Lost Causes Read Free

we’ve run out of time. Over to the weather centre …’
    Steven switched off the radio and said, ‘About time too. The vaccine situation’s been crazy for years.’
    ‘People want a hundred per cent safe vaccines,’ said Tally. ‘They see it as their right.’
    ‘You and I know that isn’t possible,’ said Steven. ‘My fear is that it’s going to take a terrorist attack before the message gets home. If there’s a vaccine available, get it. God, look at the time. No gold star for me at the end of the month.’ He got up and padded through to the bathroom.
    Tally – Dr Natalie Simmons – watched him disappear, admitting to herself that she’d been expecting something like the undercurrent of frustration Steven was showing. He loved her – she had no doubts about that – but he’d also given up a job he’d loved in order to come and set up home with her in Leicester, and she still wasn’t sure that he believed he’d made the right decision. She wanted to think it had been a considered commitment, made after a great deal of thought, but she knew differently. Steven had been angry and disillusioned at the time of his resignation: it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, although, to be fair, disillusionment had been threatening for some time before that. On the other hand and on the bright side, he had already rebuffed several requests from London urging him to reconsider and come back.
    Since leaving the army, where he’d served with the Parachute Regiment and Special Forces, Steven had been employed as a medical investigator with the Sci-Med Inspectorate, a small unit attached to the Home Office which investigated possible crime and wrongdoing in the high-tech world of science and medicine – areas where the police lacked expertise. It was a job he’d been extremely good at but it had taken him into a number of dangerous situations where on more than one occasion his life had been in danger. Tally had met him during one such investigation so she had first-hand experience of the risks. She had been terrified and had no wish to ever find herself in that position again … or even try to form any serious relationship with someone who might be.
    Steven had fallen for Tally and had initially hoped that he could convince her that being in danger was the exception rather than the rule, and that it would be perfectly possible for him to combine his Sci-Med career with a normal relationship. Tally, who had her own career to pursue and was currently a senior registrar in paediatric medicine in a Leicester children’s hospital, disagreed and was quite adamant that she couldn’t live in constant fear of the danger her partner might be in. She’d made it clear that that kind of uncertainty was no basis for a relationship and they had ultimately parted over it.
    Some time later, when Steven found himself totally disillusioned with the outcome of his last assignment when, in the ‘public interest’, the bad guys had got away with it – yet again, as he saw it – he had resigned. He had contacted Tally and told her what had happened. There would be no going back, he assured her. He had never stopped loving her. Would she consider making a life with him if he resigned from Sci-Med? Tally had agreed without hesitation and had suggested that he come and live with her in Leicester while he looked for a new job. At least one of them would be working.
    Although himself a qualified doctor and an expert in field medicine – the medicine of the battlefield – Steven had known that it would be difficult if not impossible for him to find his way back into civilian medicine, having never really been involved in it before at any level. He’d joined the army – what he’d really wanted to do all along – almost as soon as he’d completed his hospital registration year after university. He had been one of those students who’d been steered towards medicine by ambitious parents and teachers. Unlike many, he’d found the