then someone else would have seen the creepy woman. The singing would have woken Mrs Gooch, before the shouting did. Security was tight on the ward – the woman would have had to get herself buzzed through the locked doors, then walk right past the nurse on the desk. So it couldn’t be. But if it wasn’t real then it was inside her head and it would be there inside her head no matter where she went, wouldn’t it? And, at home, there were no blue pills.
Everything snapped into sharp focus. She gazed into Patrick’s worried face. ‘What if it happens again?’ said Lauren, ‘What if I start seeing things, or . . . ’
Patrick was shaking his head, making a shh sound, and he said, ‘Take each day as it comes. You can’t stay here until you’re sane. You won’t ever leave.’
The joke was delivered deadpan, as usual, and took a moment to register. A mischievous smile played on his lips as he waited for her to laugh. But she couldn’t, not this time. It was too close to the truth. Maybe they would keep her here until they thought she was sane. Perhaps she ought to leave now, while she still had the chance.
Harper sank into the swivel chair in her office and flipped her notebook open on the desk.
‘Where the bloody hell have you been, Jo?’
She flipped the notebook shut again and turned to smile sweetly at Detective Inspector Thrupp, who filled the doorframe with his grey-suited form. His blue tie was askew, as usual. He tugged at it now, loosening it further – by the end of the day it was usually completely undone and flung over one shoulder like a very thin decorative scarf.
‘Sorry, boss, just following up on a lead.’
‘Phil Gregson says you came in at seven and left again at twenty past. Now it’s nine forty. I’ve been waiting.’
‘That’s right, sir. There was a report overnight of an attempted child abduction at the hospital, so I went down to take a statement from the complainant.’
‘What child abduction?’
‘Turned out to be nothing really, sir. The woman was having some kind of psychotic episode.’
‘Couldn’t the hospital have told you that? Wasn’t it marked as low priority on the system?’
‘I thought it sounded odd, sir. Something a bit off, maybe. Worth a visit anyway, just to make sure.’
Thrupp was frowning. ‘I’ve told you before, Jo. You need to wait for my instructions before you go off interviewing people on a whim. There’s a pile of paperwork to get through, and no time to do it. Plus there’s the training session later on, which I trust you will be fully prepped for. You could have sent a uniform.’
He was right, of course. She should probably have sent a patrol officer to take the statement – then if anything needed to be followed up on, she could have opened an investigation. But so much was lost in the transcription. She liked to be able to look into the faces of complainants, to see the things they chose not to say. The length of pauses. The guilty glances. Lauren Tranter wasn’t guilty of anything, but Harper could have filled a notebook with the things she did not say.
Giving an innocent smile, she tapped the pile of papers in her in-tray. ‘I’m on it now sir, don’t you worry.’
She swivelled to face her computer monitor, which lit up at a flick of the mouse. From the corner of her eye she observed the senior officer as he stood in the doorway, before sighing deeply, shaking his head and then walking away.
The instant he was out of sight she searched in her satchel, found the disk she’d picked up from security at the hospital and pushed it into the computer. After a few seconds, a grainy image of a hospital corridor appeared. The clock at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen read 03.38. There was the nurse’s station, and there was the midwife, Anthea Mallison, in the exact same pose she’d been in when Harper had met her in person, hunched in front of the monitor. The green and white hue of the CCTV footage showed her face illuminated behind the desk by the glow from the computer screen.
She watched for a while. Nothing happened except the clock slowly marking the minutes.
Harper forwarded the video to 04.15. There. Something ran across the floor, taking the same route that Harper herself had taken earlier in the day, towards the bay where Mrs Tranter and Mrs Gooch were installed, bay three. She backed up the video and ran it again. A flash of something, rodent-like, blink and you’d miss it. The midwife kept her eyes on the screen and didn’t flinch. There seemed to be a streak of them, whatever they were – more than one, anyway, flowing past the nurse’s station. They’d have been right in her eye line. On the screen, Mallison made no reaction whatsoever.
Harper examined the section frame by frame, stopping it where three blurred smudges swam across the floor. The way they flickered, caught between two frames, they looked like big black fish. Shadows of fish. Maybe they were shadows, something flying across the light above rather than on the floor – that might also explain why Mallison didn’t react. They might have been moths, or big flies or something. Harper watched it again, in real time. She shook her head, watched it once more. It could easily have been a blip; a digital anomaly, nothing at all. So why did she feel the hair rise on the back of her neck?
Mallison had said she was in the staff loo just before Lauren’s crisis, which is why she didn’t notice anything unusual happening in the bay – Mrs Tranter would have made quite a bit of noise when she panicked and pulled the babies with her into the bathroom. Sure enough, on the tape, the midwife left her post to go to the loo at 04.21, and was still absent from the frame at 04.29, when Lauren’s 999 call was made. Harper stared hard at the screen and wished she could hear what was happening, but there was no audio. The midwife did not return to her post for another six minutes, when she sat down and started typing again. One minute after that, at 04.37, Dave appeared in his security guard’s uniform, using the desk to brake as if he’d been running – so he did in fact make it there in about five minutes, if you allowed him a minute or two to be on the phone with dispatch. Dave almost head-butted Mallison as the momentum carried his top half forward, and then the two of them rushed towards bay three, disappearing out of the camera’s view, to get Lauren out of the bathroom where she’d locked herself before dialling for help. Harper was frustrated that the camera didn’t cover the bay. If it had, she could have seen exactly what happened in there between 04.15 and 04.29. That poor woman had seemed deeply traumatised by whatever it was.
But why was she so curious about what couldn’t be seen by the camera? After all, according to the nurse, Lauren’s real trauma had happened in the two days before: the birth, the haemorrhage, the lack of sleep. If Harper could have seen what was happening in the bay it would have been a film of a woman losing her mind. No one needed to see that.
But those shadows. She shivered. Something about this case didn’t feel right.
She took an investigative materials envelope and filled in the details on the front, before burning a copy of the CCTV footage and slipping the disk inside. She had to know what the shadows were, and Forensics would be able to tell her. Hesitating over the funding authorisation box, Harper looked over her shoulder to check no one was coming before she signed an expertly practised facsimile of DI Thrupp’s signature, adding his officer number.
Turning back to her screen she opened the email from Records with the mp3 recording of the 999 call Lauren had made from inside the bathroom. Harper hadn’t been able to get much out of Mrs Tranter at the hospital,
