On Friday night, the thaw didn’t come; more snow blew down from the tops, thick and dry like salt, piling against the basement grates. At three o’clock, Mr Crowther in Room 11 tried to climb over his bedrails in the dark to go to a pigeon loft he hadn’t owned since 1984, and came down hard on the carpet.
Nothing looked broken, no shortened leg, no hip rotation, though he was bleeding from a graze on his elbow and swearing at Bee and Lauren in a thick, frightened baritone as they rolled the inflatable lifting cushion under him.
At ten past three, while Bee had her knee braced against Mr Crowther’s shoulder to keep him steady on the rising cushion, she heard it from the other wing.
The faint, flat buzz from the nurses’ station.
“Stay with him, Lauren,” Bee said, as soon as they had the old man safely back on his mattress. “Get a dressing on that arm and do his obs.”
“What’s up?” Lauren asked, her round face pink with effort.
“Nothing. Switch playing up on the top corridor.”
It took longer than Bee wanted. Mr Crowther wouldn’t let go of her wrist until she found his flat cap in the wardrobe and put it on the locker where he could see it. When she finally stepped out into the west wing passage and hurried towards the central landing, the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall was just striking the half-hour.
She checked her fob watch. 03:31. Twenty-one minutes since Room 9 had started ringing.
As she came through the fire doors onto the top corridor, the buzzer at the desk changed pitch.
It gave a second sharp click. Bee stopped by the medicine trolley. On the grey plastic panel above the desk, the orange 9 was still lit. Beside it, the bulb under 8 blinked on.
Room 8 was empty too, waiting for new carpet.
Five seconds passed. The wind boomed hollow in the tall brick chimneys overhead.
Click-buzz. Number 7 lit up. That was Mrs Vance, who had advanced dementia and hadn’t known how to use a call bell in three years; her cord was tied up out of reach over the curtain rail so she couldn’t tangle it round her neck.
Bee’s mouth went dry. She looked down the long, dim corridor. Every door was shut. The strip lights in the ceiling hummed, their plastic diffusers grey with dead midges at the ends. Nothing moved on the linoleum.
Click-buzz. Number 6.
Click-buzz. Number 5.
One after another, at the slow, deliberate pace of an old woman walking with one hand trailing along the dado rail, the orange lights came on down the board.
Click-buzz. Number 4.
The clicking stopped. Six orange lights burned in a row from 9 to 4, and the buzzer had become a thick, continuous drone like a wasp trapped in a jam jar.
Bee ran. Her clogs clattered hard on the floor, loud and clumsy. Twenty yards down the passage, outside Arthur’s door, the air turned sharp and cold against her cheeks. Not cellar cold. Moor cold, with something thin and powdery folded through it.
She shoved Room 4’s door open without knocking.
The bedside lamp was off, just the yellow corridor slit falling across the blankets. Arthur lay flat on his back, his glasses folded neatly on the table beside his watch. His eyes were open.
In the corner between the bedhead and the radiator stood the high-backed vinyl armchair where visitors sat. Nobody was in it.
Bee’s hand went to the light switch, then stopped. Her chest heaved. In the half-dark, she could see the pale green vinyl of the chair cushion. There was a hollow pressed deep into the foam in the middle, slowly, faintly rising back into shape with a tiny whisper of escaping air.
And the room smelled of lavender talcum powder. Dry, old-fashioned tin talc, strong enough to cover the smell of malted milk and warm wool.
Bee took two steps to the bed and grabbed Arthur’s wrist. His skin was cool, his pulse steady and slow under her fingers.
“Arthur,” she whispered. “Arthur, did you ring?”
“No, lass,” he said. His voice was quiet, almost conversational. He didn’t turn his head on the pillow; he was looking at the empty vinyl chair.
Bee reached up with a shaking hand and hit the cancel button above his bed. On the corridor panel, 4 went out. From down the passage, 9 through 5 kept buzzing. She touched the vinyl seat of the chair with the back of her knuckles.
It was warm. Body-warm, as if someone in a flannel nightdress had been sitting there for ten minutes and had only stood up when Bee’s clogs hit the corridor outside.
“She sat with me,” Arthur said into the dimness.
“Don’t talk daft,” Bee said, though her voice cracked on the last word. “Nobody’s been in here.”
“Came in when the clock went half-past. Sat herself down and smoothed her knees.” Arthur turned his head slowly on the pillow until his dark, unblinking eyes found Bee’s face. “She’s starved to the bone, Bridget. Cold right through. She asked if I’d keep her company down the road, seeing as we knew each other from the old days.”
“Arthur, pack it in.”
“You don’t say no to a neighbour when she asks polite,” he said mildly, and closed his eyes.
It took Bee five minutes to walk down the corridor from Room 5 to Room 9, opening each door, stepping through the drifting trace of lavender talc, and pressing the reset buttons one by one. Her fingers were so cold she had to use the heel of her hand on the last one.
* * *
Over the weekend, Arthur stopped eating his porridge.
By Sunday night, his breathing had taken on the shallow, glassy hitch that Bee knew better than she knew her own name. The district nurse came out through the slush on Monday afternoon, listened to his chest, shook her head, and wrote up the anticipatory drugs just in case. “Nothing focal,” she told Sandra in the office. “Just eighty-eight and winding down.”
That same afternoon, two ambulance care-transport lads brought Joan Pickles in from Scarthwaite Cottage Hospital and wheeled her into Room 9.
Sandra had put up yellow floral curtains and had Kofi fit a brand-new call unit with a fresh white cord. When Bee came on shift at eight, Joan was sitting up in the newly made bed, a stout, sensible woman of seventy-six in there for two weeks’ respite while her daughter had a hip replacement.
“Nice big room,” Joan told Bee while Bee helped her with her surgical stockings. “Bit parky round the skirting boards, though. Have they had the windows open?”
“Building’s old, love,” Bee said, tucking an extra cellular blanket tightly round Joan’s feet. “Give the bell a tug if you want another hot water bottle.”
She didn’t have to wait until three. At twenty past two, Room 9’s bell went.
Before Bee was halfway down the corridor, Room 9’s door flew open and Joan Pickles came out on her walking frame faster than Bee had ever seen a woman with two bad knees move. She was in her lilac bedsocks, her coat thrown sideways over her nightie, her face the colour of lard.
“I’m not stopping in there,” Joan said, her hands locked white-knuckled on the foam grips of the frame. “You can put me in the lounge on two chairs or you can ring my nephew to fetch me home, I don’t care which, I am not going back in that bed.”
“Joan, love, you’ll catch your death out here,” Bee said, getting an arm round her shaking shoulders. “Have you had a bad dream?”
“I wasn’t asleep! How could anybody sleep with the cold coming off that floor?” Joan looked back over her shoulder at the open doorway of Room 9. “There’s a little woman standing at the bottom of my bed in a grey cardigan. Got her hands folded on the rail. Just watching the door. Waiting on somebody. I asked her what she wanted and she didn’t even look at me.”
Bee moved her into Room 8 on a camp mattress from the store cupboard, made her sweet tea, and sat with her until four.
At 03:10, while they sat in Room 8, the panel buzzed for 9.
Joan grabbed Bee’s sleeve. “Don’t go in there,” the old woman whispered.
“It’s my job,” Bee said.
She went next door, cancelled the bell, and stood looking at the empty dent in the blankets Joan had kicked back. She understood it now, clear and hard as a sum on a page. Edie wasn’t haunting the room to frighten folk. She had been left alone in the dark when her turn came, and she wasn’t going to stay in it alone. If nobody came when she rang, she would go walking down the corridor until she found someone willing to go with her.
And Arthur had already said yes.
* * *
On Tuesday night, Bee didn’t wait for the buzzer to wake the house.
At nine minutes past three, she put on her fleece cardigan over her tunic, walked down to Room 9, and pulled the wooden armchair up beside the stripped bed. Sandra had had the sheets taken off again after Joan refused to set foot back inside. Bee sat down in the dark and folded her arms.
At 03:10 precisely, a tiny metallic click sounded inside the new white wall box. The amber light above the door came on. Down at the desk, the buzzer began.
Bee reached up, pressed the grey cancel button without getting out of her chair, and settled back against the wooden slats.
The cord hung six inches from her left elbow. It didn’t swing.
“I’m here, Edie,” Bee said to the bare blue mattress. Her breath showed in a faint grey puff against the light from the door glass. “It’s Bridget. Look, I know nobody came. That lad from the agency was twenty-two and dead on his feet from working double shifts at the hospital, not that that makes it right. He shouldn’t have slept. You shouldn’t have been on your own.”
Nothing answered. The radiator pipes knocked once down in the wall. Yet the cold in the room thickened around her ankles like water rising in a lock gate, carrying that faint, dry breath of lavender talc.
Bee looked at her watch. “You can’t have Arthur. He’s got a niece in Skipton who comes every Saturday with parkin for him. He’s not ready. I’ll sit with you. You rang for forty-two minutes, so I’ll give you forty-two minutes.”
She talked until her throat felt scraped raw. She talked about Chloe losing a front tooth at school; she talked about the damp patch behind the fridge in her current house; she talked about the price of winter coats and how the bus up from Scarthwaite had slid into the hedge by the Methodist chapel that morning. All the time she talked, the white nylon cord hung straight as a plumb line beside the empty bed, and the room stayed so cold her fingernails turned blue.
At 03:52, the thickness in the air thinned out. It didn’t vanish; it simply drew back towards the window, unsatisfied, like a dog that had been offered bread when it was waiting for its master’s hand.
Bee rubbed her arms on the walk back to the desk and looked in on Room 4. Arthur was asleep, breathing shallow and quick, his cheekbones sharp as slate under the skin.
Sitting with her wasn’t working. Bee was just the night girl. Edie hadn’t spent forty-two minutes staring at the door waiting for a carer in a blue polyester tunic.
* * *
At half-past four on Wednesday morning, while Lauren was heating soup in the kitchen, Bee unlocked Sandra’s office with the master key from the drugs ring.
It was gross misconduct. If Sandra caught her in the archived files without permission, Bee would be out the door without a reference, and the flat by the lock would stay a picture in the estate agent’s window for another two years. Bee didn’t let herself think about that. She pulled the cardboard box marked DECEASED / DISCHARGED: JAN from the top of the filing cabinet and found the cream folder for GARSIDE, Edith.
Next of kin: Graham Garside (Son). Relationship: Son. Address: 14 Beckside Crescent, Horsforth, Leeds.
On the back of the admission sheet, in the previous manager’s neat biro, was a single note from November: Rang Mr Garside re Christmas lunch booking. Said too busy with work prior to retirement, will ring back. Did not ring.
Bee took the cordless phone from the desk, went into the linen cupboard where the hot-water cylinder muffled the sound, and dialled the mobile number.
It rang six times before a man’s voice answered, thick with sleep and alarm. “Hello? Who’s this?”
“Mr Garside? It’s Bridget Mallory. I’m on nights at Holmroyd House.”
A rustle of bedsheets, then a long pause. When he spoke again, his voice had gone defensive, hard round the edges. “The solicitors have got the death certificate. I told the woman in the office, Sandra, I told her the charity shop in Scarthwaite could clear the wardrobe. There isn’t anything left to sign.”
“It’s not about the wardrobe,” Bee said. “You haven’t been up here since October.”
“Look here, do you know what time it is? My wife’s asleep. Whatever this is...”
“Your mam rang her bell at ten past three on the morning of the seventeenth,” Bee said, keeping her voice low against the warm towelling stacks. “She knew she was dying. She pulled the cord because she wanted somebody to sit with her so she wouldn’t go out in the dark by herself.”
Silence on the line, save for the faint hiss of his breathing.
“Nobody answered it until eight minutes to four,” Bee said. “Forty-two minutes she lay there watching the door, waiting on somebody coming through it. And she’s still waiting, Mr Garside. Every night at ten past three that bell goes off in an empty room. And because you won’t come, she’s trying to take an old man down the hall with her for company.”
“You’re mental,” Graham Garside said, but his voice shook. “You’re either drunk or you’re sick in the head, ringing folk at half four in the morning with talk like that. I’ll have your job for this. I’m ringing your manager at nine o’clock.”
“Ring her whenever you like,” Bee said. “Ten past three. Room 9.”
The line went dead.