Second Opinion Read Free Page B

the place — and then to cap it all you come back and have a go at me when I’ve done all I could, I swear to you, all anyone possibly could do, to keep things going properly —’
    George had taken a deep breath and stopped listening, while biting her lip to keep back any comments regarding the amount of time Sheila might have spent gossiping on the phone — her most infuriating habit — and said merely that she would talk to Professor Hunnisett about it. The person who really had control over staffing, of course, was the Chief Executive Officer, Matthew Herne, but she knew she’d get short shrift from him if she asked for more help. The only thing that man cared about was the rows of figures he spent all his time with; if she didn’t get a clinical ally to help her lean on him, she’d never get anywhere. Professor Hunnisett, as head of the Clinical Directorates — these new labels they all had now they were an NHS Trust were another source of irritation to George — was the only person she could ask to help her; not that he could be expected to do all that much. He never did, after all.
    She got rid of Sheila by dint of asking for coffee — a request which sent her off in a huff to complain to Jerry and Jane and Peter and anyone else in the main lab who would listen that she wasn’t a domestic, for God’s sake, the woman could make her own bloody coffee, before going into the little kitchen to make it — and settled at her desk.
    The paperwork would have to wait; first there was the report on this post-mortem to do, and she took the cassette Danny Roscoe, her mortuary porter, had given her after she’d finished her dictation, and pushed it into her Walkman. It would have to be typed out so that she could readthe notes at her leisure, but now she wanted to recall what she’d seen and done.
    She sat with her eyes closed, slowly rubbing her dull left hand with her right as she listened, and frowned.
    It had seemed to be a cot death. Certainly there were no signs of any kind to explain the death in any other terms; she had looked particularly carefully for needle marks and there had been none, and had taken samples for Jerry, her most sensible technician, to check for insulin. She, like every one else in the pathology world, had become particularly watchful for that ever since the fuss last year over the nurse suffering from Munchausen’s by Proxy, who’d murdered in-patient children up in Lincolnshire. But she doubted there’d be any; there had been no signs to lead her to suppose anything untoward had been done at all. Inevitably she was left with that most deeply unsatisfactory of diagnoses — Sudden Infant Death Syndrome — to put on the report for the coroner, and she opened her eyes and rewound her tape, glowering as she thought about it. It was as bad as those ghastly historical days, when they had entered things like ‘Dead of the Flux’ or ‘Succumbed to Melancholy’ in cause of death columns in church registers. Positively antediluvian.
    She leaned back and rubbed her face, trying to make her left hand feel less heavy, and knew the problem was as much her own mood as anything else. If she kept thinking about her hand, of course it would feel odd. Somatizing, that was what she was doing. She was anxious and pushing her anxieties into her work and thereby into her body. If she hadn’t been thinking about her mother that day when she’d done the post-mortem on the vagrant’s sadly decomposing body (they’d found him in a pile of dustbins where he had clearly been for almost a week, unnoticed because the street-cleansing work of the local council had been privatized and somehow the collections were ‘all over the place’, as the policeman who brought in the body had toldher gloomily), if she hadn’t, she repeated inside her head, she wouldn’t have let her hand with the scalpel slip. If it hadn’t slipped she wouldn’t have stuck the back of her other hand and let in the infection that