(1991) Twilight by Peter James

Author:Peter James [James, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medical Thriller
ISBN: 9780752876795
Google: _bKBPq7zgkwC
Amazon: 0752876791
Publisher: Orion
Published: 1991-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Wednesday, 24 October

The Prince Regent Hospital was on high ground half a mile back from the cliffs at the eastern end of Brighton. The rooms to the south had fine views across the rooftops of the Regency and Victorian terraces and out over the English Channel, and those to the north had views across the Downs and Brighton racecourse. As was typical with bureaucratic planning, most of the windows faced west into an industrial estate and east on to the hospital’s multistorey car park.

The hospital had begun life in the early nineteenth century as a home for disabled sailors. With constant additions over the decades it had grown into one of the largest provincial hospitals in England, and with the Princess of Wales student wing under construction was soon to become a fully fledged teaching hospital annexed to the University of Sussex.

The hospital’s central core was a grimy, grey stone building with a slate roof and a palladian portico flanked by a tarnished copper statue of the Prince Regent and an equally tarnished statue of Queen Victoria. Spread out on either side was a sprawling hodge-podge of buildings interconnected by windowless corridors and sloping walkways containing most of the firms, the older wards and the administration offices.

Pebbledash-rendered offshoots behind contained the laundry, mortuary and pathology departments, as well as the research laboratory block and the discreetly unmarked animal house, and behind them was the Queen Elizabeth II wing, a grim twelve-storey 1950s tower block containing general wards, intensive care, maternity and a suite of nine operating theatres.

Kate was disturbed by hospitals. They touched off memories and fears that she preferred to leave buried; they reminded her of her own mortality and she found life insecure enough without that. She did not like the buildings, nor their smells, nor the helplessness of the patients in them. She had been in hospital twice as a child, in Boston; once when she was seven to have her tonsils out, and when she was ten to have her appendix out. The doctors had been nice and so had the nurses, but they hadn’t made the pain any better or the fear any less.

As Kate drove the VW up the ramp of the car park, the glove locker lid fell open. She slammed it shut, it opened again and a clutch of parking tickets fell out into the footwell.

The first level was full and the next three, and she drove on up the last ramp out of the darkness into the blustery sunlight and found a space. The wind screamed at her up here and she had to lean to walk against it, her coat pulling away from her like a sail, her hair whiplashing her face, the roots straining painfully.

She went down a stone stairwell that smelled of urine, past a spraygun graffiti saying SADDAM FOR PM and through a heavy fire door. There was a barrage of signs. Mendelssohn Ward, Victoria Ward, Chemotherapy, Microbiology, Histopathology, Day Care, ITU, Obstetrics, Casualty, Enquiries.

She pushed

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