Fourth Attempt

by Claire Rayner

  In Ballantyne Ward all was very quiet. The big central corridor gleamed in the late June evening and the various bays with their four-and six-bedded arrangements hummed with the quiet chatter of patients and their visitors and the eternal bleating of television sets. It wasn’t one of Ballantyne’s operating days so there was none of the usual bustle that fills a surgical ward after a long list, and the senior nurse on duty at the central work-station was one George knew only slightly. But that suited her very well. She certainly hadn’t wanted to face Sister Chaplin again after the affair of the chocolates. And neither did she want to see Peter Selby who would have been here had he been operating today. Luck was on her side, she decided, and pressed it home.

  ‘I’ve just dropped in to see Miss Keen,’ she said lightly to the staff nurse. ‘You know — the patient in the single room at the far end. No need to look up her notes or anything. This is just a social call, not a medical one. She’s on my staff, you see.’ She smiled confidently and went off down the corridor towards Sheila’s room before the staff nurse could stop her, even if she’d wanted to.

  Sheila was sitting up in bed, wrapped in a pink silk shawl of oriental description, arranged to show off her rather bony shoulders, which were as bare as she could get them to be — her nightdress was pulled well down to show her somewhat meagre décolletage — and she was staring up at the TV set on a bracket on the wall facing her bed. She looked up hopefully as the door was pushed open, wriggling her shoulders into an even more provocative curve and smiling widely; but when she saw George her smile faded in so ludicrous a fashion that George found it easy to grin back; indeed, she almost laughed.

  ‘Hello, Sheila! I’ve brought you some flowers.’ She held out the bunch of hothouse roses she’d bought at the stall just outside the Accident and Emergency entrance, and Sheila looked at it, her mouth turned down apprehensively. ‘It’s quite safe to take them. There are no secret nasal poisons unknown to Western medicine hidden in them, nothing toxic applied to the thorns. In fact there aren’t any thorns at all, Old Eddie told me so. I said they were for you and he picked out the best.’

  That was a patent lie, since Eddie the flowerman, who had been at his stand by the hospital gates for more years than anyone could remember, heartily disliked Sheila, who always fussed outrageously over any flowers she bought from him, but Sheila chose to believe George.

  ‘That’s very sweet of him,’ she said. She managed a pathetic little moue. ‘If you leave them there one of the nurses will put them in water.’ She pointedly didn’t thank George for the roses, but George professed not to notice that. She sat herself comfortably in the armchair beside Sheila’s bed and said chattily, ‘Well, tell me, how are you?’

  There was a little silence as Sheila stared up at the screen where various soap opera stars were posturing busily. For a moment George thought she wasn’t going to answer and that she’d have to take tough measures, but after a moment Sheila said grudgingly, ‘As well as can be expected, I suppose. Under the circumstances.’ And she shot a look of undiluted venom at George, who smiled sweetly back.

  ‘Sheila, I know perfectly well you couldn’t be more pissed off with me. You think I poisoned the chocolates. Well, I didn’t do that either, any more than I tampered with your car, though someone did.’

  Sheila’s head jerked round and she stared at George with her eyes so dilated there was a rim of white around the irises. ‘What did you say? My car? Someone did do something to it?’

  It was George’s turn to be surprised. ‘But you suspected that! You said so to Za — to Dr Zacharius. I remember you said that it was strange how one week someone wishes something horrible will happen to you and then it does, and it made you wonder. I heard you, and thought you were having a go at me.’

  Sheila had the grace to blush. ‘Well, when you’re worried you say things you mightn’t exactly mean. I didn’t really think the car had been fiddled with. I thought it was just an accident — but now you say it really was?’

  ‘Yes.’ Briefly George explained what Gus had heard from Trevor the car mechanic, and Sheila sat and stared at her throughout, her mouth half open with concentration. When George had finished she hunched her shoulders so that her shawl slid up them to a more demure level, and seemed to curl herself up to lie lower in the bed. It was the sort of move a frightened child makes and George felt suddenly very sorry for her. And said so.

  ‘I know. It’s horrible. To think that someone hates you enough to do stuff like this. But you can’t think it’s me, Sheila? You and I may have our fights, God knows, but you know as well as I do that I wouldn’t do anything like that.’

  Sheila looked at her miserably for a long moment and then closed her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I know, I s’pose. It was just that…’ She opened her eyes. ‘You’ve been so horrible to me for so long I thought — well, I was mad at you. And I thought, I’ll show you how mad if I — well, if I didn’t say it couldn’t be you who did it. The chocolates, I mean.’ She looked suddenly watchful. ‘Mind you, who could it be, Dr B.? I mean, there’s no one in the lab hates me that much, is there? I’m entitled to think — well, you’ve been on my back something rotten for months. Won’t let me set foot outside the place and —’

  George leaned closer. ‘Listen, Sheila, that’s what I want to talk to you about. Do you remember what started it all off? I’d forgotten, but then suddenly I remembered why it was that I was so mad with you and why you were being as bloody minded as you could be.’

  Sheila’s lips quirked for a moment. ‘I suppose I was a bit awful.’

  George made a noise at the back of her throat that was deeply expressive. ‘A bit! Ye Gods, woman, you would have driven the Angel Gabriel into a decline the way you’ve been behaving!’

  ‘Well, a person has to stand up for herself,’ Sheila murmured and then laughed. And suddenly it was as though none of the arguments between them had ever happened. She was Sheila again, awkward, argumentative, often tiresome but at heart a good enough soul who was in general on George’s side.

  George reached out and took her hand and squeezed it. ‘That’s better.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sheila said and then added in a little rush, ‘I’ve been feeling awful about you, Dr B. I never truly thought you would do anything really nasty to me, it was just that I wanted you to know how mad I was. But then the chocolates …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I couldn’t help thinking about that and what with Sister Chaplin saying things and Mr Selby so carefully not saying anything at all…’

  ‘I can imagine,’ George said grimly. ‘But I intend to sort this out, one way or another. And I’m not bad at that, am I? Finding out what happened?’

  Sheila looked at her eagerly. ‘Oh, no. Gus and you together have done some great things.’

  ‘I can do it on my own as well,’ George replied with a spurt of anger, and Sheila produced one of her sharp little grins.

  ‘Whoops! Trouble in loveland, is there?’

  ‘None of your business — don’t you start again, lady! I’m glad we’re not fighting any more, but if you start being a smartass —’

  ‘Pax!’ Sheila said. ‘I just meant that usually you and Gus — Well, anyway, never mind. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I told you. Find out what the hell is going on here. And I’m going to start by talking to you. I need to know a few things.’

  ‘Anything you like.’ Sheila moved up the bed again and rearranged her shawl more elegantly She looked much better now. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘OK. I want you to remember: a while back, April sometime, I’m not sure when, there was this fight I had with the woman up in Medical Records. About you and her. Mrs Ellesmere, her name is.’

  ‘That one!’ Sheila said with infinite scorn. ‘One of those with bugger all to do and all day to do it in, the way she faffs around. I can’t stand her, and well she knows it.’

  ‘Yes, and I know it too. But what I want to know about is that time you had a great fight with her
— and afterwards with me — because you showed a path, report to one of her staff and wouldn’t show it to her. Or to me, dammit! What I’d like to know for openers is the truth of that affair. Is it significant? Has it anything to do with what is going on now?’

  ‘Significant,’ Sheila said in a flat voice, staring at George blankly, the corners of her mouth turning down so that she looked as though she’d been standing in a cold wind for a long time. ‘Significant, you say?’

  ‘Yup. I need to know, who was the staff member? Is that what was so important in the affair? Or was it Ellesmere being stupid or — Well, tell me. What was it?’

  ‘I can’t think how I never thought of it before,’ Sheila said. Her eyes had suddenly gone a little out of focus, as though she were staring through George to a distant point. ‘There was all that talk, all that fuss and I just never thought of it! I must be losing my mind, I swear it!’

  George looked at her, frowning. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘What didn’t you think about?’

  ‘The staff member whose report it was,’ Sheila said. ‘She’d asked me to look through the reports in the lab because she thought her test results weren’t being put into her notes the way they should be. She used to keep a close eye on her own notes, you see, being she was working in Medical Records anyway and knew a lot about the system, and about herself of course. But she was worried about something — I don’t know what, she never said. She just asked me to get her path, reports — our copies of them, you know? — and bring them to show her. So I did.’

  ‘That was what Ellesmere got so mad about?’ George said. ‘Who was she? The staff member?’

  ‘Oh, Dr B.,’ Sheila said, and there was an air of tragedy about her that was almost comical in its intensity. ‘That’s what’s so awful. About me not remembering, I mean. It was Lally, Lally Lamark. One of those suicides —’

  ‘Not suicide. Accidental overdose,’ George said. But Sheila ran on as if she hadn’t spoken a word.

  ‘I never for a moment joined the two things in my mind after I heard she’d died. I didn’t think about what she’d asked me to do all those weeks ago. Dr B., do you think it had anything to do with her killing herself? I’ll never forgive myself if it did.’

  11

  When George got back to the courtyard after saying goodnight to Sheila, with many assurances that she needn’t worry, that she couldn’t be anywhere safer than where she was (for Sheila had steadily become more anxious over what happened to her car, adding it to the chocolates incident), she stopped, uncertain what to do next. There were few people about, so after a moment she sat down on the scrubby grass, clasped her arms round her legs, rested her chin on her knees, and thought.

  The reassurances she had offered Sheila had seemed to help her, though deep inside George knew that they were little more than her own efforts to whistle bravely in the dark. The hard truth was that two attempts had been made on Sheila, certainly to harm her and possibly to kill her. And on both occasions she, George, had been set up as the possible perpetrator, at least in Sheila’s eyes. Did anyone else think she might have had anything to do with the doctoring of the car? (She squirmed at the way the word came into her head; it was hardly sympathetic to protestations of her innocence.) It was natural enough they should think she had sent the chocolates; there had after all been that card with her forged initials on it. But there was not a scintilla of evidence to connect her with the car’s wiring, apart from the fact that she used the same car park, and that applied to a large number of other people in the hospital.

  One comfort, she told herself, was that it was obvious the police did not think she had been responsible for either attack on Sheila. She’d made her statement and it had been accepted; there had been no suggestion of further questioning. Could that be because she was known in the nick as the Guv’nor’s girlfriend? (What a stupid label that is, she thought sourly. Makes me sound like something in gingham skirts with bows in my hair. I’m his woman, dammit. Or I was till this weekend. Right now I’m not sure how we stand.) Well, even if it was her connection to Gus which had protected her, the fact that she was clear of police doubt left her a free agent to see what she could do herself to unravel this mystery. She’d make the best possible use she could of that freedom, she decided, and jumped to her feet to brush the dried grass from her skirt and make her way, not to the car park and home, which would be the sensible thing to do at this time of evening, but back to her laboratory.

  The cleaners were there when she let herself in using her private key, and she blinked as one of them came towards her with suspicion written all over her very hostile face.

  ‘’Ere, this is private property, this is. You got no call to be ’ere this time o’ night. I got instructions from security that no one’s allowed in without reasonable cause.’

  ‘I have reasonable cause,’ George said mildly ‘This is my department. I’m Dr Barnabas. See?’ She pointed to her office door, which bore her name in shabby white paint.

  The woman looked at her no less suspiciously ‘Oh, indeed? And what proof ’ave I got that that is true, tell me? There’re always people walking in claiming to be doctors and so forth — or technicians, like the last one said — and I got no way to know it’s true, ’ave I? Being ’ere only of a night, I can’t get to know people’s faces like day workers can. So I needs proof, that’s what Mr Bittacy said, and ’e should know.’

  ‘Bittacy knows everything’ George, who had herself had brushes with the self-important Head of Night Security (who had been promoted from Head Porter and bossed all the artisan staff about with an air of lordly grandeur, and tried to do the same with medical staff), was not impressed. ‘I have every right to come to my own department at any time. But to keep you happy, try this.’ She scrabbled in her skirt pocket and pulled out the swipe card all the senior staff carried, which gave them access to protected parts of the hospital, such as ITU, the Pharmacy and Maternity. It bore her name and the usual sort of hideous photograph which George thought totally unrecognizable as her face, and she thrust it under the cleaner’s nose with a certain degree of aggression.

  The cleaner took several laborious moments to dig in her grubby overall pocket, pull out her glasses and put them on her nose, then studied the card as intently as though it were her ticket to Paradise. But she handed it back at last and said grudgingly, ‘Well, all right, then. I suppose that’s ’oo you are. We’ve cleared that office, let me tell you, so I ’ope you don’t go messin’ it up and then complainin’ tomorrow as we didn’t do it. I’ve ’ad that trick pulled on me before.’ And she turned on her heel and marched away back into the main lab, where her fellow cleaner could be heard clattering about in a marked manner.

  It was quite the most absurd thing that happened next. George marched in to her office, throwing her jacket on to a chair, and was about to go over to her files to start the search for the notes she had made on Lally Lamark, which she now believed needed very careful study, when without any conscious thought on her part she found herself whirling and bolting out of the door and along the short corridor into the main lab in search of the cleaner. It wasn’t until she saw the gawping faces turned towards her by the two women standing in the middle of the floor leaning on mops and brooms that she was able to get her thoughts together.

  ‘Uh, Mrs — Uh —’ she said and stood still. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know your name.’

  The woman who had stopped her outside now stepped forward and stared at her pugnaciously. ‘And why d’you want to know? I done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t!’ George opened her eyes wide. ‘Far from it. It was just that — I’m impressed, you see. Yes, that’s it. I’m very impressed. So few people in Old East seem to have any idea of the importance of security and anyone can wander anywhere in consequence. We’ve had all those robberies and all, remember? So when someone’s as sensible as you were and makes sure people aren’t where they’re not supposed to be, well, they deserve tha
nks. And I wanted to tell Mr Bittacy so.’

  The woman seemed to melt before her eyes. Her squared shoulders softened as the woman behind her first gaped and then giggled self-consciously. Clearly she too shared in the golden glow of George’s approbation. ‘Oh, well then, seein’ as you ask, I’m Mrs Glenney.’

  ‘Let me shake you by the hand,’ George said solemnly, and did so, and Mrs Glenney, now beaming widely to show the silvery glitter of well-filled teeth, preened with pleasure. ‘It’s such a comfort to know my department’s in safe hands when I’m not here. Do tell me …’ She dropped her voice to a friendlier, slightly conspiratorial note. ‘Who was it you saw off the other time? Recently, was it?’

  ‘Eh?’ Mrs Glenney looked puzzled.

  ‘You said that people are always walking in claiming to be doctors.’

  Mrs Glenney’s face cleared. ‘Oh! Oh, well, I didn’t mean always walking in ’ere, you understand! No, around the place like. Mr Bittacy told me, said as ’ow they pinch white coats and then wander about seein’ what they can steal. Or worse.’ She looked down her nose more primly. ‘Some of ’em even try it on pretendin’ to be doctors and examinin’ women and so forth.’

  George filled with disappointment. ‘Oh,’ she said a little flatly. She too had heard the tales of wannabes trying to pass themselves off as doctors, but such stories always struck her as apocryphal; she had never heard of such an episode at Old East directly from someone who’d had personal experience of it. ‘I thought you meant you’d had someone coming in here.’

  ‘Well, yes, I ’ave,’ Mrs Glenney said and George lifted her chin to stare at her.

  ‘But I thought you said you’d only heard about such things from Mr Bittacy?’

  ‘I only ever ’eard about doctors tryin’ it on,’ Mrs Glenney said punctiliously. ‘Which was what you asked me about. But I’ve ’ad that other one.’

  ‘“That other one”,’ George said carefully. Clearly Mrs Glenney was a lady who took questions very literally.