Trauma (6 page)

Lafferty held out his hand and Main grasped it briefly.

'We were driving through to see Mary's parents. Simon was their first grandchild and they doted on him. It was raining very heavily. I remember the wipers were having difficulty coping with the water so I slowed down a bit. Mary had just made a joke about a boat being more use in this country when it happened . . .'

Lafferty could see that Main was reliving the event. He didn't say anything.

I lost control of the car. I don't know why; perhaps a tyre blew or something. In retrospect it seemed to happen in slow motion. It suddenly slewed to one side and then skidded round in a circle when I tried to brake. We would have been all right if it hadn't been for the bridge across the carriageway, you know, one of these concrete fly-over things. We just ploughed straight into it or rather, the left side of our car where Mary was sitting, ploughed straight into it. I was flung out on to the road but she was killed instantly.'

'I'm sorry,' said Lafferty. 'And your son?'

'Simon was badly injured but he was still alive when the firemen freed him from the wreckage. The hospital put him on a life support machine but when they’d finished all the tests they told me that he had irreparable brain damage. They had to switch the machine off.'

Lafferty swallowed and felt inadequate.

'My son was buried five weeks ago. I never realised what true loneliness could feel like but without Mary and Simon there seems to be no point to anything any more. I can't sleep, I can't work, I can't seem to think straight. And now this other thing.'

'Other thing?'

'My son's grave was dug up and his body was taken.'

'It was your son!' exclaimed Lafferty. 'I read about it in the papers. I'm sorry, I should have realised when you told me your name.'

'I can't cope with it, Father. 'They say it was the work of occultists, devil worshippers, and I can't come to terms with it. I'm not a stupid man but I feel as if my son has been kidnapped. I know he's dead but it feels the same and not knowing what they've done to him is making it worse.'

'These monsters have taken your son's body John, but not his soul!' said Lafferty firmly.

'I've told myself that,' said Main, 'But for some reason it doesn't seem to do any good. It has something to do with the people who took him. If there are forces of light in the world then we have to acknowledge that there are forces of darkness. Equal and opposite. These other forces have taken my son and I can't convince myself that his soul is safe.

Lafferty felt his stomach tie in knots. 'I wish I could comfort you,' he confessed. 'What I can do is to assure you that I firmly believe that the forces of light will always triumph over the forces of darkness. You are obviously a caring, loving man who gave your son all the love that a father can give. Surrounded by that love, he would be safe from the powers of evil. His soul would be protected and long gone by the time this outrage was committed.'

'Thank you,' replied Main wearily. 'But if that were true why would these people want his body? I have to find out what happened to him. I have to.'

Lafferty could see that there was no way round this. He remained silent for almost a minute before saying, 'Very well, I don't know what I can do but for what it's worth, I'd like to help you.'

Main looked at Lafferty and saw that he meant it. 'Thank you,' he said.

'Am I right in presuming that you know nothing about devil worship?' asked Lafferty.

'Absolutely nothing,' agreed Main.

'I can't honestly say I know an awful lot myself,' said Lafferty, 'but I know where I can find out. There's an ecclesiastical library I can use and a colleague I can speak to. Let's meet again. Say, in two days time?'

'Here?' asked Main.

'Yes, here. Unless I find out something important before then. Can you give me an address or a telephone number where I can contact you?'

Main gave him both.

As Main got up to go Lafferty said, 'Think about what I told you. I'm sure your son's soul is in safe hands.'

Main nodded and turned to leave.

'See you in a couple of days.' Lafferty called after him.

Lafferty returned to the women in the church hall. 'I'm afraid I'll have to leave you ladies,' he said. 'Something urgent has come up. In fact I'm going to be quite tied up for the next couple of days.

'But the jumble sale!' protested the younger woman. 'What's going to happen about that?'

'I'm sure everything will be fine ladies. Just do your best.'

Sarah Lasseter had been on duty for thirty-five hours with only two hours sleep. She had known what to expect when she started out on the course that would make her a qualified doctor but that didn't make her feel any better about it. She was exhausted. What made it worse was that she really could not see any need for it. Like so many bad things, it had become 'traditional' that junior doctors should work themselves to a standstill. Because of that, there was no real impetus to change matters. If any such attempt was made it usually had to come from junior doctors themselves and in the end, the more vociferous of their number were patronised, by the authorities as being young and 'bolshie'. The others tended to fade from the protest scene of their own accord, fearing damage to their future careers.

Sarah's feelings on the matter remained unexpressed, though not through any fears about career prospects, but because, unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not harbour ambitions of a hospital consultancy or Harley Street fame. When she started out studying medicine it had been her intention to go into general practice like her father and indeed, take over from him one day when he retired. This was still her plan.

At the moment she was doing her one year obligatory residency work in hospital medicine before setting out to gain experience as a GP - probably in a large group practice. There was no point in her rocking any political boat about hospital conditions of work when she knew that her future did not lie there.

Sarah had been brought up in a small town in Norfolk. Her only regret about that was that for the rest of her life people would say, 'Very flat, Norfolk,' and expect her to find it hilariously funny. Noel Coward had a lot to answer for.

Sarah was the only daughter of a country doctor and his wife - who was virtually a partner through her involvement in the day to day running of the practice. Sarah had inherited her father’s intellect and her mother's good nature and patience. It was a combination which endeared her to all who knew her. She had been popular enough to have been elected, 'Gala Queen' of her local town when she had turned fifteen, and clever enough to have been head girl of the academy in her seventeenth year. A photograph of her carrying an armful of book prizes sat on the mantle of her parents' house. It had recently been joined by one of her graduating from Glasgow University's medical school.

What worried Sarah most of all at the moment was not the fact that she was unbelievably tired and run off her feet but that her immediate boss clearly did not like her. Senior registrar, Dr Derek Logan was a snob, but a working class snob with a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. He was an unpleasant mixture of contrariness. On the one hand he liked people to know that he’d clawed his way up from very humble beginnings but on the other he had clearly set out to distance himself from these very origins and seemed to despise anyone who still belonged to them.

Sarah did not come from that background but she still merited Logan's derision. His dislike of her seemed to stem from the fact that, in his book, she had had it too easy. The middle class roller coaster, as he called it in his sneering nasal voice. Everything had been handed to her on a plate. His first words to her on reading her C.V. had been, 'I bet you even had your own bloody horse.' This was true but she couldn't understand his resentment of it.

What was particularly upsetting was the fact that Logan seemed hell bent on making her appear a nincompoop at every conceivable opportunity. This was her second residency but there was a lot she had to learn and that often meant asking questions. Asking Logan anything invariably brought the rebuke, 'You don't know that? Your father's a doctor and you don't know that? I thought Mummy and Daddy would have drummed that into you by the time you were five!'

Sarah had the sympathy of her fellow junior doctors but there was little they could do to help in a practical sense.

The consultant in charge of the Head Trauma Unit where Sarah worked, Professor Murdoch Tyndall, was the very model of good breeding and manners, a charming man in his fifties who looked as if he might have auditioned successfully for the part of an aristocrat in a Disney film. His appearance was complemented by a formidable reputation in medical circles for his work with brain damaged patients. But despite his professional success it was eclipsed by his brother's achievements. Cyril Tyndall, also a professor at the university medical school, in viral epidemiology, was a world authority on the design and development of vaccines.

Although the Tyndall brothers worked in different areas of medical research, Cyril Tyndall's success in the development of animal and human vaccines had had a direct effect on Murdoch Tyndall's work. A grant of three million pounds from the pharmaceutical company, Gelman Holland, which manufactured and marketed the vaccines under license, had paid half the cost of converting and equipping a ward of the hospital to become the Head Trauma Unit. The government's Department of Health had paid the rest in the unusual form of a direct grant. They had done this ostensibly to establish a national centre of excellence for the treatment of head injuries but they also saw the propaganda value in illustrating how well public and private enterprise could work together for the common good in the field of health care. The government clearly saw this as the way ahead. In future, research funding would come less and less from the public purse and more and more from the involvement of commercial interests in the health care field.

The Head Trauma Unit - or more correctly, The Gelman Holland Head Trauma Unit, although no one ever called it that, had been open for fourteen months and had already earned an international reputation, particularly in the diagnosing of the degree of brain damage thanks to special monitoring equipment, the design of which was Murdoch Tyndall's special research interest. The money for the setting up of the unit had included an element of funding for a research lab in the university medical school attached to Cyril Tyndall's department where Murdoch Tyndall could carry out basic research under the auspices of Gelman Holland's research budget. A consequence of this arrangement was that much of the general running of the Head Trauma Unit was left to his senior registrar, Derek Logan. This was unfortunate from Sarah's point of view.

Sarah lived in the junior doctors' residency at the hospital, though she might have argued that she really lived in HTU; she spent so little time in her room. She was however, due some time off now. She looked at her watch and saw that she only had another hour to do before she was relieved and would have a full twelve hours to herself. There was a patient she wanted to check on before she went off duty. She went up to the ward and spoke to the Staff Nurse in charge.

There was sometimes an uneasy relationship between senior nursing staff and junior doctors. Officially the doctor was in charge but the nurses often felt they knew better. They often did so there could be a minefield of raw nerves to negotiate. The magic words were, 'What do you think Staff?' Asking a senior nurse's opinion was a sure way to a happy working relationship. The patient in question, a woman in her early fifties who had been the victim of a hit and run accident seven months before, was due to be discharged later in the day. Sarah felt that this was all right as long as her daughter was going to be around to look after her - as the patient herself had maintained she would be. The daughter, however, had been proving elusive. Sarah asked the nurse whether she had made contact yet and whether in her opinion the woman could cope on her own.

'Her daughter hasn't phoned yet,' said the staff nurse. 'And I definitely think she won't be able to cope on her own.'

'I don't know what to do for the best,' said Sarah. 'She'll be heartbroken if she doesn't get to go home today. Maybe I should try calling her daughter's number again.'

At that moment Derek Logan came into the duty room and seeing the frown on Sarah's face asked, 'Problems?'

Sarah told him what the trouble was and Logan's lips took on a sneer. 'For God's sake woman,' he said. 'You're a doctor, not a bloody social worker. Let them get on with it!'

'Yes Dr Logan,' said Sarah through her teeth.

'Leave it with me,' said the staff nurse kindly and Sarah nodded her appreciation.

'Yes Dr Logan, no Dr Logan, three bags bloody full Dr Logan!' stormed Sarah as she walked into the lounge of the junior doctors' residency and threw down her bag. There were three others there, one woman and two men. They looked up.

'One day . . .' fumed Sarah. 'One day . . . Dr Derek sodding Logan.'

'May we take it that you and Del boy have been having words again?' asked Harry Whitehead, a tall gangling resident with rimless spectacles and a thinning quiff of fair hair. The vertical stripes on his shirt only served to emphasise his gauntness but his voice was strong and deep.