Nurse Carol was on her way home after visiting a patient earlier that morning. She was driving along the seafront just two miles from Marine House when she received the message. Would you please call on an elderly man, Harry Stone, and deal with his case on an emergency basis? Dr Sean was very concerned about his patient, and he had emailed full details of his progressive illness.
It was thanks to Dr Sean’s quick action that, a few minutes later, Nurse Carol saw the blue and gold sign to the side of the front door, “Marine House”. Most of her patients were housebound in small, terraced houses, just a few on the outskirts of Brighton in detached houses with a garden around them. She looked at the wide façade, with its portico entrance – who was this patient who lived in this very grand property on Brighton seafront? Nurse Carol was intrigued to find out.
She parked in the road behind Marine House, and as she walked up to the back door, she thought she saw a drunk sleeping it off on the steps. At first, the nurse took little notice of a scene she had seen far too often, but as she moved closer, she stopped. It was beginning to rain heavily and the body, lying inert, with head on its chest and eyes closed, was already getting wet from the downpour. It was not a down-and-out, and she knelt to hold the man’s head up. Opening his eyelids, there was a flicker which looked back at her with desperate pleading.
‘What’s happened?’ Nurse Carol asked.
‘I fell.’
Stone’s head again dropped to his chest. He was drifting out of consciousness and the rain was now falling heavily on him as the nurse tried to hold his head up again. There was a trickle of blood staining through his light jacket from his right shoulder, and he did not reply as she tried to talk to him. She could only guess from the note from the doctor describing the patient that this was Harry Stone.
As if he did not know where he was, Stone opened his eyes again and immediately tried to stand up. But he was uncertain on his legs, and she held his arm as he again fell back on the step.
Carol put her cloak around his shoulders trying to shield him from the rain.
‘You are Harry Stone, Dr Sean’s patient in Marine House? Do you have a key so we can get you inside out of this rain?’ the nurse asked.
Stone fumbled in his jacket, but he could not find the key. He was confused and it left the nurse with no option but to call for an ambulance. As she waited, she tried to talk to Stone, but he only responded with grunts, and it was a long fifteen minutes before the ambulance was at the back door of Marine House. The blue lights were flickering strongly in his eyes and Stone held his hand up.
‘I don’t need that help,’ he said in a low growl, almost to himself.
But he did not try to stop the paramedics as they examined his crumpled body on the doorstep. They found his pulse, which was strong; they looked into his eyes, which gave a flicker back, but he put his hand up as they tried to undo his coat to inspect the obvious bloodstained wound on his shoulder. The nurse told them all she knew about his terminal illness and soon the paramedics were retrieving a stretcher from the ambulance.
Carol took her coat from Stone’s shoulders and watched as he was lifted into the ambulance. Stone still had his eyes closed, and all the nurse heard, again, was a low noise as if he was trying to say something. Within a few minutes, the ambulance drew away to A&E at the nearest hospital where he could be examined properly. This was not what the nurse had expected to find on a first visit to an ailing patient.
It was suddenly eerily quiet as Nurse Carol knocked hard on the back door to Marine House. She looked through the windows – there was no movement; no lights were on; and there was no sign of the key that Stone could not find in his pocket.
She called the doctor’s surgery to leave a message. The man who lived in this grand Regency house had received a heavy blow to his shoulder; there was no smell of drink on his breath – surely this was much more than a mere fall on the back doorstep. As she walked to her car, Nurse Carol thought it would be some time before she came back.
But she was not to know what was running through Harry Stone’s head at that time. That he was now going to face up to a money launderer in prison who had been taunting him with a promise of stolen, secret information that he could turn into money to buy this large property.