The Meddlers (24 page)

Gurney let him burble on. Quite obviously he’d been storing up
this spate of resentment for some time. Give him the sympathetic ear he needed, and he’d have him in his pocket. Whether or not he actually had the sort of facts Davidson was demanding was almost beside the point. He certainly knew all the ins and outs of the financing of the project from the word go, and that would be ample to start with.

“… and I must say I’m most impressed, Mr. Gurney, most impressed. It’s extremely reassuring to know that members go to so much trouble to investigate the matters they bring to the attention of the House. Most reassuring. I know, from my own position here, how vital it is to be completely
au fait
with the matter with which one deals, but I also know enough people in senior positions of the same sort who are less—shall we say less responsible? You and I, we speak the same language.”

God forbid, you wet ass, Gurney thought and smiled toothily at him. “My dear Mr. Kegan, I can assure you there are plenty of members who prosecute in the House matters of which they know less than nothing! But that isn’t my way, any more than it would be yours. And it is a great relief to me to know that we can discuss this on the same level, that you can give me the assistance I need. And I can promise you your valuable contribution to the structure of my bill won’t go unrecognized. I will make a point of mentioning it to one or two of my good friends at Alexander Fleming House. Too often, ministries never know of the immense ability of the people they employ. People who do a good job of work, and get on with it uncomplainingly, they deserve recognition.”

“Oh, please, Mr. Gurney! I want no recognition! I assure you, it’s enough for me to do my job well, and know that I am doing it.” Kegan’s delight was so obvious that Gurney could have laughed aloud. “Now, do let me offer you some lunch. We have a most pleasant dining room for senior administrative staff, and though NHS budgets are what they are, we can provide you with a reasonable meal. And then we can settle to some solid talking.”

“A delightful idea. Thank you. All I’ll need to know is the precise sources of the finances for the Briant project, the way the money is tied up, and the degree of control there is over actual
expenditure. I know Briant is somewhat … obstructive when any attempts are made to investigate him, but in your position, I’m sure that can be dealt with.”

  Isobel listened with apparent calmness, her face expressing only mild interest in what he was saying, her hands neatly folded, as usual, against her overall front. But her pulse was thumping heavily in her ears, and she felt a deep well of fear coldly spreading within her.

“You do understand, Miss Quinn? From today, I want you to stop hand-expressing of your milk after the feeds, in order to cut down the secretion. With the altered dosage of the red capsules, that will have the desired effect within a week. He won’t be aware yet, of course, of any difference, and I want you to maintain your usual watchfulness. He is still to be fed the instant the need is expressed, as before, because he must come to the new experience totally unprepared. If there is any change now, it may partly invalidate the findings when we start the experiment properly.”

He looked down at the papers on the desk in front of him. “Now, let me see those weight and physical development charts. Hmm. The weight gain spurts make a definite pattern, Barbara, you agree? No sign yet of any unevenness of growth. Interesting, though, the way the limb dimensions change? No regularity there. The right arm is clearly larger in the major muscle areas than the left, but it has appeared with a random pattern.”

“He’s right-handed.” Isobel heard her own voice almost in surprise. Why had she told him that? She never told him anything she noticed, if she could help it, not without being directly asked. But he’s not a thing, the little voice within her cried. He’s a person! He’s a right-handed
person
.

“Oh?” Dr. Briant looked up at her sharply. “You’ve noticed that? Very observant of you.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and lowered her eyes.

“Is there anything else of this nature you have recognized?”

“No, sir.”

“Hmm. Why do you say there is a definite right-handedness?”

“Because of the way he always puts it out to me first. Sometimes
it’s the other one, but usually the right. And it’s the one furthest away from me when I stand next his cot.” She raised her eyes and looked at him. “He’s very bright, and if it was as easy for him to use his left hand, he’d reach for me with it. But he doesn’t. He’s very bright.”

“Indeed he is.” He smiled thinly at her. “And so are you, to notice a piece of evidence of this sort, and correctly evaluate it. Clearly, working here with us is giving you a scientific turn of mind.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and looked down again, wanting to hit at his hateful cold face and narrow-lipped smile. Hateful, hateful, hateful man. Georgie’s a person, not a thing you look at with turns of mind.

“So, you have it clear, what it is we want of you this week? No further expression of milk, but no changes from the infant’s point of view. All his subjective experience must remain unaltered, er, he is to go on exactly as he always has.”

She went to the lavatory before going into the nursery and sat perched on the lid of the pan with her hands firmly planted on each knee, staring at the pattern of cracks on the paintwork of the locked door. She had to be completely calm, completely herself, before going into the nursery and coming into the view of the monitoring cameras. She could never be really sure how much they actually watched her, but she knew the films were kept and looked at sooner or later, so she could take no chances. But here, for just a few moments, she could enjoy the relief of letting her face go, of letting her feelings come out properly.

She grimaced and clenched her teeth and shook her head violently from side to side, and then thumped each closed fist on her knees until the ache spread down toward her feet. Then, her teeth still clenched, she let a deep rumbling growl build up in her throat, quiet, yet strong enough to reverberate through her chest. And then she relaxed her whole body and let her head droop forward until her forehead was resting on her fists, still lying as they were on her knees.

She had worked out the ritual gradually over the past few days, and as usual, it soothed her, and she stood up and felt her face
settle back into its normal calm lines, felt her body lose its tightness. Collectedly, she flushed the cistern and opened the door with a rattle before walking into the nursery. She washed her hands with care, feeling the camera above her head watching the process, and dried them and then rubbed in the antiseptic cream meticulously before walking over to the cot to look down at the baby.

He was sleeping, lying on his belly, his mouth lax and glistening above the damp patch on the muslin square under his head. He’s been dribbling more lately. I wonder if they’ve noticed? I shan’t tell them. I think he’s going to cut a tooth soon, but I shan’t tell them. He’s advanced enough to start cutting teeth as early as five weeks of age. Not that it’s got anything to do with them, no matter what anyone says. He’s just an advanced baby, that’s all. And there’s nothing that odd about it, there’s been lots of babies cut teeth early. I read about a baby born with two teeth already cut, didn’t I, once?

She sat down in the chair beside the cot and picked up the crochet she had started at the weekend. A bonnet it was, and when she’d started it, she’d thought, What does he want a bonnet for, poor little scrap? It’s not as though he ever goes out of the place, ever goes on nice little walks in a pram like other babies. What’s he want a bonnet for? But she’d fancied doing one, so she’d started it. It was a complicated pattern, and she was enjoying it.

And maybe, Georgie, we’ll be glad of it, what do you say? she asked him as he slept there beside her, her lips quietly folded closed and her eyes fixed on her work. Maybe we will be one of these days. There’s the rompers, as well, and the little jackets. And those boots and mittens I made out of the material left over from the rompers. The thing is, can I get at them? I’ve tried to work out if the cameras can see the door, but it’s very hard, the way they can move them around from downstairs. There must be some way of working it out, though. Some way to get the things where I might want them to be.

She let herself look at the baby while still keeping her head industriously bent over the bonnet. Don’t you worry, my lovely. Don’t you fret yourself. Isobel won’t let them do anything to you, I promise you. Just you go on the way you are, my lovey, and we’ll
soon show them. We’ll see if it’s really going to be like they said, like he said, and if it is, your Isobel won’t let them. Don’t you fret you, George, my lovey …

They sent up cheese and biscuits with her supper that night, and she ate in her own room, safe from observation. But the cheese and the biscuits she did not eat, wrapping them neatly in a white handkerchief and then putting them tidily into her bedside table drawer. She wasn’t quite sure there was any real reason for doing it, but it made her feel better, somehow, made her most secret thinking seem that much more interesting.

  Mike sat waiting for Briant, his long legs sprawled in front of him, for the first time in a month feeling as relaxed as he looked. To get the chance to do a piece of his own sort would go a long way to restoring his self-esteem. It had been hell, the long and so far useless search for the girl. He had been so sure the orderly would be the key, and tedious though it had been to hang about the hospital gates like any legman, he hadn’t minded too much.

But then when he had managed to spot her, walking out wrapped in a dingy brown coat, her head tied up in a scarf decorated with horses’ heads, had asked her her name, and realized he’d guessed right (she looked so exactly the sort of woman who would write letters to Problem Page Aunties), only to discover she was as much use as a sick headache, then he had hit bottom.

At first he had thought she was being stubborn, putting on a performance of stupidity in an attempt to extract money from the Echo for the information she had, but when not even the sight of two new five-pound notes on the stained tablecloth on the café where he had been giving her eggs and chips and stewed brown tea had any effect, he had had to accept it. She had genuinely forgotten the girl’s name.

“I’m ever so sorry, really, sir, I’m ever so sorry. I never was much of a one for names, like. I can tell you what she looked like. Pretty she was, with blue eyes, and—”

“You’ve already told me all that.” Mike had tried not to show his irritation with her bovine idiocy. “But it’s her name I need to know, so that I can find her address and talk to her. Look, there
must be
some
place in the hospital where there’s a record. She had charts and things, I imagine.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Notes. Green folders for Miss Guttner, and yellow ones for Mr. Jeffcoate, and blue ones for—”

“Well, couldn’t you just go and look up the notes for me? They’d have her name
and
address, come to that.”

She shook her head dolefully. “But you have to have the name and number to get them. I go over to Records, see. It’s over by the Path Lab, next to the Pharmacy, the blue-painted door you have to use, not the other one, that’s for the girls what work in Records, and you go up to the counter, and you give them the paper with the name and number on it—Sister always gives me a paper, see, because I never was much of a one for names—and then they go and get the notes and put them in an envelope all stuck down, because notes are special, you see, and then I take them back to Sister. I’m really sorry, sir, I’d tell you if I knew, because I was that worried about her and her sweet little baby. And it’s all right, now, isn’t it? Sister said to everyone it was all right. I never let on it was me wrote a letter about it. Sister was that mad, she’d have gone on and on at me. But she said it was all right, the baby was in good hands, and everything, told everyone in the ward, she did. Not the patients, I mean, just us, the staff, like, and so I thought, Well, it’s. all right.”

After that he’d tried getting at some of the nurses, was desperate enough to accost almost anyone leaving the hospital who looked as though they might be staff, and he’d drawn a blank every time. It was incredible how close the bastards were. Someone has put the fear of God into that place, he’d thought, trying to direct his anger away from himself. But it hadn’t helped. To fail so abysmally at a simple piece of journalistic skill like tracking down a source of information, that had hurt, following on what he still regarded as his failure to make his mark on the Gerrard program. That he had failed was undoubted. Not a single television offer had come in from anywhere as a result, let alone from Gerrard himself.

And it hadn’t been easy to tell Sefton he’d failed, either. The Old Man had behaved surprisingly well, Mike had thought suspiciously,
not producing the sort of thinly veiled hostility with which he still treated Graham, and that had made it worse. Mike had been quite prepared to tell Sefton where he could put his stinking job, been prepared to take his chances on getting another reasonable berth on the Street, even been prepared to risk having to give up journalism altogether. But it hadn’t been necessary.

“Look, why are you being so reasonable about this?” Mike had asked him bluntly, leaning on the spurious courage of the two double whiskies he’d swallowed before going up to see the Old Man. “You sent me to get a story, and I fell down. I expected you to raise merry hell—”

“If you expected that, your understanding of my attitude is very limited,” Sir Daniel had said dryly. “I am not given to raising any sort of fracas at any time, under any provocation. I am a reasonable man. I don’t deny I am extremely disappointed—extremely. But I have a high regard for your ability and I am rarely wrong in my judgments of the personnel I employ. So, if you tell me you are having difficulty in finding this girl, then I must be patient. Clearly the difficulties are very real, but you will overcome them eventually. In the meantime, you had better concentrate on Briant. I must tell you—and this is strictly for your ears and yours alone at this stage—that we have come to an advantageous arrangement with him. And part of it is that you should handle all the interviews he has consented to give us, and have all the agreed access to the child.”