Thicker Than Water

It was just a plain white Bedford van, unmarked and with very high sides, but it parked right in front of the doors in the bay marked AMBULANCES ONLY.

One woman and two men got out of the van - the woman in an immaf t„culate black two-piece, the men in pale blue medical scrubs. The woman was wearing large, severe spectacles which gave her a stern schoolteacherly appearance - although she was unsettlingly beautiful, too, and she carried herself in a way that made the sternness seem to be an ironic - almost a provocative - pose.

She checked her reflection in the nearside mirror, tilting her head to the left and then to the right while staring at herself critically out of the corners of her eyes.

‘You look lovely,’ said one of the two men.

The woman shot him a look and he threw up his hands in ironic apology. I was only saying.

The night was almost oppressively warm, and very quiet. The Stanger itself, normally the source of many unsettling sounds at night - screams, sobs, curses, prophetic rants - was unusually still.

There were crickets, though, despite the paltriness of the Stanger’s grass verges, which seemed too meagre to support an ecosystem. But this was London, after all: maybe the crickets had to commute like everyone else.

The three went in through the swing doors, the woman leading the way.

The nurse on duty at the reception desk had seen them pull up and now watched them enter. She had to buzz them in through a second set of doors that had been installed very recently to enhance the Stanger’s security.

She did so without waiting for them to announce themselves, because she was expecting them: strictly speaking, that was a breach of security right there.

She noticed that the two men didn’t look entirely convincing as hospital orderlies. One was a slender Asian man with a certain resemblance to Bruce Lee and an air that you could - if you wanted to be polite - call piratical. The other wore his scrubs as though they were pyjamas that he’d been sleeping in for three nights, and had a sardonic self-assured cast to his features that she instinctively mistrusted.

His mid-brown hair was unkempt and his mouth subtly asymmetrical, hanging down slightly more on one side than on the other so that when his features were at rest they seemed to wear either a wry smile or a leer."

"But these things she noted in passing, because most of her attention had immediately switched to the woman.