Stock was PD that night. Primary duty nurse, in charge of the infirmary until Dr Salazar signed back in again at eight the next morning and relieved her. And through the watches of the night, Devlin’s words worked away inside her.
Stock was a woman of strong and mostly conservative convictions. She disliked gays and immigrants and any other people who in her opinion asked for more than they deserved. Despite her atheism, she liked the moral seriousness of religions and religiously minded people. She felt they sat in the right corner on most social issues.
And one of the issues that oppressed her most was the abuse of children. She thought Jimmy Savile was a worse man than Hitler had ever been, because at least most of Hitler’s victims had been able to fight back. What could a child do when a grown-up hurt them? Nothing.
She brooded about the sex offenders in the closed unit in Dietrich block. She never got to meet them because Dietrich was a kingdom within a kingdom. It had its own medical staff geared up to the specialised needs of lunatics and monsters. That was probably for the best: if a paedophile took some damage, for example in a punishment beating, Stock didn’t know if she could bring herself to fix her.
There might be a riot at Fellside some day. In riots, Sylvie knew, all kinds of scores got settled. The protection that was routinely provided at the taxpayer’s expense for the child murderers and the child rapists meant nothing when the walls came down.
But that was a distant prospect. In the here and now, under her care this very night, there was Jessica Moulson, the Inferno Killer. With the blood of a child all over her hands. And Devlin’s soliloquy to Dr Salazar was hanging in the forefront of Stock’s mind like a permission slip from a teacher.
Her only intention was to put her finger, very lightly, on the scales of justice. Nothing more than that. And she denied to herself that she was even doing that much. Her first sins were sins of omission. She was meant to apply Vaseline to Jess Moulson’s lips every two hours to keep them from drying and cracking any worse than they already had. She didn’t bother. And when Moulson’s water bottle emptied – the one with the teat on it so Moulson could take nourishment like a baby without moving her head – she didn’t refill it.
But those small things unlocked something bigger inside her – and even though what she was doing scared her badly, she did it anyway. When she took Moulson’s temperature, she jammed the thermometer in under her swollen tongue with unnecessary force. And when it came time to give Moulson her pain meds, she handled her a lot more roughly than she needed to.
She lifted Moulson’s wasted leg and turned it, looking for a likely vein. She bent the leg sharply outwards like someone who was about to joint a chicken, gripping it too tight at the knee and the ankle. She was aware of how easy it would be to pull the tibia out of its socket. The woman’s muscles were basically string at this point.
She pulled back from the horrific thought, pretended it hadn’t excited her. She had her job to do and she would do it. She was a professional.
She found a vein at last, right up in the groin area. Evidently Moulson hadn’t got that far, back when she was using. Stock had seen heroin addicts with track marks everywhere on their bodies. She’d once treated a prisoner who’d blinded herself in one eye by shooting up into her sclera. And she’d known another one who used to inject into her tongue, using dental floss to strap off. Nothing surprised her any more. She’d gone into nursing to relieve pain, and at Fellside all she’d seen was people committing atrocities on their own flesh. She hated it.
She scrubbed the inside of Moulson’s thigh with antiseptic and prepped the hypo. She was using a multi-dose bottle of tramadol, so she slid the tip of the needle through the rubber seal and drew up the dose.
Then she put the needle to Moulson’s groin and drove it in. As with the thermometer, she pushed a lot harder than she needed to, not intending to injure Moulson but almost imagining that her hatred would communicate itself somehow through the needle’s point. She sank the plunger in as though she was detonating a bomb.
She didn’t realise her mistake until she withdrew the hypo and the blood started to well up out of the pinprick wound. The dark blue-purple was suffused with a brighter, richer red. And it was coming too freely, running down Moulson’s thigh and dripping on to the sheet before Stock could get a towel to it.
That was wrong. Very wrong, in a very specific way. She must have delivered the dose of tramadol into Moulson’s artery.
Stock bit down hard on her lower lip, but an involuntary moan forced its way out anyway. For a moment she was literally paralysed with horror. This was a terrible thing to have done – the kind of mistake that could end your career. More than that, it could end a life.
The thing that made arterial injection so dangerous was that it caused a massive concentration of whatever medicine you were injecting to be delivered very locally, to the tissue that was perfused by that particular artery. The tissue of Moulson’s upper leg and thigh would swell and her blood flow would be massively disrupted. The pain would probably be short-lived, measured in minutes, but it would be incredibly intense. In the longer run, there’d be a serious risk of gangrene because some of that super-swollen, blood-deprived tissue would die. If enough of it died, the leg would have to be amputated.
Of course there might not even be a longer run. Moulson could get a blood clot and die of a heart attack in the next few minutes.
Stock backed away from the bed, her left hand clamped around her right wrist as though it now took both hands to hold the empty hypodermic. Her mind was full of clamouring alarms, and the impulse to run was almost overpowering. She couldn’t run. Moulson’s blood was flowing down over the marbled grey skin of her upper leg. The stain on the sheet was expanding outwards, a nearly perfect circle. Irrelevantly, out of nowhere, Stock remembered her husband Ron reading aloud from the Old Testament. Moses splitting the rock, and the water coming forth in great abundance.
She pulled herself together as much as she could. She ran and got a T-pad from the first aid cabinet and brought it back to the bed, although it felt like someone else’s body she was moving. She pressed her thumb against the insertion point while she tore the packet open with her teeth. The pad was soaked with tranexamic acid. It ought to stop the bleeding.
She held the pad in place for a full fifteen minutes until her thumb ached from the constant pressure. Moulson was twitching and whimpering in her sleep, little tremors running through her body. But the drug was keeping her under, even though she was registering the pain through the narcosis.
I have to get away, Sylvie thought. I have to get out of here, right now. I can’t stay in this room.
A part of her knew that running away wouldn’t help – that this would come back on her no matter what she did. But an animal panic filled her now. She did what she could to clean up. Changed Moulson’s gown and then the sheets, her hands shaking as though she had some sort of palsy. She took the blood-soaked T-pad and its packet through to reception, dropped them into a sharps envelope and stuffed them well down in her handbag. She couldn’t take the sheets. They’d have to go into the laundry the next day, at the bottom of a bag where they might not be noticed.
She got as far as the door.
But that was where reality reasserted itself. She stopped with her hand on the handle, at the end of an invisible tether of conscience and fear and pragmatism. She really had no choice but to wait this out.
And hope that Moulson didn’t die, even though death was what she had deserved.
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