‘Really!’ Susan said, with great interest. The girl in the news! What luck! Now if she could get baby brother to tell her whether she was going to sue or not … ‘I didn’t realise she was a patient of yours. I’ve read about her, of course, but the papers don’t always tell you the truth, the whole truth and so on. It must be quite an experience to have a famous patient. Especially when she could be a rich, famous patient.’
‘Patients are patients,’ Andrew told her. ‘Wealth and fame really don’t come into it.’
‘Ah but they do in this case, surely,’ Susan tried. ‘Or they will if the rumours are true. They say she’s going to sue the railway for half a million.’
Nobody answered that so she had to descend to a direct question. ‘Is she going to sue, Nick?’
‘How should I know?’ Nick said, busy with the salt. ‘That’s her affair.’
‘Quite right,’ Andrew approved. ‘It’s called keeping a professional distance, Susan.’
‘Poor girl,’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t suppose she’s had a chance to think about it in the last few days. She must have had a really awful time.’
Susan tried another tack. ‘What’s she like?’ she asked her brother.
‘Bloody hard work,’ Nick frowned.
‘Not the heroine we’ve been led to believe?’
‘Actually, she’s one of the bravest young women I’ve ever met,’ Andrew said. ‘Amazingly brave. You should have seen her at the crash.’
‘Oh she’s brave enough,’ Nick agreed. ‘I’ll give you that. She’s a fighter. She doesn’t give in. She’s got a lot of style.’ And he told them how she’d painted herself up like a clown and entertained the ward. ‘Caused quite a stir. But …’
‘But?’ Susan prompted.
‘She’s difficult.’
‘With reason,’ Andrew said and teased: ‘Maybe you’re not handling her the right way.’
‘Nobody could handle her the right way,’ Nick said with feeling. ‘She’s a law to herself.’
‘Good bedside manner, that’s all you need.’
‘It would bounce off.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ Susan asked.
‘She’s too independent,’ Nick said. ‘Won’t be helped. Well, take this for an example. She’s lost her flat – right? – so she hasn’t got anywhere to live when she’s discharged and she can’t five with her mother because they don’t get on. So she needs help – right? So I set everything up for a social worker to come in and find her a room in a hostel. And what does she do? She turns it down. Won’t so much as consider it. She’s going to find somewhere for herself, she says, if you ever heard of anything so ridiculous.’
Susan was laughing at him. ‘Diddums!’ she teased. ‘Wouldn’t she let him play God, then?’
He was needled. ‘It’s got nothing to do with playing God. It’s her behaviour that’s at fault, not mine. I’m doing my best, she’s just plain pig-headed.’
‘Hardly plain,’ Andrew said, still teasing. ‘I thought she was rather a beauty.’
‘She’s got one leg in plaster and the other amputated below the knee. She won’t be fitted for her prosthesis for another five weeks, never mind learning to walk, and she thinks she can go house-hunting. She’s impossible. She won’t let anyone help her. It’s like … It’s like trying to cuddle a hedgehog.’ Without warning he had a sudden, vivid memory of her anaesthetised face and his own ridiculous urge to hold her and comfort her. And he had to duck his head again, this time to hide his confusion.
Susan sent a rapid eye message to her mother: Smitten or what?
But Catherine had decided to rescue her son by changing the subject. ‘How’s the inquiry going?’ she asked.
‘According to plan,’ Susan said brightly. ‘Slow but sure. We’re off to Derby tomorrow to look at the coaches.’
‘Derby?’ Catherine asked.
‘That’s where they’re taken after a crash. Suits me fine. I can go back to York afterwards.’
‘And how’s Rob?’ her father wanted to know.
The conversation slid away into domestic trivia, as wine was poured and appetites were slaked.
‘We had a call from Chris on Friday, so Rob says,’ Susan told them. ‘They can’t come to our party after all. His conference date’s been moved, apparently.’
‘What a shame!’ Catherine sighed. ‘I thought we were all going to be together again.’
‘It was always on the cards,’ Andrew said. ‘If you’re the principal speaker at a major conference like that, you can hardly call off at the last moment. You’ll see them at Easter.’
Catherine made a face. ‘That’s months away.’
‘I hope you’ll all be there,’ Susan said and joked, ‘I mean you haven’t got any major conferences or anything, have you? TV appearances or famous patients to attend?’
‘We’ll all be there,’ Catherine promised. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve warned the media. Are we ready to clear?’ The first course of their family meal had been Drew’s responsibility but the sweet was hers and it was a pièce de résistance – a home-made raspberry pavlova, no less. She couldn’t wait to bring it to the table.
The phone rang as she was cutting out the first slice. ‘Wouldn’t you know it!’ she said. ‘I’ll bet it’s for you, Drew.’
And of course it was. ‘Mrs Courtney,’ he explained. ‘Fractured femur by the sound of it. Sorry about that, kids.’
‘Who’d be a doctor’s wife?’ Catherine said as they ate the pavlova without him.
They took their coffee into the living room as usual but Andrew’s absence filled the room. The evening had grown sombre as if he’d taken the fun out of it. ‘Will he be long?’ Susan asked.
‘Hours,’ Nick told her. ‘If it’s Mrs Courtney.’ The old lady was renowned for her spectacular falls. ‘If you’re going to wait for him, it’ll be a long wait. I shall have to go in a minute. I promised Abdul I’d be with him about ten and it’s half-past now.’
‘In that case I shall make tracks too,’ Susan said. ‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow.’ It wouldn’t have hurt little brother to have told her what she wanted to know but he plainly wasn’t going to. ‘I’ll phone you when I get back from Derby, Mum.’
Catherine watched them drive away into their own lives, Susan waving red-tipped fingers, Nick sounding his horn in his customary farewell. They’d given her a lot to think about and she was still deep in thought when Drew finally came home. It was well past midnight and they were both tired but they finished their day as they always did, discussing the main events as if they were folding it away.
‘Nice to see the kids again,’ he said, pouring his necessary whisky. ‘Sue was on form.’
‘Do you think Nick’s fallen for that girl?’
‘What makes you ask?’
‘Sue thinks so and he talked about her rather a lot.’
Andrew considered it. ‘It’s possible,’ he said easily. ‘All interns get a crush on their patients at some time or another. Especially if they’re pretty. It’s fairly normal. Get carried away with sympathy; fall in love; mope around for a week or two; girl goes home; get over it and forget it.’
‘Ah!’ she teased. ‘So that’s what you did.’
‘Not me,’ he told her, teasing back. ‘Never got the chance. Not once I’d met you. Hooked I was, as you very well know.’
‘Do you think she really is as difficult as he says?’
‘No. He can’t handle her. That’s all. I got on with her rather well. She’s a good kid. Sensible. She was quite right to turn the hostel down. She deserves better than that.’
‘You’d send her to the Savoy, I suppose.’
‘I’d put her in with a family. See she got a bit of TLC. That’s what she needs. Somewhere like our granny flat.’
Catherine raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re not suggesting she comes to live with us?’
He wasn’t. But her question made him consider it. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘She’s a good kid and it woul
d only be for a week or two. Yes. Why not? It might be just the thing.’
‘Who for?’ she asked. He was looking rather too devilish for her comfort.
‘Well, Gemma principally. But us too, in a way. It would be nice to have a young face in the house.’ He grinned at her. ‘And it would show Nick what can be achieved with a good approach.’
‘You’re impossible,’ she laughed at him. ‘You can’t do this.’
‘No, probably not,’ he agreed. ‘She might turn us down too. But we could offer it and see what she says?’
‘And who’s going to do all this offering?’ He made his familiar grimace. ‘In other words I am, is that it?’
‘You could go and see her,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘Test the water.’
‘It won’t work,’ she warned. But, as he was so insistent, she agreed to visit on her next afternoon off. If Nick really was falling for this girl it would be sensible to meet her. And Drew was right. She might not accept the offer when it came to it. She probably wouldn’t.
Having settled things to his satisfaction, Andrew put down his empty glass. ‘Time for bed,’ he said. ‘We’re due in the surgery in eight and a half hours.’
In nine and a half hours Susan was carrying her impatience to the railway technical centre at Derby. It didn’t take her more than ten seconds after her arrival to discover that it was quite the wrong place for it. After her ineffectual week and her brother’s irritating lack of co-operation, she needed speed and success, and this was the slowest place she’d ever been in, a dragons’ graveyard, full of rust-stained ruins, crushed and defeated and never to move again. Even the echoes were subdued here and the inspection teams moved among the corpses like boiler-suited undertakers, quiet and sober and speaking in soft voices. As she and her team were led towards the wreckage of their particular crash, she felt completely out of place striding along in her brisk business suit, and that made her even more impatient.
The chief investigator was waiting for them, ready to introduce himself, smiles were exchanged, the chairman established his credentials as a ‘former director of safety and quality at British Rail’s research division.’ Susan was given both her titles, secretary to the inquiry, senior executive with British Rail, York, and the other members of the inquiry were introduced one after the other. It was all very quiet and laid-back and hideously slow. Oh come on! she thought, watching the interminable handshakes, or we shall be here for ever.
But as it turned out, the chief investigator was a man who came straight to the point.
‘If you will follow me, ladies and gentlemen,’ he suggested, leading them to the first battered carriage, ‘I think I can show you the cause of your accident.’
It was a fractured axle. ‘Collapsed, you see,’ he explained, pointing to the break with one broad finger.
‘Before or after impact?’ the chairman wanted to know.
‘Before,’ the inspector told them. ‘There’s no crushing, do you see, which we would have expected if it had been damaged by the crash. No. That’s your villain. Fracture, collapse, and over she goes.’
‘You’re sure about this?’ the chairman asked.
‘It looks pretty conclusive to me,’ the inspector said. ‘I’ve written a full report but I thought you’d like to see the evidence first.’
We’ve spent a week looking in all the wrong directions, Susan thought, and the answer’s been waiting for us here all the time. It seemed appalling that one small piece of metal could have killed twenty-seven people, to say nothing of all the others it had injured.
‘What caused it to fracture?’ she asked.
The reply was crisp. ‘Age and lack of maintenance. That chap on the telly was right. When a public service is required to make a profit for shareholders, safety standards go out of the window.’
‘Who owned the stock?’ one of the inquiry team wanted to know.
‘That I couldn’t say for sure,’ the inspector told them. ‘Changes come in so quickly these days, I can’t keep up with them. It’s all we can do to cope with accidents and investigations.’
The chairman knew the answer but he didn’t tell his team until they were back in their hotel and had gathered in the boardroom.
‘Railways South,’ he told them. ‘Ms Pengilly will arrange for them to give evidence.’
‘Are we putting out a statement to the press?’ Susan asked.
‘Not until the inquiry is complete,’ the chairman said. ‘We must consider all the angles. No need to jump the gun. I suggest we study the report at our leisure and see what the rest of the week will bring.’
It brought two more revelations, although getting them admitted took skill. The suspect carriage had been sold off to an American operator, as part of a job lot after a privatisation deal, and he had then sold them on ‘possibly without a maintenance check’ to a second company, who faxed that they were sure there had been maintenance work carried out but ‘were not, at this point in time, in a position to provide details.’ The lack of details hadn’t prevented them from selling half the carriages they’d bought to the new private company who were currently running them and who couldn’t find any maintenance records for them either, although they assured the inquiry that they were sure they were ‘filed away somewhere.’ There was little doubt in Susan’s mind that the carriage in question had not been properly maintained for several years, and what was more, that there were four thousand others that could well be in a similar state of disrepair. But proving it in a court of law would be extremely difficult. If that girl of Nick’s is really going to sue, she thought, she’ll have a job on her hands.
However it was Railtrack’s evidence that caused the most concern. They were questioned about the lack of rail-mounted recovery cranes and admitted that six months before the accident the company had reduced the number of such cranes from eleven to five and that there were none at all based in Scotland. Their spokesman claimed that the reduction had no real significance, on the grounds that these were ‘train-mounted breakdown cranes we are talking about. They’re not like the emergency services. The cranes and the people who work them have no life-saving role.’
But the chairman was quick to point out that fewer cranes of this type meant that Railtrack now had much larger areas to cover and that this was bound to affect their response times to the scene of a derailment. Which had to be admitted.
It was damning evidence, as the chairman admitted privately to Susan after the other members of the team had gone home.
‘We must be very careful how we handle this,’ he warned. ‘It would be relatively easy to imply negligence – hideously difficult to prove of course with so many companies involved – but relatively easy to imply. It might well lead to litigation. Is there any more news on that front?’
‘Only what we can glean from the tabloids,’ Susan told him, her annoyance with Nick renewing.
‘Um,’ the chairman said. ‘It occurs to me that it might be politic to send a private note to Railways South to suggest that some sort of compensation should be offered. To the worst injuries perhaps, if nothing else. A pre-emptive strike, as you might say. If this business does come to court, it could be a long hearing with so many interests involved. The expenses could be enormous. What do you think?’
Like the good civil servant she was, Susan forbore to point out that it had been her idea originally. ‘Very wise,’ she approved. ‘Are we issuing a press statement now?’
‘I suppose we’ll have to give them some sort of preliminary report,’ the chairman said. ‘Discreet, of course. Oil on troubled waters. That sort of thing.’
But although Susan wrote in the most diplomatic terms she could contrive, even quoting the company excuses verbatim as though they could be believed, the press were quick to pick up the implications.
On Thursday the London Evening Chronicle made it front-page news in their early edition, with a headline in letters six black inches high: POOR MAINTENANCE CAUSES CRASH. And at lunchtime, the press pack re
turned to St Thomas’s hospital.
Chapter 9
Gemma didn’t tell her mother anything about the social worker’s ridiculous offer. It would only have upset her and it had all been dealt with so there was no need for her to know. On the other hand, she was disappointed when Dr Quennell didn’t appear on ward rounds because she was looking forward to giving him a piece of her mind. Still, she’d been in hospital long enough now to know that doctors work very odd hours, and very long ones, so she knew she would see him sooner or later. And on mature consideration later might be preferable because it would give her time to think of something really stinging to say. In the meantime there were plenty of other things to occupy her.
As the days passed, and one glance at a time, she was gradually coming to terms with her changed appearance, especially now that her lesser scars were fading and her bruises had dimmed from black, blue and mauve to a general greeny-yellow. Her nights were still broken by nightmares but by day she was busy learning how to cope – discovering how to slide her injured leg out of the bed and into her chair, how to heave herself on to the toilet seat, how to dress herself sitting down, how to arrange her short hair to cover the worst of that scar, even how to take half a shower and leave her encumbered limbs unwatered. And she’d worked out how many weeks she would have to wait until her plaster was removed. It seemed a painfully long time but every day brought her nearer the moment.
On Saturday morning, she persuaded a porter to take her down to the shopping area, and having withdrawn some of her remaining cash from the hospital bank, she asked to be wheeled into the restaurant so that she could treat herself to lunch. She enjoyed it so much that she decided to make a daily habit of it – while the money lasted. It gave her a break from the endless activity of the ward, a time when she could think without being interrupted, and it comforted her to look out at the speed of the city, to be reminded that there was still bustle and purpose beyond the hospital gates and, more importantly, that she would soon be back there and part of it. Her energy was steadily returning and, despite her altered appearance, so was her optimism.
Gemma's Journey Page 9
