Free Angel of Death by John Askill Page B

the drug himself and left Claire in the care of Nurse Allitt who was accompanied for a short period by another nurse until the Ward Sister told them it didn’t need two of them there. The second nurse had only just left when Nurse Allitt cried out again from the treatment room: ‘Arrest.’ This time Claire had suffered cardiac failure.
    Dr Porter and Sister Barker had just asked Claire’s parents if they would like to see their little girl. Her condition was now stable and they had succeeded in stemming the attack with drugs, they told them. If Claire remained stable for the next twenty minutes then she would be transferred to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham where facilities were better.
    David and Sue were on their way to the treatment room to see Claire – but they never made it. As they approached the door they heard a nurse shouting: ‘Come quick’.
    The Pecks, overcome with fear, returned to the TV room. Again they asked the Sister if Claire was going to die. ‘I hope not,’ she replied. ‘Were thingsgetting worse?’ asked Sue. ‘Yes,’ admitted the Sister, ‘they are, but the staff are doing everything they can.’
    With Claire at crisis point David asked if they could see their daughter because, if she was going to die, they wanted to be with her. As Sue and David walked into the treatment room they were stunned by what they found. David closes his eyes as he recalls the scene. ‘The crash team was still working on Claire, they were giving her heart massage, electric shock and injections into her heart. She was surrounded by people, Beverley Allitt amongst them. They were all sweating, busy, working flat out as though they had been trying for a long time to save her.
    â€˜When they saw us they all stood back to let us look. I remember Sue saying: “Stop it. I think she’s had enough.” I wanted them to leave her as well.’
    David recalls: ‘Allitt was sitting right behind us, all she did was stare at us, she just watched and listened.’
    Sue broke down and cried as she remembered the sight. ‘Claire was dead, it was obvious, but they hadn’t given up hope. I suppose there was a one in a thousand chance they might pull her back, and they still wanted to carry on.’
    David still lives with the memory. ‘We gave Claire a kiss. She was laid on a white table with a light shining on her. She had a lot of holes in her chest where they had injected her. She was very pale, almost white. They said they would carry on, and they asked us to go back to the TV room, butwe realised we had lost her. Until then we hadn’t really thought she would go …’
    In the next cubicle Sue Phillips was sitting at baby Katie’s bedside when Nurse Allitt walked in to tell her that Claire was dead.
    Sue Phillips said: ‘She just walked in and started to talk. She just wanted to tell me every detail of what had happened. My Becky was dead, and there I was with Katie, and I couldn’t stop her talking. She said the worst bit was when Sue Peck wanted to hold on to Claire in her arms, and wouldn’t let go. She wouldn’t believe she was dead.
    â€˜She was asking Dr Porter to prove that Claire wasn’t alive any more. Bev said Claire still had all the monitors on, and Dr Porter had to turn each one off so she could see it was running in a straight line and there was no sign of life.
    â€˜He showed her the straight line where the heartbeat should have been and only then did Sue Peck finally agree to let Claire go. Bev was in tears and she told me she had to tell someone. She just had to speak to somebody about what had happened. It was an awful time because Becky had only been dead for seventeen days.
    â€˜But Bev was so upset. There were tears rolling down her face.’ The truth was very different. Sue Peck had not asked Dr Porter to prove Claire was dead. Neither had the doctor pointed to the