A Family Affair (51 page)

‘So you dismissed Mrs Lockyear as a hypochondriac.'

‘She had a history of hypochondria, yes. But I didn't dismiss her. I ran every test I could think of to determine what was causing her symptoms and drew blanks on every one.'

‘But you didn't do a test for carbon monoxide poisoning.'

‘No. I have to admit it never occurred to me. I wish it had – but it didn't. I find it very difficult to accept that if it had occurred to me, I could probably have saved Mrs Lockyear's life.'

For the first time Harvey Benson seemed to relent.

‘Don't be too hard on yourself, Doctor. You're not the first to miss something like that and you won't be the last. Without inside knowledge of Mrs Lockyear's circumstances you couldn't reasonably be expected to consider carbon monoxide poisoning. It is, after all, very unusual. Indeed, in my experience, rare indeed. I don't think that any blame can reasonably be attached to you.'

‘Thank you,' Helen said. But it didn't actually make her feel any better. She could have saved Ida's life and she hadn't. A fatal mistake. A professional failure. Simple as that.

Eventually all the witnesses had been heard and the coroner summed up.

‘In all circumstances, I find that Mrs Lockyear's death was accidental.'

Helen stared at her hands, knotted together around her black cotton gloves in her lap. She was enormously relieved but it did nothing to ease the sense of guilt. She got up, turning away from Walter Evans, who was heading in her direction, and walked past the rows of seats to the rear door without looking to left or right. As she stepped out into the small lobby, a voice behind her said: ‘Just a minute.'

She turned, not sure whether it was she who was being spoken to. Ida Lockyear's son, Clarence, was behind her, his wife behind him.

‘You got away with it then,' he said.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘You got away with letting my mother die.'

‘I'm sorry …' she began.

‘And so you should be! If you'd treated her properly she'd be alive today. You should be struck off!'

‘Mr Lockyear …' The viciousness of the attack had made her begin to tremble. ‘You heard what the coroner said …'

‘Oh yes, I heard all right. He covered up for you. You lot all stick together, don't you? I shouldn't have expected anything different. Well, I'm not leaving it there. My mother is dead because of you.'

‘Now just a minute.' There was someone else at the doorway behind the Lockyears. As she recognised the familiar voice, Helen started with surprise. Paul! She hadn't realised he had been in the court. He must have been in one of the back rows, hidden behind others. Now, in spite of his smart suit and tie, he looked for all the world as he must look to the attacking forwards on the rugby field – solid and rather threatening.

Ida's son hesitated, taken by surprise. Then, like a terrier squaring up to an Alsatian, he snapped: ‘Mind your own business!'

‘It is my business. That's my colleague you are talking to.'

‘Oh – another of the clique!' the man sneered. ‘You should be ashamed, all of you.'

‘Didn't you hear what the coroner said?' Paul said tartly. ‘He exonerated Dr Hall of blame. There was no way she could have been expected to know your mother's boiler was emitting toxic fumes. The verdict was accidental death.'

‘Negligence, more like.'

‘On whose part?' Paul asked.

‘Well – hers, of course.'

‘Perhaps,' Paul said smoothly. ‘I should point out that the coroner also said that if the boiler had been properly maintained, this tragedy would never have occurred.'

‘My mother was an old woman!'

‘Exactly. So don't you think there might be others who had a duty of care to make sure the house was safe for her to live in?'

‘What a thing to say!' That was Mrs Lockyear junior, determined to put her oar in. ‘My husband has just lost his mother and you're trying to put the blame on him!'

‘Not at all. But I think, don't you, that we should all accept a share of responsibility for what happened. When did you last visit your mother, for instance?'

‘I'm a busy man!' Clarence Lockyear retorted. ‘I can't keep driving up and down from London.'

‘And Dr Hall is busy, too. She has a great many patients besides your mother to look after. She can't be expected to do the things one would normally expect members of the immediate family to do. For our part, I assure you we regret what happened very much, and lessons will be learned. But it's totally wrong to try to shift the blame for what happened on to Dr Hall. She did her very best for your mother.'

‘And it wasn't good enough,' Mrs Lockyear junior was determined to have the last word. ‘Trying to blame my Clar! I never heard the like!'

‘I think we shall have to leave it there,' Paul said. ‘If you wish to make a complaint to the GMC then of course you have every right to do so.'

‘And what good would that do? They'd stick up for you lot just the same!'

‘They would look at the facts and come to a balanced conclusion,' Paul said, adding, with emphasis: ‘Just as the coroner did.' He touched Helen's arm. ‘Shall we go?'

She was shaking from head to foot.

‘Oh my God, Paul, that was awful!'

‘It was guilt, Helen. He feels guilty and he's trying to shift the blame so as to ease his conscience. He hasn't been near his mother for months.'

‘But he had a point. I should have known, Paul. I should have taken it further.'

‘We've been through this before, Helen.'

‘And I still feel terrible about it.'

‘Look.' He took her arm. ‘From time to time, Helen, you are going to miss something.'

‘Misdiagnose, you mean.'

‘If you'd known about the boiler, you wouldn't have misdiagnosed. You need facts to help you, otherwise you're only guessing – taking shots in the dark. You ran every test I'd have run and they all came up negative. Unfortunately it never occurred to you to run the one test that might have uncovered the truth.'

‘And my patient died.'

‘Little as we may like it, we have to accept it. We're human beings, Helen, not God Almighty, all seeing, all wise, whatever our patients might like to think.'

‘At this moment I feel like chucking it all in and doing something where lives aren't at stake.'

‘Don't talk such nonsense. You're an excellent doctor. Think of all the lives you've
saved.
'

‘Right now I can only think of the one I lost. You don't know how I feel, Paul.'

He was silent for a moment. Then he said:

‘Believe me, Helen, I do know. I lost a patient once because I missed something. A young woman, with a young family. She had a three-month-old baby when she came to me complaining of a painful lumpy breast. I diagnosed mastitis; she took my word for it. She didn't come back to me for another six months. By that time it was obvious to me that it wasn't mastitis. She had breast cancer. Raging breast cancer. I sent her straight to hospital and they operated but it was too late. The cancer had spread to her lymph system and her spine. The baby was fifteen months old when she died, and her other children two and four years old. It's a long time ago now. Her husband remarried and her children are all at secondary school. But I've never forgotten her, never stopped blaming myself for not spotting what was wrong in the first place and not following up to make sure the “mastitis” had cleared up. If I'd been on the ball I might have been able to save her life. But I wasn't and she died, aged just twenty-nine. So you see, Helen, I do know exactly how you feel.'

‘Oh God,' Helen said. ‘I'm sorry, Paul. But …' she laughed bitterly, ‘it doesn't actually help. It only makes the point even more clearly the awful things that can happen if we mess up.'

‘It comes with the territory,' Paul said. ‘You have to put it behind you and go on. Hopefully you learn from your mistakes. And the job has its compensations. If we weren't doing it, putting our own necks on the block, a lot more people would die.'

‘Well at the moment my neck feels very vulnerable indeed.'

‘I'm sure it does. But ride out the storm, Helen. You'll get over it.'

‘I certainly hope so,' Helen said.

They were back at the surgery now.

‘Why did you come to the inquest?' she asked suddenly. ‘I didn't know you were there.'

He smiled crookedly.

‘I thought you could do with a little moral support. And now, if I'm not mistaken, you could do with a large drink.'

‘I could, but I've still got a surgery to take.'

‘Afterwards?' he said. ‘Would you like to meet up for a drink afterwards?'

She nodded. It was only later that the thought occurred to her; perhaps some good had come out of this whole horrible business. At least she and Paul were back on good terms. Of that she was very glad. But even thinking that she might have benefitted in some way from Ida's death made her feel guilty all over again. Helen thought that it would be a very long time before she was able to

put it behind her.

Carrie stared at the letter Jenny had asked her to post for her and felt her stomach churning. Jenny was going to have a baby. There it was, in black and white, in Jenny's own handwriting.

I knew it!
Carrie thought.
I knew there was something wrong with her! Oh, the stupid, stupid girl! After all I did to try and make sure something like this didn't happen, the minute I let her have a bit of rope she goes and hangs herself with it.

As she so often did when she needed to settle herself down, Carrie went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. A cup of tea was definitely called for.

One of Jenny's Pitman magazines lay on the table and Carrie flipped it open. The page was filled with lines of symbols for translating. They meant nothing to Carrie but Jenny was good at it, she knew. It was unthinkable that all that should go to waste. And it might very well do, even now, if she posted the letter. The boy might stand by her and Jenny would end up in married quarters somewhere, tied to a husband she hardly knew and a baby to bring up when she was scarcely more than a baby herself.

But why hadn't she said something? She'd been going around looking like a wraith these last few weeks and Carrie had known deep down that it was more than simply heartache over that boy. There had been times when she'd almost confessed – Carrie could see it now – the times when she'd hovered, looking nervous as well as wretched, trying to summon up the courage to begin, most likely.

It's a good job I decided to have a look
, Carrie thought, justifying to herself the appalling invasion of privacy she had committed.
It's a good job I didn't just put it in the drawer with the others. Goodness only knows when I'd have found out the truth if I'd done that.

She reread the letter and in spite of herself, in spite of everything, felt a stab of sympathy. Jenny was obviously going through hell. But then, you couldn't expect to have your fun and not pay for it. Jenny wasn't the first young girl to find that out and she wouldn't be the last.
Stupid, stupid girl!
she thought again, angry now as well as upset.
No wonder she was so anxious to get in touch with him.

Briefly she asked herself if she had done the wrong thing keeping them apart. Perhaps she had. She'd asked herself the same question more than once over the weeks, but somehow her course of action had been like a snowball rolling down a mountain slope and gathering its own momentum until it became an avalanche.

After the first time when she'd hidden Bryn's letter to Jenny, it had been easy, too easy, to hide the next, and to refrain from posting Jenny's letters to him too. The first guilt had been swallowed up in what had become a crusading spirit – it was for Jenny's own good. When she thought it was over she'd forget him, get on with her life, and then, one day when the time was right, meet someone more suitable. Carrie could see it clearly in her mind's eye – Jenny with a good job, marrying some nice local boy.

By the time she saw how unhappy Jenny had become and experienced a few more pangs of conscience it really was too late to change her mind. One letter might go astray – a whole series of them, in both directions … well, you didn't have to be a Scotland Yard detective to work out that was highly unlikely. She'd worried about it a bit, imagining them comparing notes, putting two and two together and making four. And then the boy's letters had stopped coming and she'd begun to breathe more easily. That was it, then. All she had to do was wait for the dust to settle and things to get back to normal.

And now this. Carrie stared at Jenny's letter, feeling as if she was being carried along by a flood tide over which she had no control.

What now?

Again the thought occurred to her that if she posted this letter the boy might yet come back on the scene and Carrie couldn't see that it would really solve anything. Simply make complications.

I don't want her tied down yet
, Carrie thought.
That's not what I want for her. She's worth more than that. We'll work something out. We did before. Look at Heather now – really happy. It would have been a very different story if she'd ended up with that no-good lad in Bristol who got her into trouble. And our Jenny's got an even brighter future in front of her. We worked it out then and we'll work it out now. Ourselves. As a family.

The other letters she had omitted to post were hidden in her underwear drawer. Just in case she should change her mind. But this one …

The contents were so abhorrent to Carrie she couldn't bear for them to exist, even. She tore the letter into little pieces and threw them on to the living-room fire.

Then she made herself that much-needed cup of tea and sat down to work out what she was going to do next.