Sister: A Novel (22 page)

Before you died, I’d thought our relationship was grown-up and sensible. But on my part it was cowardly; a passive option motivated by my insecurity rather than what Todd deserved - an active choice inspired by love.

A few minutes later he left. He didn’t tell me where he was going.

Mr Wright had decided on a working lunch and has now got sandwiches from the deli. He leads me through empty corridors to a meeting room, which has a table. For some reason, the large office space, deserted apart from us two, feels intimate.

I haven’t told Mr Wright that during my research I broke off my engagement, and that with no friends in London Todd must have walked through the snow to a hotel that night. I just tell him about Gene-Med floating on the stock market.

‘And you phoned DS Finborough at eleven thirty p.m.?’ he asks, looking down at the police call log.

‘Yes. I left a message for him asking him to phone me back. By nine thirty the next morning he still hadn’t, so I went to St Anne’s.’

‘You’d already organised to go back there?’

‘Yes. The senior midwife had said she should have found Tess’s notes by then and had made an appointment for me to see her.’

I arrived at St Anne’s, the skin around my skull tight with nerves because I thought I would soon have to meet the person who was with you when you had Xavier. I knew I had to do this, but wasn’t sure exactly why. Maybe as a penance; my guilt faced full on. I arrived fifteen minutes early and went to the hospital café. As I sat down with my coffee I saw I had a new email.

To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

From: Professor Rosen’s office, Gene-Med

Dear Ms Hemming,

I assure you that we offer no financial inducement
whatsoever
to the participants in our trial. Each participant volunteers without coercion or inducement. If you would like to check with the participating hospitals’ ethics committees you will see that the highest ethical principles are strictly enforced.

Kind regards

Sarah Stonaker, media PA to Professor Rosen

I emailed straight back.

From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

To: [email protected]

One ‘participant’ was my sister. She was paid £300 to take part in the trial. Her name was Tess Hemming, (second name Annabel after her grandmother). She was 21. She was murdered after giving birth to her stillborn baby. Her funeral and that of her son is on Thursday. I miss her more than you can possibly imagine.

It felt a reasonable place to be writing such an email. Illness and death may be shut away in the wards above but I imagined the fallout blowing invisibly into the atrium and landing in the hospital café’s cappuccinos and herbal teas. I wouldn’t have been the first to write an emotional email at this table. I wondered if the ‘media PA’ would pass it on to Professor Rosen. I doubted it.

I resolved to ask the hospital staff if they knew anything about the money.

Five minutes before my appointment time I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing.

The Senior Midwife seemed fraught when she saw me, although maybe her escaping frizzy red hair made her seem that way all the time. ‘I’m afraid we still haven’t found Tess’s notes. And without them I haven’t been able to find out who was with her when she gave birth.’

I felt relief but thought it cowardly to give in to.

‘Doesn’t anyone remember?’

‘I’m afraid not. For the last three months we’ve been very short-staffed, so we’ve had a high percentage of agency midwives and locum doctors. I think it must have been one of them.’

A young punky nurse standing at the nurses’ station, her nose pierced, joined in, ‘We have the basic info on a central computer, like the time and date of admission and discharge, and sadly in your sister’s case, that her baby died. But nothing more detailed. Nothing about their medical history or the medical staff looking after them. I did check with the psych department yesterday. Dr Nichols said her notes hadn’t ever got to him. Told me our department should “pull our socks up”, which is pretty angry coming from him.’

I remembered Dr Nichols commenting that he didn’t have your ‘psychiatric history’. I hadn’t known it was because your notes had got lost.

‘But aren’t her notes also on computer somewhere? I mean the detailed information, as well as the basics?’ I asked.

The Senior Midwife shook her head. ‘We use paper notes for maternity patients, so the woman can carry them with her in case she goes into labour when she’s not near her home hospital. We then attach the handwritten notes of the delivery and it’s all meant to be safely stored.’

The phone rang but the Senior Midwife ignored it, focusing on me. ‘I really am sorry. We do understand how important it must be to you.’

As she answered the phone, my initial relief that your notes were lost became weighted by suspicion. Did your medical notes hold some clue about your murder? Was that why they were ‘lost’? I waited for the Senior Midwife to finish her phone call.

‘Isn’t it odd that a patient’s notes just go missing?’ I asked.

The Senior Midwife grimaced. ‘Unfortunately it’s not odd at all.’

A portly consultant in a chalk-striped suit was passing, he stopped and chipped in, ‘An entire trolley 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 is 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 me,’ 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 steriliser 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 beeps went off and a phone rang on the nurses’ station. The chalk-striped consultant walked away to answer his bleep; 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.

‘I gave the senior midwife my contact details in case she found Tess’s notes. But she warned me they might be permanently lost.’

‘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 each other’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 seem even 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 Gene-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 murder and domestic was an oxymoron. Doing the ironing on Sunday night and emptying the dishwasher is domestic, not murder.

‘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.’

Mr Wright must think I was keen and energetic. But it wasn’t that. I was putting off going home. Partly because I didn’t want to return home without being any further forwards, but also because I wanted to avoid Todd. He’d phoned and offered to come to your funeral but I’d told him there was no need. So he planned to fly back to the States as soon as possible and would be coming to the flat to pick up his things. I didn’t want to be there.