I Follow You

by Peter James

  ‘How did that manifest in your marriage – if I can ask – the control?’ The conversation was feeling easier now.

  ‘Well, we were fine at first: he was charming and great fun to be with, we were on a real high. Then his behaviour started getting more and more frightening – he was a complete narcissist. He’d fly off in rages. I stayed with him for a while, hoping he’d stop, that he’d change. But then I knew I just had to leave – I had a brief affair with a work colleague, which didn’t last long. Marcus found out and I was actually scared that if I stayed, something very bad would happen.’ She hesitated, then went on again. ‘I’d been pregnant in the very early days and lost the baby, and now I look back I’m pretty sure he did something without telling me, because he wasn’t ready to start a family. He had a very clear idea of when he wanted children in his life, and it wasn’t then.’

  ‘You mean he caused you to lose the baby without you being aware what he was doing?’

  ‘Well, who knows.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be, I now have two very healthy, lovely children, and I’m happily in a relationship.’

  ‘In what way was he a control freak?’

  ‘He’s completely obsessed by time.’

  Georgie thought back again to the evening of the dinner party, how he’d continually checked his watch. ‘I got the impression he had some issue about it.’

  ‘That would be an understatement! He had a very weird upbringing; his mother was a raving alcoholic and he practically cared for her towards the end. She’d been a failed actress, then she made a living giving piano lessons and had an obsession with turning him into a concert pianist. He told me she’d whack him on the knuckles if he missed a note, and scream “Timing, timing, timing!” I mean, the woman was nuts, and his dad was no better. It left him really fucked up.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t know him at all well, but I’ve sensed there’s something odd about him.’

  ‘You can say that for sure. He’s also obsessively tidy. He couldn’t bear to have a thing out of place in the house. He’d organize my clothes in colour order so I could never find anything, and my cookbooks in order of date of publication – I mean, how weird is that?’

  Georgie paused. ‘Can I ask you, did he ever tuck the laces into your shoes?’

  ‘Oh God, all the time. It was so infuriating!’

  Georgie fell silent for a moment. Her skin crawled. Thinking back two days ago. Thursday, when she’d woken after taking the sleeping pill that Valentine had given her. Everything in her room had been tidied away, immaculately. The laces of her three pairs of trainers were all folded and tucked neatly inside the shoes.

  Had Valentine come into the flat whilst she was unconscious and done this? But why on earth would he? That just did not make sense.

  But nor did it make any sense that she had done it herself.

  After she had thanked the woman and suggested they might meet when she was next over in England, she ended the call and sat still for a long while, engulfed in turmoil.

  Then she called Lucy.

  80

  Saturday 19 January

  The hospital was buzzing with rumours about Resmes. En route to her office, several staff members stopped Kath Clow to ask if she had heard the terrible news. Everyone was shocked. The young, always smiling medical student had been popular.

  Then Kath bumped into Marcus Valentine’s registrar, Barnaby Cardigan. He told her, in a conspiratorial whisper, it might have been a Romanian mafia hit – perhaps, he postulated, Resmes had been involved with a drug cartel’s attempts to gain a foothold in Jersey?

  Kath pooh-poohed that instantly and angrily. How dare he bad-mouth Resmes just because they hadn’t seen eye-to-eye, she demanded? Then she asked him if Marcus was in yet. He told her he hadn’t seen him but was expecting him shortly. ‘Shall I get him to call you, Kath?’

  ‘Please.’

  Reaching the sanctuary of her office, she sat at her desk, feeling a sense of both shock and sadness. It didn’t feel real and yet it was, horribly, sadly real. Robert Resmes. Dead. In a hotel deep freezer.

  Enemies?

  Who could the diligent student have upset so much, in his brief time here in Jersey, that they would kill him? Cardigan and he clearly hadn’t got on, but it couldn’t have got that bad, surely? She knew little about Romania, other than its reputation for human and organ trafficking. No doubt there were major drug dealers, too. Was it possible Barnaby could be right? Might Resmes have been a sleeper, however these things worked? Gone and crossed the wrong people? Attempting to muscle in on someone else’s patch here?

  No, absolutely not, none of this fitted with how sincere Resmes appeared – to her at least – to have been. There had to be another explanation, and perhaps a far simpler and less dramatic one, and she didn’t want to go down the unfounded stereotype route.

  She remembered from her own time as a student just how tough it was being a young medic. The endlessly long days and nights, your shifts getting extended then extended again until you’d been on your feet for eighteen hours straight and you were like a zombie, hardly knowing what you were doing even though the lives of some of your patients were dependent on you getting their meds right. Oftentimes you didn’t even know or care whether it was day or night. You were terrified of making a mistake. Terrified of failure. Two of the students who had started in the same year as herself had cracked and taken their own lives.

  Had Robert?

  Surely not – and besides, the pressure here in this hospital was a lot less than in the health service on the mainland. And would a student doctor really have put himself through the slow horror of freezing to death, when he would have known plenty of ways to do it quicker and more effectively? And had access to the drugs to do it.

  She switched her focus, with some reluctance, to the more pressing issue of Georgie Maclean, who was booked in for an MRI scan in just two hours’ time.

  The more she thought about it, the more concerned she was by the pathologist’s report. How could she have missed Georgie’s advanced cancer? How? It just wasn’t possible for her to have made a mistake of this magnitude.

  She logged on and pulled up the colposcopy images, and sat, staring at each of them in turn. There was no sign of cancer and certainly not the aggressive stage-2 the pathology report stated.

  She just had to hope, for Georgie’s sake, that the MRI scan might give a different result.

  But if not?

  She stared again at the images, one by one. Something was niggling at her mind and she had to know for sure, one way or the other, before putting Georgie through the scan. There was no evidence that an MRI was harmful to a foetus, but all the same, Kath hated for any patient to take an unnecessary risk, however small it was.

  She left her office and walked briskly along the corridor and down the stairs to the ground floor, then along to the Radiology department. The ever-helpful Diana was on reception there, which she was glad about, although a bit surprised she was working at the weekend.

  ‘Hi, Kath!’ Diana greeted her.

  ‘Is Andy B-C here today, by chance?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he’s off until Monday.’

  ‘Bugger,’ Kath said. Andy Borthwick-Clarke was the senior radiologist. ‘Who’s on?’

  ‘Ana Gomes. Do you want to talk to her?’

  The young registrar radiologist was a trainee, having completed two years in a British teaching hospital, and had been with the unit for just a few months. Although still a trainee, the team of consultant radiologists at this hospital considered her competent enough to analyse and report on scans. On the past occasions when she had done scans for Kath, the obstetrician had been impressed with the young woman’s diligence.

  ‘I’d like a quick word.’

  ‘Go ahead, her next patient’s not due for ten minutes.’

  Kath thanked her and walked through into the department. A lot of money had been spent on the Radiology department recently a
nd it had a calm, hi-tech feel, like a NASA sub-station, Kath always thought when she came here. There was a bank of monitors above a worktop that covered over half of the room, and an assortment of electronic apparatus.

  On the far wall was a large window looking onto the doughnut-shaped MRI scanner itself. The room was manned by a radiographer and the assistant. The six consultant radiologists and the recently appointed junior registrar, Ana Gomes, shared a small network of offices to the side.

  Ana, curvy, dark-haired, around five foot, with heavy but flawless make-up, was seated in the smallest of the offices, tapping a keypad and staring intently at the screen. She looked up as Kath entered. She always appeared nervous. ‘Oh, hello, Dr Clow.’

  ‘Hi, Ana, how are you?’

  ‘Yes, OK, thank you. We are getting a puppy today – this evening my husband and I are picking it up.’

  ‘Really? What kind?’

  ‘A Jack Russell. We’re calling him Oliver.’

  ‘Nice dogs! Be careful at the sand dunes – one went missing there last year for several days – dug himself down into a rabbit warren and couldn’t get out.’

  The registrar gave a worried frown. ‘That happened?’

  ‘Check it out in the JEP online.’

  ‘I will, thank you.’ She hesitated. ‘Is there something I can do for you?’

  ‘Actually, yes – you’re doing an MRI scan on a patient of mine at midday.’

  ‘Midday?’ Gomes glanced at her screen and tapped her keypad. ‘Georgina Maclean?’

  ‘Yes. I’m very concerned about this lady. I’m not officially working today so I’m going to be leaving soon. Would you call me as soon as you’ve done the scan? I need to know the results. She’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Kath thanked her, gave her the number then returned, quickly, to her office. She sat down at her desk, found Nigel Kirkham’s private mobile number in her Contacts and dialled it.

  When he answered, she said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you at the weekend.’

  ‘Not a problem, Kath, it’s good to be interrupted. I’m in Wiltshire, trying to assemble a flat-pack hen coop for my son and his betrothed.’

  The image made her smile. ‘You’re a handyman? I didn’t know!’

  ‘A wedding present for his bride – he wants it to be a surprise for her. He wants them to start their married life off being more self-sufficient. I gave my bride a diamond necklace, he’s given his hens! So, what can I do for you?’

  ‘When are they getting married?’

  ‘In about two hours’ time!’

  ‘Right, I won’t keep you. A quick one – you carried out a biopsy on tissue I sent you on Thursday afternoon, following my colposcopy examination of a patient, Georgina Maclean, and you rang me yesterday, concerned about the histology results.’

  ‘Yes, not good at all, I’m afraid.’

  Trying to be as tactful as possible, Kath asked, ‘Is there any possibility, any at all, that a mistake could have occurred, Nigel – that it was the biopsy of a different patient?’

  She sensed an immediate change of tone in his voice, to defensive. ‘Absolutely none, Kath. To be honest, I’m a little bit surprised you’re even asking. We’ve worked together a long time, surely you know me better?’ Then he said, ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’ve just got a sodding splinter! Look, no chance at all, Kath. Six Sigma. That’s the discipline I’ve strived to achieve in here and which we adhere to.’

  ‘Six Sigma? What’s that?’

  ‘In a nutshell, it’s a standard of quality control so tight that any company who achieves that standard wouldn’t need a returns or complaints department. Not wanting to sound arrogant, Kath, but we simply don’t make mistakes. We’ve eliminated any possibility of carry-over in our histology pathology.’

  ‘Carry-over’ was a problem that occasionally occurred in path labs, when traces of previous tissue remained after the equipment wasn’t sterilized thoroughly enough.

  She realized she may have offended him with the question. ‘Listen, Nigel, I’m not trying to question your procedures but I’m trying to get my head around the results, which just don’t chime with my findings. I’m not questioning your methodology. I’m having my patient do an MRI scan today, which will clarify things more. I’m just wondering if there could have been a mistake on the labelling, somehow. Who actually brought the jar containing the tissue sample to you?’

  ‘Marcus Valentine,’ he said. ‘Anything else, Kath? I’ve got to go and get my glad rags on.’

  ‘Marcus?’

  ‘Yes, he brought a whole bunch of tissue scrapings down from Colposcopy.’

  ‘Thanks, Nigel. Enjoy the wedding.’

  He ended the call.

  It wasn’t normal for a consultant in the colposcopy unit to take samples down to the pathology labs, although Kath had done it herself in the past, just to help out.

  Her phone rang. Answering, she heard Valentine’s voice. ‘Hello, Kath, you were looking for me?’

  ‘Yes, good, thanks for coming back to me, Marcus,’ she said. ‘Just a quick thing – you were doing some colposcopies on Thursday afternoon, weren’t you?’

  ‘Thursday?’ He was silent for an instant. ‘Yes, yes of course, Thursday afternoon. We bumped into each other in the corridor.’

  ‘Yes. I did a couple before you – and I understand you kindly took all the afternoon tissue samples down to Nigel Kirkham for biopsy.’

  ‘On Thursday?’ He sounded like he was trying to recollect. ‘Ah yes, of course, I had to go down there anyway, so I took them.’

  ‘You remember by any chance seeing the labels on all the vials?’

  ‘The labels?’

  ‘There weren’t any of the vials where the labels had come off, I don’t suppose?’

  ‘Not that I noticed, no.’ There was a pause. ‘No, absolutely not. Why, is there a – a problem?’ he fished.

  ‘Yes, I have something of an anomaly. What I saw in my colposcopy examination of Georgie Maclean just doesn’t tally with the biopsy report from Nigel Kirkham.’

  ‘But surely this is the reason we have biopsies done – to check something we can’t necessarily see with our naked eye? They tell us what’s really going on.’

  ‘Normally, I’d agree with you. But I don’t know, it’s just not making any sense to me. I suppose I’ll know for sure after the scan.’

  ‘I really hope she’s OK, she’s got enough on her plate, poor thing,’ he said.

  ‘I know. Are you around over the weekend, in case I want to discuss the scan result with you – as a friend?’

  ‘I’ll be at home most of the weekend, but if you need me, I’d be more than happy to come in and go through the result with you, Kath. Just call me any time, as soon as you’ve got it – no problem at all, that’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘I might do that,’ she said. ‘I’d appreciate your opinion.’

  ‘Of course. And with all her worries about Roger, we really do owe it to her to be extra diligent.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘By the way, what time is the scan booked for?’

  ‘Midday,’ she said. ‘I’ve told them it’s urgent and they’ve fitted it in.’

  ‘You’ve done exactly the right thing,’ he purred.

  81

  Saturday 19 January

  Georgie left the Patriotic Street car park shortly after 11 a.m. and crossed to the other side of the road, into the bright winter sunshine. But she barely noticed it as she walked quickly along towards the hospital entrance. She felt only a deep darkness inside her, which darkened further as she saw the two police cars parked outside.

  She hurried up the ramp and went in through the automatic door. A uniformed police officer stood just inside and smiled at her politely.

  ‘May I ask your business here, madam?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m coming to visit my fiancé who’s in Intensive Care and then I’m having an MRI scan
.’

  ‘OK, thank you.’

  As Georgie climbed the stairs, her phone pinged with a text. It was from her friend, Lucy, confirming their quick lunch at 1.30. She confirmed back, looking forward to seeing her and having some company. She walked on to the Relatives’ Room and was surprised to see a man and woman seated in there. She smiled and sat down some distance from them.

  Before any of them spoke, the door opened and Kiera Dale looked in. ‘Ah, great, Georgie, you’re here. Follow me.’

  She left the room and as they reached the ICU entrance, she took a squirt from the hand sanitizer and rubbed her hands together. ‘How is Roger this morning?’ she asked, anxiously, seeing nothing in the senior nurse’s face to give her any comfort.

  ‘He’s had a stable night. But still no sign of him responding to the antibiotics. The doctors are changing his meds to put him on stronger ones, and we’ll see if that makes any improvement.’ She gave her a smile. ‘Hopefully, it will.’

  Georgie sat with Roger for the next forty minutes, trying to chat, trying to sound cheerful, telling him about a text she’d had from her cousin, Chloe, that she and her husband sent all their love and that they were expecting their second child. She said nothing about the horror of last night. Occasionally, Roger opened his eyes and looked at her for some seconds before closing them again. Each time, hope rose inside her. At least he seemed to be showing he was aware of her, which was an improvement on yesterday, wasn’t it?

  At 11.45, trying to make it sound as positive as she could, she said, ‘Darling, I’ve just got to pop down to Radiology. Kath wants me to have an MRI scan, to make sure all is well with me and the Bump. Then I’m having a bite of lunch with Lucy. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  She didn’t add that she had to go to the police station after lunch to give a statement.

  Kissing him on the forehead, she said, ‘I love you so much, be strong,’ then turned away, a giant lump in her throat, and walked, tearfully, out of the ward and towards the stairs.

  At the bottom she followed the signs, taking her down a long incline. Her nerves were jangling. What were they going to find in the scan? And she was scared of the machine. She’d been in an MRI scanner before, a few years ago, and remembered vividly the feeling of claustrophobia and the din of the machine.