The Betrayal of Trust (39 page)

They helped Olive onto the bed, took off her shoes and her
spectacles
, turned her onto her side. Molly covered her with a quilt. She lay, snoring very slightly. Her features settled and she looked less disturbed, more like any other human being calmly settling down to sleep, no longer hysterical,
no longer with wild, vacant eyes. Molly stroked her hand.

‘Let’s get back to the drugs check,’ Sister Fison said. ‘She won’t bother anyone for a while.’

But as they got downstairs, the sister was called to the phone. Molly went along the corridor in search of something to eat but hesitated near Dr Fison’s office, feeling roused enough to go in and challenge him now, query the injection he had
given Olive, ask what he planned for her future treatment. It would be fair to hear what he had to say before telling Cat what was happening, asking for her opinion.

His door was ajar.

‘… But Mrs Forbes, you agree with Hazel that this country has a misguided attitude to assisted suicide. Easy enough to condemn ending a life which has become pain-filled and intolerable when you don’t have to
deal with the reality of it day in, day out. What about a single parent with a desperately handicapped child? What about the loving partner of someone in great agony? … Yes, Hazel Smith … Yes, she gave me your number … She was very concerned about you. She told me she felt powerless to help you.’

There was a pause.

‘Hazel is a mutual friend, that’s all … Well, that’s my point. Hazel believes
the same as you and I do … Yes, that’s why I am trying to … Listen … I want to make sure that the facility we offer in this clinic is absolutely the best because it’s only when we give the best that we will win the argument and get the law changed. Meanwhile, I’m going ahead on my own as I told you …’

Molly walked on towards the kitchen to collect a salad and a drink from the fridge. In the staffroom,
Teresa, one of the carers, was drinking a Coke and doing
Take a Break’s Wordsearch
. She glanced up.

‘When do you get to be a doc?’

‘Couple of months.’

‘Then what? GP?’

‘Not sure yet. Don’t think so.’ She sat down and peeled the cling film off her salad.

‘You won’t be going into this lark though. Who would?’

‘Don’t you like it? You’re good with the patients, I’ve watched you. I watched you
with Olive.’

‘Poor Olive. She’s got something buzzing round inside her head and it’s driving her mad trying to swat it. Well, you don’t get anything back, do you?’

‘They trust you. They rely on you.’

‘Nothing back. Nice enough place though. They keep it fresh which is more than you can say for some homes. I’ve worked in places you wouldn’t keep your cat.’

‘I don’t always …’

‘What?’

Molly
stuffed her mouth with ham and tomato to avoid having to answer.

‘He’s all right, you know. He’s not bad. It’s her I can’t stand. He has these ideas only she doesn’t bother to try them out. Started these memory books, you know? Memory books, memory boxes – and showing them short films of what it was like in their own day, when they were kids, when they were in their twenties … get them to try
and talk about it. It was good. Only she doesn’t bother to keep it up.’

‘Maybe they’re beyond it.’

‘No. Well, two of them aren’t, I started with them, it made a difference, you could tell. Dr Fison came round, he was quite impressed. Only we haven’t done it for a couple of weeks and I can’t organise a session if she isn’t backing me up. I didn’t come here just to sit them in a chair and leave
them to stare at the walls.’

‘Or to be drugged into shutting up.’

‘What, Olive? She’s the only one they do it with. They can’t cope, you know, it is quite difficult with someone like that. She gets beside herself with rages. She bites and kicks, she spits, she screams, she lashes out. You saw her with that fork. She’d have stabbed someone with it in one of those moods. She could injure one of
us, injure herself. So what do you do? Easy to say.’

She scored neatly through a line of words.

Molly finished her salad. She wanted to tell Teresa about the phone conversation, to ask her opinion, to find out if she was on Fison’s side. Because was she herself on it? She knew the arguments perfectly well. She knew Cat’s passionate opposition to any change in the law which would allow assisted
suicide, any suggestion that doctors should be allowed to administer lethal drugs in doses which would end life. They had argued about the difference between ending a life and not making strenuous efforts to prolong it no matter what. Cat had explained the difference patiently. Molly had listened and still been unsure.

‘You’ll discover,’ Cat had said. ‘When you’ve been doing the job for a few
years, you will gradually learn and you will know.’

‘But will it be enough? Is it enough?’

‘Yes,’ Cat had said. ‘Yes, Molly. I can’t tell you how much I believe that. It has to be or we are no longer human.’

It was warm. Sunny. The old part of the garden, and the meadow beyond it, was beautiful, with some handsome mature trees, avenues of shrubs, paths leading towards the field. Only the newer
areas nearer the house were still raw in the aftermath of the building works. A couple of sturdy old sheds had names and messages scratched on the wood panels. The place had been a school, she remembered, a Catholic convent. Girls had sat in the sun here lifting up uniform skirts to try and get their legs brown, had walked arm in arm between the trees and chatted on wooden benches. Girls had carved
their names on the sheds.

She wandered towards a small copse of silver birches and Scots pines, along a stretch of newly surfaced road which ran up to the trees, then turned away to the right, out of sight. A squirrel raced up one of the pine trunks and leapt across to the next level of spreading branches, high up.

She was not expecting to come upon any other building. This was single-storey,
with a window at each side. A white door. New paint.

Molly glanced round. The squirrel had leapt to the tree next to her and was peering down. Black bead eyes.

There was something, just something, some sense, some instinct. She walked round to the back of the building. A barred window, high up. A pair of wooden doors. A path leading to a gravel turning space. The trees had been felled here so
there was a clearing. A small brick-built shed stood to the right. She expected it to be locked but it was not. A small generator was installed, full of diesel. It looked new. Unused.

She hesitated. There was a slight soft crunching sound. Footsteps snapping a twig, walking on dry leaves.

Molly edged behind the shed. Waited. The footsteps came nearer. Long strides. Stopped. A key in a lock.
The faintest creak of new wood moving as the door was opened.

But not closed.

She moved away from the shed.

There was complete silence.

She did not know what the building was for or what was inside it. Possibly it was a mortuary, but surely a small nursing home would simply send for the undertaker and had no need for body-storage facilities.

It was a teaspoon of suspicion and a large measure
of simple curiosity that urged her on towards the white door, which had been left slightly ajar, and to push it.

She was in a small lobby with a second door ahead which was half open. She put out her hand and touched the door until it opened an inch or two further, then edged round it. Ahead of her was what she took to be a single room. She heard a metal drawer being opened. A cough. These sounds
came from a screened-off area.

The room was light, with pine panelling halfway up the walls, white paint above. A pine table held a pair of candlesticks in which stood new wax candles, on a white linen runner. There was a straight-backed but upholstered new bedside chair. On the walls several large pictures of tranquil country scenes, lake-side and meadowland in spring, photographs which had
been expertly enlarged so that when looking at them you began to feel that you might actually step into them through the frames.

There was a bed, single but not too narrow, and made up
with
fresh white linen and several pillows. A cream rug on the floor beside it. Nothing else. It did not seem as if anyone had used the room. But it was a long way from the house for a patient to be assigned to
it, and the whole building was too small for any other rooms. Something scraped against the floor behind the screen, then someone came smartly out from behind it, almost knocking her over.

‘Ah,’ Leo Fison said. ‘I had a sense that someone had come in. Do you ever have that, Molly? The sensation of being watched or that someone is just behind you, even though you’ve seen nothing and heard nothing?’

She stammered that she had mistaken the path, had thought this was the storeroom from which she had been asked to collect something, had no idea why she had strayed as far as this.

‘I’m sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to barge in. Sorry, Dr Fison.’

Molly was furious with herself for being on the defensive and apologetic. She was not that sort of person. She did not see that she was doing wrong.
He might have understood that she was either innocently exploring, or coming to find him, having seen him walk in this direction.

He stood quite still, arms folded, silent, waiting for her excuses and half-explanations to peter out. She felt as if she were twelve years old again, up in front of the head for instigating some sort of stupid prank.

‘Right,’ he said at last. ‘You had better listen
to me because I am going to trust you. I think it’s a good idea that you should learn one side of an argument of which you almost certainly, as a medical student, have only heard the opposite. Who knows – I certainly don’t – you might agree with me? You might be entirely of my own way of thinking. Now you’ve come as far as this, you’d better come further. Come here.’

He pushed the screen aside
and beckoned.

There was a window high enough up to make the area light but not to afford any view. A long wall cupboard, with a bunch of keys hanging from the lock. A clinical table. A wooden chair. A sink. Antiseptic handwash dispenser. Soap dispenser. A blood pressure monitor. A digital clock.

Fison opened the cupboard. ‘See?’

She looked. A small pharmacy was on two shelves. Phials. Boxes
of medication. Syringes and latex gloves.

‘Do you know what these are for? Why not look?’

He gestured her to go nearer, stood back so that she could read the labels. As she did so her heart began to thump. Leo Fison was standing so close to her she felt his breath on her neck.

‘And through here … you’ve already looked in here, haven’t you? The only thing I have not yet set up is a sound system
for playing DVDs. Headphones, too, of course, if people want to be even closer to their music. Headphones mean you can have what you like almost inside your head, inside your brain. Don’t you think?’

Molly felt nausea gush up through her stomach into her chest but no further. She would not shame herself by actually being sick.

The room was utterly silent. The window was tightly closed. No rustle
of the trees or sound of any birdsong, animal or human movement could penetrate from outside. She saw that it was double-glazed and sealed round the edges.

‘The undertaker’s van comes in through a separate entrance, which is off the back lane and unmarked,’ Leo Fison said.

Molly turned quickly to look at him. His face was completely expressionless. His absolute baldness gave him an oddly neutered
look.

‘So, Molly. What do you think?’

She could not speak. Her mouth and throat were dry.

‘What do you deduce from all this?’

She dared not deduce anything.

‘Come. You’re a bright girl.’

She shook her head.

‘Tell me what you know about Bene Mori? I assume you’ve heard of it?’

She nodded.

‘And? Do you think it is a sympathetic operation? Do you think people travel there to die in peace
and tranquillity at a time and in a manner of their own choosing?’

She realised that she had no clear idea, only knew what she had picked up on odd television programmes and in a newspaper feature.

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘But you ought to know, don’t you agree? You’ll be a fully qualified doctor shortly. You may have patients who want to discuss the subject with you. Who may want to take themselves
there? What would you say?’

Molly glanced quickly round.

‘Do you want to go back? You seem anxious.’

‘No.’

‘Good. Then tell me what you think. Come and sit down here.’ He gestured to the bed and the chair beside it.’

‘I should get back. They need me to help with things.’

‘It’s your lunch break. There’s nothing to help with, they’ll all be asleep. What is this room for, Molly?’

‘I … for
a patient who has to be kept away from the others?’

Fison smiled. ‘Like the old isolation wards you mean? History of Medicine, Part 3. Come, you know, don’t you? You know what I am setting up. You know because you were listening outside my door earlier.’

‘No, I …’

‘I have a mirror in front of my desk. I could see you.’ He had folded his arms and was standing in front of the white-sheeted bed,
his eyes never leaving her face.

Anything might have happened. Or nothing. He might have taken hold of her, or not, attacked her, or not, blocked her exit, or not, gone on talking, asking her questions, or stayed silent, arms folded, and looking, looking at her. She did not think, or hesitate, or give herself a chance to find out, she turned and ran, out through the door, and out, down the narrow
path, between the trees, over the grass, round the corner to the back of the main house. She was fit. Her heart pounded so much that it burned inside her chest but not with the strain of running. With panic. With fear.

At the corner, she glanced over her shoulder, expecting to find Fison on her heels, just emerging from the trees. But the way behind was deserted. No one else was about. Molly
stopped, in
the
safety of the side door and looked back again. But he had not followed her. There was no sound of footsteps.