The atmosphere had not been pleasant. Joost wasn’t the most sensitive of orthopods, which was a bit like saying he wasn’t the most sober of alcoholics or truthful of pathological liars, and Sarah was still furious with him over an incident that morning when he had refused to let her administer any analgesia to a patient undergoing a coccygeal manipulation. The girl was seventeen, scared and crying loudly and tearfully in pain, but the local anaesthetic would have taken ten minutes to work and Joost had a lunchtime ring-smooching session with a consultant that he didn’t want to be late for. He had to get his finger out of the patient’s arse and his lips to the consultant’s by twelve, as Sarah later explained to one of her colleagues.
So when Joost turned up (half-an-hour late) for the evening list of familiarly dubious ‘emergency’ ops, most of which could comfortably have waited until the next morning or even the next month, but which the orthopods wanted out of the way, Sarah was not in a tolerant mood. The first patient was seventy-nine with a fractured neck of femur, and Sarah wanted to make sure he was well under before letting Joost loose on him with his bag of DIY home improvement tools. Joost had frowningly popped his head round the door of the anaesthetic room twice in the ten minutes since he had actually condescended to show up, and then on his third visit asked Sarah if he could have a word.
‘Dr Slaughter, I have several patients to attend to this evening,’ he said flatly in an accent that suggested he had learned English from watching Max von Sydow movies. ‘We cannot afford such a wait for all of them. We will be here all night. Why is this patient not ready? How long will he be?’
Surgeons chronically misunderstood the role of the anaesthetist. They thought he or she was there in an auxiliary, subservient capacity, to gas the patient and keep the awkward bugger quiet and still while they worked their little miracles. The anaesthetist saw his/her role instead as keeping the patient (a) alive and (b) comfortable while the surgeon did his/her best to ensure otherwise.
Sarah bit her tongue, took a deep breath and explained that the patient was old, frail, dehydrated, had a history of ischaemic heart disease and had been insufficiently prepared for theatre by the orthopaedic house officer. Consequently, he would not be ready for another fifteen minutes. Joost left the room.
Two minutes later his head was back round the door, and then again a whole ninety seconds after that. Sarah stopped what she was doing and slowly turned around, then walked to where Joost was loitering in the doorway.
She grabbed him around the upper arm and led him roughly over to the patient.
‘Mr van der Elst, while we’re waiting – patiently – for this anaesthetic agent to take effect, why don’t I demonstrate how one of our most vital monitoring systems works,’ she said. The simmering Joost looked uninterestedly at the various machines surrounding the trolley, then noticed that Sarah was pointing beyond all of them to the wall, where a large white clock was mounted.
‘You see that dial right there? We anaesthetists use that to measure time. I’ll explain how you read it. The patient will be ready in another ten minutes. You see that big hand pointing at the number one? Well, when that reaches the number three, that means the patient is ready. Understand?’
Joost just stared furiously at her.
‘Understand?’ she asked again, more sternly.
He nodded curtly.
‘Good. Now fuck off and let me do my job.’
After that, she was convinced Joost was going even slower than usual just to annoy both her and the Operating Department Assistant, who had so visibly enjoyed her outburst.
The canteen had long since closed by the time she had got the last patient round in Recovery, and the vending machine had swallowed the last of her cash in exchange for a grinding noise and no chocolate on her way back to the on-call room.
She opened the door and found that the light was on, which was less surprising than the fact that Parlabane was sitting on the edge of the lumpy bed next to a large, flat cardboard box.
That moment accounted for the fright part.
The realisation that he must have broken in was responsible for the wanting to kill him part, along with everything else that had happened today, with a special mention going to having only had an apple to eat since breakfast and being hopelessly hungry.
Parlabane flipped open the box to reveal a huge and lavishly decorated pizza.
That was where the marrying part fitted in.
Sarah was munching through her second slice before the questions of how he had got in and what he was doing there regained sufficient importance.
Parlabane held up a mangled paper clip.
‘It’s not much of a lock.’ He showed her a small black canvas wallet, the kind she had once kept her surgical instruments in back in first year at university. It contained a number of metal slivers and what looked like bent or awkwardly serrated steel nail files.
‘This is the heavy artillery,’ Parlabane explained. ‘I got in with a pop gun.’
‘You just picked the lock?’
‘Well, I had to circumvent the doctors’ on-call accommodation security systems first, which required the elaborate operation of asking someone where it was and walking straight in.’
‘No kidding. We keep finding tramps and all sorts wandering about or even kipping down in the corridors. We’ve all complained about the risks but with the Trust’s money so tight, priority must obviously go to important things like new corporate logos and pot plants in the admin block.’
Parlabane reached for another slice of pizza. ‘Now that’s unfair,’ he said, swallowing a well-chewed mouthful. ‘It’s inevitable that there’s going to be no cash for security when they’ve obviously blown it all on your accommodation.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘That’s not even funny.’
She had a brief look at her immediate surroundings: the blistered and decades-peeled paint on the ceiling, the damp patches on the wallpaper, the sticky and threadbare carpet, the chipboard nailed to the frame in lieu of one window pane which a colleague confirmed had now been in place for four years. Sarah usually shut it all out of her mind and thought only of getting into the shower as soon as she got home, but occasionally the squalor of it could still depress her afresh.
‘So where did you learn to pick locks?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Of course you can tell me. I’m a doctor.’
Parlabane laughed.
‘No, I mean I can’t tell you where exactly because I was on a train from Glasgow to London at the time. I was down for an interview. Not a job interview, a me-talking-to-someone-important interview. I had this wee padlock on my travel bag, and we had just reached Motherwell when I remembered I had left the key for it on my bedside table and forgotten to pick it up when the taxi peeped its horn outside. I had a paper clip and a scheduled five – actually eight – hours with nothing else to do – my book was in the bloody bag. I picked the lock and was so proud of myself for managing it that I decided – with time on my hands – to have another go, prove that it wasn’t a fluke. I got so into tinkering about with it that I opened and shut it about a hundred times and forgot about the bloody book altogether.
‘For the return journey I bought a doorlock and a screwdriver, and spent the journey taking it apart, examining the mechanism, picking it with the back off and then picking it fully assembled. After that if I didn’t have anything particularly good or important to read I used to buy a different lock for every long train journey.’
‘Remind me not to give you my address.’
Sarah finished off her slice and washed it down with a mouthful from one of the Irn-Bru cans Parlabane had also brought. ‘I felt like Abraham Lincoln tonight – thought I was never getting out of that theatre. Contrary to what you might have heard, not all surgeons are bastards. Some of them are slow bastards.’ She lifted another slice. ‘You have no idea how much this is appreciated. I can’t be the first doctor you’ve known. Either that or you’re psychic.’
‘I’ve had dealings with a few,’ Parlabane said. ‘Late-night food always makes you their friend.’
‘For life,’ Sarah added, mumbling with her mouth comfortingly full. ‘We’re easily bought at this time of night. We even forgive gross invasions of privacy.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Didn’t want to be hanging around the corridor with a hot pizza. Might get mugged by starving medics.’
Sarah was sated. She had a last gulp of Irn-Bru, wiped her mouth with a paper towel, screwed it up, expertly arced it into the bin and sat back against the ugly plastic headboard.
‘So what is it you want to know?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I think you’re a nice guy, Jack, but I can’t see you breaking in to deliver late-night pizza just in a bout of spontaneous beneficence. Either you fancy me or you want some information. So which is it?’
He folded up the empty box and placed it by the bin.
‘Who wanted Jeremy dead, Sarah? That’s what I want to know. The cops found traces of that potassium chloride stuff on a hypodermic in your ex-husband’s flat. It’s a fair bet the mystery guest intended to kill him with an injection, making it look like sudden death or, as you suggested, suicide. Someone wanted him dead but didn’t want anyone to know about it. Someone very dangerous had something to lose if Jeremy kept breathing, and I’m afraid I don’t believe you don’t have your suspicions.’
Sarah blanched. ‘Seriously, Jack. I just went to the flat because . . .’
‘I believe that much, Sarah. You didn’t specifically go there looking for evidence or even answers. But subconsciously I think you knew something was wrong. Despite your antipathy or even indifference towards Jeremy, I believe you were still aware that there was something suspicious about him, just a vibe that meant nothing at the time but kicked in retroactively when he died. You talked about almost expecting it, you talked about him being self-destructive. What’s the deal, Sarah? What was he into?’
She was gently shaking her head and yawning.
‘I’m sorry, Jack’
‘Oh come on, there must be something you can give me. What vices did he have, who did he upset apart from you?’
‘No, Jack It’s not that I can’t tell you anything. It’s just that if I start I might tell you everything. It’s after two. I’m very tired and that bleeper could go off at any second anyway. Look, I’m free all day tomorrow. How about you meet me somewhere in the afternoon? I’ll buy you a drink and you can give me the third degree.’
Parlabane looked closely at her. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, her hair tangled and lank, having been stuffed under theatre caps for hours. Her white blouse looked crushed enough for her to have slept in it, and now that she had eaten all that pizza it looked like she was about to do just that at any second.
‘Well, to be honest, you don’t look capable of sustained rational thinking right now,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ she groaned.
‘And unlike the police I don’t find sleep deprivation very conducive to interrogation.’
Sarah’s bleeper made its loathsomely familiar sound of peremptory interruption. She closed her eyes and banged her head gently against the wall in rhythm with its electronic notes.
‘Told you,’ she said, picking it up. She dialled a number on the bedside telephone and exchanged a few quiet words with someone in a ward elsewhere in the complex.
‘Emergency caesarian section, nineteen-year-old prim, theatre four. They’d like someone incapable of rational thinking to administer a very rapid general anaesthetic so that they can get the baby out in the next five minutes and hopefully keep the mother alive into the bargain.’
She stood up and, yawning, grabbed her white coat.
‘Don’t ever get sick, Jack’
THIRTEEN
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
Parlabane smiled, cradling his tomato juice and leaning back against the wall, one foot pulled up on the bench beside him. They were in one of the more shadowy caverns of Bannerman’s in the Cowgate, quite the most conducively conspiratorial drinking establishment Parlabane had ever seen. It was like a rabbit warren beneath the belly of the Old Town, a haphazard network of caves and hollows. They sat alone in their cavern, their words dulled and absorbed by the ancient stone of the walls.
There had been a look of, well, at least acknowledgement in Parlabane’s eyes when she appeared, looking a rejuvenated being compared to the pile of damp washing he had seen the night before.
She had undergone a spontaneous self-deconstruction whilst attempting to get dressed and ready to meet him, by which she questioned the motives, semiotics and possible intentions behind every considered article of clothing. It always felt great to get into something attractive after a night on-call, an indulgent glance at herself in the mirror reassuring her that the nocturnal labours hadn’t done any permanent or at least visible damage. It was a feeling of bouncing back. But why the black lycra skirt as opposed to the comfortable and even business-like culottes? Why the light – and let’s face it, practically see-through – black blouse and not a white cotton one or even a nice T-shirt? And make-up – she didn’t wear it very often and certainly never for going out in the afternoon.
She wanted to make a good impression. Nothing wrong with that. And she had every right to look good just for herself and the confidence it gave her. Going to an effort didn’t mean anything.
Except that it did.
Whatever she told herself, she still knew that the fact she was meeting him was governing her thoughts. She didn’t have any daft, girlish feelings, she just knew that something made her want to look good around him. And that didn’t have to mean anything, yet.
‘It’s just that this might be a bit of an epic,’ she explained. ‘I feel that I have to give you the big picture because what I pick out as highlights might miss something you could consider important. I mean, I could tell you straight out that he had a gambling problem – that’s the big juicy bit – but unless you know some more about him . . . I don’t know, I’m not sure it should be taken out of context.’
‘Well, I’ve got nowhere else to go.’
‘Very well. I did my training here, Edinburgh University. There’s a surprise, huh? Firmly established as third choice among England’s upper middle classes to educate their offspring. In my case, as in many, it was the consolation prize for not getting into Oxbridge. No dreaming spires and no punting, but it’s got plenty of history and the natives are terribly decent as opposed to that unruly Glasgow place. I think many of them see it as a kind of drifted satellite city of the Home Counties with different architecture, and as many of them stay here for years without going north of Jenners or south of Marchmont, it’s probably possible to keep up the pretence. If you drink in the right bars you can even avoid hearing a local accent that would spoil the effect.’
Parlabane blinked slowly in slight incredulity.
‘You could be Scottish Watch’s first English recruit at this rate. Whatever happened to the United Kingdom?’
Sarah sipped at her glass of tonic water and shook her head.
‘Just distancing myself from my past. I’m quite good at that. What I’m saying is that I was one of that crowd. Public school boys and jolly hockey sticks girls thinking we were academic geniuses by day and the hell-raising élite by night. We were boorish, arrogant, obnoxious, immature . . . just typical medics, really. I suppose I’m trying to offer some explanation for why I got involved with Jeremy in the first place, give you an idea of what kind of person I was to be impressed by someone like him. Everything I’m about to tell you . . . everything about medics, about doctors . . . that was me, Jack. Fully signed up for all of it until maybe three or four years ago.
‘I met him when I was in my fourth year, when he was in his first junior job. He was two years older than me, but he had left school at seventeen to my nineteen, and had taken seven years to my five to complete training because he had done a BSc after second year. It’s what you do if you either want to procra
stinate or are an incurable academic over-achiever. Jeremy was the latter. He came from one of these Edinburgh medical dynasties – the place is full of them. Generations of doctors, trained here, working here. His father is Professor Ponsonby, head of the cardiac unit at the RVI, his mother’s a consultant at the Western, his sister Veronica is an SHO in Livingston, his grandfather was a professor of medicine too . . . The closest thing this family could have had to a black sheep would have been if Jeremy or Veronica had gone into surgery.
‘What I’m saying is that Jeremy didn’t spend much time staring at the stars and wondering what he would be when he grew up, and medicine is full of people like that. The word vocation is redundant. Hundreds of them, for whom it was just understood that that was where their future would lie. And there isn’t much in the way of rebellion or resentment – it’s bred far too deep.’
‘Plus they know their name will open doors, presumably,’ Parlabane offered.
‘Well, yes. Their name will also carry responsibility and expectations, but it’s still less daunting than venturing into the unknown world outside. And as well as the medical dynasties there’s the academics, who consider it a straight choice between medicine and law when they leave school, as everything else is for those less gifted than themselves; with such intelligence and qualifications, any lesser career would be a pointless waste. That was me, by the way.’
Sarah sipped at her drink and looked Parlabane in the eye.
‘The point is that medicine is full of people who went into it for all the wrong reasons,’ she continued. ‘Well, maybe not entirely the wrong reasons, as anyone who goes into it to “save lives and cure the sick” is too dangerously naive to be allowed to practice. But still not enough of the right ones. For me it was a career path, an academic route to pursue. For people like Jeremy there isn’t even that element of choice. It was simply what he was born to do.
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