He let the door ease shut behind him, not pushing it, not letting it swing: controlling even the air it displaced. The latch caught with a small, obedient click. It was the same sound as a judge taking the bench: a room reminded, without ceremony, that it had rules.
Cold fluorescent light seeped through the frosted pane and cut a pale strip across the office carpet. It turned the snow clinging to his shoulders into dull grit that began to melt at once, darkening the wool in faint, uneven patches. He stood a moment with his back to the door, listening. The building answered in its usual language: distant wheels over linoleum, a muted cough behind a wall, the low hum of ventilation pushing disinfected air in circles.
The office smelled as if someone had tried to scrub last night away, toner, burnt coffee, a thin chemical note from wipes used too often and too fast. A laminated evacuation map stared from the wall with cheerful arrows. On the desk, a stack of forms had been squared with administrative care; a pen lay exactly along the margin as if it had been measured.
He kept his gaze level, taking the space in as he would take in a witness: what was present, what had been moved, what had been made to look untouched. The chair was nudged a fraction off-centre. A waste bin held paper folded too neatly to be casual. A monitor slept, its black screen reflecting him. Pale eyes, charcoal coat, the sheen of wet at the seam of his collar.
He breathed through his nose, tasting metal from the cold. Sleep sat behind his eyes like a bruise. He could still see, in the way his mind insisted on replay, the last family he had broken with procedural correctness. Here, correctness had its own smell, its own sound.
In the corridor beyond the frosted glass, a figure paused, then moved on. The steps quickened as they passed the door.
He waited until the rhythm of them was gone before he moved.
Without taking off his gloves, he went to the narrow pane and angled himself so the glass gave him the corridor without offering much of him in return. A nurse in a fleece gilet crossed the far end, shoulders hunched against more than the cold, badge swinging. Two porters spoke too close, then split when they noticed the office door, their voices dropping into the hospital’s learned hush. No one stopped. No one looked in. That, too, was information.
He stepped back, keeping his breath steady, and began to remove the gloves as if it were part of an oath. Thumb and forefinger pinched the first cuff; leather creaked softly. One finger freed, then another, each movement measured, controlled, until the glove came away and he tucked it into his coat pocket without shaking it. The second followed with the same careful patience. He did not let the damp wool touch the handle, did not leave a smear of meltwater for anyone to photograph and call coincidence.
Bare-handed now, he crossed to the desk.
The office was functional to the point of insult, as if comfort might encourage someone to linger and think. A desktop tower squatted under the desk, its fan worrying at dust with a thin, constant whine. The stapler had been “secured” with a strip of yellowing tape, a petty restraint against petty theft, the kind of measure that assumed guilt as a baseline. Beside it, a stack of blank incident forms sat bowed and soft-edged, damp from someone’s careless mug or a leaking window frame. Paper already compromised before it ever held a statement.
He nudged the chair back with the toe of his shoe, listening for the tell-tale squeal. It rolled a fraction, compliant. Only then did he sit.
He arranges his implements with prosecutorial neatness: pen aligned to the legal pad’s spine, the pad squared to the desk edge, his phone set face-down like a witness turned to the wall. The coat goes over the radiator that breathes more noise than heat. A bead of meltwater drops from the hem, hits linoleum, and creeps outward.
The borrowed keycard lingered in his palm, warm from someone else’s pocket, its plastic edge biting lightly into the crease as if to remind him it was not his. He set it down beside the keyboard with care, parallel to the desk’s grain, and took one measured breath. The air here was too dry, too hot, scrubbed of winter. He pulled the day’s packet towards him as though paper could conceal a blade.
He slid his thumbnail under the staple and lifted, feeling the tiny resistance of metal against paper. The staple came free with a dry click that sounded louder than it should have in the thin pre-dawn quiet. He didn’t tear it; tearing left evidence of haste. Instead he set the bent staple on the desk, precisely, beside the taped-down stapler. An artefact of a system that mistrusted its own hands.
He spread the pages into a fan, each sheet squared so the headings lined up like soldiers on inspection. Mortality review. Routine. A word that did a great deal of work in this building.
On the legal pad he drew a narrow grid, columns ruled with a disciplined pressure: date, ward, bed, attending, nurse, medication changes, time recorded, time witnessed. Another line for “source”, paper chart, electronic entry, verbal report, because in a hospital the truth often came annotated. He wrote in block capitals, the way he did when he didn’t trust himself not to editorialise.
He read the first form and began the translation, not from Norwegian into English but from institution into fact. “Patient became drowsy.” He added: sedated. “Unresponsive to stimulation.” He wrote: no response to pain. “Resuscitation not indicated.” He noted: decision-maker? time? signature? The soft phrases had the same function as a defence counsel’s euphemism: to make the ugly sound inevitable.
A faint mark on one page caught his attention: an erasure, the paper fibres roughened where someone had rubbed too hard. He angled it towards the desk lamp, watching the indentation reappear like a bruise. A time had been changed; the digits were different under the light. He boxed it in red and drew a small arrow to the margin: ALTERED. NOTED.
His phone remained face-down, a deliberate silence. He could already hear the inevitable explanations if he called too early: staffing, pressures, ‘unfortunate coincidences’. He didn’t need noise yet. He needed structure. He needed, above all, to make their routine speak in a language that would not let it hide.
The first reports had the flat cadence of a forecast. “Expected decline.” “Failed to respond.” “Comfort measures commenced.” Language that made death sound like a change in pressure, like something that arrived with the tide and could not be argued with. Eirik let his eyes track the phrases the way he tracked evasions in court: not what was said, but what it spared them from saying. He drew a line under each soft verb, then, above it, wrote the harder translation in tight block capitals (DIED, SEDATED, WITHHELD) stopping himself before the words could turn into a narrative.
He forced his wrist to stay neutral. Procedure first. Fact first. Accusation came later, if it came at all.
On one form, the same sentence appeared twice with minor rearrangement, as if someone had copied and then improved the story for tone. He noted the repetition, the way the passive voice swallowed hands and choices. “Was found.” Found by whom. “No distress noted.” Noted by whom.
His mouth tasted of burnt coffee he hadn’t drunk yet. He turned the page slowly, listening to the thin paper whisper like a confession trying not to be heard.
He reached the back of the packet for the shift roster and smoothed it flat beside the mortality forms. Names, badges, start and end times: a different kind of testimony. He ran his finger down the night column, aligning rows with the timestamps he’d boxed in red, then cross-referenced the medication chart printout stapled behind the notes. One entry snagged. Pronouncement: 03:[^18]. Last administration: 03:[^05]. The window between them was legal in the hospital’s language but it sat too neatly against the changeover lull, when accountability diluted.
His pen hovered, suspended like a held breath. Then it touched down. A small circle, black ink, and a tick in the margin: SHIFT GAP. He felt the mark settle in him, heavier than paper deserved.
Another seam split under his attention. The same line (same cadence, same comma after the ward name, even the apologetic full stop) sat in two different files, two different bodies. Not a coincidence: a template pressed over a life to make it fit. He underlined the sentence twice, then in the margin wrote a question no audit asked: who is protected when records start to read like copies?
He worked on without ceremony. The method held, even as fatigue sat like a weight between his shoulder blades and pulled him towards the desk. Under the strip lights his eyes watered; he blinked it away and leaned in until the paper filled his vision. His pen did not hesitate, clean circles, measured strokes, while his spine briefly gave, then locked back into place, as if someone might be watching through the door.
He slid the mortality reports into a plain folder without a logo, as if anonymity could keep the paper clean. The borrowed office smelt faintly of toner and stale hand-sanitiser; the radiator clicked like a metronome that couldn’t quite find the beat. When he stepped into the corridor the air changed and the sound of the building thickened around him: trolley wheels, a distant cough, a lift bell that sounded too cheerful for the hour.
He walked as though he had nothing to chase. The pace invited people to forget him, to file him mentally with auditors and inspectors: another suit moving through public institutions, another quiet threat that could be ignored until it couldn’t. His eyes did the work instead.
Badges first. Who wore theirs where policy demanded, who kept it half-hidden under a lanyard twisted like a guilty tongue. Who had the temporary orange tag with its clipped privileges, and who had the blue staff card scuffed at the edges from years of doors recognising it without question. Hands next. Empty hands were normal; gloved hands without a tray were not. He counted latex, counted bare skin, counted the small fidgets people made when they’d been awake too long and were trying to look useful.
A porter came towards him with a cart of linens, eyes down, moving with the simple honesty of someone paid to shift weight rather than stories. Two junior doctors passed in a quick, bright stream, coffee steaming in paper cups, talking over one another as if speed could keep death from catching up. A nurse in a rumpled tunic stepped out of a side room and, seeing him, adjusted her badge so it faced outward like an amulet.
He didn’t look at faces for long; faces learned quickly. He looked at trajectories. Who angled towards the locked ward doors and then corrected course. Who paused at a noticeboard without reading it. Who emerged from Stairwell C with damp hair as if they’d been outside, though the outer doors were alarmed after midnight.
The folder felt too light under his arm. That was the problem with evidence at this stage: it could be folded, misfiled, corrected into nothing.
At the corner before the nurses’ station, he stops as if to check a noticeboard, giving his body the patience of someone waiting for a lift. The corridor has its own weather: a warm draught from the ward, a colder slip from the glass link, and the human heat of people changing over. Breath on air, damp cuffs, the faint reek of burnt coffee clinging to sleeves.
Night staff loosen their shoulders and drift towards exits in twos and threes, speaking in low shorthand that sounds like tenderness until it isn’t. Day staff come in with clean shoes and bright lanyards, too brisk with it, rehearsing competence before the first emergency tears it apart. Between them the handover happens, not at the desk where it should, but in the soft eddies by the medication trolley and the chart racks, where a laugh can erase a question and a question can be framed as concern.
He watches for habit disguised as necessity: who always takes the long way round past Pharmacy, who always “just needs” a signature, who never meets anyone’s eyes when the word incident is said. The station’s fluorescent light makes everyone look guilty if you hold the gaze long enough. He doesn’t. He counts movements instead.
He let his attention sit loosely on the handover like a coat left on a chair, present, unclaimed. The ones with nothing to hide took up space without thinking: shoulders rolling, an easy laugh at something unfunny, hands lingering on charts as they asked after patients by name. They spoke in full sentences, the kind that leave footprints.
Others used the churn of bodies as a curtain. A badge turned inward. A clipboard lifted, not to read but to cover a jawline. Eyes dropped to the linoleum’s scuffs, suddenly absorbed by a hairline crack as if it held instructions. They didn’t walk fast; speed attracts. They drifted, angled, let the crowd nudge them towards doors with clean lettering, STAFF ONLY, where the lock clicked politely for the right card and not at all for anyone else.
At the main entrance the kiosk-café shutters rose with a metallic rattle that sounded too loud in the half-lit lobby. The first breath of coffee pushed back at disinfectant and cold air, an indecent comfort. Bryn didn’t step out from behind the counter so much as appear: broad hands, steady eyes, the face of a man who noticed everything and never made a show of it. “Anything?” he murmured, as if asking about milk. Eirik’s reply was smaller. “Not yet.”
Eirik took the paper cup, the lid flexing under his thumb. The heat bled through the cardboard in a way that felt almost illicit. Beyond the glass the lobby performed its morning: greetings traded like small coins, a nurse snapping gloves with practised impatience, a porter making snow into a joke. Ordinary, serviceable life. He let it steady him: and marked, with a dull tightening, what his indictment would break.
By the locked ward the air changed, not in any measurable way the hospital would admit to (still disinfectant, still the faint metallic tang of radiators) but in the way voices softened, as if sound itself might be recorded and played back in court.
An orderly detached from the flow with the timing of someone who had been watching for him. Late twenties, hair cropped close, the kind of uniform that always looked freshly laundered as if cleanliness could pass for character. He wore a smile practised for relatives and management tours, bright at the edges and empty at the centre.
“Morning,” he said, too quick. “Just doing a quick run. Linen. The clean linen, you know, from the sub-basement. They’ve changed the schedule again, so if you don’t do it now you get caught later when the trolley comes and then it’s a whole thing.” He laughed softly, obligingly, and kept going without waiting to see whether Eirik had joined him. “So I’m going down, grab two bags (white, not the blue, because blue is isolation) and then straight back up, because Ward Six is short and Sister Anne’s on me about it.”
His words piled up like forms on a desk: the more paper, the less anyone looked at what was underneath.
Eirik watched his face rather than listening for content. The smile stayed in place, but the skin around the eyes didn’t take part. The man blinked too late. His gaze flicked past Eirik’s shoulder, towards the corridor, then returned as if he’d caught himself doing it.
“What’s your name?” Eirik asked.
A fractional pause, the kind that never appears in transcripts. “Mats,” he said, then added a surname that sounded assembled rather than remembered. “I’m covering. Night shift ran over. We had an admission, agitated, needed two of us.”
“Mm.” Eirik made a note of the phrasing words chosen because they sounded like policy. “Which room?”
Mats’ shoulders lifted, dropped. “Uh: end of the hall. The locked side.” He gestured with an open palm, as if offering transparency. “You’re not here for that, are you? I mean, it’s routine. It’s always routine.”
Routine was what people said when they meant: don’t look.
Mats did not block him outright; that would have been honest. Instead he drifted with the conversation, a slow lateral tide that kept re-positioning his body between Eirik and the badge reader as if by accident, as if the corridor itself demanded it. The movement was subtle enough to pass as courtesy yet consistent enough to feel rehearsed. His hands stayed where Eirik could see them, palms open, fingers loose, the universal gesture of harmlessness; but his feet told a different story, toeing the line that would force Eirik to ask, to step around, to make it social.
Eirik felt the familiar irritation of procedure weaponised: no force, no refusal, only friction. The kind that made supervisors shrug and say, What can you do.
He watched the orderly’s shoulders rather than his mouth. Each time Eirik’s attention angled towards the panel, Mats’ weight shifted a fraction, closing the lane. He smiled again, a controlled flash, and the smile held on too long: like a door left ajar on purpose.
Eirik let the explanation run until it began to repeat itself, the way a frightened witness circles back to the safe parts of a story. He listened for the joins: the too-fast add-ons meant to pre-empt questions, the micro-pauses where the man’s eyes tried to predict the next line of attack. Mats spoke in policy, not memory. Eirik kept his face neutral, prosecutor’s blankness, and used the seconds to take in what the orderly was trying to turn into background.
Past the moving body, the access panel sat dull under fluorescent glare. Around the badge reader the plastic was marked with faint scuffs, recent enough to catch the light: an arc of abrasion where something hard had been pressed, slipped, tried again. Not routine wear. Not careless keys. Someone had worried at it.
Somewhere underneath them, beyond the mapped patience of wards and waiting rooms, a service door snapped shut. The sound travelled up through pipes and concrete like a verdict. A second later came footsteps, light and retreating, already dissolving into the ventilators’ steady exhale, as if the building itself had agreed to carry them away.
Mats shifted at last, a small, belated courtesy, as if the idea of not standing in a doorway had only just reached him. The badge reader was suddenly visible, the corridor widening by a metre and a truth. Eirik stepped forward and felt what remained: not anger, not even surprise. Just the clean, sour certainty of timing. Someone here knew exactly when to impede, and when to vanish.
The wing kept its face on. Fluorescent tubes hummed with the same indifferent insistence as always, the light flattening everyone into pale planes and dark under-eyes. Disinfectant sat sharp at the back of the throat, clean enough to feel like an accusation, and beneath it the faint, burnt edge of coffee that had been reheated too many times. Doors sighed open and shut on their hydraulics. Trolleys clicked over the seams in the linoleum. An IV pump somewhere complained in a steady, domesticated rhythm until a nurse silenced it with two practised taps.
Eirik watched the choreography as if it were testimony. No one ran. No one cried. The voices stayed inside the approved register: low, calm, capable. A junior doctor paused to read a note on a clipboard, lips moving without sound, then looked up too quickly when he noticed he was being observed. A porter pushed a linen cage past with the care of a man handling evidence, eyes fixed on the floor as though the tiles could offer immunity. The night staff moved towards the exits with their shoulders drawn in, bodies already thinking of beds and blackout curtains; the early shift came in brisk and pink-cheeked from the cold, shedding snow in small, melted confessions by the radiators.
Even the locked ward performed its restraint. The door sat closed, the magnetic lock invisible, the sign about restricted access laminated and slightly skewed as if it had been adjusted in haste and then left. A woman in a cardigan stood outside with a paper cup, not quite waiting, not quite loitering. Her gaze on the door, then on the corridor, then away, as if looking too directly might be recorded.
Normalcy here wasn’t the absence of trouble; it was a policy. A set of habits reinforced by budgets and fear. Eirik felt the building making itself harmless around him, smoothing its surfaces, offering him only what it could afford to admit. And still, in the gaps between footsteps and the ventilators’ breath, the silence carried a kind of listening.
The timing was too neat. At the nurses’ station a laugh rose (single, startled, almost warm) and then died as if someone had pressed a thumb to its throat. Not fading, not trailing off into embarrassment, but cut clean mid-breath. Eirik didn’t need to look at his watch; his ears had already marked the beat between the laughter and the soft, purposeful tread coming down the corridor.
He kept his pace steady, letting the soundlessness announce him. Two nurses stood close behind the counter, shoulders pitched forward in that posture of busy people who hadn’t been. One had a pen poised above a medication sheet, the tip hovering, ink reluctant to commit. The other’s eyes flicked up and away too fast, a reflex that pretended to be etiquette.
A monitor somewhere ticked through its routine alarms in the background; a phone rang once and was silenced with a practiced palm. Behind them, the whiteboard was crowded with abbreviations and bed numbers. Someone had written a name in fresh marker and underlined it twice, then smudged the line with a hurried sleeve.
When Eirik drew level, the first nurse offered a professional half-smile that asked for nothing and promised less. The second nurse’s hand tightened on the pen, and then, as if remembering herself, loosened.
A chart trolley sat at the mouth of the corridor like a thought placed there on purpose. Not a barricade, no alarms, no shouted objections, just angled enough to demand a decision. Anyone coming through had to slow, pivot a shoulder, thread past trays of forms and plastic sleeves as if passing a polite stranger in a narrow doorway. It looked harmless in the way hospital clutter always does: wheels that didn’t quite lock, a stack of observation charts with corners curling from damp hands, a clipped pen on a string. But it severed the long sightline down to the locked ward, turned a straight walk into an interruption. Eirik noted it the way he noted pauses in testimony. Obstacles didn’t have to stop you. They only had to make you arrive differently.
A nurse came through with a medication tray balanced like an offering, plastic cups rattling softly under their foil lids. She didn’t look up. Her gaze stayed pinned to the scuffed linoleum, tracking old heel-marks and dried specks of something that never quite came clean. Her shoulders held themselves tight, neck stiff, as if eye contact might turn her into a witness.
Even the courtesies had a cadence, like lines learned off-script. A porter paused with a door held wide, smiling a fraction too long, watching to see if he would thank him. A junior doctor over-explained a blood draw Eirik hadn’t asked about, voice smooth, eyes fixed somewhere past Eirik’s shoulder. The ward’s calm wasn’t absence of trouble; it was trouble wearing its Sunday face.
Eirik claimed a borrowed administrative office the way a man claimed a corner table in a café he did not own: no fuss, no invitation, only the quiet assumption that work outranked etiquette. The room was too warm for the hour, radiators ticking beneath a window filmed with salt and frost. Overhead, fluorescents buzzed with a thin, insect persistence that made the air feel granular. A laminated evacuation plan curled at one corner on the wall, its arrows bright and optimistic in a building that preferred closed doors.
He spread the mortality reports across the desk until they became a small geography (dates, wards, consultants, causes) each sheet smoothed flat with the heel of his hand as if it might hide a crease of truth. The language was standardised to a point of comfort: natural progression, expected complications, no resuscitation as per plan. Words designed to be read by tired eyes and accepted on first pass. The numbers were tidy too, columns aligning obediently, totals landing where they should, like a household account kept for an auditor rather than a family.
He read the way he questioned: not for what was said, but for what was chosen. A change in phrasing, a missing initial, a time written with unusual care. A signature that looked hurried on one page and practiced on the next. The hospital had its own dialect of disappearance. Patients reduced to bed numbers and risk categories, pain translated into scales, death filed into a cause that fit the dropdown menu.
Outside the door, the corridor exhaled its morning routines: the squeak of trolley wheels, a distant alarm cut short, a laugh that died quickly as footsteps approached. Someone walked past and slowed for half a beat then continued on.
He traced a finger down one entry and felt the familiar irritation rise, cold and precise. Everything here was framed as if the institution were only keeping time, marking the hours between admission and discharge, between symptom and outcome. The paperwork did not lie, exactly. It simply told the story the hospital could afford to tell.
He went hunting for the tripwires that should have caught a bad night: incident flags in the margins, a raised tick-box beside unexpected event, a note about paradoxical agitation, a hasty switch from one sedative to another. He checked transfer sheets for the tell-tale shorthand of panic, moved for observation, bed pressures, awaiting scan, and for the coded language staff used when they wanted a record without a record.
There was nothing. Only the same tidy formulations, the same polite clinical inevitability. Dosages written in even handwriting, countersigned where they should be, times rounded to the nearest quarter-hour as if death observed a schedule. The margins were clean, untroubled by the small human habits that normally leak through tired administration: a crossed-out number, a question mark, an initial in the wrong place.
It was too smooth. Bureaucracy, he knew, didn’t produce perfection; it produced friction. Unless someone had sanded it down. The calm read like an instruction followed diligently: say less, write less, leave no hook for anyone to pull.
The absence of any formal alarm did not settle him; it honed him. In court, silence could be innocence, but it could just as easily be coaching. Here, in the warmed office with its buzzing light and disinfectant tang, the quiet felt arranged: set down carefully like a tray of instruments. He listened for the small tells that lived in institutions under strain: hurried voices on phones, a reprimand muffled by a stairwell door, the brittle relief of people who believed a mess had been contained. Instead, there was only routine, and routine performed too precisely.
It had the texture of a warning issued without paper: don’t speculate, don’t annotate, don’t deviate. A practiced quiet: held in the throat, in the wrist, in the choice to write nothing at all.
Line by line, he learned to read what wasn’t there. Cross-references that should have auto-populated were simply blank, as if the system had obliged a human hesitation. Summaries arrived too complete, smoothing questions he hadn’t yet formed. Even the errors were uniform: the same neat rounding of times, the same safe phrasing. Coordination, not competence, left a cleaner trail.
As the glazing paled from pitch to bruised grey, his instinct settled into something colder than suspicion. The calm did not mean safety; it meant someone had drawn a line and dared the chaos to stay behind it. A perimeter of correct forms, softened language, closed doors. Danger, here, didn’t arrive with sirens. It arrived with silence maintained, with trouble prevented from ever becoming official.
The night nurse’s handwriting is too calm for what it claims: an “expected” death, entered like a completed task, the sort of line that should disappear into the ward’s usual attrition. The ink is a steady blue, the loops disciplined, the kind of penmanship drilled into someone who has learned that shaking hands invite questions. Eirik stands at the counter with the ledger angled under the strip light, and lets his gaze rest on the word expected until it loses meaning and becomes an excuse.
The paper smells faintly of disinfectant and cheap toner. Someone has stapled the entry to a clipped printout, vitals, medication administration times, each line a small promise that a system was watching. But systems watch what they are told to watch.
He doesn’t touch the page with his bare fingers. He has been in too many rooms where the smallest smear becomes a story, and too many courts where stories replace facts. A thin latex glove squeaks as he slides the sheet half a centimetre, looking for pressure marks, indentations, anything that says the pen hesitated. There is none. If the nurse hesitated, she did it somewhere else.
The narcotics sheet sits in the same folder, its grid of times and signatures a relic from an era when trust was carbon-copied. A dose line is missing. An absence made conspicuous by the neatness around it, like a tooth pulled clean. Not crossed out, not corrected, not explained. Just a blank where a name should be, a space that invites whatever the reader most fears.
From down the corridor comes the beep of a monitor and the soft, practised murmur of staff changing over. Shoes squeak on linoleum; a trolley clicks over a seam in the floor. Life continues, parceled into tasks and handovers, and somewhere inside that routine a person has been reduced to a line and a time that won’t sit still.
Eirik exhales through his nose, slow. Expected, on paper, is a word that closes doors. In practice, it opens opportunities. He lifts his eyes to the nurse station glass and catches his own reflection and in the background the ward’s fluorescent hum makes everything look clinical enough to forgive.
Eirik’s eye catches the first alteration the way it catches a cheap lie: not with surprise, but with a small, involuntary narrowing. 02:[^14] has been tightened into 02:[^08], the original digits bruised by the ballpoint’s insistence. Not struck through. Not annotated with apology. Just overwritten, as if time were a medication dose that could be titrated to make the chart look calmer.
Then he sees the second correction, more aggressive, 02:[^08] pulled back to 02:[^12], the ink laid down darker, angrier, and beside it a different set of initials. Two hands inside one hour, two names taking turns holding the same scalpel. If it were a court file, he would call it chain-of-custody contamination. Here it is called “correction”, a clean word for a dirty act.
He angles the ledger closer to the light. The paper fibres are rough where the pen has worried them, a tiny crater where certainty has been forced into place. Different strokes, different pressure; one writer careful, the other impatient. Accountability, passed like a hot instrument across a sterile field before it can burn.
He asks for the electronic audit trail, the kind that doesn’t smudge under fluorescent light, and the ward clerk looks up with a smile that has been rehearsed in front of supervisors and angry relatives alike. Her badge swings once, then stills. “The charting system’s under maintenance,” she says, and the words fall into place like a stamp. “Requests are queued. IT will release access when it’s safe.”
Safe. Not true, not accurate: safe.
Eirik keeps his voice low. He names the fields he needs: user IDs, timestamps, amendments, the order in which the entries were saved. Her gaze flicks, briefly, to the glass corridor where people pass and don’t look. “Anything beyond what’s on paper,” she adds, just as softly, “would be a privacy breach.” Loud enough, he thinks, to remind him who is listening.
On the narcotics sheet beside it, the arithmetic behaves until it is instructed not to. Tick marks, totals, tidy signatures: then a slot left pristine, a white rectangle where a dose, a name, a reason should live. No strike-through, no “wasted”, no second witness. Not an error; an erasure. The kind of cleanliness that takes time, and permission.
The corridor holds its breath in the aftermath, the kind of hush that follows a crash cart once it has turned the corner. Nurses move with practised calm, eyes forward, voices clipped to logistics. A porter pushes linen without meeting Eirik’s stare, his jaw working as if chewing a warning. No one says a name. The silence does: it has been written into routine, signed, filed. Now swept clean.
Eirik reaches the ward with cold still trapped in the seams of his coat, the kind that never quite leaves you once it gets under the skin. The bed space he has been sent to is already neutralised. It is not merely made; it has been reset, scrubbed back to anonymity with the speed and discipline of people who have done this under scrutiny before. Fresh linen stretches tight, corners squared as if a ruler had been used. The rails shine with a wet, recently wiped glare. The monitor that would have betrayed a final rhythm has been unhooked and turned face-down on the shelf, its cables coiled with careful hands.
The air holds the faint chemical bite of disinfectant, sharp enough to sting the back of his throat, and beneath it something older, sweat, plastic, the ghost of breath. A pale rectangle on the mattress shows where a body had warmed it. It is the only thing that hasn’t been fully erased, a quiet stain of physics the staff cannot chart away.
He scans for the usual evidence of a life interrupted: a dent in a pillow, a forgotten slipper, the paper cup with a patient’s name scrawled in looping pen. Nothing. Even the waste bin is empty, liner cinched and replaced. Someone has thought of everything that might anchor a story.
A nurse is at the neighbouring bay, hands moving briskly as she replaces a glove box that doesn’t need replacing. Her face is composed in that professional neutrality that doubles as armour. Eirik watches her eyes rather than her mouth; they avoid the bed, avoid him, settle on a checklist as if it has suddenly become urgent. A porter passes with a trolley, wheels whispering on linoleum, and shifts his grip when Eirik turns. The movement is small, defensive.
Eirik stands at the foot of the bed as though he might address a jury. The place offers him nothing but cleanliness and procedure. Yet the precision feels like intent. The emptiness has been manufactured, and he can almost see the hands that did it, quick, practised, unafraid of being asked why.
They answer him as if they have rehearsed it in the lift. Not lies, exactly: units of language trimmed to fit policy. “Transferred,” says one, already walking. “Handled,” says another, eyes on the medication trolley as if it might explode. “Routine.” The words arrive clean and disinfected, each one precise enough to end a line of inquiry and vague enough to survive under oath.
Eirik lets the silence between their syllables stretch. In court, people fill silences with truth or panic. Here, they fill it with tasks: adjusting a drip that isn’t running, smoothing a sheet no one will sleep in, scanning a barcode twice as if the scanner’s failure is the only danger in the room.
He looks for micro-cracks (flared nostrils, a swallow, the flicker of relief when he turns away) but their faces are masked in professional calm. Only their hands betray them: a pen clicked too hard, a badge lanyard tugged straight, knuckles whitening around a clipboard.
When he steps closer, the corridor seems to lean back. Eyes slide off him like water off tile. Responsibility dissolves into “we” and “they,” into “night staff” and “system,” until there is no person left to hold.
Eirik asks, evenly, for the identification band and the transport slip. Not a demand. An invitation to do the right thing before he has to make it official. The junior nurse blinks once, too slow, then opens a drawer with the solemnity of ritual. What she produces is paper: a generic transfer form, crisp and blank where a name should anchor it. Room number, bed space, ward code. No signature. No porter ID. No time that could be tested.
“The printer’s been… temperamental,” she says, and there it is: the institutional scapegoat, warm and faceless. “Night shift usually, ” She trails off, palms up as if bureaucracy itself has slipped the patient out of existence.
Eirik takes the sheet. The edges are too clean. So is her voice.
At the effects locker the space for a sealed, numbered bag sat bare, label ghosted with adhesive where something had been peeled away. The clerk said the items were “sent on,” then, catching herself, “not logged yet.” Her hands hovered above the keyboard, unmoving. The cursor blinked patiently. It felt less like delay than deference, waiting for someone else to decide what was true.
Eirik paces to the service doors and back, letting his shoes count the metres the way his mind counts omissions. A room wiped to neutrality. A form that refuses a name. An effects slot scraped clean, adhesive shadow where a number should be. Each gap is small, defensible, a policy-shaped absence. Together they settle into a single, colder fact: someone has been made administratively unalive.
Eirik draws the narcotics binder towards him until it sits square beneath the fluorescent panel, the hum settling into his skull like a second pulse. The cover is laminated, corners frayed from years of compliant hands, and the metal clip bites cold through his gloves when he loosens it. Paper resists, then yields with the dry sound of a file opening: an administrative throat clearing.
The overnight page is laid out in the ward’s practised grid: times in a neat column, drug names spelled out with bureaucratic care, doses boxed and initialled as if each milligram needs a witness. The handwriting changes in the way shift work always does, rounded loops giving way to harder strokes, until his gaze catches on a patch that doesn’t belong to any hand at all.
A rectangle of nothing.
Not a crossed line. Not a scrubbed blot. Not even the messy apology of correction fluid. A blank space exactly the size of an entry, bordered by the printed table as if the form itself had decided to look away. It is too perfect, too unremarkable, and that is what makes it loud. Absence, engineered to pass for cleanliness.
He holds the page still and lets his eyes adjust to the rhythm of the log, the way an experienced prosecutor learns the shape of normal before he names the crime. Two doses recorded, then the gap where one should sit, then the next time slot continuing without pause. No explanatory note, no “patient refused,” no “wasted,” no second signature. The ward has been trained to document its own innocence. This is something else.
Eirik glances up at the wall-mounted terminal nearby, the medication screen glowing clinical blue. The ward’s digital record is alive with certainty: a dispense event at the exact hour the paper denies. Machine time, stamped and unembarrassed. It claims a vial left a cabinet; the binder claims nothing ever needed recording.
He listens for footsteps, for the small theatre of staff moving past a locked door, and hears only the distant rattle of a trolley. In the quiet, the gap feels less like oversight and more like a decision made with confidence. Someone assuming that what isn’t written can’t be argued into existence.
He angles the sheet under the fluorescent strip, letting the light rake across it the way cross-examination rakes across a witness: not to illuminate, but to force a surface to confess. He expects the quiet violence of alteration. The pressed groove of a pen that once ran here, fibres roughened by an eraser, the faint bruise of carbon from the page above. There is nothing. The paper is unbroken, as if it was printed this way, as if the hospital had always intended this moment to be unrecorded.
He runs a gloved thumb along the border of the blank rectangle and feels only the grid’s ink, smooth and indifferent. No strike-through to argue about. No correction fluid to test. No second set of initials that might drag a nervous nurse into a courtroom. Just a space engineered to look like compliance.
In his head, policy language rises like a shield, privacy, workflow, human error, and he watches it fail. Errors leave fingerprints. This does not. This is the administrative version of a clean kill: remove the line, keep the form, let the absence do the work.
At the terminal he types the patient’s identifier with two fingers, the rubber keys softening under his gloves. The screen offers him order and reassurance: tabs, timestamps, green ticks. He scrolls the administration history until the night folds open into a single line. Dispensed at 02:[^14], narcotics cabinet C-3, user badge ending 7712. Precise to the minute, as if certainty can be manufactured by granularity. The system doesn’t hesitate; it never does. It presents the event like a fact that cannot be appealed.
He looks back to the binder. The totals align, obedient arithmetic, the sort that keeps managers calm. Balanced columns, no deficit, no surplus. Except for the rectangle of nothing, sitting where a subtraction should have been acknowledged. The machine claims a vial left custody. The paper insists the ward remained pure. Between them, someone has learned how to make two truths coexist without touching.
He took out his phone and framed the page so the blank rectangle sat centre like an accusation, the flash suppressed, the shutter silent. He thumbed the note app (02:[^14], cabinet C‑3, badge 7712) and closed it again. Then, to the charge nurse: could she produce the audit trail and the cabinet access log, openings, overrides, amendments, his tone flat, as if asking for a routine exhibit.
The answer comes with a calibrated gentleness, the sort used on relatives in waiting rooms. Privacy legislation, she says; the pharmacy platform has entered a planned maintenance window; IT are “unable to extract raw audit logs today”. She lets the word today sit there like a sedative. It will reconcile automatically, she adds, smiling. Trained to delay him without ever quite saying no.
Ragnhild’s text arrived while he was still under the strip-lit hush, sliding papers into their envelope with the care of a man handling evidence. Supplier changed directors again. Overnight. Third time this month. For a second it sat in his hand as administration. One more tidying gesture in a world addicted to forms.
Then his eyes caught the timestamp. Sent at 06:[^12]. Changed overnight. While the ward had been making its own corrections, while a dose had vanished neatly from paper without disturbing the totals.
He read it twice, as if a second pass might reveal tone. Ragnhild didn’t waste words. When she sounded clipped, it meant she’d already checked three sources and was still frightened.
He glanced up. The corridor outside the small office window was a glassy ribbon, cleaners moving like pale fish beneath humming lights. No one looked in. Everyone had places they were meant to be. The hospital ran on that assumption: movement equals innocence.
His thumb hovered over reply, Send details. Now.. Then he stopped. The last time he’d pushed too hard, too quickly, he’d watched a family fold under a narrative that felt airtight until it wasn’t. The guilt of that case sat behind his ribs like cold metal. He could not afford to be wrong here. Not with bodies.
He opened the message thread anyway and scrolled to her earlier note about the procurement trail: a supplier with a name that sounded like a skincare brand, invoices signed by men who never appeared twice. It had all felt like a separate line of inquiry, distant from the ward’s stained linoleum and tired hands.
Now the timing stitched them together.
Eirik turned his phone slightly, shielding it by instinct, and typed with the same slow precision he used in court. Which supplier. New director name. Any address changes. Send registry snapshot. He added, after a pause he hated, Be careful.
The fluorescent light made his skin look bloodless in the reflection of the black screen. He locked it, then unlocked it again, as if he could will the hospital to show its seams.
He opened Ragnhild’s attachment on the edge of a counter that smelled faintly of bleach and burnt coffee. The registry page loaded with a bureaucrat’s cheerfulness: crisp headings, immaculate dates, names that sounded like ski resorts and parliamentary committees. Clean, Nordic, respectable. He scrolled anyway, because respectability was often just the first layer of a cover.
Director: changed. Again. Resignations logged within the same minute, like a choreographed retreat. The handwriting on the scanned forms was identical in its loops, too calm, as if written by one careful person in a warm office, not by three men abandoning a sinking ship. Addresses repeated with tiny variations, Suite 4 becomes Suite 04, leading back to the same serviced building with a mailbox wall and a receptionist trained to forget faces.
He tapped the company number, then the filing history. A line of “corrections” ran through it like sutures: neat stitches over something that wouldn’t stop bleeding.
His breath fogged the phone’s glass for a moment. He wiped it with his thumb, and the names returned, unbothered.
Eirik didn’t need the archive to feel the weight of the sealed brief; it lived in him like a bruise you only notice in cold weather. He had read it once, late, under a judge’s signature and a warning that had sounded almost polite. He was not meant to possess anything from it. Not notes, not copies, not the comfort of recall.
Still, he tore a sheet from a hospital notepad and wrote the new director’s name in block capitals, as if the act of ink made it procedural. The given name slid off. The surname snagged.
He stared until it stopped being letters and became an entry in an appendix: “unrelated associate”, a laundering conduit with no charges, no exposure: just a line item in someone else’s cleanliness.
He fitted the new surname into the city he carried behind his eyes: consultants who never invoiced twice, accountants whose respectability was purchased by distance, firms that existed only to lend a letterhead to someone else’s violence. The same intermediaries surfaced whenever dirty supply needed a clean receipt. In that moment the hospital ceased to be a ward with tired staff and became infrastructure. One more conduit, routed and defended.
Eirik looked down at the paperwork in his hand: routine forms in bland fonts, phrases designed to calm, “in accordance”, “as per protocol”, a language built to absorb doubt and file it away. The ward’s correction marks and the procurement director’s midnight shuffle aligned like matching fingerprints. If someone could scrub a supplier in real time, then the death upstairs wasn’t a mistake. It was a deal, ring-fenced and defended.
The senior administrator had the polished pallor of someone who never touched blood unless it was in a press release. Silver hair combed back, soft hands folded at his belt, badge clipped to his lapel like a certificate of virtue. He kept his tone genial as he blocked the corridor with his body, turning himself into a courteous piece of furniture.
“We’ve had outages,” he said, almost indulgent. “Legacy systems, tired staff. You know how it is. A correction doesn’t mean wrongdoing.”
The word correction landed with the weight of a euphemism. Eirik could smell disinfectant and burnt coffee, and underneath it something older. Budget cuts, fear, the cheap warmth of compliance. The administrator held eye contact as if it were a clinical instrument, something to be applied and withdrawn on cue.
Behind him, the ward doors clicked as staff badges passed over sensors. A cleaner’s trolley squeaked, then stopped. A nurse stood near the medication room with her shoulders drawn up, gaze fixed on a spot just left of Eirik’s tie knot, as if meeting his eyes would breach policy.
Eirik’s own badge was prosecutor’s metal, not hospital plastic, and it meant less here than a rumour. The man in front of him knew it. He knew how to make refusal sound like care.
“We have an obligation to our patients,” the administrator continued, voice lowering into practised concern. “Privacy law. You’ll appreciate that. And, ” he let the pause do the work of a warning “, we are in the middle of system maintenance. Pulling audit trails during a patch can create… artefacts.”
Artefacts. As though truth was a side effect of the software.
Eirik looked past him to the wall-mounted clock. Its second hand moved with a steadiness that felt accusatory. “Outages,” he repeated, not as agreement but as a marker. “What time did the outage begin? What time did it resolve? And who signed off on the ‘correction’?”
The administrator’s smile held, but it thinned at the edges. “These things are compiled,” he said, and the plural made it sound routine, harmless. “After the fact. Right now we’re stabilising the system.”
Eirik watched the administrator’s mouth shape reassurance in careful syllables, the soft vowels of institutional care. The eyes didn’t match. They flicked, almost imperceptibly, to the fire door at the end of the corridor, to the desk where two junior doctors had paused mid-conversation, to the nurse by the medication room who had gone very still. Counting exits. Counting witnesses. Testing what would happen if Eirik raised his voice.
Eirik kept his own low.
“Name,” he said. “Who made the first entry. Who initiated the first correction. And the second. I want the user IDs and the timestamps, not a summary.”
The administrator’s hands remained folded, wedding band dull under fluorescents. “Those details are held within the audit trail,” he replied, as if reading from a laminated script. “The unit manager will compile it for you later.”
“Later,” Eirik repeated, letting the word hang like a charge.
“Right now we’re stabilising the system,” the man added, a fraction too quickly. His gaze skated away again, to the nurse, to the corridor cameras, as though the building itself might overhear.
The nurse behind the desk didn’t lift her head. “System maintenance,” she said again, flat as a stamp, eyes fixed on the monitor as if it were giving her orders. The word had been scrubbed clean of meaning through repetition.
Her fingers kept worrying the corner of a paper binder, pinching and releasing the laminated edge until it bowed. A thin tremor ran through her knuckles. There was a smear of blue ink on her thumb, the kind you got from signing too quickly, too often.
Eirik angled the narcotics sheet so she had to see the neat blank where a dose should have been. “This line,” he said. “Who left it empty?”
Her gaze flicked to the glass doors at the end of the corridor, then to the camera dome above them. When she spoke again, she lowered her voice. “I don’t handle the counts,” she murmured. “It’s all signed.”
The administrator’s smile returned, practised and oddly generous, as if he were offering Eirik a smaller truth he could afford. “You’re a prosecutor, Mr Holmson. Patterns are your trade.” He glanced past Eirik to the ward, taking in the bowed shoulders, the lowered voices. “But hospitals are noise. People die. Forms get amended.” His tone tightened. “We can’t have you alarming staff over clerical friction.” The stress sat on can’t. An instruction, not a refusal.
A phone rang from somewhere behind the desk, too bright in the corridor hush. The nurse jerked as if struck, then pushed up so fast her chair skated and shrieked across the linoleum. “Excuse me,” she said, breath clipped, already retreating. She moved away with the rigid speed of someone fleeing a spill. She didn’t glance back. Only once, sideways, at the badge reader, counting who might open the door.
Eirik watched the nurse’s back fold into the flow of the ward, swallowed by a corner where the fluorescent light stuttered. The corridor exhaled. Somewhere a trolley squeaked, then stopped. The smell of disinfectant hung on the air as if it were trying to be the only truth in the building.
Above the reception desk a wall monitor cycled through hospital announcements: hand hygiene reminders, a charity run poster, then an IT banner in the same clean typeface as everything else. Scheduled maintenance . Log consolidation. The words were so bland they might as well have said don’t look here. He took a half-step closer, reading it twice, as if repetition could shake loose what it meant in practice. Consolidation. A polite verb for erasure.
A young man in an administrative lanyard hovered near the printer, gathering warm pages with the reverence of someone collecting evidence without knowing it. He glanced at Eirik’s suit, at the badge clipped to his coat, and offered a small, nervous smile.
“If you’re having trouble with access,” the man said, too quickly, “it’s just the update. It’s on a timer.”
Eirik kept his voice even. “What kind of update?”
The man leaned in, lowering his volume as though secrecy might make it harmless. “A batch job. It, um, normalises the logs. Consolidates redundant edit histories. Clears out duplicate entries.” He swallowed. “Makes the record cleaner.”
Cleaner. Eirik pictured the timestamps he’d seen corrected (once, then again) being pressed flat, ironed into a single official version. The system would remember only what it was told to remember. He could already hear, in a courtroom months from now, someone calling it routine housekeeping.
“By when?” Eirik asked.
The man glanced up at the monitor, then at his own wristwatch as if the hospital clock could contradict him. “Noon. That’s when it finishes and pushes the consolidated tables live.”
Eirik nodded, giving away nothing. His hands stayed still at his sides, though a pulse beat at his fingers. Noon was not a deadline. It was a disappearing act scheduled in advance.
He kept his posture loose, the way he did when he wanted an answer without a witness realising it mattered. “And the narcotics sheets,” he said, letting the word sit among the other paperwork. “At shift change: where do they go?”
The nurse at the desk hesitated, eyes flicking to the closed door behind her, then to the corridor as if someone might be listening through the hum of lights. “The binder stays on the ward until handover,” she said. Her voice was careful, practised. “After that, completed documentation is collected. End of shift.”
“Collected by whom?”
“Records. Or porters, sometimes.” She swallowed. “It’s boxed with the rest. Shredding, usually within twenty-four hours.” She added, quickly, as if to soften the blade: “It’s standard. GDPR, storage limits.”
Eirik nodded once, the motion small enough to pass as politeness. “Unless it’s needed.”
Her mouth tightened. “Unless it’s flagged for incident review,” she said. “Then it’s held.”
“And if no one flags it?”
The nurse’s gaze dropped to the counter. “Then it’s just paper,” she said, and the sentence sounded like a decision already made elsewhere.
The whole investigation tightened, not into months or even days, but into the thin band of hours before lunch. He could feel it in his body: the cold that never quite left his hands, the sleepless grit behind his eyes, the way time in this building was managed like medication. If the batch job flattened the edits into one immaculate truth and the binder was boxed up with the rest of the ward’s paper detritus, then what happened overnight would remain only as a rumour with paperwork attached. A death, duly logged. A correction, duly authorised. No first draft. No hesitation. No neat, missing line on a narcotics sheet that a jury could understand without a lecture. Just the hospital’s calm voice saying: routine. Standard. Nothing to see.
He ran through his options the way he ran through charges: method, consequence, who would notice. A preservation order would land on counsel’s desk within minutes and turn every corridor into a rehearsed statement. A warrant would snag on privacy and procedure, hours he could not spend. What remained was the old currency: family names, quiet obligations, a request small enough to sound like routine.
He chose speed over spectacle; there was no room for grand gestures in a building that sterilised everything it touched. He slid his phone into his inside pocket and let his face go blank, just another suited man walking with purpose. Off the public corridor, he headed for Level 5, older terminals, older habits, where a system still remembered what “maintenance” would soon pretend never happened.
Eirik peeled away from the main artery of the hospital as if he’d spotted an exit in testimony. One of those narrow administrative side passages the public never noticed because there was nothing to buy and nowhere to sit. The fluorescent glare softened to a tired flicker. The hum of voices thinned to a distant, institutional murmur. Here, the air held different residues: old paper kept too long in metal cabinets, toner dust, and the dry, lukewarm breath of radiators fighting a winter they would never beat.
The floor tiles changed, too. Less scuffed by gurney wheels, more marked by office shoes and the occasional dragged box. On the walls, laminated notices curled at the corners: password policies, fire routes, reminders about “data hygiene.” Each one felt like a prayer to a god that didn’t exist. A hospital could preach compliance all it liked; it still ran on shortcuts, fatigue, and who had the right credentials at the right hour.
He kept his pace measured, hands empty, coat buttoned. Not the brisk impatience of a man trying to prove he belonged, and not the furtive caution of a man who didn’t. Just the calm of someone used to being watched and refusing to react to it. The cold in his bones, hours of travel, thin sleep, the sea wind that slipped through even expensive wool, made his face feel carved.
This corridor always triggered the same reflex: the sense of stepping behind the bench, into the space where decisions were made and then dressed up as procedure. In court, the lie was rehearsed. In hospitals, it arrived disguised as routine.
He pictured the briefing he’d requested. Just enough to anchor suspicion in something that would withstand later scrutiny. Not enough to alert anyone with a reputation-management agenda. He could already hear the language they would use if he pushed too hard: patient privacy, process, “concerns have been addressed internally.”
A door clicked somewhere ahead; a printer began its stuttering feed. Eirik slowed, listening: not for sound, but for rhythm. Who was early. Who was alone. Who had time, and who would feel forced to make it.
A junior administrator sat behind a counter that pretended to be a barrier. Early twenties, lanyard too bright, fingers stained with toner. He looked up with the reflex of someone trained to apologise before he knew what for.
Eirik stopped at a respectful distance, letting the boy see the cut of his suit, the calm in his hands. Not police. Not patient. Something harder to categorise.
“Holmson,” he said, quietly. “Prosecutor’s Office.”
The name did what names did in this city. It shortened the administrator’s breath; it made his shoulders square as if posture could substitute for authority. He didn’t ask for ID, not directly. His gaze flicked to Eirik’s face, then away, as though eye contact might make him complicit.
“I need a terminal,” Eirik continued, keeping his voice low enough that it didn’t travel. “One that still talks to the legacy system. Five minutes.”
No threats, no urgency: just the assumption that the request was reasonable and the compliance already arranged. The administrator hesitated on principle, then nodded on instinct, turning his monitor slightly as if shielding Eirik from the corridor rather than from scrutiny.
He was steered to a workstation wedged between tall filing cabinets and a printer that coughed out half-pages like a smoker clearing his throat. The screen saver blinked a cheery hospital logo that felt like a dare. He slid into the chair without taking off his coat, logged in with the temporary credentials the administrator pretended not to notice, and kept his fingers light. Ordinary menus, ordinary pathways. Until he stepped sideways into the sealed prosecutorial route, a corridor inside the system that existed precisely to avoid the hospital’s lawyers. He took only what he could justify later as strictly necessary: metadata, timestamps, access histories. No names unless attached to edits. No downloads, no flags. Screenshots, cropped tight. He watched the corner for any hint of an alert and heard only the printer’s dying rattle.
The briefing arrived in blunt, unlovely blocks: dates, ward codes, shift rosters; medication discrepancies flagged, “investigated,” then closed with no narrative attached. He sorted by time-of-death and edit history. The same geometry kept reforming, North Wing, a narrow seam of night hours, and a single account brushing every “correction”. Administrator privileges. A tidy hand, working through fatigue and locked doors.
He printed nothing, forwarded nothing. He caught the relevant screens in quick, silent grabs: access ladders, edit trails, the clinician’s credentials sitting higher than any ward doctor should need. Then he backed out, menu by menu, clearing what the system would let him, scrubbing recent history with the clumsy tools of an older era. Enough to act on. Enough, later, to plausibly deny he’d ever been there.
The clustering didn’t frighten him. Fear was too honest, too bodily. This was colder: recognition sliding under the ribs, the mind’s quick, treacherous relief at a pattern that behaved itself. One ward code repeating like a refrain. One seam of night hours where the hospital thinned to a skeleton crew and fluorescent light. One account with administrator reach, touching every “correction” as if smoothing a bedsheet over a body.
Neatness. That was what caught. Not the deaths (death was always a blunt instrument) but the way the record had been made to look as if it belonged to nature: an orderly sequence of entries, the right boxes ticked, the same phrasing copied and pasted with only the times changing. A competent lie. He could feel, with unwanted clarity, how easy it would be to let it soothe him. To say: there, that’s it, the hand is visible; follow the hand and you have the truth.
He watched the timestamps and his own pulse refused to rise. That was its own warning. In his head, procedure began to assemble itself into a corridor he knew too well: obtain the testimony, secure the chain, draft the indictment, keep the mess from splashing the wrong people. He could hear the language he would use in a memo (“consistent with”, “indicative of”) words that promised control.
But control was what had ruined him once. He had mistaken a clean file for an honest one. He had confused the absence of contradiction with the presence of truth. Back then, the paperwork had been immaculate, the sort of bureaucratic hygiene that let everyone go home and sleep. He had been grateful for it. He had let that gratitude harden into certainty.
Now, the same gratitude tried to rise, quiet and professional, and he pressed it down. The system wanted him to accept its geometry. Someone, somewhere in North Wing, wanted him to stop looking because the shape looked complete.
He kept staring until the pattern stopped being reassuring and became what it was: a deliberate choice repeated, again and again, in the hours when no one wanted trouble.
Memory did not come as a lesson. It came as stationery.
A municipal crest stamped into the corner of a form, the ink slightly raised where the press had bitten. Boxes aligned with a draughtsman’s certainty. “Reviewed,” “verified,” “no further action.” The sort of language that soothed committees and let people keep their jobs. He remembered the polite signatures (two of them in blue pen, the third a neat digital scrawl) each one a small abdication dressed as diligence.
In that case he had sat across from a father who kept folding and unfolding the same cap in his hands, as if creases might turn into answers. Eirik had watched the man’s mouth form questions and had answered with procedure. With compliance. With the comfort of a file that did not resist.
Then, later, the snag: a date that could not be true, a witness “unavailable” in a way that was too convenient, an audit trail that looked perfect because someone had tended it. He saw, with a cold shame, how easily rules could be used as scenery. How readily “compliance” could be manufactured, signed, stamped, and archived, like an alibi built from institutional good manners.
He made himself go back through what he’d taken (times, ward codes, usernames) until it stopped feeling like discovery and started feeling like cross-examination. Not his own notes, he told himself. Not his own mind. Treat it as hostile testimony: assume it wants to mislead, assume it is polished to be believed. He drew hard lines in the margin where the proof actually lived, badge logs, edit trails, the narrow fact of who could touch an entry and when, and he circled the parts that were merely elegant. Correlation was a comfort the institution sold cheaply. A repeating shift pattern could be fatigue, could be staffing, could be winter; an administrator account could be convenience, not malice. He underlined, twice, the places where his desire for a clean culprit tried to supply motive.
Resolve came all the same, but it wasn’t the clean kind. In the lift’s stale warmth his hands still shook from the cold, thumb worrying the edge of his badge as he rehearsed the sequence: get to the locked ward while the witness could still consent to being heard; document every contact; anchor everything to timestamps and access logs. Move quietly. Give them nothing to erase.
Beneath the clipped steps and tidy paperwork ran a quieter arithmetic. If he reached too far, too fast, it would not be filed away as an overzealous prosecutor learning his limits. Holmson would become the headline; privilege would be recast as predation. A misjudged consent, a contaminated note, and the hospital’s defensive machinery would turn his mistake into proof: of him, not them.
He drafted the request in the corridor outside the ward, back against cold tile, pen biting through cheap paper as if it were skin. Not a letter, not an ask. A narrow instrument. He wrote like he wrote charging decisions: spare, anticipatory, built for someone hostile to read without finding a handle.
“Routine prosecutorial welfare check,” he put at the top, and beneath it the phrases that soothed institutions into compliance: public interest, safeguarding duties, limited duration, minimal intrusion. He avoided the words that would wake the ward’s defensive reflexes: investigation, irregularities, deaths. Those belonged in sealed notes, in his head, in the margin where he kept the real story pinned down with times and usernames.
He signed with the full weight of his name, then pressed his thumb over the ink until it dried. A petty ritual, but he’d learned how easily paperwork was “misplaced” when it made someone uncomfortable.
The locked ward door was a plane of reinforced glass and laminated notices. A keypad blinked, indifferent. He waited to be buzzed through, listening to the softened life behind it: a television murmuring, a distant shout, the wheeze of a trolley wheel that needed oiling. Disinfectant masked something older. Stale sweat, sour laundry, the metallic hint of blood that never quite left hospitals.
At the desk he presented his credentials with a loosened grip, nothing abrupt. The lanyard swung once and settled. He watched the receptionist’s eyes: not his face, the badge, then the name, the involuntary fraction of a second where recognition either landed or didn’t.
He kept his voice in the register of forms. “I’m here to confirm the welfare of a patient currently under your care. Briefly. I’ll take whatever process you require.”
A pause. The receptionist’s fingers hovered over a keyboard, then stopped, as if waiting for permission.
The intercom crackled. A door clicked somewhere deeper in the ward. A nurse in pale blue approached with the particular posture of someone who had learned to say no without ever speaking the word. Eirik offered the paper, his expression smooth as varnish.
He could feel how the ward would read him: charcoal suit in a place of scrubs, old money trying to look like public service. He held his gaze steady anyway. Let them suspect motive. The paper, at least, gave him a doorway.
The charge nurse didn’t refuse; she performed compliance. A smile, thin and polished, settled on her face as if it had been issued with the uniform. Her hands stayed busy so her body could keep working while her words held the line.
“Of course, Mr Holmson,” she said, careful with the title. “We can facilitate a brief visual confirmation. Anything more than that, conversation, questions, requires the patient’s informed consent, and the attending physician’s approval. It’s policy.”
She flipped a page with practised speed, offering him rules the way some people offered condolences. Visiting hours. The patient’s right to rest. The need to avoid “unnecessary stimulation” given “current stability.” Each phrase was soft, almost kind, and it made his skin prickle.
Eirik watched her micro-pauses: where she hesitated, where she didn’t. When she mentioned the attending, her eyes flicked towards the staff-only corridor, then back to his badge as if measuring how much force he could legally apply.
“I can take your request,” she continued, pen poised. “We’ll schedule something after the update.”
He adjusted, the way he did in court when a witness shut down: offer alternatives that sounded reasonable and left less room for refusal. He could wait. He could stand at the observation pane and keep it to a visual check. If speech was the problem, he would accept a written statement later, signed, time-stamped, witnessed. Each concession slid off the ward’s surface and came back as protocol: risk assessment form, attending sign-off, “patient stability,” infection-control restrictions that didn’t apply to him but did apply to delay.
“After rounds,” the charge nurse repeated, as if rounds were weather. She kept her tone gentle and her body angled to block the corridor.
The clock above the desk ticked with bureaucratic patience, counting down whatever was being moved, corrected, or sedated out of his reach.
Two security guards drifted into view as if they’d merely remembered an errand. They didn’t block him outright; they settled near the badge door, shoulders angled to suggest the idea. No voice rose. The ward just cinched itself tighter. Eirik clocked the choreography: the charge nurse’s eyes lifting once to the ceiling camera, then away; the nearer guard’s finger parked on the access panel like it belonged there.
Between the nurse’s soft cautions he heard a different message: forewarning. She handed his language back to him, “a prosecutorial welfare check”, and put a faint stress on prosecutorial, turning it from a duty into a performance. Her smile didn’t change, but her eyes did; they measured his appetite for escalation. His visit had been processed, filed, and placed neatly at the back of a waiting list.
In Stairwell C the air sat colder, trapped between concrete and neglect. The small blue camera icon on the wall promised coverage the way the hospital promised care: as a policy, not a fact. Eirik stood one step below the landing light, where the fluorescent tube flickered at its own tempo and the shadow of his shoulders broke into bands.
His phone vibrated against the inside pocket of his suit, a precise, private insistence. He drew it out without hurry, thumb already moving as if this were merely another docket note. A forwarded internal bulletin bloomed on the screen, St. Olav’s logo in washed-out teal, the same typeface as infection-control memos and mandatory e-learning reminders. The subject line could have been lifted from a compliance audit: Appropriate cooperation with external actors.
He opened it.
The body was spare, almost polite. A reminder that “all enquiries and information requests” were to be “coordinated through Administration, Level 5.” No direct prohibition, no outright refusal: just a corridor built out of words, narrowing the route until only one door remained, guarded by people whose job was to smile and stall.
He didn’t need to see a sender. He heard the hospital’s legal office in the phrasing: voluntary wrapped in obligation, courtesy sharpened into control. External actors lumped him with tabloids, ambulance-chasers, inspectors: anyone who might ask the wrong question in the wrong place. It was a way to make staff feel watched for speaking, even when no one was watching.
The stairwell held the faint smell of damp wool and disinfectant that had never quite reached its surfaces. Above, a door closed softly: no slam, just the click of a latch, the sort of sound you stopped noticing unless you were being moved around.
He stared at the Level 5 reference for a beat too long, feeling the old weight of his name and the newer weight of the case. His pulse kept itself civil. The building, however, had begun to organise.
He scrolled once, twice, letting the screen’s cold light sit on his knuckles. It wasn’t the wording that caught him first, he’d written enough circular letters himself to recognise the craft, but the timestamp. Minutes ago. Not an end-of-day reminder, not a weekly compliance nudge. A fresh plaster laid down while he was still standing in the stairwell, as if the hospital had a reflex and he had triggered it.
The memo’s tone was almost tender. Please remember. In order to ensure consistency. The kind of language that pretended to protect patients while really protecting an institution’s appetite for silence. It didn’t say do not speak; it said coordinate. It didn’t threaten; it offered a route that could be cited later, in disciplinary meetings with coffee and folded hands. Anyone who answered him in a corridor could be recast as careless, then insubordinate, then unsafe.
He pictured the message landing on phones in staff pockets, vibrating against scrubs and cardigans. He felt, more than heard, the building adjust around him: doors becoming decisions, conversations shortening, helpfulness turning into liability. Not fear. Organisation. The quiet kind that left no fingerprints.
He called the liaison anyway, the one voice in the police machine that had been unvarnished with him, and held the phone to his ear as if it were a warrant. He expected the usual clipped greeting, background noise of a patrol car or an overworked desk. Instead: ringing, a long sterile interval, then the soft click into voicemail. He tried again immediately, thumb hard enough on the glass to whiten the skin. Another ring-cycle. Then the network’s flat courtesy: the subscriber was unavailable.
Eirik lowered the phone and looked at the stairwell door as though it might answer for the man. No footsteps, no voices, only the building’s hum. It struck him, coldly, professionally, how easy it was to make a person unreachable without ever saying they’d been removed.
Before he could slide the phone away, a new notification lit the screen: Legal Office. The subject line was cordial enough to frame, but the body carried a scalpel. Written scope. Precise legal basis for any patient contact. Names and ranks of “assigned officers”. A suggestion, smiling as a threat, that access to a locked ward be “scheduled” for safety and compliance. Reasonable, individually; together, a restraint.
Eirik drafts the reply in his head then watches it curdle before it reaches his thumbs. He can see the route it would take: his scope forwarded to three committees, his statutory basis “reviewed” until it is moot, his names repurposed into a quiet warning. The ward’s fluorescent stillness turns timed. Not panic. Procedure. Doors settling shut, click by measured click, as noon tightens.
Eirik watched the cursor keep time, a clean little pulse in the corner of a message that pretended to be helpful. It blinked with bureaucratic patience: Proceed when ready. Wait your turn. Be reasonable. The legal officer’s language had been soft-edged, full of compliance and care; the blade was in what it demanded. Scope. Basis. Names. Ranks. Assigned officers. A schedule.
He pictured the chain it would set in motion: people he had never met, each with a small authority and a larger fear. An inbox forwarded to another inbox. A meeting booked for a date that would arrive after the next death. By then the nurse’s handwriting would have been “clarified”, timestamps “synchronised”, a missing vial explained away by a tired signature. The hospital did not need to lie loudly. It only needed time.
He lifted his hands from the keyboard. For a moment he let himself feel the temptation of correctness: the comfort of doing it the way the manuals insisted. He could almost hear his father’s voice in that temptation: Procedure is protection. He had learned, in a different case, how procedure could also be a weapon, how a family could be ruined cleanly, with forms and proper seals.
The ward’s humming fluorescents bled through the closed door behind him, turning the air stale. Somewhere in the building a trolley squealed, then fell silent; the quiet returned like a lid.
Eirik did not send the reply. He let it sit there, unsent, as if refusing to give the hospital his words was the only leverage left. He closed the laptop with a decisive, muffled clap, cutting the blinking off mid-beat. No draft saved. No trail except what already existed: his presence, his questions, the irritation he had stirred in people who preferred to correct records in peace.
He stood, straightened his cuffs by habit, and took a slow breath that tasted of disinfectant and cold metal. If the institution was tightening, he would have to move in the spaces it hadn’t fully controlled yet: outside committees, outside badges, outside the polite trap of scheduling.
He crossed the glass corridor with the sea-dark winter pressed against it, harbour lights smeared into pale bands on the frost. Inside, the hospital’s hum followed him, ventilation, distant alarms, the soft tyranny of doors locking on timers. The kiosk-café sat at the hinge-point between public and controlled space, a pocket of commerce that pretended to be warmth. Heat leaked from a rattling radiator; the air was coffee and burnt milk, cheap pastry and wet wool.
Bryn looked up as Eirik approached, and his expression shifted the way a queue shifts when someone in uniform arrives: small adjustments, practiced, protective. No greeting loud enough for eavesdroppers. Just the tilt of his head, the quick inventory: Eirik’s immaculate cuffs, the pallor under the eyes, the hands that kept still as if steadiness could be willed.
Eirik ordered nothing. He set his gloved fingers on the counter, felt the tackiness of spilled sugar, and waited until a porter drifted past and the corridor was empty again.
Bryn didn’t ask why Eirik wasn’t upstairs “making the proper calls”. He only said, softly, “Long night?” as if it were weather.
“No police,” Eirik said, low enough that it vanished under the radiator’s clatter. His tone had the flat certainty he used in court when laying down admissibility. “No names. No calls. No messages to anyone: especially not to people who wear badges for a living.”
He kept his hands still on the counter, but his eyes moved: corridor, glass, the turn towards the North Wing. He spoke like he was reciting directions, not building a net. “Staff entrance by the ambulance ramp. Service lift access behind the linen store. The door in the sub-basement that sticks unless you shoulder it. And Stairwell C: where the cameras go blind.”
“After midnight,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “Just watch. Write nothing down if it can be found.”
Bryn’s smile didn’t come. The warmth went out of his face and left a kind of competent focus, like he was tallying stock. “I’m not trailing anyone,” he said. “Not following into stairwells. Not confronting. If it turns ugly, I’m gone.” Eirik nodded once. That was all he needed. Not heroics. Habits. Repeat faces. Engines left running. Parcels carried too carefully, choosing dark over light.
Eirik stepped away from the kiosk with an extra weight riding inside his coat: no document, no device, only the fact of Bryn’s agreement. He told himself it was a temporary expedient, a thin bridge until warrants, consents, and proper logs could be made to exist. Yet the thought of the hospital noticing his pause made him walk faster, as if hesitation itself could trigger a lock.
Eirik left the brighter artery of the hospital and let himself be swallowed by a side passage that staff used when they wanted to arrive without being noticed and without the fiction of procedure. Here, the badge reader by the fire door blinked as if thinking; sometimes it chirped, sometimes it didn’t, and the system upstairs accepted the omission with the same weary tolerance it gave to broken lifts and missing bedpans. An institutional blind spot: small enough to be plausible, useful enough to be exploited.
The linoleum had lost its shine, worn down to a grey that never looked clean no matter how often it was mopped. Under the colder fluorescents, the walls took on a faint green cast, like bruising. The air changed too: less coffee, more disinfectant and damp wool, an undernote of old plaster that suggested the building had absorbed decades of coughs and confessions and never quite let them go.
He walked with the measured pace of someone who belonged. It was an old habit, the one that kept him upright in court corridors when he was carrying files that could wreck careers. Don’t rush. Don’t glance around like a tourist. Make your presence boring. But his eyes still audited everything: the scuffed kick-plates on the doors, the trolley marks that stopped and started in odd places, the tiny black dome of a camera that didn’t quite cover the corner it should have.
The sealed briefing sat under his arm in a plain folder, unmarked, as if understatement could protect it. His thumb worried the edge of the paper through the cardboard. One clinician with administrator access; one cluster of deaths that didn’t align with the ward’s case-mix; a time-of-death that moved like a bead on a string when someone decided it should. It was the kind of information that never arrived cleanly. It arrived with fingerprints.
From somewhere beyond the service doors came the soft grind of a lift moving without voices inside. A radiator clicked, then went quiet again. The silence here felt curated. An absence maintained by routine, by people who understood that noise drew questions.
He rounded the bend and slowed without stopping. The corridor ahead was empty, then not: the air shifted, warmer, as a door opened inward with a controlled, almost courteous hush. Someone was stepping out.
The door ahead breathed out a pocket of heat. Radiator-thick, laced with the sour sweetness of hand sanitiser and the faint, unmistakable tang of narcotics that had seeped into fabric. It swung inward with a discipline that suggested someone used to moving through controlled spaces without announcing themselves. No clatter of keys, no impatient shove; just the soft complaint of hinges that knew to keep secrets.
Eirik’s grip tightened on the folder, the cardboard flexing against his ribs. Not panic. Calculation. Paper was harmless until it wasn’t. Until a name in the wrong mouth became a threat, until a timestamp became a weapon, until a sealed line in a briefing became a rumour with legs. He pictured the chain that had carried it to him: a briefing room, a sympathetic officer, a signature that would be denied if things went bad. Everything in it could be used to build a case. Everything in it could also be used to break one.
He didn’t move to hide it. That would be an admission. He shifted his arm a fraction higher, making it look like habit, and lifted his eyes to meet whatever stepped into the corridor.
Signe Varasdottir emerged from the blind turn with the economy of someone who had memorised the building’s omissions. Ink-black hair, cut blunt. A mourning band at her wrist like a legal exhibit: not grief, a claim. Her coat sat perfectly on her shoulders; nothing about her belonged to the soft chaos of visiting hours.
They checked their bodies in the same instant. A half-step, a pivot of shoulders, two people trained to avoid contact without yielding ground. No apology. No irritation. Just the quiet mathematics of collision avoided and advantage preserved.
Eirik registered, with a prosecutor’s reflex, the absence of a badge lanyard, the deliberate choice of this corridor, the way she held her hands. She looked as though she owned the angle, and in a way she did.
They didn’t trade names or the small civility that let strangers pretend they were harmless. The file had already done the introductions. Signe’s eyes cut to the plain folder, then climbed to his face, pausing a fraction on the dark centres of his pupils as if taking a pulse for fear. When she looked back, it wasn’t curiosity. It was assessment: not what he suspected, but how far he’d trespass to prove it.
Eirik kept his expression neutral, letting the corridor’s hum fill the space where dialogue would only leave residue. He edged past her with measured politeness, shoulder angled, folder steady. In his chest, something clicked shut. This was no longer an inconvenient prosecutor nudging at policy; it was a man stepping on a nerve. Whatever waited on the locked ward would be fought for.
Bryn watched from behind the kiosk’s steamed-up window, the glass turning the sodium streetlights into bruised halos. The entrance hall had the tired hush of institutional night: a cleaner’s trolley squeaking somewhere out of sight, the distant cough of a vending machine, the faint electric hum of doors waiting to decide whether you belonged.
Just after midnight the private courier appeared again, exactly when the last bus would have dragged its heat away from the stop. Hood up, chin tucked, shoulders rounded as if the wind were a hand on the back of his neck. He didn’t pause to check the noticeboard or look for a supervisor. No clipboard. No reflective vest. Not even the performative glance at his phone that ordinary people used to pretend they had a reason to be where they were.
He crossed the forecourt with the kind of speed that meant he knew which patches of ice were safe. The bag at his side wasn’t a hospital tote or a courier crate, dark, soft-sided, carried close like it mattered who saw its shape. Bryn’s eyes went to the loading bay instinctively, the place that was supposed to swallow deliveries under fluorescent scrutiny and signatures.
The man didn’t go near it.
Instead, he cut left, past the automatic doors and the posted visiting hours, and made for the staff-only entrance that led toward the older service access. The keypad light blinked once, then steadied; a badge swipe, quick and practiced. Bryn couldn’t see the card, only the motion: wrist flicked, body angled to shield it from anyone watching.
For a moment the courier’s head turned. Not towards Bryn, not towards the kiosk. Towards the corners where the building’s sightlines ran out. He waited, still as a man listening for footsteps, then slipped through as the door unlocked with a soft, obedient click. The hospital took him in without asking his name. Bryn found his own hands had tightened on the counter edge, as if gripping could turn observation into leverage.
Bryn had begun to count the nights in beats instead of dates. Tonight he counted steps. The courier didn’t rush. He stalled beneath the overhang where the wind thinned and the lights were just dim enough to flatter a lie, waiting for the predictable drift of the security patrol to pass the glass corridor and turn away, boots squeaking on linoleum.
Then. Movement. Not hurried, but decisive, as if he were following marks only he could see. He chose the service door that always obeyed a badge rather than a human; the kind that logged entries in a database no one on night shift had the authority, or the energy, to question. Bryn watched his wrist tilt again, shielding the swipe from any casual glance.
Inside, the route hugged the hospital’s oldest bones. A strip light flickered like a tired pulse, throwing the man’s shadow forward in stuttering frames. There was a stretch where a camera housing sat empty, its bracket bolted to concrete, the lens long gone: budget line, maintenance backlog, convenient accident. Past that, a turn where the feed regularly “dropped” on the kiosk’s cheap monitor, as if the building itself exhaled into darkness on cue.
A second presence bled into the frame at the edge of Bryn’s sight: neither staff nor visitor, dressed too neutral to catch memory. They hovered by the ash bin as if the cold had driven them outside for a cigarette, but there was no smoke, no restless stamping for warmth. When the courier moved, the other moved as well, offset by a few metres, never closing the gap that would make them a pair.
At each junction they halted, head turning in small, controlled arcs. Not searching the corridor so much as checking the mirrors: fire-door windows, a polished trolley left against the wall, the dull shine of linoleum. Hands stayed empty. No phone held up like an alibi. Their gaze did the work: counting doors, counting cameras, counting witnesses who didn’t yet know they’d been seen.
Bryn pushed out with a black bin bag as camouflage, cold biting his knuckles. He caught it in a sliver of light: the courier’s fingers tapped his jacket pocket once, a check, then his hand returned heavier, shifting a soft-sided case that hadn’t been there when he entered the corridor. Behind him the watcher offered a single, economical nod, confirmation, not conversation, then peeled away towards Stairwell C, letting the dark take him.
Bryn didn’t follow. Following got you noticed, and noticed got you named. He stood where the service light failed, made himself part of the bins and the salt-stained concrete, and logged the facts: the minute on the clock, the door that took a badge, the left turn into the sub-basement. The two figures moved with a practiced economy, as if the hospital’s missing cameras were landmarks. When the dark took them, suspicion cooled into certainty: this was scheduled, rehearsed, and covered by someone who understood nights.
By morning the night had teeth. The North Wing’s fluorescent hum took on an edge, as if the building itself were grinding its molars. In Bed 7, behind a half-drawn curtain that never quite met in the middle, an old man’s chest began to stutter like a faulty pump. The oxygen saturation slid down in neat digital steps each number colder than the last. The pulse line thinned to a thread.
Eirik was halfway through a corridor conversation he could not afford to have on the record when the first alarm cut through. Not a shout (machines did not shout) but a flat, urgent insistence that made heads turn and feet move. Nurses came out of doorways with sleeves already pushed up, as if they’d been waiting for a cue. A porter appeared from nowhere with a folded blanket and no patient attached to it, then veered away when he saw where the alarm was coming from.
Eirik watched the door to Bed 7. It was shut, which in the North Wing meant something. Privacy, yes. Also control. A young nurse with a red lanyard tried the handle, hesitated, then went for her badge. One smooth motion, no fumbling. The lock clicked. The smell that escaped was disinfectant over something metallic and sweet.
Inside, the patient’s skin had the waxy grey of winter fish laid on ice. His eyes were open, not seeing. Someone had lifted the bed rail already; someone else had cleared the tray table of a cup and a magazine and laid them aside as neatly as if preparing for an inspection.
Eirik noted the small things, because in court the small things survived where outrage did not. The oxygen tubing wasn’t kinked. The mask sat correctly. The IV line had a fresh strip of tape, too white against old skin. On the bedside chart, the last entry looked new, the ink still sharp. A hand had written “stable” with the confidence of someone who wouldn’t be challenged.
“His numbers just dropped,” the nurse said, voice kept low, as if noise might make it worse. Her gaze flicked past Eirik, taking his suit in, his badge, his posture, and for a second her mouth tightened, not with defiance but with fear of what attention cost.
The monitor kept insisting. The corridor gathered itself like a jury deciding whether to care. Eirik felt the cold of his sleeplessness settle deeper, and something older underneath it, guilt, unhelpful and familiar, while he watched the patient’s chest fail to keep its own rhythm.
The response came in a way that made Eirik’s skin prickle: quick, clean, almost elegant. The crash cart was there before anyone in the corridor had finished turning their head, its drawers already half-open, its defibrillator pads peeled like someone had been waiting for permission to act. Two nurses fell into position at the bedside without being told (one on compressions, one on airway) while a junior doctor hovered at the foot, eyes flicking to the monitor and then to the chart as if the paper mattered more than the body.
No one called out instructions. No one asked the usual questions, the ones that bought seconds and exposed uncertainty. They moved with the tight choreography of a drill.
And threaded through it, a voice, calm, repetitive, almost comforting. “Complications,” a senior clinician said, not to anyone in particular, as if naming it would pin it down. “These complications happen.”
He said it again before Eirik heard a time, a cause, a medication list. Complications, complications: an explanation preloaded, a verdict offered before the evidence had even made it into the room.
After the code was called, the room carried an order that didn’t belong to failing flesh. Eirik had seen real resuscitations: wrappers underfoot, sweat on foreheads, a curse bitten back, someone barking for adrenaline. Here the sheet corners sat hospital-crisp, tucked with a care that stole time. The bedside table had been cleared as if for a photograph; even the plastic water jug was aligned to the edge. A wipe had passed over the rails recently enough that the disinfectant still bit at the back of his throat, clean and sharp, masking something iron-sweet. The floor was too dry for the bustle the corridor had promised. Someone had been thinking ahead: about what a room should look like when strangers arrive to judge.
When the medication record was pulled, the arithmetic went sour. The narcotics book showed one vial signed out and never signed back in; the bedside chart carried no corresponding dose, no note of pain, no emergency bolus, just the bland continuity of routine care. A single unit, small enough to vanish in bureaucracy, large enough to be murder, sat between them, unexplainable and deliberate.
A used syringe surfaced in the wrong bin, not buried among the usual tangle but resting near the top, cap crooked, barrel smeared just enough to look handled. Too visible. Too tidy. Eirik didn’t touch it; he watched who flinched instead. A porter glanced away too fast. Someone had wanted a mistake on record: an error easy to blame, log, and forget.
Signe Varasdottir came into the North Wing without the hesitation of a visitor. She did not pause at the access doors the way outsiders did, squinting at signage and waiting for someone to badge them through. She timed her steps to the drift of staff traffic, letting a group of porters swallow her, then letting herself surface again by a nurses’ station as if she had always been part of that orbit. Her coat was cut black and spare; the mourning band at her wrist read as grief made formal, something no one dared question aloud.
She didn’t announce herself. She didn’t need to. Names travelled here faster than pathogens.
At Station 3B she leaned in, low enough that only the nearest ears would catch the vowels. Not conspiratorial: professional. A hand on the counter, fingers splayed on laminate worn dull by years of shift-change elbows. She listened for a beat, eyes steady, then offered a sentence in return: reassurance shaped like warning. The kind that left the recipient feeling both seen and recruited.
She moved on before anyone could ask what she was doing in a public hospital at this hour. In the break-room doorway she held herself in the frame just long enough for a kettle to click off and for conversation to compress into silence. She didn’t look at the posters about hand hygiene or the union noticeboard; she looked at the faces, cataloguing fatigue, fear, the ones whose gaze dropped too quickly. Then she smiled (small, controlled) and let the room exhale as she left.
Eirik saw her at the end of a glass corridor, a dark line against sodium-lit snow beyond the windows. He watched her choose the route that avoided the older stairwell’s camera, the one with the blind corner where the tiles changed colour. She tapped a badge that was not hers against a door plate, an absent-minded gesture, like testing whether the building still obeyed, and when it didn’t open, she didn’t curse or fumble. She simply turned and found another way, as if she had rehearsed the map until it lived under her skin.
People didn’t stop her. They adjusted around her. That, Eirik thought, was the point.
By the time Eirik started collecting what he could without formal summons (names, impressions, a quiet “what did you see?” offered at doorways) the ground had already been tamped down. Union representatives, usually wary but workable, now wore a practised composure that didn’t belong to night shift fatigue. They invited him into side rooms with the door half shut, like he was the risk to be managed.
They spoke in clipped, hygienic phrases that sounded imported: process abuse. Reputational damage. A targeted campaign against frontline staff. Each term landed with the same cadence, an anxious courtesy masquerading as principle. The language had the sheen of legal advice, but it was delivered as pastoral care. Protecting nurses from “harassment,” protecting patients from “panic,” protecting the hospital from “headline justice.”
He asked who had raised these concerns first. Eyes moved, briefly, to a corner of the room, to nothing. Someone mentioned “a defence solicitor” without a name, then corrected themselves: “a lawyer advising members.”
Eirik watched mouths form the same sentence in different faces and felt, with an old, cold familiarity, the shape of preparation. Not testimony: messaging. Not solidarity: containment.
Eirik began to recognise the cadence before he caught the words. In the corridor outside Radiology, in the lift with its stale breath of disinfectant, at Bryn’s kiosk where the coffee queue pretended to be ordinary, the same phrases resurfaced like a scripted allergy. Process abuse. A pause. Frontline staff. Another pause, always on the same syllable, as if they were stepping around a crack in the floor. Even the ones who wouldn’t meet his eye held on to it, knuckles white around paper cups, using legal language like a barrier between themselves and consequence. When he asked a simple follow-up, who said that, what did you see, he got rehearsed softness in return: “It’s not personal.” A shield offered with trembling hands.
The senior nurse had been nodding, hands still damp from a hurried scrub, when her voice thinned and stalled. Her eyes flicked past his shoulder to the corridor, to nothing visible and yet decisive. “I can’t. “I can’t be seen cooperating.” The words were arranged with care, as if someone else might be listening. “Are your questions being recorded anywhere?”
On the locked ward the air changed a few metres before he reached the desk, as if the building had drawn breath and decided what it would permit. The door nurse smiled too quickly and recited that visiting protocols had “tightened”, badge readers now “audited”, consent “reconfirmed”. Inside, the patient he needed was suddenly “resting” after medication. Freshly sedated, notes time-stamped with neat inevitability. Someone had warned them.
The message came in while he was still under the strip-lights, coat folded over his forearm, phone cold against his thumb. Can’t make it. Staffing. Sorry. No name, no badge number, nothing that could be pinned to a report without looking petty. The officer who’d been assigned to sit behind him like a quiet deterrent had always been punctual, the sort who arrived early to avoid being noticed. The absence was a choice dressed up as shortage.
Eirik waited a beat, then called the duty commander. He kept his voice level, prosecutor-to-police, the language of shared constraints and mutual respect. The line clicked, a breath, and then a man who sounded like he was smiling at a desk.
“Holmson. Yes, I saw the note. We’re stretched thin.”
“Stretched thin enough to cancel a pre-booked assist?” Eirik asked. He watched a porter push a trolley past with linen bags tied like bodies, the rubber wheels whispering over scuffed linoleum.
A pause. Paper moving. The commander’s tone stayed cordial, almost generous. “We’re prioritising acute threats. You know how it is. And, ” another careful pause, as if he were stepping around a word he didn’t want recorded, “given the sensitivity, we’re advised to proceed with restraint. No need to inflame staff relations.”
Restraint. The word had been laundered until it smelled like professionalism. Eirik felt it settle in his stomach like bad coffee.
“Advised by whom?” he asked.
A soft exhale. “By people who don’t like their names in operational calls. Look, Eirik. You’ll have what you need. Just… not tonight.”
Not tonight meant the courier could walk unshadowed; meant the stairwell in the parking garage could stay dark; meant a nurse who wanted to speak could decide it was safer not to. Eirik thanked him, because that was what kept doors from slamming completely, and ended the call.
When he looked up, a union notice had been taped to the wall beside the lift, Protect staff from prosecutorial fishing expeditions, the wording clean, the threat implied. Someone had been busy while he waited for help that was never coming.
Eirik pivoted from people to systems, the way he always did when faces closed down. Records did not blush; logs did not get reassigned. He drafted a narrow request, badge-entry data for Stairwell C and the sub-basement doors, pharmacy access reports for the ward cabinets whose counts had started to drift, and sent it to the hospital’s IT and compliance addresses he’d been given as “the proper route”.
The reply came back in under a minute. Request received. A paragraph of statutory language followed, neat as a discharge summary: patient confidentiality, employee privacy, proportionality. Then the real sentence, buried mid-way like a needle in linen: the matter was being “triaged” and would be addressed at the next interdepartmental compliance meeting.
A date, conveniently distant. Ten days. Long enough for logs to be “corrected”, for doors to be reclassified, for access permissions to be quietly reshuffled. Procedure on paper; strategy in the calendar.
He called the number in the signature block. A pleasant voice, rehearsed tiredness. “We can’t expedite without committee sign-off, Mr Holmson. It protects everyone.”
Everyone, he thought, except the dead.
The administrator he’d spoken to last week no longer took his calls. At Reception on Level 5, his name was met with a careful smile and a glance at a screen. A calendar invite pinged his phone before he’d even sat down: 10 minutes. Meeting Room 5F. Attendees: Compliance Counsel. No subject line.
The room was glass-walled, all visibility and no access. The administrator arrived on the minute, hands empty, expression sealed. Beside him a lawyer in a pale blouse and an even paler manner offered a handshake like a formality.
“We’re happy to assist,” she said, already opening a notebook. “Just so we’re clear: anything you ask here will be minuted.”
Eirik tried the old routes anyway: the inherited softness of certain surnames, the quiet arithmetic of favours. In the alcove by the lifts he made two calls, voice kept low, wording calibrated to sound like discretion rather than demand. Both replies were immaculate, regretful. Not appropriate. The board’s sensitive. I can’t be seen. Same pauses, same cadence.
The change hits him like cold air in the lungs. A door that used to yield to his badge now demands a second, a nurse trailing behind with eyes already apologising. Conversations abort mid-syllable; clipboards become shields. By the time he angles towards the kiosk entrance, he reads the new geometry: committees as choke points, minutes as muzzle, and meanwhile someone else threading the service routes where cameras forget to look.
Bryn found it when he pulled the last tabloid free and the rack sprang back with its usual tired squeak. A slip of paper, folded once and pushed into the seam where metal met laminate. Not dropped. Placed.
He stood with the key still in the till, listening to the kiosk-café’s machinery settle: the refrigerator’s low motor, the faint click of the hotplate cooling, the ventilation grating dragging air that smelt of disinfectant and wet wool. Outside the glass, the entrance lights washed the snow into a bruised blue.
The paper was ordinary, the kind you’d tear from a printer tray. No letterhead. No scent of tobacco or perfume. The writing was typed, aligned like a list in a training manual.
He read it twice before he understood what his body already had: someone knew his habits the way staff knew their drug rounds. Someone had watched him enough to notice the order, the small efficiencies he didn’t think about. The note didn’t try for menace. It didn’t need to. It made his life look like a file.
His fingers went cold around the paper. He stared at the rack, at the place it had been tucked, then at the cheap camera above the counter. Its red light blinked patiently, indifferent.
A laugh threatened to rise, thin and useless, and died in his throat.
He checked the door early, then checked it again, slower, as if care could change what had already been seen. The keys slid into his pocket and felt suddenly heavy, like they belonged to somebody else. He folded the note back along the same crease and put it in his wallet behind his bank card, a private piece of evidence he didn’t yet know how to explain.
Halfway down the page his breath snagged, a small betrayal his chest couldn’t hide. The list hadn’t finished with kettles and keys. It moved on, the same neat typeface, the same calm spacing, as if it were part of an induction pack.
He could see it as he read: the vestibule’s glass fogging with his breath, the salt-stained tiles, the way the lamps bled through frost and made the snow look dirty. The stairwell was there too, in his mind’s eye: concrete walls sweating cold, the handrail tacky with old disinfectant.
No threats. No signature. Just the fact of observation, rendered in bullet points. Someone had been close enough, often enough, to write his evenings like procedure.
He altered the pattern the way he’d alter a display when teenagers started lifting sweets: small changes, no drama. He let the last cleaning crew pass, listened to their trolley wheels fade, then waited, ten minutes that felt like a confession, before killing the lights and locking up. Outside, he didn’t take the vestibule. He went the long way, looping past the pharmacy entrance where the automatic doors slept behind their glass.
He stood under a dead strip light and watched his own reflection layered over the corridor beyond: empty chairs, a mop bucket parked like an alibi. A figure could have been anywhere, by the ambulance ramp, behind the bins, in the pine-shadow beyond the sodium glare, and he’d have called it weather.
Changing route didn’t make him safer. It just mapped the blind spots.
In the morning he notices the kiosk’s lock before he notices the coffee’s gone cold. Faint crescent scars ring the cylinder, raw metal bright against the salt-dulled brass, as if a blade had kissed and lifted away. It isn’t forced. It’s assessed. A careful hand has tested the tolerances, learning what will yield, and what will squeal, without giving him a story to tell.
Bryn reached up, fingers numb from the draught that slipped under the kiosk’s counter, and steadied the cheap camera he’d mounted with two screws and a prayer. The bracket held. The image did not. The lens had been nudged so it watched the coffee machine’s chrome flank, not the register, not the door. A few degrees. Settling, if you wanted comfort. Deliberate, if you were honest. Not entry: measurement. Limits tested, alarms avoided.
Eirik’s phone vibrated through his coat as he crossed the glass corridor, the sound swallowed by the hum of fluorescent ballast and the distant churn of a floor polisher. Outside the panes, snow pressed itself into the seams of the building, turning the harbour lights into smeared amber. Inside, the hospital’s warmth was the wrong kind, stale, recycled, expensive to maintain and still failing at its one job.
The notification wasn’t from the police liaison, or the chief physician he’d been needling for days. It was a forwarded staffing notice, chain-sent like gossip but formatted like scripture. A name he’d only just coaxed into honesty. A nurse who’d dropped her voice when she said the numbers didn’t match, as if the walls had ears and a union badge.
REASSIGNED , EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
No reason code. No supervisor signature that meant anything. No handover line. Just a clean bureaucratic sentence, clipped and impersonal, as though a person were a chair being moved to another office.
He stopped beneath a junction sign watching a porter push a linen cart as if it were a coffin on wheels. Eirik read the notice again, hunting for the small tells: the wrong department header, a time stamp too neat, the phrasing HR used when it wanted to look neutral while it cut. It had the smell of policy used as a blade: sanitised, plausible, and timed to silence.
He thumbed the number. It rang out to a recorded message. He didn’t leave his name. Names were leverage; they stuck to people.
Across the atrium, a cluster of staff stood near the coffee stand, shoulders hunched in their scrubs, listening to a woman with ink-black hair and a mourning band at her wrist. Signe didn’t need to raise her voice. Her calm travelled. Eirik caught only fragments, “overreach,” “panic,” “protecting staff”, soft words that made a shield out of suspicion.
He pocketed the phone and walked on, the corridor narrowing, his reflection sliding beside him in the glass like a second prosecutor he couldn’t quite shake. The hospital was moving pieces now. Not hiding. Rearranging. Making witnesses disappear in plain sight.
He went to her unit anyway, because the hospital liked to pretend paperwork could outrun feet. The ward smelled of warmed plastic and antiseptic, the kind of clean that never quite erased fear. Behind the desk, a junior nurse glanced up, saw his suit, and tightened around the eyes as if bracing for impact.
“She’s not here,” she said, too quickly.
Eirik didn’t ask where. He asked for the locker number.
It was already tagged: INVENTORY. A strip of fluorescent tape, a barcode, a signature line with no signature. Someone had taken the time to make theft prevention look like policy. When he tried the staff door his phone gave him the answer before the lock did. A colleague in scrubs was refilling hand sanitiser, hands shaking slightly with the cold. Eirik caught his glance, held it, and watched it slide away to the floor tiles.
“Management said it’s… a wellness concern,” the man murmured. “HR is handling contact. We’re not supposed to. He didn’t need to. Unreachable was the point.
In the admin alcove off Level 5 the air was hotter, stale with toner and overworked radiators. Eirik held his warrant card low, not as a threat but as a fact, and asked for the narcotics reconciliation sheets for the ward in question. The clerk’s smile came first, then the hesitation; she slid a printout across the counter as though it were generous. Weekly totals, neat columns, no initials beside dispensed doses, no audit trail, no timestamps for “corrections”. A document designed to look complete from a distance.
“These are summaries,” Eirik said. “I need the originals. The signed pages. The edit logs.”
“In review,” she replied, eyes flicking to the open doorway. “Patient safety. Chain of command. Procedure.” She repeated the words until they sounded like law, and not fear.
A porter found him by the lift bank, eyes down, hands red from cold metal trolleys. He didn’t speak at first: just slid a folded sheet into Eirik’s palm like contraband. SEALED TRANSPORT ORDER. Locked ward. Off‑site transfer in forty‑eight hours. Destination blacked out under “specialist care,” as if ink could be treatment. The signatures were already layered, too clean, too senior. Someone wanted the witness moved before words could harden into evidence.
Eirik took the corner by Stairwell C where the lights buzzed and the draught smelt of snow and bleach. He ran the sequence again (badge pings, cleaning rounds, shift handovers) until it formed a trap with no air. Originals dissolved into “summaries”; the witness was being packed into paperwork and driven away. The case was collapsing from weeks into hours, each one already booked by someone with keys.
Eirik cracked the warrant packet with the edge of his thumbnail, the paper giving a small, dry sigh. Stairwell C was colder than the wards, a concrete throat that swallowed sound and offered back only the hum of fluorescents and the distant, muffled rhythm of a trolley rolling somewhere above. The light here did not flatter anything; it turned his hands the colour of wax and made the black ink look bruised.
He counted once, then again, not because he trusted his own fatigue but because he didn’t trust the world. The staple bit into his thumb. He slid the pages out and held them up to the light. The staple holes were clean: two neat punctures marching through empty air where paper should have been. A small absence with a large intention.
He read what remained anyway, as if the missing language might reappear through force of attention. Authorisation for specific digital exports. Badge-entry logs. A narrow grab, carefully justified, the kind of restraint judges liked. And nowhere, nowhere, the lines that mattered: access to the pharmacy’s paper binders, the handwritten tallies that lived outside the system precisely because someone had wanted them to.
He pictured the binders: thick, smudged, an archive of human habits and small frauds. He pictured a senior clinician’s pen pausing over a time-of-death entry, then moving again with the confidence of someone who had never been contradicted. Digital records could be “corrected” with a password. Paper needed hands, ink, pressure. Paper left ghosts.
A door clanked somewhere, then settled. His phone vibrated once: an unseen message he ignored. He thumbed the corner of the packet, feeling the slight ridge where pages had been torn free with care. Not ripped in anger. Removed cleanly, with knowledge of exactly what to remove.
He put the papers back in their sleeve as though they were intact, as though treating the absence gently would stop it spreading. His breath fogged in the stairwell air, a brief, visible thing. In court, missing pages were inconvenience. In a hospital, they were permission.
He dialled the court clerk on the secure line, the one routed through channels that were meant to be too dull to tamper with. His voice stayed level, almost bored. Prosecutorial neutrality like a shield. “Warrant packet. Two pages missing. Explain.”
A breath, then a reply too quick to be honest. “Clerical error,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for the call, as if she’d rehearsed the shape of the phrase in her mouth. Paper shuffled. Sound without purpose. “We can issue a corrected copy within the day.”
Within the day. In a hospital, “within the day” was a corridor you could die in.
Eirik let the silence stretch, listening past her words for the small betrayals: the over-bright steadiness, the absence of indignation. A real mistake came with embarrassment, with a stammered apology and a scramble to find who’d misfiled what. This was calm, procedural, pre-emptive.
“Who handled the packet after signature?” he asked.
“I’d have to check the log,” she said, still too smooth. “We’re very busy.”
He noted the pronoun, we, and the way she did not ask which judge. He thanked her, politely, and ended the call before his temper could become evidence.
He did not send an email. He did not ask the clerk again. He walked through the slush-dark to chambers and waited until the judge’s assistant, seeing his face, let him through without the usual theatre of appointment-making.
The judge looked up, irritation already loaded, then saw the warrant sleeve in his hand and the way he held it, as if it might bleed. “Counsel?” she said, sharp.
“Your signed packet is missing pages,” he replied.
She reached for her file with the reflex of someone who dislikes being doubted. Paper rasped. She unfolded her copy and rotated it across the desk, tapping the bottom corner where the numbering ran clean and unbroken. The missing authorisation sat there in black and white, each page initialled in her tight hand.
Her indignation was instant. Her confusion came a beat later, colder. The chain had been touched after signature. Inside the sterile part.
Eirik treated the absence as an offence scene. He photographed the staple holes, the page numbering, the torn edge under harsh stairwell light; captured the time on his watch beside the packet; wrote chain‑of‑custody notes in block capitals, each line dated and signed. A formal preservation notice went to the court administrator, plus a request for a docket audit and print‑history pull. He knew the query itself would flare on someone’s radar.
With the clock chewing through what authority he had left, Eirik narrowed the search to what the packet still covered: badge-entry logs, audit trails, the sanctioned digital extracts. He rang security and IT himself, ordered immediate preservation, and made it clear no one “processed” anything without him present. The truncation pushed him into the live system first: where edits could be made, and caught.
Eirik kept the warrant folded in his inside pocket, close enough to feel the paper warm against his shirt. In the lift up to Level 5, fluorescent light made his hands look bloodless. He watched the numbers count floors and thought of how easily a story could be renumbered, a page slid out, a death rewritten into complication.
The administrative corridor smelled of toner and reheated fish. A young manager met him with the practiced smile of someone trained to make delay sound like diligence. “We’ve prepared the extracts you requested,” she said, already gesturing towards a printer that clicked and sighed as if eager to be useful.
“No,” Eirik replied, and heard the flatness in his own voice. “No extracts. No reports. No email. I need a terminal into the live pharmacy system.”
A flicker, annoyance, then caution, crossed her face before it was smoothed away. “That’s not standard. Patient privacy, ”
“Is protected by the warrant,” he said, and produced it, not theatrically, but with the steadiness of an exhibit laid before a court. He kept his finger on the scope line as he spoke, the narrowness of it deliberate. “Badge-entry logs, audit trails, narcotics ledger entries for Ward 3B, and the associated metadata. I will view it. You will not run anything out of sight and bring it back to me as a neat narrative.”
An IT technician was summoned like an apology. He avoided Eirik’s eyes and spoke to the manager in softened syllables, as if the prosecutor might not understand basic civility. “We can put him on a read-only view,” he offered.
Eirik shook his head once. “Read-only is fine. The system is still live.”
They walked him to a desk where the keyboard was shiny with disinfectant and the mouse pad bore a faded hospital logo. On the monitor, the login field waited, blank and compliant. Eirik stood rather than sit. He leaned in as if proximity could prevent deceit.
“Log in,” he said.
The technician’s hands hovered, then moved. Each keystroke sounded too loud in the small room. When the pharmacy interface opened, Eirik watched the loading wheel turn and thought, briefly, of a heart monitor: the same promise of truth, the same ease of falsifying what came after.
The narcotics ledger filled the screen with its neat columns and thin blue lines, a grid pretending to be neutral. Today’s date sat at the top like a judge’s stamp. A cursor blinked in the middle of an entry, patient identifiers masked down to initials and bed numbers, doses rendered as clean decimals. Someone was inside it already.
The account name in the corner was not the technician’s. It was an administrator profile. One of the broad keys, the kind issued to people who never touched a syringe. Next to it, a status label read Reconciliation in progress, as if the system itself endorsed the act. The manager, just behind Eirik’s shoulder, exhaled quietly through her nose; the technician’s posture tightened, hands off the keyboard as though he’d been told not to interfere.
Eirik kept his gaze on the audit pane: user ID, session start, last action. The clinical calm of the interface made the intrusion feel worse. An unauthorised hand moving through controlled substances with the same antiseptic certainty as changing a rota. He pictured a courtroom transcript being amended mid‑question.
“Who is that?” he asked, and heard how little patience the words contained.
On the screen, the numbers rearranged themselves with the soft indifference of a spreadsheet. A dosage line flickered. A time stamp that had sat stubbornly after midnight slid back to 23:[^12], tucking itself inside the approved window of the shift. In the waste column, an empty field gained a second set of initials, a cosignature appearing without the clumsy lag of human hesitation. One vial flagged as missing quietly changed status to returned, the red warning disappearing like a bruise under make-up.
Eirik did not blink. He watched the “last action” clock tick, each update landing with the same sterile confidence as a vital sign. Someone, somewhere, was tightening the story while it was still warm.
Eirik lifted a hand, palm out. “No one touches it.” The manager and technician retreated a half-step, as if the desk had become evidence. He leaned closer, eyes on the corner where the server clock sat, and began to write: user ID, session token, every “last action” tick, each field that blinked and settled into respectability. The pattern was too clean. Correction as performance, not error.
The audit trail did not vanish; it merely thinned, a hairline fracture running through the system’s spotless surface. Each edit carried a timestamp, each “correction” a user token, and the sequence was too deliberate to be innocent. The conclusion settled in him with the weight of a finding: the institution would rewrite itself before it confessed. From here, there would be no quiet remedy. Only contest, exposure, and consequences.
Eirik drafted the notices as if he were cutting around an organ. No wasted motion, no room for a hand to slip and claim it had held the scalpel differently. Preserve and produce, the header read, but the body was a map: pharmacy dispensing logs for Ward 7 and North Wing ICU, including overrides and late entries; narcotics waste records with co-signatures; badge-entry records for Stairwell C, sub-basement service corridors, Loading Bay access, Level 5 administrative doors; access-control exports with raw timestamps, device IDs, and failed-swipe attempts; server-side audit trails for the medication ledger and the procurement portal, inclusive of user tokens, session IDs, and IP addresses. He wrote in the time window down to the minute and listed the exact fields he expected to see untouched.
He added a paragraph that was not legal ornament but a warning dressed in statute: no deletions, no “corrections”, no routine archiving. Automatic log-rotation suspended. Backups preserved. Any deviation documented in writing with a name and a reason. Patient identifiers redacted where required: privacy laws observed, not used as a curtain.
He printed three sets. Wet ink, clean paper. He signed each with the same controlled pressure he used in court, then walked them himself: IT first, where the air was warm and stale from racks of humming equipment; pharmacy leadership second, where a senior technician’s eyes went flat at the sight of his seal; administration last, where a deputy director tried to smile as if this were a misunderstanding that could be scheduled.
“There will be no staggered compliance,” Eirik said, keeping his voice low enough that no one could call it a threat and no one could mistake it for courtesy. “You receive this simultaneously. You respond simultaneously.”
In the corridor, his phone vibrated with incoming calls. Questions packaged as concern, concern edged as annoyance. He did not answer. He noted times, names, refusals disguised as requests for clarification. The institution’s reflex was already visible: delay, soften, dilute. He had cut those options off at the root and left them only the hard choice of obeying or being caught refusing.
The police tech unit arrived with hard cases that clicked shut like verdicts. Eirik met them at the edge of the IT suite, warrant in hand, his gloves still on as if the air itself might contaminate the work. He did not raise his voice; he did not need to.
“Relevant nodes only,” he said, and watched the technician’s eyes flick to the server labels. “Medication ledger database, audit log repository, access-control export server. Full forensic image. Write-blocked acquisition. Hash at source and on receipt.”
A junior admin started to speak (something about service interruption) then stopped when Eirik’s gaze held. He pointed, not accusing, merely designating. “Document every touch. Device IDs, serials, start time, end time. Two-person integrity on media handling. Chain of custody signed before anything leaves this room.”
The lead tech nodded and began laying out evidence tags and tamper seals on a cleared section of desk. Plastic crackled; the servers hummed on, indifferent. Eirik listened to the quiet rhythm of procedure: timestamp, checksum, camera shutter, pen scratching on a form.
Clinical words, but the shift in the room was physical. Whatever this had been, operations, documentation, internal housekeeping, had become a scene. Evidence now, and everyone could feel the weight of it.
Policy arrived first, wrapped in soft language. The IT manager spoke of “governance” and “clinical continuity”, of patient-privacy obligations that made raw exports “sensitive”. He watched the man’s mouth rather than the words; the micro-flinch at warrant was the only honest part.
Eirik did not argue the principles. He amputated the pretexts.
“Redact identifiers at source,” he said. “I don’t need names. I need user-role IDs, session tokens, device IDs, and the audit fields: create, edit, override, delete: if delete exists. Date range: 00:[^00] on the first to now, to the minute. Ward 7 and ICU only. Access-control: Stairwell C, sub-basement, Loading Bay, Level 5: failed swipes included.”
A pause. The room recalibrated.
“Any delay,” Eirik added, quiet as a closing submission, “will be treated as potential spoliation.”
The moment the notices hit inboxes, the ledger flickered. An unseen hand logging in under an administrator role, moving numbers as if straightening bedsheets. Late wastage entries were backfilled, co-signatures “corrected”, times rounded into something that looked clinical and inevitable. But the system kept its own pulse: a thin seam of audit timestamps, user tokens and IP traces, fresh enough to sting, impossible to scrub before imaging.
Word travelled faster than the paperwork. By midday, department heads who had smiled at “process” began to move like people measuring distance to the dock: office doors clicked shut; blinds angled; impromptu meetings migrated off email and into corridors. Phones were taken in stairwells with no cameras. Familiar routines stiffened into recited policy. In every answer, he heard defence being rehearsed before charges existed.
Eirik reached the North Wing while the sky was still a bruised slate and the harbour wind pushed sleet against the glass corridors. The lobby lights were dimmed to night-mode; cleaners moved like ghosts around yellow caution signs. He kept his coat on. Warmth made people sloppy.
At Level 5 a junior administrator waited with a badge on a lanyard and the careful smile of someone assigned to absorb blame.
“We’ve arranged a liaison,” she said, and nodded towards a security contractor in a padded jacket. The man’s hands were bare despite the cold, as if he wanted to show he didn’t carry anything.
Eirik did not look at the contractor for long. “No escort,” he said. “No single point of contact.”
He placed the envelope on the meeting table, thick paper under his fingers, the seal unbroken until he chose otherwise. When he slit it open, the sound was small but final. He slid the warrant across without theatrics: just enough for them to read the names of systems, the time window, the rooms. Their eyes moved over the words as if they were looking for a loophole to breathe through.
The administrator began to speak (policy, continuity, patient care) until Eirik opened his briefcase and laid down his own sheet.
Chain of custody.
A plain form, already headed and dated. Columns for item description, system source, hash value, time seized, time imaged, person producing, person receiving. Lines waiting like empty beds.
“This is evidentiary ground,” he said. “Anything that leaves this room is logged. Anything that enters it is logged. If you touch it, you sign.”
He taped the sheet to the table with hospital-issued tape, the act more insulting than a raised voice. Then he wrote his name at the top, time-stamped in his own hand, and offered the pen to the first person who would have to obey him.
The security contractor shifted his weight. The junior administrator’s smile thinned, caught between embarrassment and fear. Eirik watched their throats when they swallowed. The building hummed around them, fluorescent ballast, distant alarms, and for a moment he felt the hospital’s old instinct: to turn every intrusion into “process” until it dissolved.
Not today. He sat down, coat still buttoned, and waited for the first signature.
He divided the work the way he’d once divided charges: clean categories, no overlap, no room for “misunderstanding”. Pharmacy first: paper narcotics counts from the locked cabinet and the bound wastage log, lifted whole, not photocopied, not summarised. Digital second. The dispensing system’s transaction table, audit trail, and user-role matrix, exported in its native format with the headers no one ever read. Third, access control: door-controller exports and badge-entry logs for the ward, the stairwell, the sub-basement corridor, each with device IDs, time sources, and whatever the system called its truth.
He said it plainly, so it would stick in their ears. “Raw. With metadata intact. No filtering. No report views.”
An IT supervisor in a fleeced vest tried to be helpful the way institutions were helpful: offering “standardised extracts”, “cleaned reports”, “a dashboard that will make this easier”.
Eirik didn’t argue. He asked for the original system paths, the server names, the retention policy, and who had administrator access at 02:[^13] last night. The man’s gaze slid, a micro-second too long, towards the door as if looking for permission.
Eirik noted it, and wrote the time down.
Hospital security tried to turn the corridor outside Level 5 into a border crossing. A laminated “Authorised Personnel Only” sign appeared as if by magic; a contractor with a radio began offering to “coordinate” movements, to funnel requests through a single desk, to keep staff “from being disrupted”. He spoke in the soft, managerial cadence of plausible necessity.
Eirik answered by making it physical. Two plainclothes officers took up position by the meeting-room door, not blocking the ward, simply present: hands visible, eyes up, names written on the custody sheet. No bundles passed down corridors. No USB sticks walked away in pockets. If someone produced a log, they did it at the table, in his line of sight, and signed for it.
The contractor’s jaw tightened. Compliance or obstruction; either way, it would be recorded.
He commandeered a consult room off the ward, blinds half-drawn against the corridor glare. One by one: nurses with chapped hands, orderlies smelling faintly of bleach, a pharmacy technician who wouldn’t sit. He asked the same narrow questions in shuffled order, who counted, who witnessed, who had the keys, listening for micro-pauses, the too-smooth phrasing of rehearsal. When two colleagues kept answering as one, he separated them with a quiet, procedural politeness.
As the first bundles arrive, he checks them the way he checks alibis: printed pages against raw exports, every timestamp, every user ID, every quiet little “last modified” field the report view pretends doesn’t exist. He rings each system owner (pharmacy, access control, IT) and speaks the word that turns carelessness into liability: preservation. Any “routine correction” made now will have to walk through an audit trail with shoes on.
Eirik spread the badge-entry printouts like exhibits, smoothing each curled corner with the heel of his hand. Paper was honest in a way screens were not: it kept its own time, bore its own dirt. The access-control report was in neat columns, names, doors, timestamps down to the second, while the pharmacy export had that sterile, overformatted look of software trying to appear neutral.
He took a pencil, not a pen. A prosecutor’s superstition: ink implied certainty; graphite allowed revision without admitting defeat. He drew a narrow bracket in the margin beside the ledger’s revision history, 00:[^17] to 00:[^26], and then another beside the badge log. The overlap was a sliver, nine minutes that might as well have been a confession.
At 00:[^18], the narcotics ledger showed a “correction”: count reconciled, witness added, discrepancy resolved. At 00:[^19], another. At 00:[^21], the entry’s time-of-administration shifted backwards by three minutes. Small enough to look like fat fingers, significant enough to move it across a shift boundary. The revisions marched, calm and purposeful, as though someone had decided exactly how long it should take to make lies look like clerical tidying.
In the badge log, the names were different but the movement was not. A security contractor’s card opening Door C-5 at 00:[^16]. An administrative badge at 00:[^20]. No reason to be near pharmacy systems at this hour, not unless there was a fire or a secret. Then nothing, the kind of nothing that only meant the work was being done somewhere that didn’t require a door.
He tapped the pencil against the page and felt a hard, unwelcome certainty settle behind his ribs. These edits weren’t made later, to clean up a mess. They were made in real time, during his own collection, as if someone could see his hands on the documents.
He looked up at the wall clock above the sink (cheap plastic, second hand twitching) and then at his phone’s time. Off by thirty-two seconds. Close enough to coordinate. Close enough to watch.
Someone in this building was keeping time with him.
He built the comparison the way he built a case: three columns, no sentiment. Badge entries on the left, ledger revision history in the centre, terminal identifiers on the right, each line a small claim asking to be believed. He didn’t look for a smoking gun. He looked for routine. Because routine was what liars mimicked and what systems recorded without pity.
The edits wore clinical faces. A nurse’s user name, a technician’s initials, the bland authority of “PharmAdmin”. But the originating terminal class didn’t belong to any ward workstation pool. It carried a facilities prefix, the kind used for door-panel maintenance and security rounds, a machine not meant to know what a controlled drug count looked like.
He scrolled, slowed, matched. The same terminal ID reappeared like a signature in different ink. The same nine-minute window, the same tidy sequence of “correction” fields, the same cadence of someone who knew exactly which audit questions would be asked and which would be ignored.
The lie was dressed in scrubs, yes: names chosen to make blame land downward. But the keystrokes came from somewhere that smelled of keys and radios, not antiseptic.
He followed the terminal identifier the way you followed money: not where it said it lived, but where it was allowed to travel. The map didn’t land in Pharmacy at all. It landed in a contractor kiosk. One of those glassed-in security posts that smelled of damp wool, cheap coffee, and radios turned low. A machine provisioned to touch doors, cameras, alarms. A node built for “safety” with the kind of broad permissions procurement loved because it was convenient and nobody in-house had to own it.
On the network diagram it sat like a harmless junction. In the audit trail it read like an intrusion point with a laminated badge. Door systems and narcotics should never have shared a throat. Here, they did.
He traced the credential chain down to its bones: admin rights invoked through the contractor bridge, sessions tunnelling in on a facilities terminal that should have known nothing about controlled drugs. The user field flickered (nurse IDs, a technician, “PharmAdmin”) rotating just enough to spray suspicion across the floor. A dozen plausible culprits, none accountable. Not a rogue hand. A system built to shed blame.
Eirik turned the pattern into a timeline fit for court: badge swipe, session start, terminal route, ledger revision: each stamped to the minute, each linked to a body somewhere on a ward. The same bridge could reach anywhere the hospital’s permissions bled through; it could rewrite counts, shift times, smooth gaps. This wasn’t a panicked cover-up. It was architecture, repeatable, scalable, sheltered by policy and convenience.
Eirik wrote the hold request the way he used to draft indictments when he still believed paperwork could be clean. No flourishes. No moral language. Just a narrow blade slid between ribs: suspend the next scheduled disbursements only; limit the scope to a defined set of vendor IDs; cite the statutory authority for provisional restraint pending verification of beneficial ownership. He left the rest of the procurement web untouched, not out of mercy, but because overreach was how you handed the defence a lever.
The hospital’s finance system exported in neat columns: invoice numbers, payment dates, cost centres that sounded benign (“consumables”, “sterile kits”, “patient comfort”) and amounts that were too consistent to be organic. A pattern of rounded figures that belonged to someone who thought in laundering, not medicine. He cross-referenced them with the shell company’s paper address and the directors who had appeared overnight like mould.
At the bottom, he added a single paragraph about risk of asset dissipation. He did not mention death. He did not mention narcotics. He did not mention that a contractor terminal could reach into a ledger that should have been sacred. He kept it financial, procedural, the sort of request that could pass across a desk without alarming the wrong person too soon.
He routed it through Treasury because the hospital could stall anything that arrived through ordinary channels. Treasury had teeth, and it kept its own timestamps.
His contact answered on the third ring. A man Eirik had met once at a Christmas reception years ago, whose smile had stayed too long and whose gratitude had never been asked for, only remembered. Eirik gave him the vendor IDs, the dates, the statutory hook. He could hear the other man’s hesitation like a hand hovering over a switch.
“You’re making yourself visible,” the man said.
“I already am,” Eirik replied, and sent the packet.
The reply arrives from Treasury as a PDF with a government crest and no warmth in its phrasing. The vendor, it says, is tagged in the hospital’s system as critical supply. Any restraint, however provisional, will trigger an automatic escalation: board chair, regional health director, emergency procurement protocols. There is a paragraph about reputational risk written like a warning and a line about patient impact written like indemnity.
Eirik reads it twice, not because he needs to, but because he has learned what is hidden in bureaucratic emphasis. Critical supply meant someone had already insulated the money. It also meant the hospital would have a ready-made moral alibi: sick bodies held up like shields, the accused recast as saviours.
He rubs the heel of his hand against his temple and feels the lack of sleep like grit. His cursor hovers over the digital signature field. A smaller man would wait, would negotiate for a gentler route, would let the system correct itself in the dark.
Eirik signs. The timestamp pins him to the act. Then he issues the preservation notice, because once the board is alerted, someone will start cleaning.
Within hours, Procurement rang his office line instead of the switchboard, as if they’d been waiting with a finger already on the button. The voice on the other end was practiced indignation, all smooth consonants and staged concern: critical supply, patient harm, front-page scandal. Lawsuits. Parliamentary questions. The city remembering, vividly, who had “forced” the shortage.
Eirik listened more to the cadence than the threats. They kept saying you’ve escalated this, not we’ve received notice. They spoke as though the hold had landed in their inbox directly, bypassing the finance clerk and the internal approvals the hospital swore by. That was the tell: timing too tight, outrage too rehearsed. Someone with access had seen Treasury’s flag the moment it lit, and moved to contain it before anyone on the floor even knew what was burning.
He pulls the supplier registry again, not trusting memory, and threads it into his own chronology: the same rented mailbox off the ring road; directors swapping names like gloves every quarter; the same accounting firm’s stamp, neat and smug, that he has seen in a laundering file sealed for “national interest”. On paper, hospital funds now brush criminal infrastructure: clean enough for a judge to grasp without sentiment.
In the car park’s blue half-light, alone behind a windscreen filmed with salt, Eirik lets the dying heater cough its last lukewarm breath. The case has shifted under his feet. This isn’t one careless hand or a tidy cluster of “mistakes”; it is a structure with teeth, budgets and lawyers, prepared to bite. From here he either brings names to charge: or he becomes the man who indicted the city’s heartbeat and came up empty.
Eirik doesn’t call the nurse again. Phones leave trails; trails get spun into “harassment” and “pressure,” and then the only person punished is the one who tried to speak. Instead he finds the union representative for the ward: a tired woman with a lanyard full of keys and a face that has seen management’s smiles harden into memos.
He catches her between meetings, in a corridor that smells faintly of bleach and reheated soup. No overt urgency. Just his name, his title, his posture. Everything kept deliberately unthreatening, as if he were asking about a rota dispute.
“I’m concerned about workload,” he says, letting it sound like bureaucracy rather than prosecution. “If she’s been moved or overloaded, it affects patient safety. I’m told she’s been… withdrawn.”
The rep’s eyes narrow, not hostile, but measuring the risk of being used. “People are scared,” she replies, low. “And when people are scared, they get ‘checked in’ by supervisors. Or reassigned. Or told to take leave.”
Eirik takes out a small folded paper, already creased as if it has been carried all day. He doesn’t hand it directly to her; he sets it on a windowsill beside a dead potted plant, a gesture of distance that is also a promise. On it: a time, a place, Stairwell C, two floors below the ward, where the cameras blink and then forget, and a sentence written in compact, controlled handwriting.
This stays inside labour protections. Not police. Not hospital HR.
The rep doesn’t open it. She looks at it as though it might burn. “If she says no. “If she says yes, I need her words before someone edits her memory for her.”
Outside, through the frosted glass, the harbour lights smear into a pale line. Inside, the hospital hums on, indifferent. The rep slides the paper into her pocket like contraband. For a moment her jaw tightens, and Eirik sees what it costs her to agree: not heroism, just the slow accrual of enemies.
He walks away without looking back, already rehearsing the meeting as an evidentiary problem: what he can ask, what he cannot, and how to keep a frightened person alive long enough to tell the truth.
He writes the demand himself, not on prosecutorial letterhead but in the hospital’s own dialect of compliance: preservation, integrity, traceability. A memo that could pass for routine hygiene if you skimmed it with tired eyes. He limits it to one ward, one controlled-drugs cupboard, a tight date range that brackets the last death and the staff member’s collapse, nothing more. Not an expedition; a sterile swab.
He cites patient-safety obligations, internal audit standards, the kind of language administrators sign without feeling accused. He asks for the narcotics log as kept and, crucially, the correction history: who amended what, when, from which terminal, under which account. No insinuations, only the quiet assumption that systems should be able to explain themselves.
He adds a line about routine document retention and the risk of “inadvertent loss during cleaning cycles or end-of-month reconciliation.” It reads like sympathy for overworked staff. It is, in practice, a trap: refusal or delay becomes a timestamped choice.
He prints two copies, signs in black ink, and notes the exact minute he hands it over.
His badge stutters at a door that has always yielded, the reader flashing red like a small, controlled accusation. He tries once more, no theatrics, then steps aside as a porter slips through on a different credential without slowing. In the public corridor, under humming fluorescents, Eirik feels the shape of a new boundary: not shouted, just programmed.
He doesn’t argue with the guard. He drafts the request the way administrators like their problems. Sanitised and defensible. Safety compliance. Continuity planning. “If a prosecutor can’t reach a locked ward,” he writes, “a crash team may be delayed.”
He asks for door-error reports and override events for the past thirty days, tied to specific doors, not feelings. He requests the permission-change history: who altered access groups, from which terminal, under what administrator rights. Names, timestamps, justifications. If someone is tightening doors, they will have had to touch a system that remembers.
He starts a private ledger in a cheap hardback notebook, the kind that doesn’t crash or “auto-correct”. Each entry gets a time, a location, a name, and a verb: refused, redirected, deferred. He notes the exact phrasing of every “policy”, the polite pressure to “email”, the way conversations are steered into atriums of glass and footfall. Friction is trace; trace is motive.
Without signalling escalation, he builds a parallel file: shift rosters for the nights around each death, badge-swipe summaries for the same windows, and the procurement portal’s login trail. Who was in the system when the courier arrived unlogged. He maps it against witness “changes of heart”, noting which manager phoned first, which lawyer appeared, which access rights tightened. Obstruction, rendered as routine.
The retraction arrives first, signed in a neat hand that tries too hard to look calm. The nurse who had spoken to Bryn now insists she was “misunderstood”, that she’d been “under stress”, that any discrepancy in the medication count was “probably a documentation issue”. The phrases have the soft corners of counsel. They are not how ward-floor fear talks.
An hour later the orderly’s statement follows, a single-page addendum in which cash becomes a “loan from a friend”. No friend is named. The sum is rounded, as if someone has filed down the edges. He includes an apology for “wasting time”. Eirik reads that line twice. People don’t apologise to prosecutors unless someone has coached them to.
He doesn’t allow himself the comfort of outrage. Outrage is noise, and this is a signal.
He lays the two documents side by side and begins to treat them as evidence of process rather than confession of weakness. On a clean sheet he writes the times: when Bryn last saw the nurse, when she stopped answering, when she was reassigned. When the orderly was seen in the parking garage, when he started insisting it was nothing, when “his counsel” first called the office to set boundaries.
He notes what touched them. Not hypotheticals. Actual institutional hands. HR appointment scheduled in the middle of a night shift. A “wellbeing check-in” logged by an assistant manager with no clinical role. A badge-swipe into Level 5 administrative offices, outside the orderly’s normal access pattern, the day before his story changed. These are the kinds of movements nobody notices until you decide to look.
Under the fluorescent hum of his own office, Eirik feels the case tilt. Two frightened people had been a human problem: reassurance, protection, time. Two synchronised revisions are something else. A pipeline. A mechanism that takes raw panic and outputs compliant language.
He opens his notebook and writes a new heading, careful and unromantic: COORDINATION. Then, beneath it, the first verbs that matter. Summoned. Briefed. Contained.
He starts charting a different kind of chronology, one that doesn’t end in a flatline. Names line up beside mundane verbs: reassigned, signed off, rostered elsewhere, “on leave”. He pulls ward schedules and compares them against the small, domestic markers Bryn remembers better than any database. Who stopped coming down for coffee at 03:[^15], who switched from card to cash, who began sending someone else to collect cigarettes and a paper.
HR becomes a recurring timestamp. A “wellbeing meeting” booked into the only hour a nurse could have spoken to him unobserved. A sudden refresher on confidentiality policies, delivered with a smile sharp enough to cut. Then “legal”: calls that arrive not as threats but as friendly guidance on what is “appropriate”, what must be “in writing”, what can be “misremembered”. People don’t so much refuse as get funnelled into safer language.
When he plots badge-swipe restrictions and shift changes alongside the retractions, the line doesn’t point towards the clinicians. It points to the machinery that moves bodies through corridors. The hospital’s muscles, not its hands.
Eirik stops asking questions that can be quoted back at him and starts occupying space. He takes up posts in the public arteries of the North Wing, outside lifts, by the vending machines, under a CCTV dome that’s more theatre than protection, where no one can later claim he cornered them. He lets his file look dormant, his hands empty, his gaze idle.
The hospital keeps moving around him. A guard who shouldn’t be on that floor drifts close when he so much as nods at a porter. A second set of footsteps matches his pace, always half a corridor behind. When he pauses to read a noticeboard, an administrator materialises with a clipboard and a bright, unnecessary smile, as if coincidence can be scheduled.
He memorises patterns the way he memorises alibis: who arrives first, who watches, who signals.
He tests the building the way he tests a witness. At 06:[^10] the door to Records yields; at 21:[^40] it rejects him with a polite red blink while a junior doctor drifts through on the same reader. He varies routes, clocks, even the hand he uses, and later pulls the remaining swipe logs via police channels. Each inconsistency is a small, hard bead: interference made legible, motive still unnamed.
He uses Bryn the way he’d use a pressure gauge: not for facts, but for changes. Midnight couriers, unlogged routes, a new face posted by Stairwell C with hands too still to be bored. Men who stand at “polite” distance, angled to hear, close enough to chill a throat. By week’s end he stops pursuing testimony. The coordination becomes the crime, and he drafts his trap in daylight.
Signe moved first, and she moved the way she moved in court: with deadlines, margins, and a cold respect for what could later be exhibited. By lunchtime the nurse who had whispered to Bryn about missing medication was not answering her phone. By evening she was answering, but only long enough to say she’d been tired, she’d been mistaken, she didn’t want trouble. The words came out as if she were reading them from something taped to the inside of a cupboard door.
Eirik heard the shift before he heard the content. It was there in the way people swallowed before speaking, in the overbright calm that sat on top of panic. A staff member who had nodded at the mention of falsified times now insisted that the charting system “sometimes lags” and “it’s easy to click the wrong field,” as if rehearsing an innocent explanation for a question that hadn’t yet been asked. When Eirik asked what, exactly, they had seen, the answer was a smooth wall: I don’t recall. I may have assumed. I shouldn’t have said anything.
Statements that had been messy and human (contradictions, fear, the small details people only tell when they’re not being strategic) began to arrive in tidy language. He could see the edits in the syntax: the passive voice, the precise timestamps, the careful absence of motive. Someone had taken the raw material of doubt and pressed it into a shape a judge could file without wincing. “To the best of my knowledge.” “It is my understanding.” “I have no reason to believe.”
He pictured Signe in some back corridor office, black hair pinned flat, grief sealed behind professionalism, turning hospital panic into sworn certainty. She didn’t need to threaten; she only needed to give them a script that made them feel safe.
And as each message arrived, Eirik felt the perimeter tighten: not around evidence, but around people. The building was teaching its witnesses a new kind of silence: not the refusal to speak, but the willingness to speak only in approved sentences.
By the next day, Eirik stopped leaving messages. It didn’t matter what tone he used; the replies came back laundered through intermediaries. A union steward rang from a withheld number, voice careful, asking for his badge number as if they were booking a room. A private attorney followed, introducing herself with the calm of someone billing by the minute, requesting that all communication be routed “in writing” and that his questions be provided in advance “for accuracy”.
Then the defence firm called. The one he’d seen on wiretap warrants and bail hearings, the one that always arrived with immaculate folders and a faint scent of cologne over cigarette smoke. The partner didn’t threaten. He didn’t need to. He reminded Eirik of patient confidentiality, of workplace harassment policies, of the hospital’s duty of care to “staff wellbeing”. Each phrase was a glove over a fist.
Eirik heard the pattern in the pauses: someone had advised them to slow him down, to turn every conversation into a procedure, every answer into an exhibit. He could still summon them, of course. But a summons was a flare in a dark building, and whoever was watching would see exactly where he stepped.
The rumour spreads the way the hospital’s cleaning does: methodical, impersonal, leaving a sharp taste at the back of the throat. By the time it reaches Eirik it has acquired edges. He is “leaning on” night staff, “cornering” interns, “using the badge and the title” to frighten people into mistakes. Nobody says it to his face. They don’t have to.
He registers it in the small corrections of behaviour. A nurse steps aside too early, as if yielding a corridor to a consultant. A junior doctor answers with the stiff, rehearsed politeness reserved for complaints. Clipboards rise like shields. Conversations die mid-sentence when he passes, then resume with forced laughter after he’s gone.
In a glass reflection he catches himself: suit too dark, eyes too pale, standing still while the ward flows around him: an accusation dressed as restraint.
The hospital’s systems enlist with a quiet, bureaucratic precision. His badge still blesses the main entrance, but dies at side routes where the lights flicker and the CCTV never quite looks. A ward he crossed yesterday now demands a supervisor escort. Policy “reviewed overnight”. At reception, a woman with chapped hands offers an apologetic smile and repeats protocol, as if it were something she could hide behind.
Signe didn’t need to show her face to speak. The hospital itself carried her note: clipped access, sudden policies, the soft drift of insinuation. Here, his mandate held only as long as it looked polite. Anything done out of sight would be catalogued as intimidation, any urgency recast as threat. If he wanted to keep moving, he would do it under fluorescents and witnesses: where a single planted version of events could harden into fact.
Two doors in succession rejected him with the same bland refusal: a soft beep, a red blink, the kind of error that pretended to be nobody’s decision. Eirik tried once more, because procedure demanded the attempt, then let his hand fall away as if he had never meant to go through at all. The corridor behind him smelled of boiled cabbage from the staff canteen and something sharper, antiseptic laid over old damp.
He didn’t look back for a camera. Looking for cameras looked like guilt. He turned instead into the public artery of the North Wing where the light was brighter and the air more heavily trafficked: patients in socks shuffling with IV poles, relatives carrying plastic bags, nurses moving in tight formations around their tasks. A place where everyone could see him and therefore, if someone chose to tell it later, everyone could misremember it.
His posture altered by degrees he felt in his shoulders. Hands clear of pockets. Pace measured to match the flow, not to cut through it. No sudden changes in direction. In court you never rushed the witness; here you didn’t rush the corridor.
Through the glass of a connecting walkway he caught the man he’d been looking for, half obscured by a pot plant and the frosted pattern of winter condensation. The orderly, too young to carry himself with that kind of deliberate calm, walked as if he belonged among the visitors, head slightly bowed in practised deference. A clipboard tucked under his arm like a prop. He laughed at something a nurse said, mouth open just long enough to register the performance.
Eirik’s eyes tracked him, pale and still. The man was not fleeing. He was placing himself in the open, threading between witnesses like they were legal protections. Daring Eirik to make the wrong move: to close distance too quickly, to raise a voice, to touch an elbow in a crowded hall.
Eirik adjusted without thinking. He folded into the rhythm of the hallway, a prosecutor made pedestrian, and began to follow at the precise distance that could be explained as coincidence and nothing else.
He kept to the bright spine of the corridor where the hospital liked to believe itself transparent. People moved around them in soft collisions: porters steering linen carts, a father balancing a paper cup and a child’s mitten, nurses with their eyes already elsewhere. Too many witnesses to make an accusation stick, too many mouths to reshape it later.
Eirik watched what couldn’t be overheard. The orderly’s hand returned, again and again, to the same pocket as if checking for a pulse. Not a fidget born of boredom; a touch that steadied him. When he scanned, he didn’t turn his head. He used surfaces, window glass, the polished steel of a fire door, the convex mirror at a corner, catching Eirik as a smudge behind him, confirming distance without giving anyone the clean picture of fear.
Eirik closed in by half-steps, timed to the flow, close enough to be plausibly caught by the same current. The orderly’s jaw tightened when a phone rang nearby. His smile appeared for a nurse, then dropped too quickly, like a mask removed in the dark.
At an older junction the signage thinned into arrows and faded lettering. Foot traffic fell away. The man drifted towards it as if guided by habit, or instruction.
At the seam where the newer wing’s glass and chrome gave way to North Wing concrete, the corridor changed character. The hum of CCTV domes thinned; the ceiling tiles grew stained at the edges, as if the building itself had been handled too often. The orderly didn’t accelerate. He simply angled towards an unmarked staff door, badged in with the casual precision of someone who knew it would open, and let it close behind him without a click loud enough to be noticed.
By the time Eirik reached the junction, there was nothing to pursue but the idea of pursuit. A draft of colder air, a scuff on linoleum. Then, in the convex mirror mounted above a fire hose cabinet, a fragment: blunt ink-black hair, head bowed, turning into Stairwell C. The blind spot. The deliberate absence.
He took two steps towards Stairwell C and felt the impulse like a hand at his back. Then he stopped. A prosecutor in a dead zone after hours was not an investigator; it was an allegation waiting to be written. He pivoted into the public corridor, keeping the stairwell mouth in peripheral vision, using reflections, pauses. People, doors, and routine swallowed his sightline. Only the geometry remained: someone else knew it better.
At the kiosk-café, Bryn watched bodies as if they were clockwork. Staff came in predictable eddies; this one cut across them like a blade. Ink-black hair, chin tucked, no glance at the menu boards, no warmth wasted on the cashier. She slipped past the sliding doors and headed for the parking garage, not the street. Bryn rang Eirik at once, direction, minute, gait, knowing it would land late, just enough to prove the net could move faster than rules.
The letter arrived in the late afternoon, slid under her office door as if it belonged there. Thick paper, legal firm watermark embossed without arrogance, the kind of stationery that assumed compliance. The envelope was unsealed. A courtesy, or a message: we didn’t need to break anything to get in.
Ragnhild read standing up, coat still on, snow melting into a dark crescent on the lino. It was not a threat in the blunt sense; it was an inventory. Her full name, her national ID number, her editor’s direct line. A tidy chronology of her requests: registry filings, phone calls, even the small evasions she used when sources were skittish. Then paragraphs that made her stomach tighten: sentences she recognised as her own, lifted from emails and DMs and stitched into the firm’s prose like exhibits.
“Systemic corrosion,” it quoted. “Quiet compromises.” Words she had typed at two in the morning, alone, believing the worst consequence would be an angry denial and a bureaucrat’s shrug.
They cited patient privacy statutes with the precision of scalpels. Section numbers. Precedents. A reminder of criminal liability for “indirect identification”, as if they could turn her craft into an offence by changing the lighting. There was even a list of names she hadn’t published, labelled potentially affected parties. Not her sources, never that overt, but close enough that her pulse kept trying to climb.
She rang one of her best hospital contacts, a porter who’d never once pretended to be busy. It went to voicemail. She tried again, and again; the message stayed warm and impersonal.
Ten minutes later a text arrived: have meeting. can’t talk.
A nurse she’d met for cigarettes behind the loading bay stopped answering mid-ring. A union rep read her message and left it on “seen”. Then, as if an instruction had been circulated, the replies began to match. Clipped, lower-case, stripped of apology: can’t talk, don’t call again.
She sat down finally, not from fatigue but because standing made her feel visible. Outside the frosted window the city was already dark, the harbour lights smudged by snow. Her phone buzzed once more, another identical line, and she realised they were not just shutting doors. They were training her, word by word, to stop reaching for handles.
Ragnhild waited until her hands stopped shaking enough to risk the wrong digit. She didn’t use the office phone, and she didn’t use the number logged to her bylines. She pulled an old prepaid from a drawer, thumbed it awake, and stepped into the corridor outside her newsroom where the fluorescent light made everyone look like a suspect.
A minor procurement clerk. Not a board member, not a physician. The kind of name you could plausibly ring about a delivery form without anyone caring. She’d never called him before; his number had come from a registry scrape and a remembered first name.
The line rang once. Twice. Then a click: too clean, as if someone had been waiting with a finger already on the button.
A calm voice answered. Male, unhurried, Scandinavian-flat, with the tone of someone reading evidence aloud.
“Ragnhild Nyberg,” it said. Not a question. “Press.”
Her throat tightened; she could smell toner and wet wool, could hear her own pulse in the hollow between the walls.
“Who is this?” she managed, and hated the smallness of it.
“Nyberg,” the voice repeated, almost kindly, and then the line went dead before she could form the next syllable. When she looked at the screen, the call log showed the clerk’s number. The anonymity was a performance.
Bryn pulled the feed up on the kiosk’s little monitor, the kind that made people’s faces look guilty even when they were buying gum. He rewound once, then again, then slowed it to the stuttering crawl of frames. There was no smash, no yank, no drunken hand. Just a moment between two customers where the picture tilts a fraction, like someone nudged a painting straight.
He leaned in, smelling burnt coffee and cold plastic. The bracket’s screws sat clean, not stripped. Loosened, adjusted, tightened: careful work with a small tool, done by someone who knew exactly how far to turn without cracking the casing.
The timestamps ran true. No gap to argue over. Only the new absence: a neat, deliberate blind strip where the late-night couriers always paused before slipping into shadow.
On the ward she met him with the face she saved for complaints and auditors: smooth, blank, correct. Her eyes slid past his as if they’d never shared a cigarette by the ambulance ramp. “I misremembered,” she said, hands busy with a chart she didn’t need. “Counts are within normal variance.” Then, softly, too deliberate: “You haven’t repeated this. Have you?” Not concern. Compliance.
He works the phones between humming vending machines and the smell of reheated stew. Yesterday’s candour has curdled into institutional amnesia. Nurses apologise too quickly, as if reading from policy; porters swear they’ve never seen the forms he describes. The orderly with the garage money meets his questions with a trained gaze. “A private loan, nothing to do with work.” Each repetition lands identical (same pauses, same emphasis) supervised speech.
Eirik tried the badge again, holding it flat against the reader as if angle might change intent. A thin chirp. The light flashed red, quick and final, like a judge’s gavel in miniature. He waited a breath and tried a second time. Same refusal. The door stayed shut, its seal line unbroken, its window showing only the dim service corridor beyond. He did not look around for an audience. He felt one anyway. Hospitals trained people to pretend not to see.
“Sometimes they desynchronise,” the guard said, too promptly. A young man in an ill-fitting uniform with a contractor’s badge clipped to his chest. Not hospital. Supplement. He held his hands together at his belt, a posture that wanted to look helpful and read as compliant. “It’s… it happens. I can call up.”
Eirik’s eyes went, without hurry, to the printed strip under the reader: LEVEL 3 , NORTH WING , STAFF ONLY. He pulled a pen from his inner pocket and opened the notebook he had started carrying like a second warrant.
“Time,” he said, not as a question, and checked his watch. “Door ID is on the frame. State your name.”
The guard blinked. “Er. Mikael, ”
“Surname.”
A pause, as if the man’s training had covered friendliness but not formality. “Skar. Sorry. I’m sorry, sir. Your badge should work.”
Eirik wrote the apology down as well, word for word, including the “sir” he had not earned in this building by rank, only by the shadow of who he could call. He watched the guard’s mouth move and tracked what didn’t: the eyes stayed fixed on a point just past Eirik’s shoulder, avoiding contact with the discipline of someone warned.
“No need to be sorry,” Eirik said. His voice stayed even, prosecutorial calm laid over sleeplessness. “Just repeat what you said. Exactly.”
The guard swallowed. “Sometimes they desynchronise.”
Eirik underlined it once. Then, with the same controlled motion, he tested the badge on the adjacent reader: public lift, unrestricted access. Green. The system still knew him. It was simply choosing where not to.
He closed the notebook and slid it back into his coat. “Don’t call up,” he said. “Not yet.”
In the public corridor he let the traffic be his witness. The place was too bright, too open; anyone could drift past with a clip-board or a mop and later claim they had “overheard” him threaten a nurse. So he turned the space into procedure. He chose a bench beneath a noticeboard thick with union leaflets and flu warnings, sat where the CCTV did cover, and kept his coat on as if the cold might keep him sharp.
No more leaning in, no more quiet jokes to buy trust. He asked one question at a time, slowly, leaving the silence intact until the other person filled it. When an answer came, he repeated it back in the same words, neutral and exact. “You’re saying the count was correct at nineteen hundred and you did not touch the trolley after. Yes?” He waited for the confirmation. If it wavered, he wrote down the wobble, not the excuse.
His pen moved with a steady, court-hand calm that did not belong to his body. The wrist ached, tendons tight from sleepless nights, but the letters stayed clean. A record was a kind of shelter. Rumour could be edited; ink was harder to bend.
Eirik let the orderly finish his neat little line about a “loan” and then, quietly, dismantled it. Not with accusation (accusations were for court) but with particulars no one memorised unless they’d lived them. “Date. Exact time. Which garage level. Which stairwell. Who walked you in. Transfer route: lift or ramp. Which hand held the envelope. Which pocket you put it in.” He spoke as if filling out a form.
The man’s answer arrived polished, too smooth, and the same phrases returned like stamped coins. Between them: micro-pauses in the wrong places, a swallow before each noun, eyes flicking to a point over Eirik’s shoulder as if checking for approval. Rehearsed testimony. A witness on a string, pretending to be casual.
He opened a second file in his mind and then on paper, labelled not with a case number but with his own name. Every red light on a reader, every retracted sentence, every new solicitor’s letter became a timestamp, paired with rosters, badge logs, procurement “corrections”. If they meant to paint him as impulsive, he would answer with something unromantic and fatal: procedure, documented until it could not be spun.
Before the locked ward he built redundancy like a case file: a formal access request entered under his own name, timestamped; a call to the charge nurse, repeated back until she confirmed she’d be present; a note of which ceiling domes saw and which corners didn’t. He walked the corridor as though approaching the witness stand, rehearsing cross-examination, choosing answers that could survive daylight.
Eirik kept his body still, letting the room do the moving. The locked ward always had that effect: doors that sighed shut like verdicts, air too warm from recycled breath, the faint chemical sweetness of disinfectant trying to disguise fear. He pulled the visitor chair closer to the bed without scraping it, careful not to make himself an event.
The witness’s eyes found him and held, pale and wet in the fluorescent glare. For a moment the pupils seemed to settle, as if recognising in his suit and clipped posture something familiar: authority, rules, an exit that didn’t require pleading. Their fingers worried the blanket seam, picking at it with the same repetitive precision he’d seen in people who counted pills for comfort. A hospital wristband cut into the skin. A pulse line disappeared under tape.
Eirik’s voice stayed low. “I’m not here to argue with your doctors. I’m here to write down what happened. In your words.”
The first answers came out as if pulled through cloth. Consonants softened, swallowed and reformed. A name (maybe two) then a stop. They blinked hard, fighting the internal drag of whatever they’d been given earlier. Eirik watched the micro-pauses, the way the mouth opened on a syllable and then shut, recalculating.
“A date,” the witness said, then repeated it, wrong again against what Eirik had been shown in the chart. Their brow pinched, frustrated, as if they knew the contradiction would be used against them later. “Not… what they wrote. Not that day.”
Eirik didn’t correct them. He let the error live on the surface, a marker. “What day was it for you?”
Their gaze darted to his notebook and back. “Garage,” they said, and the word came out too clean, too rehearsed for something meant to be spontaneous. Again: “The garage.” A small shake of the head, almost imperceptible. “He said. “Stairwell. Cold. Paid… cash.”
Eirik felt his own hands go colder. The parking garage. Bryn’s late-night shadows. A phrase formed on the witness’s lips: half a sentence, then another swallow. They looked at him as if asking permission to keep going, as if he could grant it.
He leaned in a fraction. “Who said that?”
Their fingers tightened on the blanket edge until the knuckles blanched. “Don’t, ” The word cracked, more plea than answer. “If I talk. They, ” Another attempt. The sentence collapsed, but the intent remained, urgent and terrified, pressing against sedation like a nail against glass.
Mid-thought the witness’s gaze skittered, not to Eirik but past him, snagging on the strip of glass in the door. The corridor beyond was a sterile blur, yet something in it had shifted: an absence of sound, a pause in routine. An orderly stood too near the curtain, shoulders squared as if guarding rather than waiting, hands idle at his sides. His badge swung once, then stilled. He didn’t pretend to be busy.
A nurse hovered at the foot of the bed with a tray that contained nothing urgent. Her smile was the kind used to calm children and manage complaints; it stayed in place a fraction too long, as if practised. Her eyes flicked to the witness’s lips when they moved, then away, then back again. Not recording, not listening: monitoring.
Eirik felt the room’s perimeter tighten, the hospital’s soft power made visible in small gestures: bodies positioned, doors half-open, a pen hovering over a chart with no reason to hover. The witness registered it all at once. Their fingers stopped picking. Their shoulders drew inward. Words that had been trying to push through retreated, re-ordered, edited on the tongue. They started answering the question they thought the room would allow.
The witness forced breath into speech, as if volume could substitute for permission. “It was (no, listen) ” The words came fast, brittle, colliding. A hand lifted off the blanket, searching for something to hold, and found only air. Their eyes snapped to Eirik with sudden insistence; the fear had sharpened into anger, the kind that risks everything for one clean sentence. “They moved it. The time. He. It arrived not like sleep but like a hand over the mouth. Eyelids sank in slow increments, blinking turning into surrender. The tongue thickened, consonants smearing, the name at the centre of it reduced to a wet initial. “Stair… C,” they mumbled, and the syllable dissolved. Their chin dipped. The next attempt was only breath and a faint, frustrated sound, as if the body had been muted from the inside.
Eirik registered the shift the way he registered a contradiction in testimony: timing, sequence, the small rituals that pretended to be care. The IV port was uncovered, swabbed, and checked with a brisk, practised competence; a clamp adjusted a fraction, the syringe seated as if it had been waiting. The monitor obligingly held its steady numbers. Normality was the safest alibi sabotage could wear.
The attending physician slid into Eirik’s line of sight with a practised, almost courteous intercept, one hand lightly raised as if to steady the air. “We’re initiating agitation protocol,” he said, tone level, eyes on the chart rather than the prosecutor. Eirik’s questions became “external triggers” in that calm narrative. When Eirik reached for statutory language, the witness had already been folded under sedation, silent, compliant, untouchable.
Eirik stayed at the nurses’ station as if it were a lectern he had paid for. The counter was cluttered with sanctioned disorder and behind it the nurses moved with the brisk economy of people who could not afford hesitation. No one met his eye for more than a second. Their attention slid past him, to screens and alarms and the safer gravity of tasks.
He asked, quietly, for the attending’s name and the medication order. The charge nurse’s mouth tightened into something that might have been professionalism if it had not carried the faintest edge of warning.
“Doctor’s directed agitation management,” she said. “We’re not discussing patient specifics at the desk.”
He heard the phrase as a pre-built barrier, the sort that could be quoted later without anyone feeling responsible for the damage it did.
The corridor seemed to empty, not in fact but in permission. A draft snuck along the linoleum, cold enough to sting the knuckles, carrying disinfectant and the metallic tang of the ventilation. The fluorescent lights hummed with a tired insistence. Somewhere down the hall a door clicked shut, the sound clean and final.
A security guard arrived with no hurry and no surprise, as if he had been waiting behind the corner for a cue. Mid-50s, hospital-issued jacket, radio clipped high. He held one hand out, palm open. An almost gentle stop.
“Evening,” he said, voice pitched to be overheard and taken as reasonable. “Identification, please. And your purpose on the ward.”
Eirik looked at the outstretched hand. In another building, another life, the gesture would have been nothing. Here it was a mechanism: the hospital’s immune response.
“I’m here in an official capacity,” Eirik said, keeping his tone flat. “Interview with a witness.”
The guard nodded as if acknowledging a weather report. “After-hours policy. Non-clinical personnel are logged. It’s for patient privacy and staff safety.”
The nurse behind the desk did not contradict him. She watched her monitor, fingers poised above keys, waiting for the narrative to settle into something printable. The guard’s palm remained there, patient, rehearsed. An invitation to comply and a reminder that resistance would also be recorded.
Eirik produced his prosecutor’s badge and the slim, official card that had opened doors for him since he was young enough to think the law was a clean instrument. The guard took them with the same careful neutrality he might use for a contaminated dressing. From his pocket came a handheld scanner, matte grey, hospital property, the kind that turned bodies into permissions.
The device chirped, small, cheerful, indecent, and a timestamp blinked on its screen. Eirik watched the guard’s gaze drop, register the name, the issuing authority, the number, and then lift again with a fraction less warmth. Procedure had done its work: his arrival now existed as data, neat and retrievable, stripped of tone and context. He could already hear it read back later, in a meeting room with bad coffee: entered locked ward at 19:[^42]; remained at desk; questioned staff.
“You’ll need to sign in as well,” the guard said, holding out a clipboard that looked older than the building’s renovations.
Eirik’s hand paused above the pen. Every stroke was an admission that he was here, that he had pressed, that he had made the hospital react. He signed anyway, because refusing would be its own entry.
Nursing leadership arrived in a small formation, two women in navy tunics with lanyards held flat against their chests, faces arranged into the same calm. The taller one introduced herself without offering a hand. Her smile had the clipped edge of a policy document.
“We need to document what happened,” she said. “Can you tell me which staff members you addressed directly?”
Eirik watched the charge nurse’s shoulders draw in by a millimetre, as if a hook had found its place.
“It’s routine,” the other added, already uncapping a pen. “Whenever a patient presents with distress following external interaction, we file a conduct report. Standard safeguarding.”
The words were chosen to travel well: external, interaction, following. A chain with him at the start.
He kept his voice low. “The patient was sedated before any coherent statement. That is what requires documenting.”
Their eyes held his, steady and empty, waiting for names.
An administrator appeared as if summoned by the word document. Grey blazer, badge turned outward, voice softened to syrup. He thanked them for their “co-operation” and reminded Eirik, gently, of statutory confidentiality, of consent, of the proper channels for concerns: patient liaison, compliance, the board’s complaints committee. Each clause sounded like assistance, but carried its own hook. One wrong question and his presence became harassment. His insistence: misconduct.
He shifted into process, because process was meant to be neutral: asked for the written sedation order, the MAR printout, the exact minute the syringe driver was adjusted. He requested badge-entry logs for the ward door, escort records, names. Each question produced a new layer of compliance theatre, an escort “for safety”, a form needing two countersignatures, a terminal that logged his login, his searches, his pauses, so even restraint could be recut as menace.
Bryn dropped the kiosk’s metal shutter with a practiced shove, shoulder set against the cold resistance until it met the ground. The latch caught with a thin, final click that always sounded to him like a door in a cellblock. He locked it, felt the key bite, and let his breath out in a slow plume that fogged the glass.
The winter street was quiet in the way hospitals demanded: a hush imposed by fluorescent corridors and rules about voices after nine. Sodium light bled across the iced pavement. Somewhere behind the North Wing’s concrete, a bin lorry groaned and then fell silent again.
Across the street, headlights washed the snowbanks and made them glow like old bone. For a second Bryn saw only the glare; then the shape behind it resolved into a van, white and anonymous except for the private courier’s logo that pretended to be ordinary commerce. It idled too far from the main entrance to be innocent, tucked into the shadow cast by the parking garage, nose pointed away as if ready to leave the moment someone decided to look.
He told himself he had seen dozens of deliveries at strange hours. Shift work made its own economy. But this one kept the same rhythm, late, unlogged, never in the bay where the paperwork lived. It made the hospital look less like a public service and more like a machine with hidden feeds.
Bryn adjusted his scarf and stepped off the curb as if he were only crossing to the bus stop. The cold bit through his gloves. He kept his gaze loose, the way he did when drunk men argued outside his kiosk: present, but not inviting attention.
The van’s driver-side door opened. A figure climbed out in hospital-issued outerwear. Parka with reflective piping, the sort you could get from stores if you had the right badge and no questions. The person didn’t look around in panic. They looked around in assessment.
Bryn felt it before he could name it: the deliberate drift toward him, the angle of approach that avoided the brightest pools of light. The space between the parking-garage stairwell and the service entrance was a strip of shadow everyone used when they wanted to be unseen. He had pointed it out to Eirik once, half-joking. Now it reached for him like a hand.
Bryn stayed where the sodium light thinned, letting the glass of the kiosk and the parked cars hold him in reflection. The courier had a hard plastic tote tucked under one arm, the kind used for sterile packs and controlled supplies, its lid snapped shut with a promise of cleanliness. Nothing about the way they carried it suggested hurry. It was weight remembered, path rehearsed.
They didn’t head for the loading bay where deliveries were meant to confess themselves. Clipboard signatures, dock lights, the bored porter who made eye contact because it was his job. Instead they cut wide, skirting the marked routes like someone who knew exactly which rules existed to be weaponised later. The parka’s reflective piping flashed once, then vanished as they angled toward the service entrance.
There, the door sat half-sheltered by concrete, a narrow mouth that led down to the sub-basement corridors where pipes ran like veins and the air tasted of rust and bleach. No queue, no questions. A badge lifted briefly, a wrist turn too quick to read, and the lock gave with a soft, obedient click. The tote disappeared first; the rest followed.
Bryn moved after the tote without deciding to, one step and then another, the soles of his boots whispering over iced grit. Habit did the work: the same arithmetic he used at the kiosk when two nurses changed shifts and a security guard pretended not to watch. He mapped the hospital’s eyes. The camera above the ambulance ramp would catch a face if you stayed in the light too long; the one mounted on the garage corner stuttered, a cheap unit that blinked at the cold; and then there was the old stairwell that blocked the lens entirely, a slit of darkness everybody knew but nobody wrote down.
He slowed, letting distance grow, and kept his hands visible, as if that made him harmless. The air carried a faint chemical tang, disinfectant, latex, something clean trying to cover something else.
The figure seemed to have been waiting for the moment Bryn committed. Appearing from nowhere and yet from exactly the right place. A sleeve with hospital reflective piping slid into his line like a barrier. Before he could step back, a hand found his elbow, not rough but certain, guiding him into the narrow band of shadow between stairwell concrete and service door. Disinfectant clung to the fabric; the breath beside him was winter-cold.
The warning came as if it were procedure. Fingers settled on Bryn’s sleeve, not hard enough to mark, just angled to turn him. The voice stayed low, flattened by the concrete. “Go back to your coffee.” No names, no threats: only a quiet certainty that rules existed here and he was on the wrong side of them. The figure slid away through the blind spot, leaving only retreating steps and the sense of being counted.
The packet came in with the hospital’s ordinary detritus: invoices on thin paper, a circular from Facilities about burst pipes, a memo stamped URGENT that never meant urgent. It sat among them like a stone among snow. Someone had chosen it with care. The paper had that stiff, bureaucratic grain that refused fingerprints, and the seal lay flat as if pressed by a ruler.
Eirik didn’t open it at once. He held it between finger and thumb, feeling the measured thickness, the way the contents didn’t shift. Not a hurried bundle, not a panic drop. An artefact designed to survive handling, to look appropriate on a desk in an office that still pretended truth lived in files.
The air in his room smelled of burnt coffee from the corridor machine and disinfectant that never quite masked damp wool. Outside the frosted window, the harbour lights made a weak orange smear against snow. The radiators clanked, failing to warm the space, failing to warm him.
He checked the post log out of habit. Nothing. No signature required. Whoever sent it knew the routines, knew where paper could enter without leaving a name. That knowledge carried its own accusation.
His phone buzzed once with a calendar reminder, Locked Ward interview, cancelled, and then fell silent again. The silence was an old sensation, the gap between question and answer in a courtroom when a witness decides to break. He had lived inside it before, and people had paid.
He slid a letter opener under the flap. The blade met resistance: not glue, but deliberate folding, a second layer like a shield. For a moment his hand stilled. He saw, as if in a flash, the other file from years ago. The one he had been sure of, the one that had made him a rising name and left a family emptied out.
This envelope had the same confidence.
He tipped it and let its contents fall onto the desk without touching them more than necessary, as if the paper itself could stain.
Inside were stills and short CCTV sequences printed on matte paper, each frame stripped of the harmless seconds that made a man human. Eirik saw himself in the North Wing corridor, shoulders squared, coat dark against the bleach-white tile. The cut always landed on his most prosecutorial posture: a pause held too long, a glance angled down like a sentence being weighed. In one clip his lips moved, question, question, then the footage ended before the answer came, leaving only the suggestion that silence had been forced.
A nurse appeared more than once, her badge half-obscured by motion blur, her face turned away at the exact moment it could be read as embarrassment or fear. The next frame would show Eirik’s hand, mid-gesture, as though he were blocking a doorway; the rest of the exchange, the step back, the softening, had been excised. Even the timestamps felt curated: minutes that placed him near locked doors and unattended stations, never the hours he spent waiting for permissions that didn’t arrive.
He watched the sequence without blinking, cataloguing the choices: where the editor wanted the viewer to flinch, where they wanted colleagues to begin quietly backing away.
The phone dumps were worse. They read like a closing submission dressed up as metadata: a neat ladder of calls, highlighted names, and threads cut mid-sentence so his caution became implication. Numbers he knew, ward clerks, a registrar, a union rep, were circled in red as if they were co-conspirators rather than exhausted staff answering a prosecutor’s questions. Where he had asked for a time, a record, a confirmation, the excerpts stopped just before the reply; the missing lines left a vacuum that looked, to an outsider, like intimidation succeeding. Whole hours were collapsed into a few incriminating minutes, and the gaps, inevitable in any real timeline, were presented as deliberate darkness. He could almost hear Signe’s voice: not accusing, merely arranging.
Each page carried the same sterile choreography: aligned timestamps, captions that pretended to be merely descriptive, uniform fonts and margins that mimicked an internal briefing note. Whoever compiled it understood which bureaucratic clothes made a lie look official. It was ready-made evidence: something a supervisor could forward to Internal Affairs, or a journalist could print, untouched, as if truth required no author.
By the final sequence he doesn’t need a confession to see intent. The montage is engineered like a case file: not to show a crime, but to make one believable. Plausibility is enough: enough for colleagues to stop returning calls, for a supervisor to “pause” his access, for headlines to harden into certainty. His own restraint is cut into menace; his procedure repainted as ambition.
Eirik’s thumb paused on a thin, grey line printed so faintly it could have been a crease. Not a header, not a footer. Something the compiler hadn’t meant to be read. An artefact left behind the way a surgeon leaves a thread knot under skin.
A routing tag. Half chewed by the copier, but still legible enough: a chained path with slashes and underscores, a string of letters that belonged to the hospital’s internal systems, not the outside world. He’d seen tags like it before in police disclosures, in digital evidence bundles that were meant to survive defence scrutiny. Those were clean. This one had a stutter in it: an environment label that didn’t match, a container name that looked like an internal working folder rather than an export package. The syntax was hospital-native, but it wore its uniform wrong.
He leaned closer under the desk lamp, eyes burning from too little sleep. The packet smelled of toner and cold air; whoever had dropped it off had stood in the same winter Eirik kept carrying into every room. He traced the line with his nail, reading it again. A batch prefix. An admin token fragment. Not the sort of thing you got when you did it properly. Request logged, duty supervisor approval, automated container stamped with the standard naming convention. This was the opposite: a shortcut route, a quiet pull that implied privileges normal security staff didn’t have, and the kind of access people pretended didn’t exist until it saved them.
His stomach tightened, not with panic but with that old prosecutorial clarity: the moment you realise the lie has fingerprints, even if the liar thinks it’s gloved. The packet wasn’t just poison; it was a delivery mechanism, and delivery mechanisms have handles.
In the margin, the tag ended abruptly, as if someone had tried to crop it out and misjudged the edge. Careless, or rushed, or arrogant. Any of the three would do.
He let the page settle back into the stack. Outside his office, the hospital’s night sounds continued: the distant wheels of a trolley, a door sealing, the soft, bored buzz of fluorescent tubes. Someone was operating inside the building’s own veins, exporting shadows as evidence. And they had the keys.
Eirik pulled the hospital’s own security policy from memory the way he’d pull statute from the air in court. A normal export was a small ritual of accountability: a request raised in the queue, a ticket number, a duty supervisor’s approval, then the system doing what it always did: spitting out a sealed package with a container name so standardised it was almost comforting. There were meant to be human steps, and the humans were meant to be visible in the logs.
The routing tag on the printout didn’t belong to that ritual. It read like an internal shortcut, the kind that bypassed the queue entirely. A batch job. Administrator context. A path that implied the footage had been pulled from the source repository and compiled elsewhere, in a working directory that shouldn’t exist on any official chain of custody. No supervisor stamp, no request header, no automated audit trail; just a quiet extraction with the illusion of legitimacy laid over it afterwards.
Not a leak from the outside, then. An action from within. By someone who knew how to make absence look like compliance.
The tag changed the packet’s status in his mind from a leak to a manoeuvre. Someone hadn’t merely “got hold” of CCTV; they had reached into the hospital’s own archive and assembled a narrative from the raw feed, like editing testimony before it ever reached court. That required a level of permission that sat too close to other quiet powers here: the ability to amend metadata, to reopen closed entries, to smooth over discrepancies until the system stopped asking questions. The same kind of access that could shift a time of death by minutes (enough to break a timeline) and that could reconcile narcotics counts with a few keystrokes so no routine alarm ever fired. Different departments on paper, but the privileges overlapped in practice. An operation, not an opportunistic theft.
He set the problem out the way he’d draft a charge: elements, opportunity, means. Admin export meant a small caste. Then the human narrowing: who was on-call, who had badge entries in the gaps, who could work unseen. The time windows shrank to handovers and thin-staffed hours. Exactly when Bryn’s unlogged couriers slipped in. Poison, yes. Also a fingerprint.
He drags the notepad closer, the paper rasping under his thumb, and writes in block letters: ADMIN EXPORT. Beneath it he lists the few first names that should never sit on the same page unless the hospital’s hierarchy is rotten, IT security, facilities, a deputy director with “temporary” privileges. Find who held that access at the pull, and the packet becomes interference, not scandal. Then the real question: who is editing reality from inside.
The packet sat square on the desk blotter, too tidy to be a courier’s accident. White envelope, heavy paper, the kind that didn’t bend in a pocket. He didn’t open it at first. He watched it the way he watched a witness who’d rehearsed: for the twitch at the corner, the give in the story.
When he finally slid a finger under the seal, there was no note. Just a thin stack of prints and a USB drive in a cheap plastic sleeve. The prints were still warm from a high-end machine: clean greys, sharp contrast, timecodes in the corner like a promise of objectivity. He read them once, then again, letting his mind do what it always did when something wanted to be believed: catalogue, compare, isolate.
A corridor camera: him entering, shoulders squared, the angle from above turning his height into intimidation. Cut. Next still: a nurse’s face half turned away, captioned by someone else’s transcript, HER VOICE TREMBLING, though there was no audio here, only the implication. Cut. A security guard’s hand on a door, his own outstretched palm, frozen mid-gesture to look like force. Cut. In every sequence the beginning was missing, the first words, the first push. Everything started after the room’s temperature had already been raised, after consent had already been blurred.
He found the gaps by instinct. Timecodes that leapt in neat increments, skipping the minutes where context lived. Angles that selected for his worst light. Metadata blocks printed at the bottom: exported by an internal tool, not screen-captured off a monitor. Someone had gone into the archive and pulled it like evidence, not gossip. Someone who knew what a board would see, what a paper would quote, what an internal review would call “pattern”.
The phone dump was the same: fragments, clipped threads, the kind that could be read as pressure if you wanted pressure and read as procedure if you wanted law. It was designed to be carried into a meeting and laid down with a sigh.
He felt the shape of it, plausible, clean, poisonous, and his stomach went cold in a way winter couldn’t manage. This wasn’t meant to stop the case. It was meant to replace it.
He laid the prints beside his diary and did the dull work that made panic useful. Timecodes, cross-referenced with the metronome of the building: the handover at nineteen-thirty when tired nurses stopped being cautious, the cleaners’ round that left the corridors briefly unpeopled, the thin, watchful hour before the pharmacy count when everyone suddenly remembered paperwork. Bryn had told him those rhythms the way you told a lover where the floorboards creaked. The clips had been pulled to sit exactly on those seams: moments when a raised voice could be read as coercion, a closed door as secrecy, a hurried step as pursuit.
He watched the night’s architecture assemble itself: by morning an internal review could cite “pattern” and “staff welfare” and suspend his access pending assessment. No warrant application survived that, not cleanly; any request would look like a man lashing out at the institution that had caught him. By midday the board could frame it as patient protection and reputational hygiene, and every badge reader would become a sermon.
The case wouldn’t be dismissed. It would be renamed. It would be him.
He drew two columns on the hospital notepad, the pen skating over cheap paper. PROCEDURE: request logs, preserve chain, speak to attending, schedule the witness with consent and oversight. SURVIVAL: copy what can be edited, photograph what can be “corrected”, take statements before fear settled in. He stared at the lists until the second one looked less like misconduct and more like weather.
He texted Ragnhild from a burner he’d kept for complainants who wanted deniability: Need eyes tonight. Internal export of video/phone fragments. Smear shaping. Can you pull registry links on supplier rename. Fast. No names on my end. Then Bryn, simpler, colder: When does the private courier usually arrive next? Window, route, anything.
In the fluorescent hush, memory came like a seizure: forms initialled in haste, a witness he’d pressed too hard, certainty stitched up to look like proof. A family’s kitchen table, the silence after his decision, the apology he never found a clean way to make. The guilt didn’t thaw him; it honed him. This packet wasn’t just sabotage. It was bait, inviting him to overreach again, to become the story.
He reduced the night to a sequence of obtainable facts: who could generate an admin export without triggering alerts, which badge IDs had touched the narcotics ledger, which terminal sat on a subnet no one audited after midnight. If the leak had a hand, it had a login. He shrugged into his coat, pen heavy in his inside pocket, and left without phoning anyone he couldn’t trust to be unobserved, re-entering the corridors at a measured pace: like a man walking back into cross-examination.
In Stairwell C’s dead zone, Eirik stopped where the fluorescent light thinned and the concrete turned damp, choosing the landing that forced anyone coming up to either face him or retreat. The air here was colder, as if the building itself held its breath. The bleach tang from the wards didn’t reach so much as seep, mixed with old rust and the faint, sour ghost of cigarettes from a decade of staff breaks taken where nobody watched.
He didn’t reach for a phone or a recorder. Habit tugged (document, timestamp, secure) but he had learned what devices did to people: they made them perform. He needed Signe unperformed. He needed her instincts, her errors, the micro-second tells she couldn’t litigate away.
His glove brushed the rail. The paint was chipped to metal in places, polished by thousands of hands that had carried grief, fatigue, and casual indifference between floors. Under his suit the cold bit his forearms; sleep-deprivation made every sensation sharp, like the edge of a file. He anchored himself in procedure instead: if this became a brawl of narratives, he would lose. If it stayed a sequence of verifiable events, he could drag it into daylight.
He listened. The hospital wasn’t quiet, not really; it just hid its noise behind doors. Somewhere above, a trolley wheel rattled and then fell silent. A ventilation fan laboured like an old man. From below came the muted thud of a door letting go.
Eirik kept his face still. In his head, a list ticked forward with the mechanical calm he used in court: edited timestamps; badge entries that opened doors without matching bodies; procurement invoices routed through a shell with a fresh director; a courier who never touched the main bay. Facts, not suspicions. Pressure applied to the places it couldn’t be dismissed as paranoia.
Footsteps rose, measured and unhurried. The cadence said choice, not fear. He lifted his eyes to the turn of the stairs, already noting what she would note: the missing camera dome, the blind slice behind the fire door, the clean sightline to the exit.
Signe came into view from the lower flight as if the building had summoned her and she had decided to answer on her own time. Winter rode in with her: grit at the hem of her coat, a thawing sheen on the leather of her shoes, a faint trace of cold air that didn’t belong in a sealed stairwell. Her steps were even, unhurried, the rhythm of someone who refused to be chased.
She didn’t look at him immediately. Her gaze moved with the neat, acquisitive attention she reserved for exhibits. Handrail worn to bare metal, the overbright strip light that failed to reach the corners, the fire door’s window offering a narrow, distorted sliver of corridor. She noted the absent camera dome without tilting her head, as if she had already counted the blind spots on a floor plan. One gloved hand brushed her mourning band, not quite a gesture of grief, more like a reminder of leverage.
When her eyes finally found Eirik’s, the calm in them was manufactured: a surface poured and set hard. No warmth, no invitation. Just assessment. His stance, his fatigue, how much he had come to say and how much he could prove.
Eirik began the way he did in court: with what could be pinned down. A death certificate timestamp altered forty-six minutes after the last recorded vitals, the edit logged under a user who wasn’t on shift. A narcotics ledger entry “corrected” from an administrative terminal registered to Level 5, not the ward: no clinical justification attached, no dual sign-off, just a keystroke and a new number. Then the badge anomalies: doors in the North Wing clicking open at 02:[^13], 02:[^41], 03:[^07]. Clean digital pings with no corresponding body on any functioning camera, as if the building had admitted ghosts. He didn’t lean on accusation, didn’t offer her a question to sharpen into theatre. He let each fact sit between them like a sealed exhibit, forcing her to choose which lie to touch first.
He moved to procurement, where corruption wore a tie. A supplier that renamed itself between billing cycles; directors replaced overnight, signatures shifting but handwriting steady. Invoice numbers that ran, then jumped. No disorder, just absence, as if someone had lifted pages from a bound ledger. And the courier: after midnight, twice weekly, slipping through the sub-basement corridor, bypassing the main bay, always inside the same seven-minute slice.
Signe let him finish. Not patience. Inventory. Her eyes moved like they were counting exits and liabilities in the same sweep. When she spoke, it was almost mild. “How many of those logs have names beside them, Holmson? Real names. And who have you shown?” The mourning band caught the light as her hand tightened, a brief tremor she strangled. The air felt narrower; each of them measured what would fracture first.
Eirik unbuttoned his coat with the care of someone handling evidence rather than fabric. The stairwell’s air was colder than the corridor beyond, a thin draught threading up from the sub-basement, carrying disinfectant and damp concrete. He kept his shoulders square, his hands steady, and for a moment he watched Signe’s gaze: how it dipped, not to his face, but to the movement at his chest, measuring what he was about to make visible.
From the inside pocket he drew a flat packet, thick enough to resist bending, its edges worn slightly where it had sat against his ribs for hours. The paper was not hospital stock. It had the particular stiffness of government forms: cotton fibre, dull-white, made to survive handling and time. A watermark caught the stairwell light when he tilted it: a crown, faint and official, the sort of mark that meant the document was born inside a ministry and would be missed if it vanished.
He didn’t extend it across the space between them. He held it in both hands, close to his sternum, as if proximity was the last layer of security he could control. The seal was intact: red wax beneath a transparent strip, stamped cleanly, no lifting at the corners. The kind of seal that turned curiosity into a criminal act.
Signe’s expression stayed composed, but her pupils tightened, the smallest tell. Her fingers flexed once at her side, then stilled, as though she had started to reach for it and caught herself. The mourning band on her wrist looked darker here, a deliberate line in a place built of institutional beige.
“This doesn’t go through your hospital channels,” she said, voice low. It wasn’t a question. It was a recalculation.
“No,” Eirik replied, and let the packet hover in the air like a verdict not yet read. He could feel its heat against his palm, the warmth stolen from his body, and he understood the simple physics of it: information carried close, kept alive, ready to be released into the cold.
He didn’t dress it up. He listed it, item by item, as if reading charges into a record. Procurement board minutes (non-public) covering three meetings that should have been filed and weren’t, pages where the vote tallies were present but the discussion notes had been excised. An internal audit draft, stamped circulation restricted, the kind written in cautious language that still couldn’t disguise the pattern: invoices routed through a renamed supplier, approvals batched at odd hours, a single administrator account touching every “correction”. And a police briefing: not a rumour-sheet, but a formal intelligence summary tying that shell to named street crews, laundering routes through security overtime, and a courier network that used hospitals because hospitals never sleep.
He spoke each title like a coordinate, not a threat. The stairwell seemed to absorb the words and give them back colder.
Signe’s jaw set; her control tightened, grief and calculation welded together. She didn’t need to see the pages to understand what they did. Evidence didn’t have to be dramatic to be lethal.
Signe shifted her weight, the way a barrister does before turning a room into a stage, and Eirik caught the intention before it could become movement. “Listen,” he said, quiet, clipped. “This hasn’t been filed. It isn’t in any case-management system. There’s no chain-of-custody entry because there is no custody yet.” He watched her mouth tighten, the flicker of a plan rerouting.
“It hasn’t gone near your friends in Legal. It hasn’t touched the hospital’s compliance people, or their ‘privacy officer’, or anyone with an incentive to sanitise it into harmlessness.” He held the sealed packet steady. “I kept it out here so it can’t be corrected, ‘lost’, re-dated, or smothered in policy language until it stops meaning anything.”
Then he brought out the colder thing: his timeline. Not narrative, not motive: just columns and cross-matched stamps: badge swipes against ward doors, narcotics ledger edits, pharmacy counts, delivery windows down in the sub-basement. He tapped the faults that couldn’t be argued away: a timestamp that slipped a minute backwards, an audit signature duplicated, a door logged as opened when the corridor camera recorded nothing: because someone knew where the blind went.
He let the packet hang between them like a weight, not a flourish. “Tonight,” he said, “this leaves the building.” National oversight, the police, a duty judge. Places where hospital etiquette and favours didn’t apply. His voice never rose. He offered her the narrow mercy: cooperate and they could pull the infection out without shutting wards; resist and he would make sure no boardroom could package it as misfortune.
Signe didn’t reach for the packet. She let it hang, as if touching it would legitimise it, and instead rearranged the air with language. “Patient confidentiality isn’t etiquette,” she said. “It’s statute. You can stand in a stairwell and pretend you’re outside the system, but you’re still inside the law.”
Eirik watched the corner of her mouth, the micro-tension that came before she smiled in court.
“You’re talking about logs,” she continued, voice level, surgical. “A hospital is a machine that cleans itself on a schedule. Floors, beds, hands, charts. Every eight hours the scene is wiped. Every shift the narrative resets. You’ll walk into court and say ‘edited timestamp’ and I will say ‘routine correction’. You’ll say ‘badge anomaly’ and I’ll say ‘tailgating’. You’ll say ‘missing narcotics’ and I’ll say ‘counting error under pressure’. Reasonable doubt doesn’t need an alibi; it needs a plausible explanation.”
She angled her head, the mourning band stark against her pale throat. “And chain of custody?” A soft laugh with no warmth. “You carry a sealed packet around like a relic and call it purity. But where did it come from? Who touched it? Who printed it? Who accessed the system to obtain it? Your own restraint is an admission: you know it won’t survive the light.”
The stairwell’s fluorescent hum made every word sound too clean.
“The nurses you want to turn into witnesses,” she said, “are exhausted and afraid. They misremember times because they work through alarms and vomit and death. They will say what you want until my cross-examination reminds them what their mortgage and their union rep look like. The locked ward you’re circling is a legal minefield, consent, capacity, sedation, privacy. One wrong step and the judge will throw half your case out just to disinfect the courtroom.”
Her gaze settled on him, precise. “And the board. Your boardroom fantasies. You push this into headlines and they’ll go into containment. Budgets. Ward closures. ‘Independent review.’ Patients will pay for your crusade, Prosecutor. Not the people you think you’re hunting.”
She paused, as if granting him a choice. “You can indict. You can posture. But you can’t prosecute an institution without becoming its next casualty.”
Eirik let her finish. The statutes, the cleaning schedules, the courtroom hygiene. He allowed it to stack up between them like tiling. When she stopped, he didn’t try to push it down. He slid something smaller through the grout.
“There’s a patient on the locked ward,” he said. No name. No flourish. “Present on the evening census. Absent after midnight. Not discharged. Not transferred. Not dead on paper.”
He watched her eyes, the way attention narrowed when it hurt.
“The sedation orders don’t reconcile,” he went on, as if reading inventory on a loading dock. “Dose intervals that don’t match the administered chart. A medication signed out against one identifier and administered under another. The narcotics log corrected, always corrected, after the night shift hands over.”
He didn’t call it a scheme. He didn’t call it murder. He laid out the shape of it: a body kept quiet by paperwork, a person made into a rounding error.
“And badge entries,” he said, “into that corridor at times the system treats as empty. The kind of access you only take when you believe no one is watching. Off-record. Off-time. Off-books.”
Her composure doesn’t shatter; it misfires. A pause too small to be polite, a breath snagged high in the chest, as if the air in Stairwell C has turned thin. Her fingers cinch on the strap of her bag until the leather creaks, knuckles whitening in the fluorescent wash. The mourning band at her wrist, so often worn like a legal argument, deliberate and legible, suddenly looks like a tourniquet, something tied to stop a bleed that won’t stop.
For a beat her eyes lose their courtroom focus and go somewhere else: a bedside monitor, a note signed too neatly, a word spoken softly to make violence sound clinical. Then she pulls it back, jaw setting hard, anger rising to cauterise what grief exposed.
“Complication,” Eirik said, and let the word sit between them like a used swab. “That’s how you launder intent. You widen the margins until cause becomes weather.” He spoke as if under oath, dismantling the euphemism into steps: an altered timestamp, a late entry, a dose that never quite matches the chart. He watched her gaze slip to the landing, then snap back. Counting exits.
Signe’s anger stops performing. It settles into her voice like frost, cutting, intimate, and suddenly too honest. “You don’t understand what you’re touching,” she says, not as counsel but as widow, as creditor, as someone with a grave to defend. The threat shifts: not motions and exclusions, but names, one in particular, he is not permitted to haul into daylight. For a moment she studies him, deciding whether the truth is worth the cost, or whether she will make him pay for saying it aloud.
The stairwell gives up a new sound beneath their breathing: footsteps, measured and paired, climbing too evenly to belong to nurses drifting to a break or porters hauling a trolley. The rhythm has a practised steadiness, a metronome laid over the building’s hum. Eirik angles his head as if listening is casual but his eyes are already on the lower flight, tracking the gap between steps the way he counts lies.
Two. A pause. Two again. No shuffle, no cough, no tired drag of rubber soles. Someone is trying to sound like they have every right to be there.
He tastes disinfectant and old concrete, the air cold enough to pull tight at the back of his throat. His fingers, bare despite the weather outside, flex once against the folder under his arm. Paper. Useless, if this turns physical. The hospital’s rules are written to manage chaos; they are not written to stop it.
Signe doesn’t look down. She doesn’t have to. The change in the air reaches her too: her shoulders settle, her posture becoming an argument. For the first time since her grief bled through, she seems entirely present, as if threat is the one language the building speaks fluently.
“Your people?” Eirik asks, quietly. It isn’t an accusation. It’s a test, offered without heat.
A faint exhale through her nose. “Mine don’t wear cheap shoes,” she says, and the dismissal is almost tender, almost true. Her hand slips into her coat pocket and does not come out again. He watches her eyes instead: they flick, once, to the wall where the camera coverage ends, the blind angle they chose for privacy now turning into a liability.
The footsteps stop on the landing below, close enough that Eirik can hear the minute shift of weight, the creak of a tread under pressure. Someone is waiting for a cue: waiting to be sure which of them to collect.
Down the service corridor the latch ticks, once, then again, like a knuckle on a coffin lid, testing the give of the mechanism without taking the risk of opening it. The sound is clean, metallic, and too deliberate for a porter fumbling with keys. It carries through the stairwell’s poured concrete with the intimate clarity of a whispered name, and Eirik feels it land between his ribs.
He doesn’t move, because movement is evidence. His mind does what it always does when the room tightens: it inventories. Service door to the sub-basement. Blind angle. No CCTV. After-hours lock cycle due in minutes. A security contractor on night rota who bills overtime in blocks too neat to be true. Someone is close enough to step in, and disciplined enough to stay unseen until the moment becomes defendable.
He adjusts his grip on the folder, not for comfort but to keep his hands occupied. Paper. Timelines. The kind of weapon that only works in daylight.
From the corridor beyond, a breath (or the absence of one) seems to shift the air. The latch stays still, as if whoever touched it has gone perfectly quiet, waiting to hear which of them speaks next.
Signe’s phone tremors against her palm, the vibration sharp in the dead air, then stops as though the signal has been throttled. The screen flares once, an unread preview, a name cropped to meaninglessness, and goes dark. She doesn’t look down to check it. That would be for someone who feared missing instructions. Instead her eyes slide past Eirik’s shoulder to the angle where the stairwell folds into shadow, where the building’s cameras politely stop caring. A faint tightening at the corner of her mouth reads like recognition, not surprise. Her thumb strokes the edge of the handset, not scrolling, not calling. Counting. Then, almost imperceptibly, she dips her chin. Not to him. To whoever is waiting for permission to step out of the concrete and make this meeting end.
Eirik feels the building recalculating him, badge logs, lock schedules, contractor protocols, until “prosecutor” becomes “unauthorised presence”. One timed lock cycle, one conveniently diligent patrol, one internal note about a man loitering near a locked ward, and he is escorted out in the language of safety. While he is contained, someone else can be transferred, quietly sedated, or simply fail to wake before dawn makes it routine.
The air thickened without a weapon drawn, pressure rising as if the stairwell had been sealed and something invisible had been turned on. No shouting. No touch. Just a shared comprehension of logistics: lock cycles, blind spots, overtime men with keys, a narrative that could be typed into an incident report and believed. Here, force would be deniable, procedural, clean. No blood on tile, no fingerprints on a file.
The hospital made its announcement with the sort of sound designed to avoid responsibility: a thin, institutional chime followed by the first magnetic lock catching somewhere above them with a dull, patient thunk. It was not loud, but it was final. The noise travelled down the concrete throat of Stairwell C like a decision being carried from desk to desk, signature to signature, until it reached their landing and settled in Eirik’s ribs.
His gaze went to the access panel bolted to the wall beside the door: scratched plastic, a smear of old fingerprints, the little blue screen waking as if it had been waiting. A line of text blinked into existence and began its slow crawl. He didn’t need to read it. He understood it the way he understood court timetables and custody deadlines: systems that looked neutral until they were used on you. A countdown bar crept forward with bureaucratic patience, the hospital’s way of saying this will happen whether you agree or not.
Signe did look, but only with her eyes. No head turn. No concession to urgency. Her face remained composed, the grief underneath held in place like a bandage applied too tightly. In the cold light her mourning band read less like ornament than warning. She listened to the building as if it were one more client with a habit of betraying its own interests.
Eirik felt the locked ward beyond the stairwell not as a place but as a set of permissions: badge hierarchies, after-hours protocols, incident reports written in passive voice. He thought of how easily a man could be made to appear where he shouldn’t be. How easily a “prosecutor” could become “unidentified male” in a security log, a liability to be escorted away for everyone’s comfort. The chime had teeth, even if it was dressed as courtesy.
A faint vibration ran through the door under his palm, magnet drawing, metal aligning, then stilled. He could almost hear the night shift taking control of the building, each lock engaging like a clerk sealing an envelope.
Time, in here, wasn’t measured in minutes. It was measured in what the system would record.
A second chime followed the first, then another lock caught nearer, the sound travelling through concrete like a message meant for no one in particular. The air changed: not colder, exactly, but denser, as if the stairwell had decided it was allowed to remember its boundaries. Somewhere a door tried, failed, and settled back into place with a muted complaint.
The access panel gave a sharp, officious beep and its little screen filled with text that moved at the pace of policy: NIGHT RESTRICTIONS ACTIVE. RESTRICTED ZONES. PRESENCE LOGGED. Words designed to sound like safety while doing the work of a trap. He imagined the entry in tomorrow’s report: time, badge absence, “male subject,” “refused to comply,” the passive voice doing what hands never had to.
Eirik felt something in him click over, the way a courtroom goes quiet when a witness says the wrong thing. There would be no more circling, no more letting her posture dictate the tempo. In less than a minute, the hospital would make its own record of who belonged and who did not, and that record would acquire weight. He could almost see it becoming evidence before it became truth.
He kept his voice level, as if he were dictating into a recorder: something that could be transcribed, quoted, replayed without losing its meaning. “I will indict whoever the evidence names.” The words were plain, almost bored, but each one had been chosen to resist the kind of softening that happened in committee rooms. Not the easiest defendant. Not the nurse who couldn’t afford counsel. Not the orderly with cash folded into his locker. Whoever. He watched her closely, not for drama, but for the smallest failure of control: the blink too late, the jaw tightening, the brief mental arithmetic that meant he’d found a pressure point.
The access panel chirped again, sharper now, and the door’s latch gave a brief, irritated twitch: metal testing metal before it agreed to lock. Eirik moved in a fraction, not a threat, just the inevitable shift of a man who had stopped accommodating theatrics. “You get one thing,” he said. An offer, and a warning: don’t let your grief become someone else’s handle. “Which ward, and when?”
Silence held, stretched by the hospital’s own metronome. Somewhere above them a lock took hold with a dull finality, then another; the sound travelled down the concrete like a verdict being filed. The access panel’s screen cast a sterile glow, an unblinking pupil waiting to assign blame to whoever lingered. Eirik said nothing. No persuasion, no sermon. Just the cold, deliberate stillness of a man who had already committed to the record.
Signe’s gaze moved first, not to him, but to the architecture: the seam where concrete met painted tile, the little alcove by the fire hose cabinet, the turn of the stairs where the light thinned. She mapped the stairwell the way other people mapped faces: by what could be trusted to stay hidden. Her mourning band sat at her wrist like a warning label. For a moment the mask held, immaculate: a defence counsel weighing options, an operator assessing risk.
Then a pulse of something else pressed through it. Not fear: she’d have used fear if she could have. Something sharper, like a splinter under a nail.
“When you say you’ll indict whoever the evidence names,” she said, voice even, “you make it sound as though evidence is a god. As though it isn’t made. Edited. Misfiled. Lost under a mop and a new shift.” Her eyes came back to his, pale against the bruised corridor light. “You think you’re the only one who can read a timeline.”
Eirik didn’t move. In the hospital’s stillness, his restraint felt less like politeness and more like procedure.
Signe inhaled through her nose, the way people did when they were about to lift something heavy. “Ward 3B,” she said. The designation landed with a clinical neatness, as if she were dictating for a chart. After it, silence. A pause long enough to let him wonder if she’d walk it back, long enough to see her choose not to. The brittle thing inside her flexed, held.
“Between 00:[^40] and 01:[^20].” Another breath. “One night.”
She lifted her chin a fraction, as if to reframe giving as taking. “That’s all you get.”
A lock somewhere in the stairwell ticked and settled; the sound threaded through the concrete and returned as a dull echo. Signe’s mouth tightened (controlled, almost courteous) while her fingers, near her coat seam, made a small, unconscious press, as though checking for a phone she didn’t dare use here. “Don’t confuse this with help,” she added softly. “Confuse it with restraint.”
Eirik didn’t let the information warm him. Gratitude was a kind of noise; it muddied statements and softened edges. He took what she’d given and did what he always did with a volatile thing: he framed it.
“Ward three-B,” he said, precise, the consonants clipped clean. “Zero-zero-forty to zero-one-twenty. One night.” He didn’t ask which night. Not yet. The repetition wasn’t politeness; it was a pin through paper, fixing it to the board before the draught of later denials could lift it away.
His mind moved in narrow corridors of its own. Badge-entry anomalies: who could reach 3B after midnight without tripping a log, who could borrow a card, who had administrator access to make a gap look like a glitch. The courier’s route through the sub-basement: the unlogged door, the service lift that stank of cold grease, the timing that now had somewhere to land. The ledger timestamps that had been “corrected”: the neatness of falsification, the human hand inside the machine.
“A fraction,” he said, not accusing, simply recording it aloud as if for a court stenographer. “But it’s a fraction with edges.”
Signe’s expression smooths over, grief pressed back under lacquer. The woman who had yielded a ward and a window retreats; the attorney remains. She leans in just enough that Eirik catches the faint, medicinal sweetness clinging to her coat, the borrowed cleanliness of corridors that never truly clean.
“Use it wrong,” she says, the words kept small, as if the concrete itself could be compelled to confidentiality. “And you’ll still get your indictment: just not the right body for it.” Her eyes flick once to the stairwell’s dead angle, then back, assessing consequences like costs. “You’ll lose your witness. You’ll lose your access. You’ll be escorted out with a polite letter and they’ll call it cooperation.”
The last syllables come out edged; not quite a threat, not quite a plea: something grief has filed down into a weapon.
The locking mechanism completed its cycle with a muted, administrative certainty: click, click, click: like signatures landing on paperwork he would never be allowed to read. Eirik moved on the last beat, not fast, simply exact, choosing the moment the door would yield without comment. He slipped into the gap. Behind him the badge reader blinked red, a small lid shutting, indifferent.
Fluorescents rinse the corridor into a single, merciless colour as he steps back in, and the hospital’s disinfectant-and-burnt-coffee breath comes up like a palm over the mouth. His heartbeat stays measured; his fingers stay numb inside his gloves. Ward 3B, that window. Tight enough to act on, sharp enough to cut. It could surface a witness from sedation, or pin a death to a minute. By morning: daylight and procedure, or the institution closes ranks and calls the silence “order.”