Second Opinion Read online

  She stopped outside the door to the main lab and smiled a little wryly. You mean there’s been nothing much to interest Gus, she told herself, so you haven’t seen much of him and you miss him. Go on, be honest. You miss him.

  ‘I miss the laughs,’ she said aloud, and then shook her head. It was that of course, but a bit more besides. He really was being very odd in the way he behaved and that itself was a mystery she’d like to solve. There’d been a time, not all that long ago, when he’d been amazingly attentive. Phoning her all the time, dropping into the lab on the flimsiest of excuses, and generally behaving like a really ardent swain. And she’d liked it. Naturally, she wouldn’t have let him know that for the world. He was quite conceited enough already, and anyway she still hadn’t forgiven him for the way he had behaved back when she had been going around with Toby Bellamy after the business of Richard Oxford’s death; he’d actually lied about there being a case they had to go on together just to stop her seeing Toby. And all the time Toby had been at Old East, even long after she and he had rather cooled off each other, Gus had gone on being attentive.

  But when Toby had left, a couple of months ago, Gus had started to change. Just as she was getting quite used to the idea of having him around when she wanted him, going out with him when she was in the mood but staying in or going out with other friends when that suited her better, he’d stopped asking her. It had become more and more interesting, and more and more puzzling; and now she had to admit she missed him. Missed the laughs. Missed the fish-and-chip suppers in his restaurant where he was treated like God Almighty by the staff and clearly adored it. Missed having the chance to discuss any complex case they might have.

  But the cases they’d become involved with together in the past few months had been very run of the mill: suicides hauled out of the Thames; a few domestic batterings (including one of a woman who had killed her bullying husband, at which George had cheered and Gus had been pugnacious in his condemnation of people who had one set of reactions for men and another for women and where was her sense of justice, for Gawd’s sake, all of which had led to a most satisfying argument, which she, she had convinced herself, had won, though he vehemently denied it); and of course the usual crop of stabbings, fights and general mayhem among the young men of Shadwell and its environs.

  After all that bread-and-butter work, this case involving three dead babies must surely engage his interest? She pushed open the door of the lab and went in, once more whistling behind her teeth. Of course it would. It had certainly engaged her own. She’d do a bit of checking here in the hospital on her own account and see what she could take to Gus. One thing was sure, though; she wasn’t at all happy about dismissing this infant’s death as just another cot death tragedy. Three similar deaths in five months did not, in her estimation, seem very likely. So after she got things running again as they should here at the lab, she’d put herself about a bit; and then she made a face as she realized how easily she’d slipped into using one of Gus’s familiar phrases. Bloody man, she thought, I’ll show him! And felt absurdly elated.

  It was an elation which lasted her all through the day and only faded when she had to settle down in front of her phone at nine o’clock that night to call her mother, who should be at home at around four in the afternoon. Or was it now a six-hour time difference? She could never remember.

  This call, she thought gloomily as she dialled the fourteen digits that would connect her with her old home, would not be easy. She sat staring at the freshly painted walls of her new flat, listening to the series of single rings in her ear and visualizing the big old parlour at home with its over-stuffed chesterfields and deep loungers and her pa’s roll-top desk where the phone stood, seeing her mother coming out of the kitchen through the old swing door to answer it, and when the phone was at last picked up said, in the brightest voice she could, ‘Ma? So how are you, hon? It’s George. How’re things?’ And settled down to listen.

  3

  ‘What note?’ Didier St Cloud said and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. He was in his theatre greens and the line of his face mask, which had been tied far too tightly, still marked the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘It was attached to the PM request form,’ George said patiently. ‘On the Popodopoulos baby.’

  ‘Nasty one that. The mother was in a shocking state, poor thing. The whole family was — awful. But I did no special note about it. Only the normal ones.’

  ‘Look, I’ll show you,’ George said and flipped through her file. ‘If I haven’t left it down on my desk, that is — No, here it is. Look.’ She thrust the path. lab request form across Sister Lichfield’s desk and he bent his head to look at it.

  ‘“This is the third infant death we’ve had in Maternity since the summer.?? Linked”?’ he read aloud. He shook his head, puzzled. ‘How could I have written this? It’s typed.’

  George looked around the cluttered office. ‘Well, there’s a typewriter here,’ and she lifted her chin to indicate the rather battered machine that sat on the small desk on the other side of Sister Lichfield’s office. ‘Some people type everything, and I’m glad of it. It’s a damn sight easier to read than their handwriting, I can tell you.’

  ‘Well, I guess you’re stuck with my awful scribble,’ Didier said cheerfully. ‘I’m a technoprat. I could no more type on that than fly. It’s electronic, for Gawd’s sake, so this is nothing to do with me!’ He flicked the note with thumb and finger and pushed it back at her.

  ‘Odd though, isn’t it?’ George said, stowing the note back in her files. ‘Don’t you think? Someone writing that …’

  Didier shrugged. ‘I don’t see why. It’s not all that surprising, is it? I mean, we have had three cot deaths up here since — when was it? July. I suppose someone thought they ought to point it out to you, seeing you’ve been away. If you’d not been off sick, you’d have known about them all, wouldn’t you? I dare say someone bright remembered that and typed the note just to make sure you knew. Which rules me out again. I’m not that bright.’ He grinned disarmingly at her and stretched. ‘It’s the old hospital superstition, isn’t it? They say these things always come in threes. And it’s sort of true. I’ve just delivered my third set of twins this month. Not bad, eh?’

  ‘It might be, if they were yours and not the parents’,’ George said. She got to her feet and turned to the door. ‘Oh, well, I suppose you’re right. It’s not important who sent the note. The important thing is to tell the coroner I’m not happy.’

  Didier St Cloud was on his feet too. ‘Really? Is there something fishy?’

  ‘Fishier than three in a row?’ George asked. ‘Isn’t that fishy enough?’

  ‘I doubt it would be for a coroner,’ Didier said. ‘Would it? You’d know that better than me, but I imagine even coroners know that these things just happen sometimes. Like my twins. Like the parents‘ twins. No, what I meant was, is there something fishy about the PM? What did you find?’

  ‘A dead baby,’ George said with some asperity, ‘and no more than that, dammit. It’s difficult to tell what he died of. Or even when, come to that It’s harder to pinpoint these things in infants, of course. It looks like a cot death inasmuch as it doesn’t look like anything else, so —’

  ‘So a cot death it is, surely?’ Didier said. ‘Why make a hoohah with the coroner about it?’

  George looked at him sharply. ‘Are you suggesting I let it through on the nod?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Didier said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because sudden infant death syndrome isn’t a diagnosis of a cause of death. It’s an admission of failure to find out what really was the cause. And I’d like to know why you want me just to nod it through. What does it matter to you?’

  ‘Not a thing, personally,’ Didier said, coming round the desk to reach the office door and lead the way out. ‘I was just thinking of the parents. It’s bad enough their baby died, why make life harder for them by fussing with the corone
r so that their funeral has to be delayed? That upsets them as much as the death itself, in my experience.’

  George opened her mouth to retort that she was as concerned about the parents as he was, but along the corridor a light began to flash over one of the labour suites as a bell started its din overhead. St Cloud lifted his hands in a resigned here-we-go-again gesture and dragged his too-tight mask up over his mouth and nose again. ‘Gotta go. Can’t argue with an urgent uterus,’ he said. ‘Well, whatever you do, it’s all a damn shame. Me, I don’t like dead babies.’ And he was gone in a long loping run down the corridor, leaving George to snap into the empty air where he had been, ‘Any more than I do …’

  She stood there for a moment or two, undecided, as the Maternity department went on its usual frantic way around her. Babies could be heard bawling from all directions and somewhere down the corridor a labouring woman was letting the world know, in no uncertain terms, that as the contractions became stronger and more enthusiastic she personally had changed her mind about the whole damned business of motherhood and wanted no more to do with it, whilst down in the ward kitchen at the far end of the corridor a bad-tempered ward orderly was banging pots around in a cacophony of resentment and all-round loathing of absolutely everything.

  She sighed, and went, glad to escape the smell of the place as much as the noise. She preferred the heavy dead earthiness of her own mortuary to the somewhat sickly reek of scented talcum and disinfectant, laundry, milk and sex which seemed to her to permeate the Maternity Unit’s airspace. How anyone could work in so frenetic an atmosphere for hours on end, day after day, was beyond her, she thought as she headed for the staircase and thence the underground walkway which would take her from Red Block through to Green Block and Paediatric Outpatients. She needed a word with one of their people before she finally made up her mind what to do about the death certificate for Baby Popodopoulos.

  It wasn’t till she’d made her way downstairs and on past Physio. and Occupational Therapy to the Outpatient Department for Green Block that she remembered the Children’s new Unit had been opened at last, and swore softly under her breath as she retraced her steps and went the other way through Blue Block to get to the new walkway which had been cut underground to take visitors through.

  It was startlingly different here from the rest of the hospital. Old East was an establishment that had grown over many decades ‘like some sort of wart infestation’, as Toby Bellamy had once said (and she remembered him now with a momentary pang of loneliness; it had been fun when he’d been around), and now lay sprawled over a big slice of Shadwell land with such architectural virtues as the original Georgian building might once have claimed hidden by a welter of Nissen huts and Portakabins and other temporary erections which had been there for decades.

  The Children’s Unit, Barrie Ward, named sycophantically after the creator of Peter Pan in the fond hope that maybe they’d get a bite out of the great man’s estate (a vain hope, since all the cash from that source went straight to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, leaving Old East well out in the charity cold), had been decorated with such cheerfulness and enthusiasm that it made George’s head spin a little. The corridors that led from Casualty in Blue Block, and from the main entrance to the hospital, were painted in the richest of summery yellows, although virtually every inch of available wall space had been taken up with pictures of such unrelenting cuteness that they made George feel positively Scrooge like.

  ‘But I can’t shout “Disney crap” at the top of my voice, can I?’ she had said to Hattie Clements the first time they’d walked through together. ‘However much I yearn to. All these Bambis and Thumpers and Dumbos! It’s enough to make your teeth fall out from being over-sugared.’

  Now, as she hurried by the gaudy colours and the wide dead eyes of the cartoon characters she asked herself what possible relevance this sort of stuff had to dead babies like the small Popodopoulos corpse, now lying in one of her ice-cold drawers in the mortuary, and what effect it might have on frantic parents coming to see a dying child; and then castigated herself for being so sour. The children probably adored it all and the place was here for them, after all, not for cynical forensic pathologists.

  Barrie Ward was, if that were possible, noisier than Maternity had been. Here too children cried, a good deal more loudly and piercingly than the babies over in Maternity, but their din was topped by the joyous shrieks of other children in the playroom, the babble of a TV set from one end of the big central space and the shrill repetition of pop music from a video machine at the other. George recoiled for a moment and then went in search of someone to talk to.

  She identified a tall boy of twenty-two or so in battered blue jeans and a much-scribbled-on T-shirt as a nurse by the name badge he wore: Staff Nurse Philip Goss; and stopped to talk to him. He was sitting on the floor surrounded by a group of children and got to his feet quickly as she came up to him. The children bawled at his defection and one tugged at his T-shirt, so the boy picked him up and sat him on one hip, patting his back abstractedly as he lifted his brows at George in query and said, ‘Morning! Can I help you?’

  She was struck, not for the first time, by the tenderness these male nurses seemed able to show to children, not a trait they shared with all that many men, she told herself, and smiled at him. He grinned back.

  ‘I’m not sure. I want to talk to whoever did the paediatric checks on Maternity last — let me see …’ She riffled again in her file. ‘On Wednesday night. Any ideas who it might have been?’

  ‘That’s a medical matter, I’m afraid. You’ll have to ask one of them — there’s Dr Kydd by the desk. I dare say she’ll be able to help. Sorry I can’t …’ And he hugged the little boy on his hip who was now tugging on a lock of his curly hair with considerable ferocity and shook himself free of the small clutching fingers by dint of tickling the child and making him squeal with laughter. George went on her way towards the desk thinking confused thoughts about the child of three she’d had to post-mortem last month after its father had beaten it to death, and somewhere at the back of her mind considered writing a paper on the social pressures that turned one man into a child-killer and another into a child’s nurse of considerable skill and patience. And then dismissed it. Papers had to be scientific if they were to be published and what hard evidence could she marshal to underline her thesis that it isn’t the shape of their genitals that make people fit to care for children, but something far more complex? None.

  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.