Sister полностью

Mr. Wright had decided on a working lunch and has now got sandwiches from the deli. He leads me through empty corridors to a meeting room that has a table. For some reason, the large office space, deserted apart from us two, feels intimate.

I haven’t told Mr. Wright that during my research I broke off my engagement, and that with no friends in London, Todd must have walked through the snow to a hotel that night. I just tell him about Chrom-Med floating on the stock market.

“And you phoned DS Finborough at eleven-thirty p.m.?” he asks, looking down at the police call log.

“Yes. I left a message for him asking him to phone me back. By nine-thirty the next morning he still hadn’t, so I went to St. Anne’s.”

“You’d already planned to go back there?”

“Yes. The senior midwife had said she would have found Tess’s notes by then and had made an appointment for me to see her.”

I arrived at St. Anne’s, the skin around my skull tight with nerves because I thought I would soon have to meet the person who was with you when you had Xavier. I knew I had to do this but wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe as a penance, my guilt faced full on. I arrived fifteen minutes early and went to the hospital café. As I sat down with my coffee, I saw I had a new e-mail.From: Professor Rosen’s office, Chrom-Med To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

Dear Ms. Hemming: I assure you that we offer no financial inducement whatsoever to the participants in our trial. Each participant volunteers without coercion or inducement. If you would like to check with the participating hospitals’ ethics committees you will see that the highest ethical principles are strictly enforced.

Kind regards

Sarah Stonaker, Media PA to Professor Rosen

I e-mailed straight back.From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone To: professor.rosen@chrom-med.com

One “participant” was my sister. She was paid £300 to take part in the trial. Her name was Tess Hemming (second name Annabel, after her grandmother). She was 21. She was murdered after giving birth to her stillborn baby. Her funeral and that of her son is on Thursday. I miss her more than you can possibly imagine.

It felt like a reasonable place to be writing such an e-mail. Illness and death may be shut away in the wards above, but I imagined the fall-out blowing invisibly into the atrium and landing in the hospital café’s cappuccinos and herbal teas. I wouldn’t have been the first to write an emotional e-mail at this table. I wondered if the “Media PA” would pass it on to Professor Rosen. I doubted it.

I resolved to ask the hospital staff if they knew anything about the money.

Five minutes before my appointment time I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing.

The senior midwife seemed fraught when she saw me, although maybe her escaping frizzy red hair made her seem that way all the time. “I’m afraid we still haven’t found Tess’s notes. And without them I haven’t been able to find out who was with her when she gave birth.”

I felt relief but thought it cowardly to give in to.

“Doesn’t anyone remember?”

“I’m afraid not. For the last three months we’ve been very short staffed, so we’ve had a high percentage of agency midwives and temporary doctors. I think it must have been one of them.”

A young punky nurse standing at the nurses’ station, her nose pierced, joined in, “We have the basic info on a central computer, such as the time and date of admission and discharge, and sadly in your sister’s case, that her baby died. But nothing more detailed. Nothing about their medical history or the medical staff looking after them. I did check with the psych department yesterday. Dr. Nichols said her notes hadn’t ever got to him. Told me our department should ‘pull our socks up,’ which is pretty angry coming from him.”

I remembered Dr. Nichols commenting that he didn’t have your psychiatric history. I hadn’t known it was because your notes had got lost.

“But aren’t her notes also on computer somewhere? I mean the detailed information, as well as the basics?” I asked.

The senior midwife shook her head. “We use paper notes for maternity patients, so the woman can carry them with her in case she goes into labor when she’s not near her home hospital. We then attach the handwritten notes of the delivery and it’s all meant to be safely stored.”

The phone rang but the senior midwife ignored it, focusing on me. “I really am sorry. We do understand how important it must be to you.”

As she answered the phone, my initial relief that your notes were lost became weighted by suspicion. Did your medical notes hold some clue about your murder? Was that why they were “lost”? I waited for the senior midwife to finish her phone call.

“Isn’t it odd that a patient’s notes just go missing?” I asked.

The senior midwife grimaced. “Unfortunately it’s not odd at all.”