The Consultant's Italian Knight

by Maggie Kingsley

  She didn’t, and it had nothing to do with Paul’s capabilities. He was bright and efficient, but she also had the distinct impression that he didn’t like working for a woman. It wasn’t because of anything he’d said—he was far too astute to leave himself open to an accusation of sexual bias—but there had been the occasional look, the odd throwaway comment, that had more than ruffled her.

  ‘I can’t like everybody,’ she declared, suddenly realising Mario was expecting her to reply, ‘and as long as he continues to work efficiently I’ll have no complaints. ’

  ‘Colin Watson?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know him well enough to comment. He just qualified last month, and this is his first week with us.’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘The dreaded August intake. Never be ill or have an accident in August because that’s when all the still-wet-behind-the-ears newly qualified doctors are let loose on the wards.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She could not help but laugh. ‘And before you ask me about the nursing staff,’ she continued, seeing him glance down at his notebook. ‘As far as I’m concerned, they’re all terrific, and if you want personal details about them you’ll have to ask Terri. The only other member of staff I know well is our porter, Bill, who’s worked in the department for twelve years, and is an absolute gem.’

  Mario closed his notebook, and extracted a sheet of paper from his pocket.

  ‘This should be an exact transcript of what you told me on Saturday night. Could you read through it, then sign it if you agree that it’s accurate?’

  She took the piece of paper from him, scanned it quickly, then reached for her pen.

  ‘What about the photographs you wanted me to look at?’ she said, scrawling her signature across the bottom of the page.

  From his other pocket he pulled out a plastic envelope but before he could shake its contents out onto her desk, they both heard a distant thud.

  Kate half rose to her feet, then slowly sat down again. If anything major had happened in the treatment room, Terri, or somebody else, would come for her. She knew that. She was fully aware of that, but the thud had sounded as though something or someone had fallen over. Maybe she ought to check it out, but Paul was on duty, and despite the fact that she didn’t like him, he wasn’t an idiot. Having said which…

  ‘Your department isn’t going to collapse simply because you’ve taken a half hour break,’ Mario declared, watching her, and she flushed.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s just you don’t think anybody else can do the job as well as you can,’ he observed. ‘So which are you—a control freak, or an over-compensator?’

  John had asked her that once, too, she remembered with a stab of pain. She’d yelled back at him that nobody ever questioned a man’s dedication to his work, and he had stared back at her for a long, silent moment, and then he’d walked away.

  ‘Kate?’

  Mario’s eyes were fixed on her, curious, thoughtful, and she sat up straighter.

  ‘I thought you wanted me to look at some photographs?’ she declared.

  For a moment she thought he was going to press the subject but, to her relief, he shook the photographs out of their packet onto her desk, then sat back.

  ‘Take your time. Don’t rush at it, but examine each one carefully.’

  She was sorely tempted to tell him she wasn’t an idiot, but didn’t. Instead, she did as he asked, but when she’d reached the last one she shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry. Nobody looks even remotely familiar. As I said before—’

  ‘You don’t run out into the waiting room and stare at the people sitting there,’ he finished for her. ‘Don’t worry about it. It was a long shot anyway, and thanks for trying.’

  ‘Is that everything?’ she asked.

  ‘Almost.’ He gathered up the photographs and pocketed them. ‘You might be interested to know we’ve got a full ID on Duncan Hamilton. He was originally from London, and had been doing casual work around Aberdeen for the past ten months. According to his widowed mother, he was a Grade A student who dropped out of university and had never been in trouble before.’

  ‘Then how in the world did he ever get mixed up in something like this?’ Kate said, and Mario’s face grew grim.

  ‘As I told you on Saturday, it can happen to anybody. The fixers prey on the weak and the unhappy. People who are in debt, people who think they’ll only have to be a mule or a body-packer once, and then all their worries will be over.’

  But it was such a waste of a life, she thought, as she remembered Duncan Hamilton’s face as he’d thrashed and gasped in agony on the trolley. He ought to have had his whole life ahead of him, and now his body was lying, cold and stiff, on a mortuary slab.

  And then something else occurred to her.

  ‘Your department knew Duncan was a body-packer, didn’t they?’ she said slowly. ‘I mean, if somebody collapsed in front of me, my first thought—even though I’m a doctor—wouldn’t be “body-packer”, and yet the security guards at the airport immediately thought that. They were expecting him, weren’t they?’

  A glimmer of a smile curved his lips. ‘My department could do with people like you. ’

  ‘And that is not an answer,’ she pointed out, and he sighed.

  ‘Yes, we had a tip-off about him. It happens sometimes. Just last week we picked up a girl from Colombia who turned out to have two kilograms of snow stuffed down her bra. ’

  ‘Snow?’ she repeated, and he nodded.

  ‘“Snow”, “Charlie”, “coke”, “nose-candy”—cocaine goes by as many names as it does uses. You can snort it, smoke it, inject it, or mix it with heroin. I understand that rubbing it onto somebody’s genitalia and then licking it off is considered very stimulating. Not that I’ve ever tried it myself, of course,’ he added.

  ‘Right,’ she said, all too aware that a tide of heat was creeping up the back of her neck, and irritated beyond measure that it was.

  Good grief, she was a doctor. She’d probably seen more female—and male—genitalia in her time than this man had eaten hot dinners, so what he was saying shouldn’t be making her blush, but it was.

  ‘Who tipped you off about Duncan?’ she asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  ‘His fixer.’

  ‘His fixer?’ she repeated. ‘But, why would the man who recruits the body-packers tip you off about one of his own?’

  ‘Because the fixer knows we can’t search every passenger who comes off a plane,’ Mario replied, ‘so sometimes he’ll phone us anonymously and give us a name. We arrest that mule or body-packer and somebody else on the plane, somebody who’s carrying perhaps twenty-five times the amount of cocaine of the person we’ve been tipped off about, walks free.’

  ‘So Duncan Hamilton could simply have been nothing more than an unwitting decoy?’ she said in disgust, and Mario smiled, a small bitter smile.

  ‘It’s a dirty business, Kate, but it’s also a very lucrative one. £6.6 billion is spent on drugs in Britain alone every year. There’s a huge demand for it, and the farmers in the poorer countries of the world are only too keen to supply that market.’

  ‘But why can’t they grow something else?’ she protested. ‘Why can’t they grow something that will help the world’s population, not destroy it?’

  The bitter smile on Mario’s face faded to be replaced by a gentler one.

  ‘Kate, if you were a dirt-poor farmer in Colombia, and coffee was selling on the world market for 35p a kilo while cocaine was fetching £2,000, what would you be growing? And £2,000 a kilo is peanuts compared to the mark-up. By the time that kilo has reached the UK it has a street value of around £35,000.’

  ‘Then you’re saying it isn’t ever going to change!’ she exclaimed. ‘That there’s nothing you can do that will stem the tide.’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. The things I’ve seen, Kate…Kids as young as twelve acting as body-packers, pregnant women…’ His face became suddenly strained. �
�I have to believe I can somehow—even in a small way—stop the death and destruction that these drugs cause. If I didn’t believe it, I couldn’t do my job.’

  And he did it well, she knew he did. She could see the complete commitment in his deep blue eyes. It was a commitment she understood, a commitment she shared towards her own profession, and she wondered if he’d had to pay a price for that dedication. She’d had to. Her dedication had cost her the love of a man who had once pledged to spend the rest of his life with her. Had Mario Volante needed to pay a similar price?

  ‘Mario…’ She came to a halt as the door of her office opened, and Terri’s head appeared. ‘Problem?’ she asked, and the sister shook her head.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you—in case you were concerned by the thud earlier—that it was nothing to worry about. Colin had a crasher in cubicle 6.’

  ‘Thanks, Terri,’ Kate replied and the sister’s head disappeared again, but not before she had glanced from Mario to Kate, then back again, with patent curiosity.

  ‘It’s amazing how often it’s not the patient who faints,’ Mario observed once they were alone again, ‘but the person who brought them in.’

  ‘How do you know that a crasher is somebody who’s fainted?’ Kate asked curiously. ‘Come to think of it,’ she added. ‘How do you know about August being the worst time to come into hospital if you’re a patient?’

  ‘Because I originally qualified as a doctor, but I found the hours a real killer.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said, not bothering to hide her disbelief, ‘and a policeman works nine to five, with every weekend off. Why did you give it up?’

  He raked his fingers through his too-long black hair, and smiled a little ruefully.

  ‘It was a mistake for me to go into medicine in the first place. My parents were both doctors, you see, and though they didn’t pressurise me into following in their footsteps I suppose I just sort of assumed I would. I became an A and E doctor—was eventually promoted to specialist registrar—but when I hit thirty…’ He shook his head. ‘I realised it wasn’t for me.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked, bewildered.

  ‘I’d spent six years treating car crash victims, victims of domestic abuse, neglected children, people completely spaced out on drugs, and I thought…’ He frowned, as though groping for the right words. ‘Setting broken bones, patching up injuries…I wanted to stop the broken bones from happening, nail the idiots who drove at 100 miles per hour in a 40 mile zone, collar the drug pushers who offered hits for fifty pence a time to ensnare the unwary, the unhappy, the desperate.’

  ‘You wanted to make the streets a safer place for all of us.’ She smiled, and abruptly he got to his feet.

  ‘Something like that,’ he muttered. ‘And now I must go. I’ve taken up more than enough of your time.’

  He had, but now that he was going, she didn’t want him to leave. She wanted to ask him why he’d chosen the drugs squad rather than any of the other police specialisations, to persuade him to tell her more about himself, and that, she thought wryly, was more than enough reason to push him out the door.

  ‘Will I have to appear in court?’ she asked as she followed him out of her office and down the corridor. ‘I mean, if you catch Duncan Hamilton’s fixer, will I be needed as a witness?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said, but he didn’t meet her gaze.

  Which was odd, she realised, because she was normally all too aware of his blue eyes burning into her.

  ‘Mario—’

  ‘There you are, Kate!’ Paul exclaimed, coming out of the treatment room clutching a clipboard. ‘Terri said you were talking to an old friend…’ The specialist registrar’s eyes took in Mario’s creased leather jacket, faded denims and beat-up trainers, and his lip curled slightly. ‘So I thought I’d better remind you—in case you’d forgotten—that you’re due at an M and M meeting in fifteen minutes.’

  Of course she hadn’t forgotten, she thought acidly. She wished she could. Morbidity and mortality conferences were a necessary evil after a patient died, but all too often the conferences became an occasion to embarrass the consultant in charge, and she was all too aware that there were more than enough people at the General longing to see her fall flat on her face.

  ‘That was very thoughtful of you, Paul,’ she replied as evenly as she could. ‘Is everything OK in the treatment room?’

  ‘Naturally,’ he said airily. ‘We had a gomer in cubicle 2 earlier but I turfed him.’

  A gomer. A and E shorthand for Get Out of My Emergency Room. A derogatory term applied to a geriatric patient who had multiple complicated medical problems rather than one acute one. Kate had never liked the term, and she liked it even less today.

  ‘Don’t forget you’ll be old yourself one day, Paul,’ she said, and saw the specialist registrar’s lips clamp down hard on the retort she sensed he was itching to make.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Mario observed as Paul hurried away in answer to his bleeper. ‘I don’t like him, either.’

  Professional courtesy told her she should immediately spring to her specialist registrar’s defence, but she was all out of courtesy today.

  ‘He’s a complete prat,’ she said, and Mario laughed.

  ‘Good luck with the D and D.’ His smile widened as he saw her confusion. ‘In my med days, M and M conferences were also known as death and doughnut affairs if they laid on refreshments.’

  She let out a gurgle of laughter. ‘I must remember that.’

  ‘See that you do, and don’t let the top brass grind you down.’ He held out his hand. ‘I might see you again, Kate Kennedy, and I might not. If I don’t, it’s been nice meeting you. ’

  It had certainly been different, she thought, as she shook his hand then dropped it quickly when she felt a warm tingle of sensation race up her arm, but it was better if she never saw him

  again. Her work was exhausting enough without added complications, and if Mario Volante was married then he was strictly off limits as far as she was concerned.

  And if he’s single? her mind whispered as she watched him walk away.

  He was still most definitely off limits, she told herself firmly.

  ‘Have those bozos in Admin ever tried to save the life of a body-packer?’ Terri asked, incensed, when Kate returned from her conference, stressed out and exhausted. ‘Do they have any idea of the complications, the difficulties—’

  ‘They play it as they see it, Terri,’ Kate interrupted wearily, ‘so let’s just forget it, OK?’

  And the sister said no more, but throughout the rest of their long and tiring shift Kate heard her muttering under her breath.

  She wanted to mutter, too, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Duncan Hamilton had died whilst under her care and, though nobody in Admin had come right out and said it, she knew there was always going to be the underlying implication that he might have lived if somebody else had been treating him.

  ‘Would you like a lift home?’ Terri asked when their shift finally ended.

  ‘Thanks, but I’d prefer to walk,’ Kate replied. ‘It might clear my head.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Terri said uncertainly, and Kate forced a chirpy smile to her face.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. It’s a lovely evening, and I could do with some fresh air.’

  She could, too, Kate thought, as she hitched her shoulder bag onto her shoulder, and left the hospital. It had been a long day, and an extremely tiring one. The kind of day when she wondered if it was worth it. The endless paperwork, the drunken abusive patients who almost never died, whereas the nice people, the kind people, all too often did. And then she remembered the little girl she had treated this afternoon. Her mother had been so certain her daughter had meningitis, and the look of relief and gratitude on her face when Kate had been able to tell her that the rash was simply an allergy had been worth more than winning the lottery.

  It was all worth it, she decided, breathing in deeply and savouring the late evening sunshine
as she stepped off the pavement to get past the scaffolding that had been erected round the Edwardian building on the corner of the street. Everyone had days when they wondered whether they’d made the correct career choice. Everyone had moments when they wondered whether this was all there was to life. OK, so maybe today she’d had a bad day, but every job had its bad days.

  Though maybe not quite as unremittingly awful as this one was turning out to be, she thought, as she felt someone’s hands slam into her back and the next thing she knew she was lying face down in the road.

  Mugger, was her first thought, but, as she turned, ready to hit out with her feet and fists at her assailant, she saw to her amazement that Mario Volante was kneeling on the ground behind her, covered in dust, and the shattered remnants of a baluster were lying in the road not six feet from where she’d been standing.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said, getting to his feet quickly. ‘Did any of that masonry hit you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she gasped. ‘Bit winded, that’s all.’ She squinted up at the building from which the baluster had fallen. ‘No wonder they’ve got all that scaffolding up. That place is literally falling to bits.’

  ‘Kate—’

  ‘Oh, hell, would you look at my skirt?’ she continued in dismay as she got unsteadily to her feet. ‘I’ll never be able to mend it, and I only bought it six—’

  ‘Forget about your skirt,’ he interrupted. ‘Did you notice anybody hanging about before the baluster fell?’

  ‘Did I notice…?’ Her mouth fell open. ‘You think somebody deliberately pushed that baluster, don’t you? Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mario. The building is simply unsafe, and I was unlucky enough to be walking past it when a bit fell off.’

  ‘Maybe. ’

  ‘Are all policemen this suspicious?’ she demanded. ‘Or are you just especially paranoid?’

  ‘Kate—’

  ‘And what are you doing here, anyway?’ she continued, her eyes suddenly narrowing. ‘Are you following me?’

  ‘Of course I’m not following you!’ he exclaimed. ‘I just happened to be conducting an enquiry across the street, and came out of the house as the baluster began to fall. Come on, my car’s over there. I’ll drive you home.’