Pulse(7)

It makes you feel worthless, ugly and a burden to those around you.

And it spawns the belief that you would be better off dead.





3


I emerged from the linen store cupboard about ten to fifteen minutes later.

Thankfully, it had been one of my shorter episodes and no one else in the department seemed to have been unduly concerned by my absence.

‘There’s a policeman looking for you,’ one of the staff said to me as she hurried past.

It was PC Filippos and he found me at the nurses’ station.

‘Ah, Dr Rankin, there you are,’ he said with a slight trace of irritation in his voice. ‘I need to ask you some questions.’

‘I’m busy,’ I said.

Answering questions was the last thing I wanted to do.

He looked around at the surprisingly empty cubicles behind me. ‘It won’t take long.’

‘I’ll be needed if an emergency arrives.’

‘It won’t take long,’ he repeated. ‘Can we go somewhere private?’

Something about his expression told me he wouldn’t give up so I went with him to the relatives’ room.

‘Coffee?’ he asked, standing by the machine in the corner.

‘No thanks.’ Caffeine was the last thing I needed in my present fragile state. He made himself one and then sat down opposite me on the hospital-issue pink chairs.

‘I understand my patient died,’ he said.

His patient, I thought. That was a new one.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He had a cardiac arrest and couldn’t be resuscitated.’

He took out a black police notebook and wrote something down. ‘What caused the cardiac arrest?’

‘That will be up to the pathologist to determine and the coroner to confirm.’

‘You must have some idea, as the attending physician.’

‘I wasn’t attending him when he arrested,’ I said.

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. ‘And why was that exactly?’

‘I was called to attend another patient – a motorcycle pillion passenger arrived by ambulance with life-threatening injuries.’

He nodded as if he had already known.

‘But my patient also had a life-threatening condition.’

My stress level notched up a little.

‘As it turns out, yes, he did. But I didn’t believe it was as critical at the time.’

He went back to writing in his notebook. He sipped his coffee.

‘Am I being accused of something?’ I asked, my stress levels now reaching the stratosphere with the tingling returning to my fingertips.

‘No, Dr Rankin, nothing like that.’ He smiled and the tingling abated. ‘I just have to get the sequence of events accurate for my report.’

He wrote some more then looked up at me. ‘You must have some idea what killed him.’

‘As I said, that will be determined by a post-mortem examination.’

‘No ideas at all?’ He was persistent.

‘I understand that a blood test showed he had excessive cocaine in his system but I haven’t actually seen the results myself.’

The policeman raised his eyebrows. ‘Cocaine?’

‘Yes. It seems that he had taken a massive overdose. One of my colleagues is of the opinion that no intervention by us could have saved him but the toxicology results will prove that one way or the other.’

He wrote it down.

‘Was there any indication of how the cocaine entered his system?’

‘If you mean were there obvious signs of him having injected it, then no, there weren’t. But the post-mortem should determine that too. Some addicts are very ingenious at disguising the fact by injecting themselves in difficult-to-see places.’

‘I didn’t see a syringe in the racecourse toilet.’

‘Shooting up is not the only method of taking cocaine, you know,’ I said. ‘Most users snort it up their noses and some smoke it. You can even take it orally.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

I’m sure I blushed.

‘A misspent youth,’ I said with a laugh.

He wasn’t to know that I had recently tried anything and everything to try to alleviate my feelings of despair. Drink, drugs, cigarettes – all had been my bosom pals at some time or another during the previous twelve months. Some still were.

‘Is that all?’ I asked. ‘I should be getting back.’

‘All for the time being,’ PC Filippos replied. ‘But can I have your home address just in case?’

Just in case of what? I wondered.

I gave him my address and he wrote it down in his notebook, which he then snapped shut.

‘Thank you, Dr Rankin,’ he said, standing up. ‘Most helpful. I suspect the coroner’s office will be in touch in due course.’

‘What happens if you can’t find out who he was?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll do that. For a start, we’ll check his description against people reported missing. That usually turns up the identity of the deceased. Someone, somewhere, will miss him when he doesn’t return home, maybe not tonight but soon enough.’

I shuddered at the thought of the man’s wife and family waiting for him to get back for his supper totally unaware that his body was already cooling in the hospital morgue.