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‘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.
