1 First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  ‘You were quick,’ she said. ‘I’m not that long back from lunch. What was it, then?’

  George shrugged. ‘Can’t say. Heart failure is all I’ve got at present.’

  ‘Well, that’s it, then. He looked as though he might have had a weak heart, didn’t he?’

  ‘It’s a perfectly normal heart.’ George flicked a finger at the pile of pictures. ‘Look for yourself. Nothing to see on gross examination, certainly. I’ve taken stuff, though, all through, for Jerry to do some histology. Oh, and the blood samples – Danny still has them. I want all the usual, tell Peter. A full blood picture and drug screen: cocaine, benzo-diazapines, codeine, and paracetamol, of course, though I saw no evidence – healthy liver – as well as alcohol. Opiates, though again no evidence I could find. No puncture marks on the skin, nothing. Looks like a very peaceful way to go.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Sheila said. ‘Can’t say I’d fancy it myself. Not at his age.’

  ‘I suppose,’ George said absently. ‘Anything to tell me about what came up while I was downstairs? Because if there isn’t …’

  Sheila scowled. ‘I’m still trying to sort out this microscope business. I can’t make out what happened. P’raps you’d better have a word with them.’

  George hesitated. ‘I’ve had no lunch yet.’

  ‘Well, not to worry,’ Sheila said gloomily. ‘I dare say tomorrow’ll do just as well.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Why not later this afternoon? When I’ve eaten?’

  ‘They finish early in the other lab,’ Sheila said. ‘Remember? It’s part of the cuts in our finance. We were told – it was before you came – we were told we had to lose two technicians, and they all voted to stay on but to split the available hours between them. Dr Royle liked it that way because at least, he said, we’ve got some bodies around the place when we might need something in a hurry.’

  ‘Oh, dammit all to hell and back,’ George shouted. ‘How can anyone provide a decent service this way? I’ve got no registrar, no houseman, I have to sew up my own autopsies when I’ve spent so many years sewing up other people’s while I learned how to do it, and now not even a full complement of lab staff!’

  ‘I don’t suppose they told you the worst when you came for your interview.’ Sheila spoke with a gloomy satisfaction. ‘They’re such crooks, all of them, aren’t they?’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ George said grimly. ‘Everything short of having their fingers in the lousy till. Well, all right. Let’s get on with it.’

  In the other lab the three technicians were busy over the input from the afternoon’s diabetic clinic and the demands of Agnew Byford, who was doing a teaching round in his ward and sending down blood after blood with an urgent cry for an immediate prothrombin time. As a result none of them was in the best of humours.

  ‘Sam,’ Sheila said as she marched importantly up to his bench, seeming to pull George along like a fussy little engine with an important express train. ‘Tell Dr Barnabas what happened over the microscopes.’

  He sighed and sat up more straightly. ‘I’ve already explained. I don’t know. I came in after our tea break and there was this chap in overalls, with a clipboard, showed me a piece of paper, marked “receipt” it was, told me to sign and said he had to take them away. Fault spotted by the manufacturers. So I signed and he went away.’

  ‘Where’s the copy?’

  The boy looked blankly at her. ‘What copy?’

  ‘The copy of the receipt,’ George said patiently. ‘You should have been given a copy.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ the boy said, shaking his head. ‘I thought he had to have one. That’s why I signed.’

  George stifled any obvious show of annoyance at his stupidity but couldn’t help speaking sharply. ‘It was we who should have had one, to show where three very expensive microscopes had gone.’

  ‘The manufacturers,’ the boy said, trying to be helpful.

  Sheila looked scathingly at him. ‘Who told me on the phone they know nothing about them, and to check with our own purchasing office here. But when I phoned they knew nothing about it either.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Sam sounded sulky now. ‘I meant no harm.’

  ‘I saw the chap,’ one of the other girls volunteered, seeming to find it necessary to come to his rescue. ‘D’you remember, Jo? We met him pushing them along the corridor on one of the big trolleys, on our way back. And I said it looked as though someone else was getting new ones like we had.’

  ‘Yup,’ Jo said, not lifting her head from her work. ‘I saw ’em.’

  ‘So there it is,’ Sheila said triumphantly. ‘Zeiss know nothing about it, so they say, nor does the secretary in the purchasing office, and she was so unpleasant I’m not talking to her again, no matter what.’

  They all looked at George now, a little owlishly, and she sighed. ‘All right, I’ll go over and see about it. Sheila, get that work in hand, will you? And you three, next time someone wants a receipt or a docket signed, for heaven’s sake come and check with someone. Sheila or Jerry, or me.’

  She marched back to her office, very aware now of how hungry she was. But that would have to wait. If she wasn’t careful the people in the admin offices would be gone before she got there. They too seemed to work very short hours, she thought with some bile. And the sooner this silly muddle over the microscopes was sorted out the sooner Sheila would be quiet about them. She really was like a dog with a particularly juicy bone, worrying away at the details until she drove everyone mad. This surely was just an administrative cock-up. Wasn’t it?

  She pushed open the door of her office and stopped short. The desk had been spread with a large paper napkin which was liberally decorated with pictures of holly and tinsel and mistletoe. On the napkin stood two bottles of lager, a large round pork pie and a plate of bread and butter. There were salt and pepper pots, a small dish of mustard and a couple of tumblers. Sitting on the other side of the desk was Gus Hathaway, his head back on the chair cushion and his eyes closed.

  He sat up as she came in, rubbed his nose like a sleepy child and looked at her reproachfully. ‘Blimey, but you took your time! Thank God I opted for this instead of something hot. Come on, for Gawd’s sake. I’m starvin’!’

  9

  She closed the door behind her quietly, using a great deal of effort to do so. She was so angry she wanted to slam it hard enough to make the room shake.

  ‘Just what do you think you’re doing there?’

  He had started cutting the pie in half, taking a good deal of finicky care to make sure he was scrupulously fair, and he looked up, clearly surprised by the venom in her voice.

  ‘Lunch,’ he said. ‘Fixin’ lunch. I told you I’d get you a sarnie. Well, I went a bit better. These are bloody good pies, you know, none of your rubbish. Old Curly down the caff makes them himself. Not many do that these days. Come on, step up, sit down and tuck in.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘But what?’ He grinned cheerfully and pushed a slice of pie on to a plate for her. It looked good; the middle pink and luscious, the pastry fresh and flaky. Her belly tightened and she pressed one hand against her waist as unobtrusively as she could to stop the sound. ‘Mustard?’

  It was no good. Her hunger was stronger than she was. She took the pie and the folded paper napkin he gave her and started to eat, not bothering to sit down, holding the pie in her fingers. It tasted as good as it looked, and as she used her tongue to catch an errant crumb from the corner of her mouth he poured a glass of lager for her and held that out too.

  ‘There’s plenty of room to sit down,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be so formal, you know.’

  ‘Formal!’ She managed a laugh at that, though it came muffled through the pie. ‘You call this formal?’

  ‘No, not really. I’m just makin’ conversation. And tryin’ to get you to sit down. I’m getting a rick in my neck looking at you from here. You’re tall, aren’t you?’

  ‘And you’re very full of yourself,’ she snapped
, her anger coming back.

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. Tricky really. I don’t mean to be, but what can you do? When most of the people you’re dealin’ with are as thick as the proverbial, it’s difficult not to be. You’re not thick, though. You’re all right. So you sit down and enjoy your lunch. You’ve earned it.’

  She gave up and sat down with a thump as he took her plate from her and put another piece of pie on it.

  ‘Try the mustard this time. It’s good. And the bread and butter. Got to eat your bread and butter or your hair won’t curl. As you see, I’ve eaten lots of bread and butter in my time. Come to think of it, so have you.’

  ‘You’re impossible!’ she managed. ‘You march in here, take over my office, make outrageous personal remarks, you’re the worst kind of chauvinist, you treat me like I’m some sort of object –’

  ‘I’ll go along with the first three accusations but I’m damned if I will with the other two. If we’re goin’ to have to work together a lot, we’ll have to make a deal to keep off the feminist stuff. I’m as sensible as the next person about equal rights and all that, but I can’t handle all that fancy talk. So, yeah, I marched in and yeah, I made personal remarks. But that’s because I like to be personal with people I like. And I think you’re all right.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you? Then you’ve got a mighty peculiar way of showing it.’

  ‘Honest way,’ he said, looking at her shrewdly. ‘I could go in for all the chatting-up lines, couldn’t I? Or get all smooth and fancy and suggest I show you around, seeing as you’re new in London and all that. Or I could do what I do and say what I think. I think you’re all right. I like tall women with a bit of meat on their bones. I like women with minds of their own. I like you. You’ve got something very nice about you, you have.’

  She felt the pink tide rising in her face and wanted the floor to produce quantities of thick smoke to hide her from his view. But he seemed unperturbed by her obvious embarrassment.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else. It’s not easy to fancy a woman you’ve seen slicing up a person’s liver like, well, like cats’ meat. But I did and I do, so there it is.’ He smiled then, a wide warming grin that showed uneven, very strong white teeth. ‘Now, can we start again?’

  ‘I don’t – I’m not sure – I mean, goddamn it, you make me feel stupid!’

  ‘Yeah, I know. It always happens.’ He shook his head, seeming genuinely puzzled. ‘Being honest upsets people something rotten. Amazin’ ’n’t it? But there you go. That’s how it is. Now, how about some more pie? Finish it off, eh?’

  She said nothing, just held out her plate. He nodded approvingly, slapped the piece of pie on it and they ate in silence for a while. She was grateful for the chance to avoid speech; she needed to regain her emotional balance after the battering it had experienced. Only a few hours ago she’d been glooming at herself because of the way she’d reacted to the mild attentions Toby Bellamy had been paying her and how she’d been mortified to hear that he had been paying closer ones to Felicity Oxford. She’d blamed her own insecurity as the reason for reacting foolishly to the men she met. And now this! It was enough to make any woman giddy. And it wasn’t just the lager, of which she’d rather recklessly accepted a second helping.

  ‘Now, listen, about this chap Oxford,’ Gus said. He pushed his plate away and, reaching, took hers to pile it on top. ‘As far as I can see there’s nothing there to make anyone think there’s been dirty work at the crossroads, right? You’re goin’ to have to sign the cert. as natural causes, aren’t you?’

  All her caution came back in a great rush. The bastard! He’d been coming on to her as a way of getting his own way. He thought he could manipulate her just by turning on the charm. Well, let him rot! She wasn’t going to fall for that. No way. Nor, she decided swiftly as she sat and stared at him, nor am I going to give him the satisfaction of letting him know I’ve rumbled him. I can play devious games as much as he can. And play them in the same suit of trumps, what’s more.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Gus,’ she said, and smiled a wide smile so full of honesty that it brimmed and spilled over. ‘I simply don’t know. It’s that feminine thing, you know? Intuition. I have this gut feeling there’s something not the way it ought to be. I’d have been a lousy pathologist – in real dereliction of duty – if I’d let you think last night that there mightn’t be circumstances to investigate. I’m just trying to do my job properly, that’s all. And that means I still can’t say one way or the other about how this case will go. Not till I’ve got the reports back on the histology and the blood work. I’m real sorry about that, Gus.’

  He looked at her with his eyes slightly narrowed, and she stared back with a wide limpid gaze. ‘You wouldn’t be sendin’ me up, would you? Talking about feminine intuition and all that?’

  ‘Good God, of course not!’ she exclaimed, mentally crossing her fingers. ‘I’m trying to be as honest as you are. I just don’t feel right about this one.’

  He looked at her for a long moment and then nodded and stood up. ‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘So we’ll have to wait and see. When?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Wait till when? Results and that.’

  ‘Ah! Can’t be sure. The histology’ll take a while – got to make the slides and so forth, do the sections – but Jerry’ll get on with it as fast as he can. There’s routine work to be got through as well, of course, for the hospital; and we’re short-staffed – isn’t everybody? But as soon as I can get them I’ll call you. You have my word on that. And you have to believe I’m as honest as I’m sure you are.’

  He looked at her with that same slightly calculating glance and then nodded. ‘Fair enough. I’ll get back to the nick then. Talk to you again soon. Very soon.’ And he flicked his forefinger and thumb against his forehead in a mock tilt of an invisible hat, and went, leaving her staring after him over the wreck of his picnic. And as coldly angry as she could remember being.

  She headed for the admin block as soon as she’d thrown away the evidence of lunch (with some irritation; trust Hathaway to leave his mess behind) and had checked with Jerry that he had the Oxford work well in hand. She almost ran there; time was being eaten up today at a crazy rate; already it was getting on for four and Sheila had said the admin staff stopped early. She really had to get the wretched nuisance of the microscopes being taken back for repair dealt with today.

  The admin building was quiet when she got there, the usual racket of typewriters absent. She hared up the stairs to present herself at the door marked Purchasing Officer Asst rather breathlessly. The secretary inside was busy at her desk, tidying her handbag, and she looked unpromisingly at George and said at once, ‘We’re almost finished for today. Can you wait till tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ George said. ‘Must sort it out now. I’m Dr Barnabas.’

  ‘Ah!’ The woman got to her feet, reluctantly, but clearly prepared to show deference of a sort to one of the consultants. It was obvious she never stood up for any grade below that level. ‘Well, I told your technician, actually, doctor, these microscopes, it’s nothing to do with us, if that’s what you’re here about. Really, she does make a pest of herself, you know. It’d be a blessing to us all if you could control her.’

  ‘Oh?’ George said softly in what her own staff knew was a dangerous voice, but to which this woman, a thin and rather dispirited-looking person of about fifty, with a somewhat haunted air about her, seemed oblivious.

  ‘Yes, indeed, when the microscopes were ordered she was here every week wanting a delivery date, as if we could do anything about that! And then when they came she went on and on about making sure the guarantees were all sorted out and then the business of checking them regularly, and now she comes nagging again! But it’s nothing to do with me. I don’t know anything about them going back to the manufacturer. If she did that it was her own affair, not ours –’

  ‘She did not sent them back,’ roared George, for the first time feeling some sympathy
for Sheila. ‘We know nothing about any of this. Someone came, from this office, I imagine, took the three ’scopes and got them signed for and took them away for a check-up, so he said. We want to know why and where and –’

  ‘Have you got the receipt?’ the woman said.

  ‘Sheila explained about that!’ George said, louder still. ‘The boy who signed it didn’t know to ask for a copy and we don’t have one.’

  ‘Ah, well then,’ the woman said, as though that were the end of the matter. She took a last comforting look in her handbag before snapping it shut. ‘Nothing to do with us.’

  George advanced menacingly. ‘If you say that again I’ll –’

  ‘Hey, hey, what’s going on in here?’

  George whirled and saw a man standing in the doorway with his brows lifted in polite but very authoritative enquiry. She tried to remember who he was. She’d certainly seen him around the hospital somewhere.

  ‘I’m trying to get some sense and some help out of this – this person,’ George said and the woman behind her yelped a protest. ‘I’m Dr Barnabas, from pathology, and –’

  ‘And I’m Mitchell Formby.’ He put his hand forward to shake hers and she remembered when she’d seen him before. At the meeting about the Barrie Ward appeal. He was the one who had talked about how the actual building and supplying of the new ward would be done once the appeal had raised enough cash.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said as she shook hands. ‘Now look here, Mr Formby –’

  ‘Oh, Mitch, please. We don’t use severe titles and labels here.’ He smiled widely. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  The secretary broke into a rapid babble of explanation in which Sheila and her rudeness and all-round tiresomeness figured large, and Formby held up a hand at her and shook his head.