The Touch of Innocents Read Free Page A

steady drain on the oxygen supply to the nervous system which had begun to degrade even the basic autonomic responses and which everyone attributed to the gradual dysfunctioning of a swollen and chronically damaged brain. But the bleeding had weakened the tissue surrounding the tear until, as spleens sometimes do, abruptly it ruptured. Spleens are the washing machines of the blood, designed to produce white corpuscles and break down the worn-out red corpuscles; they are not intended to haemorrhage and squirt blood into the abdominal cavity. When they do, patients normally have no more than a couple of hours to live.
    Primrose was flustered. Less than forty minutes had passed since the grand parade of registrars, house officers, anaesthetists and physiotherapists had swept through ITU on the thrice-daily rounds, rushing around with their earnest faces and silly jokes, treating the nurses around them with as much consideration as uncomfortable pieces of furniture. Particularly student nurses. Yet now the anaesthetist, the one with the blond hair and salon tan, was on the phone, summoning her. She hadn’t even realized he knew her name. What did he want; had she fouled up?
    The other nurses exchanged knowing smiles; after all, he had the tightest and best-known glutei maximi any of them had seen in or out of surgical trousers.
    So that was it. An emergency, he explained, of a distinctly non-clinical nature. These emergenciesshe’d been handling since she was fifteen. Patiently she explained she couldn’t, not this week when she was working nights, trying to phrase her refusal so he wouldn’t be unduly deterred, wondering how far the tan went beyond the forearms, when the air-conditioned calm of Weschester General’s intensive therapy unit was shattered by the shrill insistence of an alarm. Alarms in ITU may sound if a patient rolls over and disturbs a sensor, or when a monitor is switched off for a bed bath or some other treatment. But patients in comas don’t roll over, and there wasn’t a nurse within twenty feet.
    She cut off the anaesthetist without explanation and rushed for the bed, but already McBean was ahead of her and checking the monitor. Blood pressure dropping, catastrophically. The breathing, once so serene, abruptly shallow and rasping. Now the alarm on the ECG monitor joined in the drama as it detected a heartbeat beginning to race. The body was in shock; death was calling.
    ‘Not so soon, not so soon, my lovely,’ McBean breathed quietly. It was too sudden, too unexpected to give up the fight just yet. ‘Hold on, a wee while longer. Don’t go giving up on us, not now.’
    Even as she called for the doctors to be summoned back the sister was making a further inspection of the patient, using her trained eyes, probing with her fingers, letting her years of experience block out the wailing of the monitors while she searched for the cause of crisis.
    And quickly it was found. A distended abdomen, taut, a drum.
    ‘Get a theatre ready,’ she snapped across the ward. ‘We’ll be needing it in a hurry or I’m too old for this job.’
    Calmly, she turned to the patient and beganstroking her hand, which was trembling in shock. ‘We’ll maybe get you through this after all. And then we can find out who you really are.’
    The pavement across the road from the famous doorway was cluttered with the paraphernalia of modern news gathering which, in spite of the microprocessor revolution, still seemed to consist primarily of middle-aged men, each more dog-eared than the next, raising their voices to hurl baited questions in the direction of passing politicians. They stood like fishermen crowded along a river bank, overweight, overcoated and many thermally underpinned, hoping to lure their quarry into a sound bite.
    ‘This is a traditional British game called a Government reshuffle,’ intoned the producer-turned-novice foreign correspondent. It was the hour of day when the minds of most journalists descend to