‘Top marks.’
Marion Teal flushed. ‘But those other white gowns—the empty ones—’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t quite understand what they’re doing in the painting.’
‘Don’t suppose you do,’ said Adrian Gomm negligently from his perch above her.
‘And they’re all different,’ persisted Marion. It was stupid to feel so disadvantaged just because she was having to look up at him. He wasn’t even setting out to rattle her like Mr Maldonson did. Mr Maldonson did not like women in medicine—well, women in obstetric surgery anyway—and went out of his way to make that clear in every possible way.
‘They are,’ said Adrian Gomm laconically.
Marion Teal stepped back and regarded the mural more closely. ‘This one below the saint on the left—that’s an operation gown, surely?’
‘It is.’
She frowned. ‘But what I don’t see is why its strings lead down to the long white gown lying on its side along the bottom.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘More symbolism?’ The white gown at the bottom of the mural was the opposite—almost a mirror image—of the saint’s one at the top of the mural. Whereas, though the arms of the saint stretched out and down, those of the gown down below stuck upwards in a stiff imploring fashion as if beseeching help.
‘The underneath one’s a shroud,’ said Adrian Gomm, applying his brush to the wall.
‘Oh … oh, I see.’ She looked around. ‘Then what about the other gown?’
‘The one on the right?’
‘Yes. Tell me, is that a straitjacket or something?’ Dr Teal was hoping one day to become a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist—hence the importance of Mr Maldonson to her career prospects—not a psychiatrist, and hadn’t actually ever set eyes on a straitjacket.
‘That’s symbolic, too,’ said Adrian Gomm from somewhere level with her head. ‘If you look carefully you can see that its strings tie into the saint’s robes and the shroud, just like those on the operation gown do on the other side.’
‘But what is it?’ asked Marion, interested in spite of herself.
‘Something called a sanbenito.’ Gomm hitched up his paint-stained jeans.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ she said, some of her preoccupation with Mr Maldonson fading.
‘It was a robe worn by heretics,’ Gomm informed her, ‘before they were burned at the stake.’
Marion Teal shivered. Perhaps she was getting her own problems out of proportion.
‘Although,’ Adrian Gomm tightened his lips cynically, ‘I dare say those in the operating gowns died without blessing often enough, too, don’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ she murmured, drifting back to the front door where she would be able to see Mr Maldonson come in.
If he did.
For Dr Martin Friar, on the other hand, the day was improving.
He had indeed diagnosed something interesting in the medical clinic he was taking for the absent Dr Meggie and, as the Out-Patient Department Sister had been sure he would, had brightened up quite markedly after doing so—and having had his coffee, of course.
‘How long have you been feeling like this, Mrs Allison?’ he asked the patient, a stout countrywoman from one of the more rural villages of Calleshire’s hinterland.
Her answer confounded him.
‘’Bout since last Michaelmas, Doctor.’
‘I see,’ he murmured noncommittally. ‘And then?’
‘Then after Christmas the pain got worse. I was fair winded, too, every time I tried to do anything.’
‘Housework, you mean?’
She stared at him. ‘Well, that and seeing to the hens and geese. Got so that I couldn’t bend to get the eggs, see? Not without the pain coming on.’ She looked intently into Dr Friar’s face, anxious that he should fully understand about her pain. ‘Then, when I come to give m’husband a hand with the farrowing in the night, I came over really queer and we had to have the doctor out. Haven’t done that since the children were young.’
‘I see.’ He made a note on the clean new record. He’d been brought up in the town himself and didn’t really understand the urgencies of rural life.
‘Then there was the shopping, doctor.’
‘What about the shopping?’ asked the registrar who didn’t really understand that either.
‘Carrying it, of course,’ retorted Mrs Allison, for the moment quite forgetting to be over-awed by her surroundings. ‘A week’s shopping gets quite heavy, I can tell you. And it’s a tidy step from the bus at Great Rooden up the hill to the farm after a morning on your feet at the market at Berebury.’
The registrar reached for his sphygmomanometer while Mrs Allison looked round the clinic, impressed and frightened in equal parts. It wasn’t really intended to, but the Out-Patient Clinic sometimes had the same effect on those unfamiliar with it as the Hall of Justice in the Doge’s Palace in Venice—walking the length of which was said to have concentrated the minds of those brought to trial there more than somewhat.
Dr Friar said, some of his own aching tiredness gone now, ‘So that was when you got this feeling again, was it, Mrs Allison?’
‘That’s right,’ she responded absently, her eyes on his hands. ‘What are you going to do with that thing there, then?’
‘Just putting it round your arm, that’s all. It won’t hurt.’ He picked up his stethoscope. ‘And then I’m going to have a listen to your ticker.’
‘’T’aint what it used to be,’ she wheezed.
‘No.’
‘And my ankles swell something awful by nighttime.’
‘Yes, I’m sure they do.’ Martin Friar glanced down at her bulging ankles and stout, lace-up shoes and made another note in her record. Her blood pressure was sky-high, of course. He didn’t like the colour of Mrs Allison’s lips either but he did not say so. Instead he asked, ‘What are you like after a rest?’
‘Rest?’ She stared at him as if he was speaking another language. Then her face cleared. ‘Oh, you mean Sundays, Doctor …’
He hadn’t meant Sundays but he let her go on.
‘Well, there’s still always feeding the stock, of course, but I do put my feet up for a bit in the afternoons Sundays sometimes—’
Doctor and patient both regarded Mrs Allison’s swollen, pitted legs. She said, ‘But it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference to the pain up here.’
‘No.’ Dr Friar nodded.
‘That’s why my own doctor thought I ought to come up to the hospital.’
‘Quite right,’ said the Senior Registrar, thinking—but not saying—that her own doctor—the old fool—should have sent her up to see them months ago. ‘Because,’ he went on sedulously, ‘I think we may be able to do something for you.’
‘I didn’t want to come, see,’ she said again, not listening, ‘because I’ve never been to hospital before.’
‘One of your problems,’ said Martin Friar, not listening either, ‘is that your arteries have got all furred up—a bit like an old water pipe does—and the blood can’t flow through like it used to.’
Her face cleared. ‘The water’s terrible hard out our way, Doctor, and I do feel a great throbbing sometimes.’
‘You will,’ he said, not bothering to try to dispel her confusion. ‘Now, what we need to do is to attempt to dissolve all the stuff that’s stuck on the inside of your arteries without having to send you for an operation.’
‘I shouldn’t want to have an operation,’ she said automatically.
‘There are two treatments that we could give you,’ said Dr Friar, ignoring this too. ‘Actually, as it happens we’re—that is, Dr Meggie is—testing one of the new ones here at St Ninian’s.’
‘Well, I never,’ she said, suitably impressed.
‘And what we’d really like to do, Mrs Allison, is to include you in one of our clinical trials by putting you on a course of one of these new tablets and seeing how you get on.’<
br />
She nodded uncomprehendingly.
‘I shan’t even know myself which one of the two drugs we’re giving you,’ said Martin Friar, adding with a winning smile, ‘That’s so I shan’t be improperly influencing you in any way by what I say about the tablets when I prescribe them for you.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ she murmured, now even more mystified than ever. She’d come up to St Ninian’s to be influenced and didn’t understand why the doctor wasn’t giving her something and saying how much good it would do her and that she’d soon be better again—like her own dear old doctor always did.
‘It’s called a double-blind trial,’ Martin Friar was going on. He gave her his quick professional smile again—the one he’d been practising ever since he qualified—and said, ‘Actually, to be quite accurate, it’s called a prospective, non-randomized, double-blind crossover trial—not that you need to worry about the mechanics of that.’
‘These tablets,’ she said uncertainly, temporarily blinded by science and therefore concentrating on something she did understand, ‘will they help this pain I’ve been having, then?’
‘They might,’ he said cautiously, adding, ‘although I ought to warn you that they might just upset you a little, too. If they do, don’t stop taking them. Come back and tell us here instead.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’
Friar reached for a pre-packed bottle of tablets and wrote her name and a number on the label and entered both in a record book. ‘Now, Mrs—er—Allison, isn’t it?—I need you to sign this form.’
She fumbled in her handbag. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Doctor. I didn’t think to bring my reading spectacles with me.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said easily. ‘It’s only just to say that I’ve explained to you all about this clinical trial we’re doing and that you understand … can you see the dotted line all right? Good. Well, just sign your name along that and Sister here will put her name there, too.’
‘My ordinary writing?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, filling in his own part of the form to the effect that the patient’s informed consent to taking part in a clinical trial had been obtained and a full explanation of possible risks and side-effects given. ‘We’d like to see you here in another month, Mrs Allison. I may not be taking the clinic that day—it’ll probably be Dr Meggie himself …’
She nodded. It had been Dr Meggie whom she’d come to see anyway.
‘But when you come again, just remind him that you’ve been enrolled in the Cardigan Protocol, will you?’
‘The Cardigan Protocol,’ she repeated.
Dr Friar felt a pardonable sense of satisfaction with the outcome of the consultation. Mrs Allison was an ideal candidate for the new drug test and Dr Meggie would undoubtedly be pleased with him.
‘Look,’ he said to her, ‘I’m putting a special marker in your notes to alert him when he sees you.’
CHAPTER THREE
The rank and file of doctors are no more scientific than their tailors.
‘God, that hurts!’ shouted the young man in Berebury Hospital’s spanking new Accident and Emergency Department. ‘It hurts like hell.’
Darren Clements was lying outstretched on a couch in a curtained cubicle, his left arm surrounded by blood-soaked towels and his eyes wide open in an unhealthy combination of fear, anger and pain. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. There was also an element in his expression—often found in those who encounter really sizeable pain for the first time in their lives—of sheer surprise.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Clements,’ said Dr Dilys Chomel, who was the duty doctor on call for accidents and emergencies until Monday morning next, ‘but your wound needs attention.’
The young man started as his gaze alighted on her advancing hands. He quickly jerked himself up on an elbow into a sitting position, pushing the towels away. ‘What are you going to do with that needle?’
‘I’m going to inject some local anaesthetic into the skin around the cut,’ said Dilys Chomel, ‘so that you won’t feel the stitches going in.’ Where she came from, young warriors of Darren Clements’s age regularly sought pain that called for greater stoicism than this as part of their initiation to manhood rites. She regarded her patient not unsympathetically. ‘That’s a pretty nasty cut you’ve got there, you know.’
‘Of course, I know,’ snapped back the young man ungraciously, his naturally thin face sharpened by its owner’s present anxious circumstances. ‘My hand went right through their flaming glass roof. Watch it! You do know what you’re doing, don’t you? Ouch!’
‘The X-rays don’t show any glass left in the wound,’ Dilys Chomel calmly continued with her suturing of the gaping skin, ‘so you’ve been lucky there.’
‘Lucky!’ gasped Darren Clements. ‘I’m going to get Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals for having unsafe glass in their roofs if it’s the last thing I do.’
The lady doctor forbore to remark that if he’d fallen any further through the roof then that in itself might very well have been the last thing he did. Instead she said, ‘And you haven’t cut any tendons either. That would have meant either major surgery—’
He stiffened. ‘I wouldn’t have had it—’
‘Or losing the use of your hand for the rest of your life,’ finished Dr Chomel pleasantly. ‘Can you turn it this way for me now, please?’
Darren Clements scowled mutinously but then pronated his injured wrist as asked.
‘Even so, you might still need surgery,’ continued the doctor. ‘I’ll do the best I can but you’re going to have a scar there—’
‘I’ll keep it, thank you,’ snapped Clements; like many another wounded in a good cause he wasn’t averse to having evidence of this on his person.
‘—which you may otherwise have to keep covered in case people attribute your cut wrist to a failed suicide attempt.’ Dr Chomel bent forward again. ‘Now turn the other side, please. This shouldn’t hurt so much.’
Clements groaned but did as he was told. ‘Are they still outside?’
‘Who?’
‘The police, of course,’ he snarled. ‘They want to know who was with me … and I’m not going to tell them.’
‘And whoever it was,’ she observed drily, ‘as they aren’t here, too, I take it that they were uninjured? Or did they just run away and leave you to face the music?’
‘They escaped,’ he said with dignity.
‘And you were caught—you may feel this a little—red-handed?’
‘That’s the only reason they got me,’ said Clements, missing her little joke. ‘And for your information I felt that a lot.’
‘Sorry. I’m nearly finished.’
‘Besides,’ he sniffed, ‘I couldn’t run anywhere with this hand. I’d have left a trial of blood a mile wide.’ He winced as Dr Chomel inserted another suture. ‘And even the police would be able to follow that.’
Dilys Chomel didn’t know Calleshire well but even she had heard of Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals over at Staple St James. She sighed and asked with pity, ‘What drugs are you on, then, my lad, might I ask?’
He stared at her, outraged. ‘Drugs? I’m not on drugs.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said punctiliously, ‘but what were you doing trying to break into Gilroy’s if you aren’t on drugs?’
‘Lighten up! I’m an animal rights activist, not a junkie.’ As far as he was able, Darren Clements drew himself up and said with great impressment, ‘We were going to try to let some of their monkeys loose.’
‘No, Inspector,’ George Gledhill, the Chief Chemist at Gilroy’s, was saying at much the same time over at their works at Staple St James, ‘none of them was released this time. The morons didn’t get that far.’
‘Good,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan fervently. The last raid on Gilroy’s by the Calleshire Animal Activists had resulted in monkeys infected with something with a long name that Sloan never did catch—but which sounded very nasty—being free to roam the countryside, carrying their dis
ease with them. The police had had to catch the monkeys, though.
And fast.
‘It’s only thanks to that new alarm system we put in after last January,’ said Gledhill, ‘that we foiled the blighters.’ He was a short, square man, used to taking decisions.
‘Glad to hear it, sir,’ said Sloan, adding prosaically, ‘You could say that prevention’s better than cure in the police world as well as the medical one.’
Gledhill grinned. ‘Don’t tell the doctors but I don’t know that it works for them. Just as well, probably, or I’d be out of a job.’
‘I don’t think you need worry, sir, not just yet. Any more than me.’ Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, known as Christopher Dennis to his wife and family, and for obvious reasons as ‘Seedy’ to his friends and colleagues in the Force, was the head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary. Such crime as was committed in the country market town of Berebury and its environs landed up on his desk. ‘I think there’ll be work for us both, yet awhile.’
‘Had a bit of trouble with the alarm system to begin with, though,’ admitted Gledhill.
‘Oh?’ Sloan was sorry to hear that. The monkeys hadn’t liked the cold weather the last time they had been free, that was for sure. ‘The electrics?’
Gledhill shook his head. ‘The monkeys. The little perishers found out how to set it off themselves. And did.’
‘We’re hoping to interview a man in connection with the attempted break-in,’ said Sloan formally, ‘later on this morning. I’ve got a constable waiting at the hospital now. I’ve just got to look in at Headquarters and then I’ll be going over there myself.’
In the event it wasn’t quite as simple as that. There was a message waiting for him at the police station. Superintendent Leeyes wanted to see him as soon as he got back.
‘Ah, Sloan, there you are. Come in.’ The superintendent looked up from his desk. ‘And sit down. Something rather odd’s just cropped up over at Berebury Hospital.’
‘Sir?’ said Sloan, conscious only that it was Friday and he’d been hoping to have a long-overdue weekend off.
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