by Joanna Neil
‘That’s a matter of opinion, though I’ll grant that some attempt was made to preserve her dignity. That’s something at least, I suppose.’ It was a concession of sorts, but she had to drag it up from deep within her. By now she’d definitely had her fill of Dr Matt Calder. ‘It still seems like an intrusion to me.’
She straightened her shoulders and went on, ‘I want to thank you again for what you did for the little boy…for Adam. I’m sure his parents will be very grateful to you for that.’ She hesitated for a moment, and then added, ‘As you’re not here for an interview, I hope you’ll understand if I say goodbye to you now and show you out. I have four other people to see, and when I’m finished here I have patients to attend to.’
Her green eyes flickered. He, on the other hand, probably had nothing more pressing to do than to keep a late lunch appointment with a TV executive.
He didn’t appear to be at all fazed by her dismissal of him. Instead, he reached for her hand, taking it between his palms, and said, ‘It’s been interesting to meet you, Dr Byford. Perhaps we’ll have the chance to chat again later today after my appointment with your admin department. I’d very much like to look in on Adam to see how he is doing after his surgery.’
‘I dare say that’s a possibility.’ Abby couldn’t think straight with him holding her hand that way, and she wasn’t about to commit herself to anything. With any luck, she would be engrossed in her work by then and well out of reach of this man.
He let her go, and slowly her senses began to settle down once more. She felt hot all over and her head was filled with cotton-wool clouds that only dissipated once he had taken a step back from her. It was just as well they did, because she had work to do. How was she supposed to conduct interviews with her brain in absent mode?
She saw him out of the room, but as she walked out into the corridor with him, she saw that Helen was hurrying towards them. The registrar stopped in her tracks, looking at him in wonder.
‘You’re Matt Calder from the TV, aren’t you?’ she said in an oddly breathless tone. ‘I can’t tell you how much I enjoy your programme…and your website…and I always try to catch your radio slot whenever it’s being aired while I’m driving to work.’ She stared at him in open-eyed wonder. ‘Are you here for the A and E post? Please, say that you are…I’ll be the envy of all my friends if you decide to come and work here.’
Matt smiled at her. ‘Actually, no, I’m not. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m really only free for a few mornings a week.’
‘That’s all right. That’ll do fine,’ Helen said, a note of eagerness in her voice. ‘Whatever you can spare—anything—that would be great by me.’ Her eyes were wide with anticipation.
Matt gave a soft laugh. ‘I’m glad you think so. I’m sure we would work very well together, given the chance, but, alas, I have other commitments at the moment. I’m filming over the next couple of weeks because we still have to do four more shows to complete the series.’
‘Couldn’t you do the show from here?’ Helen was clearly getting desperate now, and Abby gave her a sharp nudge with the toe of her shoe.
‘What?’ Helen reluctantly turned her gaze to Abby.
‘I think Dr Calder is going to be too busy to do that,’ Abby said in an even tone. ‘Besides, we shouldn’t delay him any longer. He has an appointment to keep.’
‘Oh, dear,’ Helen murmured. She turned her gaze back to him. ‘Do you really? That’s such a shame.’
‘I do. Dr Byford is quite right. I have to be somewhere else in a few minutes, but you’ve certainly given me food for thought and I’ll bear your suggestion in mind. Perhaps when my recording of Emergency Call comes to an end, I’ll have more time to spare.’ Matt threw a brief sideways glance in Abby’s direction, and she wondered if he was deliberately trying to rile her. ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet both of you.’
‘Believe me, the pleasure was all mine,’ Helen said huskily.
Abby tugged on her arm and pulled her into the office as Matt turned away and began to stride down the corridor. ‘You’ve obviously taken leave of your senses,’ she hissed. ‘What are you on?’
‘Pheromones,’ Helen replied in a distracted voice. ‘Sheer, unadulterated male pheromones and animal magnetism. He has it in droves. He should bottle it. He’d make a fortune.’
Abby made a wry face. ‘I think you’d better take a minute to pull yourself together,’ she said. ‘We have work to do.’
Helen sighed. ‘I suppose we do, but I can tell you now, not one of the candidates is going to stand up to what I have in mind, not after that.’
‘Then I suggest you come back down to planet Earth, and make it quick,’ Abby said briskly. ‘We have to do some serious interviewing. I need to find someone who can fit in with the department and take some of the burden off our shoulders.’
‘Oh, well, if you put it that way…’
A couple of hours later, Abby had to admit that they were no nearer to solving their problem. ‘The trouble is, the hours we’re offering people are either too few or too many,’ she told Helen. ‘Nothing seems to fit in with what the interviewees had in mind, and from our point of view we need someone who has strong paediatric qualifications. I don’t think that any of those people would be able to work under pressure. They just don’t seem to have the experience.’
‘It looks as though another advert will have to go in, then?’ Helen queried.
‘I guess so. I just wonder if we’ll get any more response than we had the first time around.’
They made their way back to A and E, and she went to check on the progress of three-year-old Adam. He had come through everything all right, and it cheered her up that she could say as much to the distraught parents who were at his bedside.
‘Would you come and take a look at the girl in room one?’ Sam asked a little later. ‘She’s the two-year-old that I mentioned earlier. I’m beginning to be quite worried about her. She hasn’t had her full range of vaccinations because of illness in the past, so until the tests come back, I’ve no idea what I’m dealing with. She isn’t responding to antibiotics, and her fever is raging. Her heart rate is fast, as well as her breathing, and the pulse oximetry reading is very low. Do you think we need to do a lumbar puncture?’
They were already walking towards the treatment room. ‘That’s a very invasive process,’ Abby said. ‘Is there any sign of a rash?’
Sam shook his head. ‘Not as such, but she appears to be very ill. I’m afraid that she’s not responding to treatment, and that she might be going into septic shock. It seems as though there’s a systemic inflammatory response.’
Abby looked at the toddler and her heart immediately went out to the child. She was dreadfully ill, unresponsive, and a brief examination left Abby concerned that her circulation was shutting down, despite the resuscitation procedures they had put in place.
The parents were tearful, pleading with her to do something for their baby.
‘I know this is difficult for you,’ she told them. ‘Lucy is very ill, but we’re doing everything possible to help her. It looks as though she has a bacterial infection of some sort, possibly a form of pneumonia, and so far it isn’t responding to treatment. I’m going to change the antibiotics and add something to assist her circulation. We just have to hang in there and wait for the medicine to take effect.’
Turning to Sam, she said in an undertone, ‘We’ll add a vasopressor to assist the blood flow, and a steroid to see if that will do something to reduce the inflammation.’
Sam looked anxious, but she said softly, ‘You’re doing all right. You’ve done everything possible.’
‘I hope it’s enough.’
She nodded. It was frightening to see a child looking so ill, and Lucy’s desperate condition weighed heavily on her mind as she left the room.
Glancing across the expanse of the department, she caught sight of Matt Calder coming in through the main door, and her first instinct was to walk in the opposite direction. She
resisted the impulse. Whatever her feelings towards him, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t simply take an escape route and avoid him.
Then she saw that he wasn’t alone. He had with him the head of administration, and the two of them were chatting amicably, almost as though they were old friends.
A nurse handed her a chart outlining another patient’s progress, and she quickly checked the details on it before adding her signature and handing it back. ‘You can reduce the observations to half-hourly,’ she told the girl. ‘His condition seems to be improving at last.’
‘I’ll do that.’ The nurse hurried away, and Abby headed for the trauma room so that she could examine a child who had just been brought in.
‘May we interrupt you for a moment?’ the head of administration queried gently.
‘Of course.’ She gave him a polite smile. She had nothing against the man personally, but his department was forever coming up with new edicts to be followed or targets that had to be met, and not one of them ever made her job any easier. The only way he and his kind would ever understand the constraints she was under would be if he was to try working at the rock face, but that wasn’t likely to happen in a month of Sundays.
‘I believe you’ve already met my friend, Matt, here?’ His smile was encouraging. Clearly he expected an enthusiastic response.
‘Yes, we ran into each other earlier today.’ So they were pals, were they? Abby mused.
‘Good, good. Then you two already have a head start. Matt’s writing an article about what goes on in A and E. You know the sort of thing…the challenges you come up against in your daily work, the kind of cases you see on a regular basis. Perhaps you could help him out? I can’t think of a better person to show him around.’
Abby glanced at Matt and forced a smile. ‘I don’t know about giving you the grand tour. It will be more a case of following me around as I work and getting questions in where you can, I should imagine. I don’t have the luxury of free time, but you’re welcome to tag along.’
The head of administration looked a trifle disconcerted at that, but Matt responded well enough.
‘That would be excellent, thank you. I really don’t want to put you out in any way.’
Didn’t he? So why did she get the feeling she was being coerced into doing this? Anyway, she wasn’t going to spend too much time worrying about it, whatever either of them thought about her manner to them.
The trouble with men in authority, from her experience, was that they expected to have everything work their way, and it didn’t matter who they trod on to get to where they wanted to be.
Wasn’t that what Craig had done? Her ex-boyfriend had begged her to help him study for his exams, had picked her brains, and then he had walked all over her to get the promotion she had been after. He had taken their shared research paper, the one she had worked on intensively and had been struggling to perfect for over a year, and he had taken all the credit for it himself, using what had mostly been her work to wow the interview board with his so-called expertise.
‘I was on my way to see a patient,’ she murmured. ‘If you’ll excuse me?’
‘Of course.’ The man from Admin clapped Matt on the back and said brightly, ‘I’ll leave you in Abby’s capable hands.’ Then he strolled back the way he had come, taking a leisurely route and pausing to admire the colourful murals along the way.
‘I don’t know how much help I can be to you,’ Abby said to Matt, continuing on her way to the trauma room. ‘I would have thought you already have some experience of A and E. We all do a stint there during training, don’t we?’
‘That’s true and, to be honest, I actually specialised in it at one time. What I’m really looking for is your take on things. How you feel about your work, and which cases have an effect on you above all others.’ He paused for a moment or two, giving her a thoughtful look. ‘I noticed that you seemed sad when we walked in here a few minutes ago. Was it because of a difficult problem you had to solve?’
‘I don’t deal with cases or problems,’ she told him. ‘I treat sick children.’
She might have expected him to draw back at the snub, but he simply studied her more closely, a glimmer of compassion in his eyes. ‘And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? That’s what makes yours such a heart-rending job.’
She winced at his perception. Why did he have to show that he understood? She didn’t like the man, neither did she want to have anything to do with him. He was the enemy, a thorn in her side.
‘If you can understand that,’ she said, ‘then it beggars belief that you should write an article on the pros and cons of vaccination. I have to deal with the fallout from that when parents read your stuff and decide that vaccination isn’t for their children. Then I have to try to save the lives of the ones who come in here with meningitis and respiratory infections that overwhelm their immune systems.’
‘Did you read the article?’
‘Bits of it.’ She grimaced. ‘Someone had left the magazine open on the table in the doctors’ lounge, and I glanced at it in passing.’
He gave a crooked smile. ‘I’m not going to win this argument when I’m up against a biased opinion like yours, am I? Perhaps you should have read the article in full before you made up your mind that I’m the devil incarnate.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she said. ‘I tend not to think about you at all.’
That remark might have been a good payback for the putdown he had made on his website, but it didn’t have anything near the effect she’d wished for. He simply tilted back his head and laughed.
CHAPTER THREE
‘HOW is the article coming along?’ Abby queried, glancing at Matt as he walked up to the reception desk in A and E. He was beautifully turned out, as usual, wearing an immaculate grey suit, with a shirt that was a soft shade of blue. It matched the colour of his eyes, she noted irrelevantly. She watched him take his notepad from his briefcase.
‘I’m getting there,’ he murmured. ‘This last session should see me through to completing it. I already have a wealth of material to write up.’
‘That’s good.’ She frowned, glancing at him through narrowed eyes. Perhaps it would mean that he would soon be gone from under her feet. It was some three weeks since he had arranged to follow her progress through A and E, but at least she had managed to limit his visits to one day a week. She was still uneasy at having him shadow her every move. His presence in the unit put her on edge, though she was hard put to say why.
‘I hope you’ll be sure to let me see the finished article before it goes to print,’ she said on a warning note. Heaven forbid he should take the opportunity to aim a few more swipes at her through his website or, in this case, a Sunday newspaper magazine.
‘I will, of course.’ His mouth made a crooked slant, one that she was beginning to recognise. He knew exactly what she was thinking, and the fact that he had the ability to read her mind so easily was making her increasingly uncomfortable.
She started towards one of the treatment rooms. ‘I’m going to check up on a six-year-old who was brought in here a little earlier. His mother was brought to A and E after a violent domestic incident involving her husband, and the episode seems to have triggered the child’s asthma. He’s in a bad way.’
Matt frowned. ‘Was it simply stress that started the attack, or do you think there could be an underlying infection that’s adding to his troubles?’
‘There may well be an infection of some sort. He’s certainly very chesty. We’re doing tests to check on that, and we have him on antibiotic therapy in the meantime, but I think whatever happened at home tipped him over the edge and sent his lungs into spasm.’
They went into the room together a moment later. The little boy was propped up against pillows, and a nurse was checking the monitors and recording his vital signs on a chart.
Abby went over to him and adjusted the oxygen mask, which had become slightly dislodged. ‘Breathe in through here for me, Ryan, will you? It w
ill help you to feel better. Here, you can hold it, if you like.’
Ryan struggled to pull in a few breaths of oxygen. He was a frail, thin little boy, with fair hair that added to his pallor. He was ashen-faced and very distressed, so that Abby was worried for him.
He gazed up at her. ‘I want my mum…’ he said in a thready voice. He turned his head and tried to look around the room, obviously searching for her, but he was very weak and the effort exhausted him. He sank back against the pillows, a teardrop trickling down his cheek.
Abby wished that she could comfort him. She wanted to reach out and hug him. ‘I’m sure she’ll be here to see you in a little while. We just need to make sure that you’re feeling better so that you’ll be able to talk to her when she comes to sit with you.’
‘My mum’s poorly,’ the boy said heavily, pulling the mask away from his mouth for an instant, and Abby held it for him so that he could still breathe in the oxygen. ‘I wanted to stay with her.’
‘I know you did,’ Abby said. ‘She was hurt, wasn’t she? But someone’s gone over to the grown-ups’ A and E to find out how she is. The nurses are looking after her right now, but as soon as she’s strong enough we’ll see if we can bring her over to you.’
His expression was solemn, as though he was thinking things through. After a moment or two, he said, his voice barely more than a whisper, ‘Daddy hit her in the tummy.’ His face started to crumple. ‘I tried to stop him. I shouted…But he pushed me out of the way…and my mum fell down.’
His breath gave way, and Abby said gently, ‘It must have been very upsetting for you to see that.’
Ryan nodded, a very slight movement of his head, and he started to chew at his bottom lip. Abby glanced up at Matt, and saw that he was frowning, his gaze intent on the boy.
‘Has this sort of thing happened before?’ he asked.