A portly consultant in a chalk-striped suit who was passing stopped and chipped in, “An entire cart of notes went missing from my diabetic clinic on Tuesday. The whole lot vanished into some administrative black hole.”
I noticed that Dr. Saunders had arrived at the nurses’ station and was checking a patient’s notes. He didn’t seem to notice me.
“Really?” I said, uninterested, to Chalk-striped Consultant. But he carried on warming to his theme. “When they built St. John’s hospital last year, no one remembered to build a morgue and when their first patient died, there was nowhere to take him.”
The senior midwife was clearly embarrassed by him and I wondered why he was being so open with me about hospital errors.
“There’s been relocation of teenage cancer patients and no one remembered to transport their frozen eggs,” continued Chalk-striped Consultant. “And now their chances of a baby when they’ve recovered are zero.”
Dr. Saunders noticed me and smiled reassuringly. “But we’re not totally incompetent all of the time, I promise.”
“Did you know that women were being paid to take part in the cystic fibrosis trial?” I asked.
Chalk-striped Consultant looked a little peeved by my abrupt change of subject. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Nor I,” said Dr. Saunders. “Do you know how much?”
“Three hundred pounds.”
“It could well have been a doctor or nurse being kind,” Dr. Saunders said, his tone considerate. And again he reminded me of you, this time for thinking the best of people. “There was that nurse in oncology last year, wasn’t there?” he asked.
Chalk-striped Consultant nodded. “Spent the department’s entire transport fund on new clothes for an old man she felt sorry for.”
The young punky nurse joined in, “And midwives sometimes try to help hard-up mums by giving them nappies and formula when they leave. Occasionally a sterilizer or a baby bath finds its way out too.”
Chalk-striped Consultant grinned. “You mean we’ve reverted to the days when nurses were caring?”
The punky nurse glowered at him and Chalk-striped Consultant laughed.
Two pagers went off and a phone rang on the nurses’ station. Chalk-striped Consultant walked away to answer his page; the punky nurse answered the phone; the senior midwife was answering a patient’s buzzer. I was left alone with Dr. Saunders. I’ve always been intimidated by handsome men, let alone beautiful ones. I associate them not so much with inevitable rejection as with turning me completely invisible.
“Would you like to have a coffee?” he asked.
Probably blushing, I shook my head. I didn’t want to be the recipient of emotional charity.
I have to admit, that despite still being with Todd, I entertained a fantasy about Dr. Saunders, but knew that it wasn’t one to pursue. Even if I could create a fantasy in which he was attracted to me, his wedding ring prevented it from stretching into something long-term or secure or anything else I wanted in a relationship.
“
“You said you found her notes going missing suspicious?” asks Mr. Wright.
“To start with, yes. But the longer I was at the hospital, the harder it was to imagine anything sinister happening. It just seemed too public, a cheek-by-jowl working environment with people literally looking over one another’s shoulders. I couldn’t see how anyone would get away with something. Not that I knew what that ‘something’ was.”
“And the payments?”
“The people at St. Anne’s didn’t even seem surprised by them, let alone suspicious.”
He looks down at the police log of our calls. “DS Finborough didn’t return your call and you didn’t chase that?”
“No, because what could I tell him? That women had been paid, but no one I’d spoken to at the hospital thought that sinister or even strange; that Chrom-Med was floating on the stock market, but even my own fiancé thought that was just a logical business decision. And Tess’s notes had gone missing, but the medical staff thought that pretty routine. I had nothing to go to him with.”
My mouth has become dry. I drink some water, then continue, “I thought that I’d been going down a dead end and should have kept going with my initial distrust of Emilio Codi and Simon. I knew most murders were domestic. I can’t remember where I heard that.”
But I remember thinking that
“I thought Simon and Emilio were both capable of killing her. Emilio had an obvious motive and Simon was clearly obsessed by her; his photos were evidence of that. Both of them were connected to Tess through the college: Simon as a student there and Emilio as a tutor. So after I left the hospital I went to the college. I wanted to see if anyone there could tell me anything.”
