The Practice Baby

by LM Ardor

  About The Practice Baby

  GP Dee Flanary risks her reputation, her livelihood and ultimately her life when she investigates the death of a patient. As Ian Rankin evokes Edinburgh and Jane Harper the Australian bush, this terrifying yet tender thriller immerses us in Sydney and the wild mountains of southern NSW.

  Tom's corpse lies cold and decaying on his bed. Can Dee fight the coroner, the police and the medical establishment to prove his death was murder? As she delves into the circumstances around his tragic fate she uncovers a trail of apparently 'accidental' deaths and a sinster connection to her own past.

  Suspicion and paranoia fight with reason as she tries to uncover the truth. Her discoveries threaten powerful men. The medical board label her psychotic, her deregistration is imminent. If she persists her career and her livelihood will be at risk.

  When the killer attacks Tom's naïve young girlfriend, Dee is forced into an edge-of-your-seat confrontation with a cold and ruthless murderer.

  Contents

  About The Practice Baby

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  Part 2

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  57.

  58.

  59.

  60.

  Part 3

  61.

  62.

  63.

  64.

  65.

  66.

  67.

  68.

  69.

  70.

  71.

  72.

  73.

  74.

  About LM Ardor

  Copyright

  Prologue

  The bedroom was neat and still. A double bed was made up with white sheets, an olive-green spread and a single white pillow. In the yellow indirect light that seeped through the heavy curtains it could be a stage set, ready for the call ‘Action’.

  The corpse was neat too. It was dressed in Tom’s clothes: white shirt, beige pants, polished shoes and a brown cord jacket. It was flat on its back, head centred on the pillow, arms by its sides, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling above. A single fly moved across the glazed left eyeball.

  Anyone could see it was a dead body, a lump of meat, not a person.

  Her job was to declare the body dead, to make it official. She pulled on gloves, knelt on the edge of the bed to reach for the pulse at the angle of the jaw. The mass jiggled as the mattress moved and a strong odour wafted up. Her lower jaw and chest were hollow, empty spaces for tears. But it wasn’t the smell or the presence of the body that bothered her—as a GP she had seen and smelt worse—it was the absence of Tom.

  The body on the bed wasn’t him. The inanimate lump had his shape, his dense black curls and it was dressed in his clothes. But this mass, these seventy kilograms of unrefrigerated flesh, was not Tom. Tom was gone.

  Part 1

  1.

  ‘Why is my life always less important than some stranger’s death?’ Beatrice yelled from the top of the walkway to the house.

  Dee opened the car door. She put the keys in the ignition but didn’t get in. She gave herself a moment to take in the view and resist the urge to respond.

  It was a perfect spring morning. Down the slope, between smooth cream and grey eucalypt trunks, patches of harbour flashed deep blue, dotted white with sails. The sun reflected up to spotlight outcrops of golden Sydney sandstone in the bush.

  This could go two ways. All the things Dee wanted to say: that she had to work to keep the four of them; that work included care for patients in their last moments; emergencies couldn’t be scheduled; that she had needs too, including the need to do her job well, which also provided for them all. The bond she’d formed with Tracy O’Neill through seven years of cancer treatments didn’t turn off at 7 pm each day.

  None of those arguments would dent Bea’s hurt. She was stung by what to her was treacherous neglect by her own mother. Dee’s needs were blown away in the maelstrom of teenage injustice. It was best to let the storm run its course.

  ‘Bea, I’m late, I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘Just let me drive as far as Sailor’s Bay Road.’

  ‘There’s no time, and your father doesn’t want you to learn to drive from me—he can pay for lessons. Let him sort it out.’

  Rob had moved to the inner city two years ago and was a newly minted enviro-moralist. His voice as he pronounced on the virtues of public transport set Dee’s teeth on edge.

  ‘Maybe you’d have time for me if I made an appointment at the surgery?’

  Dee didn’t have the energy for this.

  ‘It’s eight minutes till my first patient—we’ll talk tonight.’

  ‘You’ve got your bloody GP meeting tonight,’ Beatrice screamed at her.

  ‘Tomorrow then, and calm down. That sort of talk is very unattractive.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Beatrice turned on her heel and went inside. She tried to slam the heavy frameless glass door behind her but it swung gently into place on the hinges Rob had designed.

  Rob. Why couldn’t he sort it all out? He was the famous architect; designer of ‘the Glasshouse’ where Dee and the kids still lived after he’d moved to the city with Stephanie, a student thirty years his junior. Now he had babies—twins. It served him right, but it meant less time for his other children. Why did Bea have to suffer for his ridiculous libido?

  Six minutes to eight—Dee threw her bag onto the passenger seat and started the car. She was halfway through the three-point turn required to get out of the cul-de-sac when Bea ran out of the house with shoes, socks and backpack in her hands.

  ‘Just as far as Flat Rock Drive?’ Bea smiled and buckled herself into the passenger seat.

  ‘I’m late,’ Dee protested as they roared off.

  ‘I know. You’re always late. Thanks,’ Bea said with another smile.

  At the lights, Dee looked over at her sixteen-year-old—an early Renaissance beauty with Rob’s smooth olive skin and a gentler version of Dee’s red hair and green eyes. Bea, in a half put-together school uniform, a slice of Vegemite toast flopping from her hand, had transformed from screaming harridan to loving daughter.

  Dee looked again. Was that mascara? Time enough for makeup but not for shoes? She bit her tongue—not now. Maybe the school would sort it out.

  ‘I can skip the meeting if you like.’

  ‘No, tomorrow’s okay.’

  ‘You’ll have to jump out when I can stop at the turn into Brook Street.’

  At the top of the hill, they turned and found the traffic backed up. Each change of traffic lights only let through one or two cars. She was going to be at least fifteen minutes late. Not good for som
eone who kept people waiting the rest of the day. The morning slots were always snapped up by people who didn’t want to wait. It was eight past eight.

  ‘Ring Janelle and let her know I’m late.’ Dee fumbled in her handbag and gave Bea her mobile phone ‘Put her on speaker.’

  ‘Hi Janelle, I’m late. Be there in—’

  Janelle cut her off. ‘Well, the first one’s not here yet, and it’s a double.’ She sounded brisk.

  ‘Good, offer them a coffee when they arrive. Who is it?’

  ‘Tom Harris.’

  ‘Tom?’ Dee echoed. ‘Are you sure he’s not there?’

  ‘Unless he’s wearing his cloak of invisibility,’ said Janelle, sharp now.

  ‘Can you log into my emails and messages and check if he left a message? Oh and ring me if he arrives.’

  The phone clicked off. Three cars ahead had made it through the lights. Dee didn’t notice. The car behind them tooted.

  ‘Mum, the traffic’s moved.’

  Dee shook her head and inched the car forward.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Tom would never be late. Something’s happened.’ His recent visits had made Dee uneasy.

  ‘Everyone’s late sometimes, look at you.’

  ‘I’ve known this boy since he was born, if he was going to be late he’d let us know. Something is wrong.’

  A gap opened up. Dee didn’t notice; didn’t move.

  ‘Mum, what’s wrong with you? Move.’

  Dee came back from her anxious thoughts. She put her foot on the accelerator and managed to squeeze past a car turning right with a centimetre to spare on each side. She roared down the hill and got through the next lights on orange.

  In Brook Street, she put on her hazard lights and stopped in the clearway.

  ‘Quick, go!’

  The lights turned green. The blonde in the huge four-wheel drive behind them blared her horn continuously as Bea gathered bag, blazer, shoes and socks.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dee yelled at the blonde, ‘why don’t you take your off-road vehicle cross-country, fuck features?’

  ‘Very unattractive way to talk, Mum.’

  ‘It’s okay, she can’t hear me. Come on, out, before she drives over us.’

  ‘Hope your patient’s all right. Love you, Mum.’ Bea leaned over for a kiss before she opened the door and stumbled over to a low wall to sit and put on her shoes and socks.

  At the turn into the expressway, Dee sneaked up the outside lane and forced her way into the line of cars.

  ‘Idiot, for fuck’s sake, drive!’ she shouted from the safety of closed windows as the silver Range Rover in front of her failed to take advantage of a gap in the traffic.

  After twenty-six years she could predict the traffic on the route from Castlecrag to Pyrmont to the second. The turn onto the expressway went smoothly and she sailed across the Harbour Bridge in the middle lane, centimetres from the huge trucks rushing the other way. The speed limit was seventy but she wouldn’t get booked if she stayed under seventy-eight.

  As they came off the bridge onto the Western Distributor, the driver in front of Dee dithered, straddling two lanes.

  ‘Fucking bloody make up your mind, fart features.’

  There was just enough space between him and the guardrail. Dee accelerated and got around him. There wasn’t a speed camera in this section. She risked it and sped up to ninety.

  With a brief slowdown for the speed camera on Harbour Street, she flashed through an orange light to get across Harris Street, rounded the block to the car park and skidded into the parking spot. Her driver training from the Army Reserve was still useful after all these years.

  The surgery car space was the only place in the universe where no one could contact her—no one could ask her to do anything. Nothing worked, wi-fi or phone, and no one could even see someone was in the car without being right up close. Usually she sat for two to three minutes to enjoy no one and nothing: no kids, no staff, no patients, no one else’s needs. Today it failed to soothe her. Without the distraction of driving, her thoughts wandered around what might have happened to Tom. Her breakfast became a heavy stone in her gut.

  Dee checked the time on her phone. Eight eighteen. Why would Tom not turn up? She got out of the car and went upstairs.

  Inside the surgery, Janelle handed her a takeaway coffee. ‘Sorry it’s cold. Will I get you another one?’

  ‘No, it’s fine, as long as it’s got caffeine …’ Dee paused, not wanting to hear the answer to her next question. ‘No message from Tom?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Janelle put her hand out to touch Dee’s arm. ‘Are you okay? You look pale.’

  ‘I feel a bit odd, it’ll pass. Tracy died last night and I didn’t get home till midnight but now I’m worried about Tom.’

  ‘He probably got confused about the date.’ Janelle didn’t know Tom as well as Dee. She didn’t realise he would never miss an appointment. ‘Should I ring him?’

  ‘No, I’ll do it.’

  Patients missed appointments all the time and, normally, the free time was good. It was a chance to catch up if she was running behind or attack the mountain of report requests and letters in her in-tray. Usually she welcomed a missed appointment.

  She rang Tom’s mobile and got the ‘switched off or not in a mobile service area’ message from the phone company. She pushed the coffee aside. She didn’t have the stomach for it anymore.

  Tom’s phone was part of him, an extra hard drive for his brain. There was no way he’d let it run out of battery or switch it off. He was always on time. In the twenty-five years she had known him, he had never been late or missed an appointment, except when he was an infant under the control of Skye.

  His obsessiveness made sense as a reaction to life with his disorganised mother. Any inborn predilections for order and routine, any tendency to an obsessional personality style, were amplified by Skye’s incapacity to be organised and her reliance on marijuana to deal with stress. There was no order in the world Tom found himself in so he set about creating it. When his younger brother turned out to be severely autistic, Dee wondered if there was a genetic predisposition to Asperger’s as well.

  She got up and closed the door to her surgery. It gave a solid click. Her room was a safe space: black desk, black leather chairs, grey wool carpet, pale blue walls and a Japanese screen to hide the couch and medical paraphernalia.

  She logged in and clicked on his file. Tom’s first visit was when notes were handwritten so the computer file had dates but no details. As soon as she saw the date, five days after his birth, Dee remembered the first time she’d seen him. It was for a newborn baby check. He was the first of the ‘practice babies’—people she’d looked after from birth. In Tom’s case, she had diagnosed his mother’s pregnancy, provided antenatal care and listened to his heartbeat in the womb.

  On that first visit with him, Skye was frazzled with sore, cracked nipples and fear that she was a failure as a mother. The idea that breastfeeding was a skill to be learned by both mother and baby confronted her worldview that anything natural would come automatically.

  Tom was healthy but hungry; three kilos of determination to survive whose only weapon was to cry.

  Dee held him while Skye climbed onto the couch. He immediately stopped crying. It was well before Dee had her own children and, with one unfocused look of trust, he tunnelled his way into her heart. It felt like she’d had a part in his production. She and Rob had delayed babies to establish their careers. Maybe she was broody, a hen in need of an egg to sit on, brain primed to squirt oxytocin into her blood and create a bond with this new being. She had never confessed the bond to anyone, not even herself, till now.

  Tom’s severe childhood asthma meant she’d seen him often. Watched too many times as the little boy in pyjamas perched on the side of his bed, blue and exhausted with the struggle to breathe through bronchial tubes that were spasmed and filled with mucus.

  Skye loved her son but was not alert to the warning sig
ns of an asthma attack. She forgot his medication or stopped it for some new miracle anti-asthma diet. Denial was her first line approach to any problem. It made her a hopeless judge of when it was time to call an ambulance to get her son to hospital. As Tom grew older he learned to manage his own medication and had been well, apart from a brief period of teenage rebellion when he was seventeen. In that year he’d come close to death twice. He’d frightened himself and never again allowed his asthma to get out of control.

  Once he was put in charge of his own treatment with an asthma management plan he hadn’t had a serious attack. The obsessive traits in his personality made him a perfect patient.

  Tom made Dee feel unequivocally good. He always had a joke for her and he had a satisfyingly treatable medical condition. He was so much easier to deal with than her own children.

  While she looked through her notes from the last few consultations, she saw him, limbs unfurled, in the chair opposite. Tight black curls fell over his impossibly long-lashed eyes. He pushed his fingers through his hair like a comb to flick the curls back. He had no idea he was attractive.

  The lights in her surgery were dim. The white and black curtain at the big window next to her desk gave a glow of twilight—a space for patients to bare their bodies and their most intimate fears.

  Dee’s own fears were the problem this time. A tangle of vague anxieties she’d had for a couple of months coalesced into a web of fear. No—it was calmer, more hopeless than fear. It was grief. Somehow, she knew it was too late already; something had happened to Tom.

  2.

  Eight weeks earlier, Dee had seen Tom’s name on the waiting room list and wondered why he was there. His asthma management plan wasn’t due for review yet.

  She drained her coffee and ran a hand through her unruly red hair to get it off her face. She walked down the hall. In the waiting room, four heads bobbed up; eight eyes focused on her; four sets of lips parted slightly in anticipation that their turn had come.

  ‘Tom, come in.’ Dee beckoned the young man in a corduroy sports jacket.

  Tom unfolded his long legs, like a newborn foal surprised at having a body. In the surgery he refolded his limbs into the chair next to her desk.