The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  Finally, Woodburn questioned Rohan about John Santino’s demeanour in the hours immediately after Kendra’s death. The defence barrister was keen to characterise Santino as a bereaved man, distraught at the loss of his partner. Woodburn suggested that the police officers had prejudged his guilt, so had misread his behaviour. Santino’s refusal to cooperate, his bravado and apparent lack of sadness were, in fact, manifestations of genuine grief.

  Again, Rohan held steady in his answers and he took the opportunity to sneak in an extra detail.

  ‘Well, Mr Woodburn, I can’t know what was in the accused’s mind,’ Rohan acknowledged. ‘But I do know John Santino put up a new dating profile on Tinder two days after Kendra Bartlett was killed.’

  There was an audible intake of breath and a wave of appalled muttering through the courtroom.

  Anita noticed Santino turn, searching for Brooke, but she kept her head tilted down, staring at her huge taut belly. It was hard to tell if she was hiding from the curious stares of others in the courtroom or if this was a meaningful vote of no-confidence in her boyfriend.

  Even Woodburn didn’t look quite as relaxed and smug as he usually did. Several members of the jury were looking at Santino with open disgust now.

  From her seat in the courtroom, Anita texted Paula.

  They’ve got him. This monster is going to jail. A xx

  That evening, Rohan and Anita conducted a ceremonial opening of the remaining containers of Chilean comfort food to mark one full month of their relationship. Anita resolved to ring Paula in the morning and arrange for the three of them to have dinner together—an official ‘boyfriend introduction’ dinner.

  THIRTEEN

  WHEN PAULA ARRIVED AT THE RESTAURANT IN CHIPPENDALE, she could see the new couple already sitting at a table and she waved. Anita jumped up, slightly clumsy, as if nervous about how the evening would go.

  The two women hugged and kissed hello, and then there was an awkward little moment as Paula turned to greet Rohan. Should they shake hands solemnly like two people who had met over the murdered bodies of her dear friend and two children? Or should they exchange pecks on the cheek as a best friend meeting the new boyfriend?

  Paula could see Rohan Mehta hesitate—calm, but clearly waiting for Paula to make the call. In the end, she decided to split the difference.

  ‘It’s really good to see you again, Rohan,’ said Paula, and she reached out to put her hand on his forearm.

  ‘You too,’ he said, squeezing her arm affectionately.

  Through dinner, Anita was flustered, laughing a bit too loudly, fiddling with the buttons on her shirt. At one point, when Anita was gabbling about the food, Paula met Rohan’s gaze. They shared a faint smile, silently acknowledging that they should both calmly ride out Anita’s nervous energy until she felt sure enough the evening would go well.

  And the evening did go well.

  Rohan and Anita were so together, so clearly enjoying each other, that it gave Paula a pang of missing Remy. But seeing Anita happy was worth it. And anyway, sometimes the ache of missing her man, remembering him with ramped-up intensity, had its own consolation. She didn’t say any of this out loud, of course.

  When Anita was in the middle of an anecdote, hands flying and voice swooping to give the story its best telling, Paula noticed the way Rohan looked at her. Attentive, delighting in her energy, enjoying Anita being the centre of attention, besotted by her. That was how Paula and Remy used to look at each other.

  She recalled how Matt hated Stacey being the centre of attention. That had always been incomprehensible to Paula—why would you fall for a woman as vivacious and magnetic as Stacey if you didn’t appreciate her being that person? In Matt’s mind, when Stacey was shining bright at some social occasion, she was ‘winning’ the moment in a way that was a defeat for him, as if there was a scorecard in the sky and every social point Stacey earned cost him a point. He would chip at her, ridicule her, petulant. Sometimes Stacey could handle him, cajoling him back into a sociable mood, and other times she would make an excuse for them to leave.

  At one point during that first dinner with Rohan and Anita, Paula was aware of Rohan Mehta looking at her intently. She felt a sting of fear—maybe, as a police detective, he could somehow intuit that she was guilty of murder—but with a moment of calm breathing, she assured herself that was irrational. Ian Ferguson’s death was not considered a murder. It wasn’t even a subject of investigation or any scrutiny. If Rohan was trying to read anything in her, he was probably looking for clues to whether he’d passed the test as Anita’s new boyfriend. Paula decided to cover her moment of unease by mentioning the subject that was there at the table with the three of them, unspoken.

  ‘Rohan, can I ask where are things at with the inquest about Stacey and the children?’ she asked.

  Anita froze, her gaze darting between the two of them. But she need not have worried. Rohan handled the question with grace, explaining the process, the timeline, what would be required of Paula. He didn’t only answer her procedural questions. He also spoke about how distressing he’d found Stacey’s case at a personal level and how keenly he appreciated the loss her friends must be feeling. He spoke with delicacy and without pulling focus onto himself in an egotistical or condescending way.

  Paula decided Rohan Mehta was a properly grown-up man with a good heart. She was glad Anita had found him, whatever the context.

  The next morning, Dr Kaczmarek’s first appointment was booked in as a ‘long consultation’ and she smiled when she saw the name of the patient.

  Paula had seen Judy and her family through the normal run of illnesses and some personal tangles in recent years. There’d been Judy’s own gynaecological woes and the bout of depression after her marriage broke down. There’d been the teenage daughter’s bad scoliosis, but spinal surgery had gone well and the girl was now studying physiotherapy and playing high-level basketball. There’d been the substance-abusing son who veered close to self-destruction. Paula had helped Judy coax him into detox, residential programs and whatever threads might hold him in life during the most precarious phases. That son was now in his mid-twenties, sober for over a year and doing a TAFE course. Then Judy’s mother had suddenly showed up, dying from lung cancer secondaries. Paula had helped organise home nursing until the mother went to hospital for her final days.

  Judy flashed her fabulous earthy smile as she walked into the consulting room and plonked herself on the chair. ‘Hi, Paula.’

  ‘Good to see you, Judy.’

  Judy always made Paula feel like a person in her own right and not just a doctor fixing problems. She’d sent Paula a thoughtful, tender note when Remy died and another one when Stacey and the children were killed. She was a good woman, stoic, a warrior for her kids.

  ‘Work’s slowed down a bit,’ Judy said, ‘and no one in my family is currently in crisis, so I’ve got a window of time to do some body maintenance. I’m thinking mammogram, check cholesterol, get skin cancers burned off, grease and oil change, all that palaver.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  Paula took her blood pressure, organised the referrals Judy wanted, wrote repeat prescriptions for her regular meds. Judy chattered on, updating Paula on how the kids were doing—both pretty well, even the errant son.

  When they were finished and Judy was clutching her fistful of paperwork, she hesitated a second too long in the chair.

  ‘Ah,’ said Paula. ‘Looks like there’s something else, Judy.’ She could always tell when a patient presented with a few straightforward problems but was really there to talk about some more delicate or embarrassing matter.

  Judy laughed. ‘Oh, Paula, you do know me!’

  She reached into her large handbag and pulled out an object wrapped in a couple of tea towels.

  ‘Remember when I was looking after Mum at home and the palliative people prescribed her this liquid painkiller stuff?’ Judy unwrapped the tea towels carefully to reveal a brown glass bottle of Dilaudid. ‘I remember thi
nking at the time—that’s a bloody big flagon of a powerful narcotic they handed to me.’

  ‘Looks like it’s almost full.’

  ‘Yeah, because Mum ended up in the hospital two days after I got it. Anyway, it’s been in my wardrobe for months. And now that I’ve got my son back living with me, I don’t want to leave temptation lying around the house.’

  ‘Of course. Wise move. Do you want me to dispose of it for you?’

  ‘Could you? That’d be great,’ said Judy. ‘I didn’t want to pour it down the sink in case it got into the water supply and sent all the fish off their faces. That’s if fish even have faces.’

  After Judy left, Paula picked up the bottle, which still contained at least two hundred millilitres of hydromorphone, a synthetic opiate. It had always struck her as an anomaly that prescribing Schedule 8 drugs was so regulated, with a strict paper trail, but then situations like this would often arise—a patient died or was admitted to hospital, leaving their unused medications sitting in bathroom cabinets, no longer controlled or traceable. For now, Paula stowed the bottle in a lockable cupboard in her consulting room.

  The plan to nurse Judy’s dying mother at home had collapsed after a hip fracture landed her in an emergency department. That was how it played out for so many people. Paula’s father had died in a hospital ICU because her mother had insisted on all possible measures being taken to extend his life. By the end, his crumbly body had been barricaded behind so much equipment, it was difficult to embrace him. Two years later, her mother fell onto her kitchen floor, toppled by a stroke that most likely took a further few hours to kill her, with no one around to offer any human touch in those final moments. Neither parent had experienced the kind of death Paula would recommend to a patient.

  She was grateful that during Remy’s last week of life she was able to stay close, lying in the bed with him for pretty much twenty-four hours a day. Visitors would come and go, perching on the edge of the mattress to chat or play music or just sit quietly.

  From time to time, she would jump up to make food or to help the palliative nurse, but otherwise, she lay beside Remy, feeling the warmth of his body next to her, wanting to bank up the feeling, lock it in.

  Afterwards, she had found it hard to sleep alone in their bed and the insomnia persisted, like a stubborn injury, for months after he died. She tried temazepam, which helped her drift off for a few hours, but she would usually wake up at three or four a.m. and that would be the end of sleep for the night. In desperation, she had experimented with opioids. Not every night. Only occasionally, only when her eyeballs were scraping inside their sockets and her bones felt abrasive under her skin. Only when she needed seven or eight hours of unconsciousness so she could be rested and functional for her patients. An occasional short-term fix.

  Eventually, she admitted to herself that she relished the initial rush from the medication—a euphoria that filled the window of time before the drug made her drowsy enough to fall asleep. Paula hadn’t felt any kind of intense happiness for so long. It was astonishing to be reminded what that felt like, even if it was a brief, synthetic version of happiness.

  She wasn’t a fool. She understood how addictive these drugs were. She made sure to leave gaps of several days between using them. And when she found she was really craving that brief moment of opioid bliss, yearning for it, she would back off for a good long while. Then there would be a night when she felt the need again.

  She had convinced herself this was a phase, temporary and under control, but looking back on that period of her life with an honest gaze, she knew she had been in dangerous territory. And in truth, she had only been saved from sliding into opioid abuse by Stacey.

  One evening, Stacey had phoned Paula from a motel in Ballina. In an explosion of anger, Matt had slashed the throats of the three alpacas they kept in the home paddock. Stacey—her face swollen and pulpy, body bruised, ribs broken, all at the hands of her husband—had hustled the kids into the car before they saw the corpses of the animals and driven to the nearest police station. The instant Paula heard Stacey’s voice in that call, a sobering charge of energy went through her body. She never touched opioids again.

  Now, in her bedroom at home, sleepless at two a.m., Paula could picture the bottle of Dilaudid Judy had handed over that morning. A small amount of the liquid hydromorphone would mean blessed sleep. Paula felt the vibration along a thread that connected her body lying here in bed with the brown bottle sitting in the locked cupboard at the practice.

  She should’ve disposed of it straight away but she hadn’t. She could drive there now and use some but she wouldn’t. She trusted she could fight the temptation because she’d managed it before.

  One Wednesday towards the end of the Santino trial, Anita and Rohan travelled into the city together by train. As they walked from the station towards Phillip Street, Rohan made a call, trying to arrange his schedule so he’d have time to duck into Court 3 at some point in the day.

  While he was speaking on the phone, there was a bombardment of missed calls from the same number. He frowned and answered the next call.

  ‘Hi, do you need me?’ he asked. ‘I thought we were all set for today.’ But then he stopped and stepped out of the stream of pedestrians into a shop doorway, so he could listen with closer attention. Anita could faintly hear the voice on the other end talking rapidly, with the high pitch of someone in a panic.

  ‘What? Oh no … How is she? Can you find out more?’ Rohan asked. Pausing to press the phone against his chest, he said to Anita, ‘Irene Pileris was in an accident last night. Her bike skidded—road was wet or something—and she slammed into a bus shelter.’ Then he went back to his call. ‘Yes, please, mate—whatever you can tell me would be helpful.’

  Anita waited in the shop doorway with Rohan, watching his anxious face as he called more people.

  Finally, he slapped his phone against his forehead in frustration and turned to her. ‘Irene’s basically okay but she’s having surgery now and in hospital for—well, I don’t know, a while.’

  ‘Can’t the DPP get an adjournment?’

  ‘Argued for it, but no go,’ he said. ‘So the junior guy has to finish the trial.’

  ‘That’s Hugh Warby. I don’t really know him. What’s he like?’

  Rohan grimaced. ‘Look, he’s not a total idiot.’

  ‘Oh fuck … okay. Still, still, let’s not be silly about this. The prosecution’s been strong up to now and you told me there’s some dynamite stuff to come.’

  ‘There is,’ Rohan confirmed. ‘Great eyewitness. Even better piece of audio.’

  ‘Good. Good. It’ll be okay.’

  Walking into Court 3, Anita saw Hugh Warby, the junior barrister now running the Crown case, at the bar table, rearranging his white folders, looking sweaty and flustered before the day had even started. The poor guy was anxious that he was out of his depth and that anxiety was dragging him further out to sea.

  His first task was to question Maram Hafda, the nineteen-year-old woman who had been walking near the overpass when Kendra was killed. According to Rohan, Maram was the kind of eyewitness you want—a bit too young, perhaps, but smart, sober and unconnected to the people involved.

  On the stand, Maram started off well, even while Warby stammered out awkwardly worded questions as if he’d lost his grasp of syntax.

  ‘Can you, Ms Hafda—you can describe—well, can you, for us, relate the … You were that day walking close to the overpass at the—hold on, let me be absolutely accurate re the street …’

  Despite him, Maram was lucid and composed as she described the two people arguing on the overpass. She observed the man aggressively grab the woman and yank her around, as he yelled abusive things, including, ‘Is this what you want, you stupid bitch?’ She heard the woman repeatedly plead, ‘Let me go.’

  Maram rang 000 to report what was happening, then moved closer, considering how to intervene. A moment later, she saw Santino lift Kendra up, shove her over the low rai
ling and let her fall onto the roadway. He leaned over the edge to look down and made a ‘ha’ noise of triumph.

  Hugh Warby finished his questions, then plonked his weight heavily into the chair. He let out an embarrassingly obvious sigh of relief which he then converted into an unconvincing fake cough. However clumsily, Warby had extracted what he needed from the young woman’s testimony, which was unequivocal and so damning that Gilbert Woodburn would have to work hard to subvert it.

  ‘Miss Hafda,’ said Woodburn in his most unctuous voice, ‘what a horrible scene you witnessed by chance, when you were simply going about your day. My sympathy. That must’ve been a very upsetting sight to see. Was it?’

  ‘Oh,’ Maram responded, not expecting this. ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘My goodness, I’m sure it was. Your head must’ve been spun around by such an upsetting scenario. Do you think there’s a chance you, in your distress, got little bits and bobs of detail wrong?’

  ‘If you mean—no, I remember pretty clearly.’

  ‘Pretty clearly?’

  ‘Very clearly. Because it was so horrible, the memory is clear.’

  Woodburn nodded but then did a stagey little frown. ‘But from that distance, could you be sure what you were seeing?’

  ‘I was only a hundred metres away. And after I rang triple zero, I moved closer. Maybe only fifty metres away.’

  ‘Did you know Kendra Bartlett was on antidepressant medication?’

  ‘Uh, no,’ Maram answered, puzzled to be asked this. ‘I just saw a woman on the overpass. I didn’t know anything about her.’