Second Opinion (26 page)

It looked frankly impossible, she told herself gloomily, sliding the papers back into the folder. She glanced at her watch. Half-past two. The PM was waiting to be done at three. Maybe if she went back to Paediatrics now she’d find Prudence Jennings? There was just time and she really did need to know what had happened that night the Oberlander baby was in the department. Had Prudence’s absence contributed in any way to what had happened later to the child? Had it in any way contributed to what had happened to Harry? But that was foolish. She was grabbing for threads in what was a tangle of major proportions and she really would have to stop being so absurd. She got to her feet and went purposefully back to Paediatrics.

This time she was lucky, and found Prudence Jennings. She was sitting at the ward desk with a pile of notes in front of her, her head down as she scribbled furiously. There was no one in the play area at all; obviously everyone was bustling around in the main ward getting ready for the Grand Round. Prudence didn’t look up as George came over and perched on the desk beside her.

‘I have to talk to you,’ George said bluntly. ‘About that child, Oberlander, so called.’

Prudence didn’t look up. ‘I can’t stop now. Kydd’ll be here in a minute for the ward round and I couldn’t be more behind with my notes. Some other time …’

‘No,’ George said and was surprised at her own intransigence. ‘I’ve been trying to see you for ages and you’re never around — I never see you about the hospital or anything — and it’s a simple question I have to ask. You went off duty and left Harry Rajabani on his own when you were on call and Miss Kydd away. Why? I’m not concerned about the way you do your job, but I need to know if it had anything to do with the Oberlander child.’

This time Prudence looked up. She was pale and her red hair looked bedraggled and dull. Her eyes looked red rimmed, too; not from tears like Cherry, but with fatigue
and, George thought, illness. George frowned at the sight and said sharply, ‘Are you OK?’

‘No, I’m not,’ Prudence snapped with a little spurt of energy. ‘I’m arse over elbows with work and I can’t be interrupted.’

‘Well, you have been,’ George said. ‘Come on. Just tell me.’ And she sat tight. There had to be some authority, she was thinking, in being a consultant and dealing with a more junior member of the medical staff.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Prudence said and suddenly looked even whiter. George bent closer. The girl looked dreadful and instinctively George put out one hand to hold on to her, for she seemed about to fall forward with her head on the desk.

‘Look, I’m sorry if —’

Prudence’s eyes were closed and she was holding both hands tightly clenched against the desk in front of her. ‘Shut up, will you? I’m at the end of my rope and I can’t —’ She opened her eyes and stared up at George. ‘Oh, God, I suppose you’ll go on until I tell you. If you tell anyone else I’ll —’ She took a deep breath. ‘I was pregnant.’

‘What?’ George stared at her, nonplussed.

‘Pregnant, damn you! I wanted to be very much. I was very happy about it. And then that night I started to bleed and — and — oh, sod it. I went home. OK? I didn’t want to get any help here — Kydd told me when I started that she wanted total devotion to the job and made it very plain that if I let anything get in the way of it, I’d never get any sort of reference from her. This was — is an important job for me. Get this one out of the way and I can maybe apply for a consultancy in a minor hospital somewhere. I didn’t dare let her know I wasn’t in perfect health. All right? And that night —’

‘Oh, hell!’ George said. ‘I’m sorry. You miscarried.’

Prudence stared up at her and said nothing and George made a grimace.

‘Look, Kydd or not, you could have seen someone, surely? One of the others here would have helped you. How come your husband’ — she glanced down at Prudence’s naked left hand and amended it — ‘your partner didn’t insist that you did? To sit it out alone in a state like that … How pregnant were you?’

‘I have no partner. He left,’ Prudence said. ‘OK? He left when I started the baby. So I daren’t lose this job and I daren’t lose my reference. I have to earn — I had only two months of this job to go. If I could have hidden it that bit longer I could have made it. I know I could. But I miscarried. At twenty weeks. Oh, God.’ And she bent her head and George thought for a moment that she was weeping, as Cherry had done. But her eyes were quite dry. They just looked a little redder.

‘So that’s why you haven’t seen me around. I’m doing all I can to cope as best as I can. I’ve got some retained products, I think. I need a D and C but I daren’t go off sick. She’ll be off again in a week or two and then I’ll be able to —’

‘This,’ George said strongly, ‘is the most goddamn crazy thing I have ever heard. You can’t go on working in a state like that! You need proper care!’

‘If you say a word to anyone about this I swear I’ll — I’ll stop trying. You meddle and I’ll be over the edge and gone, I promise you!’

‘I’m still going to meddle,’ George said. ‘And there’s an end of it. And don’t worry about Miss Kydd. Tough as she is, she doesn’t scare me! Come on!’ She slid off the edge of the desk to her feet and, with one firm lift, got Prudence up beside her. ‘We are going to A & E right now. And it’s no use arguing about it.’

19
  
  

‘It’s the sort of thing you expect from junior nurses,’ Hattie said. ‘Not from doctors! But she’s clinically depressed, I suspect. Not thinking straight.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ George said. ‘Suicidal, too. Watch her, won’t you? Look, need this get out? It’s the one thing she was scared of.’

‘What do you take me for, George?’ Hattie said indignantly. ‘Stop trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs!’

‘Ouch,’ George said. ‘Sorry. How can you stop the gossip, then?’

‘Oh. Didier’ll see her here in A & E instead of one of the A & E housemen. He’s great — never says a word he shouldn’t. If she needs admission and a D and C, which I strongly suspect she will, we can get her into the branch hospital at Rotherhithe. No one there’ll know her and she can go in as plain Miss Jennings. Look, about dealing with Dr Kydd …’

‘Ah, yes,’ George put down her coffee cup and got to her feet. ‘I have to get back to my own department now, I’ve a post-mortem I should have started ten minutes ago. Tell Prudence I’ll sort things out with Dr Kydd. No need for her to worry. And I will, take it from me.’

All through the post-mortem, which was a blessedly
straightforward job demanding little extra in the way of concentration, Prudence and her problems milled around at the back of George’s mind. Getting Dr Kydd to accept her registrar’s right to get sick shouldn’t be too difficult, she told herself; what was bothering her was the way that the explanation of Prudence’s absence from Barrie Ward the night the Oberlander baby was taken away by its parents effectively closed off any other investigation along those lines. It wasn’t, she told herself as she weighed and measured viscera and dictated notes on her findings, that she had actually wanted to find out that Prudence was in some way involved in the death of the baby. It was just that she’d hoped, by finding out what had happened to Prudence that night, to be further along the road to understanding. But she wasn’t.

It was maddening, she thought as she showered after finishing the PM. A murder had been done — indeed, two — and the perpetrators had vanished as surely as if they had been vaporized. Two people, merely by using a false name and address, that most corny of tricks, had managed to vanish too; yet there must be some way to track them down, some way of finding out how that baby had died. And why.

She was still thinking hard as she went back to Paediatrics to talk to Dr Kydd, and it wasn’t till she got to Barrie Ward that she gave any real thought to what she would say to her about her absent registrar. And decided to play it as it came. It would all depend on the way Dr Kydd reacted.

In fact, Susan Kydd was not all that difficult. She was sitting at the nurses’ desk in the play space just inside the big double doors, her head down over some notes and clearly oblivious to the noise the children were making as they belted each other with toys and cushions in the middle of the room. There was no sign of Sister Collinson, though Philip Goss was there; George smiled at him and he grinned back cheerfully as she picked her way through the small bouncing creatures who surrounded him.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ Dr Kydd looked up at her and nodded sharply. ‘And what might you be doing around here? Do we have some sort of infection problems I don’t know about?’

‘Oh, I’m involved with a few more things than that!’ George said, a little nettled, but thinking fast. Infection? An idea came to her. ‘I have to come over for consults from time to time.’

‘I know, I know. It’s just that I’m damn near single-handed here and I know I didn’t ask for a consult — and I doubt Prior would have the nous to do anything like that without asking me first. Drives me mad, he does. No initiative worth whistling at. So, what can we do for you?’

‘It’s Dr Jennings,’ George said with a casual air, leaning against the desk. ‘It’s my fault she wasn’t here when you were ready to do your round this afternoon.’

Susan Kydd frowned. ‘How do you work that out? Collinson told me she’d been taken ill.’

‘Precisely,’ George said smoothly. ‘That’s the message I phoned and told her to give you. Thing is, Prue had been throwing up. She had every intention of staying at work, but I happened to notice — I walked into the canteen washroom and saw her, and got out of her what was going on. Diarrhoea as well. Not a good idea in paediatric ward staff, you’ll grant me.’

‘I’ll grant you,’ Dr Kydd said. ‘It’s a bloody nuisance if it gets in here.’

‘That was what I thought, and what I told her, though she argued and fussed. Didn’t want to leave her post and all that stuff, swore her hygiene would be adequate protection. But I’m afraid I pulled rank on her.’ She smiled widely and disarmingly at Susan. ‘Made it clear I’d throw every book there was at her unless she came to the lab at once and let me sort out specimens and do some checking. There’s been some epidemic diarrhoea in the community’ — mentally she crossed her fingers, hoping Susan wouldn’t check and find out that was a thumping great lie — ‘and I didn’t want to
take any chances. So, I’ve got her incommunicado till I’ve got my cultures done.’

‘Hmmph,’ Kydd said. ‘Well, nothing I can do about that, is there? Nor can Jennings, poor creature. I knew it had to be something important. She’s a good girl, not one to play silly buggers with me or her job. Not like that damned Prior.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know where they get their medical students these days. All I know is that the characters they’re turning out for junior jobs are the pits. A few more good girls like Prue are what we need.’

‘You should tell her that,’ George said lightly. ‘It’d cheer her up no end. She’s worried you’ll be so mad over this that — um — well, that you’ll be mad.’

‘Worried about her reference, is she?’ Susan Kydd produced a look of sudden wisdom and knowingness that lifted her face into a semblance of good cheer. ‘Well, she needn’t. Not that I’d tell her that, and nor should you, if you don’t mind. Got to keep them up to the mark, these young ones. If you lay on the approval too thick they get lazy. Well, I can’t stay gossiping here, I’ve got work to do if no one else has.’ And she got to her feet, swept her notes off the desk and with a sharp nod went through the inner doors into the ward.

Behind her Philip Goss laughed softly. ‘What a woman!’ he said. ‘Tough as they come! Where would we be without her?’

‘Hmph,’ George said, unwilling to discuss a fellow consultant with a nurse, however much she liked him. ‘So how are things here? Busy?’

‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘The usual winter crop of snotty noses and bronchitises — all these smoking mothers don’t help — but we could be busier. Got a few empty cots.’

‘Good.’ George was heading for the door. ‘Better than being overworked.’

‘They’ll close them, I dare say,’ Philip said bitterly, bending to sweep up a child from the floor just as she was about to
fall and bang her head on a toy truck loaded with wooden bricks. ‘Now we’re a Trust it seems they spend more time closing beds to save money than trying to keep them open to save lives.’

She stopped at the door. ‘You’re not keen on the new regime?’

‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

‘It’s early days yet, though, isn’t it? It might turn out better in the long run. Self-government could mean less waste, a better service, all that stuff.’

‘It ought to, but what they’re doing is trying to cut corners too much. They take on the worst sort of staff, pay them less and less and then wonder why the place is going downhill.’ He shook his head. ‘They need to think more about what they’re doing. If you want an ace service you’ve got to have ace people to run it. Can’t take on every rag tag and bobtail that turns up wanting a job, can you? But this Trust does — Whoops, come here, you little villain!’ and he was gone, almost slithering across the floor in an effort to catch hold of a particularly active child who had decided to beat another less energetic one to a pulp.