Second Opinion (5 page)

Susan Kydd looked at her sharply as she came up to the desk and that sent all thoughts of writing papers into limbo.
Dr Kydd had a formidable reputation for acerbity, and though George herself had never crossed swords with her, she knew that those who did usually retired battered, leaving Susan Kydd the victor; her name about the place might be Judy, because her large nose and strong curved chin framing a narrow-lipped mouth gave her a strong resemblance to Mr Punch’s helpmeet, but a victim she was not. She could be as combative as Mr Punch himself, and no one enjoyed upsetting her. And George, she suddenly realized, was about to ask the sort of questions that might be construed as critical of Dr Kydd’s staff. She would have to tread warily.

‘Good morning,’ she said sunnily. ‘Sorry to barge in. Just need a few words with someone.’

‘Oh?’ Susan Kydd said. ‘Who?’

‘No idea,’ George said and smiled as disarmingly as she could. ‘Whoever did the routine paediatric checks on the neonates over on Maternity Wednesday night.’

‘Wednesday?’ Susan leaned over the desk and prodded the Sister sitting there with her head bent over patients’ nursing records. ‘Patricia? Any idea who was on Wednesday night over in Matty?’

‘I’ll check,’ Sister said and looked at George and nodded. ‘Morning, Dr Barnabas. Glad to see you looking better. All OK now?’

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ George said, flexing her left hand without stopping to think. ‘It’s still a bit numb, but that’ll sort itself out. Some nerve damage, but not too much, glory be. And it’s my left hand, of course.’

‘What happened to it?’ Susan Kydd had gone back to her own notes but now she looked up, interested. ‘Needlestick?’

‘Scalpel,’ George admitted and reddened. ‘I feel such a bloody fool, but these things happen. Anaerobic infection.’

‘Nasty,’ Susan said. ‘Could have been —’

‘Well, yes,’ George said, not wishing to dwell on what might have happened, knowing perfectly well just how
nasty it might indeed have been. ‘But I’m fine now and glad to be back at work.’

‘Picking up the pieces — misery, isn’t it?’ Susan said, grinning and George grinned back, relieved. Clearly the older woman was in a good humour and there’d be no problems about her questions. ‘I remember what it was like when I came back from Bucharest. I’d only been gone a month but, Christ, you should have seen the mess here!’

Patricia Collinson’s face took on a decidedly wooden expression and she said loudly, her head bent over the staff-schedule lists, ‘Last Wednesday night, Dr Barnabas? Night before last.’ She lifted her chin and smiled a touch sharply. ‘It was you, Dr Kydd.’

‘Oh, was it?’ Susan nodded. ‘If you say so. It’s so hectic at present I can’t remember what I was doing this morning, let alone two days ago. Some sort of problem?’ And she looked at George.

‘One of the babies you saw that night was a cot death — they found him yesterday morning. I did the PM yesterday and —’

‘Cot death?’ Susan frowned and her face looked heavy again as the line of her nose and jaw once more took on the shape of a nutcracker. ‘Let me see if I can remember. There were three that night in the early part and then four more later on. Now, can I recall — yes, a frail pair of twins I wasn’t at all happy with, had them sent to SCBU but I know
they’re
all right. I saw them this morning. Coming along nicely. I think they’ll do. Oh, and a small-for-dates. I think the mother might have been a cocaine-abuser — no hard evidence, but Sister there seems to think it likely and —’

‘Not that one,’ George said. ‘This was a fine infant, very healthy as far as the look of the body went. Big child, almost six kilos.’

‘Eleven pounds?’ Patricia said, interested. ‘Was the mother diabetic?’

George shook her head. ‘No, we thought of that, I do assure you.’ Patricia had the grace to redden. ‘Insulin is one of the things I look for early, especially with a particularly large infant. There’s nothing in the mother’s history or the accounts of the pregnancy and labour. All very straightforward. Domino delivery — or meant to be — so there were no worries about it at all. Yet the baby died, and frankly I can’t find any cause.’ She stood gnawing her lower lip for a moment, glowering, and then snapped with some sharpness, ‘I hate using the cot-death label. It’s so goddammed unsatisfactory!’

‘I do sympathize,’ Susan said and her face lost its hardness. ‘It’s not so bad when you can find the answers.’

‘Precisely. So I just wanted a word —’

‘To see if I missed something when I did the checks?’ Susan didn’t sound particularly acid, but George felt herself get pink again.

‘Not at all,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It was this note.’ She pulled the PM request form out of her file yet again and showed it to Susan.

Susan stared down at it, read it and then shook her head. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘It couldn’t be, could it? The child was a patient in Matty, not my ward. I didn’t even know it had died.’

‘I know. It’s a long shot but …’ George shook her head. ‘The registrar, do you know him? Didier St Cloud.’

‘St Cloud … Oh yes, the one who looks like a dish mop.’

George grinned. Susan’s own close-cropped grey hair gave her a look of a lavatory brush, in her private opinion. To hear such a judgement on another’s appearance from someone as unprepossessing as the Senior Paediatric Consultant was undeniably funny. ‘Yes. That’s the one. He didn’t type the note, and I thought … Well’ — she shrugged — ‘I’m not sure what I thought, to tell the truth. So I just decided to come over here and check. I suppose I’ll have to ask the nurses and mid-wives on Matty.’ She shook her head again. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’

‘What? Three cot deaths since the summer? I suppose so,’ Susan Kydd said.

‘Actually, I meant the note,’ George said. ‘Let’s face it, with a throughput like ours, it’s a statistical likelihood we’ll have a few cot deaths from time to time. No, it was the fact that someone thought to write this note that I found odd.’

‘Well, I’m afraid I know nothing about it,’ Susan said briefly. ‘And I really have to get on. It’s gone eleven and I haven’t even been to the SCBU yet. Was there anything else?’

‘No, no thanks,’ George said and stood back to let her pass, and then watched her as she went hurrying away across the big central play area to the door marked ‘This way to the Special Care Baby Unit’. Beside her Patricia Collinson sniffed loudly and lusciously.

‘If she makes any more cracks about the place being a mess when she came back from bloody Bucharest I’ll murder her, I swear I will,’ she growled. ‘Honestly, we’d only been in here a couple of weeks when off she swanned and then Petra Samson went sick and we were short staffed on the nursing side too and what did she expect? But does she make allowances? Does she hell! She never stops niggling —’

‘Well, put it down to high standards,’ George said, uneasy to be the recipient of nursing confidences about another consultant. ‘She clearly cares a lot about the children.’

‘No one would argue with that! That was why she took a month’s unpaid leave to go to Romania. I just wish she wouldn’t nitpick so much about silly little details now she’s back, that’s all.’

‘What was she doing in Romania?’ George asked, not only to change the tack of the conversation, but also because she was, as always, totally unable to control her passion for news titbits, however miniscule. No one could accuse her of gossiping with nurses about other consultants just because she showed an interest, surely.

‘Babies with AIDS,’ Patricia said and made a face. ‘We
saw this video, you know? Someone had put it together from all the stuff on telly and were using it to raise funds. Now Barrie Ward’s finished, the committee that raised the cash was looking around for something to do, and someone brought the video, and Susan saw it. Off she went like a bullet from a gun, looked after some of them and then had to come back. But she goes often now. It’s not as bad as it was a couple of years ago, seemingly, but it’s still not good.’ She looked gloomy. ‘If I know her, she’ll be off to Bosnia next to care for kids there and give us hell the minute she gets back because she doesn’t like the way we store the request forms for haematology or something.’

‘You should be proud of her,’ George said, a touch reprovingly. ‘It’s tough, that sort of work.’ She too had seen the films of the children of Romania and had wept over them. ‘I’m not sure I could do it.’

‘Oh, hell, of course we’re proud of her! If we weren’t, do you think I’d be complaining like this? It’s just that she’s such a nitpicker! Everything has to be just so for Judy, and some days she drives me potty. Especially as I’m not the world’s best-organized soul.’ Patricia grinned then. ‘Forget it, do, Dr Barnabas. It’s been a bad morning. That Dr Choopani’s been on and on at us and —’

‘Dr who?’

‘Local GP. Diljeet Choopani. Always on about something. I have to say, when it comes to nitpicking he beats Judy into a cocked hat. He’s been trying to admit a child with gastroenteritis all morning and we keep telling him we haven’t got an isolation bed and there’s no way this side of the millennium we’ll take her into a general bed, but will he stop whining?’ The phone, as if on cue, rang and she growled, ‘I’ll bet you all I’ve got to a penny piece this is the old bugger again.’

She picked up the phone and fluted, ‘Barrie Ward, Sister speaking,’ and then grimaced horribly at George to show she was right. ‘No, Dr Choopani. I’m afraid she’s not around
just now. What?’ She listened for some time, her face blank with surprise. ‘Oh! Well, thank you for letting us know,’ and hung up. And swore loudly.

‘Got the child into Kings, over the river, would you believe!’ she said. ‘Positively gloating, he was. I
loathe
that man, I really do —’

‘Well, I must be on my way,’ George said quickly, not wanting to listen to another of Patricia Collinson’s prolonged whines about her problems — something she was clearly settling down to enjoy — and she picked up her file and moved out of the nurses’ station. ‘Thanks for your help, anyway.’

‘Sorry we couldn’t do more,’ Patricia said, settling down to her papers again. ‘Maybe the nurses on Matty’ll know whatever it is you want to find out.’

‘Maybe,’ George said. ‘If I get round to asking them. It doesn’t really matter that much, I suppose. I was just — well, curious.’ She looked at her watch. ‘And I’d better call the coroner, or I’ll miss him.’

She went, grateful to leave the hubbub of the ward behind. The children had begun to whoop in excitement as the lunch trolleys arrived. There were times, occasionally, when she fretted over the fact that here she was, thirty-six and still childless, let alone husbandless; and others, like this, when she was grateful for the pleasant places in which her lines had fallen, even if they weren’t places which included such close relationships.

A thought which, inevitably, reminded her of her conversation last night with her mother. Tomorrow she’d be here, with Aunt Bridget in tow, having arranged a flight just as soon as George had called her. If that wasn’t enough to cure her of any yearnings for family life, she told herself gloomily as she made her way back to her laboratory, nothing was.

4
  
  

She had no time to think about anything, however, neither her mother nor the matter of the note on Baby Popodopoulos’s file, because the lab was in an uproar when she got back to it. An agitated wide-eyed Sheila — who always got immensely excited whenever she had the opportunity — greeted her with an air of great portentousness and told her almost before she’d got inside her office that the mortuary was ‘positively groaning at the seams with bodies, a ghastly RTA over on the other side of Leman Street and the place is
milling
with police and —’

George sighed, put down her files and reached for her dressing-room key. ‘I’ll see for myself, Sheila,’ she said repressively. ‘Who has the PM requests and the notes?’

‘Mr Constant’s down there and so’s that nice young policeman. You know, the Scottish one and —’

‘Right, I’ll get on, then,’ George said firmly and went, cutting off Sheila in mid-flow, clearly to her annoyance. George changed as fast as she could into her greens, tying her hair up tightly in a cap. It was horrid the way the smell of the place clung to her hair if she wasn’t careful. She remembered fleetingly how she’d thought a while ago that she preferred the smell of her mortuary to that of the maternity ward, and allowed herself a sardonic sniff at her own stupidity.

The PM room, when she reached it, was indeed in a hubbub. All three of the slabs had occupants and Danny, the mortuary porter, was busy cutting the clothes off them under the beady eye of DC Michael Urquhart from Ratcliffe Street police station, while Harold Constant, the coroner’s officer, stood in close colloquy with someone George couldn’t quite see, since Constant was a sizeable man whose bulk hid his companion. On the far side of the PM room a young uniformed constable was standing looking a touch pale and anxious. George sighed. The last thing she needed was six foot plus of fainting copper on the floor getting in everyone’s way. She went over to him and said cheerfully, ‘Good morning!’ and looked at him closely.

He swivelled his eyes to look back at her. She could see the line of sweat on his upper lip and grinned sympathetically. ‘Good morning, madam,’ he said. He was hoarse.