George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (42 page)

‘Sheila has a file that she calls her own. It isn’t really, it’s a sort of back-up, only it’s on paper and not on disc. She stores a lot of past path, results and reports on staff and patients in these files in a little cubby hole of her own. Most of our later stuff’s on computer, of course. So, whatever he’s looking for would be from the past, not the present.’ She shook her head then and subsided. ‘No, I don’t think it’s that. I’ve looked around Sheila’s files. Believe me, no one’s been interfering in there. I could tell at once if they had.’

‘Then it’s what we said before. It’s what the guy
thinks
she has. He hasn’t found it yet, but he’ll carry on till he does.’

‘It’s all falling apart in my head,’ George complained, uncertain now of her original conviction that James Corton was indeed the object of their search. ‘Why go to all this trouble just to cover up a hoax, like pretending to be a doctor when you’re not? Let’s face it, it happens a lot. It’s not a capital crime — there are always cases being reported. Sooner or later they’re flushed out because they display ignorance of an important subject that every doctor knows. That’s his big danger. Unless …’ She went off into a brown study of her own.

He waited a while and then said, ‘Well? Let’s be having you.’

‘Unless,’ she said slowly, ‘he’s already done something that’s led to a patient’s death. Maybe in one of his other hoaxing adventures — and we’ve no way of knowing where else
he’s worked, of course — he’s done something that led to a death. Which means he’s got a hell of a lot to hide, right? That would account for him being so willing now to risk deliberately killing people, in case one of them lets it out that he’s a hoaxer and that starts a search for previous activities. After all, if you’ve killed once, what can they do if you do it again? No one gets executed any more, glory be. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds sound,’ he said gravely. ‘A sound judgement. Listen George, we could be on to something good here. I’ll start the wheels rolling in the morning.’ He sat down, leaned back and stretched. ‘What was the ethical quandary?’

‘Mmm?’

‘You said you had an ethical quandary: one hell of a problem, if we do find out he’s a trickster.’

She’d forgotten her words in the thrill of the deductive chase but now it all came back to her. She bit her lip. ‘Ideally no one lets him know if we find out he’s a hoaxer, right? We just stake him out and watch for actions that could be evidential, right?’

‘Of course,’ he said, sounding almost shocked. ‘You wouldn’t rush off and tell him we’ve rumbled him, would you?’

‘I might have to,’ she said flatly.

‘What?’ He stared. ‘Why on earth — oh Gawd!’

‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘I wondered when you’d see it.’

‘You can’t let an unqualified fella loose on your patients any longer than you have to. In fact, you ought to report your anxieties to the hospital right now, yes?’

‘If not to the management, at least to the Three Wise Men.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s a rather neat system they have here in Britain. If a doctor spots something about a colleague’s behaviour that worries him and doesn’t want to alert management or make waves, he goes to one of the people — doctors, you know —
appointed by all the medical staff to be one of the Three Wise Men and says, “Say, Jack, old boy, I’m a touch bothered about old Fred. Tends to drop his tools in theatre, don’t you know. Could be because he’s always pie-eyed. What do we do about him before he kills someone and gets us all in the soup, hmm?”’ She managed a creditable imitation of a drawling Oxford accent and he grinned fleetingly.

‘Well,’ she went on. ‘I could go and tell them what I know, getting myself in trouble no doubt for snooping round the employment records, but I can wriggle out of that, I dare say. Once I tell them I’m off the ethical hook.’

‘What would they do?’

‘It’s my guess they’d go straight to him to have it out. They wouldn’t go to the management, not till they knew, in case he really is a doctor. But once they did he’d be out faster than you can say “hang about a bit”, even though we’re looking for a murderer here. And then we’ll never get our evidence and these cases get listed among the great unsolved.’

‘Then don’t tell your Three Wise Men,’ Gus said, sounding very reasonable.

‘I’ve got to do
something
,’ she said. ‘There’s no way I can let the guy go on working as an anaesthetist when I suspect that he isn’t trained to do so! People die in operating theatres because of good anaesthetic practice, for God’s sake. When the anaesthetist isn’t a good one, the risk is enormous.’

‘Has anyone died after one of his anaesthetics since he came here to Old East?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not to my knowledge, though maybe there’ve been some near misses, and that was what alerted people like Mendez. Or Lally when she saw from the notes what had happened in a particular case? Hell, Gus, what do I do? Whether there’s been a death already isn’t what matters. Preventing a future one is the important thing.’

‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘Shit! Have you no ideas apart from telling these wise monkey doctors? We all know what doctors
are — when they’re under threat, they close ranks tighter’n a duck’s bottom, and that’s watertight.’

‘Like the police don’t?’ she said, firing up. ‘I remember what happened when you were in trouble.’

‘OK, OK,’ he said hastily. ‘No ancient history, please. Is there no way you can get him relieved of duty that won’t make him suspicious?’

‘I’m a pathologist,’ she said. ‘Not occupational health. And even they couldn’t do anything unless he came to them with symptoms. Except when —’ She stopped.

‘Except?’

‘Except when there are special pushes on infection control,’ she said slowly. ‘Do you remember? When we were looking into the baby case, a couple of years ago, I used the ploy of saying I was checking infection control and had to swab all the noses and throats of people in the maternity unit. I did it to find out where everyone was on a particular day, without actually interviewing them.’

He was grinning widely now. ‘I remember that very well. So, a variation on a theme?’

‘Indeed. Let me think.’ He looked at her and then got to his feet and padded out to the kitchen to make them some coffee. When he came back with the tall cafetière steaming gently on a tray, she was scribbling furiously.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s the remedy?’

‘MRSA,’ she said.

‘Ah.’ He waited but she offered no more, still scribbling, scratching out and scribbling again.

‘So, explain already!’ he said plaintively. ‘MRSA sounds like something to do with World War Two, like — like —ENSA, Every Night Something Awful. Or the NAAFI — Nasty Attacks of Awful Flatulence Immediately. Only they didn’t say flatulence. So what’s MRSA? Let me see — Make Randy Superintendents ’Appy?’ And he leaned over and slid one hand into the neck of her shirt.

She wriggled and said absently. ‘Shut up. I’m trying to
word this announcement right.’ She went on writing as he sipped his coffee, but at last stopped, read over what she’d written, and then, satisfied, leaned back. ‘Got it.’

‘So, what is MRSA? Could it possibly be I was right?’

‘Not at the moment,’ she said crisply. ‘It’s Methycillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.’

‘Serves me bloody right for asking.’

‘It means a dangerous pathogenic — disease-causing — organism that can make people very ill, which is resistant to treatment by the toughest of antibiotics, that’s all. If it gets into a hospital — especially the theatres and surgical wards — it’s the very devil to get out. We’re always doing checks for it. If I set up a random sampling operation no one’ll be a bit surprised. And after I do it, if I tell James Corton sadly that I’m very sorry, he has a dubious result and I’ll have to keep him off duty until such time as I can clear him —’

‘You mean he can have this disease without being ill?’

‘He can carry it. Like typhoid or hepatitis or HIV — there are lots of things people can carry while being symptom-free themselves. And they can pass them on, that’s the thing. I’ll put this in hand tomorrow, send this note to all theatre staff and get the job done quickly. I’ll have him off duty very fast indeed. How’s that?’

‘Great.’ He slid an arm across the back of the sofa to rest on her shoulders. ‘So, we’ve done a good job tonight. Let’s go to bed and rest after our labours. Or rest eventually, anyway.’ He leered sumptuously.

‘I’ll be glad to,’ she said. ‘Eventually. But right now, we’ve got to finish the paperwork.’ And she flourished her clipboard at him.

‘No point,’ he said. ‘We’ve got two suspects in there. First Corton, who has to be our main man, and, secondly, Klein.’

‘I think Frances Llewellyn too,’ she said.

‘Why? She wasn’t involved at St Dymphna’s, was she?’

‘The St Dymphna’s connection only points at a link between the murders and Mendez. But she could have had
links with some of the other victims. She was researching gynae. matters, remember, so she might have treated Pam Frean.’

‘That rabbit won’t run, ducks. Frean has to be dead because she got pregnant. And with the best will in the world, even the cleverest of female gynae. researchers can’t make other women pregnant.’

‘Tell that to the infertility unit,’ she said, laughing at him. ‘No, fair enough. Her apparent motive is not obvious. But I have a gut feeling strong enough to put her down as a suspect.’ She duly did, but didn’t tell him she’d got the gut feeling from talking with Zack Zacharius about the case. It seemed wiser. ‘And now we’ve got the three suspects, in order, with motives for three of the deaths. Next we have to look at some more headings. Like OPPORTUNITY and MEANS, and —’

‘Bugger that for a game of soldiers,’ he said with a sudden burst of energy. ‘There’s a lot of work before we can even begin to fill those columns in. We’ve done very well for tonight. I told you, come to bed!’ He twirled an imaginary moustache and flashed his eyes at her. ‘Come, my fair maiden, I will not be balked of my desires. I demand that you part with your womanly virtue instantly!’

‘Oh, Sir Jasper,’ she cried, throwing her clipboard on the floor beside her, ‘spare my maiden blushes!’

‘Some maiden!’ he said and kissed her.

Getting the MRSA testing for theatre and other surgical staff set up the next day was less easy than she had hoped it would be. First of all she had to get financial consent from Ellen Archer, the Business Manager for the Investigations Unit as a whole, and since she had recently had some major expenses for the Radiology Unit (who were clamouring to get their hands on a Magnetic Resonance Imager) George almost had to go on her knees to do it. The only way she could persuade her was by lying freely about an increase in cases of infection in post-operative patients sent home, about which she had heard in an informal manner from local GPs. And she prayed inside her head that Ellen wouldn’t take the time to check up and find out what a dreadful fabrication (and, incidentally, an insult to Old East’s surgical care) that was.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Ellen,’ she said then, inspired. ‘I can take a close look at the bit of forensic which is part funded by the police and Home Office, and see what I can push in there that belongs to us. It’s not exactly honest, but what the hell — if the police can’t take care of the sick occasionally it’d be a pretty poor show.’ She produced the very English phrase with aplomb and grinned broadly at Ellen who cheered up considerably at the thought.

‘If you can manage to do anything to stretch the edges of this bloody budget, I’ll be one grateful lady,’ she said.
‘It’s getting harder to do all I have to with the pittance I get’

George promised to do her best and went off guiltily aware how much NHS cash she was spending on an operation that was more designed to help the police than Old East. But she comforted herself with the reflection that, after all, keeping a suspected hoaxer anaesthetist well away from patients while he was being quietly investigated had to be to the patients’ benefit.

And then the actual work had to be done. She played with the notion of collecting all the swabs and then not culturing them, not even Corton’s, and just telling Corton he was a possible carrier, but she rejected it. Suppose there really was a MRSA carrier in the place? If she didn’t spot him now and he was noticed on a future screening … it didn’t bear thinking of. So she set to work grimly.

Jerry looked surprised when she recruited him to help, as well as some of her junior staff, but went off obediently enough with his trays of swabs and specimen bottles, marshalling his assistants like an amiable sheepdog. He did very well indeed. When she checked with him at lunchtime, needing to know where she herself should take over, he grinned at her with great self-satisfaction, and reported, ‘I’ve done the lot. Every surgeon, every technician, every surgical nurse. I know the uvulas of the staff a great deal more intimately than I want to, and I’ve been retched at and coughed over like a right ’un. If I wasn’t afflicted with MRSA before I started and one of that lot has it, then I’ll sure as hell have it myself now. Lots of luvverly sick leave, hmm, while I get cleared of it?’

‘In your dreams,’ George said. ‘Seeing I can always put you on non-infection-area work if you happen to have a problem. Which I doubt. No Staph, organism would dare to come near you for fear of what it might catch.’

‘Thanks a bunch,’ Jerry said without ire. ‘Listen, how essential was this? I don’t think we have a problem here, have we? I’ve been asking around and I’m mystified. So’re the staff. I know there’s a lot of MRSA at some of the neighbouring
hospitals, especially the geriatric ones, but us? The surgeons were a bit surprised too. Put out, I’d say.’

‘I’m trying to make sure we stay that way. Clean as the proverbial,’ said George quickly, mentally cursing herself for not telling Jerry some anecdotal tale for use with the staff before he set off. ‘Do tell them all if they ask. It’s a policy of perfection. I’m the sort that likes to mend the plumbing in good time rather than keep on mopping up puddles on the cellar floor.’

‘Good thinking,’ Jerry said. ‘I’ll put that about. Or ask Sheila to do it. You know how she likes a nice opportunity to gossip.’