Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  George was eventually able to soothe her by dint of much hugging and rocking as the storm of distress flooded itself away until at last the girl was just sitting in a sodden heap and sniffing gently. George gave her a final hug and then gently pushed on her shoulders so that she was sitting upright again.

  ‘It was a dreadful thing to happen,’ she said. ‘And I know how you feel, truly I do. I’m — er — trying to find out how it happened, and why.’

  ‘There’s been no end of talk about the place,’ the girl said drearily. ‘People saying he was killed by these racists and others saying he was probably pushing drugs the way that fellow was two years ago — that nurse what they caught with morphine down at the market — and that was why he was killed. I know he wasn’t, he wasn’t like that. And I couldn’t say nothing because he’d made me promise I’d never let on we was going out because —’ Again her face crumpled. ‘He wanted to tell his sister about us first. She lives in Holland and I promised him I wouldn’t — and I thought, well he’s dead now and I can’t just go against what I promised, can I?’

  ‘No,’ George said gently. ‘No, you were quite right to keep your word. What’s your name? I can’t talk to you properly without knowing your name, can I?’

  ‘Cherry.’ The girl sniffed hard and seemed to get some of her control back. ‘I’m Cherry Lucas.’

  ‘And you work here in Maternity?’

  Cherry shook her head. ‘Not exactly. I’m the secretary over on Fertility. It’s sort of part of Maternity and not quite, know what I mean? They’re always trying to use our rooms and Dr Arundel, she always fights back like anything. You’d think our department didn’t matter, but it does — it makes so many people happier than they could have been and — well.’ She stopped. ‘That’s where I work.’

  ‘And a very important job it is,’ George said. ‘Cherry, if I ask you some questions about Harry, will it upset you?’

  The girl looked at her miserably. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’ll make it easier, I think. The worst thing’s been not being able to talk about him to anyone. It’s like he wasn’t ever here and I wasn’t here with him, know what I mean? I can’t talk to my mum and dad ‘cause Mum’ll only say good riddance and, like I said, Dad never knew, and my sister, she works over the other side of London and I don’t get to see her that much and — it’ll be nice to talk about him.’

  ‘Good,’ George said and squeezed the hot damp hand that lay in Cherry’s lap. ‘It might help us to find out what happened to him.’

  ‘Was he killed deliberate, then?’ Cherry looked up at her with her drowned blue eyes wide and sharp, and George thought, this child is a lot brighter than she may appear. ‘I didn’t really believe it at first, when they all said and it was in the papers and on TV. I thought, just horrible violence, but then I wondered, was he killed deliberate by someone who was just after him, like?’

  George hesitated. ‘Yes,’ she said at length. ‘Yes, I think he was. But we don’t know why, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Have you any idea who might have been — well, I suppose I have to say an enemy, though it sounds so dramatic, doesn’t it?’

  Cherry nodded. ‘That was the way I was thinking. He was so nice, Harry. So funny and — well, nice. I used to think he was ever so glamorous when I first saw him, just like that lovely actor in LA Law, know the one I mean? He’s black and ever so handsome, and he’s got a white girlfriend and — well, I used to see him and think, cor … I never thought he’d ask me out. But he did and I told you, I just flipped.’ Cherry looked dreamily at George and managed a smile. ‘He was good looking, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Very good looking,’ George said. ‘And I agree, he did look very like that actor. Was he like him in other ways? Like his character, I mean, getting involved in people’s problems and so on?’

  Cherry seemed almost to light up. ‘Oh, yes! I told my sister that, and she said I was just being silly and romantic. She’s ever so practical, my sister, and she said getting hitched to a doctor could be the best thing I ever did, but not because of him being so handsome, but because of never being out of work, not like her boyfriend. He’s in the printing and you know how things are for them now. She saves money all the time and she’s — well, she doesn’t think like me. But he was just like that lawyer, only better. Really cared about things. Used to worry about the children in Paediatrics, he did, all the time. He was always telling me about the way some of the parents were and getting all upset. His mum and dad had been really nice to him — they died when he was a kid, and it was his sister reared him — and he said to see the things these parents did to their children just made him so sick. Like that man who had a go at him over on Paediatrics that day. Harry said he was one of the worst. His kid told him — told Harry, that is — that his dad had interfered with him. I mean, how horrible can people be? And then the man threatened Harry and — oh, it’s all so dreadful!’

  ‘It is,’ George said. ‘Dreadful. Was Harry scared about Dave Ritchard? That was the man’s name. Did he say there’d been any other threats?’

  Cherry shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t bothered about him. It was bad at the time he said, but by that evening he’d got over it. Then on Friday I saw him in the canteen. At six o’clock. He said he’d pick me up and we’d go out for a drink or something at around nine. Only he never showed up.’ The tears began to well up in her eyes again.

  ‘Nine?’ George said. ‘Wasn’t that rather late?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ There was a ghost of indignation in Cherry’s voice. ‘I said, why so late? And he said he had to see someone about something important and I said what, and he said he thought there was something a bit odd going on and I said well, what sort of odd? and he said it could be a really important thing only he had to get his facts right and he’d tell me all about it when he saw me. Only he never showed. I stood outside the medical-school gates, where we said we’d meet, till after half-past nine and then I went home in a real temper. I thought awful things about him and then next morning when I heard — Oh, my God.’ And once more the tears slid down her cheeks.

  Outside in the corridor there was a rattle of trolley wheels as the last lunch waggon made its way out, and somewhere further along voices were raised as the labour ward door opened. George lifted her chin to listen, and then leaned over and took Cherry’s hand.

  ‘Cherry, I think we ought to get away from here. We can’t talk easily. Have you had any lunch?’

  Cherry shook her head.

  ‘Then we’ll skip away and get some. Come along.’

  The girl got to her feet obediently but George frowned and stopped. ‘Er, Cherry, what were you doing here? In the filing cabinet, I mean?’

  ‘What?’ Cherry looked back for a moment. ‘Oh, it was this file.’ She reached across and took a buff folder which she’d dropped on top of the cabinet when George had come in. ‘I thought I ought to tidy Harry’s desk. I mean …’ She bit her lip. ‘It’ll sound daft, I s’pose, but he wasn’t the tidiest of people, know what I mean? And I thought I’d kind of sort things out for him. There was a lot of notes in his room and I thought I’d take them all back quietly so that no one would think bad of him. He was always having people go on at him because he hadn’t fetched notes back.’ The woebegone look had come back. ‘I don’t want people saying anything more about him that’s nasty. I already put back all of the paediatric ones. There was just this one for here.’ She turned back to the filing cabinet. ‘I’ll slip it in now.’

  ‘May I see?’ George said and reached out a hand. Cherry hesitated.

  ‘What for? I mean, you’re not — Which department are you? Are you here in Matty? Because I don’t want to get Harry into trouble —’

  George shook her head. ‘No, Cherry. I’m the pathologist here. I’m trying to find out what happened to Harry, remember? Maybe there’s something there in those notes that might help. After all, he wasn’t part of this department either, was he? He was a Paediatric Houseman, so why should he h
ave Maternity notes in his room?’

  ‘He used to come here a lot,’ Cherry said. ‘He told me. It was the best part of the job for him. Looking over the newborns to see they were all right.’ She looked down at the folder in her hand. ‘He got really upset when things went wrong for them. I told him he was much too soft for his own good. Not like the other doctors here.’

  George kept her hand outstretched but still Cherry hesitated. The noise in the corridor increased and George felt an urgency rising in her; it was suddenly very important to her to have those notes. But she said nothing, just looking at Cherry with her brows raised and after what seemed an eternity, but was less than a second or two, Cherry gave them to her.

  ‘Great,’ George said as casually as she could. ‘Now some lunch. Come on.’ And she tucked the notes under her arm and shepherded Cherry out into the corridor.

  Further along she could see Sister Lichfield in her labour ward greens talking to her staff midwives and she looked up as they appeared at her door. George waved a hand casually. ‘Won’t stop now, Sister, I’ll be back. Just a minor query,’ she called and began to walk along the corridor towards the exit doors, hoping Sister wouldn’t notice Cherry walking in front of her. If she did, she would want to know what the girl was doing in her department, surely, and Cherry would tell her about the notes and Sister Lichfield would demand them back and George wanted to look at them … and then she relaxed her shoulders. This was becoming rather silly. All she had to do was tell Sister she needed the notes, whatever patient they belonged to, and promise to bring them back. And yet, and yet …

  She tried to think why she was so concerned and then decided that it was due to over-developed suspicions — which at once took off again, running round and round in her head like the proverbial mice on wheels. Maybe it had been Sister Lichfield herself who had attached that note to the Popodopoulos baby’s request form. Maybe it was Sister Lichfield who had something to do with the whole affair. Maybe —

  Which was so absurd a thought she laughed aloud as she reached the double doors and followed Cherry through. Cherry looked back at her questioningly and George at once straightened her face and pretended it hadn’t been she who had laughed; then took her to the canteen to give her some long-overdue lunch.

  It was gone two before the girl had pecked her lacklustre way through a plate of soup which she swore was all she wanted, because she spent most of the time talking about Harry. That she had a deep need to do so was obvious; the words spilled out in a river and George listened and nodded and said nothing as the girl revealed all too vividly her sad little fantasy; of how she would marry her handsome Harry and leave behind the narrowness of the life she lived in a Rotherhithe council block with parents who did little more than watch TV and complain about the noisy bloody blacks in the next flat all evening, and a sister who though only in her late twenties seemed to be totally absorbed in being middle-aged, planning and penny-pinching and never wanting to do anything else. Certainly she had scant respect for Cherry’s aspirations; her approval of Harry had been based solely on the value of his future earning capacity, but she had refused to meet him, ‘seeing he was coloured, you see,’ Cherry said mournfully. And now the girl was alone again, with her fantasy in tatters, and it was hard to tell for what she mourned most, Harry himself or the plans she had painted around him.

  She finished talking at last, her voice trailing away, and glanced at her watch and gasped and fussed at how late it was and how Dr Arundel’d go mad if she didn’t get her dictation typed up before five o’clock. She jumped to her feet, then she looked at George with her eyes once more full of the glitter of tears.

  ‘You’ve been ever so nice to me,’ she said. ‘It was kind. Ta ever so.’

  George filled up with guilt. For the last half-hour she’d been aching for Cherry to stop talking and to go away so that she could settle down to studying the brown folder, which lay on the bench beside her looking innocuous but seeming to shriek its promise into George’s inner ear. And now she was being thanked.

  ‘That’s OK, Cherry,’ she said a little awkwardly. ‘If you want to talk again, just call me at the path. lab and if I’m not there when you phone, they’ll tell me and I’ll find you. And meanwhile, I’m truly sorry for your loss.’ And she held out her hand to offer a consolatory handshake as she’d been taught to do for the bereaved in her childhood.

  Cherry straightened her drooping shoulders and seemed to grow a little at that. ‘Thank you,’ she said with considerable dignity. ‘Thank you so much,’ and turned and went. George watched her and again the guilt rippled in her. Why are we all so bad at understanding what it is people need? she thought. Just some recognition of her pain was all Cherry had wanted, and all I’m interested in is the puzzle and the fun of the hunt. I should be ashamed.

  But common sense moved in. She couldn’t be emotionally involved with all the people who were touched by death, even violent death. If she did she would find her own feelings in a permanent state of laceration and that would do no one any good, indeed make her useless. Better to do what she was there to do and concentrate on that.

  She looked at her watch, took a large bite of her own neglected sandwich, and picked up the folder.

  The tab was clearly written: ‘Chowdary, Angela’. George frowned and spread the contents in front of her on the sticky Formica table.

  It was all routine stuff. Angela had been referred from the Fertility Department at six weeks of pregnancy, and there was a précis of her previous treatment. George read through the sheets with their account of the use of Clomid and then of human gonadotrophin. They went on to describe the wearing trek through the tedious processes of IVF; timing the harvesting of the eggs, collecting the specimens from Viv, the husband, attempting the fertilization in vitro — and then at last when the eggs were fertilized their reimplantation. It appeared that there had been no remaining fertilized ova suitable for freezing for a second attempt should the first fail and that only one of the two implanted ova had proceeded to develop.

  But Angela had become pregnant, and from then on the notes were a straightforward account of a serene and healthy pregnancy. Angela had sailed through it and enjoyed every stage; until the sad note at the end of the sheet of paper on which the findings of the child’s first paediatric examination had been listed, reporting its death.

  But that was not all there was in the folder. At the back, under a flap, there were half a dozen sheets of paper. They looked crumpled, as though they’d been thrown away and then rescued, and she smoothed them again as she sat and stared at them.

  It was gibberish. Line after line of jumbled letters and symbols and numbers that had no significance at all to her. She closed her eyes for a moment and thought, ‘Oh, hell! Another code!’ and then opened them again to stare at the paper.

  The Oxford case, soon after she’d come to Old East, had thrown up a code. Breaking that had been part of the solution of the problem. It was too much to expect, surely, that someone else at Old East should now be using a sort of cryptogram?

  She sighed and leaned back in her chair, thinking. Well, was it so odd? When the Oxford business had been sorted out the whole place had hummed with talk about it for months. Every single detail had been picked over, analysed and examined time and time again till each bone gleamed bare and polished. The fact that there had been a code must have been common knowledge. Maybe someone else here at Old East with a secret to hide and at the same time a need to make a record of something had got the idea of creating a code from that gossip?

  Well, she thought, looking at the paper again, maybe or maybe not; the fact remains that here in this folder is a whole load of gibberish which might or might not be a code. If it isn’t, why is it here? And she frowned as she looked at some of the lines.

  OK OHRRFR

  YPG( CPLG OFR$

  £HL$CA, (LOFS y23$GP″″HS

  YF ¼ y1KOK6,

  It looked frankly impossible, she told herself gloomily, sliding the p
apers back into the folder. She glanced at her watch. Half-past two. The PM was waiting to be done at three. Maybe if she went back to Paediatrics now she’d find Prudence Jennings? There was just time and she really did need to know what had happened that night the Oberlander baby was in the department. Had Prudence’s absence contributed in any way to what had happened later to the child? Had it in any way contributed to what had happened to Harry? But that was foolish. She was grabbing for threads in what was a tangle of major proportions and she really would have to stop being so absurd. She got to her feet and went purposefully back to Paediatrics.

  This time she was lucky, and found Prudence Jennings. She was sitting at the ward desk with a pile of notes in front of her, her head down as she scribbled furiously. There was no one in the play area at all; obviously everyone was bustling around in the main ward getting ready for the Grand Round. Prudence didn’t look up as George came over and perched on the desk beside her.

  ‘I have to talk to you,’ George said bluntly. ‘About that child, Oberlander, so called.’

  Prudence didn’t look up. ‘I can’t stop now. Kydd’ll be here in a minute for the ward round and I couldn’t be more behind with my notes. Some other time …’

  ‘No,’ George said and was surprised at her own intransigence. ‘I’ve been trying to see you for ages and you’re never around — I never see you about the hospital or anything — and it’s a simple question I have to ask. You went off duty and left Harry Rajabani on his own when you were on call and Miss Kydd away. Why? I’m not concerned about the way you do your job, but I need to know if it had anything to do with the Oberlander child.’

  This time Prudence looked up. She was pale and her red hair looked bedraggled and dull. Her eyes looked red rimmed, too; not from tears like Cherry, but with fatigue and, George thought, illness. George frowned at the sight and said sharply, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Prudence snapped with a little spurt of energy. ‘I’m arse over elbows with work and I can’t be interrupted.’