Beneath the Bleeding Read Online Free

as her office. ‘So what’s the latest on Tony? How’s he doing?’
    It was, thought Carol, a funny way to put it. She gave a half-shrug and said, ‘As far as I know, he’s fine.’ Her tone was calculated to close the subject.
    Chris swung around so she was walking backwards in Carol’s path, checking out her boss’s expression. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh my good god, you don’t know, do you?’
    ‘Don’t know what?’ Carol felt the clutch of panic in her stomach.
    Chris put a hand on Carol’s arm and indicated her office with a jerk of her head. ‘I think we’d better sit down,’ she said.
    ‘Christ,’ said Carol, allowing herself to be led inside. She made for her chair while Chris closed the door.‘I’ve only been in the Dales, not the North Pole. What the hell’s been going on? What’s happened to Tony?’
    Chris responded to the urgency in her voice. ‘He was attacked. By one of the inmates at Bradfield Moor.’
    Carol’s hands came up to her face, covering her cheeks and pushing her mouth into an O. She drew breath sharply. ‘What happened?’ Her voice was raised, almost a shout.
    Chris ran a hand through her short salt-and pepper hair. ‘There’s no way to soften it, guv. He got in the way of a madman with a fire axe.’
    Chris’s voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off. Never mind that Carol had inured herself to sights and sounds that would have made most people whimper and gibber. When it came to Tony Hill, she had a unique vulnerability. She might choose not to acknowledge it consciously, but at moments like this, it altered everything. ‘What…?’ Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. ‘How bad is it?’
    ‘From what I heard, his leg’s pretty smashed up. He took it in the knee. Lost a lot of blood. It took a while for the paramedics to get to him, on account of there was a madman with an axe on the prowl,’ Chris said.
    Bad though this was, it was far less than her imagination had managed to conjure in a matter of seconds. Blood loss and a smashed knee were manageable. No big deal, really, in the great scheme of things. ‘Jesus,’ Carol said, relief in her released breath. ‘What happened?’
    ‘What I heard was that one of the inmates overpowered an orderly, got his key off him, trampled hishead to a bloody pulp then got into the main part of the hospital where he broke the glass and got the axe.’
    Carol shook her head. ‘They have fire axes in Bradfield Moor? A secure mental hospital?’
    ‘Apparently that’s precisely why. It’s secure. Lots of locked doors and wire-reinforced glass. Health and Safety says you have to be able to get the patients out in the event of fire and a failure of the electronic locking systems.’ Chris shook her head. ‘Bollocks, if you ask me.’ She threw up her hands in the face of Carol’s admonitory expression. ‘Yeah, well. Better a few mad bastards burn than we get this kind of shit. One orderly dead, another one on the critical list whose internal organs are never going to be right again and Tony smashed up? I’d shed a few homicidal nutters to avoid that.’ Somehow, the sentiment sounded even worse in Chris’s strong Cockney accent.
    ‘It’s not an either/or, and you know it, Chris,’ Carol said. Even though her own gut reaction matched that of her sergeant, she knew it was emotion and not common sense talking. But these days, only the reckless and the heedless casually spoke their mind in the workplace. Carol liked her mavericks. She didn’t want to lose any of them because the wrong ears heard them sounding off, so she did her best to curb their excesses. ‘So how did Tony get caught up in it?’ she asked. ‘Was it one of his patients?’
    Chris shrugged. ‘Dunno. Apparently he was the hero of the hour, though. Distracted the mad bastard enough for a couple of nurses to drag the injured orderly out of harm’s way.’
    But not enough to save himself . ‘Why did nobodycontact me? Who was our duty