Robin had phoned her boyfriend, CID officer Ryan Murphy, as soon as she’d been able to reach her mobile, but he was too far across London to have any realistic chance of reaching her before evening visiting time had ended. She’d begged Murphy, who was horrified by what had happened, to call Strike with the excuse of the fever and sore throat, and tell him she wouldn’t be able to drive him into Kent. Robin had also impressed upon her boyfriend that her parents weren’t, on any account, to know what had happened. The very last thing Robin needed right now was her mother hovering over her, and blaming what had happened on Robin’s job, which she was sure, however unfairly, to do.
The shock of her sudden hospitalisation, and the reason for it, had been such that twenty-four hours later, Robin still felt as though she’d slipped through some kind of portal into a reality that wasn’t her own. She’d barely slept the previous night, due to the low moans of an elderly woman in the next bed. That morning, Robin had been wheeled into a newly vacant single room, for which she was grateful, though without being entirely sure what she’d done to deserve it, except that one of the older nurses on duty seemed to pity her for having had no visitors.
Groggy though she was from the combination of sleeplessness and morphine, Robin had spent a lot of the morning trying to retrace events in her head, to work out when the contraceptive failure must have happened, given the likely date of conception given by her surgeon. She now thought she’d worked out when the mistake must have been made, and she dreaded having to talk to Murphy about it when he arrived in the afternoon. Most of all she felt a vast sense of self-recrimination, for not having managed her own body better, for having, as she saw it, brought this avoidable catastrophe upon herself.
She was lying watching a murmuration of starlings twirl across the leaden sky outside her window when her mobile rang. She picked it up and saw her mother was calling. Unable to face the conversation, she let it ring. Linda gave up at exactly the moment the door of Robin’s room opened. She looked around to see the broad, genial face of her surgeon, Mr Butler.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said, smiling.
‘Hello,’ said Robin.
‘How’re we feeling?’ he asked, taking her chart from the end of the bed and casting an eye over it.
‘Fine,’ said Robin, as Mr Butler pulled up a chair and sat down.
‘No pain?’
‘No,’ said Robin.
‘Good. Well, now… did you know you were pregnant?’
‘No,’ said Robin. Not wanting to seem stupid, she said, ‘I had to come off the pill for a bit, but we’ve been using condoms. I suppose one of them must have split, and we didn’t notice.’
‘A shock, then?’ said Mr Butler.
‘It was, yes,’ said Robin, with polite understatement.
‘Well, as I told you yesterday, we had no choice but to remove the ruptured tube. It’s very fortunate you got here so quickly, because it could’ve been life-threatening, but I’m afraid there’s an issue you might not have been aware of,’ said Mr Butler, no longer smiling.
‘What’s that?’ asked Robin.
‘We found significant scarring on the fallopian tube we removed. We had a quick look at the other one, and it’s exactly the same.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin.
‘Have you ever had a diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease?’
‘No,’ said Robin.
‘To your knowledge, have you ever had chlamydia?’
The dart of dread was blunted by the morphine, but Robin felt it nonetheless.
‘Yes, when I was nineteen, but they gave me antibiotics.’
‘Right,’ said Mr Butler, nodding slowly. ‘Well, by the looks of it, the antibiotics didn’t work. It can happen. Did you continue to have symptoms?’
‘Not really,’ said Robin. There’d been some pain, certainly, in the months following the rape that had ended her university career, but she’d told herself it was psychosomatic. The last thing she’d wanted at the time were any more intimate physical examinations. ‘No, I thought it had gone.’
‘Well, the symptoms are variable, they can be easy to miss. Can you remember when you were next given antibiotics?’
‘I think… maybe a year later?’ she said, struggling to remember. ‘I got strep throat. I was given more then.’
‘Right, well, that lot probably did the trick, because there’s no current infection. Unfortunately, though, you’ve been left with quite a lot of damage. I think it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to conceive naturally, I’m afraid.’
Robin simply looked at him. Possibly he thought she hadn’t understood, because he continued,
‘The embryo couldn’t get past the scarring, you see, which is why it implanted in the tube and ruptured it. And as I say, the other side’s just as bad.’
‘Right,’ said Robin.
‘How old are you?’ he asked, looking back at her chart.
‘Thirty-two,’ said Robin.
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with the ovaries. If you’re planning on children, though, I’d consider freezing your eggs sooner rather than later. Your best chance would be IVF.’
‘OK,’ said Robin.