Angel of Death by Charlotte Lamb Page A

blood pressure must be sky high. What would she do if he walked in here? Every time she set eyes on him something terrible happened. When she was a child, her mother had often told her she had a guardian angel looking after her, night and day. She had never told her the Angel of Death was likely to follow her around, haunt her.
    Nurse Embry put her back to bed then insisted on taking her pulse, her temperature, her blood pressure, looking concerned as she took that.
    ‘Your pulse is a bit fast, but it’s your BP that bothers me. It’s far too high. You know, there’s no need to worry about your mother. She’s going to be fine. She’ll be going home tomorrow.’
    And I’ll be left alone here, thought Miranda. What if he comes tomorrow, after she has gone? She grasped wildly at a way out.
    What if she spoke to Neil Maddrell? Told him she was afraid of having visitors, apart from him, got him to ring the ward and insist that she had no visitors without warning, without the staff asking her if she wanted to see whoever had come.
    ‘Can I have the phone brought over?’ she asked Nurse Embry who looked uncertain, but finally agreed and went away and came back wheeling the portable phone. Neil had given her his number at the police station.
    ‘Sergeant Maddrell isn’t here at the moment,’ she was told. ‘He’ll be back later today. Can I take a message?’
    She tried to think but her mind was in such a tangle she couldn’t work out what to say.
    ‘Hello?’ the operator at the police station asked.
    Pulling herself together, she hurriedly said, ‘Yes, would you tell him Miranda would like him to ring her at the hospital?’
    She hung up. When Nurse Embry came to take the phone away Miranda said, ‘I’m tired, I think I’ll have a sleep. Don’t let any visitors in, will you? Except the police. And if I get a phone call from Sergeant Maddrell will you bring the phone over to me?’
    ‘Are you OK?’ The nurse hesitated, looking anxious.
    ‘I’m fine, just sleepy.’ She kept her eyes shut and after a moment heard the phone rattling away. She hadn’t expected to sleep, it had just been an excuse, a way of making sure she had no unwanted visitors. But as she kept her eyes shut and refused to listen to the desultory chat going on in the ward, from one bed to another, she slowly slid into a light doze.
    Neil Maddrell rang hours later when she was eating her light supper. It wasn’t disgusting, but on the other hand she would rather have had something else than this salad with tinned tuna followed by a tinned pear with tinned cream.
    ‘I saw that man, here in the hospital,’ she broke out in a shaky whisper, afraid somebody might overhear. The other patients always eavesdropped on phone conversations. ‘You know, the man who I told you about, who is a customer of Finnigan’s, the boat builder, the one who I saw just before my accident and afterwards, among the crowd around me. He was sitting in a waiting room. I was being wheeled back to the ward. I don’t think he saw me, but I don’t want him visiting me – can you talk to the ward sister, leave instructions to make sure they don’t let him in?’
    The policeman was reassuring. ‘Of course, don’t worry, I’ll make sure they keep him out, but . . . tell me, why do you find him so frightening?’
    She couldn’t tell him; it would sound so stupid. ‘I don’t know.’
    It was true, in a way. Whenever she tried to think about him her mind became confused, muddled, with different emotions churning inside her. ‘I just don’t want him near me,’ she insisted.
    ‘I’ll take care of it. Is that all?’
    ‘Yes.’ She couldn’t tell him that she had felt safe here, in the hospital, but now she didn’t. Would she feel safe anywhere in future?
    ‘How did you find your mother?’
    ‘She seems OK. Well enough to go back to Dorset tomorrow, she says.’
    ‘What are you going to do when you get out of hospital? Have you decided yet?’
    ‘Well, I