His whingeing tone was making him sound like a spoilt brat and Greg decided that when they were alone he would talk to him about his behaviour.
‘Joe, we’ll go back home if you’re not careful. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy back there.’
‘I don’t want to go home. I want to do something fun, and you said we were going to have fun today cos it’s nearly Christmas.’
‘OK, OK, pipe down. I didn’t mean it about going home. We’ll do something, just give me a minute to think.’
Alex Taylor was watching the exchange with amused eyes, and Greg took the opportunity to reassess the woman. Could this woman be crazy? She looked sane enough right now.
‘Do you want to do something different?’ she asked casually.
Greg didn’t. He would prefer to go to a pub and get an early lunchtime drink and then find a cinema where Joe could watch something and Greg could sleep. ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘Are either of you afraid of heights?’
Greg tentatively shook his head.
‘Just give me a second,’ she said. She moved a short distance away and pulled out her mobile.
After a couple of minutes of conversation she put it back in her coat pocket and rejoined them. ‘OK, it looks like you could be doing something different so long as the weather stays good.’
Warily Greg found himself shrugging agreement to something he was still in the dark about. ‘What did you have in mind?’
A small smile brightened her tired face. ‘A helicopter ride.’
Chapter twenty-nine
Saturday was a good day for a guided tour of the hospital. There were fewer heads of department on duty and fewer people about generally.
Laura Best’s guide, Harry, a short and stocky man, was one of the longest serving security guards at the hospital and proved to be resourceful at gaining access to off-limits places. With an element of charm and a matter-of-fact manner he had introduced Laura as ‘the police’, who needed to have a look around.
There was more to the hospital than she had ever imagined. Not just the wards and the operating theatres, but much that patients never saw – changing rooms, training facilities, offices. To begin with Laura was determined to pay attention, but as they proceeded her patience began to wander. Luckily Harry turned out to be a bit of a gossip.
Laura had tuned out the boring bits: the cutbacks, the staff shortages, the closed-down departments and the history of the hospital, her ears pricking up only when the topic was useful to her.
She knew several hospital workers’ names now, knew about two affairs that were going on in main theatre, knew of a nurse who had just been suspended for telling a patient to ‘fuck off’ and of another nurse who recently got his jaw fractured by a patient coming round from an anaesthetic in the recovery room.
It was this last gem that encouraged her to talk to Harry, as he wandered down a short slope to show her yet more of the outdated piping system. ‘It sounds like you have as much violence to put up with as we do.’
‘Sometimes we do,’ Harry agreed, searching through his key chain. ‘Especially in A & E. And at night there’s only ever two security guards on. We have to ring you lot quite often to come and sort out the troublemakers.’
‘It’s a wonder more staff don’t get attacked.’
‘They do if they’re not careful. They get given these personal alarms to carry. They press a button and it bleeps the security guards to come running. But as I said, there’s only ever two of us.’
‘It’s a shame Dr Taylor wasn’t carrying one a few weeks ago.’
Harry raised his head at this and stared at her strangely, and Laura worded her next comment carefully. ‘She could have bleeped for help and been found sooner in the car park instead of lying out there in the cold.’
‘Ohh arr,’ he agreed, revealing his Somerset accent. ‘She could have. It were blowin’ all right. For a minute I thought you were thinking she’d been attacked.’
Laura shrugged. ‘Well she thought she was.’
Harry shook his head. ‘It was me that found her, along with her boyfriend. Poor thing was just lying there.’
Laura pressed her advantage. ‘So you didn’t think she’d been attacked, then?’
He shook his head again. ‘No. No reason to. There were bits of tree branches around her, a hell of a wind that night, and her clothes were all in proper order, if you get my drift? She was dressed, in other words. She’d been knocked down, hadn’t she? By a tree branch, I mean. I don’t know what all that commotion was about afterwards. She must have had a bit of concussion.’
‘I heard,’ Laura said more quietly, glancing up and down the corridor as if checking they were entirely alone, ‘that she had a bit of a strange time last year as well.’
Harry’s eyes suddenly bored into hers and she saw what she had missed earlier beneath the charm, the chat and the gossip – the keen intelligence. ‘I don’t know too much about that. There was something happened, but I don’t know what it was about. The young doctor just took a bit of time off. Had about a month away from the place. The only reason I knew something happened was because I saw her with the consultant and Fiona Woods walking along the corridor and Dr Taylor was crying.’
‘And you have no idea what it was about?’
‘It could have been about anything. I see a lot of staff crying. It’s the pressure of the place, especially in A & E. It never lets up. I see a few of them crying when they lose patients .?.?. They have a hard job, you know, I shouldn’t—’
‘Don’t worry. You’ve been so helpful, thank you. I think we’ve seen everything we need?’
Laura Best walked out of the hospital in a positive mood. She had got what she came for. She had met the man who found Alex that night and heard his take on what had happened. She had established that the doctor was involved in something else last year, and she had learned that Dr Taylor was a liar.
It hadn’t happened. Alex Taylor had made it up, and it had something to do with what happened last year.
Chapter thirty
Wearing black protective earmuffs and a yellow fluorescent jacket with DOCTOR written in green on the back, Alex stood, like her guests, with her back to the helicopter, facing the bushes and wire mesh fence. The blades were still rotating and natural debris – twigs, leaves and even small stones from the ground – could be whipped up and flung into their eyes.
They were standing in the cricket field only yards from the emergency department entrance, separated from the hospital grounds by a simple fence. It was a perfect spot for the airlifting of patients, and the cricket club put up with the occasional interruption without complaint.
The helicopter behind her – privately owned by three of Wiltshire’s ambulance pilots – was a Robinson R44, a lightweight four-seater that allowed good visibility to all its passengers.