No Escape Page 2

She gave a little cry when the hot rim touched her lips and her eyes opened very wide.

  “Drink some,” said Tim in his best bedside manner. “Doctor’s, orders.”

  She stared, not taking this in, not realising her surroundings at all. But she put a hand to the mug and having sipped one mouthful, sipped again.

  “Who are you?” she said at last, pushing the mug from her.

  Tim hesitated.

  “He’s the bloke that’s just saved your life, miss,” said the officer with the cup, handing it to the other and issuing a string of rapid orders. He turned back to the girl. “I am an officer of the River Police. This is the launch that effected your rescue from the river. Would you like to tell me how you came to be in the water?”

  The girl stiffened.

  “No!” she cried. “No! No! No!”

  Tim moved quickly to her side again.

  “Lie down,” he ordered. “Do as I tell you. Lie down!”

  She obeyed him slowly, covering her face with her hands, beginning to sob.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Tim said. “At least everything from Hammersmith Bridge to wherever it was you picked us up.”

  “That won’t tell us where she fell in—or jumped in—will it? Or will it?”

  Tim told his story briefly. There was not much to it, he realised; the patrol officer was right. It threw no light at all on the question they all needed to know. Was this an accident, and attempted suicide, the most probable explanation, or something much more sinister?

  “She won’t tell you in her present state,” Tim said, in a low voice when he had finished. “Send someone up to the hospital tomorrow morning. You might have more luck then. You don’t have to sit at the bedside these days, do you?”

  “Thanks for the information,” the officer said, with heavy sarcasm. “Perhaps you’d like to advise me which hospital she ought to go to?”

  “Mine, of course,” said Tim, impatiently. “Aren’t you making for the nearest pier? Well, the West Kensington is the nearest place for casualties, isn’t it? I’m surgical registrar there, on duty tonight—sleeping in. Oh, my God!”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What’s the time?” He shook his wrist despairingly. “I’ve drowned my watch. What time is it, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Ten forty-five.”

  “Is that all?”

  The river patrol man grinned.

  “We should be nearly there now,” he said. “Ambulance will be waiting. They’ll have fixed a bed for the young lady.”

  “At the West Kensington?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  The launch rounded up into the tide to come alongside the pier at Chelsea. She heeled as she came broadside on to the wives whipped up by the wind, and the girl, feeling herself slipping, cried out in renewed terror.

  “Not to worry!” Tim called to her, staggering in his turn as the vessel righted again. “We’re just about to land.”

  They were alone now, the officer having gone to the wheel to bring the launch alongside himself.

  “Listen!” said Tim urgently. “You’re to do exactly what I tell you. I’m going to arrange a bed for you at the hospital where I work. I’ll see you aren’t badgered by the police again, tonight, but you’ll have to tell them the truth tomorrow. Understand?”

  “I must go home. I’m all right. I must go home.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re not going to do. If you try to insist I shall tell the police I believe you are mixed up in something you daren’t tell them. You are, aren’t you?”

  “You devil!” she whispered. “How dare you! I’ll see you—”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I must go home!”

  “You can give your addresss at the hospital and your parents will be notified at once and come to you.”

  “I don’t live with my parents. I won’t go to hospital.”

  “You will or else!”

  They were both furious, Tim because she defied him and seemed to be wholly without gratitude for what he had done, the girl because of her abiding fear.

  Above, there were sounds of activity, a few thumps, a few short orders. The engine of the launch died. A voice said, “This way. I’ve got them both below here.”

  Two ambulance men appeared and a helmeted policeman, who carried Tim’s duffle coat and jacket over his arm and his shoes in his hand.

  “Picked up on Hammersmith Bridge, sir,” he said. “Yours, I believe.”

  Tim put them on, feeling much more like himself, the nightmare quality of the last hour fading rapidly. He went ashore ahead of the stretcher with the girl to find out what arrangements had been made.

  “Waiting to hear,” he was told. “Emergency Bed Service have it. Might be outside the area.”

  “To hell with the E.B.S.!” Tim cried, furiously. “I’m on the staff at the West Kensington. Where can I find a phone?”

  He was able to fix a bed for the girl, whom he described as an accident case with query fractured ribs and severe shock. He was also able to check that his presence had not been needed at the hospital since he left it.

  In the ambulance he said nothing to the girl at all. Nor when she was transferred from the stretcher to a trolley and wheeled into the hospital. But at the entrance to the ward, while the night nurse was organising her reception, he leaned over her and said, “I’ve admitted you as an accident with damaged, possibly fractured ribs, left side. You fell in the river at a broken bit of the parapet. Understand?”

  “Thank you,” she whispered and caught at his hand. “It won’t be any good, but thank you for everything.”

  Chapter Two

  Jane Wheelan struggled into her white working coat in the tiny cubicle set apart for non-resident staff of the Radiography Department at the West Kensington Hospital.

  Four girls and Miss Gleaning used this cubicle, which was no more than one of the changing rooms for outpatients sent to the department. It was totally inadequate. There were only three hooks on the walls for five coats. There were no lockers, no shelves. There would not have been room for them. There were five small stools extracted from the hospital store by a threat of rebellion. On these, or under them, the girls put their handbags, their hats, (if any), their shoes, if these differed from the ones they wore in the department. For years Matron had fought an unproductive battle to secure a proper changing room with lockers for all the non-resident staff. But the Ministry, pandering from political fear to the voracious general public’s demand for luxury drugs, pep pills, tranquillisers and so on, for which they, the public, paid about a twentieth of the proper cost, had forbidden all piecemeal interior development in what had been, like many others, a Poor Law hospital or workhouse before the reformation of 1948.

  So Jane, beset with other people’s clothes so that movement of any kind was difficult, struggled into her white coat, while the patient who ought to have been using this cubicle to undress in, sat on a bench outside the department, waking.

  Miss Gleaning, a handful of ward papers in one hand, came towards her as she emerged.

  “It’s going to be a busy morning, Jane,” she said, severely.

  “I’m not late, am I?”

  She glanced at the clock on the wall of the department. She was not late. Apparently the others were all early.

  “No. But you’re the last. You usually are.”

  “I stayed late yesterday. Nearly two hours.”

  She wanted to add, ‘and no overtime’, but held her tongue. Miss Gleaning was the dedicated type, the kind that made progress in the profession impossible. A single woman, in her forties, with no interests outside her work. Nothing would make her understand that the younger generation were just as interested, just as committed, but not prepared to give up a private life and a wider experience outside the job, not prepared to be exploited, overworked and underpaid, simply because their consciences would not let them neglect patients with real diseases, would nev
er, in fact, allow them to strike.

  So she waited, hoping the unprofitable, veiled rebuke, that had no real substance, was over. Miss Gleaning understood the girl’s antagonism and sighed. When she herself was young she would not have dared to say even as little as Jane had done. She would have found herself standing before Matron at the end of the day, listening to a sermon that ended in her dismissal for insubordination, knowing the competition was fierce and she must plead for her job. Now it was the other way round. Radiographers were worth their weight in gold, but the gold was not there.

  She handed Jane a paper.

  “This girl came in last night. Nightingale Ward. Emergency. Some kind of accident. Query fractured ribs, left side. Very vague. She should be down from the ward by now. They don’t seem to have her name. Miss Query. Will you see what you can make of her before you start and let me know?”

  “Yes, Miss Gleaning.”

  She went through the department to the room where stretcher cases from the wards or casualty arrived. She recognised a nurse from Nightingale standing beside a trolley and went up to her. The nurse stood aside. A white face framed in a mop of untidy white-dyed hair stared up at her.

  “Sheila!” Jane exclaimed. In spite of the hair, which had been light brown, and the eyes, fixed, hard, full of an unaccountable resistance, she was sure of the recognition.

  But the girl continued to stare and said nothing. It was the nurse who said, brightly, “Well, you never expected to see a friend of yours so soon, did you, Miss—?”

  “Burgess,” said Jane. “You are Sheila Burgess, aren’t you?” She was puzzled, uncertain how to go on, with a response so entirely negative.

  Then the girl spoke, using a hard voice, as unlike her former self as the unnatural pinkish-white hair and the hard eyes.

  “Yes. I’m Sheila Burgess and you’re Jane Wheelan. You stayed in this racket, did you?”

  Jane, suddenly angry, looked at the paper in her hand.

  “You’ve hurt your ribs? Left side? Is that right?”

  “Haven’t you got it down? Doesn’t it say?”

  “It says. But what about you? Where d’you feel it? Incidentally, how did it happen?”

  Jane was aware of the nurse opening and shutting her mouth, trying to gain her attention. But before she could turn aside from the trolley to speak to her out of hearing of the patient, the latter shot out a thin arm to clutch her sleeve.

  “Jane! Oh Jane, let me tell you myself! Let me, please!”

  Tears had begun to run down the white cheeks, sobs shook the blanket.

  “Of course, tell me anything Sheila, don’t! You’re ill. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  Jane took hold of the trolley, nodding to the nurse, who stood aside. She wheeled the girl into a corner of the room, then bent to listen to a story confused enough, incomplete, but startling in its implications. At the end of it, Jane said, soothingly, “Did you actually bump anything? I mean, those ribs—”

  “I think I bumped the bridge—the stone under the arch in the water—it sticks out—I couldn’t avoid it.”

  “You mean as the current took you through?”

  “Yes. I can swim, you know. I was swimming on my back. I didn’t see how near the stone I was. The water rushed me through!”

  “Have you any pain this morning?”

  “On my left side, yes. But I think it’s only stiffness. They put a strapping on.”

  “We’ll have a look.”

  Jane beckoned the nurse back and went in search of Miss Gleaning. The latter listened to her report impatiently. She was very busy that morning.

  “You actually know the girl?”

  “Slightly. I haven’t seen her for years. Five years, I suppose. We did a photography course together. She’s changed a lot—”

  “Has she any bone injury? Where?”

  Jane told her.

  “Get on with it yourself, then Sounds like attempted suicide. That’s not our concern. Only her ribs.”

  Seeing Jane’s face set in lines of contemptuous anger, she added, “I’m sorry. To me this is one patient among many. Most of them want to live and I’m here to do my part in helping that on. Suicides—”

  “She’s not a suicide,” Jane said and turning abruptly, went back to the other room.

  After the photographs had been taken and the nurse had wheeled Sheila away, Jane remembered what she had said to Miss Gleaning and wondered why she was so sure of it. Then other work claimed her and she put the strange case out of her mind.

  But later in the morning, when, with two of the other girls, she was having a quick cup of coffee the whole thing came up again in an even more interesting light.

  “We haven’t seen the hero of the hour yet. Or have we?” one of them said, smiling at Jane.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You don’t! I thought you had the jump-in-the-river girl to do yourself? Am I wrong?”

  “I’m still not with you.”

  “Really, Jane! You know there was a suicide emergency admitted last night?”

  “I doubt if it was really attempted suicide. But go on. I know the girl you mean. I’ve just let her go back to the ward. I think her plate’s negative. What about her?”

  “Well, don’t you know who pulled her out of the water?”

  “It said something about the River Police on her notes. I didn’t read it all.”

  Another girl said, “You’re hopeless, Jane. It was a front page splash this morning. Mystery girl in the Thames. Heroic rescue.”

  “Not in my paper,” she answered, wishing at once that she had not said this, though it was perfectly true. She went on quickly, to cover it up, “Tell me. Please.”

  “Our Timothy Long.”

  “Beech-Thomas’s registrar?”

  Both the other girls nodded. Jane laughed. She remembered bumping into him only the afternoon before. She remembered his clever, not very good-looking face red with annoyance and confusion. Some muddle over a gallbladder series, wasn’t it? Yes, the report. And Dr Milton at his most icy.

  “You mean to say he actually went into the river after her?”

  “That’s right. Held her up till the police launch got there. Fixed a bed for her here, too. Can you imagine? She can’t have been looking her best in the water, can she?”

  “Perhaps he chased her on to Hammersmith Bridge and she jumped over to get away from him.”

  “Not a hope, poor chick,” the other girl took it up, laughing. “Down he came after her and grabbed her and now he’s got her right under his thumb!”

  If it had been anyone else whose ribs she had just photographed and yes, anyone other than the baffled young man keeping his temper so bravely, remembering to apologise for colliding with her while no doubt wishing her in hell first, Jane might have laughed, too. As it was she shook her head, putting down her cup and turning away.

  “I happen to know the girl you’re making those cracks at,” she said, over her shoulder. “Her name’s Sheila Burgess. We did photography together, once. There’s nothing funny about what happened last night. Nor about Mr Long, either.”

  By the end of the morning the West Kensington hospital was in a state of siege. From an hour or two before dawn the building had been infested with journalists all hunting for the hero and heroine of the ‘river story’. They had been frustrated because the night porters, old and experienced in the ways of the Press, had refused to give them the whereabouts of either protagonist and Night Sister, furious with the creeping, whispering groups she found in the corridors, had driven them away to the best of her ability.

  But the journalists, equally experienced, more ingenious, practised various unsuspected methods of evasion. At first light they crept out from their places of hiding. Some had gathered stories from junior nurses, some had switched to fascinating tit-bits gleaned in Casualty. All these hurried away. The more persistent, intent on the original story, were winkled out and escorted to an outside door. The Hospital Secretary iss
ued three orders; all doors were to be locked, except the Casualty entrance; notices were to be put on other doors to this effect; at Casualty a concentration of porters would admit journalists singly and escort them to his office where he would present each with a typed bulletin. The bulletin told them what they knew already and not a thing more.

  So neither Sheila Burgess nor Tim Long were troubled with unwanted, impertinent questions. But the questions, for all that, existed and grew larger as the hours passed. For Sheila’s X-ray pictures, as Jane had guessed, were declared totally negative. Dr Milton’s report, very brief, noted ‘no bone injury.’ The psychiatrist, also called in, reported, ‘no evidence of mental disease of any kind. The patient is suffering from shock after a very frightening experience’. This, like many psychiatric reports, merely confirmed the conclusions everyone else had arrived at without special training in that field.

  During the afternoon a collision between a lorry and a mini-van brought three serious orthopaedic emergencies to the hospital. They had to be admitted. Sheila was occupying an orthopaedic bed on no valid grounds. The orthopaedic registrar, the houseman and Sister in Nightingale wrangled mildly in Sister’s room.

  “She’s not fit to be discharged,” Sister said. “She’d do it again tonight.”

  “Not she,” the houseman said. “Properly got the wind up. Later, perhaps.”

  “We must have that bed,” said the registrar. “I’ve got an old woman with both legs smashed I’m going to fix within the next half-hour. Three cases into two beds won’t go. The other two are men.”

  A knock on the door brought Tim into the room.

  “Afternoon, Sister,” he said. “Can I speak to that girl?”

  “Which girl, Mr Long?”

  “Don’t know her name yet. The one I admitted last night.”

  “Nor did we know her name, for she wouldn’t give it, until Miss Wheelan recognised her down in the X-ray.”

  “Blimey, does someone actually know her?” the orthopaedic registrar exclaimed, seeing light ahead.

  Sister explained the situation, adding a little bitterly. “If you’d made a better diagnosis, Mr Long, she wouldn’t have been in my ward at all.”