The Secret

TWO

‘All right?’ asked Sue, who was working in the kitchen when Steven entered by the back door.

‘Yes thanks,’ Steven replied. ‘Sorry about running off.’

‘Don’t be. It’s when the death of a friend doesn’t affect you that you should start to worry.’

Steven smiled. ‘How come you always know the right thing to say?’

‘You obviously weren’t at the last meeting of the PTA when I suggested that the collective IQs of the local council wouldn’t break three figures.’

‘Did you really?’ exclaimed Steven, his voice betraying more admiration than shock.

‘'Fraid so. Maybe you should go talk to Jenny for a bit. She’s on the games console with the other two.’

The children were arguing about whose turn it was next when Steven entered the playroom. Jenny rushed over to him and gave his waist a big hug. ‘Auntie Sue said you’d had some bad news about one of your friends, Daddy.’

‘I’m afraid so, nutkin.’

‘Are they dead?’ asked Peter, the eldest of the three.

‘Yes she is, Peter.’

‘Was she a policeman like you, Daddy?’ asked Jenny. Sue and Richard had brought her up to believe that this was what Steven did in London.

‘No, nutkin, she was a very kind doctor who worked in far-off countries helping sick children.’

‘Was she eaten by a lion?’ asked Mary.

‘Don’t think so, Mary.’

‘What will the sick children do now?’

‘The other doctors will have to do extra work.’

‘I’d hate it if one of my friends died,’ said Peter and the other two concurred with nods.

‘Maybe we should talk about something else, like what we're going to do tomorrow,’ suggested Steven.

‘Swimming,’ exclaimed Peter.

‘Yes, swimming,’ echoed the other two.

‘Swimming it is then,’ said Steven, pleased that the tradition of going swimming at Dumfries pool during his visits was not to be broken, although he suspected that the junk food lunch afterwards followed by as much ice cream as they could handle had more than a little to do with their decision.

With the children in bed and Sue and Richard parked in front of the TV watching a serial they followed, Steven went off to his room to call Tally.

‘Having fun?’ she asked.

Steven told her about Simone.

‘I don’t think you've mentioned her before.’

‘It’s been a couple of years since I last saw her.’

‘Was she… special?’

‘Not in the way you mean but she was a special sort of person.’ Steven told Tally about Simone’s work with Médecins Sans Frontières.

‘So what was it? Guilt or booking a front-row seat in heaven?’

‘Neither,’ replied Steven, permitting himself a small smile. Tally was nothing if not forthright. ‘Simone didn’t believe in God and she had nothing to feel guilty about. She told me she had a very happy childhood; sailed through medical school with an armful of prizes before joining Med Sans.’

‘Then she really was special,’ conceded Tally. ‘A truly good person. You don’t meet many of those along the way.’

‘Yep.’

‘So what happened?’

‘John didn’t know. He just thought I should be told. He’ll call back when he learns more.’

‘Are you going to stop off in Leicester before you go back to London?’

‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Oh, I’ll have you all right,’ murmured Tally.

A broad smile broke out on Steven’s face. ‘You could make good money with a telephone voice like that.’

‘Where d’you think the flat came from?’

‘I find out a little more about you each day.’

‘I’ll have to watch that. Take care, Steven. Sorry about your friend.’

John Macmillan called just after nine thirty. ‘It was an accident.’

‘What kind?’

‘She died in a fall from a gallery in the library of the Strahov monastery in Prague.’

‘What?’ Steven exclaimed as if it were the last thing he expected to hear.

Macmillan repeated it but added, ‘It’s not quite as strange as it sounds. She was attending a scientific meeting in Prague and a visit to the monastery was arranged for the delegates. Apparently the monastery library has a particularly beautiful painted ceiling. Dr Ricard was one of those who climbed up to the gallery to get a better look. For some reason she fell and broke her neck.’

‘God, how awful,’ murmured Steven.

‘I understand her body is being returned to Paris tomorrow. Will you be attending the funeral?’

‘I’d like to; depends what we’ve got on, I suppose.’

‘Not much at the moment. I was going to ask you to take a look at a hospital in Lancashire where the cardiac death rates were sky high but the situation has resolved itself. The usual reason — an ageing surgeon not realising his faculties had declined and his colleagues being too respectful to tell him.’

‘Always a problem,’ sighed Steven.

‘Well, finally someone plucked up the courage. Anyway, you can let me know what you decide when you get back. When will that be?’

‘It was going to be Tuesday but I’ll be back on Monday afternoon — see if I can find out a bit more about Simone’s death.’

Steven went downstairs and told Sue and Richard what he’d learned.

‘Do you want to cancel the swimming tomorrow?’ asked Sue.

Steven shook his head. ‘I let the kids down today. I’ll take them swimming and then we’ll go to lunch, but I’ll head south after that and stay overnight at Tally’s before going back to London on Monday.’

Steven found Tally exhausted when he got to the flat just after eight o’clock and let himself in. His hello was met with a faint mumble of reply. She was sitting in the living room with her feet up and her eyes closed, a glass of white wine on the table beside her as she listened to the BBC proms.

‘Did I mention that I hated the NHS?’ she asked without opening her eyes.

‘Many times,’ replied Steven, planting a kiss on the top of her head as he came up behind her chair. ‘But you also love being a doctor, remember?’

‘That’s what makes it so unfair,’ Tally grumbled. ‘We’ve got all these bloody managers playing around with charts and numbers and targets and ticking boxes to make it appear that we’re doing well when we’re not. If they got rid of them and employed a couple more doctors and a few more nurses, we bloody well would be.’

‘It’s an unfair world,’ Steven soothed. ‘I take it you’ve had a busy weekend?’

‘There were times when I felt I was working in a refugee camp. We’ve got to be so careful when we’re dealing with kids who’ve just arrived in the country. It’s so easy to miss diseases and conditions you wouldn’t expect to turn up in an English children’s hospital. You tend to over-compensate by asking the lab to carry out every test under the sun and they get pretty pissed off. We’ve also got to be on our guard against TB all the time because it’s making a comeback, so we send every kid for a chest X-ray and of course the radiographers start getting grumpy.’

‘I can see the problem,’ Steven sympathised, sitting down opposite her.

Tally opened her eyes and, feeling slightly guilty, looked at Steven sheepishly. ‘But my problems are probably nothing compared to what your friend had to face,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for being such a moan. I’m losing my sense of proportion. Hungry?’

‘I can fix us something.’

‘No you won’t. You’ve had a long drive. Why don’t you shower and change? I’ll heat up a couple of quiches; we can have them with some salad and a whole lot of wine.’

‘Sounds good.’

Later, as they sat with coffee on the couch, Steven asked, ‘So how big is this TB problem I keep hearing about?’

‘Hard to say. Officialdom doesn’t want the extent of the problem becoming widely publicised for fear of stoking racial tensions. The kids presenting with TB are almost exclusively Asian and it would be all too easy to have the right wing shouting about English kids being threatened with a killer disease they'd caught from immigrants, so the figures are wrapped up in something which in turn is disguised as something else.’

‘Something the Civil Service are good at.’

‘Well, it could be a continuing challenge. TB might not be the only thing making a comeback. There are those who predict we’re going back to what it was like in the forties and fifties of the last century.’ Tally groaned and stretched her arms in the air. ‘God, I’m tired.’

‘That’s not surprising: you haven’t had a day off in weeks. We should think seriously about taking a holiday, somewhere nice and sunny where they have blue skies instead of grey.’

‘Holidays are for other people, Steven.’

‘C’mon. The hospital could get a locum in. Ask your boss about it. This would be a good time, right? Just after you’ve done him a favour.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘I’m serious. Talk to him tomorrow. You are going in tomorrow?’

‘Does the pope wear red socks?’