Joanna shook herself free and returned to safer ground. ‘OK. So take me through last night’s events.’
As no one spoke straightaway she prompted them. ‘You say you arrive about eight thirty.’
Nods from all three.
‘And you have a handover between half eight and nine.’
Joan Arkwright resumed her role as spokesperson. ‘Yes – we hear the report on anything unusual to do with the patients.’ She lapsed into corporate speak. ‘It’s part of the Ongoing Care Plan.’
Resisting the temptation to roll her eyes because she hated jargon, particularly as, working in the Force, she was subjected to an overdose of the stuff, Joanna nodded. There were times when jargon could be useful. Joanna tried to make use of this ‘Ongoing Care Plan’. ‘When you had your handover on Sunday evening, was anything mentioned about Mr Foster?’
‘Yes.’ Joan Arkwright’s eyes brightened. Surefooted as she skipped over this ground. ‘Yes. They said he was still upset about his teddy bear.’
‘They said,’ Susie Trent put in, ‘that he was agitated.’
‘Agitated?’
‘Yes.’
‘Agitated enough to try and search for it outside the home?’
They looked at each other, less sure of their lines now. ‘Did you talk to him about it?’
‘When I was giving him his night sedation,’ Amelia put in bravely, ‘I said that we were all trying our best to find it.’
‘And were you?’ Bridget’s soft voice was nevertheless a well-inserted probe.
‘Of course. We were all keeping an eye out for it.’ Susie Trent was reverting to a sulky defence. Since the questioning about her night-time cigarette, she had resorted to folding her arms, which gave her a defensive, slightly stroppy look.
‘OK. So you, Amelia, tried to reassure Mr Foster that you’d keep an eye open for his teddy bear.’ She wished this investigation wasn’t tumbling down this rabbit hole straight into CBBC.
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
‘We did the rest of the night-time drinks and gave them their medication like we always do.’
Joanna almost smirked at the memory the word ‘medication’ provoked. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Medication time.’ Which in Nurse Ratched’s tone had sounded an ominous threat.
‘So you’re locked up, drinks and sedation given and then you settle down?’
More guilty looks exchanged between all three. Joanna could picture it. A nice, warm, cosy coffee room. Positively soporific.
‘There’s bells to answer and we do rounds through the night,’ Amelia put in.
‘OK, we’ll talk about that in a minute.’
Joan Arkwright’s irritation came bubbling to the surface.
‘Surely you should be out there, searching for him? Not finding out how he left. We know how he left.’
‘Do we?’ Joanna’s voice was soft but underneath she was furious. If these women had done their job properly, Zachary Foster would be tucked up alongside Mr Alfred Dean in room eleven and she would be investigating a proper case. Not an old man looking for his teddy bear. She kept that thought to herself and her voice deliberately cold as she repeated. ‘Do we? How?’
Sister Arkwright kept her stare up. ‘Through a door,’ she said finally, still grumpy.
Joanna didn’t bother going down the ‘Which door?’ or ‘When – exactly?’
Instead she addressed all three. ‘As we speak, there are more than twenty officers searching both town and country for your missing patient.’ She omitted to point out the obvious fact that twenty officers engaged in looking for Mr Foster was twenty officers taken away from other duties. But even though she hadn’t pointed this out, she could hear the accusation souring her voice. The baby was squirming inside her. She was uncomfortable. She wanted to pee. She wanted to be home, with Matthew. He might be overly protective, possessive, proprietorial even, but there were times when that was just what a woman needed. And this was one of those times. She wanted to shower, change into something comfortable, feet up on the sofa. Not here.
But she had a job to do and no answers yet so she continued with her jibes. ‘The resources we’re expending are considerable.’ She was tempted to finish on a note of admonishment but resisted bleating about limited resources or mentioning the fact that the police could be better employed than searching for an old man and his teddy, both of whom should have been safe.
Instead she continued with her line of questioning. ‘Did you have any visitors during the night?’
‘No.’ All three of them chorused this answer.
‘So it was just you and your forty-six patients. Minus one by the morning,’ she couldn’t resist adding.
Joan Arkwright chewed her lip.
Joanna moved on. ‘So …’ She produced a floor plan. ‘Take me through the night. Was it a quiet night on Tuesday or were you rushed off your feet?’ A swift, insightful glance from the night sister told her she’d picked up on the irony.
They all looked at each other, checking, Joan Armstrong providing an answer. ‘Reasonably busy.’
‘So when did you last actually see him?’
This time it was Susie Trent who spoke up for all of them. ‘I looked in on him and Alf about two-ish.’
For some reason, perhaps believing the PC would be more trusting (right), her eyes were on Bridget Anderton when Joanna prompted the lie. ‘So?’
Susie Trent licked dry lips. ‘They were both fast asleep.’ She waited nervously while Joanna, smiling, picked the inevitable hole in this. But leaving Susie a way out. These were not villains but innocent liars caught in their own trap. It was up to her to snap it open.
‘You stood in the doorway? Or did you enter the room?’
‘Just in the doorway.’
Joanna paused, savouring the moment before she produced her trump card. ‘You couldn’t have seen Mr Foster from the doorway, could you?’ she pointed out gently.
Susie hung her head but there was an attitude of anger about the action, a sharp breath drawn in through her teeth, a silent, What’s it to do with you?
Joanna pressed the point home. ‘So you didn’t actually see him, did you?’
She shook her head.
After a brief pause, Joanna moved on. ‘When exactly did you realize Mr Foster had gone?’
They looked at one another, guilty all.
Again, Joan Arkwright answered for them all. ‘Not until this morning. Just after seven. We were looking for him everywhere.’ Her eyes flicked round the other two inviting their agreement. Obediently they nodded.
‘You looked inside the home?’
‘Top to bottom,’ Susie put in.
‘And in the grounds?’
‘We didn’t have time.’
Alarm in all three pairs of eyes.
‘So your call came in to police at …’ Joanna glanced down at her notes, ‘… just after eight.’
Again Susie Trent made an attempt to be helpful. ‘The day staff come in at seven forty-five. They went outside and had a quick look for him. When none of us could find him either inside or out, we called the police.’
It was time to wrap this up. ‘Let me point out something to you all. You didn’t actually see Mr Foster after you gave him his night sedation at around nine-ish. So he could have left at any time after that.’ She turned to look at the hapless HCA. ‘If Mr Foster left before you, Susie, had your cigarette, you would have found the door both unlocked and unbolted. When you secured the door you would have locked him out.’
She looked appalled. ‘Are you saying …?’
Joanna continued. ‘It seems unlikely that he wandered out while you had your cigarette because you would have seen him. If, on the other hand, he wandered out after you’d had your cigarette, that is, after two thirty, the door would have been unlocked and unbolted this morning. You see my quandary? We have a frail old man, confused, somehow able to walk through doors which were locked and bolted. And, even more incredibly, he locked and bolted them after he’d made his escape. Now then, I wonder whether any of you might want to revise your statements?’
There was no response from any of them. They were frozen.
Joanna addressed her next question to all three of them, moving on as though her previous allegation had been passed over. ‘So during the night he must have come down the stairs. I take it you spend much of the night in the coffee room?’
No one denied this. ‘Did any of you hear something unusual during the night? Someone wandering around? Voices? Doors opening, closing?’
All three shook their heads and looked puzzled.
‘Nothing?’ She looked at all three faces in turn and read exactly that – nothing. ‘You didn’t hear Mr Foster coming down the stairs?’
Again, they shook their heads.
‘Did he usually use the lift or was he able to manage the stairs himself?’
Amelia Boden spoke out. ‘He could manage – if he hung on to the bannister. He was slow, though.’
And Joanna was wondering how the hell this old man who had to clutch the bannister to descend the shallow steps of Ryland’s staircase had climbed a chair to unbolt a stiff lock that even she had problems with, descend the patio steps, of which there were five and which had no steadying handrail, and then presumably make his way down to the front of the house – gravel drive so steps would be audible – and disappeared into thin air.
Sometimes it was the simplest of cases which were the most impossible.
But if Mr Foster was somewhere in the grounds, he would have been found by now. She knew the uniformed team, including Jason Spark. Although prone to excitability, he had a boyish enthusiasm for his work and, more importantly, he was thorough. If Zachary Foster was within a few hundred yards of Ryland’s, he would have found him, however well-hidden. Besides, they’d roped in Holmes and Watson, predictably named, but the Force’s bloodhounds all the same. They were trained sniffer dogs, and had turned up a number of bodies.
Not this time.
Usually at some point during an investigation, as facts were unearthed, some sense and order started to appear. In this case it was the exact opposite. The more facts she learned about this elderly man’s disappearance, the more confusing and impossible it seemed.
Joanna puzzled over this while the three nurses waited for her next question.
She stood up and crossed the small interview room then turned to face them. ‘You do understand,’ she said, ‘that no crime has been committed. A little carelessness, yes. Possibly some misunderstandings or faulty memories …’ She was leading them towards a way out. ‘But no crime.’ Her reassurance had been meant to put them at their ease, feel freer to perhaps leak some facts they had, up until now, kept back. Clarify times and the annoying point of the locked or unlocked, bolted or unbolted door. But all she got were three pairs of eyes, all with the same hostile, stony, deceitful stare. And so she produced the next card she’d been holding up her sleeve, which DC Alan King had copied from her description.
‘This is a rough ground-floor map of Ryland’s, plotting the day room, the kitchen, the ground-floor bedrooms, windows and doors. I wonder, would you show me on this diagram where you sit when you’re not busy seeing to patients?’
The innocent question flooded them all with the same guilt and Joanna filled in the gaps. Somewhere warm, comfortable, somewhere where they could doze the night away; possibly not central enough to hear everything that was going on but where they could still hear residents’ bells. ‘Here?’ She jabbed her finger at a room nearer the front door, a room she guessed the staff used in the day for coffee and lunch breaks and at night, no doubt containing a few comfortable-looking armchairs, as a room to relax in. It was placed so anyone descending the stairs could reach the day room without passing that door. And from the glances they exchanged which were conspiratorial, she guessed she’d been right.
From the main front door, apart from the snug, there were two two-bedded rooms, one to the right and the other to the left. The sister’s office, which they claimed was locked, was tucked away on the right, beyond the stairs. The kitchen was at the back.
The day room was on the left, the entrance reached by a short corridor. If her guess was correct, Zachary could conceivably have descended the stairs, crossed the hallway and entered the day room without them being aware if they were comfortably ensconced in the room she was mentally calling The Snug.
She deliberately marked it with a red, felt-tipped cross. It was bold enough to appear an exaggeration. Eying it, Joan Arkwright responded in a professional tone she’d somehow recovered: ‘We spend the first part of the night checking up on everyone, giving out a hot drink, night-time medication, checking who wants to go to the toilet. That takes until around eleven, eleven thirty sometimes. And, of course, by six a.m. they’re all awake again.’
‘So between say midnight and six a.m. where are you?’
The night sister drew in a deep breath, took in the red cross and answered with a touch of asperity. ‘When we’re not answering the residents’ bells or doing our rounds …’
Which consist of peering in through the doorway at a pile of drugged-up geriatrics …
‘We’re in there.’
The Snug.
Joanna jumped right in. ‘With the door open or closed?’
The night sister looked affronted. ‘Open. Of course.’
‘And you can hear the bells in there?’
The nod was unmistakably hostile, Joanna’s lifting of stones to reveal the creepy-crawlies beneath visibly resented by all three.
C’est la vie.
Joan Arkwright added, ‘A light comes on if a bell is pressed.’
But her expression was guarded. No need then for pseudo-politeness. ‘Was last night very busy answering bells? You were running up and down stairs all night?’
‘The usual. Two or three times every hour. It generally quietens down between half two and five.’
‘And when you are answering bells? In which parts of the home are you?’
A deep sigh. ‘Upstairs mostly. Mrs Williamson – she seems to need to go to the bathroom every hour or so.’
The others nodded their agreement with gusto. Clearly Mrs Williamson’s toilet habits were well known. ‘But none of you noticed Mr Foster out of bed, wandering?’
Shakes of the head. ‘Does he usually wander in the night?’
Susie Trent answered for them all. ‘Not Zac. He’s no trouble. A sound sleeper – usually.’
Joanna noticed she’d tacked the word on as an afterthought and picked up on it. ‘Usually?’
‘Since his little teddy’s gone missing, he’s been a bit more restless.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘Like a kid,’ she said. ‘Goes to sleep cuddling it, his face pressed against it. Like a child has its comforter.’
Which pulled Joanna up short, a thought intruding. Would the child that was bumping around inside her have a ‘comforter’? Curious that she knew so little about him – or her. Not even its sex.
She shook the thought away. ‘OK. So for some of the time during the night, when it’s quiet, you sleep?’
None of them even attempted to answer this one but the looks they exchanged said it all.
Oddly enough it was Amelia who responded. ‘We might doze for a moment but sleep – no.’
Joanna let the quiet seep in under the door and permeate around the room.
Night Sister Joan Arkwright apparently felt compelled to add her two penn’orth. ‘We might have had forty winks.’ It was the only admission she was going to proffer.
Joanna frowned because the scenario sounded unlikely. At some point Mr Foster, whatever his physical and mental state, had crept downstairs and let himself out. So she felt compelled to ask again. ‘During the night you heard nothing?’ She knew she should have moderated the incredulity in her voice when she caught Bridget Anderton’s surprise.
Two of them shook their heads but Amelia Boden frowned and met Joanna’s eyes. ‘I thought I might have heard something,’ she said. ‘But I think it must have been part of a dream I was having.’
‘When you say “something”?’
She half closed her eyes. ‘Whispering.’ And then she tried to explain it away. ‘Maybe it was a real voice but it was very, very soft and quiet. I can’t be certain.’
‘Did you decipher any words?’
She smiled and shook her head.
‘Whose voice did it sound like?’
Again the young woman smiled, shook her head and shrugged, effectively detaching herself from her previous statement.
Joanna pressed her. ‘Male or female?’
And then Amelia turned full circle. ‘If I did hear anything, it must have been Zac, muttering, mustn’t it?’
‘What sort of time would you say that you heard this … whispering?’
‘I don’t know. About …’ She thought for a moment. ‘Midnight, maybe? Two or three – I can’t be certain.’
Her two colleagues were looking at her with tolerant, amused exasperation, so she moderated to, ‘I can’t really say.’
‘And did you wake then?’
‘Briefly. It didn’t sound anything too worrying. I checked that none of the bell lights were on but it was all quiet. Nothing alarming. I listened for a while and decided it was nothing, so I carried on dozing.’
They were waiting for her to dismiss them so they could head towards their night’s work.
Joanna watched them. Joan Arkwright, the trained night sister, was so pale she looked as though she never saw the light of day. Before her shift had even started she looked exhausted. As she left, Joanna regarded her with curiosity and a certain dread. All the surveys indicate that broken nights led to depression and ill health, even early death. So why did Sister Arkwright choose this life? Because there was no option? Because the pay was better? Because it fitted in better with her home life? An avoidance of the hustle and bustle of the day? Autonomy, given that she was, quite definitely, in charge, with no one watching her work?
The phrase, broken nights, jangled in Joanna’s ears like a shop bell. Pretty soon, when this lump of a child was finally born, she would be having plenty of those. She’d heard too many mothers talk about being so exhausted they would have mortgaged their soul for eight hours’ sleep to fool herself that she would escape.
She tossed the apprehension aside and ended the interrogation with the usual request that if any of them remembered anything, however trivial, they would contact the station.
Then she dismissed them, making the comment after they’d gone.
‘A few holes in that.’
PC Bridget Anderton agreed.
Before leaving for the evening she checked around the station.
Their man was still missing.