Heart Stopper

by R J Samuel

  Priya managed as genuine a smile as she could.

  Tara said, “I thought you were down when I came in. You really have a lovely smile. But with those dark shadows under your eyes I think maybe someone got lucky last night…?”

  Priya shook her head. “We’re not all cougars like you.”

  “Cougars!? Girl, cougars are older women, like, over 40, who like young men. Aidan is 36!”

  “Oh, my mistake. I thought he was so much younger than you. I thought he did look my age. You know, young…” Priya couldn’t stop herself as she burst out laughing. Teasing Tara had been her tonic, she felt herself slip into the comfort.

  “I am only 30 as you well know!” Tara stomped over to her desk and then laughed too. “Why do I let you wind me up? And you can get away with it cos you look twenty no matter what age you really are.” Tara sat down at her desk and looked over. “Maybe not today though. I like that top, by the way. The white really highlights that lovely skin tone. Girl, I am soooo jealous. This stuff is a nightmare to deal with. Can get all orange and caked up if you’re not careful.” Tara held out hands and examined between the fingers.

  Priya said, “You don’t need that fake tan stuff, Tara.”

  “Easy for you to say. Although from what I see with you, it isn’t easy to meet anyone if you’re gay in Galway. But I never thought it would get so hard to meet someone if you were straight! Have you seen the perfect specimens of women out there on a night out? They’re all done up to the nines. Even on a Wednesday night! I hate all that, the high high heels and the skimpy skirts. And even when it’s freezing out. And then they’re falling over at the end of the night, pissed out of their minds, climbing into cabs with God knows who.” She sighed. “Those were the good old days. I feel old.”

  “Well, you don’t look it, much as I like teasing you. Aidan’s a lucky guy. By the way, how is our Aidan?” Priya said as she set up her desk.

  “Our Aidan is actually very nice. More than that. He’s the first guy I’ve really liked in ages. This could be the one. I’m hoping the actual cougar is not lying in wait for him. Or for me.”

  Priya looked up at the note of concern in Tara’s voice.

  There was a knock at the door and Mary popped her head into the room.

  “Priya, Ms. Fairer would like to see you in her office if you’re free.”

  Priya forced a smile, but Mary didn’t wait for an answer and Priya felt a spark of irritation as the door closed.

  Tara said, “Aha, I knew you’d get it together with her. You too make a beautiful couple, you know, such a contrast, and yet so, so matched somehow.”

  Priya stopped smiling. She got up and walked to the door saying as she did so, “Tara, I am not ‘with’ Reyna. Apart from too many reasons to go into, she’s married.” She didn’t wait to hear Tara’s reaction.

  ∞

  Reyna was sitting at Daniel’s desk and Priya realized how alike Daniel and Reyna had looked. Both exuded strength, but Reyna’s was a quieter line of steel that seemed to hold her upright. James was sitting across from Reyna. He was wearing green scrubs, his dark hair neat before a day under the scrub cap he was holding. It was Thursday which meant surgeries all day.

  James got up as Priya knocked on the open door.

  He said, “Sorry about this, Reyna, but I’ll see you later, as soon as it’s over.” He nodded to Priya and walked past her out of the office.

  Reyna looked tired. She said, “We’ve had to postpone the meeting. Valerie and Gerry will be in before lunch, could you come in as well. I’ll get Mary to call you when we’re ready?”

  Priya hesitated. The thought of sitting down in the same room as Valerie made her feel sick. Reyna was looking at her, pushing for an answer. Priya nodded and turned to go.

  ∞

  Tara had been in and out of the office all morning. Every time she came back in, she talked about Aidan, but Priya could not concentrate on what she was saying and resorted to nods at what seemed to be appropriate times. It was obvious Tara wanted to ask about Reyna, but she sensed Priya’s reluctance. It was almost midday now. Priya needed some air and walked down the corridor towards reception. She heard Valerie’s voice and stopped. She could see Gerry’s back and heard Clodagh’s reply. Priya backed up a few steps and turned back into her office and closed the door. She didn’t want to see them, to deal with her emotions and Valerie’s games.

  From behind her desk she watched their silhouettes pass the clouded glass sidings as they walked to Daniel’s office. Priya wondered if her conduct was an item on the agenda for this meeting.

  She tried to focus on the figures in front of her, but they refused to settle into a pattern. She had not been able to concentrate since she’d seen Daniel’s body and nothing that happened since had helped.

  She tried to put together a list of questions for Gerry and Valerie. She assumed the future of the research company was being discussed and after that Reyna would want to know about the specifics of the pacemaker product from the people who had worked on it with Daniel for so long.

  Priya was beginning to think she couldn’t help. For too long, she had just been going through the motions, working in a job, not a career. Using equipment to communicate with devices, just seeing data, code, frequencies. Not heartbeats, messages, lives. She had chosen to see the world as black and white, as a problem to be solved, but patients were different shades of grey and she’d fled to the crispness and logic of code. Which was deserting her now.

  What was bothering her about the figures? In the papers that she had risked her job to bring home. She closed her eyes and focused. The Controller II had not needed the same level of approval as the other devices as it was a second version of an already approved device. So it qualified for the 501(K) process. It used wireless technology to communicate with the implanted pulse generator.

  She looked at the design of the Controller II. The schematics made no sense to her, she wasn’t an industrial engineer. She used a test version of the actual device, to communicate with an explanted pulse generator, to test the data flow between the pacemaker and the controller. She kept this version in her clinical room along with a version of the Controller I and the actual Controller II she used for the routine checks on her patients.

  Priya looked through the files. The clinical trials on the pacemaker itself had started in 2001. It had been implanted in thousands of patients after the two years of trials. The first version of the programmer, the Controller I, had been in use in many clinics around the world until it was replaced in 2006. TechMed Devices had weighed in heavily behind the pacemaker product vaunting the alternative form of powering the device that promised less surgery because of its self-sustaining nature. The marketing was effective, speaking directly to the natural fears of people, reassuring them.

  She now had the voltage readings for the Controller I since its launch in 2003. Her initial mental translation of the numbers for the Controller II had highlighted dips in the voltages in a few cases. The readings for the Controller I showed similar dips. She was going to have to trawl through thousands of readings and find the dips and try and find a reason for this.

  She checked her phone. It was almost lunchtime. Tara must have been doing checks; she hadn’t come back into their office for a while. Priya now missed her presence, missed the chance to tease her; it would take her mind off the impending meeting, if it ever happened.

  The knock on the door startled her. Reyna pushed open the door and Priya could see Valerie and Gerry pause to shake hands with James and then continue down the corridor towards the front desk. James was still wearing his scrubs and he hurried off in the direction of his office.

  “Sorry Priya, we were so late starting and we got tied up, we didn’t really get through anything important. Perhaps you could come to lunch with us now instead? I’m off to Dublin this afternoon with the funding agency and I have another meeting with Valerie and Gerry tomorrow at their office.” Reyna’s tone was light, but again Priya had the fe
eling she couldn’t refuse.

  Reyna continued when Priya nodded, “I’ll be leaving for Dublin from there, so you’d probably better take your car as well. We’re going to that hotel up the road from here, the…”

  “Westwood?”

  “Yes, that’s it. See you there in a few minutes?” Reyna was already moving down the corridor as she spoke.

  ∞

  The lunchtime traffic was heavy and Priya saw that Reyna’s rental car was parked in the hotel car park when she drove in. Valerie’s red Jaguar Coupe was crouching in the space beside Reyna’s car. The car park was jammed. The Arts Festival was coming to a climax this weekend to be followed next week by the Galway Races. July in Galway seemed to be a month long festival. Priya had to drive around the side of the hotel and park near the service entrance to the restaurant. She walked slowly back around to the front, memories of other meals at other pubs were crowding in to her mind. She steadied her nerves, if the others could carry it off, this pretence that nothing had happened, she could do it too. She had become an expert at suppressing her thoughts. She had a mental picture of the fairground game where you hit gophers on the head as they popped up and she smiled as she exaggerated the image into one of her with a big-headed hammer hitting little blond thought gophers that had Valerie’s face stuck onto them.

  The lobby was busy, business suits moving by in a hurry to grab a lunch. Priya turned into the bar and caught sight of Reyna and Valerie standing by the stairs leading to the upper level. There was no sign of Gerry; Priya assumed he must have gone upstairs to get them a table. Valerie was around the same height as Reyna, but she had her face tilted up, her eyes focused on Reyna’s face as if nothing else existed in the bar. Valerie’s blonde hair shone against Reyna’s dark jacket and Priya stopped dead, her breath catching in her throat. She couldn’t do it. The memories were too strong. She turned and walked out of the bar and the hotel and into her car fighting the traffic to get back to her desk.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Priya had refused Tara’s invitation again and had walked down to the petrol station at the corner to buy a sandwich. She ate her lunch at her desk. The routine act of eating and the sounds of people entering and leaving the clinic dulled the memories, but the pangs of jealousy remained sharp.

  Annoyed with herself, she threw the half-eaten sandwich into the bin and emptied her briefcase onto her desk. She picked up Liam’s file which fell out. Where was Tara’s second detailed description of Liam’s heart attack? She remembered that she’d seen some handwritten sheets in amongst the typed sheets of the papers Daniel had sent Catherine. She had separated them into the pile that didn’t fit into any category and hadn’t got to them yet.

  She found the sheets and was about to read them when Reyna walked in without knocking. Her eyes were cold and Priya saw them go colder when Reyna noticed the half-eaten sandwich in the bin.

  Priya spoke before Reyna could say anything. “I’m sorry, I got caught up in this stuff.” She waved the sheets of paper, the feebleness of the gesture not creating enough of a draught to cool down the heat of her face as she lied. “Did you have a nice lunch?” She looked at the clock on her phone, “I thought you had to go directly from there?” The light tone felt forced, but she kept her expression casual.

  Reyna stared at her, as if trying to get into her head, and then she said, matching Priya’s nonchalance, “Yes, lunch was delicious. I just popped back in to get my… bag.”

  “Find out anything useful?”

  “I’m meeting them again tomorrow morning at their offices. I plan to get all the financials from them, for the Research Company.”

  Priya waited for an invitation to join them, but Reyna nodded a curt goodbye and turned to leave the office then paused and turned back.

  “I won’t be back here till Monday, can I take the material Daniel sent Catherine. I think it might be better if I held on to that stuff for the moment.”

  “Wow, must have been an interesting lunch.” Priya couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “It would be safer, that’s all.” Reyna looked at her watch and grimaced. “Sorry, I really have to go.”

  Priya’s muscles felt stiff as she gathered up the relevant papers, grateful that they were still in separate bundles, and handed them to Reyna who took them and left without another word.

  ∞

  Priya examined the doodles she had drawn on her notepad. The afternoon had slipped away. Tara was handling all the new patients for the moment and had finished at 4 p.m. She was in a good mood leaving, looking forward to her day off the next day. Priya could hear the chatter of the nurses. She had held on to Liam’s file and she looked through it again. Daniel had asked for more information from Tara in March. He’d made her write it out in detail. Priya thought back, Daniel had been moody and withdrawn for the last few months. He’d gone to New York in early July, searching for something, worried about something. Was it something about Liam’s case that had triggered the worry? She wished she’d had a chance to read Tara’s second report. She couldn’t even ask her now till Monday.

  So she’d have to work it out herself.

  Liam was a healthy 39 year old when he had suffered a massive heart attack at the clinic. There had been no signs of electrical activity in his heart and he was extremely lucky that the attack had taken place where it did. It wasn’t unknown for young healthy men to have heart attacks, but it was unusual which is why the doctors had investigated. She presumed they had found nothing.

  She logged onto her PC and went to Google. She typed in ‘Cardiac arrests in young men’ and the usual surge of information was displayed on the screen. The first link was to a study that highlighted the sizeable rise in the death rate in the 1990s from sudden cardiac death in young adults aged 15 to 34. Right, so it wasn’t as uncommon as she’d thought. The multitude of links after that just confirmed it.

  Liam’s file had a diagnosis of sudden cardiac arrest of unexplained origin. Priya spent the afternoon clicking on links, wandering deeper into the navigational forest. As the afternoon turned to evening she decided to try another tack. She made an assumption. That Daniel had not considered Liam’s heart attack as a random incident. Daniel had been troubled by something about the way it happened.

  She searched through the files she had received from Daniel, the ones he had given her a few weeks before his death. She had seen a sheet of paper with a list of links printed on it, the blues and green and black on the computer screen reminded her of it the printout. She found the sheet and examined the links. They had been copied from a Google search and put into a Word document.

  She typed in the first link including all the question marks and numbers and was taken directly to an article on the online version of a local newspaper in Boston. The article was from 2004 and it described the life and death of a 29 year old woman who had been born and brought up in Boston and had been working as an electrophysiology technician in a clinic in Singapore. The picture showed a woman in her twenties, her plump face widened by a smile, the graduation cap dropping its tassel into her curls. The article described her death as a cutting short of the promising life of a much-loved daughter, wife, and mother. The cause of death had been a heart attack and the journalist highlighted the irony of a death from a sudden cardiac arrest occurring in a state-of-the-art cardiac facility.

  She looked at the list lying on the desk. There were 3 links in total. Her fingers were slow as she typed in the second link. This time the article on the newspaper site was from 2006. It was a local paper from France. Priya had limited French, but it was enough to work out that the death of the 35 year old woman had occurred at her place of work at a cardiac clinic in the south-western city of Limoges.

  The other link was to a clinic in Seattle. No death mentioned. But it was a cardiac clinic.

  Priya sat back in shock.

  Priya took down the number for the clinic. It was now after 5 p.m. Irish time on a Thursday evening. She did a quick search on
line for time zones around the world. There would be no problem with Seattle as it was 9.23 a.m. there. She could call Seattle from the phone on her desk, but she was reluctant. The clinic around her was bustling with activity as the nurses were discharging the post-op patients. Most of the staff would be around until 6 p.m.

  Priya decided to make the call from her house. She was working out the time as she collected all the paperwork she had left and filled her briefcase. She folded the sheet with the links together with the one with the number for the clinic and slipped them into her pocket feeling the crackle of paper loud against her thigh.

  ∞

  The clinic in Seattle put her through to her counterpart immediately they heard that she was an electrophysiology technician working at the Fairer Clinic in Galway. It was just coming up to lunchtime in Seattle.

  “John Landon here. I had the pleasure of speaking to Daniel Fairer himself a few months ago.” He still sounded pleased.

  Priya said, “I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr. Landon. I don’t know if you know that Mr. Fairer passed away two weeks ago.” His shocked exclamation told her he hadn’t heard the news and she continued, “I worked closely with Mr. Fairer and I’m trying to sort out some of the things we were working on in the last few months. I was just wondering if you could fill me in on your conversation with Daniel.”

  “Of course, of course. I can’t believe he’s dead. He was so kind to call, I think it was in May, I don’t know how he found out or why he would put himself out to call me after the attack, but he did.”

  “The attack?”

  “Yes, I suffered a massive cardiac arrest in April 2006. I would have died if I hadn’t been at work when it happened.”