Before We Met(47)
On the ninth floor Hannah stepped out at the same time as the man in greens, who quickly disappeared through a pair of double doors to the right of the small lobby. The newness of the place was evident everywhere. The windows shone; the paintwork was scuff-free. A little way down the corridor a woman operating a huge industrial floor-polisher was taking care not to hit the skirting as she manoeuvred it from side to side.
Hannah paused for just a second then followed the arrow that directed her through the double doors and down a broad corridor. She would ask. There was bound to be some sort of desk or reception area and she would ask if Hermione Alleyn was working today. If she wasn’t – and really, she already knew she wasn’t – then it would be confirmed.
The wards, it seemed, all branched off this central trunk of a corridor, one set of double doors after another marked by signs at ceiling height that eliminated the need for people to stop and look at the names on the walls and thus clutter up the thoroughfare. She could see the sign for the renal ward at the far end of the corridor and kept going, passing a pair of hospital porters wheeling the bed of a tiny elderly woman with an oxygen tank resting on the expanse of undisturbed sheets at her feet. The further she went, the fewer the footsteps behind her as people peeled off into the other wards.
When she reached Renal, Hannah stopped. Through the glass panel in the left-hand door she could see a little way into the ward: first what looked like a storage bay occupied by a couple of wheelchairs and an unmade bed with a plastic mattress, and beyond that the nurses’ station. Behind the desk was a nurse in a short-sleeved tunic and a younger man, perhaps thirty or so, in a dark shirt. Through the other panel, the opposite side of the ward was visible: a line of single doors, private rooms or offices, she guessed, and an orderly with a cleaning cart. There was no one who looked like the woman online.
The man came out from behind the desk and Hannah stepped away from the glass. Anyone who saw her peering in like this would think she was one of those oddballs who got their kicks hanging round hospitals and doctors. For a moment she saw herself as if from the outside: what would the person she’d been on Saturday morning, only three days ago, think of this one, standing with her nose literally pressed against the glass for a view into the world of the woman who was sleeping with her husband? She experienced a burst of self-loathing so intense it was almost a taste in her mouth, and turned to go. Just as she did, however, a woman whose clipped approaching footsteps she’d been vaguely aware of came to a stop just behind her.
‘Excuse me. Sorry.’ She reached past to the disinfectant gel dispenser then pressed the entry button. When she was buzzed in, Hannah took some gel and followed her.
The woman went straight to the nurses’ station. Hannah hung back until she’d been directed to a patient in one of the individual rooms then approached the desk herself. The nurse behind it, a woman in her fifties with grey-blonde hair pinned into a nub of a ponytail, looked at her over a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked, in a brisk voice.
‘It’s just a question, actually. I wondered if Hermione Alleyn was in today?’
‘Ms Alleyn?’ On the desk behind her the telephone started ringing. The nurse looked at it then at a colleague, who pulled a quick apologetic expression over the shoulder of the visitor she’d been collared by. The nurse looked back at Hannah. ‘May I ask why you want to know?’
‘I . . .’ For a moment her mind emptied. The nurse raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m from the florist,’ said Hannah. ‘I’ve got a delivery for her downstairs but, well, it’s big and I wanted to make sure I was in the right place and she was actually here before . . .’
The telephone stopped ringing but started again almost immediately. The nurse gave it another harried glance. ‘Fine, yes. She’s in today but she’s in theatre at the moment. The list isn’t long so I should think they’ll be done shortly. If you bring the flowers up, we can keep them behind the desk here.’
‘Great, thanks.’ Hannah nodded and made her way to the door again. She tugged at the handle three or four times before seeing the release pad on the wall at wheelchair height. Back outside in the corridor, she walked until she was out of view from the glass panels.
Her mind was racing. What was going on? Hermione Alleyn was here. She was here and working in the operating theatre, which meant that wherever Mark actually was – New York, Rome, Ulan Bator – she wasn’t with him. Unless, Hannah thought, this was the wrong woman after all. She remembered the Cambridge connection, though, the fact that they would have been at St Botolph’s at the same time – what was the likelihood Mark would know two Hermione Alleyns? No, it had to be her, this one. So what did that mean? That he was in London somewhere, holed up at her house and waiting for her to come home? No: not his style. And anyway, if he were in London, he’d be at the office, wouldn’t he? There was no way he’d be here and not go to work, especially with a buy-out imminent.