Angel of Death by John Askill

was kept, the detectives discovered, in much the same way as in hospitals all over the country. It was not a dangerous drug, to be stored with the morphine, but was kept on the ward in a locked fridge, ready for use. No accurate records were ever considered necessary because, as in most hospitals, nurses had a habit of drawing more than they required into the syringe and squirting the remainder away. It was kept and used in much the same way, and with the same security, as other everyday essential medicines.
    But Supt Clifton now wanted to know whether Paul had been given an injection of insulin deliberately or could it have been an awful mistake? Suspicions grew when he discovered that the key to the fridge had gone missing. Nurse Allitt said that she had gone to open it but found that the key had vanished from the key ring. A thorough search was made but the key was never traced.
    Ward manager Moira Onions had been asked by doctors to carry out an urgent review of the drug supplies to the ward. They wanted to know whether there could have been a mix-up in the labelling. Could Paul have innocently been given the wrong drug by mistake? Could there have been another child on the ward who should have been receiving insulin instead?
    Supt Clifton, however, still felt that the overdose had been no accident and, if it wasn’t, then he had to know who could do such a thing. It had to be someone who had easy access, someone who was trusted enough to get close to the child, administer an overdose and not be noticed. The ‘spy’ camera was producing nothing and there had not been another single incident on Ward Four since the day the police were called in.
    Detectives began questioning every nurse whose duties had taken them to the ward, asking them in minute detail what they remembered of the emergencies, where they had been and who had been with them at the time children had died or collapsed.
    Still, for many of them, the reason for the police investigation was a mystery. A detective said: ‘In the end we had to call all the nurses together to a meeting and tell them exactly what we were doing and that we needed their cooperation.
    ‘They had all taken an oath, not to talk about patients, and as a result the word just didn’t get round for weeks on end.’
    Some of the nurses suffered feelings of guilt and blamed themselves for not realising what had happened. Others were convinced they were under suspicion. Nurse Kathy Lock, who worked on the Children’s Ward, said: ‘I was there most of the time during the period that the police were investigating and yet it had never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that it could be deliberate. It was the last thing we had thought about.
    ‘It’s not the sort of thing you could ever imagine happening in a hospital.’
    Another nurse said: ‘We realised that we were all suspects and some of us were interviewed half a dozen times. We had looked after the children at various times so I suppose at that stage we were all looking at one another, and wondering ….’
    Supt Clifton and his team drew a chart, detailing each one of the emergencies, and pinned it to the wall. They were looking for a common thread – a pattern which would make sense of the events.
    Armed with the detailed staff-rota lists, they drew rough graphs on the wall of the incident room. Supt Clifton wanted to know if there were any nurses who had been regularly on duty when the incidents happened.
    As he ticked off each event, one name recurred time … and time … and time again.
    It appeared alongside every one of the twenty-four incidents that had occurred on Ward Four during the sixty days.
    The name was that of Nurse Beverley Allitt.
    The newly qualified SEN, still only twenty-two, was taken under arrest at breakfast-time on the morning of Monday, 3 June – five weeks after the start of the investigation – to the grey stone Grantham police headquarters. She was questioned for two days about Paul Crampton,