Chapter 43

Fiona walked over to where the bottle of mouthwash was lying on the floor in a puddle of green foam. She leaned down awkwardly around her enormous belly and picked up the almost empty container in the tips of her fingers.
Very cautiously, she brought the mouth of the bottle near her nose and wafted the odour into her face, like it was perfume.
”Smell this!”
“Its bleach,” Kelloway said, looking sideways over the sink, her face twisted in anguish. She spat out the word ‘bleach’ as if it were a mouthful of the stuff.
The nurses passed the bottle around and took turns smelling the fumes, all of them red-faced with anger. There was no question in their minds that Kelloway had been intentionally poisoned.
“I’m not sure,” one nurse said after smelling the bottle. “It’s definitely fumy. It’s giving me a headache.”
“-It smells like mouthwash.”
“-It’s some kind of sick soap smell. We should call housekeeping.”
“-It’s a laundry chemical.”
A short, dark-haired girl with an under-bite, dressed in aqua blue housekeeping scrubs came forward from the crowd and took a sniff of the bottle.
“That smells like Ultra Quat,” she said authoritatively. “I should know I smell the stuff every day. It’s a housekeeping cleaner.”
Everybody gasped.
Sharon Havelock arrived on the scene and took the mouthwash bottle from Fiona, placing the evidence theatrically in a clear plastic garbage bag and pledging to get to the bottom of it.
Kelloway was immediately helped onto a Stryker cart and wheeled into the patient TV lounge. There were no available rooms, so they turned the lounge into the next best thing, by blocking the entry way with room dividers.
Meanwhile Fiona and the other nurses gathered angrily around Sharon Havelock in the hallway, demanding immediate action be taken and that the police be called.
Sharon brandished the bottle high above her head.
“I’m taking this to the Lab to have it tested right now,” she announced, leaving the unit in a flourish.