Bloodthirst Read online

  Tomorrow okay?’ he hissed.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered back then, straightening, said formally: ‘Your pen, Dr Pilgrim.’

  * * *

  ‘Well, I hope old Beresford was pleased with this afternoon’s exercise,’ Dr Peter Pilgrim remarked to Dr Tudor Owens as they rested their elbows on the bar of the Mason’s Arms, the local pub used by the medical staff of the nearby hospital.

  ‘You were bloody marvellous, boy-o,’ his companion grinned. ‘When you brought in that bit about the need for a computer, I think the old bastard could have kissed you. He’s been after one for years, indeed yes. He’s potty about electronic medicine.’

  Tudor Owens was balding, florid and genial. The loves of his life were rugby and its associated booze-ups (he played scrum-half for one of the London-Welsh teams), his red sports car (known as The Haemorrhage to his colleagues) and a succession of willing nurses, in that order. The young neurologist’s only fear was that he might fall in love in an unguarded moment and lose his glorious bachelorhood.

  ‘We could certainly use a computer,’ said Peter. ‘It’d make my life a lot easier.’

  ‘Again please, Helen,’ ordered Tudor. ‘You don’t have much to complain of. You’re on a good number here. Make it spin out, boy-o. The secret of success is always to make everything appear difficult. But you’re doing all right, I see.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘With that French bird who picked up your pen. You have a loud whisper. Old Beresford must have heard you making your date. Well, good luck. There’s a lot of betting on how soon you’ll make it.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘You can never keep a secret in a hospital, boy-o. But there’s an extra lot of speculation about you and Anne-Marie Clair. Because she’s cold and French, she’s been nicknamed La Glagonne by the nurses. So go to it, Peter. We all want to see if you can crack the ice, and there’s a lot of money riding on you. But be discreet, you know Matron’s view about doctors and nurses even in these enlightened and permissive times…’

  ‘Coming from you, that’s the best joke yet.’

  ‘The sin is only in being found out. By the way, I hear we can expect a visiting fireman from Scandinavia soon, a top neuro by the name of Stromberg. He’s set up a fancy clinic somewhere in Finland, and now he wants to have a look round our shop. If you ask me he’s talent scouting, but old Beresford is probably pleased. One sympathetic voice closer to the Nobel Prize, and if his new radiation technique works out he could be in the running.’

  The talk became technical, but Peter’s mind was back with the girl he had encountered in the corridor. He could understand a certain amount of jealousy from her less endowed colleagues, but it had never occurred to him that there was anything about her to suggest an icicle. Perhaps he had been allowed to see her from a different standpoint to even one else; perhaps he was much luckier than he had realized.

  * * *

  Lionel Tedworth was a hospital orderly whose plump smile was bland and often kindly, a mask that rarely slipped. He lived alone in a chintzy bedsitter and for five years, after abandoning his dream of becoming an actor, he had worked at the London Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System.

  This evening he walked with his usual briskness into the large entrance hall which had recently been modernized to give the impression of an airline hotel foyer. But this failed to disguise the basic hospital atmosphere. Many fear its antiseptic tang, an odour which conjures for them visions of unprotected flesh at the mercy of strange chemicals or honed steel, or ultimate horror behind gay curtained screens. To Lionel it was the scent of security. The tidal rhythms of the hospital, its warmth, its efficient order in a disordered world, soothed him.

  The orderly took the large, aged lift up to Fleming Ward where he changed into a white coat before walking down the central passage to Sister’s office. The ward was part of the modem wing and, instead of being an old-fashioned dormitory, it was really a wide corridor off which were rooms of varying sizes which accommodated patients according to their sex, condition and treatment.

  He arrived exactly on time for the twelve-hour night shift at Sister’s neat desk, to be followed by Staff Nurse Hoskins, a cheerful, well-scrubbed girl from Somerset whose passion in life had been bell-ringing.

  ‘Good evening, Staff,’ said Sister. ‘Good evening, Lionel.’

  She looked down at the record book in the glow of the green-shaded lamp.

  ‘It’s been a quiet day. Mr Hayes is still on the drip and I think you’d better give Mrs Shapiro phenobarb tonight, she’s had a rather disturbed day. The leucotomy came back from theatre a couple of hours ago and Nurse Wakeling is already on the post-op vigil … ’

  Lionel listened to the routine report with contentment. Although orderlies were officially only manual helpers, he had absorbed some medical knowledge and when the nurses were rushed off their feet was often trusted to do more than was in his official line of duty.

  ‘There are two new patients,’ concluded Sister. ‘A Mrs Davidson in for observations, suspected aneurism, and down for a CFS test. And there’s a new addition to the narcoleptics, a little Scandinavian girl called Britt. Her father brought her to London for a consultation and she went into coma. You’d better read the report, Staff, it looks a bit odd to me. Dr Pilgrim wants an EEG done as soon as possible so you’d better take her down, Lionel.’

  After further instructions Sister departed and Lionel wheeled a trolley to a room at the end of the ward. In the eerie light of a blue bulb dolls and teddy bears kept watch over the narcoleptic children, who were as unaware as their toys.

  In the bed nearest the door lay a beautiful child. Silver blonde hair cascaded over the pillow on either side of her face her rosy lips were slightly smiling as her breast moved regularly beneath the crimson coverlet. Lionel remembered with sudden vividness an illustration of the Sleeping Beauty from a fain tale book which had fascinated him in childhood.

  ‘She’s a pretty one,’ Nurse Hoskins said. ‘Such a shame!’

  Lionel agreed automatically as, with the ease of constant practice, he and the nurse lifted her slender body on to the trolley. Then the child, still locked in her trance, was wheeled to the lift. The aged operator made clucking sounds through his toothless gums when he saw her. Soon the trolley was squeaking into the Electroencephalographic Department. An efficient young woman in a green coat deftly attached small electrodes, smeared with special conductive cream, to key points on the child’s skull.

  ‘See she doesn’t move,’ she instructed. ‘Even the winking of an eye will show up on the EEG graph.’

  ‘She’s not likely to move, miss,’ retorted Lionel in a tone which indicated he had been longer at the London than she. ‘The patient’s suffering from some kind of cataplexy.’

  The technician adjusted the eight cables which led Medusa-like from the girl’s head to the EEG apparatus, checked the indicator lights on the console and flicked a switch. There was an electronic hum and an endless roll of graphed paper slid under eight sty li behind a Perspex panel.

  An electroencephalographic machine works by recording electrical impulses which arise in the human brain. Even if the patient is unconscious, the automatic mental reflexes which control the body’s pulse rate, breathing, temperature and so on are strong enough to be picked up by the ultrasensitive electrodes. These impulses are amplified and cause the sty li to move to and fro over the paper according to the strength of the signals.

  In a health) person the signals from both lobes of the brain are identical, thus the four sty li reflecting the impulses of the left lobe should make the same flowing pattern as the four mirroring the right. Where there is a tumour or other lesion there is a change in the pattern and experienced neuro-surgeons can frequently locate the position of the disorder by studying yards of ruled paper covered with the styli’s spider tracks.

  Lionel looked from the patient’s peaceful face to the styli resting on the moving paper like wire fingers. They should h
ave been zig-zagging. Instead they remained still, with eight perfectly straight lines flowing from their inky points.

  ‘You’re not getting a reading,’ he reported.

  ‘I can see that,’ retorted the technician. She halted the moving paper and inspected the cables which ran from Britt’s head. All were correctly connected to the terminals.

  The process was repeated, and again the result was eight straight lines.

  ‘It was working all right an hour ago,’ said the technician almost apologetically. ‘Are you sure your patient’s all right — you’d only get a reading like that from a corpse.’

  Lionel felt the throb of Britt’s pulse.

  ‘She’s alive all right,’ he said. ‘Slow but steady. If you ask me it’s your machine that’s dead.’

  The EEC operator pushed her fingers wearily through her hair.

  ‘Probably something very simple,’ she said, ‘but I won’t waste any more time with it now. I should’ve gone home ages ago. Orderly, move the trolley over to the stand-by machine.’

  The trolley was wheeled over to an identical machine.

  ‘We should get it this time,’ the technician said as a ruby eye winked and the dials flickered into activity. Lionel watched as the new roll of paper began to move under the sty li, but again only eight rectilineal marks showed on the travelling paper.

  ‘Still not working,’ Lionel announced.

  ‘It must be your patient,’ the EEG girl replied.

  ‘She’s only in a coma, she’s not dead.’

  ‘According to our two latest, most sophisticated machines she’s not alive either. It’s impossible that both can go on the blink at the identical moment. I’ll get the electronics engineer to check them out tomorrow, but meanwhile I suggest you get Dr Pilgrim to have a good look at her. It seems to me there is no activity there at all.’

  ‘She can’t be neither alive nor dead,’ Lionel objected, releasing the trolley brake.

  The technician collected the strips of graphed paper, neatly concertina-ed them and laid them on the rug covering Britt.

  ‘You’d better let Dr Pilgrim see those just to prove what I’m saying,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s a brand new disease. I ran tests on the other narcoleptics and they all responded.’

  The trolley squeaked back to the room where the narcoleptic children lav deep in their unnatural trances. After Staff Nurse Hoskins learned of the EEG result she instructed Lionel to check Britt’s pulse and respiration even twenty minutes.

  ‘I’m sure it’s some fault in that damn gadget,’ she said, ‘but we’d better be on the safe side until Dr Pilgrim sees her. If he can’t get a proper reading he’ll probably want a ventriculogram done.’

  Lionel smiled secretly, hoping this would upset Dr Pilgrim’s programme. He did not like Dr Pilgrim because he was not decorous enough. Lionel had a great sense of propriety when it came to hospital life, believing doctors should behave with traditional dignity. When Dr Pilgrim first came into Fleming Ward wearing a turtle-necked sweater he had been quite scandalized.

  At ten-thirty Lionel made a routine ward check while the nurses busied themselves with the leucotomy patient who was sinking.

  He stepped into one door and heard the ‘hiss-swish, hiss-swish’ of a respiratory machine. In the old days such breathing appliances had been frighteningly termed ‘iron lungs’. From coffin-like tanks encasing victims of paralysis, they had evolved to light plastic casings which fitted over the patient’s trunk with airtight seals allowing the head and limbs to protrude. A pumping machine connected by a tube to the casing rhythmically changed the pressure thus forcing the patient’s lungs to expand and contract. Here the patient was a young woman who had suffered almost total paralysis following a car crash.

  The fact that Jennifer had been a promising tennis player made her case all the more tragic. Lionel saw tears glisten in the eyes of the most hardened nurses on the dreadful morning her fiancé sent a note breaking off their engagement. Hysterically she had begged them to switch off the motor which kept her alive.

  ‘Everything all right, Jennifer?’ Lionel asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ she answered in a whisper. ‘I just can’t sleep tonight. Sometimes I wonder if the room is haunted.’

  ‘That’s a funny idea to have.’

  ‘I suppose scores — perhaps even hundreds — of people have died in this room since the hospital was built. Surely there must be some ghosts around.’

  ‘It’s too antiseptic for ghosts,’ said Lionel. ‘You need ruined castles and ancient graveyards and places like that to make ghosts feel at home.’

  The girl gave an odd laugh, distorted by the pulsation of the breathing apparatus.

  ‘I must be getting morbid. I know it’s stupid, but for the last few hours I’ve felt there’s something bad … something evil … close to me. My granny used to be psychic. They say you take after your grandparents, don’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ said Lionel in his special pacificatory voice. ‘With the greatest respect to your old gran, she probably saw things after a couple of gins too many.’

  ‘I suppose you can’t help having funny notions when you’re caged up in a machine,’ she said with sudden bitterness. ‘Life isn’t real anymore.’

  * * *

  In the dim office Lionel looked at the luminous hands of his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning, the period known to the staff as the ‘witch hour’ when, according to hospital superstition and statistical fact, most patients die.

  He yawned and walked softly to die bed of the little Swedish girl. In the pale beam of his torch she looked unnaturally beautiful with her spun silver-gold hair framing small exquisite features. As he counted her respiration her eyelids fluttered and he found himself gazing into ice blue eyes. She murmured something in Swedish, and then gave him a slow smile which dissolved the solemnity of her grave expression.

  He bent closer.

  A strange, dangerous and breath-catching urge came over him — the temptation to softly kiss the slightly parted lips of the Sleeping Beauty. This was immediately followed by a steadying twinge of guilt that he should feel such an unprofessional emotion. Kissing little girls had once brought trouble to Lionel which for years he had determinedly pushed into the attics of his memory, yet the urge grew and slowly he lowered his head. With a look of secret knowledge, the girl raised hers.

  Two arms clasped the orderly round the neck and Britt pulled his face close to hers with unexpected strength.

  God, if Staff should walk in I he thought in a panic. But the fear was submerged under a rush of emotion as he felt Britt’s lips on his face, soft and moist as rose petals after rain.

  ‘Torstig,’ she whispered. ‘Torstig, alskara.’

  Her lips explored his cheek, lingering on his mouth and then creeping down his jawline until he felt their warmth on his neck.

  He was filled with an erotic sensation of dissolving into a dream of indescribable pleasure. Next instant the dream became a nightmare. The flower mouth at his throat opened and a savage pain seared him, causing him to straighten up with an ungainly reflex action. Britt’s arms were tightly round his neck, clinging with the desperation of a drowning swimmer, and the only effect of his convulsed movement was to drag her out of bed.

  Still she clasped him as they crashed to the floor. Still her teeth remained deep in his palpitating throat while she frantically swallowed the blood flowing into her mouth.

  Chapter 3

  The taxi drew up outside the Villa Dei Cesari and the driver concluded his indignation about the Black September hijack and became a man of business. In the lamplight the Thames Embankment gleamed wetly. Anne-Marie Clair dashed for the canopied restaurant entrance while Peter Pilgrim settled the fare. He joined her in the foyer with prismatic raindrops in his hair just as she handed her cloak to the toga-ed attendant. She faced him with a smile.

  ‘Do I look all right, Dr Pilgrim?’

  He gazed back at her and thought how
good she did look. Not only did she have a generous mouth (a feature that always found a response with him), violet eyes and delicate bone structure, but an expression of unusual mobility. But perhaps her most striking feature was the pale gold hair which fell on each side of her face to shoulder level.

  ‘You’re absolutely fine,’ he answered, and felt a warm touch of pride that he was her escort in this sophisticated place.

  The head waiter hovered.

  ‘There’s a table booked in the name of Pilgrim,’ Peter said. ‘Sorry we’re a little late.’

  ‘This way, sir.’ The couple were led into the main body of the restaurant, across a sunken dance floor and up to a gallery where through large windows they could see the Thames flowing fast and mysterious under the slanting rain.

  Is there something on your mind?’ the French girl asked they seated themselves.

  He nodded and ordered a large whisky from the wine waiter. He downed it quickly while Anne-Marie sipped a Campari soda.

  A little Swedish girl has just joined my group,’ he explained. ‘The extraordinary thing is that we can’t get an EEG reading on her. We tried different machines last night and today, and they all remained negative. It was as though were trying to get a response from a corpse.

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘Impossible but true. Not that she is corpse-like. She woke for a few seconds and managed to bite the Fleming orderly last night.’

  Anne-Marie giggled.

  ‘If it was that Tedworth creature I think she has good sense. He gives me the creeps with his funny looks … ’ Funny looks or not, he will certainly remember Britt,’ d Peter. ‘Anyway, I’ve had a frustrating day, trying tests without any joy, and I’m sick of shop.’

  He smiled at her suddenly and said: ‘Happy birthday, Anne-Marie.’ From his pocket he took a flat paper packet. For you,’ he added.

  ‘Merci beaucoup,’ she responded in an imitation of stage French. She untied the string and found the gift to be a large double buckle of antique silverwork.