Second Opinion Read Free Page A

been on holiday when the first baby had died and off sick with an infected injury to her left hand when the second one came down to her morgue, was very much on duty. And there was no way she was going to accept as mere coincidence the occurrence of three cot deaths in Old East within a matter of five months. George knew better than that. And anyway, she was worried.

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    ‘Nasty to come back to,’ Sheila said with rich sympathy. ‘It’s awful when babies die. All that wasted promise and the poor mother left with empty arms …’
    George grimaced, more irritated than usual by Sheila’s sentimentality, but very aware of the fact that she was in general irritated by everything this morning.
    The weather was foul, for a start; not cold and brisk, which she could handle easily, but dank with a bone-deadening chill from the river mist which filled the air with the acrid scent of oil and mud and old dead things. Everything she had touched since she got out of bed in her noisy little flat just over the river in Bermondsey had seemed slimy with condensation and sticky with heaven knew what in the way of pollution; and her hand felt heavy and dull and less responsive to the demands she had made on it as she worked on the small body that had been waiting for her in the morgue. Fortunately, it had been her left hand she had accidently stuck with the point of a scalpel during a PM on a vagrant’s corpse — a piece of clumsiness over which she was still furious; even thinking about it made her flush with shame — but all the same it slowed her down, even though it was now officially regarded as healed and free from infection, and made her painfully conscious of what she was doing.
    At least this morning’s PM hadn’t been observed by anyone from Ratcliffe Street nick, she thought. It would have been dreadful to have had Rupert Dudley there, looking his usual sardonic and unpleasant self, or one of the younger ones — like Michael Urquhart, who would have been sympathetic and understanding which, in a way, would have been worse than Rupert’s sneering gaze. She deliberately didn’t think about what it might have been like to have had Gus Hathaway there; he belonged in another part of her mind entirely, and she wouldn’t let him intrude where he didn’t belong. A thought which she knew was stupid and which therefore made her even more irritable.
    And then there was the state of the department when she came back. She’d been off sick for a month, admittedly, but there’d been no need to let the paperwork pile up on her desk so appallingly. Everything looked shabbier and messier than usual, too, and she’d said as much to Sheila, seeing she was the senior technician responsible for efficiency, as soon as she returned. Sheila had bridled and looked offended, then admitted that George was right; things had slipped badly. But what could she, Sheila, do when they refused to replace either Barbara Pratt, the haematological technician, or the junior, Tracy, both of whom had left this summer, and the locum pathologist had been so uninterested in what he was doing? She did her best to keep the work going through but with staffing levels the way they were, how could she, Sheila, be expected to cope? She wasn’t a miracle worker, after all, just a humble toiler in the vineyard doing her best with what she had.
    And, she had continued, warming to her theme, it wasn’t as though it was only in Pathology there were problems with staffing; wasn’t the entire fabric of Old East under threat with all the changes the new Trust Board was making? ‘Counting the bloody paper-clips,’ she said bitterly. ‘That’s what we’re doing. Everything’s being cut to ribbons.It’s death by a thousand cuts, that’s what it is.’ She said it as though the cliché were a phrase she had newly minted. ‘There are all those bloody Union meetings all the time and you fall over protesters and their placards every time you go in and out of