Bee had one shoe off and the kettle halfway to the tap when the call panel gave its flat, nasal buzz, splitting the quiet between her and the five minutes of hot tea she had been promising her feet since two o’clock.
She set the kettle down on the laminate counter. Above the nurses’ desk, the grey plastic box blinked orange. A single digit glowed through the scratched Perspex: 9.
Bee shoved her swollen heel back into her clog. Six years on nights at Holmroyd House had taught her feet to spread like rising dough by three in the morning, and twelve hundred quid still stood between her savings account and the deposit on the two-bed flat down by Scarthwaite lock. Chloe needed her own bedroom before she turned ten. That meant Bee took every waking night she was offered, drank lukewarm tea, and answered bells when they rang.
Only nobody was in Room 9.
She glanced at the wall clock. Ten past three. Outside, sleet ticked against the tall Victorian sash windows, driven slantwise off the moor road. Down in the west wing, Lauren, the nineteen-year-old bank carer on with her tonight, was changing sheets for Mrs Firth. Bee was on the top corridor alone.
She walked down the passage, her rubber soles squeaking on linoleum that smelled faintly of lemon bleach and the white toast she had made for Room 2 at midnight. The radiators along the wainscoting gave a sudden, metallic knock, as if someone had taken a spanner to the pipes in the cellar.
Holmroyd House had been built by a woollen-mill owner in the eighteen-seventies, all high plaster covings and dark mahogany doors that had been sawed through to fit fire-glass vision panels. Room 9 was at the far end, over the old carriage drive. When Bee had gone off on her week’s annual leave to look after Chloe through a bout of chickenpox, Edie Garside’s things had still been in boxes by the wardrobe.
Bee pushed the door open.
The radiator under the window was turned off at the valve, and the cold in the room hit her throat like well water. No curtains hung on the brass rail. Beyond the dark glass, snow showed grey on the high moor road, though down in the valley it was still falling as sleet. The profiling bed had been stripped to its blue waterproof mattress cover, wiped down with chlorine, and left cranked half-up like a broken deckchair.
Beside the headboard, the red plastic triangle at the end of the white nylon cord was swinging.
It wasn’t a big swing. Just a gentle, rhythmic pendulum across three inches of flock wallpaper, tap-tapping its corner against the wall plate with the steady patience of a grandfather clock. Above the door inside the room, the reset button glowed solid amber.
“Draught from the sash,” Bee said aloud. Her voice sounded flat in the bare room, with no blankets or curtains to soak it up.
She crossed the cold linoleum, reached past the head of the bare mattress, and pressed the grey cancel button on the wall box. The amber light died. Down the corridor, the buzz at the nurses’ station cut off. She caught the red plastic triangle in her palm to stop its swinging. The nylon cord felt stiff with cold, almost greasy. She let it go. It hung dead straight.
She checked the window catch. Latched tight, swollen shut with forty coats of cream gloss paint. No draught came round the frame.
“Damp in the backbox,” she muttered, wiping her palm on her tunic hip. She went back to the desk and boiled the kettle.
* * *
At ten past three the next night, she was filling in the turning charts when the panel buzzed. Orange light. Number 9.
Bee didn’t put her pen down for five seconds. She watched the digit blink. Then she walked down the corridor, unlocked the door she had locked herself at ten o’clock, and went in. The room was freezing. The bare blue mattress glistened under the strip light from the passage. The red triangle was swinging, three inches left, three inches right, ticking softly against the plaster.
She cancelled it, locked the door, and left a yellow sticky note on the maintenance clipboard before she clocked off at seven.
When she came in at quarter to eight that evening, snow was banking against the gateposts and Kofi Mensah was still in the staffroom, zipping his padded waistcoat over his overalls. He had a small plastic sandwich bag on the table beside his flask. Inside it lay three feet of white nylon cord and a red plastic triangle.
“You’ve been busy,” Bee said, unwrapping her scarf.
“Kept tripping while I was having my dinner,” Kofi said. He had a quiet, measured voice, born in Accra and flattened out by thirty years in Huddersfield workshops. “Three times between one and two. Took the faceplate off. Checked the microswitch with the meter. Dry as a bone in there, Bee. No corrosion, no shorted wires.”
“Must’ve been the cord catching on the bedhead.”
“Bed’s two feet clear of the wall.” Kofi picked up the sandwich bag and dropped it into his tool bag. “Switch reed was sticking down on its own, I thought. Old spring. No spare unit in the cupboard till Tuesday, so I snipped the cord right off at the grommet so nothing could tug it. Left the toggle up.”
“That’ll sort it, then,” Bee said. “Get home before the top road freezes over.”
At 03:10, the panel buzzed.
Bee was coming out of the sluice room with a stack of cardboard bowls. She stopped in the middle of the corridor. The orange 9 blinked steady and bright in the dimness over the desk. Behind her, the old hydraulic lift gave a sudden, dry click in its shaft, though the cage was sitting dark on the ground floor.
She walked down to Room 9. When she opened the door, the little amber light over the lintel threw a murky stain across the bare blue mattress. On the wall beside the bed, the white plastic switch plate sat empty, a half-inch stub of frayed nylon sticking out of the bottom hole like a cut fuse. Nothing to pull. Nothing swinging.
Bee pressed cancel. Her thumb lingered on the cold plastic.
When Sandra Platt arrived at eight in the morning, shaking wet snow off her sheepskin coat and smelling of peppermint and car heater, Bee caught her outside the office.
“Room 9 rang again at ten past three,” Bee said. “Kofi cut the cord off yesterday and it still went.”
Sandra didn’t look up from unlocking her door. “It’s the frost getting in the cavity wall. Plays havoc with the low-voltage lines. Kofi can put a blanking plate on it when the weather breaks.”
“He tested the line, Sandra. Said it wasn’t shorting.”
“Well, it’s doing something, isn’t it, Bridget?” Sandra pushed her office door open and switched on her desk lamp. “Ignore it. Or take the bulb out of the panel if it’s bothering you. I’ve got the council funding officer ringing at nine about Mrs Pickles from the cottage hospital. She’s coming in Monday. I cannot have Room 9 sitting empty another week, we’re eleven hundred pound down on the month as it is.”
“In Edie’s room?”
“It’s a room, love, not a shrine,” Sandra said, sitting down. “Close the door behind you, there’s a draught off your coat.”
Bee didn’t go home straight away. She went back to the nurses’ station while the day shift was doing handover in the lounge, pulled the heavy lever-arch file marked Call Log: Printouts from the bottom shelf, and flipped back three weeks to January.
She hadn’t been on the night Edie Garside died. Bee had been off with a bruised rib after Mr Crowther in Room 11 had swung his walking frame at her, and Sandra had brought in an agency lad from Halifax to cover.
Bee ran her finger down the dot-matrix printout for the seventeenth of January.
RM 09 CALL ACTIVATED 03:10:14
RM 09 CALL CANCELLED 03:52:38
Forty-two minutes.
Bee stared at the purple ink. Forty-two minutes with the buzzer going at the desk, while the agency lad slept in the wing chair in the quiet lounge with his hoodie pulled over his ears. When he had finally walked down to turn the noise off, Edie was already cold enough that the paramedics hadn’t bothered getting the defibrillator out of the ambulance.
Bee shut the folder. The metal rings snapped together like teeth.
* * *
“You’re walking heavy tonight, lass,” Arthur Kell said when she brought his midnight malted milk.
Arthur was propped up on three pillows in Room 4, his railwayman’s pocket watch sitting face-up on the overbed table beside his water jug. At eighty-eight, he looked like a twist of dry hawthorn bark in blue striped pyjamas, his hair combed flat with water, his eyes bright and dark behind thick lenses.
“Feet are playing up,” Bee said, setting the mug down by his watch. “Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Goods train to Wakefield goes through at twelve-fifteen. Always woke for it.”
“They pulled the Scarthwaite line up in nineteen-seventy, Arthur.”
“Tell my ears that.” He picked up the mug by both hands, blowing across the top. “You went down to Nine again last night.”
Bee paused with her hand on his bedrail. “You heard the buzzer?”
“Heard your clogs. Three-ten, near enough.” Arthur looked over the rim of his mug at her. “She was a neat little woman, Edie. Worked forty year at Calder Bank Mill on the big looms. Used to walk past my box at six every morning in her headscarf. Never missed a clocking-on in her life.”
“She was quiet,” Bee said. “Never asked for much.”
“That’s the weaver in her. Can’t shout over eighty looms, so you learn to keep your mouth shut.” Arthur took a slow sip. “She didn’t have pain, that last night. Her chest had been rattly since New Year, aye, but it wasn’t pain made her pull that string.”
Bee kept her voice level. “How d’you know that?”
“Because she told me the afternoon before, when they sat us together by the telly. Said she knew her bellows were done. Said she didn’t mind going, she’d lived ninety-one year and buried her husband and seen plenty, only she couldn’t abide the thought of going out in the dark by herself.” Arthur set the mug down by his watch. The small tick of the escapement filled the quiet between them. “She pulled that cord so somebody’d hold her hand while she went over. And nobody came for Edie. Forty-two minutes she lay there looking at the door. She’ll keep ringing till somebody does.”
“It’s a stuck reed in the wall switch,” Bee said. “Kofi’s ordering a part.”
Arthur gave a dry little grunt that didn’t argue and didn’t agree. “Mind you shut my door all bar an inch, lass. Watch the light in my eyes.”