Agnes and I made the same long trek to the ward where Lily was. Clusters of visitors gathered round the beds. The curtains were drawn around Lily’s. She was asleep and her head was bandaged.
We pulled up chairs on either side of the bed. Agnes took Lily’s hand in her own. I said I’d go see if there was anyone about we could talk to, left them to it.
There was a new shift of nurses on duty. When I enquired about Lily one of them checked the board. ‘Post-op. She’s had the surgery. She’ll probably sleep through till the morning. We’ll be checking on her throughout the night.’
‘Do you know how it went?’ I asked.
‘Not in detail,’ she smiled, ‘but she’s resting now and everything seems to be going as we’d expect. It’ll be several days before we can be sure. They’ll do more scans to check and so on but she seems to be doing very well so far.’
I reported back to Agnes. Lily lay very still. Only a slight but regular movement in her throat showed us she was breathing.
‘I’ve been finding out a bit about Dr Goulden’s caseload,’ I said. Agnes was listening attentively. ‘He’s referred six patients to Kingsfield in the last twelve months. I don’t know how many beds there are but the place is meant to serve the whole of South Manchester, and those six are from just one GP, just two homes.’
‘Were any of them like Lily? Did any of them seem all right until they went into the home?’
‘Maybe one, a bloke called Philip Braithwaite. He seemed to go downhill quickly, then they found a tumour, they did a biopsy but he got flu and died while he was here.’
‘So it could have been the tumour that complicated things,’ she mused. ‘And the others?’
‘Classic symptoms, nothing unusual, came here for scans, ended up in Kingsfield.’
We were interrupted by the nurse I’d spoken to earlier. She wanted to check Lily’s pulse and temperature.
Agnes asked how long Lily would be in hospital and whether she could tell us if the scans they had done had told them anything about her Alzheimer’s.
‘I’m sorry,’ she made notes on the chart and clipped it back on the bed, ‘I don’t know. You need to speak to Mr Simcock about that.’
At eight o’clock we left, along with the last of the other visitors, and I drove Agnes home. She wanted to speak to Charles and I was keen to find out what he knew. I followed her through to her back room where the phone was. It was bitterly cold and we both kept our coats on. The room was much more lived in than her lounge and still sported an old-fashioned creel suspended from the ceiling where clothes could be hung to dry. Edges of green lino showed around the large Indian rug that covered most of the floor. The wallpaper was some faded leaf design and here and there paintings and old photos hung. She lit the gas fire and left it on full. She found and dialled the number.