‘You can’t take me. I’m not moving from here.’
‘Don’t worry, Willow.’ Sister Lulworth’s voice was firm but kindly enough. She stood up. ‘Nurse Brown will take Lucinda. She’ll be quite safe. Nurse!’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Take Lucinda to the ward and stay with her there. Now, come along. We must get you out of here so that we can sort everything out. Lucinda will be perfectly all right. Come with me.’
As the remaining panic began to ease and some rationality returned to Willow’s brain, she said more calmly: ‘Not until my husband is here to see that she’s safe. Then I’ll go anywhere with you.’
As a familiar pain gripped Willow’s abdomen, she became aware that some of the blood on the floor of the lift and on her kimono might be her own. The first blow to her stomach must have started the wall of her womb bleeding again.
‘But not until he’s here. It’s not safe,’ she said more firmly and was glad to hear that she sounded a lot less mad. ‘Look what’s happened here. It could happen again.’
‘Now, don’t be silly,’ Sister Lulworth said. ‘We’ll give you something to calm you down and …’
‘You damn’well won’t. I’m not mad. I don’t need Largactil or anything else. If you give it to me, it’ll be assault, and I’ll sue. That woman …’ She pointed at the still body that was lying on the floor outside the lift. One of the nurses was taking her pulse. ‘That woman tried to kidnap Lucinda and attacked me. I don’t know why, but I’m not prepared to let any of the rest of you get anywhere near Lucinda until I do know. Get my husband.’
‘We’ve already rung him. You!’
The porter stepped forward.
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Fetch a trolley for this woman. Willow, who is she?’
‘I don’t know.’ Willow was relieved to hear that her voice was almost steady again.
‘You don’t know!’
Willow was still hurting and feeling very sick, but the wild, irrational terror had gone. She held out her right hand. The blood was there still, but the trembling had stopped. The buzzing in her brain had eased, too, and her tongue felt less woolly. She could even think.
‘There’s no name badge on her coat,’ said Willow, not even aware of who had produced the furious exclamation. ‘That’s why I was suspicious. That and her wanting to take Lucinda for an X-ray at this time of night. And in the basement. And she sounded odd, too. At first she was pretending to be Scottish, but then that changed when she got angry. I don’t know who she is. She attacked me. I had to defend myself.’
‘What’s going on, here?’ Doctor Kimmeridge pushed his way through the crowd, looking even more tired than usual and extremely worried. ‘Sister Lulworth, what is all this?’
‘Doctor Kimmeridge,’ said Willow before the midwife could say anything at all. ‘I’m sorry you had to be disturbed, but look.’
She saw his eyes widen as they took in the body on the floor and the blood all over the lift. She nodded.
‘We don’t know …’
He put up a hand to silence her and turned to the nurse who was holding the so-called Doctor Wilson’s wrist.
‘Why hasn’t she been moved?’
‘I’ve sent for a trolley,’ said Sister Lulworth. ‘Ah, here it is.’
Doctor Kimmeridge oversaw the raising of the unconscious woman on to the trolley, covered her with a red blanket and checked her pulse for himself. He then raised one of her eyelids and then examined the worst of the cuts, before feeling her scalp with extreme care. Willow was relieved to see that most of the cuts in her face had already stopped bleeding. Kimmeridge ordered the porter to take the trolley down to the casualty department and dictated a short message for the doctor on duty. In a very short time he had got rid of all the spectators except for Sister Lulworth, Nurse Brown and a hospital security guard in the familiar grey-and-yellow uniform Willow had first seen on the night of Lucinda’s birth.
‘Now, Mrs Worth, will you come out?’ said Kimmeridge.
The security guard edged into the lift and gingerly put his hand on her arm.
‘I won’t leave until Tom comes,’ she said, still standing with her back pressed against Lucinda’s cot. ‘Or the police. Have you called them yet?’
‘All in good time.’
‘What the hell is going on here?’ said Tom, bursting out of one of the other lifts and seeing the security man standing guard over Willow.
‘Tom. Thank God,’ she said, still not moving away from Lucinda’s cot. The security guard was much too close for comfort.
‘What’s happened? Who did this?’ Tom demanded.
‘She did it,’ said the security guard crossly, tightening his grip on Willow and pointing at her with his other hand. She pulled away but he did not let go.
‘Will?’ Tom walked into the lift, stepping carefully over the bloodstains. ‘Let her go, man.’
The guard took his hand away, but he did not move any further off. Tom ignored him and took Willow in his arms, stroking her hair. ‘Tell me.’
She did, leaning against him, but still keeping one hand on the cot behind her. Lucinda’s cries had lessened as soon as the shouting stopped and were now no more than occasional breaks in her breathing. As Willow spoke, giving Tom all the details she could remember, she was endlessly interrupted by the security guard or by Kimmeridge and Sister Lulworth.
Eventually Tom, still holding her head, said to the others: ‘Will you all please be quiet? Thank you. Now, has anyone contacted the police?’
‘Not yet,’ said Kimmeridge. ‘I was trying to find out what had happened before we bothered them.’
‘Call them at once. The team dealing with the Ringstead murder. Where is the woman who attacked my wife?’
‘She’s been taken down to Accident and Emergency,’ said Kimmeridge in a professionally soothing voice. ‘She’ll be fine there. They’re equipped to do everything that’s necessary. The injuries were not nearly as serious as they looked at first sight. I suspect she hit her head on the wall as she fell and knocked herself out, but they’ll check everything downstairs.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be fine, but who’s going to make sure she doesn’t abscond?’ asked Tom.
‘She’s unconscious, man,’ said the security guard. ‘Your wife beat her senseless.’
‘Nevertheless, get down there and make sure she stays put,’ said Tom. ‘She may come to and she’ll leg it if she can.’
Seeing that the man was about to argue, Tom reached into his breast pocket for his warrant card. The guard looked surprised and quickly did as he had been told.
Kimmeridge told Sister Lulworth that she had better call the police and she went reluctantly, taking Nurse Brown with her.
‘Will?’ said Tom, who still had an arm around her.
At last she moved away from the cot. There were some splashes of blood on the outside of the perspex walls, but none had reached the baby, who had opened her eyes and was sticking her tongue in and out against her bottom lip. Willow made sure she kept at least three feet away from Lucinda’s face. She did not want her to see any blood, and she wished that she could do something to disguise the smell of it too.
‘She’s all right,’ said Tom, sighing in relief.
‘I hope so,’ said Willow.
‘And you?’
‘I don’t know. The woman didn’t hurt me much, if that’s what you mean. Although I’m bleeding again. She hit me in the stomach.’
‘What?’ said Kimmeridge. ‘Why didn’t you say so before? Come along at once.’
Tom stayed behind to ensure that the lift was deactivated and sealed to await police examination, while Kimmeridge took Willow into an empty single room. When she was lying down with Lucinda’s cot within reach at her side, Kimmeridge fetched a nurse, examined Willow and then gave her another injection.
‘D’you know who the woman was?’ Tom asked as soon as the nurse had gone and Willow was sitting up again, looking very pale under the b
lood splashes on her face but in control of herself again. She wanted to wash her hands and face, but Tom would not let her do anything else until the police had examined her.
‘No. She said she was Doctor Wilson and that she was a paediatrician here, but she had no name badge. She wasn’t a doctor. I know she wasn’t. And she hit me.’
‘There are no paediatric specialists called Wilson in this hospital,’ said Kimmeridge with authority.
‘What about a locum?’ suggested Tom. ‘You must be short-handed without Ringstead.’
‘Yes, but none of the locums are called Wilson, and none are that woman’s age.’
Willow shivered. Tom sat on the edge of the bed and held her carefully.
They were still there, waiting in silence for the police, when they heard a female voice calling from outside: ‘Superintendent Worth?’
‘I’m here,’ said Tom, adding a moment later: ‘Inspector Boscombe. Good. You know my wife, don’t you? And this is Doctor Kimmeridge, who has taken over from Ringstead here.’
‘We’ve met.’ The police officer nodded to them all and waited to be told what had happened.
Tom quickly explained. Inspector Boscombe left the room for a short while to issue orders over her mobile telephone. When she came back to question Willow, Tom asked whether the woman in the A and E department had been identified.
The inspector shook her head.
‘There’s nothing on her that gives us any idea who she is. We’ll find out in due course, but we may just have to wait until she’s conscious again – or someone reports her missing. But that might take some time. Now, I need to ask Mrs Worth some questions.’
‘Do you mind if I stay?’ asked Tom, watching Doctor Kimmeridge rather than the inspector.
‘Not at all, sir,’ she said.
Kimmeridge took the hint and removed himself and his nurse from the room. Willow told her whole story again, listing the various things that had made her suspicious about ‘Doctor Wilson’ and describing as much as she could remember of the fight.
‘Right,’ said the inspector, sounding marginally more friendly than she had when she had been interviewing Willow for her memories of Alex Ringstead’s last appearance. ‘And have you really no idea who she is?’
‘None,’ said Willow. ‘But it’s possible that she could have been a patient here, recently discharged from the psychiatric wing.’
‘You sound as though you’ve been talking to Sister Chesil.’ There was a hint of humour in her brisk voice.
‘Yes, I have. Why? Don’t you think she might be right about the person who murdered Mr Ringstead?’
‘No, I don’t. That sort of killing tends to be random and immediate – usually by stabbing. Ringstead’s death was planned. Any other ideas?’
‘I suppose she could have had something to do with WOMB,’ Willow said slowly, and then wished she had not as she saw incredulity and contempt passing across the police officer’s face.
‘What makes you say that?’ Inspector Boscombe sounded barely polite.
‘One of their leaders came to see me today. She’d been told that I was back here because of a complication of my daughter’s birth. She wanted me to fight for compensation from the hospital and she got quite angry when I showed her that I found her motives suspect.’
‘She’d hardly have got someone else to launch an attack on you just for that,’ said the inspector.
‘I don’t know,’ said Willow more crisply. She was getting angry. ‘Someone did it. And there may have been more to Ros’s anger than irritation that I wouldn’t join her campaign.’
She went on to explain her suspicions of Ros and Durdle as succinctly as possible. It did not do her much good. Inspector Boscombe continued to look deeply sceptical. Tom was kinder, but he did say: ‘That sounds pretty far-fetched, Will.’
‘Maybe, but WOMB have been getting information from somewhere and Durdle hated Ringstead.’
Lucinda started to cry and Willow got up off the bed at once. ‘It’s time for her feed, but I can’t even hold her like this. I must wash off the blood. She can’t wait much longer. Please.’
‘Could we get one of the doctors here to take samples?’ Tom asked Inspector Boscombe. ‘The police surgeon could be hours yet.’
After a moment the inspector nodded and went to find Kimmeridge. He took scrapings from under Willow’s nails and removed some of the blood from her hands and face with sterile swabs, which were carefully enclosed in sample pots and bags. Tom had Lucinda in his arms by then and was walking up and down the small, grey room, jiggling her and trying to quiet her. But her crying was beginning to sound frightened again.
Willow waited with as much patience as possible for Kimmeridge to finish and then, escorted by Inspector Boscombe, shuffled towards the basin to wash. She could not bear the thought of having any traces of blood on her when she fed Lucinda.
Looking in the mirror above the basin, Willow was disgusted by her reflection. Her skin was greyish white. With the streaks of brown blood and the dark shadows under her eyes, which themselves looked huge and mad, she could have been the model for some medieval gargoyle. Bending down until her back ached, she sluiced cold water over her face, shuddering, and then scrubbed at her hands with soap. Standing up again, she dried her skin and then combed her cold fingers through her hair. The final result was not encouraging but at least she was clean and blood-free.
Lucinda was shrieking by the time Willow had finished washing. Tom handed the baby over with a mixture of apology and relief and watched Willow unbutton her nightdress. She saw that Inspector Boscombe had tactfully left the room. As soon as Tom saw that Lucinda was sucking and that Willow looked calmer, stroking the baby’s small downy head and crooning to her, he joined his colleague just outside the door.
Willow could not hear what they were talking about and decided that she was not very interested. Some milk ran out of Lucinda’s mouth and over Willow’s breast. She withdrew it from the baby and held her upright, gently patting her back. At that moment it seemed far more important that Lucinda should take milk from her once more than that any of Inspector Boscombe’s questions were answered.
Chapter Fifteen
Inspector Boscombe did not leave until she had arranged for a constable to sit outside Willow’s room for the rest of the night. Tom wanted to stay too, but Willow eventually managed to persuade him that she would be safe enough and that he ought to go home for some rest.
For the first hour after Tom had gone, she found the constable’s presence outside her door reassuring. It was only later, when she woke from a shallow sleep that had been spiked with nightmares, that she wondered whether Inspector Boscombe had put him there less for her protection than to stop her leaving. She even began to wonder, as she turned uncomfortably on to her sore front and then back again, whether her attacker had returned to consciousness and persuaded the police that she had been the innocent victim and Willow the deranged aggressor.
Soon after five o’clock in the morning Lucinda settled into a deeper sleep, but Willow could not follow her example. She poured herself some water from the jug beside her bed and sat in the dim light that came through the glass panel in her door, forcing herself to work through everything that had happened and to face the possible consequences. Only then, she thought, might she be able to stop her racing thoughts and sleep properly.
Once more afraid that she had lost her reason and imagined Doctor Wilson’s first assault, Willow pulled up her nightdress and was comforted to see a large spreading bruise on her swollen abdomen. The woman had definitely hit her, and the blow had been very hard indeed.
Given that, it seemed virtually certain that she must have been involved in the killing of Alex Ringstead. It would have been too much of a coincidence to have had two completely unconnected violent assaults in the same part of the same hospital in so short a time. Equally certain was the fact that it must have been the questions Willow had been asking that had triggered the attack. After all, her que
stions were the only connection she had had to the dead man beyond that of every other woman in the obstetrics unit.
‘Doctor Wilson’had seemed vaguely familiar, and yet Willow was certain that they had never met. That being so, whatever threat she had represented must have reached the other woman at second hand. Willow tried to see which of all the people she had talked to about Alex Ringstead could have been the conduit, but she failed.
Frustrated, she turned her mind instead to the woman herself, trying to track down the source of her elusive familiarity. Wondering whether it could have been a photograph of ‘Doctor Wilson’, Willow reached into the locker that had been wheeled into her room the night before to pick up the leaflets she had there.
There were plenty of photographs in the publicity material for the Friends of Dowting’s Hospital, but they were of buildings, the garden, and some of the senior doctors, including Alex Ringstead. There was no one who looked at all like ‘Doctor Wilson’. In the WOMB leaflet the only pictures were of babies, unidentifiable nurses (who all looked too young) and some newly delivered mothers.
Going back over everything that had happened from the moment she woke to feel the woman’s hand on her shoulder, Willow castigated her memory for letting her down so badly.
‘Her smell,’ she said suddenly and quite loudly. Luckily it did not wake Lucinda, and Willow was free to follow her thoughts wherever they took her.
The fake doctor had been wearing a heavy, exotic scent that Willow had recently smelled somewhere else. It was not something she herself had ever worn; she rarely used any kind of scent any longer. She did not know its name, but she had definitely smelled it recently. Where?
After a moment her brain produced the answer to that as well and she slumped down on the bed in frustration. It was the same scent that Petra Cunningon had been wearing at the bridge lunch – and whoever ‘Doctor Wilson’really was, she certainly was not Petra Cunningon in disguise.
They may have shared a taste for expensive scent, but they looked completely different from each other. Petra was a good four inches taller than the woman in the lift and neither her face nor her voice was remotely similar.
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