Donor (16 page)

Outside in the car park Sandy stopped abruptly as they neared Esmeralda.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Kate.

‘Do you get the impression that we may be ever so slightly … out of place?’

Kate looked puzzled; then she saw what he meant. Esmeralda was flanked by a Mercedes saloon on one side and a BMW coupé on the other. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I fear you may be right.’ A quick glance around showed few of the cars were over two years old and most were top marques.

Sandy held the door open for her and put on his butler’s voice. ‘If Modom would care to enter?’

‘Idiot,’ smiled Kate and got in.

Sandy turned the ignition key, but nothing happened save for a clicking sound. ‘Shit,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding,’ said Kate.

‘’Fraid not,’ said Sandy with a grimace. ‘Esy’s doing the dirty on us.’

‘She knows how to pick her moments,’ said Kate glancing over her shoulder. ‘Any idea what the problem is?’

‘The solenoid’s engaging but the starter motor isn’t turning. Maybe it’s jammed.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘Can a bird fly?’ Sandy opened his door and got out. Kate waited patiently while he disappeared under the open bonnet. Various swear words told her that work was in progress. The car rocked a little.

‘Give it a try, Kate.’

She moved into the driving seat and turned the key. There was a solitary click, followed by a curse from under the bonnet.

‘No luck?’ asked Kate with slight trepidation.

‘The battery’s flat. We’ll have to bump-start her.’

Kate let off the handbrake and took hold of the steering wheel, while Sandy pushed the car backwards out of its slot. ‘Ready?’ he asked, going round to the back of the car to begin pushing.

‘Ready.’

The car park was flat, so there was no convenient gradient to make use of. Sandy found it hard work getting some momentum into Esmeralda. ‘Right!’ he said lifting his hands off the boot and straightening up. Kate let up the clutch and the car jerked to a halt, showing no interest in starting.

‘Right, we’ll try again,’ said Sandy.

‘Can I help?’ said a male voice at Sandy’s shoulder.

Sandy turned to find a tall, dark-haired man standing there.

‘She seems a bit reluctant,’ the stranger went on.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Sandy. ‘She can’t be that cold. She’s only been parked for half an hour and the battery goes flat.’

The two men gave Esmeralda a good shove and built up more momentum than the time before. ‘Right!’ yelled Sandy.

Once again Esmeralda jerked, then lurched to a halt in mechanical silence.

‘Third time lucky,’ said the stranger, resting his hands on the boot again.

Sandy nodded, then suddenly looked up as if he’d had an idea and said, ‘Kate?’

‘Yes?’ came the reply.

‘You have got the ignition on, haven’t you?’

There was a long pause before a small voice said, ‘Sorry.’

Sandy and the stranger smiled at each other and gave Esmeralda another shove. This time her engine came to life when Kate let up the clutch, and Kate drove her round the square while Sandy thanked the stranger for his help.

‘Not at all. Been visiting one of the patients?’

‘Our daughter’s just been admitted to the transplant unit.’

‘That’ll be Dr Ross’s unit.’

‘Then you work here?’ said Sandy. ‘A doctor?’

‘Sort of.’ The man held out his hand and said, ‘Steven Dunbar.’

‘Sandy Chapman. That’s my wife, Kate, just starting lap two in the green Williams Renault, known to us as Esmeralda.’

Dunbar at once recognized the name ‘Chapman’ from his conversation with Clive Turner, and smiled.

Esmeralda came slowly past with Kate looking anxiously out of the window. ‘When can I stop?’ she asked.

Both men laughed at the look of mock anguish on her face.

‘Any time,’ replied Sandy. ‘Just don’t stall the engine.’

She brought Esmeralda to a halt and listened to the idle speed for a moment. Satisfied that it was steady enough, she got out and joined Sandy.

‘Kate, this is Dr Dunbar.’

‘Hello,’ said Dunbar. ‘I’m not really a doctor here – more of a civil servant. I look after the government’s financial involvement in the hospital.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ said Kate politely.

‘Then you wouldn’t have been too keen on taking our Amanda on for free?’ suggested Sandy.

‘On the contrary, I’m delighted we have,’ said Dunbar.

‘Thanks for the push,’ said Sandy.

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Dunbar.

He watched as Kate and Sandy got into Esmeralda and drove off, waving to them as they disappeared out of the gate. He was glad he had okayed their daughter’s admission. He must have misjudged Médic Ecosse’s referral policy when he suspected that they were taking only straightforward ‘show-business’ cases to use for self-promotion.

There was one strange thing though. He’d just come from the press reception for the jaw-operation patient, and at it there had been no mention of the hospital taking on a free NHS transplant case. Why not? Why miss the opportunity to gain some good publicity?

The reception hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared. The patient was an ordinary girl from the local area, who hadn’t suspected for a moment that she was being exploited. She seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention, turning this way and that at the request of the photographers, posing with the staff and with the local councillor for the area, who had seized on the occasion to make political capital. Dunbar remembered him. He was the Labour councillor who had taken every opportunity to express his opposition to private medicine at the meeting between the Scottish Office and the hospital. Now here he was, smiling into the cameras with his arm round the star patient, doing his best to create the impression that he had been the prime mover in the whole affair.

None of this made Dunbar angry because, as Ingrid had said, the bottom line was sound enough and the bottom line was that the girl had been given a new and better life because of the operation. The hospital was going to get some positive publicity that would do no one any harm and if a local politician grabbed the chance to promote his own interests, what the hell? That’s what politicians did. That was the way the world worked. Nature abhorred a missed opportunity in the world of self-interest.

That was why it was so surprising that there had been no mention of the Chapman girl. A transplant was a much bigger deal than the relatively minor jaw surgery they had just been celebrating. He’d ask Ingrid about it after the weekend. In the meantime, he was going to drive over to Bearsden to return Sheila Barnes’s journal.

He was almost halfway there when he started to have doubts. Was there any point in returning the journal to the house, when it seemed certain that neither Sheila nor her husband would ever return there? On the other hand, he would feel guilty about hanging on to it. It was far more than just a diary of events; it said so much about the woman herself. He decided that he’d return it to Sheila in person. He’d take it down to Helensburgh at the weekend and tell her how useful it had been.

As he headed back to town, he found himself thinking about Lisa Fairfax. He really should have told her about Sheila Barnes – who she was and what she’d claimed. But he was so used to telling people nothing more than they needed to know that he’d kept quiet. But the knowledge that someone else had made the same allegation as she had about Médic Ecosse would have been a comfort, and if anyone deserved to feel better Lisa did. She didn’t have much of a life with no job and being at the constant beck and call of a deranged mother. On impulse, he drove over to her flat and pushed the entryphone button.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Steven Dunbar. Can I come up?’

‘I suppose so,’ answered Lisa a little uncertainly.

The door lock was released and Dunbar climbed quickly to the third floor.

‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ said Lisa, ushering him inside.

Dunbar looked to right and left as he entered the hall.

‘She’s asleep,’ said Lisa.

‘I was passing,’ he lied. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you the other day that I think I should have. Something about Sheila Barnes.’

‘Sheila Barnes?’ repeated Lisa. ‘She’s the nursing sister you asked me about. You wondered if I knew her.’

‘That’s right. She left well before you started at Médic Ecosse, but what I didn’t tell you was that she had a very similar experience to yours. She said much the same thing about a patient who died in the transplant unit in her time.’

Lisa looked at him as if trying to decide whether or not she should be annoyed at not having heard this before. ‘You mean I wasn’t the only one?’

‘No, you weren’t,’ confessed Dunbar. ‘That’s really why I was sent up here to Scotland. There were two of you who maintained that patients had been given the wrong organ in transplant operations.’

‘Did they treat her like an idiot too?’

‘No one took her seriously either,’ agreed Dunbar. ‘Unfortunately, both she and her husband are suffering from cancer. She’s dying. I went to see her in the hospice she’s in, down in Helensburgh.’ He explained about the journal. ‘She wanted me to see the entries she made at the time of the incident.’

‘Did you learn much?’

‘They were very detailed. In the end I was struck by how similar her version of events was to yours.’

‘So you might even believe us?’

‘I’m finding it difficult not to.’

‘Good. Did you say Sheila’s husband had cancer too?’

‘He’s in the same hospice.’

‘How strange, and what rotten luck. I hope they’re able to comfort each other.’

Dunbar silently acknowledged a nice thought.

Lisa got up and turned down the heat on the electric fire. ‘Don’t you ever miss being a practising doctor?’ she asked.

‘Not a bit. I didn’t really like it, I had no feel for it, I gave it up. Simple as that.’

She smiled. ‘What a remarkably honest thing to do. I’ve known lots of doctors who have no feel for it but giving it up is the last thing on their minds. They’ll be hanging in there till it’s carriage-clock time with a vote of thanks from the poor sods who managed to survive their ministrations.’

‘It’s hard to escape once you’ve started,’ said Dunbar.

‘Maybe,’ agreed Lisa. ‘Would you like a drink?’

He nodded. ‘I would. It’s been a long day.’

Lisa poured them both gin and tonic, handed one to Dunbar, then sat down again.

‘Why did you really come here?’ she asked with sudden directness.

The question took him aback. ‘To tell you about Sheila Barnes. I thought you had a right to know.’

‘But I don’t have a right,’ said Lisa. ‘You were under no obligation at all to tell me, so why did you?’

‘I thought you should know anyway,’ said Dunbar. It sounded weak, even to him.

‘Was it pity? Pity for my situation?’

‘I …’

‘I don’t like people visiting me out of pity. I don’t need it.’

‘It had absolutely nothing to do with pity, I promise,’ he said quietly. ‘I simply enjoyed your company last time and since I know no one else up here, I looked for an excuse to come back.’

‘That’s better,’ she said after a slight pause to consider.

‘Lisa!’ came a cry from the bedroom. ‘Where’s my breakfast? I want my breakfast!’

‘Coming, Mum,’ replied Lisa without taking her eyes off Dunbar.

Dunbar automatically looked at his watch. It was 10 p.m. He got up and said, ‘It’s time I was going anyway. Would it be all right if I popped back again? Sometime soon?

She looked at him doubtfully for a few moments before saying, ‘Providing you don’t bring pity with you.’

‘I’ll bring gin,’ said Dunbar.

NINE

Dunbar watched
Newsnight
on the television in his room, then switched it off. The silence was broken by the sound of rain on the window, at first a gentle, irregular patter but then quickly becoming a harsh rattle that made him go over to the window to look out briefly before closing the blinds. He decided on an early night.

As he lay in bed, he looked back on the evening. He was glad to have re-established contact with Lisa. He liked her a lot, not least because of her obvious care and concern for other people. Like Sheila Barnes she was a born nurse. It wasn’t something you could instil in people through qualification and training. It had to be there at the start. He had particularly liked her hope that Sheila and her husband could give comfort to each other in their dying days.

It was an aspect of the situation he himself hadn’t considered, although there was something about it that had been niggling away at him. Lisa was right; it was strange that both Sheila and her husband had contracted cancer at the same time; the matron at The Beeches had also remarked on it. Neither of the Barneses had ever smoked, yet both had developed a particularly virulent form of lung cancer at almost exactly the same time. It was as if they had been simultaneously exposed to some sort of trigger mechanism, although in the leafy suburb of Bearsden that possibility seemed remote. The area did not exactly abound with chemical factories pumping out toxic fumes. They didn’t live next door to a nuclear power station, and he couldn’t imagine the rafters of Bearsden bungalows dripping with blue asbestos.

On the other hand … He remembered the nosey neighbour, Proudfoot, and the problem with Cyril Barnes’s camera … only there wasn’t a problem with Cyril’s camera. The repair company had reported nothing wrong with it, despite the fact that films kept coming out ruined as if they had been exposed to light … or maybe something else. Dunbar sat up in bed, now fully alert. Light wasn’t the only thing that could ruin photographic film. Exposure to radiation would damage it in exactly the same way … and prolonged exposure to radiation would almost certainly cause cancer in a human being … or two human beings if they were exposed to it together.

Was it possible? Was it conceivable that Sheila and her husband had been exposed to a radiation source in their own home? Questions queued up in his mind. What could it be? Where was it and how had it got there?

Dunbar tried convincing himself that such a possibility could not be real. Surely it was a flight of fancy on his part, an academic exercise, a tribute to his powers of imagination but too bizarre to be real … wasn’t it? He found he couldn’t stop thinking about it. The seed had planted itself in his mind and insisted on growing. Sleep was now out of the question. He had to know. He had to find out for himself. But how? He would need specialist equipment for this kind of investigation.