George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt

Also by Claire Rayner

A STARCH OF APRONS

THE MEDDLERS

A TIME TO HEAL

MADDIE

CLINICAL JUDGEMENTS

POSTSCRIPTS

DANGEROUS THINGS

LONDON LODGINGS

PAYING GUESTS

FIRST BLOOD

SECOND OPINION

THIRD DEGREE

Thanks for advice and information about death, detection, fires and sundry other topics are due to: Dr Trevor Betteridge, Pathologist of Yeovil, Somerset; Dr Rufus Crompton, Pathologist, St George’s Hospital, Tooting, London; Dr Azeel Sarrah, Pathologist, Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire; Detective Chief Inspector Jackie Malton, Metropolitan Police; Dr Hilary Howells, Anaesthetist of Totteridge, Hertfordshire; the London Fire Brigade; many members of the staff of Northwick Park and St Mark’s Hospital, Harrow, Middlesex; and many others too mumerous to mention; and are gratefully tendered by the author.

The gossip spread around Old East like oil on a marble slab, oozing into every corner of the hospital until not only were the staff talking about it, so were the patients.

‘I said to Sister when she was doing my dressing this morning, I said, “Well, Sister, what’s going on here then? And who’ll be the next? Is there anything worrying
you
?”’ The rather fat woman in the peach chenille dressing gown, sitting awkwardly festooned with drainage tubes and IV lines in the shabby dayroom on Annie Zunz Ward, shook with pleasure at her own wit and then grimaced as her operation site gave her a twinge of pain. ‘Ooh, you take your life in your hands when you laugh, don’t you? Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? It’s the best medicine, I always say.’

The woman sitting on the other side of the dayroom, who had heard enough of Peach Chenille’s opinions on everything upon which it was possible to hold an opinion, forbore to answer, but later, when she went back to her own bed, she too spoke to her immediate neighbour about it all, wondering what was going on at Old East and who might be next.

‘Three suicides in as many days, so they’re saying,’ she said. ‘If it was the patients, you’d understand, what with worrying about yourself the way you do, but the staff … Well, it makes you think about there being something wrong in the place, doesn’t it? You read a lot in the papers about
morale being low in the NHS and all that, but this is really too much.’

Her neighbour, who knew herself to be dying of her liver disease and already detaching her mind from other people’s interests in consequence, managed a faint smile. ‘People don’t choose to die because of the way everyone feels,’ she murmured. ‘It’s always because of something personal.’ She closed her eyes and wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to die now herself rather than a few weeks down the line when she’d probably feel even sicker than she did at present — if that were possible. She’d always promised herself she’d choose when to go; but since she no longer had the strength either emotionally or physically to take action on any decision she made, she wisely chose not to think at all any more.

But others did: most of all, the staff. They, after all, were most affected. If people they worked with were choosing to hurl themselves prematurely and to an extent violently out of life at Old East, didn’t that mean they should look a little more closely at what life in the hospital entailed? As the patient in Annie Zunz had surmised, morale was indeed low, and the implication that you might be driven to commit suicide at any moment did nothing to raise it.

Sheila Keen, the senior technician in the path. lab and famous throughout Old East for her passion (and great gift) for gossip, seemed excited rather than depressed by what was going on. She was displaying a bright-eyed relish for it all that irritated her colleagues immensely, not least her boss Dr George Barnabas. George had been sitting in her cubby hole of an office, looking over the notes that had been sent down with Pamela Frean’s body and the post-mortem request, when Sheila came in, smiling sweetly and bearing a tray with a pot of freshly made coffee and biscuits. Since Sheila was often loudly on record as not being part of Old East’s staff in order to make coffee for the head honcho (a piece of outmoded slang which in itself set George’s teeth on edge), and
the two of them had had a row only last week, the sight of her made George scowl.

‘What are you after, Sheila?’ she said bluntly. ‘And try not to be so obvious about it, for Pete’s sake. I’d prefer you to come right out with it and ask instead of all this best buttering-up stuff.’

Sheila’s fixed smile became a little more brittle but didn’t falter. ‘Oh, Dr B.,’ she said indulgently as she set the tray down on the desk and set about pouring the coffee, which smelled wonderful to George, who had as usual missed her breakfast. ‘You did get out of the bed on the wrong side this morning, didn’t you?’

‘I did not,’ George said, managing not to clench her teeth. ‘What do you want?’

Sheila opened her eyes wide. ‘I just thought I’d see if there was anything special you wanted done. I’m bang up to date with everything — even the cardiac clinic stuff is ready a day early — so I’ve got a little time available. I could take your PM notes for you maybe? Just to take some of the weight off you?’

‘Oh, balls!’ said George. ‘Who do you think you’re kidding? You just want to be there when I do it.’

‘Well, why not?’ Sheila dropped her air of innocence and looked avid. ‘You can’t blame me, Dr B.! I mean, what a carry on! Three suicides among the staff and —’

‘Who says they’re suicides?’ George snapped. ‘I don’t believe I made any such suggestion about the last two. And as I recall,’ she added with heavy sarcasm, ‘I think I did do the PMs, didn’t I? Not you?’

‘Oh, Dr B., come on! They can’t just be accidents. Not three times in a row. You might as well expect your lottery tickets to come up as that.’

‘The first two
were
accidents. I can’t say what this one is. Not till I do the PM. And I don’t need your help with it, thank you. I can cope perfectly well with Danny’s assistance.’

Sheila flushed. Danny was, after all only the mortuary
porter and as such well below Sheila’s regard. ‘Well, if that’s the way you want it. I was only trying to be helpful.’

‘Oh, sure,’ George said. ‘You always are, aren’t you? If you’ve got that much free time, you can help Jerry catch up. He’s overloaded with the extra histology I gave him. He needs someone to cut his specimens for him.’

‘I’m not here to do Jerry Swann’s work, thank you very much.’ Sheila made for the door. ‘I’m the senior technician here and that means I have a supervisory role over people like Jerry. Take a look at my job description some time to remind yourself.’ And she flounced out before George could answer, even if she’d wanted to.

George went down to the PM room, clutching the notes and swearing inaudibly at letting Sheila rile her so much. Sheila had always been the most difficult member of the staff while at the same time being the most expert at her job. She never made mistakes, kept well up to speed with the lab’s very considerable output of work and knew the place inside out. If only she didn’t have to be so hard to get on with, George thought as she dumped the notes and made for her dressing room to get into her greens. A taste for gossip shouldn’t madden me so much, I like gossip myself. But she really is the end …

By the time George was ready, her hair tied up in a tight cap to protect it from the unpleasant smells that were an inevitable part of working with corpses, rubber-aproned and with her feet tucked into the oversized boots that protected her from the water Danny always sent splashing so enthusiastically over the slabs, she had managed to push Sheila and her irritating ways to the back of her mind. She had a job to do and she had to concentrate on it.

But all the same, as she and Danny prepared to start, she couldn’t help mentally reviewing the previous two cases involving members of Old East’s staff on which she had worked in the past few days: Tony Mendez, the theatre porter who had died of alcoholic poisoning, and Lally Lamark, from the
Medical Records department, who had been diabetic and who had died in an insulin coma. Both had clearly been accidental, she thought, yet all over the hospital there had been this rush of gossip that they had been suicides. No wonder Sheila had been so eager to come and find out what had happened to Pam Frean. She’d want to be first with the news; just as, probably, she’d been first with the chatter about Mendez and Lamark. Goddamn Sheila, George thought furiously, and then was annoyed with herself for letting her intrude again.

Pushing Sheila out of her mind, George looked down at the body on the slab and felt the twinge of pity that she still experienced whenever the subject for a PM was young. This girl couldn’t have been into her twenties for long: her face was smooth and taut with none of the signs of wear that life had scribbled on most of the bodies George dealt with. Her hair was thick and long, and George watched as Danny twisted it into a heavy rope and pinned it to the top of the head to get it out of the way. Had the girl been proud of its soft smoothness and pampered it with expensive shampoos? Probably. And her body, so soft and pretty, in spite of the marble-like effect that was inevitable in the post rigor mortis state: had she taken a delight in that too? Who could know? George picked up one of the flaccid hands and looked at the nails. They were short, unpolished, cut straight across and had clearly never been manicured. So she hadn’t been into fashion and self-adornment, George thought, letting the hand go. This was being silly, even sentimental, she told herself. Better to find out the facts instead of surmising like this.

‘Right, Danny,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s get going.’ She pulled down the microphone above her head so that it was suitably close to her mouth and began to dictate. ‘The body is of a female, height…’ Danny measured and told her and she repeated the fact into the mike and they were off, slipping comfortably into the routine of a post-mortem, and all musings apart from what she was actually doing and looking at slid out of her mind.