George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (13 page)

‘I grovel. Don’t sue me this week, huh? Leave it till next time. Only I swear there won’t be a next time. Until I’m invited, that is… So, did you have a good weekend?’

She looked back at it in her memory and grimaced. ‘Oh, sure.’

‘Like that, was it? Me too. Busy but no fun. Have you had breakfast yet?’

‘I wasn’t going to bother.’ She locked the car and began to walk towards her department. ‘I have a lot to do.’ But he steered her away towards the canteen block.

‘Not healthy. A person needs her breakfast. A pathologist needs it more than a person does, seeing she has such an onerous burden of work to face.’

‘More onerous than a researcher’s?’

‘Oh, much more. All those PMs and tests and the masses of paperwork and computer fiddling —’

‘How right you are!’ she said feelingly. ‘That’s the part I dislike most. Still, it has to be done.’

‘Can’t you hand it over to your staff? I try to get some other guy to do it every chance I get. Not that I get as much as you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have that huge a staff, you know, and most of ’em have very specific jobs of their own: histology and biochemistry and so on. I can’t just drag them away to deal with data just because I don’t enjoy doing it.’

‘Poor you.’ They’d reached the canteen where a flutter of night nurses was making a fair amount of noise over the last meal of their working day. There was a smell of not very good curry in the air which made George wrinkle her nose in distaste.

‘Poor me indeed. God, that smells horrible. How people can eat curry at eight a.m. is beyond me.’

‘To them it’s an evening meal,’ he said, reaching for a tray. ‘What’s for you then? Bacon and eggs and all things cholesterol?’

‘Muesli and orange juice and all things fibrous,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it tastes better. They don’t have to cook it. Tea or coffee?’

‘Since they both taste equally foul, I leave the choice to you. You find a table, I’ll pay.’

‘Make a note of my share. I pay my own way,’ she said. He
opened his mouth to protest but she just looked at him very directly indeed with her brows up and he subsided.

‘Oh, indeed, indeed, She-who-must-be-obeyed,’ he murmured.

‘Oh, did you read that book too?’ She felt a warm surge of pleasure. ‘It was one of my favourites when I was a kid.
She
—’

‘By Rider Haggard. Of course I read it. It was real sexy.’

‘Wasn’t it just! If my Ma had known what sort of tale it was, it’s my guess she’d have pushed me back at
Little Women
.’

‘They made me read
The Last of the Mohicans,’
he said. ‘I preferred Ayesha and
Sanders of the River
every time.’

They found a table and settled to eat, still talking eagerly of the books they’d read as children, until George spotted Jerry leaving the canteen, having finished his breakfast, and sighed. ‘I have to get to work,’ she said. ‘That paperwork, remember?’

‘So what sort do you have?’ He sounded only politely curious and she laughed.

‘You don’t really want to know.’

He straightened up. ‘Oh, I do, I do,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in everything you do. So tell me. I insist.’

‘Oh, well, if you
insist,’
she said. ‘There are all the assays to spot check, to make sure the staff are up to the mark. There are the costings on all sorts of procedures to keep Ellen — she’s the Business Manager — happy and to keep my budget in good shape. There’re staff assessments for the personnel department. There’re the reports I have to make on postmortems and pieces of special evidence I might have to give in court. There are —’

‘God,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed. But it’s very routine stuff, isn’t it? Don’t you have any of the fun data to play with? Research results, say? I mean, some of the research that we do goes through your department, doesn’t it? Institute work?’

‘Oh, some,’ she said. ‘There are hormone assays, aren’t there, involved in some of the work? That’d come to us, but I
don’t handle the paperwork — or rather the computer work — for that. One of the senior technicians deals with it.’

‘Well that’s something. Sheila?’

‘Maybe. Or Jerry Swann or Peter. Why do you ask?’

‘I told you. I’m interested in everything you do. You’re an interesting woman, so your work is interesting too.’

‘La, but you’re becoming a deal too particular, sir,’ she said, with a mock Restoration flourish of her hand, and got to her feet. ‘Like I said, I gotta go. And when a woman’s gotta go —’

‘May I come over later to go through the stuff I worked on over the weekend?’ He sounded eager. ‘I have the list of patients ready, and the X-rays and so forth. It’d be a great help to get some input from you before I go on.’

She hesitated, mentally running over her day’s schedule in her mind. She wouldn’t know till she got to the lab whether or not there were any PMs to be done, but she did have an appointment to go to court to give evidence. She explained how difficult it was to know just how long a case would take once it had started, and even if it would start on time. ‘But I should be through by a late lunchtime,’ she said. ‘I sure as hell hope so. If you don’t mind taking a chance that I won’t be available, you could phone over around three, and I’ll see how I’m doing.’

‘Great.’ He smiled at her, and once again she felt the little surge of interest she had felt when she had first seen his eyes vanish into slits the way they did when he was particularly happy. This time she rather enjoyed it.

When she got to the lab she found Danny waiting in her office, looking even more lugubrious than usual, if that were possible. ‘There’s a bit of a flap on in the coroner’s office,’ he reported with gloomy relish. ‘There was a multiple pile-up in the Commercial Road. Three of the drivers are here in intensive care and two in the Royal London, and there was two fatalities and they’re waiting downstairs for you. And then there’s been some trouble at a school over in Stepney Green with a couple of these bovver boys carving up a Paki. They
want all three of the PMs dead urgent, and they keep calling to see what you can do to rush ’em.’

‘Not a lot,’ she said crisply. ‘I’m due in court at — let me see my worklist.’ She picked up her folder and studied it. ‘Ten o’clock. It’s a tricky one, so even if it starts on time … Look, I’ll call the coroner’s office myself. You go and get the first of them ready, anyway.’

‘Which one?’

Danny was being wilfully difficult, she told herself and smiled at him as brilliantly as she could. ‘The one that the police are most likely to be interested in. I imagine that’ll be the knife wounds, don’t you?’

‘S’pose so,’ he muttered, and went stomping off.

George set to work to get through as much as she could before having to leave for court. When she’d made sure that the lab was running smoothly and had dealt with her urgent mail and phone calls, she had a little time left over to tidy her desk, which she did, stacking the files high. And that was when she found the envelope that had come over by hand from Ratcliffe Street.

She recognized Gus’s handwriting on the envelope, and bit her lip. Maybe she’d been a bit unfair to him; if this was some sort of peace offering she’d accept it and no hard feelings.

It was a brief note that he had merely initialled, chilling in its lack of any friendly touches.

She brooded on that for the rest of the morning: all through her court case (except fortunately while she was actually in the witness box, which was just as well because she
had to face a particularly vicious cross-examination by the defence) and even while she did the PM on the young Asian boy who had been knifed in the school playground. But again fortunately the anger that created in her (to see a healthy young body sliced to death for no reason was precisely the sort of trigger to rouse her fury at the best of times, and this was far from that) fuelled her concentration enough to find a fragment of metal in one of the wounds that would, she knew, enable the police to identify the weapon and therefore the perpetrator very fast indeed. Which gave her a degree of grim satisfaction, if not enough to help her feel all that much better.

She was about to start on the first of the traffic accident PMs when the phone in Danny’s cubby hole rang down the corridor. He departed to answer it, even as she bawled after him, ‘Let it ring!’, then came back to find her scowling more than ever. He told her blandly that, ‘Dr Zack said as how you told him to phone now, but I told him you was busy and wouldn’t be best pleased at being interrupted, so he said not to bother. All right, then?’

She stared at him nonplussed. That would have been exactly the right thing to have said to any other caller, but he’d brushed off Zack, and she wasn’t at all happy about that. Talking to him would have soothed her thoroughly ruffled feathers. But she couldn’t say that to Danny, who was smirking at her in the most maddening way possible. All she could do was get her head down and finish the job in hand as best she might.

Which she did, including the second traffic accident victim, much to Danny’s annoyance, since he had expected her to leave that till first thing the next morning, thus allowing him to get to his favourite pub at his usual hour. Recognizing his annoyance helped George to regain her own composure and by the time she had finished and was in the shower as Danny banged about furiously clearing up, some of her equanimity had returned.

If it was going to take three days or so to get the information on Sheila’s car, well, so be it. She’d just have to wait till she had it (if, that is, Gus gave it to her, and the possibility that he might refuse she did not even want to contemplate) and in the meantime get on with another line of enquiry.

Once she was out of the shower and dressed, with her hair brushed up and dried, she’d decided what to do. She glanced at her watch as she ran upstairs to her office: well after seven. She had been working flat out all day and she ought to be both tired and hungry, but she was neither. She knew just what she was going to do, and no one was going to stop her.

In Ballantyne Ward all was very quiet. The big central corridor gleamed in the late June evening and the various bays with their four-and six-bedded arrangements hummed with the quiet chatter of patients and their visitors and the eternal bleating of television sets. It wasn’t one of Ballantyne’s operating days so there was none of the usual bustle that fills a surgical ward after a long list, and the senior nurse on duty at the central work-station was one George knew only slightly. But that suited her very well. She certainly hadn’t wanted to face Sister Chaplin again after the affair of the chocolates. And neither did she want to see Peter Selby who would have been here had he been operating today. Luck was on her side, she decided, and pressed it home.

‘I’ve just dropped in to see Miss Keen,’ she said lightly to the staff nurse. ‘You know — the patient in the single room at the far end. No need to look up her notes or anything. This is just a social call, not a medical one. She’s on my staff, you see.’ She smiled confidently and went off down the corridor towards Sheila’s room before the staff nurse could stop her, even if she’d wanted to.

Sheila was sitting up in bed, wrapped in a pink silk shawl of oriental description, arranged to show off her rather bony shoulders, which were as bare as she could get them to be — her nightdress was pulled well down to show her somewhat
meagre décolletage — and she was staring up at the TV set on a bracket on the wall facing her bed. She looked up hopefully as the door was pushed open, wriggling her shoulders into an even more provocative curve and smiling widely; but when she saw George her smile faded in so ludicrous a fashion that George found it easy to grin back; indeed, she almost laughed.

‘Hello, Sheila! I’ve brought you some flowers.’ She held out the bunch of hothouse roses she’d bought at the stall just outside the Accident and Emergency entrance, and Sheila looked at it, her mouth turned down apprehensively. ‘It’s quite safe to take them. There are no secret nasal poisons unknown to Western medicine hidden in them, nothing toxic applied to the thorns. In fact there aren’t any thorns at all, Old Eddie told me so. I said they were for you and he picked out the best.’

That was a patent lie, since Eddie the flowerman, who had been at his stand by the hospital gates for more years than anyone could remember, heartily disliked Sheila, who always fussed outrageously over any flowers she bought from him, but Sheila chose to believe George.

‘That’s very sweet of him,’ she said. She managed a pathetic little moue. ‘If you leave them there one of the nurses will put them in water.’ She pointedly didn’t thank George for the roses, but George professed not to notice that. She sat herself comfortably in the armchair beside Sheila’s bed and said chattily, ‘Well, tell me, how are you?’

There was a little silence as Sheila stared up at the screen where various soap opera stars were posturing busily. For a moment George thought she wasn’t going to answer and that she’d have to take tough measures, but after a moment Sheila said grudgingly, ‘As well as can be expected, I suppose. Under the circumstances.’ And she shot a look of undiluted venom at George, who smiled sweetly back.

‘Sheila, I know perfectly well you couldn’t be more pissed off with me. You think I poisoned the chocolates. Well, I
didn’t do that either, any more than I tampered with your car, though
someone
did.’

Sheila’s head jerked round and she stared at George with her eyes so dilated there was a rim of white around the irises. ‘What did you say? My car? Someone
did
do something to it?’

It was George’s turn to be surprised. ‘But you suspected that! You said so to Za — to Dr Zacharius. I remember you said that it was strange how one week someone wishes something horrible will happen to you and then it does, and it made you wonder. I heard you, and thought you were having a go at me.’