by Ken McClure
Both men laughed at the look of mock anguish on her face.
‘Any time,’ replied Sandy. ‘Just don’t stall the engine.’
She brought Esmeralda to a halt and listened to the idle speed for a moment. Satisfied that it was steady enough, she got out and joined Sandy.
‘Kate, this is Dr Dunbar.’
‘Hello,’ said Dunbar. ‘I’m not really a doctor here — more of a civil servant. I look after the government’s financial involvement in the hospital.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ said Kate politely.
‘Then you wouldn’t have been too keen on taking our Amanda on for free?’ suggested Sandy.
‘On the contrary, I’m delighted we have,’ said Dunbar.
‘Thanks for the push,’ said Sandy.
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Dunbar.
He watched as Kate and Sandy got into Esmeralda and drove off, waving to them as they disappeared out of the gate. He was glad he had okayed their daughter’s admission. He must have misjudged Medic Ecosse’s referral policy when he suspected that they were taking only straightforward ‘show-business’ cases to use for self-promotion.
There was one strange thing though. He’d just come from the press reception for the jaw-operation patient, and at it there had been no mention of the hospital taking on a free NHS transplant case. Why not? Why miss the opportunity to gain some good publicity?
The reception hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared. The patient was an ordinary girl from the local area, who hadn’t suspected for a moment that she was being exploited. She seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention, turning this way and that at the request of the photographers, posing with the staff and with the local councillor for the area, who had seized on the occasion to make political capital. Dunbar remembered him. He was the Labour councillor who had taken every opportunity to express his opposition to private medicine at the meeting between the Scottish Office and the hospital. Now here he was, smiling into the cameras with his arm round the star patient, doing his best to create the impression that he had been the prime mover in the whole affair.
None of this made Dunbar angry because, as Ingrid had said, the bottom line was sound enough and the bottom line was that the girl had been given a new and better life because of the operation. The hospital was going to get some positive publicity that would do no one any harm and if a local politician grabbed the chance to promote his own interests, what the hell? That’s what politicians did. That was the way the world worked. Nature abhorred a missed opportunity in the world of self-interest.
That was why it was so surprising that there had been no mention of the Chapman girl. A transplant was a much bigger deal than the relatively minor jaw surgery they had just been celebrating. He’d ask Ingrid about it after the weekend. In the meantime, he was going to drive over to Bearsden to return Sheila Barnes’s journal.
He was almost halfway there when he started to have doubts. Was there any point in returning the journal to the house, when it seemed certain that neither Sheila nor her husband would ever return there? On the other hand, he would feel guilty about hanging on to it. It was far more than just a diary of events; it said so much about the woman herself. He decided that he’d return it to Sheila in person. He’d take it down to Helensburgh at the weekend and tell her how useful it had been.
As he headed back to town, he found himself thinking about Lisa Fairfax. He really should have told her about Sheila Barnes — who she was and what she’d claimed. But he was so used to telling people nothing more than they needed to know that he’d kept quiet. But the knowledge that someone else had made the same allegation as she had about Medic Ecosse would have been a comfort, and if anyone deserved to feel better Lisa did. She didn’t have much of a life with no job and being at the constant beck and call of a deranged mother. On impulse, he drove over to her flat and pushed the entryphone button.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Steven Dunbar. Can I come up?’
‘I suppose so,’ answered Lisa a little uncertainly.
The door lock was released and Dunbar climbed quickly to the third floor.
‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ said Lisa, ushering him inside.
Dunbar looked to right and left as he entered the hall.
‘She’s asleep,’ said Lisa.
‘I was passing,’ he lied. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you the other day that I think I should have. Something about Sheila Barnes.’
‘Sheila Barnes?’ repeated Lisa. ‘She’s the nursing sister you asked me about. You wondered if I knew her.’
‘That’s right. She left well before you started at Medic Ecosse, but what I didn’t tell you was that she had a very similar experience to yours. She said much the same thing about a patient who died in the transplant unit in her time.’
Lisa looked at him as if trying to decide whether or not she should be annoyed at not having heard this before. ‘You mean I wasn’t the only one?’
‘No, you weren’t,’ confessed Dunbar. ‘That’s really why I was sent up here to Scotland. There were two of you who maintained that patients had been given the wrong organ in transplant operations.’
‘Did they treat her like an idiot too?’
‘No one took her seriously either,’ agreed Dunbar. ‘Unfortunately, both she and her husband are suffering from cancer. She’s dying. I went to see her in the hospice she’s in, down in Helensburgh.’ He explained about the journal. ‘She wanted me to see the entries she made at the time of the incident.’
‘Did you learn much?’
‘They were very detailed. In the end I was struck by how similar her version of events was to yours.’
‘So you might even believe us?’
‘I’m finding it difficult not to.’
‘Good. Did you say Sheila’s husband had cancer too?’
‘He’s in the same hospice.’
‘How strange, and what rotten luck. I hope they’re able to comfort each other.’
Dunbar silently acknowledged a nice thought.
Lisa got up and turned down the heat on the electric fire. ‘Don’t you ever miss being a practising doctor?’ she asked.
‘Not a bit. I didn’t really like it, I had no feel for it, I gave it up. Simple as that.’
She smiled. ‘What a remarkably honest thing to do. I’ve known lots of doctors who have no feel for it but giving it up is the last thing on their minds. They’ll be hanging in there till it’s carriage-clock time with a vote of thanks from the poor sods who managed to survive their ministrations.’
‘It’s hard to escape once you’ve started,’ said Dunbar.
‘Maybe,’ agreed Lisa. ‘Would you like a drink?’
He nodded. ‘I would. It’s been a long day.’
Lisa poured them both gin and tonic, handed one to Dunbar, then sat down again.
‘Why did you really come here?’ she asked with sudden directness.
The question took him aback. ‘To tell you about Sheila Barnes. I thought you had a right to know.’
‘But I don’t have a right,’ said Lisa. ‘You were under no obligation at all to tell me, so why did you?’
‘I thought you should know anyway,’ said Dunbar. It sounded weak, even to him.
‘Was it pity? Pity for my situation?’
‘I…’
‘I don’t like people visiting me out of pity. I don’t need it.’
‘It had absolutely nothing to do with pity, I promise,’ he said quietly. ‘I simply enjoyed your company last time and since I know no one else up here, I looked for an excuse to come back.’
‘That’s better,’ she said after a slight pause to consider.
‘Lisa!’ came a cry from the bedroom. ‘Where’s my breakfast? I want my breakfast!’
‘Coming, Mum,’ replied Lisa without taking her eyes off Dunbar.
Dunbar automatically looked at his watch. It was 10 p.m. He got up and said, ‘It’s time I was going anyway. Would it b
e all right if I popped back again? Sometime soon?
She looked at him doubtfully for a few moments before saying, ‘Providing you don’t bring pity with you.’
‘I’ll bring gin,’ said Dunbar.
NINE
Dunbar watched Newsnight on the television in his room, then switched it off. The silence was broken by the sound of rain on the window, at first a gentle, irregular patter but then quickly becoming a harsh rattle that made him go over to the window to look out briefly before closing the blinds. He decided on an early night.
As he lay in bed, he looked back on the evening. He was glad to have re-established contact with Lisa. He liked her a lot, not least because of her obvious care and concern for other people. Like Sheila Barnes she was a born nurse. It wasn’t something you could instil in people through qualification and training. It had to be there at the start. He had particularly liked her hope that Sheila and her husband could give comfort to each other in their dying days.
It was an aspect of the situation he himself hadn’t considered, although there was something about it that had been niggling away at him. Lisa was right; it was strange that both Sheila and her husband had contracted cancer at the same time; the matron at The Beeches had also remarked on it. Neither of the Barneses had ever smoked, yet both had developed a particularly virulent form of lung cancer at almost exactly the same time. It was as if they had been simultaneously exposed to some sort of trigger mechanism, although in the leafy suburb of Bearsden that possibility seemed remote. The area did not exactly abound with chemical factories pumping out toxic fumes. They didn’t live next door to a nuclear power station, and he couldn’t imagine the rafters of Bearsden bungalows dripping with blue asbestos.
On the other hand… He remembered the nosey neighbour, Proudfoot, and the problem with Cyril Barnes’s camera… only there wasn’t a problem with Cyril’s camera. The repair company had reported nothing wrong with it, despite the fact that films kept coming out ruined as if they had been exposed to light… or maybe something else. Dunbar sat up in bed, now fully alert. Light wasn’t the only thing that could ruin photographic film. Exposure to radiation would damage it in exactly the same way… and prolonged exposure to radiation would almost certainly cause cancer in a human being… or two human beings if they were exposed to it together.
Was it possible? Was it conceivable that Sheila and her husband had been exposed to a radiation source in their own home? Questions queued up in his mind. What could it be? Where was it and how had it got there?
Dunbar tried convincing himself that such a possibility could not be real. Surely it was a flight of fancy on his part, an academic exercise, a tribute to his powers of imagination but too bizarre to be real… wasn’t it? He found he couldn’t stop thinking about it. The seed had planted itself in his mind and insisted on growing. Sleep was now out of the question. He had to know. He had to find out for himself. But how? He would need specialist equipment for this kind of investigation.
Although he could get practically anything he wanted in the way of specialist equipment and expert advice from Sci-Med, it would take a little time and he couldn’t wait. He had to know right now, even if it was just to eliminate the notion from his head. What he needed most was a radiation detector, a Geiger counter or something along those lines.
He looked at his watch. It was just after eleven thirty. Unless there was some kind of emergency at Medic Ecosse there was every likelihood that the Radiology Department would be empty and unmanned at this time of night. A radiographer would be on call but probably not on the premises. He could get hold of a radiation monitor there. He threw back the covers and swung his legs out of the bed.
Rather than sneak into Medic Ecosse unobserved, he decided he would drive quite openly into the car park and tell Reception he had come back to check some figures for a report he was working on. He didn’t think that would arouse too much suspicion and might even chalk up some brownie points for the civil service. A stay of about fifteen minutes would seem about right. That should give him enough time to get down the back stairs and along the corridor to Radiology. His cover story would account for his carrying a briefcase — it should be big enough to hold the monitor and some protective gear. What if the department was locked for the night? He couldn’t risk a break-in, he decided. If it was locked he’d abort the plan and make his request through Sci-Med in the morning.
As he walked from the car park up to the main door of the hospital he wondered if there was any chance that there’d be no one at the Reception desk. Of course not: the desk was run like everything else in Medic Ecosse, very well. Not only was there a smiling receptionist on duty, but there were two uniformed security men in the hall, silver-haired but fit-looking and alert. Despite the fact that the receptionist recognized Dunbar and greeted him by name, one of the guards still asked to see his ID.
‘I won’t be long. I just came back to check on some figures,’ said Dunbar to the receptionist.
‘And I thought you people drank tea all the time,’ she smiled.
‘A cruel myth,’ said Dunbar with a backward glance and a half-smile as he headed for the double doors leading to the main corridor.
He climbed the stairs to his office and became aware that his palms were sweating. It was some time since he’d done anything like this and he was nervous. He switched on the light in his office and put his briefcase on the desk. His heart was thumping. Did he really want to do this? Maybe he’d lost his nerve. There was, however, no doubt in his mind that he still had a yen for an occasional walk on the wild side, if only to ask questions of himself.
With his pulse rate still rising, he opened his office door and looked out into the corridor. It was deserted. He stepped out and went quickly and quietly along it until he reached the head of the back stairs. Another pause to listen for any signs of activity but there was still nothing. Medic Ecosse was sleeping.
He was halfway down the stairs when suddenly he heard voices; they were getting louder. His first fear was that whoever it was might turn into the stairwell and find him there. He was debating whether to run back upstairs, when the sound of trolley wheels registered. They couldn’t bring a trolley up the stairs. Reassured, he continued down to the bottom landing and shrank into the shadows in a corner from where he could see through the round glass window in the door.
The trolley party comprised four people. All wore blue cotton surgical garb with masks obscuring their lower faces. Dunbar could tell only that two were male and two female. Lying on the trolley was a young girl of five or six. Her eyes were closed and a drip-feed into her arm was being held up by one of the nurses as they waited for a lift at the door opposite the stairwell. The child seemed peacefully asleep but, in view of the lateness of the hour and the surgical dress, he supposed it more likely that she had been prepped for surgery. ‘Good luck,’ he whispered as the lift arrived and the doors slid open to spill light on to her pale little face. The doors closed. Dunbar watched until the indicator told him the party had stopped on the second floor, then edged out into the corridor and went quickly on down to Radiology.
The wide blue doors, which had earlier been propped open to permit the easy passage of trolleys, were closed, and Dunbar prepared himself for the worst. It would be in keeping with everything else about Medic Ecosse if the department had been responsibly and securely locked for the night. He looked to both sides before trying the handle; it moved all the way down. He pushed gently and the door opened. Swallowing hard, he slipped inside and closed it behind him.
He was in complete darkness with only the sound of his own breathing for company. He remembered that there were no outside windows in Radiology, so switching on the lights would not be a give-away. The light would show around the edges of the door, of course, but there was little reason for anyone to come here at this time of night. It was a chance he would have to take. He ran the palm of his hand up the wall, found the panel and clicked on all four switches.
For some reason t
he room’s equipment looked threatening. The X-ray guns were waiting for him to make a move before turning on him. The immobilizing straps on the scanner bed were only pretending to hang lifeless. They were snakes, ready to ensnare him should he stray too close, waiting to secure his limbs and forehead like steel bands before feeding his body into the dark maw of the scanner, a black hole leading to…
Get a grip! thought Dunbar, raising his eyes to the ceiling. He really was out of practice at this sort of thing. He tried to remember where he had seen the radiation monitoring equipment. In a cupboard somewhere — Svensen had brought it out to demonstrate his new toy. But in which room? He walked around slowly, hoping for inspiration, and found it when he looked into Svensen’s office. He remembered the radiologist opening the cupboard to the left of his desk and taking out a monitor.
Dunbar opened the cupboard and found three monitors. Two were mini-monitors for the routine checking of surfaces. The third was more sophisticated, with accurate metering capacity for measuring dosage. One of the mini-monitors would suit his purpose admirably. It comprised a rectangular metal box about eight inches by four with what looked like a microphone clipped to its top surface; this was the probe. It was attached to the main unit by about three feet of spring-coiled cable. There was a single control knob on the side to alter sensitivity settings and to provide a battery check. Dunbar turned it to this position and the needle swung upwards, well past the red line on the meter; the battery was in good condition. He unclipped the probe and moved it around. Random intermittent clicks from normal background radiation indicated that the monitor was in working order.
He turned his attention to the idea of protective clothing. If a small thing like a monitor was missing, people would assume someone else was using it or that it had been left in another room. It would be a while before anyone realized it wasn’t in the department. The same applied to protective gloves. He would take just one. He debated taking one of the heavy aprons worn by the radiographers, but decided it was too bulky and would be too easily missed by the staff. The last thing he wanted was for them to come in in the morning and see that there’d been a break-in. He’d make do with the monitor and the glove.
