Second Opinion (37 page)

Outside in the waiting area there was no sign of Gus; clearly Bannen had spirited him away somewhere. George hesitated, uncertain what to do next. Go in search of Goss and question him? That might be tricky. Apart from the fact that he was to be accompanied all the time by a police constable, the man would be listed as a suspected head injury and in need of careful attention. The first adage she’d learned in her neurology had been the famous Hippocratic one: ‘No head injury is so slight that it may safely be ignored, nor so severe that life should be despaired of’, or something of the sort. To question a man in such a condition would hardly be the act of a caring doctor. Yet right now she was being a detective … She grimaced at her own confusion and looked around.

And then stiffened. On the far side of the crowded rows of chairs where patients and their friends and relations (now arriving in considerable numbers as the news got out of what had happened at Old East) sat, she saw the neat erect figure of Dr Choopani. Immediately she made her way over to him, weaving over outstretched feet and between the rows of seats as quickly as she could.

He greeted her as courteously and as calmly as though they were both strolling peaceably at a vicarage garden tea party. ‘Good morning, Dr Barnabas. I trust I see you well.’

‘I’ll get by,’ she said, touching the bruise on her cheek, which was aching a little. There were other parts of her anatomy that were aching too, but she preferred not to think about those. ‘What are you doing here?’

He raised his brows. ‘Where else should I be?’ he said. ‘My new unit is to open today, had you not heard? This is a great day for us!’

She tilted her head to indicate the crowded waiting room behind them. ‘I had heard something about it,’ she said with deliberately heavy irony. ‘Like all those other people here.’

‘This little fuss’ — he waved a dismissive hand — ‘they will get over it. I have always got over the attacks on me in the past, so I will again. As I told you when we last met and you were so kind to me, these people are garbage and not worthy of attention.’

‘Oh, you’re wrong there, Dr Choopani,’ George said softly. ‘Not that they’re not garbage — I wouldn’t argue with you on that, though it’s one hell of a label to put even on people who foment this sort of trouble — but they are very worthy of attention. Suppose I told you that one man has been killed already because he was mistaken for you?’

He contemplated her seriously for a long moment, his eyes never leaving her face. And then sighed deeply. ‘My dear Dr Barnabas, I know that these people are dangerous. I am not sure how you can be certain that someone has been killed as part of an intended attack on me, but even if you are right — though I have to say it sounds unduly dramatic to me — even if you are right, it does not change my opinion. They are not worthy of attention, however dangerous! It means we must be watchful and protect ourselves, that is all. But waste time worrying about them? I would be ashamed! Ah, here is the good Sister Clements. You will excuse me — she is my strong support for my new unit, you know, and I want to speak with her. I hope you will come and see our work when you have time? It is a small beginning but we will grow!’ And he bent his head politely and slipped away towards the far side of the waiting area where Hattie was in close colloquy with, George saw with a lift of her spirits, Gus.

What happened then was surprising, not because of its suddenness, but because it seemed to George to happen so slowly, almost like a film that had been deliberately run at half speed.

As Dr Choopani made his dignified way across the waiting hall, stepping over people’s legs with a sort of fine disdain that George could see offended some of them — for people hurled ugly looks after him and some muttered as he passed — one of the cubicles on the far side was opened with a rattle of curtain rings and an empty trolley was pushed in. By the time Dr Choopani was halfway across the crowded space, the now loaded trolley was on its way out again. George couldn’t quite see who was on it at first. She just saw a nurse at the head end with a saline bag held high in the air, attached to the IV line on the patient’s left arm, and a young police constable hovering behind her, rather out of reach of the trolley. There was a sizeable bandage over the head of the patient so the identity was not clear, although the presence of the policeman George found very suggestive.

Slowly the trolley came forward. It was being manoeuvred a little awkwardly by the porter at the foot end, a very young man who looked to George to be a comparative newcomer to the job, for he was clearly inexperienced in the handling of the cumbersome thing. Dr Choopani went on his majestic way, like a liner quite oblivious of the lesser craft fussing around beneath his bows, and reached the side of the trolley just as it was brought round so that the foot pointed in the direction of the doors that led out to X-ray and the wards.

George worked out without thinking consciously about it that the man was Goss, on his way for further investigations and therefore out of her reach for any sort of questioning. She was about to turn her attention back to Gus and to follow Dr Choopani in his direction, when the figure on the trolley seemed to rear up, like a whale emerging from deep salt water, slowly and yet forcefully, and with a sort of native elegance.

‘You bastard!’ The voice was shrill and thick at the same time and George was startled. She moved without realizing
she had, rushing across the floor with scant regard for the people in her way.

‘You bastard!’ the man on the trolley screamed again, and now George could see clearly that it
was
Goss, as she had suspected.

Goss looked wildly round and glared at the nurse beside him, who was as young and as inexperienced as the porter at the foot of the trolley — and indeed, the young policeman too — and seeming, like him, to be frozen into inaction by surprise at the behaviour of their patient. Goss looked down at his arm and the IV line going into it, reached with his other hand to yank it out, and then pulled on the other end; the nurse started at the tug and let go of the saline bag which Goss took in both hands and hurled with all his strength at Dr Choopani’s head, just a matter of feet away from him. It hit him foursquare and burst. Choopani stood there with saline dripping down his face, and his hair flattened by it; but he made no sign of being affected, staring back at Goss with cold control.

‘You and your fucking blacks and their money, saving their shitty lives; dying’s too good for them, you stinking lousy bastard —’

It was amazing. George stood there, as frozen as the young nurse beside Goss and indeed as virtually everyone else in the big waiting area, as he went on shrieking and raving and shrieking again, his language becoming ever more ugly and furious.

Once again George’s professional mind took over and began to lecture her about the sort of personality changes and loss of inhibition that could occur in certain sorts of brain injury. Goss was now completely without inhibition; his scheming and tweaking and words-in-ears were vanished skills. All he could do was let out all his rage and hatred in a great sickening tide of bile. She shuddered and put her hands up to her ears to block it out, it was so horrible.

Others had begun to move too: Hattie running across the
big space to take over from the young nurse and settle Goss down again; Gus joining her and the constable; other nurses and some of the casualty doctors coming to deal with the waiting patients who had been upset and were whimpering in consequence. George too made an effort and hurried over to the trolley where Goss lay panting and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling over his head. He went on mouthing words, but now at least he was doing it silently.

‘Oh, lor,’ Hattie gasped as George came up beside her to help tighten the restraints she was applying from the sides of the trolley to hold Goss safely in place. ‘Oh, lor! It’s like those parsons who start to swear when they’re coming round from anaesthetics — Thanks, George, I think we’ve got him now. Listen, Nurse Patterson, you take him, will you? Warn them he’s a handful, but we must get him there. They’ll do X-rays when he’s in the ward. Neurology Three, that’s right. Fast as you can.’

Hattie watched him go as the waiting room slowly settled to its usual dull roar and someone led the still silent Dr Choopani away to dry him. ‘Oh, George, I am sorry,’ she said, turning a woebegone face to her. ‘I remembered after you’d gone this morning — earlier, you know? — I remembered that Goss had once said to me that he thought what Dr Choopani was doing was asking for trouble with the local white people, and he shouldn’t be allowed to do it. I thought then it was an odd thing for a nurse to say, especially one who was so busy with others’ affairs and the Union and so forth and always going on about ethics. I thought it was the sort of way people who hate blacks talk, but he’s supposed to be a champion of equal rights. And I meant to tell you …’

27
  
  

‘I don’t see who else could be the killer,’ George said again. ‘He’s the one with the best motive we’ve got, isn’t he?’

‘You’re trying too hard,’ Gus said. ‘And you’re adding two and two together to make into seventeen. First of all, you want to believe that because Goss is a raving racist, he’d decide to kill Choopani just because he wanted to start this unit for a disease only black people get, and then you want to believe that he mixed up the two men — Choopani and Harry — and killed the wrong one. But that’s one hell of a mix-up, George. Choopani’s a man in his forties and not particularly good to look at. Harry Rajabani was well under thirty and no end of an oil painting into the bargain — and a man Goss worked with every day!’

‘Harry was wearing a woolly Rastafarian hat when he was killed. Everyone looks the same in those things. Goss must have seen him and thought he was Choopani and —’

Again Gus shook his head. ‘Sorry! Too many maybes, ducks. More coffee?’

She made a face. ‘If I drink any more I’ll be awash. You too. You’ll start to twang like a harp if you have any more. You drink too much coffee for your own good, anyway.’

He stretched back in his chair. ‘Oh, she cares for me after all!’ he told the ceiling in thrilling tones. ‘Worryin’ about
my health now! It’s a good sign. She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me —’

‘Shut up, Gus,’ George said, but she was abstracted and sat there staring down at her hands on her desk, frowning and trying to think. They had come back to her office once the hubbub in A & E had died down and the walking wounded had been sent on their way (some of them via the police station, where statements were to be taken and charges made regarding the demo) and the more severely injured admitted to the hospital, Goss among them.

She sighed and shook her head. ‘You realize the man’s in a bad way? They reckon he’s bleeding fairly copiously into the skull and that’s what’s causing the symptoms — the shouting and loss of inhibition among them. They’ll be coming out of theatre with him in an hour or so.’ She twisted her wrist to squint at her watch. ‘And he’ll be in intensive care for some time after that. But we’ve got to talk to him, find out where he was that night and what he was doing and —’

‘Marvellous, ‘n’t it?’ Gus said to the ceiling. ‘Give her an inch and she’s bloody off like Mick the Miller. She’ll be wantin’ my pension next as well as my bleedin’ job.’

‘Are you saying I’m getting too involved in this case?’ she demanded pugnaciously, sitting up very straight.

‘Yup.’

‘Oh.’ She was nonplussed for a moment but then regained her equanimity. ‘Well too bad, buddy. Too damn bad. I’m in and I’ll go on being in whether you like it or not.’

‘I love it,’ he said and grinned at her. ‘I was just tryin’ to make the point that interviewin’ suspects is something policemen are supposed to do. I don’t cut up bodies, you don’t talk to suspects. It’s tidier that way.’

‘I’ve been very useful talking to suspects,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t talked to Prue I wouldn’t have met and talked to Goss and I wouldn’t have known Harry and —’

‘Yeah, yeah, you’re the best in the world.’ He leaned over
the desk and very deliberately gave her a loud, smacking kiss. ‘Where’d I be without you?’

‘I hate to think,’ she said, not displeased. ‘So now what?’

He sighed and got to his feet. ‘I have to leave you, my love, my own. Cor, get me! I’ll be singin’ to you next. I’ve got to get back to the nick, see what’s happenin’ there. I’ve got as many men as I can spare diggin’ out all they can about adoption and agencies and babies — Gawd knows what they’ll find. It’s like looking for a sweet-tempered pathologist. And I’ve got all this new stuff to handle. I’ll have to look into Goss’s background, find some of his associates, ask a few questions — if you don’t mind, that is?’

She laughed. ‘Tell you what. Go and talk to Alan Prior.’

‘Who?’

‘He’s a doctor here, had a sort of affair with Goss. I gather it’s over — Prior wasn’t best pleased at having his manly beauty damaged in Goss’s demo, which he only went on to please Goss, though he probably shares his racist views. He’s a thoroughly unreconstructed South African. I think you’ll get a lot of stuff out of him.’ She told him all that Alan Prior had told her in A & E and he listened appreciatively.