Faith

by Peter James

  Faith followed him up a flight of stairs and along another corridor. 'Do you know all the patients here?'

  'I try to see everyone for the first consultation, then decide what treatment would work best. In conventional medicine, most of the time there is just one treatment and you deviate at your peril, risking the wrath of your profession, the insurance companies, malpractice suits, you name it. In the medicine we practice here, every case has different needs. That young woman has a very rare form of rheumatoid-arthritis. Her mother brought her to see me two years ago — she was in a wheelchair and unable to hold a pen. Now she just has problems with one foot. She drives here herself. We've given her her life back.'

  'Amazing.'

  He stopped outside another door. 'We don't do anything amazing here. We only do what the pharmaceutical industry ought to allow conventional medics to do, but doesn't. You have to understand where much of the pharmaceutical industry is coming from. There's no money in curing people with a one-off knockout drug — the development costs are too high. The big bucks are in disease management. The industry likes chronic conditions that don't actually kill you, but keep you in a state of permanent ill heath, on medication and drug-dependent all your life. That's how it can recoup the hundreds of millions of pounds that drugs cost to develop.'

  He raised his eyes. 'Our sole interest is to see patients cured. That's the reason the pharmaceutical industry does everything in its power to trash what we do. It gets upset when we cure people using techniques that are not patentable, or natural remedies that are freely available.'

  She gave him a quizzical smile. 'So why do the big bosses invite you to their dinners?'

  'I think they just like to know their enemies.' He knocked, then went in. The windowless room was dark while he groped for a light switch, then twin fluorescents on the ceiling flickered into life. One buzzed loudly.

  It was a small consulting room with an array of high-tech equipment and an examination couch. There was a strong smell that Faith always associated with modern offices and hire cars, the anodyne smell of brand-new, synthetic upholstery. It reminded her, suddenly, of the Toyota they'd been driving in Thailand.

  They'd been home barely a month but it seemed far longer than that. Now, her recollections of their holiday were more like a television travelogue she had watched, than anything she had experienced. The travelogue showed a tall man with a blonde wife and a small son. The man played with his son and, when he wasn't doing this, he was sitting at the bar, chatting to anyone who happened to be around, the very model of charm itself.

  The blonde wife seemed to be struggling a bit. She had been badly sunburned on her shoulders and chest, and had spent several days in the shade reading, alternating between thrillers and one serious book about the psychology of human relationships.

  They had taken several trips around the island in a rented Jeep, visiting the monkey forest and a spectacular waterfall. They had gone with their little boy to an aquarium where he had been fascinated by a giant squid and had made bold faces at a hammerhead shark.

  They seemed like any other family on holiday, having a good time. It was easy, Faith thought, to give the world the illusion you were happy. All you had to do was to walk along holding hands, and everyone figured you were fine, you were in love, you were having a nice life. Few people knew what went on behind your locked doors. Few people knew that she prayed every night at dinner that Ross would drink too much and fall asleep the moment they went to bed instead of wanting to make love to her.

  Oliver tapped the keyboard in front of a computer and the screen woke up. She saw her name appear at the top of a large, blank form.

  'OK, let me get a few basics down. I need your date of birth.'

  She was feeling queasy again. The nausea she had woken up with and which had stayed with her on the train had gone when she had seen Oliver at Victoria. This queasiness was of a different kind — not the sort born of illness, but the sort born of fear. Fear of the man in the leather jacket down in the street.

  She gave him her date of birth.

  'Your GP — this Dr Ritterman — gave you a thorough check-up when you went to see him?'

  'Well, it seemed pretty thorough.'

  'And you're generally in good shape, other than this thing?'

  She shrugged. 'I try to keep in reasonable condition — I walk the dog three or four miles every day, swim quite a lot in summer, go to a local gym twice a week and do aerobics — well, before I went away. But Jules Ritterman…' she fell silent.

  'What about him?' He gestured for her to sit.

  'He's never been communicative, and over this thing, nothing at all. I don't know if this is because there's nothing wrong or because there's something seriously wrong that he's keeping from me.'

  'Why would he do that?'

  She looked up at the thrumming light. 'Because I'm just Ross's wife — this genetically challenged X-chromosome thing somewhere down the bottom of their mental food chain.' She bit her lip. 'Sorry, I don't mean to rant. It always hacks me off, being patronised.'

  'It ought to. That shit is all part of the voodoo of conventional medicine. Like the way doctors always used to write things in Latin so you couldn't read their prescriptions.'

  Oliver pulled up a chair close to her, and was silent for some moments, studying her. It was a comfortable feeling. She could smell the subtle, masculine scent of his cologne, could feel the energy coming off him; despite his intellect, there was a quality about him that was pure animal, something muscular and powerful, a lion, or maybe a leopard. He was wearing a quietly fashionable black jacket, black roll-neck jumper, black trousers, Chelsea boots. The colour emphasised the fine bone structure of his face, the alertness of those titanium grey eyes behind his glasses, the silver streaks in his unkempt curls.

  And she could see something she had sensed before: the inner toughness of a man who has absolute confidence in what he is doing, and is comfortable in his skin.

  Something stirred deep within her: the need for this man that increased with every moment she spent with him.

  And she had to stop this, needed to remember why she was here: he might be able to make her better. That was all. She had to be able to say that to Ross, and to look him in the eye while she said it, because there was going to be a mighty confrontation when the private detective reported back.

  'Oliver, can I ask you something? I want you to promise you'll be honest with me. You will tell me straight if you find anything wrong with me, however bad it might be?'

  'Let's work on the assumption that we're not going to find anything of the magnitude you're worrying about. OK?'

  'Now you're patronising me!'

  He laughed. 'You're right. I apologise. I want you to understand that if we do find something bad, whatever that thing is, it's in big trouble, because it's going to have to deal with me.' He tapped his chest hard.

  She grimaced. 'OK.'

  'Whatever we find, we're going to deal with it. I promise you that.'

  She believed him.

  41

  They were kissing. Their faces pressed hard together. Faith and Oliver Cabot. Dr Oliver Cabot.

  The man had the gall to call himself Dr?

  Joke.

  Tight close-up, taken with a zoom lens, fast film, short depth of field, the small areas of background visible in the frame were just a blur.

  Cheek to cheek.

  His wife and Dr Oliver Cabot. Intimacy in the fucking street, for God's sake!

  Ross rested the photograph against the wood-rimmed steering wheel of his Aston Martin and turned, simmering, to the private detective in the passenger seat beside him. The man was exuding a stale, unpleasant odour of musty fabric and last night's tobacco.

  They were in the west car park of the Queen Victoria Hospital, in East Grinstead, in a courtyard bounded by tired red-brick buildings and a solitary prefab.

  Ross always found it hard to believe that this unprepossessing place was where modern plastic surger
y had begun. In 1939, this group of buildings that looked like workshops had been turned into a burns unit for fighter pilots and become world famous. They still looked like a collection of workshops today, and maybe that was a good thing, he thought sometimes. Good to remind surgeons that they were craftsmen, nothing more; they might carry the title Mr today as a snob thing to set them above mere doctors, but not so long ago they were mere barbers who did amputations as well as haircuts and shaves. However, he wasn't thinking that today. He was thinking that he wanted to kill the man who was kissing his wife.

  'It's a joke,' Ross said. 'This man's a bloody quack. You tell me how this bastard has the gall to call himself a doctor.'

  From the computer bag on his lap, Hugh Caven removed a sheet of paper and handed it to Ross. In a non-judgemental tone, he said, 'This is Dr Cabot's curriculum vitae.'

  Ross glanced down the sheet.

  1976 Grad. Princeton Medical School. Magna cum laude.

  1979 Doctorate, Hons, Immunology. Pasteur Institute.

  1980–82 Junior Registrar, Oncology, Mount Sinai Hospital, Beverly Hills.

  1982–88 Jnr Consult. Oncologist at St John's Hospital, Santa Monica.

  1988–90 Doctorate in psychology. California Masters in clinical psychology then specialist training in hypnosis.

  1993 Established Cabot Centre for Complementary Medicine, London.

  Passing it back dismissively to the detective, Ross said, 'The man's a traitor to his profession.' He focused his attention on Caven's report. 'My wife and this charlatan were together for two hours inside this building, during which you have no idea what they were up to. Then he drove her back to Victoria Station. They could have been screwing for two hours.'

  'With respect, Mr Ransome, I don't think so. I believe it was a bona fide medical examination. There was nothing improper in their body language when they emerged from the building, nor when they parted at Victoria Station. Nothing at all, in my experience, to suggest anything other than a professional relationship.'

  Ross looked at him. 'Professional relationship? You can go to all the alternative doctors in the world, Mr Caven. You can swallow all the useless homeopathic pills you want, you can have people stick acupuncture needles in you until you look like a hedgehog, you can listen to them telling you how they can cure this or that by pressing their thumbs into the balls of your feet, you can believe whatever you want. I don't have any time for that crap and I won't have truck with the con-artists who peddle it.' He shook his head. 'Do you really want to put your faith in the kind of primitive stuff witch doctors were doling out two thousand years ago? I'll tell you something, Mr Caven. One hundred years ago, if you got acute appendicitis it was almost always terminal — there was nothing anyone could do for you. Now it's little more than a minor inconvenience. The Second World War was the first time in the history of the human race that more soldiers died in hospital from their wounds, than from the infections they had picked up while they were being nursed. And do you know why?'

  The detective shook his head.

  'Penicillin. In the Western world, life expectancy has doubled in the past hundred years for one reason only: the progress of the science of medicine. People who turn their noses up at modern medicine make me sick. And I'm not having any Johnny-come-lately quack messing with my wife's health. Do you understand what I'm saying?'

  'Very clearly, Mr Ransome.'

  Ross stared at the car clock. 'My wife and Dr Oliver Cabot are either currently fucking each other or about to start fucking each other. And I want the photographs. Another gift that our modern world has gained through science.'

  42

  The boy walked from the station. It was a hot July morning and he stopped on the way to buy himself a Lyons Maid orange ice-lolly. He was licking it as he entered the gates of the hospital, a tall, gangly boy in shorts, Aertex shirt and school blazer with a badge sewn on the breast pocket, carrying a small bunch of flowers. He was looking forward to seeing his mother, the woman who had abandoned him seven years ago because she couldn't put up with him being untidy.

  A kind-faced receptionist told him the name of the ward his mother was in. She was a little hesitant, but she looked at the flowers, smiled sadly at him and told him where he could find the ward sister.

  There was consternation when he identified himself at the nursing station. A short, rather severe woman with a badge on her lapel, 'Marion Humphreys. Staff Nurse' and a watch on a chain glanced at a younger nurse, then back at Ross. 'You are Mrs Ransome's son?'

  Ross nodded. He wore the doleful expression he had been practising in front of the bathroom mirror.

  Marion Humphreys took him into a small room with vinyl-covered chairs, sat him down and closed the door behind her.

  'Ross?' she said. 'That's your name?'

  'Yes.'

  'Your mummy's not at all well. She's terribly burned and she's on a lot of medication. I think you might find it upsetting to see her.'

  He dropped the ice-lolly stick into a wastepaper basket. 'Is she going to die?'

  The woman looked awkward. 'We're doing everything we can to save her, but when you have very bad burns like hers, the lungs get damaged and so do a lot of important organs. We do a lot of our breathing through our skin, and she has very little skin that isn't damaged.'

  'Do you think she will die?'

  'I don't know, Ross.'

  'Will she be badly scarred if she survives?'

  The nurse frowned at the question. 'She's in the best place for burns. We have the finest plastic surgeons in the world here. If anyone can make her better, the doctors in this hospital can.'

  'You're nice,' Ross said. 'I like you.'

  'And you're a nice boy to care so much for your mummy. Have you taken the morning off school?'

  'My teacher said I should come.'

  'Where's your daddy?'

  'He and Mummy don't get on very well.'

  'I see.'

  'Can we go to her now?'

  'Just for a few minutes.'

  She took his hand and held it all the way down the corridor and as she opened the door into a small room.

  As he went in he noticed a strong smell of chemicals, and an even stronger, sweet smell of cooled grilled meat. He stared down, past a bank of monitoring machines and through a forest of drip lines, at a blackened, hairless head, covered in a glutinous, translucent jelly, protruding from a body almost entirely swathed in white gauze.

  For a moment he thought her head was turned away from him towards the far wall because all he could see was a mass of dark blisters, which had to be the back of her scalp, surely.

  Then he realised it was her face.

  Pads were taped over her eyes. Her lips, through which a breathing tube was inserted, were bubbles the colour of parchment. The only sound for a moment was the steady clunk-puff… clunk-puff… clunk-puff… of the ventilator.

  The nurse said, 'Mrs Ransome, your son is here. Ross. He's brought you some flowers.'

  There was a strange sound, a rattling moan somewhere deep in her throat, and tiny beads of spittle appeared at one corner of her mouth.

  'Beautiful flowers, Mrs Ransome!' The nurse cast a glance at Ross and lowered her voice. 'All her airways have been burned. I don't think she can smell them, I'm afraid. But she understands you're here.'

  'She looks very tidy,' he said.

  43

  our news! At the end of September we moved into a beautiful old house on the river right in the middle of Shrewsbury, only five minutes' walk from the cinema (for Simon) and from Marks and Spencer (for Bridget) and a good pub only two doors away. We have settled in happily despite the worst floods for fifty years, which arrived three weeks after our move — waist deep in water in the basement, all character-forming stuff!

  * * *

  Rain was falling steadily outside. At the kitchen table, Faith sipped camomile tea to try to settle her stomach as she read the morning post. She was feeling lousy this morning, her head ached, and her eyes felt
raw, as if there was grit inside her contact lenses. Upstairs, in their bedroom directly above, she could hear Mrs Fogg Hoovering. The machine clunked against the skirting-board and Rasputin, lying on his bean-bag in front of the Aga, lifted his head and growled at the ceiling. He was in a grumpy mood because she'd only taken him for a short walk.

  'I know you don't mind the rain, but I do today,' she said to him. 'Sometimes, just very occasionally, we do what I want, not what you want.'

  The dog looked at her hopefully, eyes bright, pink tongue out, panting. Then he stood up, trotted out into the hall and returned moments later with his lead in his mouth.

  Faith laughed weakly. 'No, I'm sorry, boy, I'm not going out now.'

  Ignoring the plaintive bark that followed, she returned to the chatty circular letter, envious of her friend's happiness. She and Bridget Nightingale had been close friends at school, but now, living two hundred miles apart, they communicated only rarely. Bridget had gone into nursing, and also married a doctor, a neurologist, but that was where their similarities ended. Bridget and Simon were happy, they had a great marriage, lived a normal life. They'd had their share of ups and downs and tragedies, but they adored each other.

  The tone of the letter deepened Faith's sense of failure. Above her the Hoovering stopped and she listened to the rain thudding against the windows. Then the phone rang.

  She answered it quickly, her heart lifting, in the hope that it might be Oliver — even though she'd told him only to use her new mobile number. But it was the Aga service engineer, calling to arrange a visit. She stood up and walked across the kitchen to her diary.

  Then she sat down again, turned to the next letter and slit open the large, thick envelope. It was information on a nutritionist course at the Open University she had requested, together with an application form. She was glad it had arrived today and not tomorrow, when Ross would have seen it. It would have been something else for him to get angry about — he didn't approve of her doing anything that smacked of independence. He barely even tolerated her charity work.