Mark Pearson - Blood Work

'I'm afraid that won't be possible right away.'

'Why not? There's been a death, a serious assault. This is a police matter now.'

'And an investigation is under way. Your involvement will need to be officially sanctioned.' He shrugged, apologetically. 'At this moment it is out of both our hands.'

Delaney looked at him steadily. 'You know why I was due to speak to him?'

'I do. And I'm sorry.'

'Then you also know why I'm not going to just let this go?'

'Of course I do. And I want you to know that I will do everything in my power to help you, Inspector Delaney. Work with me on this.'

Delaney turned to Sally. 'Come on, Constable.'

'Sir.'

Delaney held the door open and turned back to the governor pointedly as Sally walked out. 'I'll be coming back. And in the meantime, you have my mobile number. You call me night or day you hear anything.'

'I am on your side, Inspector.'

Delaney held his gaze a moment longer and then left. The governor took off his glasses, running his hand over his brow, damp suddenly in the air-conditioned room.

Kate Walker shrugged out of her raincoat as she entered the suite of rooms and nodded distractedly to Lorraine Simons, her recently graduated assistant, who was still in the early days of training to become a forensic pathologist. She hung up the coat on an old wooden hatstand and walked past the trainee's desk, straight to her own office. She heard the young woman say something but had absolutely no idea what it was. She closed the door behind her, sat at her desk and, holding her head in her hands, cursed herself in a low whisper as she tried to put together a picture from the jigsaw pieces of memory from the night before.

She remembered travelling on the Tube, she remembered deciding to go to the Holly Bush rather than returning straight home, although now she wished to God she hadn't, she remembered having the first couple of Bloody Marys, and then she remembered chatting to the tall, handsome man in his late thirties, with dark curly hair and the kind of dark, come-to-bed eyes that were lately proving to be her undoing; but after that she had absolutely no memory whatsoever. It was a complete blank. She couldn't remember a damn thing from about eight thirty last night to waking up with a complete and total stranger in her bed at seven thirty that morning. And that wasn't something Kate Walker did. Ever.

She had shown the man, Paul Archer, out in the morning but had barely said ten words to him. Just hurried him out before closing the door on him, feeling the heat burn her face then as it was now as she shamefully tried to recall the previous night's events. Tried desperately hard, but failed absolutely.

The door to her office opened and Lorraine stuck her head round the corner. She was twenty-five, with strawberry-blonde hair, a body trim from cycling, a heart-shaped face, innocent eyes and the kind of optimism only found in the unworldly young or the terminally stupid.

'I was asking if you wanted any coffee, Dr Walker? I'm just about to make a trip to Starbucks.'

Kate found a smile from somewhere. 'Thanks, Lorraine, get us a hot chocolate and a croissant. And, please, it's Kate, not Dr Walker.'

Lorraine nodded. 'It's the weather for it. Don't know what happened to the summer.'

Kate smiled again, ironically. 'In our job you get to learn pretty fast that all things pass, Lorraine. All things end.'

Lorraine grimaced. 'Cheery thought.'

Kate flapped a dismissive hand at her. 'Go on, get the drinks.'

Lorraine closed the door behind her and as it did Kate's smile headed south faster than a penguin on a promise. She made a small fist of her right hand and put the nail of her thumb between her teeth. She deliberated for a second or two, then picked up the phone and rapidly tapped in some numbers. After a moment her call was answered. 'It's Kate,' she said quickly, needing to spill the words out. 'I think I've done something really stupid.'

She listened to the response, looking up at the ceiling. 'It's nothing like that. But I need to see you.' She looked through the glass window of her office to see Lorraine, bundled up against the cold, heading out the door and sighed. 'I need you to do some tests on me, Jane.'

'What kind of tests?' Jane Harrington's voice boomed, shocked, from the earpiece of her phone. Kate held it away from her ear then put it back and spoke into it, her voice a hoarse whisper. 'I think I might have been raped.'

South Hampstead Hospital was built, like many similar institutional buildings throughout the country, in the mid-Victorian era. In the year 1860 to be exact. It started life as a hospital for consumption and other diseases of the chest and much of the old Victorian architecture was still present, although new buildings had been attached over the years, most notably the teaching wing of the hospital which was inaugurated in 1904. The majority of the property was Grade II listed, now, which meant a lot of the offices and consulting rooms were poorly heated, relying on old, cast-iron radiators that the administration hadn't yet managed to justify the expense of replacing. What the rooms lost in terms of heat, however, was more than made up for in terms of ambience and in architectural charm.

Jane Harrington's office was a testament to clutter. The shelves lining her walls were jammed with books, with papers, with articles clipped from medical journals, with videos and DVDs and with a poorly tended ivy or two in inappropriate pots. Her equally cluttered desk sat beneath a bay window that looked out over a small quadrangle, at the far end of which stood the towered east wing of the original hospital. The windows were leaded lights, the desk was old oak and a visitor might be forgiven for imagining they were in the study of a don from one of the older colleges of Oxford or Cambridge.

Jane hung up her telephone, shocked at what she had heard. Kate Walker was more than just a dear friend, she was like a younger sister to her.

She drummed her fingers on her desk for a moment, then snatched up her telephone and pushed the button to connect with her administrative assistant. 'Adrian, it's Jane. Can you cancel my tutorials for this morning and rearrange as best you can? Thank you.'

She hung up again and looked out of the window at a group of nurses who were walking across the quad, their traditional black cloaks flapping in the wind like a storytelling of ravens. She always thought the collective noun rather odd. Less sinister, she supposed, than a murder of crows. The cloaks were originally coloured blue with the founding of the hospital, but with the death of Prince Albert they had been changed to black. Like the ties of Harrow schoolboys, the colour was originally only to last for a hundred years as a memorial to the German father of nine, but like the school, again, South Hampstead Hospital had stuck with it. Jane watched them thoughtfully as they walked out of sight, hurrying out of the persistent rain into the main part of the hospital. She came to a decision and picked up the telephone once more and punched in a number. 'I'd like to speak to Dr Caroline Akunin please.'

She waited for a moment while the call was put through. 'Caroline. It's Jane Harrington. Have you left for the frozen steppes yet or are you still on call as a police surgeon?' She listened and nodded tersely. 'Good, I need a favour.'

The sight of a man's penis would not normally have alarmed Valerie Manners. She was a nurse after all and nearing retirement. She had seen more examples of the male reproductive organ than most women of her generation, even including those who had lived through the free love era of the sixties and the wife-swapping fad of the seventies. This one, however, was attached to a raggedy man, and although not impressive, was unpleasantly semi-priapic and being wagged in her general direction as she cut though the lower part of South Hampstead Common on her way home after a late shift at the hospital. Caught off guard, she ran off the path and through some trees and bushes into open grassland, running uphill and not looking back. She ran for three and a half minutes and then stopped, realising that she wasn't being followed. Panting for breath she leaned against a tree and willed her wildly beating heart to calm down. She berated herself for a fool, flashers weren't rapists. They might develop into rapists but at the flasher stage of their development they were usually harmless. She knew that much from reading American crime novels. She put her panicking down to tiredness and being too wired after far too may cups of coffee to get her though the night shift. She was getting too old to work nights, she told herself. Her breathing slowed eventually and as she smoothed down her rumpled uniform, a bird fluttered noisily up through the branches of a tree nearby, startling her again. She looked across at the undergrowth beneath the tree and something caught her eye. She moved a little nearer, tentatively, and bent down to have a closer look. When she saw what it was, Valerie Manners, who had been a nurse for more years than she remembered, who had always despised those trainees who fainted or screamed at the sight of blood and injury, screamed, backed against the tree, all colour drained from her face, and fainted.