Discover a collection of original stories by Norman Waterhouse. Each story offers a glimpse into his distinctive style of suspense, mystery, and psychological intrigue.
You noticed her. Followed her around the wards a little, making it seem as though bumping into her was serendipitous and not the highlight of your day. She was petite with a gamine face framed by gold rimmed glasses and a short straight bob. She wore a starched white coat, sporting an armoury of pens in the front pocket and the side pockets bulged by a Filofax on one side and a BNF on the other. A stethoscope looped around her neck, the bell sitting on the faint rise of her breast. There wouldn’t have been more than a year between you but it was light years in status.
She was a houseman, a qualified doctor. North 4A Cardiology. She had patients under her care. She examined, prescribed, got called to emergencies. She got paid. You were a final year surgical student on North 4b, across the corridor from her in cardiac surgery. You were taken with her, thought about her incessantly and tried endlessly to engineer opportunities to be alone with her. When you managed it, your stuttering attempts at conversation dwindled to moonfaced silence. She didn’t feign indifference. She was indifferent. Your cardiology module ended and you shipped out to dermatology on the other side of the city.
But you did see her again.
The bus pulled up, and we struggled with the door handles until the driver walked round and opened them from the outside. We spilled out onto the M4 motorway, the primary artery to West London, into spectral silence.
Thirty yards away, a blue tourist coach faced us, and an upended truck straddled the other carriageway. I had imagined flashing blue lights, lines of ambulances, smoke and engine fires, but it was nothing of the sort. There were no rows of stretchers or casualties with IV lines in their arms and oxygen masks strapped to their faces.
The front of the coach was smashed, and the ground in front of it glittered with glass. I squinted at the other vehicle, a truck with a wooden trailer. The cab lay on its side and the body of the trailer was reduced to matchwood, as though a bomb had gone off in the back. Something else lay in the road, and I knew it was a body.
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