The Nurse(39)

As the bus chugged along, I stared out the window, forgetting to blink, my eyes watering from weariness.





There was little natural light in my apartment. The long narrow window above the door faced north and was in the shadow of the two-storey house next door. As a result, even on the brightest sunny day, the interior was in a perpetual twilight. It didn’t bother me, and in fact was a blessing when working nights.

I pulled off my clothes, dropped them where I stood and slipped under the duvet. After a night shift, sleep would normally come as suddenly as switching a light out. That morning, I shut my eyes, the thoughts of Mrs Wallace and my father buzzing in my head making me toss and turn. When I finally fell asleep, my dreams were full of staring eyes. I recognised Jemma’s and Olivia’s. I always did. They followed me everywhere. Awake or asleep. But there was another pair. I wasn’t sure, but I’d a sneaking suspicion they were Carol’s.

Less than two hours’ sleep only filed the edges off the exhaustion that would probably linger until I slept again that night. Rather than getting up, I lay there with my fingers linked behind my head, my thoughts dancing around the intriguing Mrs Wallace. I wasn’t interested in people in general. Most were boringly dull two-dimensional characters trudging through their incredibly banal sad little lives.

I preferred people to be like onions with lots of layers to peel off, never knowing if under the next there was going to be something gross, or if you’d make it to the centre before finding the heart of it was stinkingly rotten.

Sometimes it was easy. People like that ward manager Pippa, peel away one layer and you saw what was underneath – someone who’d be happy to do anything to get what they wanted or keep what they already had. Sometimes it was a little more difficult. I still wasn’t sure about Carol.

The unknown Mrs Wallace struck me as being more fun to investigate. I hadn’t needed to peel away any layers to see her secret behind the locked door, but I guessed there was more to be discovered, that if I looked, I might find something deviously ugly and rotten at her centre.

I hoped so; I scrambled from the bed and grabbed my bag, then sat back with the silver frame in my hand, staring at the young Mr Wallace, my father’s lookalike. I had planned to leave the photo in it as a reminder of the man my father had once been, but I changed my mind. The frame was difficult to open. When I broke a nail, I grabbed a knife to prise it apart. The photograph of Mr Wallace as a younger man had been put on top of an older one of him with a woman, her face slightly averted. She could have been anyone. She could have been my mother. Frowning, I took it out and put it into the book I’d been reading. A photograph of my mother was propped against a book on the shelf. I slipped it into the frame and put my father’s lookalike behind. When the frame was reassembled, I made space for it on the bookshelf. It did my mother justice.

My thoughts drifted back to Mrs Wallace. She had been married before, Carol had said. But not him. I wondered why. Did he too have secrets? I suddenly desperately wanted to know, as if somehow, knowing him would help me understand my father and the road he took.

Carol had been working for the Wallaces for weeks, and unless she went around with her eyes shut, she had to know something. She was such a goody two-shoes though, it wouldn’t be easy to squeeze information out of her.

I lay considering my next step until hunger pushed me from the bed. There was no need to get dressed. A scruffy T-shirt that had lost both colour and shape over the years and hung to my knees was perfect lounging wear. I wasn’t going out or expecting visitors. That was a joke on me. I never went anywhere except to visit my mother, and nobody visited me. Ever. It was the way I liked it.

The small freezer was full of ready meals I bought in bulk every few weeks from Waitrose. Their meals for one were convenient and tasty although the variety was limited to three: cottage pie, fish pie or beef lasagne. I ate them in rotation, sometimes bringing home a Domino’s pizza for a change if I happened to be passing one of their shops. I didn’t get deliveries. Officially, I didn’t have an address. Nor did I have a letter box.

Theo had broken the news after I had paid over the deposit and first month’s rent in advance.

‘Give Lily Cottage as your address,’ he said, tucking the cash he’d requested into his shirt pocket. There was a plant pot outside the door planted up with a fake box shrub. It had obviously been there for years, the faded leaves strung with lacy cobwebs. He tilted the pot on its side. ‘If post comes for you, I’ll stick it under here, okay?’

It seemed odd, but I received so little post it didn’t seem to matter.

The ping of the microwave jolted me from my thoughts. I used a towel to take the fish pie across to the table. I never saw the point in emptying the food onto a plate. It was simpler, and saved on washing up, to eat straight from the container.

The book I’d been reading was on one side of the table. The bookmark I’d left to mark where I’d left off made it easier for me to flip it open one-handed, and within seconds I was lost in the grim story of the dangerous and psychopathic inmates housed in Broadmoor.

Fiction – even the more graphically violent novels – was too tame for me. It was books about serial killers and real-life murders, the more debased the better, that fascinated and enthralled me. Perhaps it said a lot about me that after an hour reading about the horrific details of some of these inmates’ crimes, my thoughts had cleared, and I knew what I needed to do next.