Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Well, you have been,’ George said. ‘Come on. Just tell me.’ And she sat tight. There had to be some authority, she was thinking, in being a consultant and dealing with a more junior member of the medical staff.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Prudence said and suddenly looked even whiter. George bent closer. The girl looked dreadful and instinctively George put out one hand to hold on to her, for she seemed about to fall forward with her head on the desk.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if —’

  Prudence’s eyes were closed and she was holding both hands tightly clenched against the desk in front of her. ‘Shut up, will you? I’m at the end of my rope and I can’t —’ She opened her eyes and stared up at George. ‘Oh, God, I suppose you’ll go on until I tell you. If you tell anyone else I’ll —’ She took a deep breath. ‘I was pregnant.’

  ‘What?’ George stared at her, nonplussed.

  ‘Pregnant, damn you! I wanted to be very much. I was very happy about it. And then that night I started to bleed and — and — oh, sod it. I went home. OK? I didn’t want to get any help here — Kydd told me when I started that she wanted total devotion to the job and made it very plain that if I let anything get in the way of it, I’d never get any sort of reference from her. This was — is an important job for me. Get this one out of the way and I can maybe apply for a consultancy in a minor hospital somewhere. I didn’t dare let her know I wasn’t in perfect health. All right? And that night —’

  ‘Oh, hell!’ George said. ‘I’m sorry. You miscarried.’

  Prudence stared up at her and said nothing and George made a grimace.

  ‘Look, Kydd or not, you could have seen someone, surely? One of the others here would have helped you. How come your husband’ — she glanced down at Prudence’s naked left hand and amended it — ‘your partner didn’t insist that you did? To sit it out alone in a state like that … How pregnant were you?’

  ‘I have no partner. He left,’ Prudence said. ‘OK? He left when I started the baby. So I daren’t lose this job and I daren’t lose my reference. I have to earn — I had only two months of this job to go. If I could have hidden it that bit longer I could have made it. I know I could. But I miscarried. At twenty weeks. Oh, God.’ And she bent her head and George thought for a moment that she was weeping, as Cherry had done. But her eyes were quite dry. They just looked a little redder.

  ‘So that’s why you haven’t seen me around. I’m doing all I can to cope as best as I can. I’ve got some retained products, I think. I need a D and C but I daren’t go off sick. She’ll be off again in a week or two and then I’ll be able to —’

  ‘This,’ George said strongly, ‘is the most goddamn crazy thing I have ever heard. You can’t go on working in a state like that! You need proper care!’

  ‘If you say a word to anyone about this I swear I’ll — I’ll stop trying. You meddle and I’ll be over the edge and gone, I promise you!’

  ‘I’m still going to meddle,’ George said. ‘And there’s an end of it. And don’t worry about Miss Kydd. Tough as she is, she doesn’t scare me! Come on!’ She slid off the edge of the desk to her feet and, with one firm lift, got Prudence up beside her. ‘We are going to A & E right now. And it’s no use arguing about it.’

  19

  ‘It’s the sort of thing you expect from junior nurses,’ Hattie said. ‘Not from doctors! But she’s clinically depressed, I suspect. Not thinking straight.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ George said. ‘Suicidal, too. Watch her, won’t you? Look, need this get out? It’s the one thing she was scared of.’

  ‘What do you take me for, George?’ Hattie said indignantly. ‘Stop trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs!’

  ‘Ouch,’ George said. ‘Sorry. How can you stop the gossip, then?’

  ‘Oh. Didier’ll see her here in A & E instead of one of the A & E housemen. He’s great — never says a word he shouldn’t. If she needs admission and a D and C, which I strongly suspect she will, we can get her into the branch hospital at Rotherhithe. No one there’ll know her and she can go in as plain Miss Jennings. Look, about dealing with Dr Kydd …’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ George put down her coffee cup and got to her feet. ‘I have to get back to my own department now, I’ve a post-mortem I should have started ten minutes ago. Tell Prudence I’ll sort things out with Dr Kydd. No need for her to worry. And I will, take it from me.’

  All through the post-mortem, which was a blessedly straightforward job demanding little extra in the way of concentration, Prudence and her problems milled around at the back of George’s mind. Getting Dr Kydd to accept her registrar’s right to get sick shouldn’t be too difficult, she told herself; what was bothering her was the way that the explanation of Prudence’s absence from Barrie Ward the night the Oberlander baby was taken away by its parents effectively closed off any other investigation along those lines. It wasn’t, she told herself as she weighed and measured viscera and dictated notes on her findings, that she had actually wanted to find out that Prudence was in some way involved in the death of the baby. It was just that she’d hoped, by finding out what had happened to Prudence that night, to be further along the road to understanding. But she wasn’t.

  It was maddening, she thought as she showered after finishing the PM. A murder had been done — indeed, two — and the perpetrators had vanished as surely as if they had been vaporized. Two people, merely by using a false name and address, that most corny of tricks, had managed to vanish too; yet there must be some way to track them down, some way of finding out how that baby had died. And why.

  She was still thinking hard as she went back to Paediatrics to talk to Dr Kydd, and it wasn’t till she got to Barrie Ward that she gave any real thought to what she would say to her about her absent registrar. And decided to play it as it came. It would all depend on the way Dr Kydd reacted.

  In fact, Susan Kydd was not all that difficult. She was sitting at the nurses’ desk in the play space just inside the big double doors, her head down over some notes and clearly oblivious to the noise the children were making as they belted each other with toys and cushions in the middle of the room. There was no sign of Sister Collinson, though Philip Goss was there; George smiled at him and he grinned back cheerfully as she picked her way through the small bouncing creatures who surrounded him.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ Dr Kydd looked up at her and nodded sharply. ‘And what might you be doing around here? Do we have some sort of infection problems I don’t know about?’

  ‘Oh, I’m involved with a few more things than that!’ George said, a little nettled, but thinking fast. Infection? An idea came to her. ‘I have to come over for consults from time to time.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just that I’m damn near single-handed here and I know I didn’t ask for a consult — and I doubt Prior would have the nous to do anything like that without asking me first. Drives me mad, he does. No initiative worth whistling at. So, what can we do for you?’

  ‘It’s Dr Jennings,’ George said with a casual air, leaning against the desk. ‘It’s my fault she wasn’t here when you were ready to do your round this afternoon.’

  Susan Kydd frowned. ‘How do you work that out? Collinson told me she’d been taken ill.’

  ‘Precisely,’ George said smoothly. ‘That’s the message I phoned and told her to give you. Thing is, Prue had been throwing up. She had every intention of staying at work, but I happened to notice — I walked into the canteen washroom and saw her, and got out of her what was going on. Diarrhoea as well. Not a good idea in paediatric ward staff, you’ll grant me.’

  ‘I’ll grant you,’ Dr Kydd said. ‘It’s a bloody nuisance if it gets in here.’

  ‘That was what I thought, and what I told her, though she argued and fussed. Didn’t want to leave her post and all that stuff, swore her hygiene would be adequate protection. But I’m afraid I pulled rank on her.’ She smiled widely and disarmingly at Susan. ‘Made it clear I’d throw every book there
was at her unless she came to the lab at once and let me sort out specimens and do some checking. There’s been some epidemic diarrhoea in the community’ — mentally she crossed her fingers, hoping Susan wouldn’t check and find out that was a thumping great lie — ‘and I didn’t want to take any chances. So, I’ve got her incommunicado till I’ve got my cultures done.’

  ‘Hmmph,’ Kydd said. ‘Well, nothing I can do about that, is there? Nor can Jennings, poor creature. I knew it had to be something important. She’s a good girl, not one to play silly buggers with me or her job. Not like that damned Prior.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know where they get their medical students these days. All I know is that the characters they’re turning out for junior jobs are the pits. A few more good girls like Prue are what we need.’

  ‘You should tell her that,’ George said lightly. ‘It’d cheer her up no end. She’s worried you’ll be so mad over this that — um — well, that you’ll be mad.’

  ‘Worried about her reference, is she?’ Susan Kydd produced a look of sudden wisdom and knowingness that lifted her face into a semblance of good cheer. ‘Well, she needn’t. Not that I’d tell her that, and nor should you, if you don’t mind. Got to keep them up to the mark, these young ones. If you lay on the approval too thick they get lazy. Well, I can’t stay gossiping here, I’ve got work to do if no one else has.’ And she got to her feet, swept her notes off the desk and with a sharp nod went through the inner doors into the ward.

  Behind her Philip Goss laughed softly. ‘What a woman!’ he said. ‘Tough as they come! Where would we be without her?’

  ‘Hmph,’ George said, unwilling to discuss a fellow consultant with a nurse, however much she liked him. ‘So how are things here? Busy?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘The usual winter crop of snotty noses and bronchitises — all these smoking mothers don’t help — but we could be busier. Got a few empty cots.’

  ‘Good.’ George was heading for the door. ‘Better than being overworked.’

  ‘They’ll close them, I dare say,’ Philip said bitterly, bending to sweep up a child from the floor just as she was about to fall and bang her head on a toy truck loaded with wooden bricks. ‘Now we’re a Trust it seems they spend more time closing beds to save money than trying to keep them open to save lives.’

  She stopped at the door. ‘You’re not keen on the new regime?’

  ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

  ‘It’s early days yet, though, isn’t it? It might turn out better in the long run. Self-government could mean less waste, a better service, all that stuff.’

  ‘It ought to, but what they’re doing is trying to cut corners too much. They take on the worst sort of staff, pay them less and less and then wonder why the place is going downhill.’ He shook his head. ‘They need to think more about what they’re doing. If you want an ace service you’ve got to have ace people to run it. Can’t take on every rag tag and bobtail that turns up wanting a job, can you? But this Trust does — Whoops, come here, you little villain!’ and he was gone, almost slithering across the floor in an effort to catch hold of a particularly active child who had decided to beat another less energetic one to a pulp.

  George went back to the lab in a thoughtful frame of mind. She had never been particularly political at Old East; all during her first months here when there had been much talk of their application for Trust Status she’d held herself aloof. As an American, albeit one who’d lived and worked in Britain for over ten years, she’d felt she had no right to get involved, although she did admire the NHS she had worked in for so long. It was so generous, she had felt, so patient-centred compared with the hospitals she had known at home, where the accounts department had equal status and probably greater value than that of the most life-saving of specialities. Now, though, even she couldn’t ignore the restlessness that permeated the place as the inevitable cuts forced on to the Old East Board by the new NHS rules and financial structures led to redundancies and cuts in all directions. Her own job had been safe because not only was she a single-handed pathologist; she was also a sort of part-time consultant as far as Old East was concerned. Half her time was paid for by the Forensic Service, and that, she knew, always made her particularly attractive to the Dean and the rest of the senior financial people at the hospital.

  But if young nurses like Philip Goss were getting so dispirited it was a bad thing. Perhaps, she told herself as she clattered into her department, hurrying to get out of the bitter December chill, I should talk to someone about this. Tell the Professor, maybe, of the sort of vibes I’m picking up. It can’t be good for the place if dedicated nurses are losing their heart.

  The light was on in her office and she knew at once why.

  ‘Skiving off again, Gus?’ she said as she walked in and he, in his usual perch in her tipped back chair with his feet comfortably propped on her desk, grinned at her above his folded arms.

  ‘O’ course. No fun bein’ in charge if you can’t swing the odd brick.’ He swung his legs to the floor and got up. ‘Before you ask, here’s your chair, nicely warmed for you. I’ll settle over here.’ He went and dragged the spare chair from its place by the wall, dumping the papers piled on it on the floor. ‘Anyway, for once I wasn’t skivin’. I was thinkin’.’

  ‘Careful,’ she said, riffling through the little pile of messages Sheila had left on her desk. There was nothing urgent and gratefully she tucked them into her ‘Pending’ clip. ‘You might do yourself a personal —’

  ‘I love it when you speak my language. It shows you really care.’ He leaned down to look into her face, for her head was still bent over the papers on her desk. ‘Hey, look at me! I’m talkin’ sweet nothin’s at you!’

  She looked up at him and laughed. ‘And I never noticed! OK, I’m all ears. So, you’re thinking! What about?’

  ‘You,’ he said promptly. ‘And me. On a desert island somewhere where the water’s a rich, silky blue, and the rum punches are satin on the tongue and the sky’s like azure velvet and —’

  ‘Sounds like a robbery in a dress shop,’ she said. ‘Start again. What were you thinking about?’

  ‘Why do I try? It’s like reciting poetry to a concrete wall. Woman’s got no soul, that’s her trouble. OK, here’s what I’ve been thinking. I’m stymied, that’s what.’

  ‘Stymied?’ She lifted her brows at him and settled herself comfortably in her chair. ‘Now you’re speaking my language!’

  ‘All right. In English then. Balked. Halted. Trammelled. Stopped in me bleedin’ tracks.’ He looked at her gloomily. ‘I’d never have believed it could be such a bugger. Not a thing on the Oberlander baby front. It’s like no one anywhere saw a thing, no one anywhere noticed a kid going adrift, no one nowhere — you get the picture. Then there’s the car, the one that did for Harry Rajabani. Do you think we can get a lead on that? Can we bloody hell! There’s not a garage nor a lock-up this side of the river we haven’t checked — and the other side too. We’ve got as far as we can short of checking every single vehicle in the country for traces on wheels and bumpers, and that’s just not possible. And then there’s the business of the STD clinics — remember? GUM clinics they call them now. I said we’d check all of them for a mum who might be HIV positive — well, there aren’t that many, thank God — at least that are known. And we’ve been through every sort of hoop we can to check on them and we’ve got nowhere there, either. So, like I said, stymied. Up the creek without the old proverbial. Now what?’

  He gazed at her with an expression of wry gloom on his face but she wasn’t beguiled. He really was feeling bad about the situation.

  ‘Not your fault, Gus,’ she said. ‘Nor your guys’. I’m sure you’ve done all you can. I’m just as stymied as you. Prudence, remember? Why did she vanish the night the Oberlander parents whipped their child away under Harry’s nose?’

  He lit up hopefully, and she shook her head. ‘I told you I’m stymied like you. It’s, well — there’s a personal reason for he
r vanishing the way she did. It’s a true bill, I’ve checked it and there’s no way she’s covering up anything. I’ll say just that she was sick, no more. And there’s not a hint of anything to tie her into the Oberlander baby’s death. So, there you are.’

  ‘Nothing, then,’ he said.

  Now she smiled, a long slow stretching of her whole face. ‘Not entirely nothing, as it happens. Not entirely.’

  ‘You’ve got something.’ He sounded accusing. ‘You were going to hide it from me, but you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ She was genuinely startled.

  He winked. ‘I told you. I like clever women. And for why? Because I’m a clever bloke. And there was something there in the way you looked … Anyway’ — he became practical — ‘if you’d meant to tell me you’d have done it already. You’re not one to wait your turn, not usually.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t tell you after all.’

  ‘Don’t be a silly cow,’ he said amiably. ‘Now you’ve started you’ll have to finish. It’d drive you potty not to tell me now, and we both know it.’

  She sighed and reached beneath the pile of notes on her desk — was there a desk anywhere in Old East that wasn’t so decorated? she wondered — and pulled out the Chowdary file.

  ‘OK. I have picked up something. I did think of having a go on my own but — well, listen.’ And she told him at length of her conversation with Cherry Lucas and the finding of the notes, and when she’d finished talking, pulled out the crumpled pieces of paper and pushed them over to him.

  He crouched over them like a cat with a freshly caught mouse and almost purred. ‘A code. Oh, I do love a code! It’s sort of classy, know what I mean? Something really to get your head into.’

  ‘It’s weird, though, isn’t it? That there should be another, I mean, after the Oxford case.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that weird. People use private codes all the time. Try reading the Valentine’s Day messages in the paper next February. And you ought to see the sort of notes some of my lads make. I have to teach ‘em to be comprehensible to outsiders, on account of their notebooks are used in evidence. Now, let’s look at this one.’