Second Opinion (14 page)

She made a face. ‘Sorry about that. I did send a message, though, didn’t I? They were too bushed. And anyway …’ She hesitated.

‘You didn’t want ‘em to see you’re hangin’ around with a low life like me?’

‘Try not to be any stupider than you were born to be —’ she said. ‘No. Nor is it the other way around, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just that — well, Ma’s not the healthiest of women.’

‘She can’t be that bad if she got herself here from the USA,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not exactly that she can’t — Oh, damn. Look, let me talk to them about it, hmm? Then I’ll call you and we’ll make a plan.’

‘You’re on. I’ll send the trawlers out to get the best fish in the North Sea for you. And I’ll set the jelliers to work on the eels at once.’

She grinned. ‘OK, just stop crowing, will you? You were right and I was wrong. Jellied eels are human food after all. Now, will you go away, Gus? I have things to do. Like going home to look after my visitors.’

He showed a strong disposition to linger. ‘Are they staying for Christmas?’

‘Yes,’ she said a little firmly. ‘It’s going to be busy.’

He nodded. ‘Then I have an idea for you. No, not now. I can think of a night out for your two old ladies that’ll knock ‘em in the aisles. I’ll sort things out and we’ll talk about it. It’s Friday night I’ve got in mind for takin’ you all out to supper. Call me, hmm? It’ll have to be early. Around six, even. But it’ll be worth it’ This time he did go, with that familiar flick of thumb and forefinger, leaving her to lock up the office at last and get on her own way. But she had to admit she felt better for talking to him. He did cheer the place up so, she told herself. That was all it was. And it
would be nice to go out and introduce Bridget and Vanny to fish and chips, Gus style. She felt positively excited at the thought.

10
  
  

She took the sets of case notes on the cot-death babies home with her. There was no urgency about going through them for clues for Gus, but she felt it might be useful to have them with her; and in the event she had been wise. Bridget had dragged Vanny round the West End of London and through Knightsbridge and Kensington on a shopping spree that had left the pair of them depleted in more than money. They sat after dinner in a state of semi-exhaustion in her small living room, dozing in front of the flickering TV as it murmured softly in the background and fell asleep almost before they’d finished their coffee, so George was grateful to have something to do which wouldn’t disturb them.

She almost fell asleep herself, for there was nothing there she could get hold of. She had ordered up the ward notes from the hospital registry before she left, sending Sheila hotfoot to get them, and though the Chowdary file was only a précis — the main file was signed out to Maternity still — there was enough information for her to work on. Now, as she plodded her way through the accounts of the pregnancies and labours that had produced the infants, she marvelled at the detail, even in the Chowdary précis, that the midwives had offered. Every moment of monitoring and the treatment over the long pregnant months and the hours
of labour and delivery had been carefully recorded and very monotonous reading it all made.

So did the reports of the post-mortems she had not been there to do herself; they were as straightforward and as unsatisfactory as her own post-mortem report on the Popodopoulos baby had been: no real answer to the question ‘Why did they die?’ She sighed deeply as she pushed the papers back together again and tried to think of where she might go next in her investigation.

Was there anything different about any of these babies? She looked again at the brief notes she’d made while going through the voluminous hospital ones. The first two had weighed around three kilos at birth, but the last one had been bigger. The first two had been around 50 centimetres in length, the third one a couple of inches longer — 55 centimetres. She stopped and looked again at her postmortem notes on the Popodopoulos baby. According to her own measurements that child had in fact been 59 centimetres long — a discrepancy of about an inch, and she was hopeful for a moment that she’d found something different that might be useful. But then shook her head. She had measured a dead body stretched out and flaccid. The midwives had measured a newborn live and kicking and with normal muscle tone. The chances of their getting the same measure she had were very slim, and anyway, what did it matter? There was nothing in the relative lengths of the babies that might contribute to their deaths.

All right, she thought, what about their backgrounds? This was even less help than the facts about the babies, for they were so widely disparate that there could be no connection between them. The first infant had been born to a mother who abused both alcohol and, the midwives had suspected, drugs; she had lived a hand-to-mouth existence partly on the streets and had had no antenatal care at all. Her baby had in fact been a prime candidate for a death in the neonatal period.

The other two, however, couldn’t have been more different The Chowdary baby had been the result of long months spent under the care of the Fertility Department at Old East and had therefore been particularly precious, while the Popodopoulos baby had been the third child of a healthy happy mother who had had excellent antenatal care on the district and who had no history of any illness or problem that might contribute to her baby’s death.

‘I could go and talk to them in Fertility, I suppose,’ she murmured to herself aloud, ‘see if they can add anything to the Chowdary history,’ and then as Bridget stirred in her armchair, decided to pack up her work. The two old ladies needed to be woken, provided with their malted milk nightcaps and despatched to bed, and she set about doing that feeling rather like one of the nurses on the wards back at the hospital. She’d never before realized just how agreeable it was to live alone and do just what she wanted when she wanted, without any responsibility for anyone else. Oh, the joys of selfishness, she thought, and went and crouched in front of her mother to coax her awake. I’ll never moan about being on my own again …

In the event she couldn’t find time to visit the Fertility Clinic until Thursday morning, and then she went directly to the clinic before going to her own department. Once she got herself bogged down in the day’s work she would, she knew, once again find it impossible to get away, and she did want to follow this through. The more she thought about it, the more peculiar the whole affair was, and anyway, there was another value in having a case like this to think about. If she got absorbed in this, it made it harder for her to think about her mother and her health and the implications that carried for her own future.

The Fertility Clinic was housed in a small set of rooms on the far side of the Maternity Department; not a very tactful placing, George thought as she pushed open the main door. Patients attending the clinic had to make their
way through a corridor that it shared with Maternity, so the sounds of crying babies and even, sometimes, yelling labouring mothers could be heard clearly. She could imagine the distress that might cause to people who were yearning to be parents and failing abysmally.

She said as much to Dr Julia Arundel, the consultant in charge, when she found her in her office. Julia grimaced.

‘I know that perfectly well, George! I’ve been nagging them till I’m blue for a separate unit, but there isn’t a hope in hell at present, if ever. They’ve cut two of my staff as it is, and when I do ask for more help all I get is a lecture about the budget deficit and GP fund-holders not sending the patients here in large enough numbers, and threats to close me down altogether. I’ve even thought about talking to those people out there on those demonstrations — by the main entrance, and at A & E, you know? — to see if they realize what they might lose here. I might have to eventually, unless I can get my hands on some more money outside the NHS. I’ve been chasing supporters and sponsors till I’m blue but there’s damn all cash around these days and people are so uncaring anyway. Not enough are willing to even think about how desperately important a unit like this is.’

George bit her lip, holding back the thought that had immediately come to her, which was that though she sympathized deeply with the misery of people who couldn’t have babies, in a world as crowded as this one and a hospital as poverty-stricken as Old East, perhaps it was understandable that not everyone shared Julia’s view. But it wouldn’t be politic to say that, so she just contented herself with murmuring vaguely about the generosity of those who had supported the building of the new Children’s Unit, Barrie Ward, at which Julia at once snorted and shook her head.

‘And where will their future patients come from if my department vanishes for want of a few pounds?’ she demanded.

George blinked at that. ‘Well, the birth rate’s still pretty good with people who don’t have fertility problems — Maternity seems to be run off its feet these days.’

Again Julia displayed her disgust. ‘Maternity? They could double their throughput if they made the effort and streamlined their service so that I could have a couple more rooms, which I definitely need, but will they put themselves out? Not they! No, I have to go around with my begging bowl to keep a decent service going here. I’m speaking to the Operational Board about it at their next meeting. I need all the help I can get — I hope you’ll support me there.’

‘I’m not on the Board,’ George said hastily. ‘I have to run my own budget, of course, but as I’m a single-handed consultant they agreed to let the head of the Investigative Directorate be from Radiology. So Dora Hebden’s the Board member for me — you’ll have to ask her for help.’

‘A fat lot of good
she
is,’ Julia said with a fine scorn. ‘Got three children and had them like shelling peas, as far as I can gather. Certainly she can’t — or won’t — see that Fertility
matters
. You see what I mean? It’s hell trying to get this department properly funded.’

The only way to head her off, George decided, was to go straight to the point. ‘I wanted to talk to you about a baby you produced — sad case. It died soon after birth, in Maternity. A cot death.’

Julia looked blank for a moment and then said, ‘You must mean the Chowdary child. Yes, terribly sad, that. I had the mother here for — let’s see …’ She reached into her desk drawer for a notebook and then stopped and looked sharply at George. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘There’ve been a couple of these neonatal deaths recently,’ George said. ‘I just wondered if there could be any connection.’

Julia looked surprised. ‘Connection? Why should there be?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ George said candidly. ‘If it hadn’t been for
a note attached to the request form for the PM on the most recent of them, I might never have given it a thought.’

‘Note?’

George explained and Julia listened and then nodded in comprehension. ‘Oh, well, yes. Under the circumstances you better had investigate. Now …’ She began to riffle through her notebook. ‘Here it is. The Chowdarys. She’s thirty-nine. He’s forty-two. Sperm motility a problem as well as the actual count, but she had an oocyte shortage into the bargain. Or so it seemed. We managed to cause a super ovulation, harvested five ova, used a concentrated specimen of his sperm, did a straightforward
in vitro
job with two of them — she absorbed one foetus early on but managed to retain the second. A very speedy and satisfactory result. And then it went and died even though it had gone to term.’ She snapped the notebook closed and sighed. ‘All very sad, as I say. I never even saw the infant, you know.’ She sounded a touch aggrieved.

‘Oh?’

‘No. And that matters to me. I photograph them all, add them to the gallery.’ She waved a hand at the wall over her desk where pictures of babies, many of them in twinned pairs and a few in triples, were posted. George had noticed it of course. It was unmissable. ‘But I was away the day this one was born. At a meeting in Wolverhampton — the Society, you know. We need to keep in touch with all the newest techniques and it does mean a lot of meetings. So there it was. Couldn’t see the child the day it was born. But they had no reason to think there were any problems, I gather, so no one here was alerted to get a picture.’ She seemed to brood over that for a while and then went on: ‘When I got back next day and heard it had died I was most put out, I must say. It was very upsetting. But what could we do? Not a thing.’

She threw George an almost shy glance from beneath the thick straight fringe of dark hair streaked with grey which
hung over her deeply set brown eyes. It was a look that made her seem a little like a mournful dog of the bloodhound sort. ‘Though I have written and told her we could try again. Usually after they’ve had one successful pregnancy and birth they have to be turned away or into the fully paid private sector. I can’t afford to tackle them again, even though they do pay something for their care. We’re not entirely NHS, you see. We can’t be, dammit, the way things are at present. But in this case — well, I told her we’d try again.’

‘Will she?’

‘Will she what?’