The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(46)

Phillips was ashamed he hadn’t thought of it himself.

“Aye, I’ll do that now.”

“Frank?” Ryan swallowed back a sudden constriction. “Find out her name. She has a name.”

*

A team of medics surrounded Nicola Cassidy, from the most revered specialist to the lowliest of hospital porters. They fought to keep her alive while Ryan stood guard, silently watching their every move. His eyes followed them fitting an oxygen mask over the woman’s face and an IV tube, hooking her up to a monitor so they could check her blood pressure and heart rate. He watched them arrange a sats probe to check the oxygen levels in her bloodstream, and then quickly administer fluids and begin a blood transfusion.

It all looked right.

But the woman was in cardiac arrest, Ryan realised. He heard the loud, ominous alarm sound on the heart monitor and knew they were losing her.

Everything moved in double speed.

He watched them prepare the woman’s body and heard Draycott shout, “CLEAR!”

Her feet shuddered and her body reared up on the gurney in reaction to the defibrillator. She was missing several toes and the soles of her feet were dirty and scuffed from the road.

There was a deafening silence.

“Again!”

They went through the process again and more people arrived, responding to the fast bleep on their pagers. Ryan noted each of their faces and every action they took.

The woman’s body reared up.

“How’s she doing?”

Phillips hurried back and took stock of the situation immediately, falling silent as they waited.

And then, when they thought all hope had gone, the monitor began to beep slowly.

Beep…beep…beep.

Ryan closed his eyes and sent up a prayer of thanks to a God he didn’t believe in.

*

When Nicola’s eyes opened, there was a sea of white light.

Heaven.

Shapes began to emerge. The edge of the heart monitor, the line of the curtain, the shape of their heads. Faces came into view, so many faces, some in surgical masks. Doctors, nurses.

The hospital.

She blinked against the light and, suddenly, his face appeared.

She would have known his eyes anywhere.

“Hi-hi…” she gasped, her fingers twitching as she tried to point.

“She’s going!”

Across the room, Ryan and Phillips heard the monitor flatline again as her body collapsed. Ryan ran forward, refusing to believe they’d lost her, only to be held back by Phillips as the medics performed manual CPR on her inert body.

“No, lad! Let them try. They have to try!”

They watched Draycott take charge, rapping out orders. They tried for long, painful minutes to revive her until he told them quietly to stop. One of the doctors was taking a turn to manually pump her chest and they could see the muscles of his arms contract as he continued to work on her, long after she was gone.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Come on!”

“Edwards, it’s too late. We’ve lost her.”

“No, we haven’t!”

“She’s gone, Keir. She’s gone,” one of the older nurses said.

They saw Draycott step forward to pull the other man gently away in a rare show of compassion.

“You did everything you could,” he told him. “Nature has taken its course.”

Ryan and Phillips watched the other doctor stumble back and raise a forearm to wipe the sweat from his brow, looking down at the woman lying on the trolley with intense sadness.

“Whatever people say, you can’t knock the NHS,” Phillips said, with admiration. “They gave it everything they had.”

“True,” Ryan said. “But nature had nothing to do with what happened to that woman.”

Phillips remained silent, watching them go through the motions of recording the time of death for the coroner, removing tubes. There was a moment of quiet in the room while the crowd came to terms with losing her, and one revelled in the thrill of it all.

The brrrriiing of a red telephone interrupted the silence.

A blue-light ambulance was on the way and the cycle needed to begin again. Several members of the crash team peeled away to prepare another resuscitation area for the next person in need, and it seemed Nicola Cassidy was already forgotten.

In the residual quiet, Ryan walked across to her body. He found Draycott standing beside the doctor who had performed CPR, and a nurse.

“I thought we had her,” Draycott said, in the kind of unemotional tone that set Ryan’s teeth on edge. “A pity.”

“You did your best,” one of the nurses murmured to the other doctor. “Nobody could have done more.”

“What happened?” Ryan asked.

They looked up in surprise, seeming to notice him for the first time.

“Who’re you? You shouldn’t be in here,” the nurse began heatedly, seeking out the security guard.

“This is DCI Ryan, from Northumbria CID.” Draycott stopped her with calm authority and removed his glasses to polish them against the edge of his scrubs.

“Major cardiac arrest,” the surgeon said, reaching across to cover her body. “She was resuscitated once but we couldn’t do it again. She was too weak.”

“Wait.”

His hand paused on the blanket at Ryan’s sharp command.