But she didn’t click the incident reporter shut and open PowerPoint, as she knew she ought to do. The call from the hospital was bothering her. A sliver of dread crept into her stomach, and she tried to dismiss it as ridiculous. But there it sat, black and heavy. Between the lines of text on the screen she read the mother’s fear, her sure knowledge that someone wanted to take her babies away. Harper couldn’t help but feel it herself, that threat of separation. Unthinkingly, she placed her hand low on her belly, where the skin had never quite tightened over the hard muscles beneath.

Perhaps she’d just make completely sure it was nothing, then she could forget about it and get on with her day. One phone call, that’s all it would take. Harper dialled the security service at the hospital.

After the introductions, the guy was nervy.

“Oh, no, nothing to worry about, officer. The lady in the toilets? Maternity? She was just having a bad trip.”

“She was on hallucinogenic drugs?” Harper used a stern, alarmed tone.

“No, no. No. She was, I dunno, spazzing out.”

“She was … what?”

This what, delivered quietly but ripe with pointed incomprehension, implied a need for Dave, the security guy, to explain himself pretty quick and stop using such offensive out-dated language. Harper could pack a lot of meaning into one word. She was rather enjoying herself.

“Look, officer, ma’am, I dunno what happened.” Dave started talking too fast, about how “your lot” had called him and said there was an intruder on the ward so he got up there sharpish. “I couldn’t understand how an intruder would get in—there’s a security door, and I hadn’t seen nothing on the monitor. I ran there, fast as I could—it’s about a mile from my office, you know. I made in it five minutes.”

Five minutes. The triathlete in her couldn’t help but think, not a bad time if it’s true, but he wasn’t about to get a medal from Harper for that. And, she didn’t put much stock in the fact that Dave hadn’t seen anything on his monitor. He sounded very jumpy. Very jumpy indeed. If she had to guess, she’d say he’d probably been asleep when the dispatch controller had rung him, when he should have been awake and alert for such emergencies.

When he’d got there, nothing. Just a “crazy woman in the toilet”. No intruder. “So I rang your lot back. I said, nothing doing here, the psychiatric team are dealing with it. Whoever I spoke to, they said they’d tell you, that they’d cancel it. Didn’t you people get the message?”

“We got the message. I’m just following up on a few things, that’s all,” said Harper.

Harper told Dave to get together the relevant CCTV on a disk for her, and that she would be there later today to pick it up.

“Aw, man. I clock off in an hour, that’s going into my own time—”