Angel of Death by John Askill Page B

patient, going home whenever Sue and Peter could cope.
    The following Wednesday, Sue and Peter decided they were ready to have Katie at home permanently and she was finally discharged from hospital. Sue said: ‘I felt very confident that day and I knew that the longer we left her at the hospital, the more difficult it would become to take her home.’
    She said: ‘We brought Katie home dressed in the pink-and-white baby-gro Bev had bought for her. It was such a lovely, sunny and warm day again that we decided to walk from the hospital, pushing Katie in her buggy. It’s only a five-minute walk and it was wonderful.’
    It was a relief having Katie home for good, although Sue couldn’t bear the thought of going into the nursery where the twins had slept those first few hours on the night Becky died. Peter swapped the rooms round so that Becky’s cot was gone and Katie slept in the front bedroom. At least it looked and felt different and there were no awful memories to haunt them.
    The next day Allitt, now a growing family friend and a shoulder for Sue to lean on, arrived at the house around lunchtime. Smiling, she picked up Katie to give her a cuddle and Sue was delighted when she offered to feed her. Sue left her sitting on the settee in the lounge with Katie on her lap feeding her with her bottle.
    What a good friend she was turning out to be. Allitt was off duty and ended up staying for four or five hours. The two women were soon going on shopping trips together, pushing Katie around Grantham in her buggy.
    Sue said: ‘She knew I was still a bit apprehensive about having Katie at home. It was just so reassuring having Bev around. She said to me: “You are bound to feel like that, Sue. Don’t worry about it.”’
    The next day Katie was snuffling with a cold and wasn’t interested in feeding and, taking no chances, the emergency doctor decided she should go back into hospital, just for observation. Katie was admitted to Ward Four where she was placed in a cot in Cubicle Two. She was congested and doctors prescribed simple nose drops and antibiotics to clear up what seemed like a dose of flu.
    Sue stayed with her and, by the Monday, after two nights in the hospital, Katie was much better. When doctors insisted, however, that she must stay in for about a week, Sue was reassured that Allitt was on duty and assigned to look after her little goddaughter-to-be. Katie recovered so quickly that, by Wednesday, 29 May, paediatrician Dr Nanayakkara told them they could take her home.
    It was a week later before the Phillips saw Beverley Allitt again. Unknown to Sue and Peter, the police investigations had been in full swing on Ward Four for more than a month. Allitt made no mention of the police enquiries, her arrest and suspension from duty, when she popped in for half an hour for a cup of coffee. She blamed herabsence on the fact that she had been working hard.
    She returned the following Tuesday, the day Peter kept a long-awaited date with surgeons to have a vasectomy – a decision they had taken even before Becky had died. She wanted to ask if she could take Katie out on a trip to visit a friend.
    Sue’s mother, who was in the house babysitting, asked her to wait until Sue got home from hospital; Allitt was still at the house when Sue returned. She asked if she could take James as well as Katie to the park. Sue saw nothing wrong with the request.
    â€˜I wasn’t worried at all when they went off,’ she said. ‘But they were gone for ages and that’s when I became anxious. After about two hours I was beginning to panic a bit, wondering if something had gone wrong. I rang Bev’s house, about a mile away, but there was no reply. I just sat there and waited.’
    Sue wasn’t to know that Allitt was doing what she’d always done when looking after children; she had taken them to show her grandmother in the rural village of Corby Glen, eight miles