel; actors in police uniforms huddled together under arches, drinking coffee out of paper cups.

  Harriet’s assistant gestured down some steps. ‘Parked down there, on the pavement.’

  ‘OK. Before you start ringing Derek, get Benny up here, then ring Sean and ask him to get over here fast. He’ll have to rewrite his rewrite, I’m afraid.’

  The other girl nodded, lifting her mobile phone to her mouth. ‘Benny? Harriet wants you in the square. Yes, now.’

  The stunt driving would be the most complex part of the scene and would take the longest to shoot. The cars would have to drive up steps into the square and out the other side; it would take hours to set up so Harriet decided to begin with that, and, for once Mike Waterford was on time and not suffering from hangover. He actually knew his lines, too. Not that he had many.

  ‘A minor miracle,’ said Harriet thankfully to Sean when he arrived an hour later. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of shifting to him the lines you’d given to Annie in the first version of that scene. It was the only way I could go ahead with shooting the opening pages of the scene, and, as you see, the light’s terrible, and traffic is getting worse all the time. God, location work is such hell. Why do we do it? It’s so warm and cosy on a studio set.’