Angel of Death by Charlotte Lamb Page A

her mum. I guess that toughened her up. The social took her away from her dad; he tried it on with her. He was losing it, even then.’
    ‘Have you got a photo of Tracy? What’s her full name?’
    ‘There’s this picture of her and me at Brighton a month ago, that suit you?’
    They looked very similar, much the same height and make-up, with dyed blonde hair and bright, knowing, eyes. They wore the same sort of clothes, too. Tracy was wearing a lacy top through which you could catch glimpses of her smooth, pale skin; a straw hat with the words Kiss Me Quick printed around a red satin ribbon.
    The lacy blouse gave her sexiness; the cheap hat made her look like a schoolgirl; very young and pathetic, perhaps because, mused Neil, the hindsight of suspecting she was dead altered the way you thought of her.
    ‘Her name’s Tracy Morgan, she said her family came from Wales,’ said Delphine. ‘I’ve known her since school. We both lived around here all our lives.’
    He glanced out of the window at the ugly greyness of the streets. A life lived here must be depressing.
    ‘Anything else you can tell me about her, or the young man she was seeing?’
    ‘Yeah. She was too good for him, and you can quote me. She was OK, was Tracy. D’you think something’s happened to her? Or has she just gone off with her bloke?’
    ‘At the moment, I’ve no idea.’
    The next time Miranda woke up she was in bed in a quiet, softly lit hospital ward. There was a bed on either side of her, both occupied, the women in them sleeping, the bedcovers pulled up to their necks. There were another three occupied beds across an expanse of polished wooden flooring. The windows had beige blinds drawn down over them. It was night, she realised. Somewhere somebody coughed. Quiet, steady footsteps came from outside.
    She had spent so much time in hospital three years ago that this was all very familiar. Almost comforting. In here, she felt safe.
    The pain she had been in had diminished, ebbed away. She felt calm and heavy. Miranda knew what that meant. They had drugged her. She recognised this lethargic state, the wooliness inside her head. She was unworried, unafraid, because she was tranquillised.
    She carefully moved to see what injuries she had. Her right leg was in plaster, her right arm was bandaged, and there were bandages on her head.
    The right must have been the side of her body that was hit by the car. Her left side seemed quite undamaged. She could move her left arm and leg freely, without pain, tentatively fingering the bandages on the other side of her body, investigating what had happened to her.
    She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t even dying, she realised. The angel of death had missed again.
    At least this time she had not woken up to find him in the room with her, waiting for her to die.
    A nurse came over to her bed, smiling brightly, whispered, ‘Back with us again? That’s great. How do you feel?’
    ‘I’ll live,’ she said, and laughed, although it wasn’t really funny.
    ‘Well, you sound cheerful! That’s good. My name’s Sally, Nurse Embry. Can you tell me your name? Then we can get in touch with your relatives or friends, or whoever you want us to ring.’
    ‘I’m Miranda Grey. You’d better tell my mother, but don’t ring her until morning, I don’t want her woken up in the middle of the night and scared to death.’
    The nurse scribbled on the chart hanging from the end of her bed. Miranda watched her, noticing her pallor and deep-set eyes. She looked tired, and no wonder, working all night. Miranda would have hated the job, could never have coped with the long hours or low pay, not to mention the sheer horror of what nurses had to cope with, broken bodies, blood, death.
    ‘We’ll need your mother’s telephone number and address.’
    Miranda whispered them and the nurse wrote them down with long, elegant fingers.
    ‘Dorset? That’s a long way off. Is that where you grew up?’
    ‘No, she moved there when she