Keep Me Alive Page 5

  ‘Can I help?’ asked a heavily accented voice behind her. Trish turned to see a tall blond nurse hurrying towards her. There was a harassed expression on his pale, chiselled face. His accent suggested he came from Eastern Europe, or possibly even Russia.

  ‘It’s OK. She’s a friend of mine and I just wanted to see what you’re giving her.’

  ‘Only saline to keep up fluids,’ he said. ‘At this stage.’

  ‘Do you know what kind of food poisoning it is?’

  ‘Not yet. The results are not back from the lab. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I was eating with her yesterday, and I’ve been affected too, though not like this.’

  ‘Ah. The doctor thinks E. coli maybe, but the lab will say for sure in a day or two.’

  ‘E. coli? Is that enough to make her as ill as this?’

  ‘Oh, yes. If resistance is lowered, E. coli can be … severe. The infection is able to spread, maybe affecting the blood, too. This is known as septicaemia.’

  The last thing Trish wanted now was a lesson in medical terminology. Horrified at the thought of what could be happening inside Caro’s body, she said, ‘What are you doing about the source of the infection?’

  ‘Is nothing we can do. We think it will have come from the sausages she ate, but no one knows what brand they have been. Often it will be poor hygiene, not the food itself, that infects.’

  ‘Even so, it should be checked out. And Caro’s partner must have the wrappings in their flat. I could go now and—’

  The nurse put his hand on Trish’s arm to hold her back. ‘All the packagings have been thrown out, and garbage removed this morning. We have asked this already. Miss Jess says often her friend will buy food when she is at work and it will be out of the refrigerator all day. Is enough to allow bacteria to multiply. How are you treating this?’

  Trish told him and was relieved to hear that the advice she’d been given over the phone by NHS Direct had been correct. But that did nothing to change the fact that her best friend was lying in front of her, unconscious, perhaps dying. Could it be true? Trish gripped the metal bedstead and tried to think sensibly. The only ideas her mind threw up were like a child crying ‘it’s not fair’. Caro was too rare a person – and too necessary – to die. It couldn’t happen if there were any kind of justice.

  Trish pushed the thought away. She’d learned years ago that no one could guarantee justice.

  Chapter 5

  Pain was everywhere, absorbing all Caro’s brain cells and tearing at every part of her body. She moved to ease it and something tugged at her arm. Her eyelids felt too heavy to lift, but she had to know what it was. Trying to focus on the transparent worm that was burrowing into her flesh, she heard someone calling her name.

  ‘Inspector Lyalt! Inspector! Inspector Lyalt!’

  At last, she managed to force her eyes fully open. Someone with short dark hair was hanging over her. The picture fizzled at the edges and bent out of shape, then reformed.

  ‘Guv,’ he said, still urgently. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She ran her tongue around her mouth. It felt as dry as sandpaper and tasted horrible. No wonder her voice hardly worked. Her mind swooped. She tried to talk. This time the sound was better. ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re in hospital.’

  She began to remember. The worm must be part of a drip. This was serious, then. ‘What happened?’

  ‘They think you’ve been poisoned.’

  Memories of a night with Jess and buckets and panic came back. Then there were the ambulance paramedics, whose certainty and kindness had blessedly soothed Jess. They had wrapped red blankets around Caro and strapped her into a stretcher. The sensation of security had been unlike anything she’d ever felt.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked now, feeling as though her tongue was the size and texture of a steak.

  The face hanging over her moved back. It looked hurt.

  ‘Pete,’ said its owner. ‘PC Peter Hartland.’

  ‘Of course. Sorry.’ Caro lifted her hand to rub her eyes. ‘Not myself. Why are you here, Pete?’

  ‘To see you. And to ask whether you ate or drank anything when you were interviewing Daniel Crossman.’

  Concentrating was hard. Like lifting the biggest weights in the gym. The time before the pain seemed dim and unreal. Trish was there. And a leaky rubbish bag. Jess was upset.

  ‘Crossman?’

  ‘Think back.’ Pete’s voice was panicky. ‘You went to see him and his wife. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘About Kim?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She could feel his breath on her hot face as he exhaled. He was much too close. He’d been eating cheese and pickle.

  ‘Well done,’ he said, blowing into her nostrils again. She blinked. ‘Did you go into their flat, guv?’

  ‘Yes. It was cold. The sun doesn’t reach it. Very clean. The baby was crying.’

  ‘Did you eat anything, or drink anything while you were there? A cup of tea maybe?’

  ‘Tea?’ It had been strong, and the darkest, hottest thing in the flat. The tannin had scraped at her tongue. She hadn’t known what to do with the cup, holding on to it while Crossman tried to frighten her out of his flat and his life, just like he’d done to this boy, and to everyone else who’d tried to help the child. ‘Yes. Why? Did he do this?’ Her hand moved protectively to her stomach.

  Pete Hartland disappeared. There were voices, quiet but furious. Caro tried to lift her head to see what was happening. Someone in a strange uniform – white with buttons down the front – took his place.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ The voice was male and foreign but kind.

  ‘Horrible.’

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  Caro felt a laugh forming, but it was too much effort to let it out, so she just tried to explain about the grinding in her back and the clenching in her gut, and the way all her muscles felt as though she had been racked.

  The nurse started tidying her up, smoothing the sheet that had rucked up under her and flattening the pillows. Then he did something to the transparent bag at the end of her drip and added a note to the card at the end of her bed.

  ‘What happened to Hartland?’

  ‘He is gone. He should not have been here, disturbing you with questions. He was told not to.’

  ‘He said I’d been poisoned.’

  ‘You have food poisoning. That is all. We think it was the sausages you cooked the night you were brought in here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you had a friend eating with you, who has also suffered.’

  ‘Trish? Is she here?’

  ‘No. Her case was less serious.’

  The world was swimming around Caro again. She was being sucked under. As she went down, she heard herself say, ‘Tell Pete.’

  It was so urgent that he should know Daniel Crossman hadn’t done this to her that she fought to stay above the surface. But she couldn’t make the nurse understand. He didn’t know how passionately Pete hated Daniel Crossman.

  With his past, Pete should never have been let anywhere near Child Protection, but the powers that be hadn’t listened to her when she’d warned them. It wasn’t that he’d been physically or sexually abused himself as a child; they’d have understood that and kept him right away. But he had been emotionally terrorized by the grandfather who’d brought him up. Any male authority figure could make him suddenly behave weirdly. He’d responded well to Caro when they’d put him on her team, and she liked him. He was a demon for work, too, but he was driven by forces he didn’t properly understand, and that made him dangerous.

  He had to be stopped now, before he took the law into his own hands and screwed up every chance they had of rescuing Kim. What was it Pete had said after Crossman had thrown him out of the flat? ‘Someone needs to teach that bastard a lesson. I hope I get the chance.’ Caro tried to call out. No one answered.

  The white blob of the nurse’s uniform had dwindled
to nothing and Caro’s voice didn’t seem to work any more.

  Trish spent the following day listening to Ferdy Aldham and Antony as they tried to elicit from Furbishers’ witnesses sufficient evidence to persuade the judge one way or the other. It was hard to concentrate because it was all so familiar. Still, she had to keep her mind on the job, noting down each point the witnesses made and mentally ticking them off against the lists she and Antony had prepared. Then they had to go back to chambers for the usual post-mortem, so it was after eight by the time she was free to go back to Dowting’s to find out how Caro was getting on.

  The news wasn’t good. At the front desk they told her that Caro had been moved into a proper bed. Trish made her way up to the tenth floor and found herself in a bay that was a lot quieter than the admissions ward. The view was good, too, straight over the Thames to the Houses of Parliament. If this had been a private hospital, such a position would have commanded a big premium, but it wasn’t. It was the National Health Service at its best.

  Trish went from bed to bed in the bay, apologizing to occupants and visitors as she peered at them. At last she found Caro, lying with her eyes closed and mumbling. She looked awful.

  There was a man standing beside her, looking down at her ravaged face. He was wearing loose grey-blue trousers and a collarless natural linen shirt. As Trish approached, he looked up. She recognized his smooth-skinned roundish face at once, even though she could not put a name to him.

  ‘Trish!’ he said in a light voice that teased her memory. ‘How wonderful! It’s Andrew. Andrew Stane.’

  ‘Of course,’ Trish said, identifying him as the social worker she’d met over one of the worst cases of child cruelty she’d ever been involved with. She’d admired his devotion to the job from the start and she’d come to like him as they fought to protect the child whose parents had systematically tormented him for years. Starvation and cigarette burns had been the least of it. ‘How are you?’ They shook hands. ‘It must be a good five years since I saw you.’

  ‘More, I should think. But I’ve never forgotten the way you worked with little Dean Welkins when no one else could get through to him. We’d never have won without you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Trish tried not to let her memory yield any details of the boy’s agonizing story, but she couldn’t keep them all down. She’d never forgotten her first sight of his heart-shaped white face and piteous black eyes, and the story she’d helped him to tell had shaken her more than any other.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Not well, I’m afraid. But with that kind of start, how could he?’ Andrew’s smile was so sad it made Trish’s teeth ache. ‘I tell myself that at least he’s alive, and safe, warm and fed. That’s a lot more than he could have been sure of before we intervened.’

  ‘Not enough, though, is it?’ she said, remembering all over again why she had moved away from work with brutalized children. ‘Are you involved with Caro in this business of the girl with the terrifying stepfather?’

  ‘Yes. And I came tonight because I’d heard she was better, making sense again. But look at her!’

  Trish edged closer to Caro, who was still lying with her eyes closed, but talking all the time. Nothing made sense. There was just a jumble of sounds.

  ‘What’s she saying?’

  ‘I’ve been here twenty minutes and it’s been a complete mishmash. Sometimes she talks about Kim – the child – sometimes Jess. Sometimes you. One of her colleagues features occasionally; he was in here today, so that may be why. But mostly it’s nonsense. Occasionally there’s a whole sentence. They think she may be able to hear us; then again she may not.’

  ‘Do they know why she’s so ill?’

  His face hardened. ‘No. The bacteria involved have been confirmed as E. coli 0157. But it doesn’t usually have this effect.’

  ‘Although it can be serious,’ Trish said, remembering the nurse’s warnings, as well as old news reports. ‘People have died from it, haven’t they? Vulnerable people.’

  ‘That hardly applies to Caro,’ Andrew said. ‘She’s the fittest of the fit and in the gym at least three times a week.’

  ‘Yes, but stress can go for the immune system, and this case seemed to be stressing her more than usual.’

  ‘She’s not the only one.’ He rubbed both hands over his smooth face, and stopped with them steepled against the end of his nose. He looked at Trish over the top. ‘We’ve only got two weeks left. If we don’t get any evidence, Kim is going to have to go back to her stepfather. Caro was the driving force. Without her, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Even the psychiatrist has admitted defeat. That’s why I came this evening. I mean, I’d have come anyway to see Caro, but we need her firing on all cylinders. And look at her. There’s no way she can help now.’

  A nurse appeared behind him, leading an elderly woman on a Zimmer frame, and urging her on with a stream of gentle encouragement. The woman’s skin was almost transparent, and white wisps of hair kept blowing in her foggy eyes. Her fingers were gnarled with arthritis and the skin discoloured with pale-brown spots.

  She’s the kind of patient who should be at risk of food poisoning, Trish thought, not a tough police officer in her thirties. She looked back at Andrew, who’d let his arms drop to his sides again.

  ‘So the child still won’t talk?’ she said, remembering everything Caro had told her.

  ‘That’s right. There were signs Caro was beginning to get through to her during their last interview. Now we’re stuck.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Trish said. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  Andrew must have recognized that for he asked about her work. She gave him a quick sketch of the case against Furbishers.

  ‘I hope you win,’ he said politely. ‘Are you still living in Southwark?’

  ‘Yes. I love the flat too much to move. What about you?’

  ‘I have moved. I’m in Muswell Hill now. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do.’

  Trish looked at Caro’s twitching face. It seemed all wrong to be making this sort of trivial conversation while she was so ill. Telling Andrew Stane she had to go, Trish hurried out of the ward. At the nurses’ station, she stopped and scribbled a note to be given to Caro when she was well enough to read it.

  ‘I’ll see she gets it,’ said the young Filipina nurse who took the envelope.

  ‘She is going to get better, isn’t she?’

  ‘We hope so.’

  With that cold comfort, Trish went back to her flat to spend what was left of the evening picking at a bowl of cottage cheese and trying not to think any more about the possibility that Caro might die.

  When the phone rang, she grabbed it, more than ready to talk to George, who had promised to ring from Australia tonight. Then she saw that it was still too early for him, so she gave her name much more cautiously.

  ‘Trish, it’s Andrew. I’m sorry to phone you at home. I just thought it would be easier to ask this if I could be sure we wouldn’t be overheard.’

  ‘To ask what?’ she said, puzzled.

  ‘For your help interviewing Kim Bowlby, the child in Caro’s case.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Trish said at once, without even thinking about it. ‘I’m up to my neck in my own work. Besides, I’d have no standing. I don’t do family law any more.’

  ‘I could swing it, having you as an expert, I mean, given your experience. Please, Trish. You helped Dean to speak and probably saved his life. If anyone could work the same kind of miracle with Kim it would be you.’

  ‘I can’t, Andrew. I’m sorry, desperately sorry, for the child, but I can’t help. It’s just not possible.’

  ‘Even to save Caro’s reputation?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The buzz is that she’s not half as ill as she seems, that she’s faking this near-death condition,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Who could possibly believe anything so idiotic?’ The snap in Trish’s voice echoed back at her down the line.

  ‘Her col
leagues in the Child Protection Unit,’ Andrew said with all the mildness of a man trained to avoid reacting to aggression. ‘The suggestion is that she’s come to realize that she’s overreacted to the Kim Bowlby case for some unknown reason of her own. Projection probably. And now she’s staked so much of her reputation on the outcome, she can’t back down. Being ill will let her off. They think she’ll carry on like this until the interim care order has expired and then make a miraculous recovery, when it’s too late to do anything for Kim.’

  ‘That’s ludicrous. And unbelievably offensive. Caro is far too self-aware and experienced to do anything like that. She’d never be so irresponsible,’ Trish said, adding silently to herself: or make the people who care about her go through this kind of terror.

  ‘Misreading what goes on in families and relationships does happen. To all of us. You know that. But this is another reason why I’d do anything to get Kim to talk. She’s important – any child in that kind of state would be – but Caro matters more. She’s in a position to save a hundred Kims, so long as she doesn’t lose her confidence and standing over this. You have to help.’

  Blackmail, Trish thought. Sodding blackmail. ‘How do you know that’s what her colleagues are saying?’

  ‘There’s a young PC there, Pete Hartland, who’s devoted to Caro and passionately determined that Kim should be saved from her stepfather. Hartland has been keeping me up to speed. It was he who told me Caro was better, which is why I rushed straight round to Dowting’s this evening. I told you: we’ve got less than fourteen days to deal with this. You know what I found. She’s not in a position to help anyone now.’

  ‘Look,’ Trish said, feeling her resolution crack, ‘whatever happens, however urgent it is, I couldn’t do anything until the weekend. I have to be in chambers for pre-court preparation by seven every morning; we’re in court all day; then there’s the post-mortem conference and plenty more after that.’

  ‘The weekend may be the best we could do. But if I got permission, would you talk to Kim then? Please, Trish. The child needs you. We all need you.’