I emerged from the linen store cupboard about ten to fifteen minutes later.
Thankfully, it had been one of my shorter episodes and no one else in the department seemed to have been unduly concerned by my absence.
‘There’s a policeman looking for you,’ one of the staff said to me as she hurried past.
It was PC Filippos and he found me at the nurses’ station.
‘Ah, Dr Rankin, there you are,’ he said with a slight trace of irritation in his voice. ‘I need to ask you some questions.’
‘I’m busy,’ I said.
Answering questions was the last thing I wanted to do.
He looked around at the surprisingly empty cubicles behind me. ‘It won’t take long.’
‘I’ll be needed if an emergency arrives.’
‘It won’t take long,’ he repeated. ‘Can we go somewhere private?’
Something about his expression told me he wouldn’t give up so I went with him to the relatives’ room.
‘Coffee?’ he asked, standing by the machine in the corner.
‘No thanks.’ Caffeine was the last thing I needed in my present fragile state. He made himself one and then sat down opposite me on the hospital-issue pink chairs.
‘I understand my patient died,’ he said.
His patient, I thought. That was a new one.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He had a cardiac arrest and couldn’t be resuscitated.’
He took out a black police notebook and wrote something down. ‘What caused the cardiac arrest?’
‘That will be up to the pathologist to determine and the coroner to confirm.’
‘You must have some idea, as the attending physician.’
‘I wasn’t attending him when he arrested,’ I said.
If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. ‘And why was that exactly?’
‘I was called to attend another patient – a motorcycle pillion passenger arrived by ambulance with life-threatening injuries.’
He nodded as if he had already known.
‘But my patient also had a life-threatening condition.’
My stress level notched up a little.
‘As it turns out, yes, he did. But I didn’t believe it was as critical at the time.’
He went back to writing in his notebook. He sipped his coffee.
‘Am I being accused of something?’ I asked, my stress levels now reaching the stratosphere with the tingling returning to my fingertips.
‘No, Dr Rankin, nothing like that.’ He smiled and the tingling abated. ‘I just have to get the sequence of events accurate for my report.’
He wrote some more then looked up at me. ‘You must have some idea what killed him.’
‘As I said, that will be determined by a post-mortem examination.’
‘No ideas at all?’ He was persistent.
‘I understand that a blood test showed he had excessive cocaine in his system but I haven’t actually seen the results myself.’
The policeman raised his eyebrows. ‘Cocaine?’
‘Yes. It seems that he had taken a massive overdose. One of my colleagues is of the opinion that no intervention by us could have saved him but the toxicology results will prove that one way or the other.’
He wrote it down.
‘Was there any indication of how the cocaine entered his system?’
‘If you mean were there obvious signs of him having injected it, then no, there weren’t. But the post-mortem should determine that too. Some addicts are very ingenious at disguising the fact by injecting themselves in difficult-to-see places.’
‘I didn’t see a syringe in the racecourse toilet.’
‘Shooting up is not the only method of taking cocaine, you know,’ I said. ‘Most users snort it up their noses and some smoke it. You can even take it orally.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it.’
I’m sure I blushed.
‘A misspent youth,’ I said with a laugh.
He wasn’t to know that I had recently tried anything and everything to try to alleviate my feelings of despair. Drink, drugs, cigarettes – all had been my bosom pals at some time or another during the previous twelve months. Some still were.
‘Is that all?’ I asked. ‘I should be getting back.’
‘All for the time being,’ PC Filippos replied. ‘But can I have your home address just in case?’
Just in case of what? I wondered.
I gave him my address and he wrote it down in his notebook, which he then snapped shut.
‘Thank you, Dr Rankin,’ he said, standing up. ‘Most helpful. I suspect the coroner’s office will be in touch in due course.’
‘What happens if you can’t find out who he was?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll do that. For a start, we’ll check his description against people reported missing. That usually turns up the identity of the deceased. Someone, somewhere, will miss him when he doesn’t return home, maybe not tonight but soon enough.’
I shuddered at the thought of the man’s wife and family waiting for him to get back for his supper totally unaware that his body was already cooling in the hospital morgue.
‘Awful to die so alone,’ said PC Filippos, as if he had been reading my mind. He downed the rest of his coffee and looked at his watch. ‘Right, I must be getting along. I’ve got to get back to the racecourse. I need to check for evidence in the Gents where the man was found.’
‘What, now?’ I said. ‘Surely it will have been cleaned.’
‘It was the cleaner who found him – the poor woman was very upset. The man was in a locked lavatory cubicle and all she could see were his feet under the door. I have given instructions for the whole Gents to be left alone so I’d best go back tonight. They’ll need it available for the racing tomorrow.’
He hurried away and I went back to caring for the sick and injured, all the while thinking about the unnamed man lying on a slab just along the corridor.
I worried about my decision to administer the adenosine. Why did I do that before having the blood results back from the lab? That had been reckless of me. At best, it had hastened his death. At worst, perhaps he would have survived if I hadn’t been so foolish.
I soon convinced myself that it had been my stupidity that had killed him.
It was all my fault.
My shift ended at 2 a.m. and I drove home afterwards like a maniac.
It was a way to express the anger that was boiling within me.
I was angry with the man for dying, and angry with myself for letting it happen. But, most of all, I was angry at what had become of me – angry at this wretched depression and the way it was ruining my life.
I jumped a red light on the Evesham Road, passing straight through the junction without even braking.
It was as if I didn’t care.
And I didn’t.
On this occasion, late at night, the roads were clear and I sailed through without incident. I did it without thinking rather than as a conscious effort to kill myself. I didn’t exactly think of myself as having a death wish but, if the Grim Reaper came along and hooked me with his scythe, it wouldn’t have bothered me too much.
Maybe I was more suicidal than I realised.
But then I thought about those in another car that I might hit. I knew all too well the horrific injuries that occurred in high-speed car crashes. I spent my working life saving people from them.
I would never forgive myself if I seriously injured or killed someone else.
I slowed a fraction.
Perhaps I’d be better off just driving really fast into a nice big solid tree. That should do it.
‘Single-car accidents’, the police called them. ‘Tut-tut,’ they would say, ‘she must have gone to sleep after a long shift at the hospital. Such a shame. Such a waste.’
But Grant would have known otherwise. What would he say to the boys?
The boys!
Oh God, I couldn’t do it to them.
I slowed a bit more.
I made it home in one piece.
Home was a modern four-bedroom detached house on a new estate on the outskirts of Gotherington, a village five miles to the north of Cheltenham.
I’d had to drive past Cheltenham Racecourse on my way.
I knew it well. I regularly acted as one of the racecourse medical officers, following the horses in a Land Rover, ready to leap out and treat any jockey injured as a result of a fall.
But my mind tonight wasn’t on the track, the horses and the medical requirements; it was on the gentlemen’s toilet under the main grandstand.
I imagined the unfortunate cleaner finding the man unconscious in one of the cubicles. It must have given her quite a shock. But at least the man was then still alive.
When I’d been at medical school there had been a story going around about a man who had died while sitting on the loo. In the macabre humour of all medical students, we had laughed at the revelation that, by the time he was found, rigor mortis had set in and the ambulance crew couldn’t lay him down flat on a stretcher. He’d had to be carried to the morgue on a chair.
I pulled into the driveway and parked my little Mini Cooper next to Grant’s Audi.
That was a good sign, I thought. He’s still here.
I had an intense fear that Grant would leave me – that he would have had enough of my erratic behaviour and, one day, I would come home to find him packed and gone. I didn’t have any hard evidence to make me think that way – no unexplained telephone calls or cryptic emails – but I still worried. Sex between us had become a distant memory and I’d have probably left me by now if I’d been him.
He repeatedly tried to reassure me that he wouldn’t go but I knew that he was fed up treading around me on eggshells, saying nothing at all rather than risk uttering some throwaway line to which I would take exception.
I realised that I took even the slightest criticism straight to my heart; every cross word was a dagger in my side.
Didn’t everyone?
No, they didn’t.
I had tried hard to let things pass, to laugh them off as nothing more than mere banter between husband and wife, but God had wired my brain wrongly. I couldn’t leave things be or let them go. I would demand to know what he meant and refuse to believe his answer of ‘nothing’. It would end in tears, his or mine, and we wouldn’t speak for hours.
I quietly let myself in through the front door. The light was on in the hall but the house was quiet. I imagined Grant had allowed the boys to stay up late to watch Match of the Day but they would be asleep by now, dead to the world as only teenagers could be.
I went through to the kitchen and, even at this late hour, I put out the breakfast things. It was like a ritual. Cereal packets, bowls, spoons, mugs, plates, knives, butter dish and marmalade – all had to be put in exactly the right place on the table.
I stood back and checked.
I’d always had a bit of OCD – obsessive-compulsive disorder – but the depression had made it much worse. I knew that it was irrational to arrange everything just so, but I couldn’t help it. The house might burn down in the night if I didn’t, or my mother would die in her sleep, or any number of other awful outcomes would occur simply because I hadn’t put the spoons properly in line with the bowls.
I believed it. Totally.
I went upstairs and put my head round the door of each of the boys’ rooms.
As I’d expected, they were fast asleep, the sound of their breathing like music to my ears. They were my raison d’être. My all, my life.
I took my pills, potions and patches in the bathroom and then slipped between the sheets next to Grant. He grunted, which I took to mean, ‘Welcome home,’ and then he went straight back to sleep, snoring gently.
It had been my first ‘late’ shift of three in a row and I’d been up since six, almost twenty-one hours on the go and most of it on my feet. I was exhausted but, even so, I couldn’t nod off.
I lay in the darkness listening to the sounds of the house cooling, as I did almost every night. My psychiatrist had given me pills to help me sleep but they didn’t seem to work. Perhaps I should double the dose.
My mind was racing too much for sleep, worrying about the dead unnamed man, about the still living girl I’d sent to Bristol, about whether I had put the marmalade in the correct place downstairs and if I should go and check, about how I would pay the mortgage if Grant left me, about famine in Africa and about nuclear missiles raining down on us from North Korea. I worried about anything and everything, most of which I had no control over anyway. But that didn’t stop me worrying about it.
I turned over and tried unsuccessfully to switch off my brain.
I was tired of worrying.
I was also tired of being angry all the time, tired of feeling worthless and tired of the emptiness I felt inside.
I was tired of being depressed while pretending I was fine.
But, most of all, I was just tired of being tired.
I must have fallen asleep eventually because it was light when I woke. And I was alone in the bed. I rolled over and looked at the clock on my bedside table. Eight-thirty. Not bad for me, I thought. I was usually awake at five.
Grant will have gone on his regular Sunday morning run, I said to myself. He’d put on a few pounds after leaving the military but he still liked to keep himself in reasonable shape. He wouldn’t be back until nine-thirty at the earliest.
He was welcome to it. The last thing I felt like doing was exercise. I simply didn’t have the energy to do anything I didn’t absolutely have to.
I rolled over again and stuck my head deep into the pillow. A little longer wouldn’t do any harm, surely, and I would be back at work at six that evening for another eight hours of picking up the broken pieces of other people’s lives.
I just wished I could pick up those of my own.
‘Mum, are you awake?’ one of the twins shouted from the landing. Even after fourteen years I found it difficult to tell their voices apart, especially when they were shouting.
‘I am now,’ I shouted back.
‘I need my football kit. I have a practice at nine.’
Toby, I thought. The eldest by two minutes. Mad keen on football and now in the village boys’ team. ‘It’s in the airing cupboard,’ I called back. ‘And your boots are under the stairs.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Do you want any breakfast?’
‘No time,’ Toby shouted back. ‘I’ll have it after.’
Oliver, the younger twin, meanwhile, would still be sound asleep. He hated football and only said he wanted to watch Match of the Day so he could stay up late. The twins might look identical, but they had very differing opinions. Oliver maintained, often at great length, that footballers were all overpaid prima donnas who should get a real job rather than playing a stupid game all the time.
But I thought we were all playing a stupid game, the game of life, and, when the referee’s whistle blew, we would shuffle off this mortal coil and out of the floodlights only to be replaced by a new signing with an unpronounceable name from Real Madrid or Juventus. The never-ending match would go on, but without us on the pitch. And no one would notice.
The front door slammed shut as Toby left and I went back to trying to catch a few more winks.
The quiet before the storm.