Second Opinion (47 page)

‘Like hell I will,’ George said vigorously. ‘Get it dressed over at A & E and then come back. I’ve got work you can do on the histology films where the odd bug won’t matter a damn. Yeah, I know, you don’t like paperwork, but hard luck, Buster. It’s where you go till you stop being a walking pesthouse. I can’t use you anywhere else, and you’re not sick enough to go off work! But thanks, Jerry, you’ve given me a hell of a good idea for something else.’ She jumped to her feet and reached for a clipboard to which she attached her sheet of ruled columns. ‘On your way!’

‘Oh, well,’ Jerry said philosophically. ‘I thought it was worth spreading on the old Petrie dish to see what would grow. Didn’t think I’d get far with you! Glad I was of use anyway.’ And he held the door open for her as she came round her desk at full pelt.

‘Oh, you were useful, Jerry,’ she assured him happily. ‘You were very useful!’

34
  
  

‘Well, it could be nasty, Sister,’ George said. ‘Strep viridans, you know.’

Sister Lichfield looked pained. ‘Strep viridans? In my department? I don’t think so!’

‘I hope you’re right, indeed I do,’ George said and smiled at her, making herself look the epitome of hopefulness. ‘But for all our sakes, a little check-up won’t do any harm, hmm?’

‘Well, if you insist.’ She was grudging. ‘Though checking people’s movements hardly seems to me to be a way of —’

‘Oh, you know how it is with infection control,’ George said vaguely. ‘We have to look into the oddest corners as well as the obvious issues. Let me start with you, if I may. On these dates, can you tell me if you were on duty?’

George handed over the sheet of paper she’d brought with her. She’d scribbled it in the lift on her way to the department; a list of dates, most of them arbitrary but including all the significant ones; the dates the three babies had died; the date Harry Rajabani died; the date the Hillmans brought Teddy into Paediatrics and the date they came and took him away again (as well as the date they took him to Harley Street and he was taken from them). She reasoned that if people were on duty in Maternity on the last four, they could hardly have been involved with the
dead babies, so date checking was, she was sure, the quickest way of clearing away obvious non-starters in the suspect stakes.

Sister Lichfield looked at the list, muttered and went across her office to rummage in her bag, which was hanging on the back of the door. ‘I’ll check my diary,’ she said. ‘But honestly, I can’t see how this’ll help you.’

‘Honey, I’m not sure either,’ George said with an air of great candour. ‘But I’ve been asked by the Department to make these checks and there it is.’ Please don’t let her ask which department, she prayed inside her head. I’ll be hard put to it to think of who might talk such nonsense about infection control. But she was safe. Sister Lichfield didn’t ask — public health investigation wasn’t a subject many people in hospitals understood very well — and came back to George, thumbing through a small diary.

‘Here we are. Sing those dates out then.’

George did, and Sister agreed that in fact she’d been on duty for all the days on the list. ‘Which isn’t so surprising,’ she said a little sniffily. ‘Seeing there’s no one else here to carry the ultimate responsibility apart from me. I’ve been asking for a full time deputy for months and do you think the Clinical Manager’ll listen? Not on your bloody — Oh, all
right
!’ A bell was ringing urgently down the corridor and she went hurrying out, leaving George to fill in the columns on her clipboard.

So, Sister Lichfield had had the opportunity to exchange the three babies who had ostensibly died, but she had not been in Paediatrics the night the Hillmans had come in with Teddy, and of course not in the Rag and Bottle pub either. The thought of Sister Lichfield in the Rag and Bottle made George’s lips quirk. She’d hate it, she thought and, more to the point, she’d be very visible, the classic sore thumb. People would undoubtedly have noticed someone like Sister Lichfield in the public bar there.

Didier St Cloud came in as she sat contemplating her
list, smelling of sweat and the labour ward; he was in his theatre greens and looked rumpled and a little tired but she ignored that and launched herself into the same tale she had given Sister Lichfield as he looked around for the coffee tray that was usually in evidence at this time of day. He swallowed it as easily — even more easily in fact — and George sighed inside; bad enough a senior midwife should be so unknowledgeable about public health measures; that a doctor should be too almost embarrassed her for her profession.

‘It’s the Professor’s Rolls to my clapped-out Mini that I was on duty,’ he said lugubriously, ‘I usually bloody am,’ and he too reached into his pocket and hauled out a small diary.

But matters were not as clear with him, George realized as she talked to him in more detail. Being on duty didn’t necessarily mean being in the maternity unit. He was sometimes in Accident and Emergency.

‘You’d be amazed how often they need an obstetric opinion down there. We get a fair number of pregnant girls drugged to their eyebrows or mashed up in RTAs,’ he said. ‘I’m up and down there like the old yo-yo. Paediatrics, too, come to think of it. Sometimes they want me to consult on an infant — but that’s no problem to you, is it? I mean, it’s only the possibility of there being strep viridans here in Matty that worries you, isn’t it? I assume you’ll be taking swabs from us all?’

‘Oh, yes,’ George said, her heart sinking. He wasn’t as accepting of her tale as she had thought, after all. Now she would indeed have to take swabs from everyone’s nose and throat to shore up her story. A lot of work for nothing. Not that it did any harm to do a survey of the reigning organisms in such a department from time to time, but all the same she could have done without the chore right now. ‘I’m just collecting data, at present. Seeing whom I need to swab.’

‘Oh, umpteen people,’ Didier said, finishing his coffee.
‘Christ, I’m tired! I’ve got to hang about though. We’ve got a twin delivery on the boil. Yeah, you’ll have to do masses of swabs, won’t you? Not just the consultants and me and the houseman among the medicos, and of course all the midder and nursing staff, but the cleaners and the porters and the physios and so forth. It must run to a huge number, hmm?’

‘Not necessarily,’ George said, extemporizing. ‘I gather it’s not every single person who ever comes here they’re interested in surveying. It’s the full-time regulars, you know?’

‘Really? I’d have thought almost anyone could leave a nasty bug here on just one visit. But even if they are leaving the occasional people out, it’s still a lot you’ll have to deal with,’ Didier said. ‘I mean, this office alone, you’d be amazed who comes in and out of here!’

‘So tell me!’ George said. She settled back in her chair, trying not to look too eager. ‘It’d be a great help to have some idea of the population in transit, as it were.’

‘Well, everyone who has anything to do with Maternity, of course — oh, umpteen. Phlebotomists for example, some of your people come up here to take bloods, don’t they? And like I said, physios and so forth. But then there are the other departments —’

‘Which others?’

‘Well, Paediatrics for a start. Every one of the babes is checked by someone from Paed., you know that. Some of them more than once, if the babies are a worry. We see as much of the paediatric staff as we see of each other, here. GPs come in sometimes too, of course, but I doubt you’ll have to concern yourself with them. They’ll come under the Community Trust, won’t they?’ He looked at her, bright eyed and knowing, and she hoped her confusion didn’t show. He was after all one hell of a lot smarter than she’d given him credit for being.

‘Hmm? Oh, yeah. So, Paediatrics.’ She scribbled something
meaningless on her clipboard, and then stopped short as an idea came to her. Paediatrics; the senior consultant was a person who made many trips to Romania. She caught her breath as she considered that. Why on earth hadn’t she remembered that sooner? Could Susan Kydd be the person they were looking for?

‘Does Dr Kydd come to see babies here?’ she asked as casually as she could.

‘Mmm? Oh, sure, of course! They all do, and not just the medical staff. The senior nurses do sometimes, too. It depends on the condition of the baby, you see. We all do all we can to keep the mother and baby together and if that means bringing the Paediatric people here instead of sending the baby to them, that’s the way it has to be. It’s Fay Buckland’s policy, and no one — not even Susan Kydd — argues with our esteemed boss!’

‘So,’ George said, working hard at being matter-of-fact, ‘Paediatrics people come here. Who else?’

He frowned. ‘Let me see. Last night we had one of the cardiologists in here. We delivered a girl with severe mitral stenosis and we started to have problems. Oh, and then the Endocrine lot come in a good deal. For our diabetic mums, you know. Fertility, of course, are involved with Endo. — though they’re really part of us, aren’t they? The Radiology people come in a good deal, and, oh yes, we’ve been working a lot with Oncology for the last few months. We’ve got a couple of patients in remission with leukaemias, and they monitor their progress very closely. There’s a nice piece of research going on.’ He stood up and made for the door. ‘So you see, you’ll have a lot of people to sort out, won’t you? If this investigation’s a really
necessary
one.’ And he smiled slyly at her and was gone, leaving her discomfited, trying to gather her ideas into some sort of order.

Had he been teasing her? Did he know perfectly well that her story about investigating a possible outbreak of
infection in the department was so much hogwash? Had he been trailing his coat as far as his own alibi went, so confident he wouldn’t be found out that he wasn’t worried about her? She frowned. It was hard to think of Didier St Cloud as a suspect; certainly harder than seeing Susan Kydd in that role. She was now very high on George’s suspect list, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t prepared to consider other possibilities, and Didier was a very real one. And yet he always seemed so straightforward and so genuinely enthusiastic about his job, so good with the mums and babies. She had seen him with them in the corridors and in her dealings around the department, and she couldn’t believe it all had been a con trick or mere professional good manners.

Philip Goss conned you, she told herself then. You thought he was a deeply caring nurse and look what he turned out to be. A fascist bastard who manipulated people for his own racist ends, fomenting trouble and deliberately causing fights … But does that stand in the way of his being a good nurse? Certainly as far as those children I saw him with were concerned, he wasn’t acting. They trusted him, felt comfortable with him. Maybe Didier isn’t acting when he’s with his patients either; yet he could still be the man we want.

Except that isn’t it a woman we’re looking for? The Hillmans, at any rate, said so. Was there any other reason for thinking so? She frowned again, trying to think it through. At the Rag and Bottle the landlord had been quite clear, as she remembered it, that the person Harry had been talking to was a young man. Why had she been so certain they were looking for a woman? And even if they were, there was always the possibility that more than one person was involved. There could be two criminals, one of each.

She looked down at her clipboard again and sighed. Her idea of sorting out the culprit or even culprits simply by
means of excluding those who hadn’t the opportunity to carry out the various actions that built up this case was so much nonsense. This department was like Victoria Station; the world and his wife went through it. And, she reminded herself, she’d only been thinking of staff. What about the patients and their families? Every time she came here there were women wandering around in the corridor, strolling up and down, chattering in corners; and visitors too were much in evidence, since there were no officially set hours for them. They could and did come with their flowers and sweets and helium-filled balloons and smuggled bottles of booze any time between nine in the morning and eight at night. Couldn’t the criminal have come from anywhere and reached the babies, and later the typewriter on which the codes had been typed, at any time? The office door was always open, and as far as she knew there were no locked doors anywhere in the unit.

She got up to go. She’d have to go back to Gus with her head low and admit failure. They would have to find another way to sort it all out. She shoved her clipboard under her arm and scowled as her bleep trilled in her pocket. That was all she needed, she thought; some sort of emergency in her own department. That was the last thing she was in the mood for right now. She hit the off button on her bleep and reached for the phone.

‘Oh, Dr Barnabas!’ the girl on the switchboard fluted. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind me bleeping you — I told her so, though she did say not to. She’s holding on.’

‘Who’s holding on?’ snapped George, irritated by the smug tone in the girl’s voice.

‘Your mother, Dr Barnabas,’ the girl’s voice said smoothly and George’s belly lurched. Oh, God, an emergency at home. Ma was ill. She was suddenly very aware of the way she had neglected the old ladies this past few days. She’d hardly seen them, rushing out to the hospital each morning as she had and coming in late and being monosyllabic until
they seemed to take the hint and trailed off to bed early. And now … She swallowed as the line clicked in her ear and she heard Vanny’s voice say uncertainly, ‘Hello? Hello?’