‘Go!’ Ginny said. ‘Sweet nothings yet! Get out of here, Max McMurray, and take your sweet-talking ways with you.’
She waved him away, but he stood his ground.
‘Can it happen? Have you thought about it at all—since we met again on Monday?’
Only every second second of the day, she could have said, but she was so confused she knew it would be wrong to offer false hope.
‘I could swear I heard someone suggesting we not rush things,’ she reminded him. ‘Could that someone have been you?’
His lips lifted into a quick smile and he put up his hands in surrender.
‘Guilty as charged, my sweet Ginny. But I didn’t say anything about not kissing you, did I? Surely I couldn’t be stupid enough to have made promises like that!’
He hesitated, and the moment was lost, for the rattle of a door opening made Ginny draw back, and the sound of Paul’s footsteps as he trod firmly along the veranda made her retreat even further.
‘One o’clock lunch?’ she murmured to Max, easing the door closed at the same time.
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘See you then.’
He turned to greet Paul but was thinking of honeyed kisses so he wasn’t really listening to the conversation—until Paul said, ‘I see in the morning paper they’ve identified the fourth victim.’
‘They have? I assume she’s a local. Did you know her or of her?’
‘Why should I?’ Paul’s stride shortened and he turned to frown at Max.
‘No reason at all, but living here…’ Max let the sentence trail away. He didn’t know why he’d asked the question, but Paul’s tetchy reaction was normal for a man who would have been extensively questioned by the police after Isobel’s death.
‘According to the newspaper report, she worked in a coffee-shop in a small group of shops in a southern suburb,’ Paul continued. ‘Apparently she’d recently shifted into her own flat so her parents didn’t realise she was missing until they tried to contact her last night. With Isobel, I contacted the police when she didn’t come home at her usual time. They told me not to panic, but an hour or so later I phoned again and told them what she looked like.’
He stopped talking as they crossed the road, then resumed his lament.
‘Even then, they didn’t do anything. Kept saying she might just be held up somewhere. I went out looking myself. Of course, the hall where she went to yoga was closed by the time I got there and I had no idea how to contact the person who ran the classes. In the end, the police discovered she hadn’t been to the class—that the animal had grabbed her earlier.’
Grabbed! Max stopped himself repeating the word—just in time. Grabbing someone, taking them forcibly, against their will, left tell-tale signs—like bruising on the upper arm. Ginny had raised questions about the lack of evidence of the women having struggled as they’d been strangled, and while this could be put down to some form of drug, the lack of force in the actual abduction was another mystery.
‘Given that two young women not unlike her had already been murdered, would your wife have gone off with a stranger?’ Max asked as they walked through the car park from which, it was assumed, Isobel had disappeared.
‘Only at gunpoint,’ Paul said grimly. ‘And sometimes I wonder if she’d even have gone then without shouting or making a fuss.’
‘Or if it was someone she knew?’
Paul turned towards him, his disbelief so obvious it was almost comical.
‘You’re not saying someone Isobel knew would have killed her? That’s insane. Impossible! She was wonderful. The sweetest, kindest, most generous woman imaginable. No. It had to be at gunpoint.’
He’d obviously thought it through, but even at gunpoint there’d still be force, Max thought. Bruises on her arm, where she’d been held.
But he didn’t have to tell Paul he didn’t believe this scenario.
They watched the boom gates lift as a car drove in.
‘Boom gates!’ Max muttered. ‘If Isobel was abducted by someone from the car park, how did the abductor drive out? You need a key card to open the boom gate.’
‘You can’t really believe that!’ Paul’s voice echoed his look of disbelief. ‘The police thought that at first, until someone pointed out that any number of swipe cards, from phone cards to train tickets, will open the gate.’
‘Train tickets?’ Max echoed. ‘Surely not!’
But Paul had lost interest in the conversation. He was watching two men disembarking from the car which had so recently driven in.
‘That’s the police back,’ Paul said, unnecessarily from Max’s point of view for the driver of the car was Brent.
‘You’re waiting for them?’ Max asked, as Paul remained at a standstill.
‘I’d like to know more about what’s happening,’ Paul explained. ‘Particularly now they’ve discovered the identity of this latest victim.’
Max decided life would be simpler if Paul didn’t know about his relationship with one of the investigating officers. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, and walked away, back through the now familiar entrance to A and E, although today he intended spending more time out the back.
Even though Ginny wouldn’t be there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
VOICES from within a green-curtained room indicated where the action was. Max found Sarah examining an older man while the paramedic who’d accompanied him to hospital was explaining the circumstances. He slipped into what he hoped was an unobtrusive spot in a corner of the cubicle.
‘His wife said he’d been feeling pain on and off during the night, but refused to “worry anyone” at night. She finally phoned the doctor who called an ambulance to bring him straight here.’
‘Does it hurt when I press here?’ Sarah asked.
She eased her fingers into the fleshy lower right quadrant of the patient’s abdomen.
‘It hurts all over,’ the man moaned, almost writhing with pain as Sarah continued her examination.
‘All the time, or in spasms?’ Sarah asked.
‘All the time!’
She questioned him as she worked. How old was he? When did the pain start? Had it begun as an all-over pain, or come and gone?
At the same time she was quietly issuing orders to the support staff, organising an X-ray, blood and urine samples. When had he eaten? Used his bowels?
The questions continued but the actual work of that preliminary examination didn’t stop, and Max was impressed with the woman’s quiet efficiency.
‘I can’t see you getting stressed in any situation,’ he told her later when the patient had been despatched for an exploratory laparoscopy.
‘Don’t you believe it! That one was easy. In fifty per cent of patients over sixty-five, surgery, even if it’s only exploratory, is required. Lack of fever and the man’s ability to move without intensifying the pain made peritonitis not very likely, so there wasn’t as much urgency as there could have been. X-rays don’t show much, but with a scan you can see trouble like a strangulated bowel.’
‘Next you’ll be telling me stress doesn’t exist in these departments.’
‘Not likely!’ Sarah told him. ‘Hang around. You’ll see plenty.’
Her forecast was correct. By lunchtime, when he dragged her away to meet Ginny for lunch, Sarah and the intern had treated five children injured in a school-bus accident, sending two home and admitting three—two with broken legs and another with a hairline fracture of her skull. She’d seen, by Max’s count, nineteen walk-in patients with ailments ranging from an allergic reaction to a bee sting to an elderly woman sent on by her GP and admitted with acute kidney failure.
Working in tandem with her, the intern had cleaned out numerous wounds, stitched and cut a variety of digits, admitted a severely dehydrated baby to hospital for further tests and, all in all, seen as many patients as Sarah.
‘The clerk and admitting nurse suffer the most stress,’ Sarah told Max, as they walked towards the lift to go up to the canteen.
‘The nurse does the triage work, sorting out priorities, so she cops the blame when someone with breathing difficulties comes in and the cut finger is bumped further down the line. And the clerk gets the complaints— “I was here before him, why’s he going in first?”’
‘Isn’t there some way you can get rid of the cut fingers?’ Max asked, though his attention had been diverted by the sight of Ginny walking purposefully down the hall ahead of them, stopping by the lifts to speak to someone.
‘Send him to his GP?’ Sarah shook her head. ‘A surprising number of people don’t have a GP, and use the hospital whenever they need attention. Then you get local accidents. A steel-worker who injures himself up on the fourth floor of a building job in the city isn’t going to drive out to the suburbs to see his local doctor when the hospital is only a couple of blocks away.’
‘So triage is essential?’
‘Absolutely,’ Sarah told him. ‘Hello, Paul. Hi, Ginny, we survived the morning without you.’
Once again Max was glad Sarah had taken control of the conversation. Apart from the trouble he was having with an acidic reaction to Paul Markham chatting with Ginny was the fact that Ginny looked so good.
Good? He had four degrees to his name and ‘good’ was the best he could come up with?
‘Hi, Max.’
Not only did she look good, but she sounded pleased to see him. Though she’d probably said, ‘Hi, Paul,’ with equal enthusiasm.
Max struggled with his wildly swinging reactions and emotions.
‘Is it so very tiresome to see me again?’ the source of this confusion asked.
‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.
‘You were sighing as if the world was coming to an end—or, at the very least, your income tax return is overdue. And you did invite me to lunch, if you remember.’
‘Of course he remembers,’ Sarah said, saving the situation by taking Ginny’s arm and leading them all into the lift. Well, nearly all of them. Paul stayed outside and though Ginny, apparently realising he wasn’t joining them, turned to say something to him, the doors closed and the lift began to move.
Max hid another sigh, this time one of relief.
‘You look great!’ There, he’d said it! ‘Really great!’
OK, don’t overdo it. Or find some word apart from ‘great’.
If Ginny had responded he might have done better but, apart from a surprised glance thrown in his direction, she was obviously far more interested in how Sarah had fared in A and E.
‘The department’s a nice size,’ Sarah said, in answer to Ginny’s question. She turned to Max. ‘I see where you’re coming from with your stress study, but part of the reason bigger departments are so much busier and obviously have higher stress levels is that more acute cases are sent on to them.’
‘But they still have the drop-ins, the less acute walk-in patients like the ones you’ve seen this morning,’ he argued.
‘We’re here,’ Ginny reminded them, and this time she led the way.
The workings of the A and E department remained the topic of conversation while they selected and paid for food, then carried it to a table. It continued until, during a lull between explanations of the consequences for the hospital of having larger A and E facilities—more patients admitted, so more hospital staff needed—Sarah was called away.
Max should have been pleased to have Ginny on her own, but as Ginny herself had reminded him the previous evening, the deaths of the young women should be taking precedence over his fledgling love-life.
‘I saw Brent earlier,’ he said, reluctantly steering their talk in the direction he needed it to take. ‘Did you know we were cousins?’
‘Does the relationship relate to the conversation?’ she asked, and he grinned at her.
‘In no way,’ he admitted, ‘but I didn’t want you to think I was chasing after the police in search of the latest gossip.’
‘Aren’t serial killers known for trying to insert themselves into the investigation?’ she murmured, while her eyes gleamed with teasing mischief.
Such beautiful eyes, he thought, immediately distracted from the point he wished to pursue.
‘Was your remark leading somewhere?’
Now it was the movement of equally beautiful lips that caught his attention.
Then an image of the dead woman flashed through his mind, and fear for future victims reminded him of the urgency of the investigation. Yet he still hesitated. Assuring Brent he’d bring up the subject with Ginny of looking at the videos was one thing but, now push had come to shove, it was hard to re-introduce the subject of the murders. Hard to ask the question.
‘I can always say no.’ Ginny’s remark startled him into a shamefaced grin.
‘I can’t believe I’m so easy to read,’ he complained. ‘But it is to do with you and it is a request.’
She was smiling at him now—no doubt, at his transparency, though possibly she saw it as stupidity. Whatever— the smile was causing even more problems for him than the slinky mini-dress, teasing eyes and curving lips had earlier.
He focussed on his salad sandwich in an effort to get his mind off Ginny and back to where it should be. The logistics of keeping the filling inside the bread should have been diversion enough, especially as the beetroot slices showed an alarming tendency to leap out and head straight towards his clothing.
‘Brent would like you to look at some videos,’ he said, pushing grated carrot firmly back into place and holding it there with his finger. ‘The ones from the mall outside the hairdressing establishment and from the department store. He thought you might just possibly see someone who seemed familiar on one of them.’
‘Someone I might recognise as having been a patient?’ Ginny said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s only a matter of looking,’ Max pressed.
She frowned at him, then gave a gurgle of laughter as the slice of beetroot finally escaped his control and hurtled downward towards his trousers.
‘I didn’t mean I didn’t know about looking at them,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know how reliable my memory would be for patients seen over a month ago in A and E. And the man might not have been a genuine patient—or even pretending to be a patient,’ she added, while Max tried vainly to eradicate the beetroot stain, first with his handkerchief then with a paper napkin. ‘He could have walked in and sat down and looked as if he was waiting for someone.’
‘Sarah didn’t assume I was waiting for someone when she called in Security to question me that first afternoon,’ Max reminded her.
‘A staff member had been murdered. I think everyone had reason to be extra cautious,’ Ginny replied, then she frowned as if considering the situation. ‘People come and go and not all of them are patients, though usually they’re with patients or are relatives of patients, which does make you wonder how he found Isobel.’
She looked across at Max and reassured him with a smile.
‘Yes, I’ll look at the videos. Whenever you like, though it should be soon if the man’s escalating his attacks. I know Isobel did other things and went other places, but when she was in a restaurant or at her yoga class, would someone noticing her casually have known she was a doctor?’
Max guessed where she was heading.
‘If she disappeared from here, he must have known where she worked so it’s probable he’d seen her at work.’
Ginny nodded, then she frowned again.
‘But the police have been through our videos as well. They must have experts—probably have computer programs—to pick out resemblances between people caught on different films. What good will me looking at the videos do?’
Max glanced around, realising belatedly the canteen wasn’t the best place to be having this conversation. There was a noisy crowd a couple of tables away but no one seemed unduly interested in their discussion, so he explained.
‘Given the decreasing time intervals and the fact that it’s been a very short timespan overall, the police are wondering i
f he checked out all the victims first.’
‘Stalked all four of them?’ Ginny murmured, in a voice suggesting the idea sickened her.
‘It’s only a possibility, but if it’s true then he was likely to have been in A and E more than a month ago, and the security people reuse the film after a month.’
‘I did talk to them about keeping it longer,’ Ginny assured him, ‘though I guess it’s too late to help this investigation.’
Max watched expressions shift across her face as she considered either his suggestion or the problem of security cameras.
‘Do the other places keep theirs longer?’ she asked. ‘If he set about finding all his victims first, he mightn’t show up on any of the ones the police have.’
‘That was always a possibility,’ Max told her. ‘In fact, a probability. But just in case…’
His hesitancy was rewarded with a smile.
‘Are you bound to a timetable?’ Ginny asked. ‘Do you have to stay in A and E for so many hours a day, or could we go back to my place and watch the wretched things now? I’d prefer to get it over and done with.’
She paused, then added, ‘I presume you have them. I don’t have to go to the police station, do I?’
An uncertainty in her voice made Max want to hug her but, given how delectable she looked, it might be dangerous to start something he would definitely not want to finish.
‘Yes, I have them, and as long as you have a video player we can watch them at your place, though if you like I could probably get a small conference room here at the hospital.’
Ginny studied him for a moment, the slight crease between her eyebrows suggesting she was puzzling over his offer.
‘They’re only videos of people,’ she eventually said. ‘Not the victims, or crime scenes, or anything I might not want to see?’
‘People going about their business in shops and malls,’ he assured her. ‘OK?’
A decisive nod of the head.
‘No worries! I’ll just go down and see Sarah, tell her I’ll be home again this afternoon if she needs me.’
A Woman Worth Waiting For Page 11
