Blood Ties (A Nik Pohl Thriller) by Alexander Hartung

Author:Alexander Hartung [Hartung, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542015837
Published: 2019-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

Nik was wearing a white shirt, light blue jeans and his custom-made leather shoes. He walked into the hospital holding a bunch of flowers and a small plastic bag containing his scrubs. He smiled and waved to the porter as he entered. Once he was inside, he went upstairs to the first floor and walked along the long corridor looking for a toilet. As he’d expected, there weren’t many visitors in the hospital at this time of day. The day patients had all gone home, and the shift change meant that employees had gone back into their offices and staff rooms. Nik put the flowers on a table and went into the men’s toilet, where he slipped the doctor’s coat on over his clothes, then he hastily left the bathroom and, finding a staff stairway, hurried down to the basement.

The rooms upstairs had been flooded with light but down in the basement it was dark and forbidding. Thanks to the building plan that Jon had downloaded, Nik was quickly able to locate the archive room. The lock quality was mediocre and Nik only needed a few minutes to pick it.

Once inside, he paused for a moment, closing his eyes and focusing all attention on his ears. He couldn’t hear a sound and the light was off, so he assumed nobody else was in the archive. He took out his phone, attached the headset and called Jon. The reception was bad but it was enough to stay connected.

‘I’m inside.’ Nik took a small headlamp out of his trouser pocket and looked around. There were ten rows of shelves in front of him, each eight metres long and three metres high. ‘If we can’t narrow down the search somehow, I’ll be here for the week.’

‘OK. We could narrow it down to the prenatal centre but even then, the files could be in a number of areas.’

Nik wiped the dust from the labels on the shelves, pushed some boxes around and tried to get to grips with the storage system. ‘Everything’s covered in dust,’ said Nik, rubbing his nose frustratedly. ‘I doubt anyone’s even been in here for ten years.’

‘Let’s hope not,’ said Jon. ‘That would be an advantage for us.’

‘I’ve found the birth registrations,’ said Nik after a while. ‘Starting in the 80s.’

‘We’re looking for June 2003.’

Nik walked up the aisle until he came to 2003. ‘You’re fucking joking,’ he blurted out. A box was missing. ‘They only go up to April 2003. And then start again in September.’ He rubbed his finger along the empty space. ‘Hasn’t been gone long. There’s no dust in the space.’

‘Why are we always one step behind?’ said Jon, beginning to feel the frustration himself now.

Nik leaned against the shelving and closed his eyes. ‘So, what do we do now?’

‘We could ask the clinic employees . . . ?’

‘About a case from fourteen years ago?’ Nik asked. ‘Ten children are born here every day. No doctor or nurse is going to remember that night.’

‘Yeah, but even if we don’t know why or how, we do know that night was different.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.