“Do you have any idea how he’s doing?” Ramouter asked Henley as they walked through the intensive care unit of Lewisham Hospital. The only sounds came from the barely audible conversations of hospital visitors, family and friends gathered around bedsides, unsure if their words were being understood or evaporating into the sterile air.
“No, not a thing,” Henley replied.
“They say no news is good news, I suppose.”
“Crap,” Henley muttered under her breath as they reached the empty nurses’ station and she read the whiteboard of patient and room names.
“What’s wrong?” Ramouter asked.
“We don’t have a name for him,” Henley replied.
A male nurse appeared from a side door. “Oh, we’ve called him Mr. Question,” he said after Henley had explained who they were. “We couldn’t keep calling him the bloke in bed number eight and we’ve already got a patient Smith.”
“Is it possible to speak to the doctor who’s been dealing with him?” Henley asked as she and Ramouter were handed disposable plastic gowns by the nurse and directed to use the hand sanitizer.
“If you’re good to wait for about half an hour. Dr. Chaplin should be coming down to do his checks. One of your colleagues came in this morning with a photographer. Have you got a name for him?”
“No. Nothing yet. There should be an article in the early edition of the Evening Standard, so you never know, we may get an ID on him by the end of the day.”
“I hope so. He looks so young. He has to be someone’s baby,” said the nurse as a bell went off in the ward and he left Henley and Ramouter to wait.
“We almost lost him at quarter past five this morning,” said Dr. Chaplin standing at the foot of the bed with his hands clasped behind his back. “He stopped breathing and he went into cardiac arrest. It took us nearly twenty-five minutes to resuscitate him. We were just about to declare him dead, when he came back. His pulse is still weak, and his blood pressure is not where I would like it to be, but he’s still here.”
Still here. Henley repeated the words in her head as she stared down at him. How would anyone be able to identify him? His brown eyelashes briefly fluttered against the swollen yellowing and purple skin under his eyes. The clear breathing tube in his mouth had pushed his tongue out grotesquely to the side, with saliva dried to a crust. A thin yellow tube joined the breathing tube and had been taped against his neck. Henley could make out the bruised imprints left behind by cruel fingers on his scratched skin. His white and blue checked hospital gown covered half of the ECG sensors on his chest. How would anyone recognize him as belonging to their family?
“We had to remove his right kidney,” said Dr. Chaplin as Henley’s gaze followed the urine that flowed from the patient’s bladder into the catheter and drainage bags. “We also found fluid, well, water to be exact, around his lungs and heart.”
“Water?” Henley’s mind flashed back to the bucket and plastic jug that had been found in the room with their unknown boy. “How would he get water around his heart and lungs?”
“We usually see that amount of fluid in the lungs of drowning victims, but I’ve also seen it with a patient who had an epileptic fit and nearly drowned in the bath.”
“We found him tied to a bed,” said Henley as she looked over at Ramouter and then at the thick bandages around the patient’s wrists. “And he was nowhere near a bath, but there was an empty bucket in the room where he was found.”
“Waterboarding?” the doctor said with a shrug. He walked over to the right side of the bed and checked the contents of the drainage bag.
“Waterboarding?” Ramouter repeated. “I’ve only ever seen that in episodes of 24.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve dealt with something like this,” said Dr. Chaplin. “But it’s usually been a prank gone wrong.”
“Jesus Christ,” Henley muttered, raising her eyes to the ceiling.
“Well, whoever it was really did a number on him,” said Dr. Chaplin as he walked over and checked the monitors. He pulled out the chart attached to the side of the bed and made a note on the page. “If he makes it through the next few days then I would say that his chances of survival are reasonably good.”
“What do you mean by ‘reasonably’?” asked Henley.
“I don’t like to give odds. Let’s see how he does over the next twelve hours or so.”
“Do you think that he will be able to talk to us if he does wake up?” Ramouter asked.
Dr. Chaplin scratched the top of his head, like a mechanic about to give you an unwelcome estimate. “His heart stopped beating when he was in the ambulance. He was technically dead when he arrived here yesterday afternoon. It took us eight minutes to restart his heart, which means that his brain was starved of oxygen for that entire time. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but you need to be prepared for the fact that he might not be able to tell you anything if he does wake up.”