there. Cursing the receptionist she tried to the right. It wasn’t there either. In the end she asked a woman with her arm in a sling and was directed to the other end of the hospital.
‘It’s way past the main door. You can’t miss it. I wouldn’t go in, though. It’s absolutely filthy. Dust everywhere.’
This time Eva did find it. The place was filled with children injured in the coach crash. Eva went back to the main door and found herself in what looked like a shopping mall with a restaurant and adjacent tearoom, a boutique, a parfumerie and a book and magazine stall. For a moment she felt quite mad. Then gathering her wits together she headed down a passage following a sign which read ‘Gynaecology’. There were more signs pointing down other corridors further on. Henry wouldn’t be in a gynaecological ward.
Eva stopped a man in a white coat who was carrying a decidedly sinister-looking plastic bucket with a bloodstained cloth over it.
‘Can’t stop now. I’ve got to get this little tot to the incinerator. We’ve got another starting in twenty minutes.’
‘Another baby? That’s lovely,’ said Eva without getting the implication of ‘the incinerator’.
The nurse put her right. ‘Another bloody foetus,’ he said. ‘Take a dekko if you don’t believe me.’
He removed the bloodstained cloth and Eva glanced into the bucket. As the nurse hurried away she fainted and slid down the wall. Opposite her a door opened and a young doctor, a very young doctor, came out. The fact that he was a Lithuanian and had recently attended a seminar on Obesity and Coronary Infarcts didn’t help. Fat women lying unconscious were his chance to show his expertise. Five minutes later Eva Wilt was in the Emergency Heart Unit, had been stripped to her panties, was being given oxygen and was about to be put on a defibrillator. That didn’t help either. She wasn’t unconscious long. She woke to find a nurse lifting her breasts for a defibrillator pad. Eva promptly hit her and hurled herself off the trolley and grabbed her clothes and was out of the room. She dashed to the toilet and got dressed. She’d come to visit her Henry and nothing was going to stop her. After trying several other wards she traipsed back to Reception. This time she was told that Mr Wilt was in Psychiatry 3.
‘Where’s that?’ Eva asked.
‘On floor 6 at the far end,’ the receptionist told her to get rid of the wretched woman. Eva looked for a lift, failed to find one and had to walk up to floor 6 only to find herself outside Autopsy. Even she knew what an autopsy was. But Henry wasn’t dead. He was in Psychiatry 3. An hour later she found that he wasn’t. In the following two hours she had walked another mile and was furious. So furious in fact that she tackled a senior surgeon and screamed abuse at him. Then because it was getting late she remembered the girls at home. She’d have to go back to see they weren’t up to any mischief and to make supper. In any case she was too exhausted to continue her search for Henry. She’d try again in the morning.
Chapter 26
But by the time she arrived at the hospital the next morning, Inspector Flint had gone to get a cup of coffee and Wilt was still apparently unconscious. In fact Wilt was considering what the doctor had said.
‘He may have amnesia and have no memory of what happened to him.’ Or words to that effect. Wilt was now definitely in favour of having amnesia. He’d had no intention of making a statement. He’d had an awful night, much of it spent listening to a man on a
