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systematically massaged anyone's feet before. He'd caressed women's feet, kissed them as part of love-making, but nothing like this.
    Hers were nice. Small. Evenly shaped and, apart from the fragile, tender area around where her shoes must have been rubbing, smoothly soft. He finished with her right foot then stilled, but she said nothing and didn't pull away so, resigned, he started again on the left, more firmly this time, using the beds of his thumbs to balance the pressure from his fingers and doing his best to ease away the soreness in the fine muscles beneath his hands.
    When he'd finished again he stopped. She still didn't move, but she was absolutely silent and finally, because he couldn't see well enough to make out her face, it occurred to him that she'd fallen asleep. He slowly lifted her legs and carefully eased himself out from beneath them, then hesitated.
    Obviously very deeply asleep, she lay so quietly that he couldn't even hear her breathing, one arm flung across her face, the other under her head. He remembered she'd had only a few hours' sleep all weekend and felt sorry for her. Real life would hit her soon enough; he could do something to ease its impact tonight. Gently^ doing his best not to wake her, he crouched beside her and eased the bleeper from the side pocket of her white coat.
    He might not remember a great deal of general medicine, he acknowledged, but he was still confident he had more knowledge than a first-year graduate. If there was a problem on the medical wards in the next four hours before fresh medical staff arrived then the nursing staff would have the novelty of seeing how a surgeon dealt with it.
     

CHAPTER TWO
    Merrin's eyes snapped open one minute before eight. A second horrified glance at her wristwatch confirmed the awful truth and within seconds she was pulling on her socks and shoes. Then she was up and out of the mess, braiding her long hair viciously and trying to ignore the urgent de mands from her bladder. She rubbed the sleepy creases from her face and tore through the hospital, up eight short flights of stairs and along the corridor to the surgical ward where she was supposed to be attending her first ever ward round as a qualified doctor.
    The gathering of about twenty people in white coats around an X-ray display cabinet in the seminar room at the far end of the ward told her the round had already started, and she skidded as discreetly as she could manage up to the back of the group, exchanging a harried smile with the young doctor she found herself next to.
    'Merrin Ryan,' she puffed. 'I'm one of the new house officers. Hi.'
    'Hi.' He had a round, pleasant face and he smiled at her and whispered, 'I'm new today, too. Have you got any idea what's going on?'
    'None,' she confided breathlessly, craning her neck. 'But I've been on call for the weekend. I'm working for Professor McAlister. The one with the fair hair is Douglas,' she told him quietly. 'He's Prof McAlister's registrar. And his senior house officer is Lindsay—she's the one standing beside him in the brown dress.' Lindsay and Douglas were presenting one of the cases that had been admitted over the weekend, and they were displaying the man's X-rays for general discussion.
    'I don't know for sure which one's Professor McAlister himself because he was away when I was interviewed and he's been busy all weekend in Theatres and I was too frantic on the wards to have time to go and introduce myself.'
    'My consultant's Mr Sanderson, the one with the glasses at the front,' the other doctor whispered, pointing out an elderly surgeon who stood beside another kindly looking man with equally white hair—a doctor Merrin decided was probably her new boss, Professor McAlister. 'But he's the only one I know.'
    Douglas started presenting another patient they'd admitted over the weekend. 'Twenty-year-old with blunt abdominal trauma from seat-belt injury,' he recited, putting up abdominal X-rays taken from both lying and