Second Opinion (27 page)

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 her 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.’

He began to read the symbols aloud. ‘OHRRFR YPG … Hey, that’s a new wrinkle!’

‘What is?’

‘They’re usually letters or numbers or mixed, but I’ve never seen one before that uses a half bracket! Hmm. CPLG OFR$. Blimey, a dollar sign, no less! OFR$ £HL$ CA. Good, sterling gets a look in., (LOFS y23$GP” “HS. This is ridiculous, commas, quote marks and all sorts.’ He sighed. ‘How many lines like this are there?’ He counted. ‘Blimey. It’ll take more’n a computer to crack this one.’

‘That’s what I thought. I spent ages over it but gave up.’

‘Let me take the pages away. Then I can put our boys on it and you can —’

‘No! I want to have a go. There are ways of decoding — I’ve heard of decoding books, haven’t I? I think so. You can’t have them!’

‘Split the difference?’ he offered amiably. ‘Photocopy? You keep the original, I’ll take the copies. Fair dos?’

She thought for a while. ‘Fair enough. I’ll get them copied tomorrow.’ She held out her hand and he gave her the sheets, though clearly unwillingly. ‘I promise to send them over as soon as I can.’

‘Bring them over. Then I get to see you,’ he said, leering horribly. ‘I like seeing you.’

‘You’ll be seeing me all day over Christmas,’ she said and suddenly, to her own amazement, went a little pink. ‘It was
good of you to let the old ladies have their way. They’ve been fluttering around like —’

‘A brace of daffy hens, I can imagine. But I wasn’t letting them have their own way at all. I wasn’t being good either. I was being bloody sensible. It’s the best Christmas offer I’ve ever had.’ He beamed. ‘I haven’t looked forward to Christmas much for years. I usually spend it on my own or on duty and —’

‘You’re putting me on!’ She looked at him closely. ‘You’re just trawling for sympathy.’

‘No, I’m not! If I were, you’d get a better story than that. It’s true. Been on my own for — well, it doesn’t matter.’ He was grim now and didn’t look at her, shrugging into his coat a little fussily. ‘Anyway I’m looking forward to Christmas with you three. It’ll be a gas. I’ve been shopping my head off today — and you won’t be able to argue on account it’s the festive season. Bloody marvellous.’

He was at the door now, with his hand on the knob. ‘I leave you with just one thought.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You say Prue’s right out of the running on account of she’s sick, was sick that night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it’s a true bill — no chance she’s putting it on?’

‘None at all.’

‘Well, OK. But that doesn’t mean she mightn’t still be involved, does it? She was the one who saw the kid first. She was the one who spotted there was something odd about the child’s age.’

‘So?’

‘So, it could all be an elaborate cover-up. It won’t be the first time people have tried it on that way. I doubt it’ll be the last.’

She shook her head firmly, but all the same, a worm of doubt began to wriggle inside somewhere. ‘I’m sure she’s out of it.’

‘Well, if you say so. But think about it. Let me quote good old Oliver Cromwell to you, if I haven’t already —’

‘You have,’ she cried hastily, but it was too late.

‘“I beseech you,”‘ he was intoning. ‘“In the bowels of Christ, consider it possible you — may — be — mistaken.”‘

And he was gone.

20
  
  

By the end of the week and Christmas Eve, the hospital seemed to have blossomed into a flurry of balloons and tinsel-trimmed trees and glitter. Sheila and Jerry had put up a tree in the lab, bedecking it with strings of lametta, and already had a festive bottle of sherry and a tin of chocolate digestive biscuits on the go, even though the department still had a great deal of work to get through before the day was out. But they seemed to be working as hard as ever and George prudently said nothing about the biscuit crumbs among the slides. She had to trust them to make sure they did no harm, the place couldn’t function otherwise; and her trust wasn’t usually misplaced.

In the mortuary Danny, displaying a sublime inability to recognize any incongruity in his actions, had threaded strings of red and green aluminium foil streamers through the handles of the great drawers that held the bodies in the cold room and she had to remonstrate with him. He sulked, of course, but cheered up marginally when she agreed to let him put some holly in the dissection room. No one but hospital people or police ever went there after all; not like the rooms where the bodies were, where it was always possible a relation might have to come to make an identification.

By the time she’d dealt with all that and cleared her
morning post, which was blessedly light of any real work though it produced a blizzard of Christmas cards (much to her discomfiture, most of them came from people to whom she’d forgotten to send one of her own) she had time to think about other things.

First she checked again on Prue Jennings and was assured by Hattie Clements she was fine.

‘Tucked up in Rotherhithe, just another patient. No one’s spotted her as one of our medics at all. Needed a D and C and will probably be able to go home this evening. She’s got a mum and dad to go to — I’ve checked on that — so she’ll be all right. Have a good Christmas, George! Doing anything nice? We’re having people wandering in and out all through Boxing Day, Sam and I’d love to see you.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got my ma and a sort of aunt staying.’

‘Bring them too,’ Hattie said heartily. ‘The children’d love to see you, and they like old ladies. Bring anyone you want.’ George promised she would try and turned her attention to the Chowdary file.

She couldn’t keep it here in the path. lab for much longer. It ought to go back to Maternity, and from there eventually to the Registry. She decided the best way to get it back there was via Cherry. She had, after all, some reason to go nosing among the files in the cabinet there in a way that George certainly did not. So she picked it up, put her head round the lab door (pretending not to notice that they had a radio on playing Christmas carols) to tell them they could bleep her if she was needed, and headed for Fertility.

The Maternity Ward, as she cut through it, struck her as being the most ferociously decorated place in the entire hospital. No fewer than three Holy-Family-and-the-Crib scenes had been set up at intervals along the main corridor; there were streamers and paper bells and balls everywhere; and a vast tree just beside the entrance. The place smelled odd with its mixture of disinfectant and milk and pine
needles, but not unattractive, and for the first time she felt a lift of the old here-comes-Christmas excitement. Maybe tomorrow with Ma and Bridget and Gus was going to be fun after all. Getting presents for them all had been a hectic affair, carried out in a couple of desperately busy lunch hours. Sometime this afternoon she had to get the things wrapped to take home for the small tree that she knew Bridget and Vanny were decorating this evening; and she pushed open the door that led into the Fertility Clinic feeling light-hearted and happier than she would have thought possible.