1 First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  Also by Claire Rayner

  SECOND OPINION

  THE MEDDLERS

  A TIME TO HEAL

  MADDIE

  CLINICAL JUDGEMENTS

  POSTSCRIPTS

  DANGEROUS THINGS

  Claire Rayner

  FIRST BLOOD

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-024-0

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

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  M P Publishing Limited.

  First published 1993

  Copyright © Claire Rayner 1993, 2010

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book.

  e-ISBN 978-1-84982-024-0

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  For Kim Ismay,

  the sixth Rayner,

  with love

  Thanks for advice and information about death, detection and motor cars are due to Dr Trevor Betteridge, Pathologist, Yeovil District Hospital; Detective Chief Inspector Jackie Malton, Metropolitan Police; Dr Rufus Crompton, Pathologist, St George’s Hospital, Tooting; Dr Hilary Howells, Anaesthetist; and are gratefully tendered by the author.

  1

  ‘Good God!’ Sheila Keen said and stared at him in horror. ‘Are you telling me he’s a woman?’

  ‘You got it.’ The mortuary porter was enjoying himself hugely. ‘Not a he. A she, that’s what he is. Dr George Barnabas. Female of the species. You needn’t have bothered with the coffee tray, need you? Not unless you’ve gone funny in your old age and going in for a bit of let’s be friends!’ And he laughed and went away to make coffee for himself, deeply pleased to have got his own back on the old cow for the way she’d complained about him to the former department head, just because he’d been a bit off-hand with a couple of relatives who hadn’t given a damn about the stiff anyway. It was just as well old Dr Royle had been finishing his last week at the time or he’d have made things hot for him, Danny, and Danny liked things quiet and peaceful around the place. Mortuaries, in his estimation, ought to be quiet and peaceful places, especially mortuaries which he was in charge of. Except when he could make Madam Sheila Keen mad. Then it was worth putting up with a bit of a row just for the pleasure of watching her simmer. She might be the senior technician in the lab but so what? He was the boss of the mortuary which was the most important place in the whole of the path. department.

  Left alone in the consultant’s small office, which was, unusually, shiningly tidy and scented with fresh coffee, Sheila was indeed simmering. How could they have lied to her so over in the Dean’s office when she’d gone to hang around the secretaries and ask questions about Dr Royle’s successor? They’d always been a catty pair, but how could they have been so hateful as to let her get it so wrong? How could they have expected her to think that a person called George was anything but a man – an unmarried one at that, or he wouldn’t be moving into the residency the way he had. She had, dammit all. Sheila sniffed hard, picked up the coffee tray and took it out to the main laboratory. To hell with the secretaries and to hell with the new consultant. She was certainly not going to let any female think that she, Sheila Keen, was there to make coffee for her, head of the department though she might be. Jerry could have the coffee – he at least was a real man even though he was one grade lower than Sheila herself, and therefore usually to be regarded with some contempt. Though not all the time …

  ‘Did you know that the new man was a woman?’ she demanded as she slapped the coffee tray down beside Jerry, who was curled up over his bench with his head down over a set of slides. ‘Named George and a woman. I ask you!’

  ‘Ah!’ Jerry said sympathetically, not lifting his head from his microscope; he had to keep it very carefully focused. It was an antique model, and he always insisted on using it, however much the others accused him of affectation. ‘Disappointed, are you, love? Well, never mind. Plenty of fish in the sea … Have you got the follow-on set to this lot? Umm – double A nine two seven three?’

  ‘Look for it for yourself,’ Sheila snapped. ‘I’m not here to wait on you, you know. Do your own running around.’ And she snatched up the coffee tray again and bore it off to her own corner to sit there and drink it grimly, determined no one should benefit from her efforts to be nice but she herself.

  Jerry sighed, abandoned his microscope and went to find his set of slides. On the way back he went and stood behind Sheila, and tickled the back of her neck surreptitiously. ‘Don’t get gloomy, sweetheart. She may turn out to be quite a decent type. You never know your luck. And it’s not as though old Royle was such a gift, is it? A right old misery, he was. I’m glad to see the back of him, personally.’

  Sheila shook her head irritably, but not so much that Jerry would be distracted from his attentions to her neck. ‘Oh, you don’t understand. Not at all. She’ll try to push me around and give me orders –’

  ‘She wouldn’t dare,’ Jerry said. ‘I’ll see to it that she doesn’t.’

  Now Sheila did turn to look at him thoughtfully, but he backed off and laughed.

  ‘No, you don’t, sweetheart. Don’t go getting ideas again. I’m not for you. I’ve told you, what we are is best friends. Let’s not spoil it with anything else. It didn’t work last time you tried it on with me, and it won’t now. Don’t let’s ruin a beautiful relationship with sordid old sex.’

  ‘I don’t know why I put up with you,’ she snapped. She got up and, sweeping up her coffee tray, went away to the small kitchen at the back of the lab, leaving Jerry to amble back to his own place. The other two technicians in the small lab, both pretending to be immersed in their own work, made commiserating faces at him as he passed their stools. Quiet fell again, broken only by the faint hiss of the centrifuges and the rattle of the agitator with the samples from the cardiac clinic.

  After a while Jerry stretched and yawned. ‘Does anyone else have any gossip about the new incumbent?’ he asked the air, and Peter, the older of the junior technicians, his head still down over his own work, only grunted. But Jane was ready to stretch her back too and stop for a while.

  ‘Not a word,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It wasn’t till I heard Sheila tell you that I knew it was a woman. Nice, that. Make an agreeable change. At least Sheila won’t moon after her.’

  ‘Poor Sheila,’ Jerry said absently. ‘We’ll have to find her a bloke somewhere. It’s all getting a bit too obvious.’

  ‘If she can’t have you – and Heaven knows why she should fancy you – she wants a senior consultant. Nothing less would do for her,’ Peter said, sniffing loudly, and Jane winked at Jerry.

  ‘You’d have had a tiger by the tail if you’d managed to get anywhere with her when you tried,’ she said. ‘You’re much better off with your nice little physio.’

  ‘Hmmph,’ said Peter, and went on working.

  ‘Pity, really. She’s not a bad old soul, Sheila. Just so damned anxious,’ Jerry said.

  ‘She’ll be really sick over this new one.’ Jane giggled. ‘She had it all worked out, I’ll bet you. Cook him nice little late dinners, offer to do his notes for him – poor bugger wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

  ‘Well, it’ll have to be me who cooks the
new one nice little late dinners and does her notes for her, won’t it?’ Jerry said and Peter sniffed more lusciously than ever.

  ‘So what else is new?’ he jeered. ‘If it isn’t Sheila leching after every new pair of trousers that walks in here, it’s you slavering over every skirt. The pair of you make me sick.’

  ‘I dare say it’s those salmonella samples,’ Jerry said kindly. ‘You’ve probably been licking your fingers again. Oh, shit. That sounds like the Professor. Heads down, children.’

  They were working with great absorption when the door opened and the boom of Professor Dieter’s voice, which had alerted Jerry, came clearly over to them. None of them looked up as he came in.

  ‘And this, of course, is the main lab, though I think you saw it when you came for your Board …’

  ‘Mmm, yes,’ his companion said and stood looking around. Jerry, at the sound of her voice, lifted his chin a little and, grateful yet again for his old microscope, twisted its mirror to give himself a rear view, diminutive and distorted, but still a view. And took stock.

  She seemed to be tall. That was a plus. A man as lanky as Jerry got tired of jokes about girlfriends having to be put up to it. This one could look him in the eye, yet he’d have no trouble seeing down her cleavage. He squinted to see how she measured up in that department, and was frustrated, because she was wearing a heavy bunched topcoat and had her hands in her pockets. A very disguising garment, a topcoat, he thought, I’ll get a better view when she gets into her lab whites; and looked at the rest of her as she went on staring round.

  Curly and dark. Nice, that. A little untidy to look at, but then it was blowing a gale outside; the old tiles on the roof had been rattling all morning. He looked at her face then, and was just in time to see her pull her hands out of her pockets and put on a pair of glasses; big round glasses with rather dark rims and he shivered happily. Women in glasses were always so sexy, in his experience.

  Professor Dieter was still booming on, something about the rather dilapidated state of the labs and how hard it was in these times of cutbacks to get all the work done they’d like and how if they got their Trust status in the next round it might be possible to manage a little money to improve the working conditions, as well as the staffing levels, but meanwhile he hoped she’d cope as her predecessor had so well. Jerry went on studying her through his mirror, and then went a sudden scarlet. She had spotted him and was looking coolly back at his reflection with her brows raised. He reached up and turned the mirror back into position and began to fuss with his slides.

  Professor Dieter was introducing her now. Sheila had come out of the kitchen and Jerry looked at her out of the corner of his eye and was amused; she had powdered her nose and applied fresh lipstick and her frail blonde prettiness was greatly enhanced by the way she’d fluffed up her soft hair. The newcomer might be a woman but there was no way Sheila Keen was going to let herself down by not looking her absolute best. Not bad for an old ’un, Jerry thought pityingly, aware as always of the fact that he, at thirty-four, which was old enough, God knew, was still five years Sheila’s junior. She could have been quite toothsome if only she weren’t so intense.

  ‘How do you do?’ Sheila said with gracious charm as Professor Dieter made the introduction. ‘Ah, Dr Barnabas, yes.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Dr Barnabas and put out her hand, and Jerry thought, American? She’s a bloody American! And this time turned round to look.

  ‘And this,’ said Professor Dieter, ‘is – er – is …’ And he looked blankly at Jerry, for all the world, Jerry thought with irritation, as though he were a stray puppy who’d wandered in to pee on the floor.

  He shifted his gaze from the Professor’s rather pale face and smiled at Dr Barnabas. ‘How do you do, Dr Barnabas. I’m Jerry Swann. Technician. Mostly blood, some histology, general purpose really.’ He shot a glance at Sheila who was hovering in the background. ‘Deputy,’ he said smoothly, ‘to Miss Keen. I’m in charge when she’s not here.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Dr Barnabas again, and surveyed him with, it seemed to Jerry (who found it was a hopeful sign), some amusement. Her eyes, he saw, were a strong dark brown and her face was – well, interesting. Not pretty, but interesting. Big eyes, big mouth, big nose. About thirty-five, he thought. Not bad for a consultant’s post. It’ll be her first. ‘Good to meet you.’

  ‘Good to meet you,’ Jerry said with some fervour as Professor Dieter took her off to meet the two juniors and also Danny Roscoe, who had emerged from his fastness in the mortuary ostensibly to deliver a message to Sheila but actually to hover at the door with a deference that deceived none of the laboratory staff who knew him. His personal radar was very effective; he always knew where and when to put in an appearance and, what was more to the point, when to be invisible. Now was a good time to be seen, and he smirked as Professor Dieter introduced him and Sheila looked furious. Pushy was the word she most often used about Danny who, in her estimation, thought far too highly of himself.

  Professor Dieter took Dr Barnabas away to introduce her to the rest of the staff in the other laboratories, Sheila Keen leading the way as was her right as senior technician. Jane and Jerry immediately started to compare notes as Peter, with obvious scorn, went back to work and pointedly refused to join in. Which made both the others even more outrageous.

  ‘What do you think, Jerry? Is she to be filed under “Beddable” or “Forget All About It”?’

  Jerry was judicious. ‘Hard to be sure. Wears glasses, which is always such a turn-on for the discriminating man.’

  Jane wrinkled her nose in disagreement. ‘But she doesn’t take much care about how she looks. No make-up to speak of. But she’s available, that’s the best bit, surely? She’s got to be unattached. She moved into the residents’ quarters, so Sheila said, didn’t she? That’s why she got so excited when she thought George Barnabas was a fella.’

  Jerry shook his head. ‘I doubt that means all that much. Probably worked somewhere right outside London before, and hasn’t got a place here yet.’

  ‘No.’ Jane was very definite. ‘If she had a chap, whether a husband or a posselque, they’d have found somewhere to be together, a hotel even, if they had to. She certainly wouldn’t have settled down all virginal in that dump over the way.’

  ‘Posselque?’ Jerry was mildly diverted.

  ‘Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters,’ Jane recited. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I do now. So if there’s no posselque that means she could be a sinbad.’

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ Jane said, after a moment.

  ‘Single Income, No Boyfriend, Absolutely Desperate. I could do all right if she is. Make-up or no make-up, she does wear glasses, after all –’

  ‘Will you two shut up?’ Peter roared, no longer able to maintain his cool disdain. ‘You sound like a pair of rutting rabbits. For God’s sake!’

  ‘Do rabbits rut? I thought that was stags,’ Jerry said, as Jane giggled.

  ‘Everything ruts,’ she said. ‘Even old Peter. Except for poor old Sheila …’

  ‘And I hope Dr Barnabas,’ Peter snapped. ’So that we can get some peace around here. It’d make a nice change, that. Very nice indeed.

  George Barnabas watched the Professor stride away across the courtyard back to the main hospital buildings. Not until she was sure he wouldn’t turn round and come back again did she relax. He’d been fussing round her ever since she’d got here this morning and she’d become more and more irritated. It was right and proper of course that the Dean should be interested in a new consultant but he didn’t have to make quite such a drama. She felt like a new over-rich child at a fancy school being hauled around by a snobbish headmistress, and that boded ill for the future. The main reason she’d applied for this post, even though it was in such a dump of a hospital, far from the well-kept splendours of the elegant Scottish place she’d come from, was to be free of the burden of constant supervision and watchfulness.

  Being a registrar had been inte
resting, of course, and she’d had some excellent experience, both on the hospital path. side and the forensic, but never the real freedom she’d hankered after. The job at Shadwell’s Royal Eastern Hospital (what was it they called it? Old East?) had seemed to her to promise that: the advertisement in the BMJ had stressed the autonomy of the appointment, the importance of being able to organize the combination of hospital and forensic work and to work with minimal support, because the post, the advert had admitted smoothly, was for a single-handed consultant; and so she had applied. She’d never thought she’d get it, of course. At just thirty-five, and with only two registrar jobs behind her, she had to be well down the list for a consultant post, she’d told herself when she’d come up to London for the interview. But clearly no one better had fancied working in such a dismal part of the world. And that was why she was in.

  And I wish, oh I wish I’d never heard of goddamn Shadwell! she thought now as she pulled off her heavy topcoat and threw it at the hook on the back of the office door. I knew it’d be a poor neighbourhood, but Jesus, not this poor! She sat at the desk and thought broodingly of the walk she’d taken last night after she’d dumped her bags in the gloomy room they’d assigned her in the residents’ quarters. It had been raining, but that had never bothered her in Inverness; there the rain had been soft and agreeable, scented even. Here it was cold and harsh and reeked of diesel and the river and human dirt; and she had plodded through the dull streets, past the anonymous blocks of flats and the littered yards and tried hard not to think about Ian. Just as she was trying not to think about him now.

  But she had to give up because it was impossible to keep him out of her mind, and she sat now glowering at the closed door, thinking about Ian very hard indeed. How could the man be such a bastard? How could she have been so mad over him for the best part of a year and not know he was a bastard? That was the thing that hurt almost the most. She’d thought he was wonderful: not just a great lover and fun to be with; not just a fine brain and fizzing with the sort of ambition that made him lively and exciting all the time, whatever they were doing; but a caring person, one who understood her and her feelings and hopes and ambitions. But when it had come down to it, he’d turned out to be – well, a bastard. One of the worst sort.