After Effects Read Free

‘Sir—’
    â€˜Yes?’
    Dilys Chomel said uncertainly, ‘I’m afraid there’s something else, sir.’
    â€˜And what is that?’ enquired Dr Beaumont with carefully controlled impatience.
    â€˜I understand that this patient—Mrs Muriel Galloway—was one of those taking part in Dr Meggie’s Cardigan Protocol.’
    â€˜Hell and damnation,’ said Dr Edwin Beaumont quite unprofessionally and without thinking at all.

CHAPTER TWO
    The medical contention is, of course, that a bad doctor is an impossibility.
    It wasn’t only Dr Byville and Dr Meggie who were not available at their hospitals.
    â€˜No, Dr Teal, I’m afraid Mr Maldonson isn’t in yet,’ said Shirley Partridge for the third time that morning.
    She’d watched the lady doctor pacing up and down the entrance hall of St Ninian’s earlier on looking tired and anxious and now she was back on the phone again. It wasn’t, Shirley Partridge knew perfectly well, any obstetric emergency that was bringing about all that stress. It was the unkind behaviour of Mr Maldonson, her boss.
    â€˜Oh.’ Dr Teal sounded drained. ‘Oh … then I’ll have to … would you put me through to this number, please?’
    â€˜Ringing now,’ sang Shirley Partridge.
    â€˜And then,’ said Marion Teal wearily, ‘I think I’ll just come down to the front hall and wait for him to come in. It’s not,’ she added more to herself than to the telephonist, ‘as if there’s anything more I can do here now anyway.’
    The Obstetric Registrar, who had been on night duty all the week, was exhausted enough to have subsided on to one of the benches in the front hall and gone to sleep there and then but by now she was much too wound up to have done any such thing. Resting while you could was the action of someone with a quiet mind and Marion Teal’s mind was not quiet. What she needed to do was to unload some of the bottled-up anger and irritation she was feeling over Mr Maldonson’s blatant misogynism on someone somewhere—and preferably male.
    The artist, Adrian Gomm, though admittedly of rather epicene appearance, was the nearest man. He was almost out of reach on a ladder.
    â€˜Do you mind,’ she called up to him, ‘if I ask you about your work?’ It was more than Mr Maldonson ever did about hers. All he seemed interested in was making her so late going off-duty in the mornings that all her careful arrangements for child care were disrupted.
    â€˜Go ahead.’
    â€˜It’s all very symbolic, isn’t it?’
    â€˜That,’ said Gomm, ‘is the general idea.’
    â€˜That’s St Ninian at the top, isn’t it?’ The figure of a distinctly substantial saint clothed all over in white, complete with halo in gold, was spread across the whole of the upper part of the mural, his arms benevolently encompassing the painting.
    â€˜Top marks.’
    Marion Teal flushed. ‘But those other white gowns—the empty ones—’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜I don’t quite understand what they’re doing in the painting.’
    â€˜Don’t suppose you do,’ said Adrian Gomm negligently from his perch above her.
    â€˜And they’re all different,’ persisted Marion. It was stupid to feel so disadvantaged just because she was having to look up at him. He wasn’t even setting out to rattle her like Mr Maldonson did. Mr Maldonson did not like women in medicine—well, women in obstetric surgery anyway—and went out of his way to make that clear in every possible way.
    â€˜They are,’ said Adrian Gomm laconically.
    Marion Teal stepped back and regarded the mural more closely. ‘This one below the saint on the left—that’s an operation gown, surely?’
    â€˜It is.’
    She frowned. ‘But what I don’t see is why its strings lead down to the long white gown