Dead Man's Grip Read Online Free PDF Page B

sufficient to cause massive internal bleeding and almost certain death – on top of everything else that was probably going on in there.
    This lad’s best hope, he thought grimly as he worked on, would be to die quickly.

11
    Roy Grace was shocked to see how pale Cleo looked. She lay in a high bed, in a room with pale blue walls that was cluttered with electrical sockets and apparatus. A tall man in his early thirties, with short, thinning brown hair, dressed in blue medical pyjamas and plimsolls, was standing beside her, writing a measurement on a graph on his pad as Roy entered.
    She was wearing a blue hospital gown, and her blonde hair, cascading round her face, had lost some of its usual lustre. She gave Roy a wan, hesitant smile, as if she was happy he had come, but at the same time embarrassed that he was seeing her like this. A forest of electrode pads were attached to her chest and a monitor, like a thimble, covered her thumb.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said meekly, as he took her free hand and squeezed it. She gave him a weak squeeze back.
    He felt a terrible panic rising inside him. Had she lost the baby? The man turned towards him. Grace could see from his badge that he was a registrar.
    ‘You are this lady’s husband?’
    ‘Fiancé.’ He was so choked he could barely get the word out. ‘Roy Grace.’
    ‘Ah, yes, of course.’ The registrar glanced down at her engagement ring. ‘Well, Mr Grace, Cleo is all right, but she’s lost a lot of blood.’
    ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.
    Cleo’s voice was weak as she explained, ‘I’d just got to work – I was about to start preparing a body for postmortem and I suddenly started bleeding, really heavily, as if something had exploded inside me. I thought I was losing the baby. Then I felt terrible pain, like cramps in my stomach – and the next thing I remember I was lying on the floor with Darren standing over me. He put me in his car and drove me here.’
    Darren was her assistant in the mortuary.
    Grace stared at Cleo, relief mingled with uncertainty. ‘And the baby?’ His eyes shot to the registrar.
    ‘Cleo’s just had an ultrasound scan,’ he replied. ‘She has a condition that’s called placenta praevia. Her placenta is abnormally low down.’
    ‘What – what does that mean – in terms of our baby?’ Grace asked, filled with dread.
    ‘There are complications, but your baby is fine at the moment,’ the registrar said, pleasantly enough but with foreboding in his voice. Then he turned towards the door and nodded a greeting.
    Grace saw a solidly built, bespectacled man enter. He had dark hair shorn to stubble, a balding pate, and was dressed in an open-necked blue shirt, grey suit trousers and black brogues. He had the air of a benign bank manager.
    ‘Mr Holbein, this is Cleo’s fiancé.’
    ‘How do you do?’ He shook Grace’s hand. ‘I’m Des Holbein, the consultant gynaecologist.’
    ‘Thank you for coming in.’
    ‘Not at all, that’s what I’m here for. But I’m very glad you’ve arrived. We’re going to have to make some decisions.’
    Roy felt a sudden stab of anxiety. But the consultant’s businesslike attitude at least gave him some confidence. He waited for him to continue.
    The consultant sat down on the bed. Then he looked up at Roy.
    ‘Cleo came in for a routine ultrasound scan five weeks ago, at twenty-one weeks. At that time the placenta was very low but the baby was normal-sized.’
    He turned to Cleo. ‘Today’s scan shows your baby has hardly grown at all. This is unusual and cause for concern, to be honest with you. It signifies that the placenta is not working well. It’s doing its job just about enough to keep the baby alive, but not enough to enable it to grow. And I’m afraid there’s a further complication that I don’t like the look of. It’s a very rare condition known as placenta percreta – the placenta is growing much further into the wall of the uterus than it should.’
    From feeling a