A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two, Mark Hobson [notion reading list txt] 📗

boy of around five or six, paper-clipped to a sheaf of medical notes. The boy’s eyes were all bloodshot and watery, but whether the picture was pre-op or post-op Pieter didn’t know.

He scanned his gaze over the paperwork which all seemed fairly standard stuff. The child’s date of birth, address, general health. There was mention of a pre-existing condition: AMBLYOPIA, which Pieter knew was the correct medical term for a lazy eye. But no name. Just PATIENT 27.

Below was a handwritten note:

Following complications the patient was recommended for SPECIAL PROCEDUREin Unit One.

It was signed by both Dr Christiaan Bakker and his assistant Julian Visser.

Pieter dropped the file back onto the desk and picked up another.

This one was for PATIENT 41 – U1 RZ. PROCEDURE: 3 – date 28th MARCH, and inside was a photo of an Asian woman, who according to her notes was aged fifty-nine and requiring lens replacement treatment.

Again the same recommendation for the SPECIAL PROCEDUREin Unit One.

Another folder: PATIENT 46 – U1 RZ. PROCEDURE: 3 – date 2nd APRIL. A thirty-six year old male needing retinal detachment repair work, and being put forward once again for the SPECIAL PROCEDURE

He tossed the file onto the cluttered desktop and stood there thinking things over.

Unit One RZ? he pondered. SPECIAL PROCEDURE? Where was Unit One, and what exactly did this SPECIAL PROCEDURE entail?

Determined to find out, and wanting to ask a few serious questions about what had happened to Kaatje, Pieter left the office, his gun back in his hand. Most of all he wanted to privately confront Visser, before he called in police back-up and let the wheels of justice take over.

He moved over to the internal corridor. The automatic doors here were locked in the open position just as the main entrance was, and once again he found himself following the coloured lines on the polished floor, using the flashlight to light his way.

The place was strangely deserted. Everywhere there was a hushed and empty feel, as though the entire clinic had been abandoned, evacuated even, in a rush. Just ahead was a wheelchair left askew across the passage, and further along a patient’s gown lay discarded on the floor – not that he had seen any signs of actual patients yesterday. And as he entered the glass-covered passageway he felt something crunch beneath his feet, so he pointed the beam of the flashlight down, and saw thousands of tiny red and white capsules and tablets spilled across the floor.

Stepping through them he entered the separate building block of the facility. A few metres ahead and the yellow line swung to the right and disappeared beneath a door – CONSULTATION ROOM No 1 he remembered. He headed across.

Before he pushed through the door he noticed a bank of light switches on the wall and he reached out and flicked both rows down. To his surprise, the lights in this section still worked, and everywhere the bright ceiling lights flickered to life. Switching off the flashlight and ramming it into his coat pocket, Pieter entered, using the barrel of his gun to push open the door.

The room was familiar, and once more there was nobody here. Yesterday, during his walk around the place, he’d peered through the glass and given the place a cursory glance, and everything was how he recalled. Now he decided to have a better look around.

The first thing he noticed was that it was much tidier than Visser’s office. The L-shaped desk was reasonably well organized and the chair was pushed neatly under it. On the surface, as well as the monitors and a large, square leather blotter with pen and several blank envelopes, there was a small stack of kidney-shaped stainless steel medical dishes, as well as a chunky pair of magnifying eyeglasses with small LED lights attached to both sides. He spotted nothing unusual. Putting his gun away, he tried the desk drawers, but they were all locked and there was no key.

Behind the desk was the examination couch surrounded by a bank of equipment and lights and a keratometer. On the wall opposite was a standard eye chart of the sort found in every opticians.

Tucked into the far corner there was a tall freezer with a glass door. On the shelves inside were four or five trays filled with test tube samples.

A small window overlooked the inner courtyard.

He wondered briefly if this was where they had held Kaatje and lasered her eyes away, but he concluded that was unlikely. They would do that in one of the operating theatres.

Shrugging to himself, content that there was nothing here worth lingering over, Pieter returned to the main corridor outside. Feeling more and more relaxed, sure that the place was deserted, he continued onwards without removing his gun.

Two minutes later and he followed the blue line where it branched away down a short side-passage to his left, and he pushed through a pair of swing doors into the overnight accommodation ward, named THE JACQUES DAVIEL WING.

It was how he remembered it from the photos on the website, which he’d scrolled through on his iPad on their drive over yesterday morning. The large ward was shaped like a huge letter U, with a curving row of large and luxurious-looking beds arranged around a series of couches and coffee tables in the centre. There was also a coffee machine, some games to play and today’s copies of the daily newspapers, including The New York Times and Bild, plus a row of three laptops. At both ends of the U was a matching pair of large tv screens, visible to all of the patients recovering from their operations, but currently turned off. All very plush, spotlessly clean, and empty of patients or staff.

He wandered up and down, taking note of random things:

The neatly made beds.

The lifeless diagnostic equipment.

The half-completed game of snakes and ladders.

A jug of orange juice on a coffee table, with a pair of plastic beakers.

A mobile phone, left behind by someone. Pieter picked this up