Page 42 of The Happy Family

‘Arthur! Get back here right now!’ I call out to him, but he mischievously keeps running and then he disappears around the side of the building.

‘Come on,’ I say to Ruby, figuring we’re going to have to go after him, and together, along with the hungry and crying Jude in my arms, we follow Arthur around the side of the building. When we do, I spot my son standing up ahead of us, in front of a police blockade. There are officers everywhere, as well as the yellow tape that signifies this is a crime scene and nobody is allowed past this point. Beyond that, I see a van with the word Forensics on it, as well as several paramedics and ambulances.

Whatever has happened here, we are closer to it than we were in that other part of the hospital. I fear that my son might be about to see something bad, so I rush towards him, eager to get him away from here in case there are several grim sights about to emerge from the hospital to go into the back of the waiting ambulances.

‘Arthur. Get away from there. We can’t be here,’ I say, and I’m hoping one of the many police officers around here will notice us and come over to tell us to move. That should get my son to comply if he continues to ignore me. But before that can happen, there is movement by one of the doors and a second later, I see something being carried out.

It’s a body bag.

I want to avert Arthur’s eyes and Ruby’s too, but for a split second, even my morbid curiosity gets the better of me, and I find myself standing and staring at the scene unfolding right in front of us.

The body bag is fully zipped up, as I would expect it to be, so I cannot see the face of the victim. Poor person. I wonder what happened to them.

But they are not alone.

A second later, another body is carried out, and the zip is not fully fastened on this one. A paramedic’s oversight is my opportunity to morbidly glance at the face of this victim. But when I do, I almost drop Jude in shock.

That’s because I recognise this person in the body bag.

I recognise the corpse being carried from the hospital.

It’s a woman I was once attracted to, although now she looks deathly pale.

It’s Gemma.

TWENTY-NINE

LUNA

I still haven’t been questioned or arrested. I still haven’t been caught for the crime I committed that caused this hospital to lock down. I still haven’t paid the price for anything I have done in the past.

Long may it stay that way.

I might seem invincible, but I certainly don’t feel it. I’m tired from a lack of sleep, both since I’ve been here and since Jude was born before that. I’m also feeling weak because of my injuries and also because I haven’t eaten much since I was admitted as a patient. Most of all, I am still shaken and stressed from having to kill two people today, although it was very nearly three. If Sadie had died, I’d have scored a hat trick of kills. Maybe it is for the best that she is still alive. I’m not sure my conscience could take much more in one twenty-four-hour period.

All I want to do now is go home and be with my family. But in order to get there, I need a doctor or nurse to accept that I am fit and well enough to leave. That’s why I am going to go looking for one. Before I do that, I’m getting changed out of my patient gown, the one with a bit of Gemma’s blood on it. My own clothing is lying beside my bed, so I quickly get changed, using the privacy that the curtain continues to provide me to stay unseen. It feels good to take off the gown, but I know I can’t just leave it lying here on the bed for a cleaner to find. Not when they might notice the blood and hand it over to a police officer. So I stuff the gown into my bag and plan on taking it home with me, where I can dispose of it myself in a safe and secretive way. Then I use what is left in a bottle of water to wash any traces of blood off my hands, but there isn’t much. The gown carries all the evidence, which is why it is now hidden away.

Once I’m back in my own clothes, I zip up my bag, put it over my shoulder and then pull back the curtain. When I do, I see the kind of thing I expected to see. A busy ward, full of staff members and patients. I almost feel I could walk out of here without saying a word to anybody. Maybe I won’t get noticed and stopped and, if so, I could be in a taxi in the next ten minutes, which would be nice. But someone will notice I have left at some point when they come to check on me, and I don’t want anybody getting suspicious of why I suddenly vanished, so I better go and alert at least one of these nurses that I plan to leave.

‘Hi, excuse me,’ I say to a nurse I don’t recognise, so this must be the first shift she has worked since I came here.

‘Are you okay?’ she asks me before checking the time. ‘Visiting hours haven’t started yet. You shouldn’t be in here.’

‘I’m actually a patient,’ I say before gesturing towards the bed I just vacated.

‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry,’ the nurse apologises.

‘That’s okay. I was here because I fainted earlier and didn’t feel well after waking up. But I feel much better now, and I really want to get home because I have a baby son who needs me, so I was hoping I could get discharged?’

‘I see,’ the nurse replies. ‘Let me just go and check your notes and speak to the doctor, just to make sure there isn’t anything he needs.’

‘Do you have to? Like I say, I feel fine and I really need to get back to my son, so…’

‘It won’t take a moment,’ the nurse tells me. ‘Wait here.’

She leaves me then and it’s frustrating to have to linger for longer. But I wait for her to return, hoping that when she does, she has good news for me. There are enough sick patients here who can occupy their time, so I’m hoping they’ll have no problem with me giving them one less person to look after. It takes a while for the nurse to return, and the more I wait, the more I think about the evidence I carry in my bag and how it would only take a tap on the shoulder from a police officer to bring my world crumbling down.

But the next person I see is the nurse and not a police officer, and as she reaches me, I show her a hopeful smile.