The Secret

ONE

Dr Steven Dunbar parked the Porsche Boxster and got out to clamber over steep dunes to reach the beach, with the soft, dry sand and tufted grass begrudging him every step of the way. He needed to escape the travails of everyday life, to get his head straight, to think things through, and, as always, it was a beach he came to when milestones loomed large in his life. The location of the beach didn’t really matter as long as it was deserted and afforded him views to the horizon with a big expanse of sky above, the bigger the better.

Today’s beach was on the north shore of the Solway Firth in south-west Scotland — the part tourists rushed past on their way north to Loch Lomond in their haste to embrace the Walter Scott-manufactured myths of the Scottish highlands. Many of those who knew and loved the wild, romantic shores of the Solway were in no hurry to let the cat out of the bag and were aided in their desire for continuing anonymity by uneven sand banks, fast-flowing tides and quicksand lying in wait for the unwary.

Steven’s milestones were the usual mix of sad and happy common to most folk — a time when a life-changing decision had to be made, the death of a parent, an impending marriage, the birth of a child and, in his case, the tragic loss of a wife through the ravages of a brain tumour. Today he’d learned of the death of a friend and needed to be alone. He’d been on leave up in Scotland visiting his daughter Jenny when the news had reached him. Sir John Macmillan, his boss and head of the Sci-Med Inspectorate in London, had phoned to tell him that Dr Simone Ricard of the French-based but international charity Médecins Sans Frontières had been found dead. Macmillan had remembered that she’d been a friend of Steven’s and thought it significant enough to interrupt his long weekend with the news. Currently he had no further information but would keep him informed if and when details came in.

Steven reached the water’s edge and drew a line in the sand with his toe for no particular reason. It was clear enough today to see where the sky fell into the sea and this pleased him. It conferred a sense of order on the scene, unlike days when the heavens disappeared into the water in a miasma of grey nothingness. He thought about Simone and wondered, as he had so often in the past, how they had become friends in the first place. True, they were both doctors, but they could hardly have been more different in outlook.

Simone was French, the only child of professional parents — both university lecturers — who’d been born and brought up in Marseilles but had moved to Paris to complete her education and attend medical school. She had wanted to become a doctor from an early age and had never wavered in her determination. For her, medicine was a true vocation while for him it had been the course he’d followed at university, the one he had pursued largely in order to please parents and teachers who’d sought the kudos of having a doctor in the family or on the school records.

He had gone all the way through medical school before maturing enough and achieving the self-confidence necessary to admit to himself and everyone else that he had no great wish to board the medical career train: his heart simply wasn’t in it. When the arguments were over and the dust had settled he had gone on to complete his studies and qualify as a doctor, even working his obligatory registration year in hospitals before veering off to join the army and pursue a career more suited to his love of the outdoors and a yen for adventure.

A strong build and a natural athletic ability honed on the mountains of his native Cumbria had ensured rapid progress in the military, serving with the Parachute Regiment and then with Special Forces in operations all over the world. The army of course, did not ignore his medical qualifications and had put them to good use in training him up to become an expert in field medicine, the medicine of the battlefield where initiative and the ability to improvise were often as important as professional knowledge. It was these qualities that would later lead to his recruitment to the Sci-Med Inspectorate when the time came for him to leave the service in his mid-thirties.

The Sci-Med Inspectorate comprised a small investigative unit based in the UK’s Home Office under the direction of Sir John Macmillan. It was their job to investigate possible crime or wrong-doing in the hi-tech areas of science and medicine — areas where the police lacked expertise. The investigators were all qualified medics or scientists who had done well in other jobs before coming to Sci-Med. Macmillan did not employ new graduates: his people had to have proved themselves under stressful, demanding conditions in real life. Turning out for the local rugby club or indulging in executive team-building games at the weekend did not count for much to his way of thinking. He knew the most unlikely people could crack when reality came to call.

Steven had proved himself to be a first class investigator and was regarded as such by Macmillan although they had not always seen eye to eye, Steven often feeling frustrated when highly placed wrong-doers were too frequently in his eyes allowed to get away with their crimes in the so-called ‘national interest’. A couple of years before, things had come to a head after a particularly difficult assignment and Steven had resigned from the Inspectorate to begin a new life with Tally — Dr Natalie Simmons — a paediatrician working in a children’s hospital in Leicester whom he had met in the course of a previous investigation.

Tally had never really come to terms with what Steven did for a living, having witnessed at first hand some of the dangerous situations he found himself in. It had proved such a stumbling block to their relationship that they had parted over it, with Tally declaring that she couldn’t face a life of continual worries over whether her man was going to come home or not. Things had changed when Steven resigned from Sci-Med and got back in touch to tell her so, assuring her that he had no intention of returning. Would she now consider spending her life with him? To his relief, Tally’s feelings hadn’t changed. She had welcomed him back with open arms.

Steven had found a job with a large pharmaceutical company in Leicester as head of security — more concerned with the guarding of intellectual property and the vetting of staff than the patrolling of premises — and they had set up home together in Tally’s flat. Despite loathing his job and finding himself in the rat race he’d always managed to avoid, Steven declined all attempts by John Macmillan to lure him back to Sci-Med, believing that, in time, he would grow to feel better about his new career and consoling himself with the thought that at least he had Tally.

An unexpected wildcard had been thrown into the mix when Macmillan had fallen ill with a brain tumour and had asked to see Steven before undergoing major surgery with what doctors had warned him was a less than certain outcome. At Tally’s insistence, Steven had travelled to London to be at Macmillan’s bedside, only to find himself immediately under pressure when Macmillan asked that he seriously consider taking over from him as head of Sci-Med should he fail to pull through. Steven, faced with the awful choice between reneging on his promise to Tally and turning down a possible last request from the man he respected more than anyone else had in fact declined. He had apologised to Macmillan, hoping that he’d understand how much Tally had come to mean to him and that he couldn’t risk losing her.

There was to be another twist, however, when Tally, sensing how unhappy Steven was in his new job — although he’d never openly admitted it — and how badly he fitted in to the system of corporate hierarchy, decided that she couldn’t be party to such a situation any longer. She’d insisted that Steven return to Sci-Med: she would support him and they’d work something out.

In the event, Steven did not commit to taking over at Sci-Med but did agree to go back and take a look at something that had been troubling Macmillan greatly, the sudden deaths of a number of people including a former health minister who’d been involved in a series of health service reforms some twenty years before. It was during the course of this investigation that Macmillan underwent surgery and amazed his doctors by making a good recovery against all the odds. He was now back at Sci-Med in full charge of all his faculties and the organisation he had founded.

Steven, who had resigned his job with the pharmaceutical company in order to carry out the investigation, was still with Sci-Med but ever mindful of how Tally felt whatever she said — something that constantly caused him to overstate the routine nature of what he was doing, hoping to convince her that being in danger was very much the exception rather than the rule. Tally didn’t really believe it and he had to concede that she did have a point. He had come perilously close to losing his life on more than one occasion in the past few years.

Tally hadn’t come with him to Scotland this weekend: she’d agreed to provide cover at the children’s hospital for her boss whose mother had died after a short illness. Steven had driven north alone to spend time with his daughter Jenny and the family she had lived with since his wife Lisa’s death. Jenny had been a baby at the time but was now moving into the ‘seniors’ at her primary school in the village of Glenvane in Dumfriesshire where she lived with Lisa’s sister, Sue, her solicitor husband Richard and their own two children Peter and Mary.

Tally and Jenny got on just fine but Steven had given up harbouring dreams about his daughter's coming to live with them on a permanent basis and all of them playing happy families — a notion of domestic bliss he’d entertained for some years, albeit to happen at some unspecified time in the future. He now recognised it as being both impractical and unrealistic. Jenny had lived too long with the folks in Glenvane and was happy there, accepted and much loved as one of the family. Having a ‘real daddy’ who came to visit whenever he could was a bonus in her life not an alternative. Sue and Richard had agreed with this assessment, having no wish at all to lose their ‘second daughter’.

Apart from this, Tally had a career of her own to pursue and no thoughts of giving it up. In fact, Steven’s return to Sci-Med had encouraged her to start applying for a consultant’s post, the next step up from her current senior registrar’s position and something she’d been delaying because of Steven's having given up so much to come and live with her in Leicester. Success in this would almost certainly mean a move to another town or city, but with Steven living in London through the week Leicester was no longer their natural base. A position in a London hospital would suit them both down to the ground.

Steven paused in his progress along the water’s edge to pick up a handful of stones and begin throwing them out as far as he could, straining to hear the splash against the sound of the wind in his ears. Each successful one seemed to trigger a new thought about Simone. Whereas he had gone off to join the army as soon as he’d finished medical school, Simone had gone off to do what she could for the sick and the suffering in the third world. She would never follow the traditionally comfortable career path of the medic to middle class affluence and status. She would use her skills and dedication to help those who needed her in Africa and Asia throughout a career which had come to an abrupt and unfair end for whatever reason.

She had been working for some years for MSF, prepared to go wherever they chose to send her, but she was also a very charming and persuasive woman who had been used by the organisation to seek funding and practical help from big business — mainly the pharmaceutical industry — on many occasions, something she’d proved good at, with company executives often complaining with good humour that she could pick their pockets without their realising what had happened.

Steven had first met her when he had been seeking information about an outbreak of Ebola in one of the African countries where she had recently been working. He had been trying to identify the source of a possible case being held in a UK isolation unit. They had liked each other from the outset and their friendship had been cemented when Simone spoke of the difficulties of performing surgery in the bush and Steven was able to help her with tips and suggestions gained from his own wide experience of field medicine. Carrying out emergency surgery on the wounded in the deserts of the Middle East and in the depths of the South American jungle had given him a lot to pass on.

Simone could never understand why Steven had joined the army in the first place — You train to save life and then you train to take it? It’s crazy — just as he didn’t understand why she had devoted her entire life to what he saw as taking on an impossible task with the odds continually stacked against her and everyone like her. He was a very practical individual who didn’t believe in getting into fights he couldn’t win while she was very much an 'It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness' sort of person. Although he’d never said so, Steven had always suspected that religion might be behind Simone’s outlook, as was so often the case with those involved in the apparently selfless doing of good, but this idea was torpedoed when on one occasion Simone had volunteered that she didn’t believe in God. It had taken him so much by surprise that he could only mumble ‘Me neither'.

They had met at irregular intervals, usually when Simone was in London with her ‘begging bowl’, as she put it, although it sounded better with a French accent. They would get together for dinner and discuss the state of the world, Steven’s views reflecting his ever-growing cynicism while an apparently eternal optimism that always made him laugh shone from Simone. He smiled at the memory as he picked up another handful of pebbles to throw into the sea. He had once said to her that he could understand why everyone liked her but failed to see what she saw in him. She’d laughed and put her hand on his arm to reply, ‘You have a good heart, Steven. Don’t try so hard to hide it.’