‘This is Harry Stone, a sixty-four-year-old found by the care nurse lying unconscious on the back doorstep of a large house on the seafront. We understand he has other health issues than a gash to his right collarbone, but we don’t have those details,’ the ambulance paramedic told the A&E doctor.
Stone came round from his semi-conscious state soon after arriving in the hospital and lying on a bed in A&E.
‘So, Harry, this wound to your shoulder, how did it happen?’
‘I fell on the back steps to my house – it was wet – I slipped.’
The doctor looked at the nurse standing by him. They did not believe what he said – had he got concussion that was clouding his memory?
‘We’ll make you comfortable, do some X-rays of your shoulder and collarbone to assess the damage.’
His shoulder was throbbing with an ache, and he made a grunting noise as the nurse tried to remove his shirt which was torn into the wound. A morphine drip eased the pain as they cleaned the wound and applied a dressing. Stone soon felt much easier.
What was he doing here? What had happened? He tried to sit up from his prone position in the flat bed. But the nurse gently coaxed him to stay still until they had carried out necessary X-rays. He laid back with a sigh, his eyes now wide open and fully understanding where he was. It was then that he felt an immediate need to get out of this place. After fifteen minutes, left alone in a small, curtained-off area, Harry Stone again tried to sit up. But the porter and a nurse came to take him to X-ray and Stone reluctantly quickly slumped back in the bed.
Half an hour later he was back in A&E, and he clenched his fists and closed his eyes. The examining doctor told him that his shoulder blade was very badly bruised but not broken. He would need to rest, and it would be painful for some time. That was enough for Stone. It was all he needed to hear – he took the pain relief canula feed from his hand and tried to lower himself to the floor from the bed. But the nurse watched aghast, unsure what this patient was trying to do.
‘Mr Stone, we do need to monitor you for the next few hours. You have a nasty wound on your shoulder, and you were unconscious when you came in here. Your blood pressure is racing away, so please relax and we’ll do our best to make you comfortable.’
‘I’m okay. Good enough to get out of here – I don’t like hospitals and I’m leaving. Where is my jacket?’
Stone again felt dizzy, and he rested back on the bed. He put his head on the pillow and, for the next few minutes, heard no more than the buzz of people around him.
‘Mr Stone, can you hear me?’ the doctor asked.
Stone nodded and again closed his eyes.
‘We’ve had full details of your underlying health condition from your doctor, and we think you should stay with us for the next twenty-four hours so we can make you comfortable and do a full assessment before you are discharged. We are going to transfer you to a general ward upstairs.’
His eyes were closed, and Stone took little notice of what was going on around him for the next hour. He became alert when a porter wheeled his bed to a lift and up two flights to a brightly lit ward with a flickering television high on a corner wall. He became more alert, and he again started to feel that he was being taken somewhere he had no wish to go. It was a new space; it was noisy; it was enclosing him; and he could not stop it.
The ward was small, just six beds, and he again began to feel the stabbing pain in his shoulder. Suddenly he thought he saw, as if he was next to him, the wide-shouldered hooded man who had stood over him at the back door to Marine House. But this reverie drifted away as he rested again on the soft pillow of the bed.
There were visitors sitting by two of the other patients’ beds. Stone suddenly felt conspicuous; this place lacked basic privacy that Harry Stone always tried to find wherever he was. Blue curtains were drawn around his space; he was helped to take his torn shirt and trousers off and dressed in hospital pyjamas. But Stone was agitated; he closed his eyes and sank lower into the clean, white sheets of his new bed.
‘Where are my clothes?’ he asked when a nurse came in five minutes later just to check on him.
‘In a small, curtained place just over there.’
The nurse pointed to a gap just into the corridor at the entrance to the ward. The space was open, and the curtains were not pulled across it.
‘But you won’t need those tonight, and we’ll see in the morning how you are. Anything personal, valuable, place in the drawer by the side of your bed and please make sure you lock it.’
It was a matter-of-fact statement the nurse had probably made a few hundred times in the last few weeks alone.
He would need to visit the toilet in the night, but in this curtained-off space his privacy was gone. It was with his thoughts racing that Stone, two hours later, tried to close his eyes. He was going to blot out everything that had led him to be in this crowded, noisy place, and the heavy pain relief he had been given made that easier.
He slipped into a light sleep, and it was some four hours later that he looked at his watch. He roused himself, wondering where he was. There was just a night light in the ward, and it was 2.30 in the morning. The place was quiet except for a deep snoring sleep in the bed next to his. He tugged at the bedclothes and stood by the side of his bed. The pain in his shoulder and his back both hit him, but that is how it always had been for the past few weeks.
Irrationally, Stone now had just one intention, one way to deal with his illness. He was never going to die in a hospital. Or anywhere else except Marine House. He had growing faith that Claire would see to that for him. He walked quickly to the small, curtained place that held his clothes.
Within five minutes, Stone was dressed in his bloodstained shirt, trousers and jacket that were still damp from lying on his back doorstep. He fumbled in his jacket pocket with a torn sleeve for the key to the back door of Marine House. He held it firmly in his hand; his body was fragile, but his mood was now defiant as he walked past the empty nurses’ station in the corridor at the end of the small ward. He passed nobody; there was no security presence as he walked down the two flights of stairs to the ground-floor level and followed the signs to the hospital fire exit. When he walked into the air, the rain had stopped, but his pain had increased. It was just after 3.00 in the morning, and the road was very quiet. He could not walk much further, and he sat on a bench in a park just across the road from the hospital. A startled Vlad, his driver from the local garage, answered his call five minutes later.
It was still dark when he arrived at Marine House. Without even saying goodbye to Vlad, he let himself in by the keypad on the front door and shut it securely. The house was cold, very dark and quiet; his shoulder was starting to ache with a throb. Within a few minutes, Stone was in his study and pouring a glass of malt whisky.
Time was just a blur, but when it got light, he had urgent business to attend to. And nobody was going to stop him.