by Peter James
What was going on? she wondered, in bewildered terror. Yesterday he’d been looking fine when she’d left the ward. But today he looked very much worse. Stepping away, out of earshot of her fiancé and talking quietly, she told the nurse her concerns. This time, instead of allaying her fears, Kiera concurred.
‘It’s possible he’s picked up an infection,’ she said. ‘We’re giving him a course of antibiotics to try to knock it out.’
‘I don’t like his heart rate or his blood pressure,’ Georgie said. ‘Both are worse than yesterday – than last night when I left him.’
The nurse gave her the kind of reassuring smile she hated. ‘Hopefully he’ll respond to the antibiotics in time.’
‘Really?’ Georgie rounded on her. ‘How much time? In time for what? He seemed to be doing OK last night when I left him – what the hell is going on? Are you really going to tell me this is normal? There must be some complications going on, surely?’
‘We’re doing all we can for him, Georgie,’ the nurse replied. ‘Yes, it’s not an ideal situation – we would have hoped he would be up and about by now, but as I told you earlier, all patients respond differently. But if he doesn’t pick up in the next few hours, the doctors will have to see if there is something else going on.’
‘Something else? Like what?’
‘I don’t really feel it’s my place to speculate – we’ll wait for the next ward round. It could be as simple as Roger not reacting well to one of the medications.’
‘I’m so worried.’
‘I know, and I do understand what you must be going through. Please don’t worry. I’m sure in a few days he’ll be back home and well on the road to recovery.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go to a meeting, I’ll be back in a short while to see how he’s getting on.’ She pointed at the nursing station. ‘The nurse, just over there, will be in charge of him in the meantime. Speak to her if you have any more concerns.’
Georgie saw a short, dark-haired nurse standing in front of the counter. She smiled at her and the nurse smiled back.
As Kiera left, Georgie kissed Roger’s cheek. It was clammy. Then she held his free hand. It was limp and clammy, also. She leaned over and whispered into his ear, ‘Hi, darling, I’m here with you. I love you. Love you so much. You’re going to be OK, you’ll be fine. We’ll get through this together. Just be strong. Little Bump needs you to be better quickly!’
She felt a faint squeeze back.
For the next hour and a half, she maintained her vigil while Roger slept on. All the time she watched the monitors like a hawk, willing the figures to start improving. He seemed stable, at least from the digital readouts. Hopefully, the antibiotics were working.
At 1.30 p.m. Georgie’s stomach was rumbling, reminding her she’d not eaten a thing all day so far. Although she had no appetite, she was aware she needed fuel so she left Roger, went downstairs and bought herself a tuna sandwich and a bottle of Coke for the caffeine and sugar hit from the cafe in the entrance lobby. Then, in need of fresh air, she carried them outside, into the biting wind and stinging rain. It refreshed her but was too cold to stay out there. She returned to the hospital, sat on a thin bench inside the entrance and bit into her sandwich.
As soon as she had finished, she hurried back up to the ICU and resumed her vigil on the chair at Roger’s bedside. He was still sound asleep, out of it. Just as she leaned across to kiss him, she was aware, out of the corner of her eye, of two figures entering the ward. Marcus Valentine and his student, Robin – no, Robert – Resmes. They were accompanied by Kiera Dale and two other medics she did not recognize.
Valentine beamed smartly down as he approached.
‘Hello, Georgie, how is my patient doing?’ he asked.
‘Not that great actually,’ Georgie said, before the nurse could respond. ‘Is there anything you can do for him, please? He just doesn’t seem to be improving.’
Oh sure, Marcus Valentine thought. What would you like me to do? Save his life so you can live with him in marital bliss?
In your dreams, lady.
He gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t you worry, you just relax. He’s bound to have a few ups and downs following the accident and such major surgery. He’s doing fine, I’m quite happy.’ He made a show of studying all the monitor displays. ‘All is good, pretty much what I’d be expecting to see.’
He turned on his heels and, followed by his entourage, headed towards the exit.
His words echoed in Georgie’s head: Don’t you worry, you just relax.
Easy for you to say, she thought.
65
Thursday 17 January
As he left the Intensive Care Unit, Valentine was in a troubled mood. And the Romanian medical student was the source of this.
I just wanted to mention something, Mr Valentine. I did not think it was appropriate at the time – in theatre – during the operation. But it looked to me that there might have been a tiny tear in Mr Richardson’s bowel.
Fortunately, he was losing him next week. But the young man worried him. How long before he told someone else what he had seen? Once Richardson started to go seriously downhill, which would be happening soon, and Resmes told another member of the team what he suspected, one of the other general surgeons would probably open him up again. They’d find that perforation, repair it and, almost certainly, Richardson would recover.
And almost certainly an inquiry would follow. With Resmes sticking to his claim that he had told Marcus what he’d seen, and he’d ignored it, there was a real threat to his own career. He could be suspended. God forbid, he could be struck off.
Needing time to think, he told Resmes he had to catch up on some paperwork in his office and to go and take his lunch break. The next thing in his diary that would be of medical interest to him, he told the student, would be a colposcopy examination of a patient with advanced cervical cancer, at 3 p.m. He would meet him then.
Unlocking his office door, he went in and sat at his desk. He was about to log on to his computer when something caught his interest. Something out of place. He glanced down and saw that the bottom left drawer of his desk wasn’t completely closed. There was a tiny gap.
He always closed it tightly.
Had someone been in there? Why? Who?
Annoyed, he opened it fully, then began to sift through the folders of old documents he kept in there until he reached the bottom, where he kept the keys to the two filing cabinets in the room.
Instantly, another warning bell rang in his head.
The keys were sprawled messily apart. He would never leave them like that.
Who the hell had been in here?
He unlocked the filing cabinet and rummaged, urgently, through the green file folders hanging inside. He pulled out the one with the large bulge and his hackles rose.
As a precaution he always placed the phone with the display side facing away, towards the rear of the cabinet. Now it was facing towards the front. He picked it up. Fuck! It wasn’t on mute.
No question. Someone had been in here and removed it. How had he been so careless?
His mind went back to last night. Remembering now the strange phone call he had received from Resmes.
Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Valentine, sorry to disturb you. I – I just wanted to check what time and where I should meet you tomorrow?
For fuck’s sake, had the little creep gone into his office after he’d left? Was he spying on him? And, even more worrying, had he seen the contents of his phone?
There was one sure way to find out. You think you’re so fucking smart, do you, Robert Resmes? Great powers of observation, eh? Well, Mr Interfering Fucking Foreigner, how come you failed to spot this?
On a corner shelf, on the far side of the office, sandwiched between two cacti plants, lay a medical directory. No one entering his office would give it a second glance. But if they picked it up, they might think it was a little light – and they’d be right. Valentine had hollowed out the
pages and inserted a video camera, which had a wide-angle view of almost the entire office.
He tapped the CleverCam app on his regular phone to bring up the images. The camera was programmed to take a photograph any time there was movement in the room. The first image he saw was himself, entering the office just a couple of minutes ago. He scrolled back to early evening last night and saw an image of Robert Resmes entering the room. The next showed him halfway across it. Then looking around as if startled by something. Going to the filing cabinet. Tugging the drawer. Then walking to his desk. Sitting at it. Then returning to the filing cabinet. Removing the phone.
Examining the phone.
Then pocketing it. Closing the filing cabinet. Returning to the desk and apparently replacing the key.
The time then jumped to 9.44 a.m. today. Resmes re-entering. Removing, presumably, the key from his desk. Opening the filing cabinet. Replacing the phone. Replacing the key. Leaving.
Valentine fought to contain his rage at the sheer nerve of the man. How dare he? Then, trying to calm down, he thought hard, wondering what the Romanian had been doing with the phone in the interim. Trying to unlock the password, almost certainly.
Had he succeeded?
He had to assume so. Thinking anything else would be too much of a risk.
He was going to have to act fast.
He started by deleting the incriminating contents of the phone, both the duplicated running pictures from his personal phone and everything else.
66
Thursday 17 January
At 2.15 p.m., Georgie Maclean reluctantly left the ICU, where Roger was still asleep, and followed the signs along the hospital corridor to the Maternity ward. She passed a wheelchair, a waste bin with a hazard-warning symbol and a strip across it saying, ‘No yellow bags’, a yellow cone warning of a slippery floor, and saw the sign she had been looking for.
COLPOSCOPY. CONSULTING ROOM 5
She knocked on the door then entered a small waiting room, with a row of lockers on one side and a curtained-off dressing room on the other. A young Australian-sounding nurse handed her a blue gown and a locker key, asked her to remove all her clothing and put the gown on, and departed, saying she would be back in a few minutes.
Georgie did as she was instructed then sat, barefoot, and waited. The nurse returned and ushered her through into a small room cluttered with technical apparatus, including a monitor and the binocular microscope Georgie remembered from her previous examination, with an elaborate white-and-blue examination chair, with padded leg supports, occupying centre stage. Another nurse in the room helped Georgie position herself in the chair, placing each of her legs on the pads, then reclined her.
Lying back, with her legs almost in the air, she felt helpless and vulnerable, as well as full of her nagging worry about what Kath might find. Another time she might have made an attempt at a joke, but she was too preoccupied with her fears for Roger and her baby.
A few moments later the obstetrician entered, in blue scrubs and gloves.
‘Hello, Georgie!’ she said, brightly as ever. ‘How are you, my love?’
‘OK, thanks.’
‘And how’s dear Roger doing?’
‘Not good. I’m very worried about him.’
‘He had pretty major surgery,’ she said. ‘A splenectomy can really take quite a while to recover from.’
‘I know, but the ICU team can’t understand why he’s not showing any improvement in his condition – he actually seems to be going downhill since yesterday.’ She gave a helpless shrug. ‘He’s on antibiotics and currently stable, but I can see they’re concerned. I don’t know, I just get the feeling something is not right.’
‘Georgie, I know from experience that a lot of patients have heightened fears while pregnant. Roger is in the best possible place where he is. Try not to worry too much, he’s going to be fine, really.’
Georgie gave her another thin smile. ‘Yes. God, I hope you’re right.’
‘OK, let’s take a look at you and see how everything is. I’m pretty confident those small spots of blood you saw are nothing to worry about, but let’s be sure, eh? I’m going to take a biopsy, just to eliminate any possibility of anything nasty.’
Kath gelled the tip of the speculum and then, peering into the microscope binoculars, entered it slowly into Georgie, pushing it further and deeper in over the next few minutes. ‘As I thought, it’s looking pink and healthy, Georgie. There are a few changes, which are probably due to your pregnancy. I’m not seeing anything to worry me at all. But I’m going to take a biopsy just for belt and braces.’
Fifteen minutes later, removing the speculum, the obstetrician placed the tissue sample in a small plastic vial and screwed back the lid. She wrote an instruction to the pathology lab on the label and stuck that on.
This vial, along with all the others in this afternoon’s colposcopy clinic, would be taken down to the path labs for analysis straight after the clinic was finished.
‘It all looks pretty good to me,’ Kath said to Georgie by way of reassurance. ‘But let’s wait for the biopsy result so we can be one hundred per cent, eh?’
‘But you really think it’s fine?’
‘Yes, I do, I’ve honestly not seen anything to give me any concern.’
Released from the chair, Georgie retrieved her clothes from the locker and changed back into them. As she walked out into the corridor, intending to return to Roger’s bedside, she saw Marcus Valentine, trailed by his student, heading towards her. Both were in scrubs.
‘Hello, Georgie!’ Marcus greeted her. ‘How did your procedure go?’ He made this sound like she was a schoolgirl up for a prize.
‘I was teacher’s pet.’
He frowned, missing the irony of her retort, then said, uneasily, ‘Ah.’
‘Dr Clow was concerned because I had a little bleeding, but she thinks it’s all fine – though she doesn’t want me running at the moment.’
‘Good to hear – bleeding at your stage of pregnancy should always be investigated, but it’s usually nothing to be too worried about.’
‘I’m much more worried about Roger, Marcus,’ she responded.
‘I told you earlier, don’t be – he’s my friend and I’m looking after him.’ He gave her a smile, one which was not mirrored by his student. Robert Resmes had a concerned expression on his face. As if he shared the same doubts that Georgie had.
As the pair went in through the Colposcopy Unit door, she headed on back towards the ICU. Wondering as she walked.
Wondering about the look on Resmes’s face.
Then she heard footsteps gaining rapidly on her and turned, to see Valentine hurrying after her. ‘Oh, Georgie,’ he said, as he caught her up. ‘You mentioned that you have an open gym session on Thursday evenings, was it, specifically for running training? Are you having one tonight, by chance, or is everything on hold?’
‘Yes, I’m going to have to. I can’t let my clients down.’
‘Would it be OK if I came along? I think you said 6.30 p.m.?’
‘That would be lovely.’
67
Thursday 17 January
At 3 p.m., in the colposcopy room Kath Clow had just vacated, Valentine began the examination of the first of three patients who would take him through to the end of this afternoon’s clinic. She was a sixteen-weeks-pregnant Polish woman of just thirty-two, Kasia Mackiewicz, presenting with cancer of the cervix.
As he peered through the scope, the magnified image was displayed on the monitor for the benefit of the nurses and his student, and so he kept his commentary to the very minimum, not wanting to worry the woman. But what he saw was not good news. The cancer was metastasizing. A whole cluster of polyps, like baby cauliflower, with heavy bleeding around them. The cervix was an unhealthy grey colour. He was almost certainly going to have to operate on her as soon as possible – which would mean terminating the pregnancy first.
He took tissue samples for the path lab and, at the end of the
examination, as she was getting up from the chair looking worried as hell, he tried to reassure her, deciding it would be better to break the news to her later in a one-on-one consultation, rather than here.
As she left the room, he placed the samples in a plastic vial, screwed on the cap, wrote his instructions to the pathologist on a label and stuck it on the side of the vial. Then he checked his list to read the notes on his next patient.
An hour later, shortly after 4 p.m., when he had completed the third colposcopy, finishing the clinic in the unit for this afternoon, he scooped up all four plastic pots, including Georgina Maclean’s, telling the nurses that he had to go and talk to the pathologist on a matter and that he’d drop the tissue samples in for them, to save them a journey.
Walking with Robert Resmes back out into the corridor, shoving the vials into his pocket, he closed the door behind him and turned to the student. ‘So, Robert. I hope you’ve found this past month to be instructive?’
Resmes stared at him.
Valentine could read so much in his eyes and in his body language. And he did not like anything that he saw. The young man was not going to keep his mouth shut, that was blindingly clear. And eventually someone would listen to him and believe him.
‘You want to have a chat, don’t you, Robert?’ he said, all friendly now.
‘I think we should.’
‘There are things you need to understand if you’re going to become a successful doctor. I recognize in you a real talent – you are way brighter than the average student I get. You’re smart and you are going to go far, and I can help you – I want to help you.’ He made a show of looking around, then lowered his voice. ‘Walls have ears. This building is not a good place to talk.’ He gave Resmes a conspiratorial wink. ‘Understand what I’m saying?’
Resmes stared back at him levelly, giving no indication whether he understood or not.
‘Do you know the Bel Royal Hotel, Robert?’
The Romanian shook his head.
