Scalpel (12 page)

Day 4

1
8

9.
15 am, Thursday, 13th February 1997

South Wing, Central Maternity Hospital

Professor Patrick Armstrong was born middle-aged.

Now aged sixty-six and the only non-gynaecologist on the staff, he had the bearing of a man holding firm to tradition in Irish medicine. Solemn and aloof, arrogant and detached, cold and overbearing, his tall asthenic build was usually dressed in dark sombre suits, starched white shirts and dull muted club ties. He had a hawk-like face with small, dark eyes squinting from under dark, bushy eyebrows as if searching for prey. The only son of a famous father and grandfather in Irish medicine, he had a childhood of stuffy formality and extraordinary boredom, barely knowing what a smile was, a laugh beyond comprehension. What in the world was there to laugh about? Life was too serious.

On the morning of Thursday, 13th February 1997, Armstrong was livid. He held the business card in his left hand, peering at it over half-moon glasses. There was no disguising his disgust.

'He wants to what?' he snapped at his secretary, a boring and aloof middle-aged woman with a face like a hatchet.

'He wants to interview you about that incident yesterday in the laboratory.' Mary Dwyer's death would never be described as murder by the older medical staff. Unwittingly they had begun to talk about 'the incident'. It made them feel better. It was a form of denial.

'He wants to interview me?' Incredulous.

'Yes sir.' She always called him 'sir', she knew he liked that.

'Well, Mary, you can tell Detective Inspector Jack McGrath of the Serious Crime Squad based in Store Street Garda station,' Armstrong read from the card, 'that I am a very busy man. He'll have to make an appointment to see me like the rest. When is my next free appointment, Mary?'

Mary scanned the diary she was holding. 'There's nothing free for about a month.' She smirked.

'Tell him that, Mary. Tell him that.'

'Yes sir.'

Professor Armstrong picked up the phone, flipped open a card index, and began dialling.

'Dean, it's Paddy Armstrong here. I'm sorry to trouble you so early this morning but I won't keep you a moment. It's about that incident in the laboratory.'

Lynch stiffened.

'I've just had a request from a Detective Inspector McGrath to interview me,' continued Armstrong, 'and I really find the whole thing quite distasteful. I'm sure you do too, Dean.'

Lynch mumbled.

'Well I think we senior consultant staff should close ranks a little here, Dean, don't you? It's quite appalling that the police should be in this building in the first place. It's doing no good to our public image. What's the place coming to when senior staff have to be interviewed by the police? It really is quite preposterous. Don't you agree?'

'Absolutely.'

In the five years since he had joined the medical staff at the Central Maternity Hospital, Professor Armstrong had never as much as bid Lynch the time of day. He'd ignored him in the corridors, in the wards, in the canteen, everywhere. Suddenly he was all over him like a rash. Dean loved it.

'Well Dean, I think we should put these policemen in their proper places. I mean they are just wasting their time
and ours. Why aren't they out looking for the real thug among the drug takers and criminals that have made this country the way it is?'

'I couldn't agree more.'

'Excellent Dean. I hoped you would agree. I'm going to ring a few more colleagues and have this scotched before it gets out of hand. If you see anyone down in East Wing do please tell them of our policy.'

'Of course.'

'Good morning, Dean. Again, sorry to have disturbed you. Like myself, I'm sure you've got a busy day ahead and little time to waste.'

'Indeed.'

Lynch replaced the receiver slowly, a smile creasing his lips.

This is becoming quite extraordinary. I'm causing all sorts of ripples.

Such a
simple
act.

Mary Dwyer shouldn't have smiled. She
just
shouldn't have smiled. If she had done her job, and not interfered, I wouldn't have had to kill her.

But she interfered.

She knew too much.

And she
smiled.

And now look at all the fuss.

It's really quite extraordinary.

Quite
exciting.

It'll soon be time to do it again.

Now, what other bitch is going to cross me?

McGrath soon found himself stonewalled at every turn. Too many egos were being challenged, reputations risked.

How to handle an investigation for murder, committed right on your doorstep, was not taught at medical school. Having to produce an alibi,
preposterous.

The phones in various family solicitors' offices began ringing. The advice was the same from each: say nothing unless your personal legal adviser is present. Be polite but
firm in your request for legal advice before answering any questions. The solicitors were emphatic. They could see a decent fee in this.

19

10.22 am

Laboratory, East Wing

'Okay. I want you to give me a tour of this place and tell me what happens here.'

McGrath and Dowling were back in the laboratory accompanied by Luke Conway. Kate Hamilton had been assigned to second interviews with hospital security.

'This is haematology and biochemistry.'

'You can stop right there. All this may mean something to you but it's Chinese to me.'

'Bloods. This is where we do all the hospital blood tests. Check blood levels, body chemistry, blood groupings and things like that.' Conway was trying to be polite and patient. He was equally determined to get the laboratory back into action as soon as possible. 'We also do immunology, AIDS testing and such like.'

McGrath said, 'What sort of test was Mary Dwyer working on?'

'We finally tracked down the last test she did that night. It was a full blood count for Ward Four in North Wing.'

'Anything unusual in that?'

'Absolutely nothing. The patient was an elderly lady about to undergo major surgery. Her case and the test were completely routine and uncomplicated.'

'Nothing to kill for?'

Conway shrugged. 'I'm no help here, Inspector. I can't think of anything Mary Dwyer knew or was doing here that would make her a murder victim. I'm as disturbed and
puzzled as the rest of my staff. I mean, this sort of thing just doesn't happen in hospitals.'

McGrath and Dowling exchanged looks.

'Could she have been doin' any tests on the quiet. Like could she have been doin' anythin' for a friend that might have been out of the ordinary?' Dowling asked.

Conway pursed his lips, thinking this one over. 'It's possible. It's strictly against hospital policy to perform any unauthorised tests but I know it goes on all the time. It's very hard to police.'

'So she could have been workin' on somethin' that nobody knew anythin' about?'

'It's possible,' agreed Conway, 'but I can't think what she would have been working on that was so important someone would want to kill for.'

McGrath was standing over the rack of broken test tubes still lying undisturbed on the floor.

'Why would he have smashed these?'

Conway shrugged again, trying to hide his annoyance at the repetitive nature of the questions. 'I'm a gynaecologist, Inspector. I don't want to appear unhelpful but I really haven't a clue.'

'Can ye find out what sort of tests were bein' run on those samples?' asked Dowling.

'Sure. The individual bottles are labelled with the patient's name. We keep triplicate copies of all request forms.'

'Where?'

'In a back office.' Conway indicated the general direction with a nod of his head.

'Okay,' interrupted McGrath suddenly. 'Put all the requests against the sample bottles and get me a list of the patients and the tests. Could that be ready within an hour?'

Conway nodded.

'I've had the PC and printer checked,' added McGrath. 'It's bolloxed and we're not gonna get anything useful out of them. Would you check around these offices and see if you can find paper torn out of the printer. There's so much
paper in here nobody knows what might be genuine rubbish and what this gook might have been trying to hide or destroy.'

'I'll have to get the chief technician to do that, he'd know that better than me. Is that okay?'

McGrath mulled this over briefly, then nodded. The chief technician had been cleared as a possible suspect. 'The other machines he smashed, any ideas on that?' he asked.

Conway shrugged no.

McGrath peered through a door connecting the first laboratory room to other rooms inside.

'What's down there?'

'Cytology and histopathology. Lots of microscopes for checking glass slides. Containers with pathology specimens.'

McGrath's eyebrows raised quizzically.

'Samples of uterus, samples of breast tissue, samples of ovary, samples of…'

'Okay, okay, I get the message.' McGrath was feeling squeamish again. He popped a peppermint. Dowling grinned.

'Any other rooms?' McGrath was beginning to sound tetchy.

'Three,' said Conway. 'There's an office at the very end. Beside that there's a small room where all paperwork from the lab is processed. That's where all hospital requests are stored.' He paused as he watched Dowling scribble something in his notebook. 'Then there's the autopsy room.'

'Autopsy room?' McGrath's peppermint almost dropped out of his mouth. 'This is a maternity hospital. What the hell do you need with an autopsy room?'

Conway cleared his throat. 'People die here too, Detective. Sometimes babies don't make it into the world alive. Sometimes their mothers don't survive labour. We deal with a lot of women who have cancer, cancer of the womb, cancer of the ovaries. Sometimes we don't get them better. Sometimes they die and postmortems are necessary. We need to know why some babies die when we reckon they should have lived. We need to know how diseases progress.'

The room was silent apart from Conway's quietly spoken words. McGrath and Dowling were visibly shaken. Maternity hospitals had always seemed places of joy and life. Babies being born, fathers going in and out clutching flowers and expensive cigars.

Life and living.

Futures.

Not death.

'You have to cut up dead babies?' McGrath mouthed, his words barely audible.

'Indeed that happens on occasions, though I don't do it personally. It's the one thing the staff here find really difficult. Dealing with a baby that never got a chance at life.'

Conway sensed he had touched a raw nerve in both detectives. Now's the time to put a bit of pressure on, he quickly decided.

'You see this hospital has to deal with life and death all the time. Everybody thinks we only deal with delivering babies. But there's a lot more. We have a fifty-bed gynaecology unit, an eight-cot neo-natal intensive care ward and an eight-cot special care unit. That's where we look after the very small, premature babies. We take a lot of pride in that unit. Our success rate in stabilising and nursing those babies to a decent size so that they can go home is among the best in the world. We do a lot of good work here.' He paused. There was no mistaking the expressions on McGrath and Dowling's faces.

They were impressed. Impressed and humbled. This was indeed hallowed ground.

Conway decided to milk the moment.

'That's why this murder is so obscene. We can handle death here, we're used to it. But only when it's from natural causes. To come into a hospital, any hospital, this is traditionally inviolable territory, and then kill someone as innocent and beautiful as Mary Dwyer is diabolical, an obscenity.' His voice sounded strained. 'We all want you to find out who did this and bring him to justice. But we've got to think of the rest of the patients up in the wards. The mothers and
their babies. The women waiting for surgery. All of them. We've got to get the hospital back to some sort of normality. We need to get this lab back into action.'

Outside McGrath turned to Dowling. 'For a moment I almost believed every word.'

'Jaysus, Jack but ye're an awful cynic'

'You need to be cynical in this game, Tony. He was doing well up until he started to cry about his missing lab. That guy should be in equity.'

Detective Inspector Jack McGrath by now had decided he hated doctors as well as hospitals. They were as bad as the common criminals he dealt with all his working life, shifty, evasive and self-protective.

He could sense he was on a collision course.

He was right.

Head high, mind racing, Conway didn't notice Kate Hamilton staring at him as he came towards her. She stopped and did a double take as he came level, then sat down suddenly on a nearby bench, her hands shaking. She grasped at the lapels on her jacket for control and took deep breaths in and out to try to regain her composure. She looked again at the retreating figure who had now stopped to talk briefly with a white-coated doctor. Conway half-turned in mid-conversation and looked back along the corridor to where Hamilton sat. She could see his face clearly, there was no mistaking the features, the tall bearing, the tight red hair, the darting eyes. She remembered him vividly. It all came flooding back and she had to suppress the urge to run up and punch him straight in the nose.

'Don't you think you should put your baby up for adoption?'

She was lying sobbing on the delivery bed only thirty
minutes after giving birth. From inside her body she had
pushed the most perfectly formed baby boy into the outside
world. It hadn't been an easy birth, physically easy, maybe, but
emotionally a nightmare. She could still see the tall man,
dressed in green protective gown, masked and with what looked like a J-cloth covering his hair. He had gently eased and controlled the final, bursting stage, coaxing and cajoling.

'Push… don't push… deep breaths… relax… push… don't push… deep breaths… you're doing fine… one more push… that's it. I can see the head coming. No, don't push until I tell you, that's it… good girl… that's great. Head coming now. One more big breath and then a big, long push… excellent. That's it. Scissors please nurse. Lignocaine... breathe deeply on the mask now. You're going to feel a sharp sting near your bottom… perfect… baby's head born. Your baby's head's born. Try and relax. Feel another one coming? Okay, deep breath and push.'

Suddenly it was all over. The relief. Then the joy as the tiny, blood-smeared baby was handed to her, wrapped in hospital greens, his eyes rolling in his head as if stunned by the journey into life.

Squashed and bruised as he was, there was no mistaking. He was his daddy's boy.

Except his daddy would never see him, never see anybody, ever again. There was only his tiny baby to mark his existence in this world.

As Rory was taken away to be weighed, Kate began to sob uncontrollably. There was no one to share this special moment, no family to rush home to and show off her newborn baby. Her own mother was dead and she had strictly forbidden her father to come near the hospital. But the greatest torment was knowing there would be no father coming in later clutching flowers and handing out cigars and wanting to dance with the nurses.

She was one more single mother.

She gradually became aware of the figure leaning over the bed, face mask down, cloth cap removed. Dr Luke Conway had read the signs all wrong, totally and humiliatingly wrong.

'Don't you think you should put your baby up for adoption?'

She started screaming, struggling to climb off the bed. 'Where's my baby? Where's my baby?'

He'd ordered her held down and forcefully sedated.

She'd never seen him since. Until now.

Kate Hamilton slowly stood up, straightened her uniform and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. With as much control as she could summon she walked towards the library where the rest of the investigation team waited. Relax, relax, she warned, don't let the others see you're upset. Don't let anyone know you now have a personal agenda here.