by Sam Archer
As she stepped out through the hospital doors into the icy street, Melissa saw a passing bus with an advertisement down the side. The advert was for an exclusive jewellery shop. She found herself wondering what Fin was going to do with the necklace she’d seen him buy, for her, he’d said. She supposed he’d return it for a refund.
The cold wind batted at her face as she walked quickly towards the Underground station, making her eyes tear up and stream. By the time she reached the Tube entrance and prepared to descend the escalator into the depths, the sobs were threatening to burst free from her chest.
Chapter Eight
‘Merry Christmas!’ yelled a man across the road, walking arm-in-arm with his wife or girlfriend. Fin glanced around, saw nobody about and concluded that the man was hailing him. He waved back.
‘You too!’
Fin felt momentarily touched that this complete stranger had decided to wish him well, without prompting. But there was something undeniably magical about the season, something that brought out simple kindness in people.
Or perhaps the man simply felt sorry for him, a solitary figure walking the streets on Christmas Day.
Fin tightened his coat about him against the chill and strode up the hill. It had been an easy drive across town to the north London suburb, with very little traffic on the roads. Feeling the urge to stretch his legs, he parked the Jaguar at the bottom of the hill and made his way up on foot.
He’d visited Catherine every Christmas Day for the last three years.
It was usually a melancholy time for him. This year, the melancholy was mixed with intense shame, and guilt, over what had transpired between him and Melissa. What he’d allowed to happen, and how he’d handled it. But, as he’d decided during his midnight walk along the Thames, he was not going to let the feelings grow any stronger, still less dictate his actions for him.
Another reason he liked to walk up the hill, apart from the exercise it gave him, was that there was a flower seller halfway up. Even today, at Christmas, she was plying her trade. She beamed at him as he approached the stall, recognising him from countless visits before.
‘The usual, Mr Finmore-Gage?’
‘I think I’d like something a little different today, Mrs Patel, seeing as it’s Christmas. Something more elaborate.’
Fin was the first to admit he didn’t have much of an eye for which colour flowers went with which. Mrs Patel helped him put together a bouquet he found pleasing, one he thought Catherine might like.
Flowers in hand, he set off once more, and reached the wrought-iron gates.
The cemetery was largely deserted. Later on it would fill up, Fin knew, once people had enjoyed the rituals of gift-giving and dining with their existing loved ones and came to pay their respects to those who’d passed on. But for now, there was only the occasional visitor visible here and there amid the beautifully maintained lawns, mostly solitary people like Fin himself, though the majority were much older than him. Fellow widowers and widows.
Fin trod the familiar paths, as he’d done approximately once a week for more than three years. The grave was in the eastern part of the cemetery, well positioned to catch the morning sun, which was one reason he preferred to visit at this time of day. He picked it out with ease from a distance, despite its simplicity: a small plot with a simple marble headstone.
Fin laid the flowers before the headstone and straightened, gazing down at it.
In our hearts and memories, the inscription read. Catherine Finmore-Gage. Her date of birth followed, then her date of death. July 17, three years ago.
He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and slipped back effortlessly to that day. July the seventeenth.
He and Catherine had been living in a different flat from the one he owned now, in Notting Hill. The journey to St Matthew’s each day took up precious time but Catherine, who was a junior partner in a law firm, worked within walking distance of the flat and he was happy to oblige her. It was a hot summer’s evening, the flat’s air conditioning failing to keep the humidity of the city at bay, and Fin sat at his desk with the window open, preparing a lecture he was going to deliver at a conference in Edinburgh the following week.
As the light began to fade, he became gradually aware that Catherine wasn’t around. Looking up from his work, he realised she’d been gone some time. He checked his watch. Two hours. It hit him, then, that she’d put her head in at the door and said she was going out to the supermarket for some milk and bread, and would be back in fifteen minutes. He’d been so absorbed in what he was doing that he’d failed to notice she hadn’t returned.
Alarm turned to panic as he roamed through the flat, established that she was indeed still not home, and then began ringing their local neighbours and friends, on the off-chance that she’d stopped in to chat with one of them. Nobody had seen her. He put down the receiver after the last call and the phone rang. Fin snatched it up immediately.
Catherine was in the Accident & Emergency Department at the local hospital, not St Matthew’s. She’d been brought in an hour ago but it had taken some time to locate an address and phone number for her as all she’d had by way of identification was a credit card with her name on it. The credit card company had supplied her contact details and the hospital had rung Fin.
Catherine had been hit by a car as she was crossing the road on the way back from the supermarket. The driver had, according to eyewitnesses, been speeding, and hadn’t stopped after hitting her. She was unconscious on arrival at the hospital and had suffered multiple injuries.
Fin dropped the receiver and sprinted out of the flat and to his car, tearing through the streets and at one point narrowly missing a group of pedestrians – now wouldn’t that have been ironic – before pulling up outside the hospital in a howl of tyres. He burst through the doors of the A&E Department and raced from cubicle to cubicle, trailing a chorus of angry and confused shouts.
He found them in the resuscitation room, Catherine supine on the bed and an army of doctors and nurses working on her. One of the nurses tried to steer him back out but he explained tersely who he was and what he did, and after a glance at the consultant emergency specialist, she nodded for him to stay.
‘Tell me,’ he snapped at the consultant, who was the most senior doctor in the department.
‘Your wife has a skull fracture with an extradural haematoma, as well as a significant crushing injury to the chest. Cardiac tamponade.’
Catherine had bleeding on the brain, and blood in the sac surrounding her heart, putting growing pressure on the organ. Both severe, life-threatening injuries. In her case the heart problem was the more urgent one.
The A&E consultant explained that he’d carried out pericardiocentesis, the draining of blood from the sac. Fin looked at the heart monitor. The rhythm appeared normal.
He said, ‘She needs a pericardiectomy.’
The consultant shook his head. ‘Not indicated. Her heart’s looking good.’
‘The tamponade might come back.’
‘Then we’ll drain it again.’
Fin was accustomed to taking heroic measures. A pericardiectomy was an invasive procedure, an operation to cut open part of the sac surrounding the heart to ensure all the blood and other fluid was removed. He stepped forward, seized the other doctor by the lapels.
‘I’ll do it myself if I have to.’
The consultant put a hand in the middle of Fin’s chest and shoved him back. ‘Mr Finmore-Gage, control yourself. Or I’ll have security remove you.’
The next few minutes were etched on to Fin’s memory with exquisite, terrible clarity. Catherine going into cardiac arrest. The staff around her working in a frenzy. Fin trying to shoulder them aside and take charge himself. Somebody large and burly appearing from behind him, locking his arms and dragging him out of the room.
Catherine was pronounced dead thirty-seven minutes after Fin had appeared in the department. The staff had pulled out all the stops to save her, had done all they could reasonab
ly have been expected to do.
But for Fin, wracked by grief, they hadn’t done nearly enough. He hadn’t done nearly enough. He should have overridden the consultant, used the power of his reputation to impose his wishes, taken Catherine to theatre himself and operated. The fact that she had gone into cardiac arrest only seconds after he’d decided what she needed was something his crazed mind was unable or unwilling to accept.
More than that, Fin knew he’d let Catherine die by not being there for her sooner. If he’d noticed her failure to return from the shops even half an hour before he did, he might have tracked her down and been able to save her. The supermarket was only a few streets away; if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his wretched presentation, he might have heard the commotion through the open window, have at least been aware that there was some sort of to-do nearby and gone to investigate. He might have been able to help her then and there, or at least offset the damage before the ambulance arrived.
Instead he, Mr Daniel Finmore-Gage, one of the country’s leading trauma surgeons, had had to watch his wife die of traumatic injuries, ones he dealt with every day in his clinical work.
Looking down at Catherine’s headstone, Fin felt the commitment he’d made after her death solidify. It had wavered over the last few weeks, but now he felt it in his bones once more, strong and rooted. He didn’t know if it was possible to be both a great doctor and a great husband – he didn’t think so – but he was certain that it was possible to be bad at both. He’d failed Catherine as both a husband and a doctor. He wouldn’t – couldn’t – risk doing that again, to anyone. So he had to do two things. One was to double his efforts to become as close to infallible a surgeon as was humanly possible.
The other was never, ever, to allow anyone to become close to him again.
Fin remained for a few more minutes at the graveside before kneeling and touching his fingers to his lips. He placed the hand on the cold surface of the headstone and let it linger for a second. Then he straightened and headed back towards the gates.
***
It was when Melissa was emerging from theatre into the scrub room, peeling off her surgical gloves and shrugging loose the bloodied gown, that she realised something was wrong.
The man stood with his back to her, peering through the glass into the theatre opposite to the one she’d just come out of. He didn’t look like a nurse or a doctor, or like anyone else whose business it was to be in the scrub room.
‘Can I help you?’ she called.
It was New Year’s Eve, and Melissa had volunteered to do the night duty. It had nothing to do with recent events concerning Fin and with her desire to lose herself in work. She’d never been a big fan of the forced jollity of New Year’s Eve, the way every seemed to feel obliged to stay up and party till all hours, so it wasn’t as if she was missing out on anything she’d enjoy. Nine o’clock had brought in a stabbing victim, one of the casualties of a gang war. He’d needed opening up and repairing, something Melissa was by now well practised in, and she’d completed the laparotomy within an hour and a half. The internal injuries had turned out not to be as severe as they might have been. The boy had had a lucky escape.
The man at the glass turned swiftly to stare at Melissa. He was young, menacing-looking.
‘Where is he?’ he hissed between clenched teeth.
The shock nearly drove Melissa a step backwards but she held her ground. As neutrally as she could, trying to keep a tremble out of her voice, she said, ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Jason. He came in here.’ The boy raised his hand, and Melissa felt a stab of cold terror as she saw the harsh light glint off the blade protruding from his fist. ‘Got to finish the job.’
Melissa drew a deep breath, held it, and expelled it as evenly as she was able.
‘Put the knife down. Let’s talk about it.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ The young man took a step forwards, his eyes wide, his mouth hooked in a snarl. He brandished the knife in front of him. Panic clutched at Melissa’s chest, and this time she did shuffle backwards a fraction.
‘What’s Jason done to make you so angry?’
She understood that Jason was the boy she’d just operated on. This must be a member of the rival gang, perhaps even the man who’d stabbed her patient in the first place. He jabbed the knife in Melissa’s direction, making her flinch.
‘Tell me where he is.’
‘I don’t know who –’
‘Tell me where he is!’ His voice rose to a yell and he lunged at her. Melissa yelled and leapt back, colliding with a small trolley table carrying a pile of empty metal bowls. The bowls crashed off the wall and scattered clanging on the floor.
The noise seemed to panic the young man, who roared with frustrated anger and made after Melissa as she slid along the wall, trying to put as much space as she could between her and her would-be attacker. She felt her hip meet the resistance of one of the basins and realised she couldn’t make any further progress.
Many doctors and nurses had been attacked in the course of their duties, but Melissa had always managed to avoid it. She stared into the man’s eyes, the whites showing all the way round the irises. He was on something, she supposed distantly; some drug. His mouth was wide open and panting, and he held the blade up in front of his face like the ophthalmoscope she used to examine a patient’s eyes.
She felt the urge to close her eyes, but didn’t; she couldn’t take them off him as he advanced. Desperately she tried to remember what she’d learned about breakaway techniques and self-defence. She’d have to use her knee, or her foot. Or would her nails in his face be more effective?
The door to the second theatre flew open and Fin came through at a run.
As if his senses were heightened by whatever psychoactive substance he’d taken, the young man whirled and shoved the wheeled table which had held the bowls towards Fin. At the same time the man made a dash for the door leading out of the scrub room into the main theatre reception area. Fin stepped sideways to dodge the table, and while he did so the boy reached the door and disappeared through. A male theatre nurse, who’d followed close on Fin’s heels, burst through the door after the knifeman.
Melissa cowered against the edge of the basin, half slumping. For an instant Fin looked as if he was going to set off in pursuit of the young man. Then he stared at Melissa, and the next moment he had reached her and folded her tightly in his arms.
‘My God, are you all right?’
She nodded against his chest, unable to force out words. For a few seconds they stood there, his warmth surrounding her and cocooning her, her nose pressed against his chest where it was exposed above his surgical scrubs (he’d taken off his gown, she noticed), inhaling the male smell of him. He rocked her gently, and she felt his hand move up and caress her hair.
‘It’s okay,’ he murmured close to her ear. ‘He’s gone now.’
Melissa felt herself starting to tremble, uncontrollably, and as if he sensed this he wrapped his arms more tightly around her as though to relax his grip would be to allow her to shake herself apart. She whimpered, her voice muffled by his chest, as the realisation hit her of what a lucky escape she’d had.
No, not lucky. Fin had saved her.
She pulled her face away from his chest and gazed up at him. He looked down at her, his eyes grave with concern, scared even. As though he too was considering what might have happened.
‘I’d just finished up through there,’ he said. ‘Heard shouting. What was he doing in here?’
In a faltering voice, she explained how the young man was coming to finish what had been started on the other boy she’d operated on. Fin listened, still holding her. When she’d finished he pressed his lips on to the top of her head.
‘You kept you cool,’ he said. ‘If you’d panicked form the word go, there’s no telling what he could have done.’
She pulled her head away and gazed up at him again. ‘But you came to the rescue,’ she said.
‘He was going to cut me.’
Something passed through his eyes, a flicker of what Melissa had seen there in his office that night, moments before they kissed for the first time. A smouldering heat that threatened to ignite into full flame at any second. Quickly she reached up a hand to grip the back of his head and pulled his face towards her, arching up against him, her mouth seeking his. She felt his body respond down below, where his hips pressed against hers.
Fin bent his neck so that his mouth hovered inches from hers. He lowered so that his lips brushed hers, the tip of his tongue finding her own, gently probing.
Then he drew back, releasing his grip on her. Melissa felt as if a lifebelt was being loosened from around her in the middle of the ocean.
His eyes burned, the passion overwhelmed by something much darker and more agonised.
‘We can’t,’ he whispered.
Melissa straightened and, in doing so, glimpsed two of the nurses who had emerged through the theatre doors behind find. They stood and stared.
Still trembling, but now from a violent maelstrom of emotion that was more than simple delayed shock, Melissa tore off her surgical gown and flung it into the laundry hamper and strode out of the scrub room, not caring if the man with the knife was somehow lurking beyond.
***
By the following afternoon Melissa was tired of everyone asking her if she was all right.
The young man with the knife had been apprehended near the exit by the hospital’s security staff, who’d wrestled the knife away from him and kept him still until the police arrived. They’d taken a statement from Melissa, of course, and at the end had commended her on keeping her cool as she had. Melissa didn’t think there was anything to be applauded in what she’d done.
Fin had met her later with a couple of the hospital managers and they had asked her carefully if she was hurt. No, she’d replied; but she’d thought, not physically, anyway. Nothing in Fin’s expression gave a hint of what had passed between them earlier in the scrub room. The managers had asked if she wanted to go home early. Melissa declined.
