Dead Man's Grip

as the rain pattered down. During her time with the ambulance service, she’d discovered that every paramedic had his or her own particular favourite field of work and seemed by some quirk of fate to attract that particular call-out. One of her colleagues always got mentally ill patients. She herself had delivered fifteen babies over the past three years, while Phil, in all his career, had yet to deliver one.
    However, in her two years since qualifying, Vicky had only attended one serious road accident, and that had been on her first ever shift, when a couple of teenage boys had accepted a lift home in Brighton from a drunk driver. He’d hit a parked car, at 80mph in the centre of town. One boy had been killed outright and another had died at the roadside. Despite the horror of that incident, she found her work incredibly rewarding.
    ‘You know, Phil,’ she said. ‘It’s strange, but I haven’t been to a road fatality in almost two years.’
    He unscrewed the cap from a bottle of water. ‘Stay with this job long enough and you will. In time you get everything.’
    ‘You’ve never had to deliver a baby.’
    He smiled sardonically at her. ‘One day—’
    He was interrupted by the high-pitched whup-whup-whup siren inside the ambulance. It was a sound that could dement you sometimes, especially during the quiet of the night. The sound of a call-out.
    Instantly he looked down at the screen mounted between their seats and read the Incident Review information:
     
    Emergency Inc: 00521. CatB Emergency
    Portland Road, Hove.
    Gender unknown.
    Three vehicle RTC. Bicycle involved.
     
    He tapped the button to acknowledge the call. It automatically loaded the address into the satnav system.
    The target response time for a CatB was eighteen minutes – ten minutes longer than for a CatA, but it still called for emergency
action. Vicky started the engine, switched on the blue lights and siren, and pushed her way carefully out over a red traffic light. She turned right and accelerated up the hill, past St Nicholas’s Church, pulling out into the right-hand lane and forcing oncoming traffic to brake. She switched between the four different tones of the ambulance’s sirens to get maximum attention from the vehicles and pedestrians ahead.
    Moments later, peering hard at the incident screen, Phil updated her. ‘Situation confused,’ he read out. ‘Several calls. Upgraded to CatA. A car crashed into a shop. Oh shit, cyclist in collision with a lorry. Control not sure of situation, backup requested.’
    He leaned through the bulkhead for his fluorescent jacket and Vicky felt a tightening in her gullet.
    Screaming down towards the clogged-up Seven Dials roundabout, concentrating hard on her driving, she said nothing. A taxi driver sensibly pulled over on to the pavement to let them through. Fuck me, Phil thought, a cabbie who was actually awake! He unclipped his seat belt, hoping Vicky didn’t choose this moment to crash, and began wriggling into his jacket. At the same time he continued watching the screen keenly.
    ‘Age unknown, gender unknown,’ he updated her. ‘Breathing status unknown. Unknown number of patients involved. Oh shit – high mechanism. SIMCAS en route.’
    That meant the Accident and Emergency doctor had been summoned from the hospital to the scene.
    Which meant the status of the incident was worsening by the minute.
    That was confirmed by the next update on the screen. ‘Limb amputation,’ Phil read out. ‘Ouch! Bad day for someone.’ Then he turned to her and said, ‘Sounds like you might be getting your wish.’

9
    Hospitals gave Roy Grace the heebie-jeebies and particularly this one. The Royal Sussex County Hospital was where both his parents, at a few years’ interval, had spent most of the last days of their life. His father had died first, at just fifty-five, from bowel cancer. Two years later, when she was only fifty-six, his mother had succumbed to secondaries following breast cancer.
    The front façade, a grand Victorian neoclassical edifice with an ugly black metal and glass portico, used to give him the impression of an asylum whose portals you entered once, never to leave.
    Stretching out beside it, and up the hill behind the front entrance, was a massive, messy complex of buildings, new and old, low- and high-rise, joined by a seemingly never-ending labyrinth of corridors.
    His stomach knotted, he drove his unmarked silver police Ford Focus estate up the hill to the east of