1 First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  He’d had the chance of a job in London too; he was a good surgeon and had a marvellous CV; he’d even been head-hunted by a private sector set-up where he’d have made a lot of money – which was very much part of his ambition – and got a lot of kudos too, because they could have fiddled him an NHS consultancy as well. But would he see it that way? The world’d explode before he would, she told herself, with bitter tears filling her throat and making her eyes feel hot and dry. The bastard …

  It had been so surprising, that was the thing. She’d told him, burning with excitement, how she’d got the job; had gone hurtling from the airport to the hospital in a very expensive taxi, instead of a bus, just to get to him sooner; had gone rushing into the medical staff common room, expecting him to cheer as loudly as he could, expecting him to get excited about taking up his own offer from London so that he could come south with her; and what had he done? He’d stared at her, unsmiling, and said baldly that he’d never expected her to get the job; that he’d encouraged her to go down for the interview just to get the itch out of her system; that he wanted a wife, not a competitor in his own house; that if she wanted the marriage they’d been talking about she’d settle for a registrarship until she started having babies, and after that it wouldn’t matter anyway. And when she’d protested, had told him that there was no reason why consultants couldn’t have babies, he’d told her coolly that she was being too damned feminist for his taste these days and she’d better make up her mind what she really wanted and choose accordingly. The only comfort there’d been in the whole rotten mess was his clear astonishment when she’d told him she had chosen and was taking the job. He’d stared at her with his mouth open, literally. There’d been some pleasure in that for George; but not for long. He’d just listened and then had closed his mouth, nodded and said flatly, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and had turned and walked out of the common room. And that had indeed been that.

  And now here she sat in a rotten East End of London slum in the middle of a battered old hospital that no longer had the glow she’d seen around it when she’d come down for her interview and there’d still been a loving Ian in the background and the world had seemed full of happy possibilities. She was a consultant, sure, but big deal. She was head of a department that had no registrar or houseman attached; only the promise of such appointments as and when the hospital could afford them. Some consultancy that was! She was furthermore all alone in London without enough money to get a place of her own to live in, not in this outrageously expensive town, with not a friend in the whole lousy city. Ever since she’d come to Britain from home ten years ago, she’d worked anywhere but London, so she had no London contacts. She’d done her forensic training in Liverpool (and what a great city that had turned out to be! She still missed the buzz of it, and the people she’d known there) and her house and registrar posts in Scotland. That had been a great part of the world for an eager new forensic pathologist. Lots of work, lots of opportunities to indulge her passion for probing into other people’s deaths, and therefore their lives, lots of chances to deepen her knowledge and her abilities. But no chance to make London-based contacts. Yet she had felt herself ready for London. What she hadn’t thought was that getting there might turn out to be a recipe for a deeply lonely life. Now she feared it would. Being an American in Britain hadn’t mattered so far. She’d gone to Inverness via Liverpool and her various jobs with a golden reputation, and leaving the family behind at home all that time ago hadn’t turned out to be all that painful. People in the North had been friendly and within a month of getting to Inverness, of course, there’d been Ian – Oh, shit, she thought and got to her feet. I’d better start doing something, anything, or I’ll get maudlin. I might even miss my mother and want to go home to Buffalo, and that really would mean I was in the pits.

  She put on the clean white lab coat set waiting for her over the desk chair and began to prowl round the office, looking in drawers and cupboards. She wasn’t impressed. Someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to tidy up, but what was there wasn’t worth the effort. There was no decent equipment, not of the sort she was used to, certainly, and only the most battered of what there was. The chair by the desk swivelled crookedly, and the desk itself was scored with dents and scorched all round the edges with cigarette burns. The window was clean but looked out on to a far-from-attractive view of the main courtyard, with its criss-crossing of glass-roofed walkways and the inevitable litter silted around the stanchions that held them up, and the uneven and unpleasantly shiny walls that framed the window were painted in a grainy and depressingly thick green. She sighed deeply and thought about the staff to whom she’d been introduced.

  The pretty little woman seemed pleasant though a bit watchful; but that was natural enough. No one relaxes their guard when a new boss turns up till they know whether it’s safe or not. The long lanky young man with the thick bush of springing yellow hair had looked cheerful if a bit on the randy side, and the others – well, she’d get to know them in time. As long as they weren’t all madly attached to her predecessor, and resentful of her newness, she’d be all right. She got on with most people pretty well, after all. Except Ian, an inner voice whispered, but she ignored it. She’d go now and have a wander, talk to them all, get the feel of the place.

  The door opened after a perfunctory knock and the fair-haired woman looked in. She was smiling, a triumphant sort of grin that George found alarming, as though George had done something nasty to her, and the woman was about to get her own back. A silly thought. She dismissed it and welcomed her, pushing her glasses further up her nose and smiling widely. ‘Oh, yes, do come in. Sheila, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sheila said and smiled even more widely. ‘I’ve got a message for you. They’ve just brought a body into the mortuary. The coroner’s officer’s down there waiting for you. Want a PM right away, please, because the courts are jamming up, they’ve got so much backlog, and they want to get the inquest in as fast as they can, while they’ve got a slot.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ George got to her feet. ‘You’ll have to show me the way to the mortuary, I’m afraid. Professor Dieter never got that far. They never do, do they? Always keep out of the nasty places if they can. Can someone go over to my rooms and get my instrument case? I like to use my own gear when I can.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll want to use anything good on this one,’ Sheila said, and her voice was creamy with satisfaction. ‘Drowned. Been in the water well over a week, according to the river police, who brought it in. Very far gone, it is. Stinks to high heaven. Nasty for your first one here, isn’t it? Well, there it is, that’s the way it goes. I’ll show you the way. Danny’s down there getting ready. Even he’s not best pleased about this one, so soon after lunch, and it takes a lot to get under old Danny’s skin. He’s dealt with more nasty bodies than you and I have had the proverbial hot dinners. But I dare say you won’t mind.’ And she beamed beatifically and held the door open.

  2

  ‘It’s for Barrie Ward,’ Danny said. ‘You know – named after J.M. Barrie. The kids’ ward. They should ha’ called it Peter Pan really, but there you go. But the meeting isn’t happening there, anyway. It’s to be in the Board Room in the old building there on the far side of the third block. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘Why do people always say that when missing it is the easiest thing you could possibly do?’ George said, pulling off her rubber gloves and throwing them into the bucket, and Danny snorted and at last took the cadaver away. She took a deep breath of relief.

  It had been one of the nastiest George had ever had to deal with and at first she hadn’t enjoyed it at all, and neither had the coroner’s officer. Almost before she’d made the first examination, once they’d got the clothes off and they’d found the wallet in the pocket of the jacket with its still legible suicide note and clear identification (the man had been an accountant who, it seemed, had been overenthusiastic about investing his clients’ money and had lost large amounts of it), he had
announced that he was quite content to leave her to it, would see her again soon, and goodbye for the present. And had fled. She’d wished for a moment that she too could escape the unpleasantness of it; but then, as she got on with the job, the work had taken over and the last remaining shreds of queasiness had gone. But they had come back after she’d finished and she’d had such a job closing the abdomen. The tissues had deteriorated to such an extent it was inevitable there’d be problems, but she’d managed it (to Danny’s grudging approval, she knew, because he’d been a good deal more respectful to her after they’d finished than he’d been when she’d started) and then made her notes – the man had died of drowning after taking a heavy dose of a hypnotic drug – and only then did the awareness that the object on which she’d been working had once been a breathing human being come back to her, and that had brought back the nausea.

  Now she stripped off her gown and apron and began to scrub her arms and hands, enjoying the sting of the water on her skin and the heavy reek of the soap. A shower and shampoo and complete change of clothes was indicated too. In future, she’d make sure she kept a set of the necessary things here at the mortuary so that she could get herself cleaned up and comfortable without having to go over to her room to shower. She should have thought about that this morning.

  Danny came back and began the sluicing that always followed an autopsy, and shouted above the noise of the water, ‘You’ll be going to the meeting about the kids’ ward then?’

  ‘Do I have to?’ George began to collect her notes and the cassette tapes she’d dictated, and her camera and its pile of pictures. Danny had looked askance when she’d told him it was her normal practice always to take Polaroid photographs of her autopsies, just in case one day she wanted to do a book of some kind, muttering about old Royle never having done that and no one had never had no complaints, seeing as how the police took their own if there was any call for them. She registered the fact that her predecessor had clearly been either a lazy or a rich man. She knew lots of pathologists who took pictures of their more interesting cases, mostly because they, like herself, had vague plans some day to write, for pathology textbooks could be extremely lucrative. Well, perhaps Dr Royle hadn’t had any need to consider pecuniary matters. She, however, was very interested in improving her finances if she could, and if investing in a few Polaroid pictures could lead to such improvement, take them she would, no matter what her mortuary attendant thought. But in fact she knew that because of the way she’d handled this unpleasant first case, she had Danny very much on her side; from now on he would be willing to accept anything she did with equanimity. So perhaps it was no bad thing her first corpse at Old East had been so very nasty; it had certainly served to make at least one of the staff show a proper respect for her.

  ‘Oh, that’s up to you, of course.’ Danny was scrubbing furiously at the marble slab, covering it with Festival, the concentrated disinfectant that gave the place its odd fruity smell. ‘Not for me to say. Mind you, it’s one of those things they’re all on about – getting cash for the kids’ ward. There’s never enough for all the things they want there. The latest’s a pool for the physios to use for the rheumatoid arthritis cases, after they’ve built the new ward block. That’ll cost a bomb. But getting it! Well, there’ll be some very fancy footwork over it, you mark my words. Everyone who’s anyone around Old East’ll get themselves involved.’

  ‘Politics?’ George said, lingering to watch the small busy figure. Maybe now was the time to recruit her first ally. She’d worked in hospitals long enough to know how important they could be; making sure you had them among the secretaries and orderlies was as vital as having them among the senior consultants and ward sisters. ‘Is that what you mean? It could be a good step for me? I’d be glad of advice.’

  Danny stopped scrubbing and leaned on his bunched fists on the slab. ‘Well, since you’re asking, doctor, I’d say yes, it would be. From all I hear, they’re all mixed up in it, from top to bottom: consultants, nurses, as well as a few fancy outsiders; the lot. It’s all wrong, I reckon, having to go to charity to raise the money for fixing up the children’s ward. Supposed to be the NHS, ain’t it? Some bloody NHS when you got to go around with a beggar’s bowl to give the kids a decent place to be in when they’re ill. Anyway, that’s how it is these days. Much good the bloody election done us, eh?’ He brooded for a moment and then nodded at her, starting to scrub again. ‘If I was you I’d go along. You might as well meet as many of the buggers at one time as you can. Begging your pardon …’ He threw her a sharp little glance under his brows to see how she’d react to his lèse majesté and, when she laughed, grinned widely. From now on, George told herself with great satisfaction as she assured him she’d do just as he advised, and went to her office, Danny’s my man.

  She gave her cassette tapes to Sheila, so that they could be passed on to Dorothy, the woman in the typing pool who dealt with the path. lab’s secretarial work, and told her she was about to go over to the medical residence for her shower and change. The smell of the cadaver lingered in her nostrils and probably about her person too; the sooner she cleaned up the better.

  ‘I wish I could have had a chance to talk to everyone properly this afternoon,’ she said. ‘But that took a long time. These tricky ones do.’

  ‘Nasty, was it?’ Sheila said with some relish. George lifted her brows at her. ‘To start with. The coroner’s officer certainly thought so. Went very early. But it was really too interesting to be unpleasant. It’s amazing what survives in these immersion cases and what doesn’t. There was a note in the pocket that was still legible – admittedly it was inside a wallet, but all the same – Anyway, it makes it clear it was a suicide, and he’d taken a handful of a hypnotic before he chucked himself in the river, and some of the pills were still visible in the stomach, so that should get it through the inquest fast enough. But the skin …’ She shook her head. ‘The degree of maceration was really –’

  ‘I dare say,’ Sheila said hurriedly. ‘Well, I must go. Got a rehearsal tonight – the hospital show, you know, for the children.’ She began to collect her things, and George looked at her sharply. This was in marked contrast to the positively joyous way in which she’d announced the arrival of the body in the mortuary and for a moment her heart sank. Dammit, the woman was hostile. She’d been pleased to see her faced with a dirty job. George sighed. Someone else to coax round into the allies’ camp. Why the hell had she ever come to Shadwell? Why the hell didn’t someone hang Ian up by his sleek blond hair and tickle his feet till he screamed for mercy? Why –

  ‘The children,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve heard about that. There’s some sort of thing tonight, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, a reception for a few of the locals. We’re biting their ears as hard as we can. Are you going?’

  ‘I thought I might. It’d be a chance to get to know a few people around the place.’

  Sheila was looking thoughtful. ‘I could come and introduce you to some if you like. I mean, our rehearsals can’t start properly till it’s over, because some of the more important people in the cast have to be at the reception for the first little while. If you like, of course. I don’t mind.’

  She was elaborately casual but George sniffed her eagerness. She wants to show me off, she thought, pull me around like a liner behind a tug, her property. I’ve met her sort before. She opened her mouth to snub her but then thought better of it, remembering the need for allies, and instead said meekly, ‘That would be very kind of you.’

  Sheila actually bridled, lifting her head and shoulders with a little moue of self-satisfaction, and George was amused. A harmless enough creature after all, she thought. Needs attention the way babies need milk, that’s what it is. And smiled at her with as genuine a warmth as she could conjure.

  ‘Do tell me who’ll be there. Just so that I don’t look a complete nerd. What sort of locals are they? The Mayor and so forth?’

  ‘Possibly. He does come to quite a few things
. But he’s not so important as the ones with money.’

  ‘Are there ones with money around here? From what I see it’s the pits. I mean, the poorest of the poor live here, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’ Sheila looked pleased to be able to contradict her so flatly. ‘You have to see beyond the end of your nose in these parts. We’re on the edge of Docklands here, Dr Barnabas. There are flats –’ She stopped and then went on with kindly patronage: ‘Apartments, you know, that cost enormous amounts. They’ve got as many bathrooms as they’ve got bedrooms, even if there are six of them, and marble kitchens and heaven knows what else.’ She nodded with a sort of pride as though the affluence of the Docklands apartments conferred credit on her personally. ‘Oh, there’s plenty of money in these parts, take it from me.’

  George forbore to make any comment on the fact that she was well acquainted with the idea of homes that had as many bathrooms as bedrooms and said only, ‘Well, you never can tell, can you? So you’re getting the sort of people who live there to come in. Are they all that much interested in helping? In my experience rich people like to get real value for their charity dollars. You know, fancy balls and showy bonanzas where they can wear their diamonds.’

  ‘Oh, but we’ve got the Oxfords,’ Sheila said, and seemed to glow. ‘They’re not like that, and the sort of people they know aren’t either. They get a very nice class of person supporting our events. It’s the Oxfords who are in the cast of the show – well, Richard is, at any rate.’ She dimpled as she said his first name, clearly relishing the intimacy. ‘You know who Richard Oxford is, of course.’