The Nurse
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
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A Letter from J. A. Corrigan
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Steve, with respect and love
Always
What’s done cannot be undone.
Shakespeare, Macbeth
Prologue
Queen’s Hospital, Derbyshire, May 2015
This new space is too quiet. No music, no background chatter, nothing. The young man tries to move his lips to ask if someone can put the radio on, but the muscles in his face won’t obey his command. He can breathe, obviously, and hear, but he can’t move, or speak. Can’t seem to open his eyes either. A male voice, he thinks his doctor, told him that he’s been brought out of an induced coma and moved from intensive care. He’s now in the hospital’s high dependency unit. As well as silence, a dense humidity envelops him in this new room. He wishes a nurse would take off the sheet.
He attempts to remember something about his life, anything, but the fog inside his brain is making it difficult. He tries to move again, but his limbs are utterly unresponsive. Then a familiar aroma enters the unfamiliar room. It’s the nurse, he thinks. She smells of cinnamon and she’s the one who talks to him. He likes that. The other members of staff never talk; they perform their duties and leave.
She’s moving around his bed, but she hasn’t spoken. His mother smelt of cinnamon a long time ago, and it’s as if his senses and subconscious are working to create another plane of time. A fragmented memory stabs. His mother has been here to see him – before, when he was in intensive care – and told him something she thought he couldn’t hear. She didn’t think he’d pull through.
He listens hard. He won’t know for certain who’s in the room until they speak.
What did his mother tell him? Her words are somewhere inside his mind. He will remember. Soon.
He gives up attempting to think and instead allows himself to give in to sleep, and to his relief, a curtain begins to close across his consciousness. It is only the smell of cinnamon that stops him from drawing the other in the matching pair. Then a voice speaks.
‘I’m so sorry.’
He’s uncertain of its timbre, unsure if it’s a man or a woman, doubtful of the smell, and panic begins to press inside him. Something is very wrong.
All the moments of his existence come together in a kaleidoscope of images, and he sees his wife, her already burgeoning belly taut, the dark skin of her face translucent with happiness, and as his life ebbs away, he acknowledges that his efforts to find the truth have all been in vain.
The curtains close, with no gap remaining for the light to enter.
He has gone.
1
Rose
8 December 2015
My eyes sweep the courtroom and settle on my husband, and I accept my life is over. Despite his love, and perhaps because of it.
I look at the woman who will soon deliver my sentence. She is petite, pretty, and too young to be a judge, surely. A mixture of expressions have passed over her features during the course of my hearing: well-veiled disgust at what I’ve admitted to, frustration that I’ve given no reason for what I have done, and sadness when confronted with the victim’s wife and baby. But today, for a moment, I see a sliver of compassion. She has no questions left to ask me. I have confessed to Abe Duncan’s murder. And that is that.
A shaft of winter sun finds its way through the high-set windows, slicing across her left cheek. She leans forward, and a silver crucifix slips out from the collar of her white blouse, glinting in the laser light. And as I question whether she should be wearing this statement of her faith, she lifts her hand and pushes it back beneath the silky fabric. We all need to share the consequences of our decisions sometimes.
Again I look at my husband. I cannot bear to see his pain, which is not only mirroring my own but amplifying it also.
He’s the one who’s been here for me. Always.
The room is filled to capacity, and my gaze shifts to a man in the public gallery who is staring at me with intent and inquisitiveness. He has nut-brown skin and wears an unzipped North Face jacket; he must be so hot. I study him for a few more seconds, but then turn away and focus on the judge.
Her dark, intelligent eyes move over the faces packing the courtroom as she sums up my crime: its premeditation, its callousness, my admission of guilt. She ends her soliloquy with the heartache that I’ve caused Abe Duncan’s wife and family, although his parents have been absent throughout my hearing. This is one thing for which I can be grateful.
I wait.
Twenty years.
I’m almost relieved.
2
19 March 2016
I’ve been in prison for three months, and the monotony, the routine, the ambiguously pleasing absence of freedom are turning out to be surprising comforts of life inside. There is, though, a lot of time to think and analyse, and my therapist encourages me to do both in our sessions, although our encounters are exhausting because I spend them avoiding answering his questions. I know this frustrates him. He senses something I’m not saying, as I suspect the judge did too. But the answer will stay within me. I’m in here and it’s where I should be. Where I deserve to be. Where I want to be.
Restless, I stand, take the few steps towards the other side of my small cell.
Through the closed and locked door I hear the post being delivered to the rooms on my floor. Since being in here I’ve received a fair amount of correspondence from various members of the public keen on an epistolary relationship with a convicted killer.
I look up as my door is unlocked.
‘Letter, Rose,’ the custody officer says.
‘Thanks.’ I nod and take the thick envelope from him. My stomach drops a
