Written In Blood

Chapter Fifty-One

The surveillance room in the security suite at St Mary's Hospital was small, barely big enough to hold the two chairs occupied by the guard who had the duty of watching the bank of monitors that took up most of the space and by DI Harrison. There certainly wasn't enough room for either of them to move out of the way, which meant Harrison had to lean across the guard who was reluctantly sharing his space in order to see the image in the middle left monitor better.

"All stations, heads up, we have a possible suspect in the East stairwell, heading up from the ground floor," Harrison alerted the officers he had been given for the operation he had put together. "Suspect appears to be between five-eight and six feet tall and medium build, wearing dark clothes, including a balaclava or similar.

"Can you follow him on the cameras?" he asked of the security guard next to him as the figure in the stairwell continued up, disappearing out of range of the camera he had been watching.

The guard answered the question with a nod and quickly cycled through the cameras he controlled until he found the mystery figure again, he then followed the suspected killer on his way to the fourth floor.

Harrison found himself torn by conflicted feelings as he watched the figure leave the stairwell on the fourth floor. A part of him was pleased that the plan he had come up with appeared to be working; someone, and he didn't want to pre-empt his thinking by putting a name to the figure, was heading towards Emily Wright's room, almost certainly with the intention of killing the teen before she could wake up. A much larger part of him, however, was concerned about the fact that there was now a murderer in the hospital, and the violence he had shown, according to the post-mortems, suggested that he was not going to simply surrender when he realised he had been tricked. If anything, discovering that he had been set up was likely to make him angry and violent.

The murderer paused when he reached the fourth floor so he could listen at the door of the stairwell. He had made it that far without being seen, as far as he was aware, and was determined to make it the rest of the way, and back out again; he hadn't even been seen when he entered the accident and emergency department and headed for the stairwell.

He listened for more than a minute before deciding that the corridor on the other side of the door was empty. He eased the door open and slipped through after a quick visual check of the corridor. He was pretty sure he knew where Emily's room was from his current position, but everything looked different in the semi-darkness.

Despite the gloom, he made it to his destination with only one incident; the sound of footsteps around the corner he was approaching made him scurry back the way he had come in search of somewhere to hide. He found what he was after in the form of an ITU room occupied by an elderly man who was connected to a variety of machines that seemed to be the only things keeping him alive.

As he had in the stairwell, He pressed his ear against the door and listened until he was sure the way was clear; the footsteps approached his position, making him worry he was going to be found, then passed and receded into the distance. Relieved to have evaded detection, He left his hiding place, and a couple of minutes later he reached the room Emily had been put in. He stopped in front of the door and looked around briefly before entering the room to do what he was there for.

Melissa heard the door as it began to open, the noise was surprisingly loud in the quiet of the room, and had to fight the urge to turn her head and look. It proved to be far harder than she had anticipated to remain still and continue the pretence of being a comatose Emily Wright, knowing that a suspected murderer had entered the room. She was sure if the room had not been as dark as it was, her pretence would have been spotted, either because of the flickering of her eyelids or the tenseness in her muscles.