Heart Stopper (10 page)

“Are you saying Daniel raped you?” Reyna’s voice was strained and unbelieving.

“No. I said it was complicated. Some things happened the night of my birthday.” Priya took her hand away from Catherine’s and rested her face in her hands. “I haven’t told anyone this. I was too ashamed. I came on to Daniel that night to stop something happening with someone else. It worked; he ignored her and gave me a lift home. I was drunk, but there was no way I would sleep with him. But, as I said, I was drunk, and I really don’t drink much, never have, I can’t handle it. It’s just since… since things went wrong…and I felt like I had led him on…”

Catherine came around the table and sat in the chair next to Priya. Reyna was staring across the table with a stony expression on her face and Priya’s voice got weaker.

“I have this stupid sense of responsibility so when he parked outside the house and kissed me, I didn’t stop him. But I came to my senses almost immediately and stopped him and he seemed fine at first and then he figured out what I’d done and he started talking and this anger just started to build in him. I could feel it like it was some kind of physical wave rising in him. It wasn’t directed at me though, but I guess I was the one there.”

Priya continued, her voice tight and small, “I panicked when he slammed the steering wheel and I tried to get out of the car. I think he just reacted too; he reached out and grabbed my hand as I was getting out and something snapped in my arm. It felt like that anyway.”

Reyna’s mouth had dropped open. Catherine put her arm around Priya’s shoulder as Priya continued.

“I screamed, and Daniel released my hand. He came around and told me to get into the car while he examined my arm. He said we had to get to A&E immediately. He drove us there. We didn’t speak at all. When we got there, he came in with me to the waiting room, but then I think it dawned on him how it would look. I think he panicked. He left. When I was eventually seen, I told them I had twisted my arm, but the doctor could see the bruise on my wrist and with that type of spiral fracture, of course he asked who had done it. The admissions people had seen Daniel with me. They thought we were in some sort of abusive relationship and that I was protecting him. They reported to the Guards who spoke to Daniel. He said I had come on to him, and that it had just been an accident. There was enough of the truth in there and I wasn’t saying anything so they had to drop it, but I got the impression that they thought there was a lot more to it. It took weeks, during all of that time my mum was sick in India, and I didn’t go to see her. I hated them all for that after she died. I asked them to drop it, they’d never have done anything to him anyway, he was too important. And at that point, I didn’t care. It seemed so minor in comparison.”

They were silent for a few minutes. All Priya could hear was the soothing of Catherine’s hand on her shoulder.

Catherine said, “It’s not my place to apologize for Daniel’s actions; I think he did try to make up for it in his own way. I know he was feeling bad about something, but he wouldn’t talk about it, not to me anyway.”

Reyna butted in, “I am sorry. He mentioned you quite a few times to me. I got the impression you were on his mind a lot and you were someone important to him. And then when he said he was seeing one of the researchers I assumed you were together. I can’t believe I took you to his apartment. And left you there!” Reyna got up from the table and stalked into the house.

Catherine said, as she watched Reyna go, “She’s got a temper like Daniel’s I’m afraid. But it comes out very rarely. Her anger is usually directed at herself. She doesn’t get mad at other people even when she should. She’s not able to see things clearly at the moment.” She turned to Priya. “I’m grateful you were able to tell us about it. And I’m always here for you if you want to talk more.”

Priya felt a bit lighter than she had since that night, a small portion of the weight carried away on the stream of words that she had let flow.

Catherine said, “I know there’s something else that’s happened. You’re not ready to share that yet. You’ve been through a terrible time losing your mother, what happened with Daniel, but there’s something more. Something that happened before last year.”

She nodded as Priya looked at her in surprise.

“My dear, something must have got you to a place where you as a comfortably gay woman would come on to a man to stop him going after a woman.” Priya cringed and Catherine said, “Don’t get me wrong, I am not judging you. I get the sense that you’ve been through hell in the last while, but you’re not facing up to it. You’re running and you’ve found yourself in a very bad place.” She sighed. “Like Rain.”

Catherine examined Priya’s face. “The two of you as individuals have got all this negative energy surrounding you at the moment. And you’re both too proud to admit that. So you both go bouncing around the place hitting off things. I just hope this chemistry between you is not a result of all that. Because there is a potential for so much good. Rain doesn’t trust her own judgment anymore. So she doesn’t trust anyone now. Always thinks the worst of people, especially women.”

∞

Reyna walked back onto the patio. She was carrying a large brown package and a glass of water that she placed on the table in front of Priya.

“I don’t know if you’d still want to help us. Catherine received this in the post. It’s from Daniel. It was here when she got back from the funeral.”

Catherine patted Priya on the shoulder and got up.

She said, “Thank you for telling us what happened. I know it was difficult.”

She sat back down in her chair across from Priya and picked up the package. It was thick and papers were sticking out of the open end.

“As Rain, sorry, Reyna said, you may not want to help us and I’ll understand if you don’t. I don’t understand what the papers are about. There seems to be a lot of information on pacemakers and frequencies, a lot of figures and graphs. I called Reyna when I got them. She’s looked through them too and she doesn’t understand them either.”

Priya sipped at the water. She sensed that Reyna was just being polite phrasing it as a request for help rather than a command. But she was curious. She reached for the envelope and Catherine handed it to her.

Reyna said, “Daniel had been worried about something in the last month. He came to New York a few weeks ago and he went through a lot of papers and filing cabinets. He spent a bit of time with our grandfather. He told me there was something wrong, but he didn’t tell me what it was all about.”

“When did he tell you this?” Priya took the papers out of the package and laid them on the table.

“He came to New York in the first week in July, a week before he died. He actually got me worried, that’s why I came to Galway to see him. I arrived on the Thursday and stayed with Catherine. He was supposed to meet me on the Friday evening. He said he always went to the birthdays of staff members so I agreed to meet him in Massimo. I waited there and I saw you with a group. I presumed it was the group from the clinic because Daniel had spoken about you and there were no other Asian looking women there.”

Reyna stopped and looked at Catherine.

Priya said, conscious too of Catherine sitting there, “Much as it embarrasses me because I don’t remember, I need to know what happened that evening.”

“You were with the group for the first while. It was a noisy bunch. You and Tara were coming back with drinks and you saw me. You stayed with the group, but you kept looking at me and smiling.”

Priya felt the familiar heat creep up her face as she cringed inside.

“You came over after about half an hour and asked if I minded you joining me. Daniel had just texted to say he wasn’t feeling well. That was around 8 p.m. I think. He also added that he had been worrying about nothing and that he’d see me later over the weekend. And then when you told me your name, I knew I should have just left. I was going to, but you were very … interesting. We spent the next few hours talking.”

“And then I kissed you and Tara and the others left without me. So you took me to Daniel’s place.”

“Yes. It was around 1 a.m. when we left the pub. I was surprised when you flirted with me. I thought it was because you were drunk so when the others left you there I thought taking you back to Daniel’s place was the right thing to do. I didn’t want to disturb Daniel so I put you in the guest room.”

Reyna seemed to be spitting the last few words out and Priya saw what Catherine meant. The anger was self-directed.

Priya asked, “Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t want to be there in the morning. That would have been too weird. I assumed you and Daniel would spend the day together and I came back here.”

“Was there anything different about the apartment?” Catherine asked and her quiet voice startled the two of them.

“It was dark. I was trying to get Priya settled. I didn’t notice much.”

Priya gathered her thoughts. “Okay, so we have a text from Daniel at around 8 o’clock on the Friday. I woke up just after 5 a.m. and found him. When I was leaving I heard a voice or voices from the lift..., elevator. Then I think someone looked through my stuff when I was away on the Thursday or Friday after and someone followed me yesterday.”

Catherine said, “Daniel was worried for the last month about something to do with work. He went to New York at the beginning of July and worried Reyna enough that she flies here to see him. He doesn’t make it to the pub and he’s dead the next morning. The postmark on the envelope is 5 July and it was sent from New York; the day before he was to come back to Ireland. Why didn’t he keep a hold of the papers till he got here?” She paused. “I’m more confused now. The papers are obviously important. Will you look through them and see if there’s anything there that might explain any of this?”

For the first time that evening, Catherine looked like a tired woman in her sixties. Her eyes were faded and the lines in her face stood deeper. She took a deep breath and stood up.

“I’m sorry your first visit out here happened at this horrible time. And thank you for agreeing to look through the papers. I’m going to go to bed. You’ll both have to leave early to get to the clinic tomorrow so I’ll say goodbye for now. We’ll meet up as soon as you’ve read them, if that’s ok?”

Priya got up and hugged Catherine. “Of course it is. I’ll look through it tonight but there’s a lot of stuff there so maybe at the end of the week.”

Catherine held the hug tight for a long moment and then wandered into the house.

Priya’s chair was turned to face the view, but she had not looked at anything except the papers in front of her. After Catherine left, Reyna had finished clearing, brought them out coffees and then sat in a hammock chair that swung from an upright beam fixed to the patio. An hour had passed in silence.

Priya’s head was starting to pound. She hadn’t slept well for the last few nights and had been up early as well. The graphs were beginning to blur. She’d done a quick scan and separated the papers containing notes on the design of the original Mark 1 Pacemaker from the results of trials on it. The notes and the testing of the Mark I Controller were also in two separate piles and she made a fifth pile with anything that didn’t fit into the other ones. The papers she could see were all densely packed with typing and graphs, figures and code. They looked like photocopies.

She started with the Mark I Pacemaker. She had never been shown these details before. Her specific area of interest during her year with Fairer Research had been the security protocols used in the wireless communication between pacemakers and their program controllers. The Controller Home was being
 
discussed and she had been given data to work with, but in a very restricted range.

She found some of the sheets on the Mark I Pacemaker that were darker and were actually old carbon copies. Or copies of carbon copies.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen carbon copies. Do you remember when they were being used, those purple sheets of stuff?” Priya said, and Reyna swung the hammock around with her feet.

“That would have been the 80s, I think.”

“These seem to be the notes your granddad made then for the first pacemaker he designed. He patented the use of a new and alternative way of powering the pacemaker.” Priya pointed to the second pile of papers. “They seem to be some of the results from the clinical trials on that pacemaker.”

“What was the technology he patented?” Reyna asked. She got out of the hammock chair and sat down across the table from Priya.

Priya laid out the copies of the older papers. She said, “I’ll try and explain. I know some of this from my studies in the field obviously; I just never had this kind of detail on it before now. Do you have the internet here? I could show you some pictures that would make it clearer.”

Reyna shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Catherine didn’t get the place hooked up, we’re lucky to even have a phone line, there’s no cell phone signal out here.”

“I don’t know how anyone could live without an internet connection! Okay, do you know what a pacemaker does, where it goes and stuff?”

“Well, I helped my grandfather on the business and finance side not the medical bits. I manage the foundation he set up. I know that pacemakers are used when there are problems with the heart and I know the different product ranges. I need us to get to a point where we can figure out why Daniel gathered all this stuff. And why he didn’t give it to you.”

Priya felt the anger rise. “So you still think I had something to do with this?”

Reyna tapped one of the piles on the table. “I guess we’ll see how capable you are.”

Priya glared at her. “You want me to explain all of this, but you don’t trust me. How can you trust anything I say then?”

“I know you’re good at your job. And that you used to be some kind of genius when it came to coding. If you don’t have anything to do with whatever was worrying Daniel then you don’t have anything to hide, do you? You’ll be as eager as I am to figure all this out.”

Reyna looked at her and the challenge in her eyes infuriated Priya. But Priya thrived on a challenge, at least she had. And, like Reyna, she couldn’t understand why Daniel hadn’t spoken to her about his worries, or sent these papers to her, why he’d sent them to Catherine when he’d given Priya the readings and code on the Controller II with no apparent reluctance. What was so important that he had gone to New York, called Reyna in, and sent the papers to his mother?

Priya closed her eyes and stopped the questions crowding her mind. She tried to simplify and arrange the concepts instead. She was aware of Reyna’s eyes on her face.

She opened her eyes and said, “Okay. I’ll start with the basics. Pacemakers can be used when there are problems with the heart’s normal rhythm. The heart has its own built-in electrical system that creates the signals that tell your heart when to beat. It has a group of cells called the SA node that creates the electricity. This SA node is called the natural pacemaker. It ‘self-fires’ at regular intervals to cause the heart to beat with a rhythm of about 60 to 70 beats per minute. There’s obviously a lot more to this, but problems can occur with the natural pacemaker or the rest of your heart’s electrical system, which could lead to a slower rhythm or a faster rhythm, and you get symptoms like fainting or shortness of breath or palpitations. When people say pacemakers, it’s actually a pacing system. It includes the bit that generates the pulse, the leads, and the programmer, what we call the controller. The pulse generator part is implanted in the upper chest; around here,” Priya pointed to the area just under her collarbone and then felt conscious of her heart beating as Reyna looked, “under the skin and fat, above the muscle. The leads are fed through the vein and into the correct area in the heart and then the other ends of the leads are hooked up to the pulse generator. All clear so far?”

“Yes, keep going.”

“Modern pulse generators are programmable with information and settings and we can also get information by transmitting data from the pulse generator to a controller which is called telemetry. The telemetry and programming communication uses a wireless technology. We usually do this at the clinic, but some of the newer ones can even download their data to the internet or can be checked over the telephone.”

“So you’re talking to a device that is inside somebody and it’s telling you stuff about itself?”

“Yes. It can tell us how efficiently it’s working, how much energy it is using, whether any arrhythmias occurred. Now, normally we would be checking battery life with a view to replacing it if necessary, but that’s where the technology your granddad patented comes in.”

“Right, you said it was a new way of powering the pacemaker.”

“Yes, in the 50s Medtronic’s founder developed the first pacemaker that was wearable and it was powered by mercury batteries. In the 60s implantable pacemakers were produced. They’ve used nickel cadmium rechargeable batteries and zinc-mercury batteries. Each had problems. There has been work on biological batteries - biogalvanic cells, fuel cells utilizing oxygen from blood and hydrogen from body proteins, kinetic body energy. Even nuclear batteries. In the 60s there was a pacemaker that used Plutonium. The life of this type of pacemaker is around 14,000 years so these pacemakers would generally survive longer than the patient.”

Priya laughed at Reyna’s expression. “I love dropping that fact in. Some use the ceramic plutonium oxide to reduce the possibility of spillage in the case of the accidental impact of a rifle bullet. Plutonium could be used for other dangerous stuff so they stopped making this type of pacemaker, the U.S. government closely monitors the few that still have them in, and they come to collect the material from the pacemakers when the patient died. Anyway, in the 70s they started using lithium batteries. These batteries would last from 5 years to 10 years depending on their usage. Your grandfather was very interested in alternative self-sustaining sources of energy for the pacemaker and he figured out a way to use the voltage changes from around the natural pacemaker, the SA Node, and feed that back through the leads in the heart to the pulse generator. Quite ingenious really.”

“But the patient who has a pacemaker has a bad SA node, yes?”

“That area of the heart has a lot of self-firing electrical activity. And the SA Node itself is not necessarily damaged; the arrhythmia might be due to a problem with the conduction system. The leads that are placed in the heart sense the electrical activity there, he just found a way to harness that energy and use it to run the pulse generator. The pulse generator senses when there is an abnormal rhythm and there are different types, some only discharge when they detect a problem, others give out a regular beat and others change their rate with the body’s activity.”

“So the person’s natural pacemaker could still be working away.”

“Yes.” Priya was impressed with Reyna’s grasp of the information. She was beginning to wish she hadn’t spent the last two years suppressing any intelligent thought.

She continued, “There is a small lithium battery in the pulse generator just as a backup. We check its remaining battery power at the regular checks, but it is really just routine.”

Priya said thoughtfully, “I just checked the battery on a patient with an implanted pacemaker and her lithium battery seems to have been used.”

“But you said it was only a back-up.”

 
“Yes, that’s why I found it strange. I need to go back over the battery readings for her and for the other patients. I should have caught it last week, but what with everything that’s been going on.”

“So, what do the papers show?”

“I have really just separated them out. I need to look at them properly. They developed the Controller Mark I to communicate with the Pacemaker Mark I. They used to use the Controller I in the clinic to check on the implanted pulse generators. The Controller II replaced it then, it works using wireless technology as well, but it incorporates the ability to communicate on the MICS channel as well as the older 175Hz frequency.”

Reyna looked confused.

Priya explained, “The older pacemakers communicate on the 175Hz band. The Pacemaker Mark I does too, despite the fact that the FCC in the U.S. brought in the new range in 1999. All implantable medical devices are now to communicate on the 402-405 Hz band. This will help for longer-range communication, for devices that can be controlled at a greater distance. Like the new Controller Home that the Research Company is just finishing. They are also going to launch the Pacemaker II which operates on the longer-range frequency.”

“The Controller III or the Controller Home is almost ready, that will be used by patients or their carers in their own homes and the information can be sent over phone lines if necessary. The papers here relate to the Mark I pacemakers and controllers. Nothing that I can see on the Mark II controller.” She hesitated.

“What?” Reyna asked.

“I have the notes on the Mark II controller, that’s what I had in my briefcase when you invited me out here.” Priya made up her mind. “I took the research papers home a few weeks ago. Daniel gave them to me and I had a feeling something was out and I know the security issues and the rules, but I really wanted to continue working on them. I told James about it yesterday. I had to; whoever broke into my house probably saw the papers. I presume James will be talking to you about it at some point.”

Reyna rubbed her forehead. She rested her chin on her palm and stared at Priya. A little line had appeared between her eyebrows and Priya had an urge to reach out and smooth it away.

Priya said, “You’re thinking how come someone who appears to be bright enough can do so many stupid things, right?”

Reyna gave a smile that seemed to come out against her will. “Well…”
 

“I seem to have made it my mission in the last few years. I was probably right this time though. I mean Daniel wouldn’t have collected this stuff and he wouldn’t have sent it here if he hadn’t also felt something was wrong.”

“Okay, we’ll have to deal with that particular mistake later. I’ll have to hear it from James and I should consult with him and see what he thinks should be the consequences of your taking the papers home and possibly exposing them to the wrong eyes. I think Gerry and Valerie will have to make that call, it is their research material really that you’ve potentially exposed. So I think the faster we can work out what’s going on, the better.”

“I’d better get back to the papers then.” Priya picked up the second pile.

Reyna sighed and got up from the table. She went back to the hammock chair and stared out at the view.

∞

 
“Did we, you know...?” Priya’s voice ran out. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on the papers in front of her for the ten minutes since Reyna had left the table. She was too conscious of Reyna, of the gentle movement of the hammock.

Reyna said in a softer voice than Priya had heard from her “You’re a very beautiful woman, Priya, and you were
very
charming... If it hadn’t been for the fact that I thought you were
Daniel’s...” She paused. “No, we didn’t do anything, well... I lay beside you for a few hours because you said you didn’t want to be alone.”

“And you undressed me? Or did I manage that myself?” Priya was finding her voice and it had a bitter tone.

“I helped. And I lay on top of the covers.”

∞

They were silent again and Priya tried to focus, but she gave up after a half hour of alternating looks between the papers on the table and the weave of the back of the hammock chair as it swung slowly. She had glanced through the clinical trials on the Mark I pacemaker and nothing had jumped out at her. The summer light was leaving the fjord and the air was darkening in minute degrees.