George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt

by Claire Rayner

  ‘What woman?’ George had been bewildered. ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘That Keen woman from your department! Weren’t you listening to me? She comes up here, making a pest of herself, and when I ask her to tell me what is going on, she flatly refuses and makes me look and feel a complete idiot in front of my own staff! I won’t have it!’

  ‘Let me understand you,’ George said. ‘You are saying that Sheila Keen was in your department, showing a path, lab report to someone.’

  ‘Showing a woman her own path, report! You didn’t listen. She was showing her her own path, report and whispering away and when I demanded to be told what it was all about she said it was confidential so I had no right to know. Me, the manager, no right to know! I have every right to know! If she goes on wasting my staffs time like this and refusing to be co-operative, I tell you, the Trust management will be informed and you’ll be up to your neck in a disciplinary.’ And she had hung up the phone with a snap.

  George had of course gone to look for Sheila and found her in the lab red of face and clearly just back from wherever she’d been, and about to start telling everyone who would listen why she was in such a state.

  ‘Sheila!’ George had snapped. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  Sheila had had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘I was just — I just got back from an errand,’ she muttered.

  ‘An errand? What do we have juniors in this department for? Why are you running errands?’

  ‘This was sort of a personal one —’ Sheila began and then George lost her temper.

  ‘I know perfectly where you’ve been. I’ve had that Ellesmere woman on the phone shouting about it. You’ve been up in Medical Records showing someone a path, report she had no right to see, and refusing to show it to Mrs Ellesmere.’

  ‘The person in question had every right to see it,’ Sheila had said with sharp dignity, looking redder than ever. ‘And Mrs Ellesmere certainly did not. It was confidential patient data. The relationship with the patient can’t be damaged by professional staff prattling to managers!’

  ‘You go too far, Sheila, sometimes, and this is one of them,’ George had said. ‘Now, what is this path, report? And who is the person who you’ve been showing it to? Give it to me!’

  Sheila had been standing with her hand in her pocket and now she tightened it into a fist so that the shape showed through the nylon fabric. ‘It’s confidential,’ she said. ‘I shan’t.’

  ‘Sheila!’ roared George. ‘Show me! Tell me what this fuss is all about at once!’

  Sheila very deliberately had pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket — clearly a path, report — and run across the lab to a bunsen burner on one of the benches, its harsh blue pencil of flame pointing up towards her, and very deliberately set the sheet alight. It had been consumed before anyone had had a chance to reach it, with Sheila standing defiantly by it, staring at George with her chin up.

  And that had been that. George had gone storming back to her office to cool down as best she could once Sheila had told her mulishly that the burned paper was only a photocopy of an original, which was now safely filed, and she certainly was not going to tell George or anyone else, unless she chose to, where it was or what was in it, because it was no one’s business apart from the person whose path, report it was, and she cared about patient confidentiality, even if no one else did.

  And really that had been that. The whole episode had simmered down the way fights with Sheila always did, only Sheila herself had gone on sulking longer than generally and been ever more obstructive. Admittedly, George had made it impossible for her to prowl around the hospital as usual picking up her news and disseminating it, by making a new work rota that ensured any message that had to be delivered by a senior person, or any non-lab work that needed a special degree of expertise, fell into Jerry’s tray And ever since Sheila had been behaving as though George was the devil incarnate: no wonder George had become irritable with her. Now she was accusing George of trying to harm her. And in fact very unpleasant things were happening to her.

  The visual memory faded and George shoved her notes into one of the desk’s pigeon holes, though she went on sitting there with unfocused gaze, thinking. She’d forgotten all that fuss until now, and why not? So much happened in Old East that the events of a couple or so months ago were like prehistoric experiences. But this was worth remembering. It explained so much.

  But not why Sheila was now being attacked. And that was something that it should be possible to work out. What she had to do, George told herself, was to talk to Sheila about what had happened in the Records department all that time ago, and get a lead from her that she could actively pursue; and a faint tingle seemed to reach her shoulders and give her an agreeable frisson. Perhaps an investigation into what had happened then would lead her to why someone was doing these things to Sheila now? Perhaps once she knew that she’d know who. Anyway, it seemed as reasonable to start in Medical Records as anywhere else.

  She cheered up so much at the thought of having a piece of digging around to do that she relented about Gus. She would phone him and forgive him handsomely. Then they could spend this Saturday evening together happily, and tomorrow too. And come Monday, when they both got back to work, between them they’d sort out this Sheila mystery in no time, he working on the car angle and she on the path, lab reports aspect, and she’d be able to relax and enjoy life again. Which might or might not include teasing Gus a little about Zack. Yes, that would be fun; and she dialled his number in a very cheerful frame of mind.

  But he spoiled everything, because he was out and his answerphone said only that if they needed him at the nick to use his bleeper and he’d respond at once; otherwise, his voice said flatly, he wasn’t available till Monday morning for anyone.

  Altogether, it was a horrible weekend for George.

  10

  The first person she saw when she got to the hospital early on Monday morning was Zack, and she had had so dreary a Sunday that she greeted him with more warmth than perhaps she should have done. She had managed to park her car, in spite of the fact that half of the car park had been closed off to allow the Estates Department to apply new ground markings designed to make the place easier and safer to use, and was about to lock it up when she spotted a heap of detritus — paper wrappers, dead leaves, flakes of street mud and the like — on the floor. She bent to brush it out, her posture far from elegant, only to receive a mild slap on her bottom. She pulled herself out of the car to deliver a blistering reproof to whoever had delivered it, suspecting it might be Gus, only to see Zack standing there and smiling at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at once. ‘I know I shouldn’t have but I simply couldn’t resist. You have a neat rear elevation and the presentation was more than human flesh could bear.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, a modern man like you,’ she said trying to sound angrier than she was, ‘I could have you for sexual harassment.’

  ‘I grovel. Don’t sue me this week, huh? Leave it till next time. Only I swear there won’t be a next time. Until I’m invited, that is… So, did you have a good weekend?’

  She looked back at it in her memory and grimaced. ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘Like that, was it? Me too. Busy but no fun. Have you had breakfast yet?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to bother.’ She locked the car and began to walk towards her department. ‘I have a lot to do.’ But he steered her away towards the canteen block.

  ‘Not healthy. A person needs her breakfast. A pathologist needs it more than a person does, seeing she has such an onerous burden of work to face.’

  ‘More onerous than a researcher’s?’

  ‘Oh, much more. All those PMs and tests and the masses of paperwork and computer fiddling —’

  ‘How right you are!’ she said feelingly. ‘That’s the part I dislike most. Still, it has to be done.’

  ‘Can’t you hand it over to your staff? I try to get some other guy to do it every
chance I get. Not that I get as much as you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have that huge a staff, you know, and most of ’em have very specific jobs of their own: histology and biochemistry and so on. I can’t just drag them away to deal with data just because I don’t enjoy doing it.’

  ‘Poor you.’ They’d reached the canteen where a flutter of night nurses was making a fair amount of noise over the last meal of their working day. There was a smell of not very good curry in the air which made George wrinkle her nose in distaste.

  ‘Poor me indeed. God, that smells horrible. How people can eat curry at eight a.m. is beyond me.’

  ‘To them it’s an evening meal,’ he said, reaching for a tray. ‘What’s for you then? Bacon and eggs and all things cholesterol?’

  ‘Muesli and orange juice and all things fibrous,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it tastes better. They don’t have to cook it. Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Since they both taste equally foul, I leave the choice to you. You find a table, I’ll pay.’

  ‘Make a note of my share. I pay my own way,’ she said. He opened his mouth to protest but she just looked at him very directly indeed with her brows up and he subsided.

  ‘Oh, indeed, indeed, She-who-must-be-obeyed,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh, did you read that book too?’ She felt a warm surge of pleasure. ‘It was one of my favourites when I was a kid. She—’

  ‘By Rider Haggard. Of course I read it. It was real sexy.’

  ‘Wasn’t it just! If my Ma had known what sort of tale it was, it’s my guess she’d have pushed me back at Little Women.’

  ‘They made me read The Last of the Mohicans,’ he said. ‘I preferred Ayesha and Sanders of the River every time.’

  They found a table and settled to eat, still talking eagerly of the books they’d read as children, until George spotted Jerry leaving the canteen, having finished his breakfast, and sighed. ‘I have to get to work,’ she said. ‘That paperwork, remember?’

  ‘So what sort do you have?’ He sounded only politely curious and she laughed.

  ‘You don’t really want to know.’

  He straightened up. ‘Oh, I do, I do,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in everything you do. So tell me. I insist.’

  ‘Oh, well, if you insist,’ she said. ‘There are all the assays to spot check, to make sure the staff are up to the mark. There are the costings on all sorts of procedures to keep Ellen — she’s the Business Manager — happy and to keep my budget in good shape. There’re staff assessments for the personnel department. There’re the reports I have to make on postmortems and pieces of special evidence I might have to give in court. There are —’

  ‘God,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed. But it’s very routine stuff, isn’t it? Don’t you have any of the fun data to play with? Research results, say? I mean, some of the research that we do goes through your department, doesn’t it? Institute work?’

  ‘Oh, some,’ she said. ‘There are hormone assays, aren’t there, involved in some of the work? That’d come to us, but I don’t handle the paperwork — or rather the computer work — for that. One of the senior technicians deals with it.’

  ‘Well that’s something. Sheila?’

  ‘Maybe. Or Jerry Swann or Peter. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I told you. I’m interested in everything you do. You’re an interesting woman, so your work is interesting too.’

  ‘La, but you’re becoming a deal too particular, sir,’ she said, with a mock Restoration flourish of her hand, and got to her feet. ‘Like I said, I gotta go. And when a woman’s gotta go —’

  ‘May I come over later to go through the stuff I worked on over the weekend?’ He sounded eager. ‘I have the list of patients ready, and the X-rays and so forth. It’d be a great help to get some input from you before I go on.’

  She hesitated, mentally running over her day’s schedule in her mind. She wouldn’t know till she got to the lab whether or not there were any PMs to be done, but she did have an appointment to go to court to give evidence. She explained how difficult it was to know just how long a case would take once it had started, and even if it would start on time. ‘But I should be through by a late lunchtime,’ she said. ‘I sure as hell hope so. If you don’t mind taking a chance that I won’t be available, you could phone over around three, and I’ll see how I’m doing.’

  ‘Great.’ He smiled at her, and once again she felt the little surge of interest she had felt when she had first seen his eyes vanish into slits the way they did when he was particularly happy. This time she rather enjoyed it.

  When she got to the lab she found Danny waiting in her office, looking even more lugubrious than usual, if that were possible. ‘There’s a bit of a flap on in the coroner’s office,’ he reported with gloomy relish. ‘There was a multiple pile-up in the Commercial Road. Three of the drivers are here in intensive care and two in the Royal London, and there was two fatalities and they’re waiting downstairs for you. And then there’s been some trouble at a school over in Stepney Green with a couple of these bovver boys carving up a Paki. They want all three of the PMs dead urgent, and they keep calling to see what you can do to rush ’em.’

  ‘Not a lot,’ she said crisply. ‘I’m due in court at — let me see my worklist.’ She picked up her folder and studied it. ‘Ten o’clock. It’s a tricky one, so even if it starts on time … Look, I’ll call the coroner’s office myself. You go and get the first of them ready, anyway.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Danny was being wilfully difficult, she told herself and smiled at him as brilliantly as she could. ‘The one that the police are most likely to be interested in. I imagine that’ll be the knife wounds, don’t you?’

  ‘S’pose so,’ he muttered, and went stomping off.

  George set to work to get through as much as she could before having to leave for court. When she’d made sure that the lab was running smoothly and had dealt with her urgent mail and phone calls, she had a little time left over to tidy her desk, which she did, stacking the files high. And that was when she found the envelope that had come over by hand from Ratcliffe Street.

  She recognized Gus’s handwriting on the envelope, and bit her lip. Maybe she’d been a bit unfair to him; if this was some sort of peace offering she’d accept it and no hard feelings.

  It was a brief note that he had merely initialled, chilling in its lack of any friendly touches.

  I can’t tell you for some time what happened to Sheila Keen’s car. It was checked first thing this morning by CID here and arrangements were made to ship it to the main forensics laboratory for full testing. I’ve just heard, however, that they’ve a major overload of work and cannot promise a report before midweek at the earliest. Sorry about this. I’ll let you know what there is as soon as I get it Ditto with the report on the chocolates.

  She brooded on that for the rest of the morning: all through her court case (except fortunately while she was actually in the witness box, which was just as well because she had to face a particularly vicious cross-examination by the defence) and even while she did the PM on the young Asian boy who had been knifed in the school playground. But again fortunately the anger that created in her (to see a healthy young body sliced to death for no reason was precisely the sort of trigger to rouse her fury at the best of times, and this was far from that) fuelled her concentration enough to find a fragment of metal in one of the wounds that would, she knew, enable the police to identify the weapon and therefore the perpetrator very fast indeed. Which gave her a degree of grim satisfaction, if not enough to help her feel all that much better.

  She was about to start on the first of the traffic accident PMs when the phone in Danny’s cubby hole rang down the corridor. He departed to answer it, even as she bawled after him, ‘Let it ring!’, then came back to find her scowling more than ever. He told her blandly that, ‘Dr Zack said as how you told him to phone now, but I told him you was busy and wouldn’t be best pleased at being interrupted, so he said no
t to bother. All right, then?’

  She stared at him nonplussed. That would have been exactly the right thing to have said to any other caller, but he’d brushed off Zack, and she wasn’t at all happy about that. Talking to him would have soothed her thoroughly ruffled feathers. But she couldn’t say that to Danny, who was smirking at her in the most maddening way possible. All she could do was get her head down and finish the job in hand as best she might.

  Which she did, including the second traffic accident victim, much to Danny’s annoyance, since he had expected her to leave that till first thing the next morning, thus allowing him to get to his favourite pub at his usual hour. Recognizing his annoyance helped George to regain her own composure and by the time she had finished and was in the shower as Danny banged about furiously clearing up, some of her equanimity had returned.

  If it was going to take three days or so to get the information on Sheila’s car, well, so be it. She’d just have to wait till she had it (if, that is, Gus gave it to her, and the possibility that he might refuse she did not even want to contemplate) and in the meantime get on with another line of enquiry.

  Once she was out of the shower and dressed, with her hair brushed up and dried, she’d decided what to do. She glanced at her watch as she ran upstairs to her office: well after seven. She had been working flat out all day and she ought to be both tired and hungry, but she was neither. She knew just what she was going to do, and no one was going to stop her.