Trauma (17 page)

'I accept that the patient spoke but was it true consciousness Doctor? Did you conduct a proper question and answer session?'

Sarah opened her mouth to affirm but suddenly realised that this would be untrue. McKirrop had not answered any questions directly. He had supplied words and phrases which she had interpreted as a two way conversation. 'No sir but he appeared to remember things about his recent past.'

'They could have been words snatched from the cosmos Doctor.'

'I didn't get that impression sir.'

Tyndall smiled but there was a suggestion of impatience about it. 'I'm sorry your chap died,' he said. 'Gaining experience in medicine can be a painful business.'

'Yes sir,' said Sarah, accepting that the time for any argument was over.

'I understand Dr Logan will be carrying out full brain scans on two of our patients this morning. Why don't you help out?'

Sarah took a deep breath and fought to control her temper. She was a naughty schoolgirl being given extra homework but if she gave rein to her tongue right now her time in HTU would be over. Maybe even her career in medicine. 'Yes sir,' she said.

Sarah went through an awful day on auto-pilot. She assisted Logan with the scan patients, knowing that he was gloating over every second of her discomfort. 'It's very important that the gain control on the monitor matches the one on the recorder . . . it's something that can be so easily overlooked ...'

'I'm sorry Dr Lasseter, was it something I did?' asked Nurse Barnes when she came on duty.

'No nurse,' replied Sarah. 'I'm quite sure neither of us did anything wrong but if we did, it was my responsibility.'

'Maybe it was just one of these things?' said the nurse.

'Maybe,' replied Sarah. The comment had been meant kindly but Nurse Barnes was a pork pie short of a picnic if she really thought that.

The last thing Sarah did before coming off duty was to return fifty pence to the night Staff Nurse.

'What's this for?' asked the nurse.

'The official view is that McKirrop did not regain consciousness. You win the bet.'

'But I was there,' said the nurse. 'I saw it happen.'

'Random words and phrases from a destroyed brain,' said Sarah.

'Who said that?'

'Professor Tyndall.'

The nurse thought for a moment then said, 'He may be my boss and he's certainly a very distinguished man and all that but this time . . . he's talking a load of balls.'

Sarah suddenly regained her confidence. Up until then she had been unaware of how it had been eroding away and just how close she was coming to accepting the official view of things. 'Yes,' she said thoughtfully. 'He's my boss too and you're right. He is.'

The nurse pushed the fifty pence piece back to Sarah and said, 'Off with you. You seem to live in this place.'

Sarah went down to watch the evening news on television. She was alone in the common room, a large square room on the ground floor of the residency furnished with a variety of unmatched furniture and which always reminded her of a dentist's waiting room. There were a couple of comfortable arm chairs however, and she removed the pile of newspapers on the one nearest the TV to sit down. Being alone, she kicked off her shoes and put her stockinged feet up on the low table in front of her.

The national news was followed by the weather and then a bulletin of local news which she was about to turn off when the name 'McKirrop' stopped her. She sank back in the chair to watch the report. John McKirrop, the down and out who had witnessed the exhumation of little Simon Main's body and who had been injured in a brave attempt at tackling the culprits, had died in hospital that morning. He had been injured again in another violent incident in which a woman had died. This time McKirrop's injuries had proved fatal. The police were appealing for witnesses. There was some footage of the canal towpath and the police incident unit at the site. This was followed by a plan of the area and an approximate time of death for the woman. As yet the police had failed to apprehend those responsible for the outrage in the cemetery.

Sarah had been hoping for distraction from the television. Instead she had been forced to think about McKirrop again. She had declined an offer to go out with several of the other residents for a drink down at The Quill, the hospital's local pub, feeling that she wouldn't be good company after the day she'd had. She had made an excuse about having some reading up to do. Maybe she should have gone to the pub after all, she thought. Apart from reminding her of the McKirrop case, the television story had forced her to consider the role of alcohol in their lives. The contrast between her colleagues laughing and joking over few drinks down at the pub and John McKirrop's alcohol ruined life could hardly have been starker.

Ostensibly it was a tale of two different worlds but only at first glance. In reality they were much closer than any of them would care to admit, especially in medicine. Pressure led to stress, stress could lead to heavy drinking, heavy drinking could lead to dependence and then it was downhill all the way. Medicine was the profession with more suicides and more alcoholics than any other. That's what they’d told her at medical school.

Sarah got up and poured herself some coffee from the heated flask that sat on the sideboard. The residency had coffee available all day but Sarah wasn't sure how often the domestic staff made fresh stuff. Certainly not within the last four hours, she concluded after sipping it. It tasted burnt. She put it aside after a few more sips and tried to concentrate on her book. Her father had recommended that she read Renee Weber's 'Dialogues with Scientists and Sages' as an exercise in perspective.

Sarah found that she couldn't concentrate. The McKirrop case was still uppermost in her mind. It wouldn't go away. After reading the same page three times without taking in anything she put down the book and rubbed her forehead as she lay back in the chair. She tried again to think things through logically but it was complicated by her inability to analyse her own feelings properly. They were a mixture of disbelief, anger, sorrow and . . . unease. Yes, that was it, there was definitely an element of unease, the one feeling she’d not been admitting to. Now that she had, she could start defining its cause.

She had recorded an encouraging brain scan on John McKirrop, one which suggested that he would recover consciousness and some hours later he had. This was her opinion and also that of the staff nurse who’d been with her. But instead of being on the road to recovery, as she would have predicted, McKirrop was dead and her bosses were telling her that the brain scan readings had been some kind of aberration, some quirk of fate or even a mistake - a mistake on her part! What was more was that they were telling her that McKirrop had not regained consciousness at all. It was all a misunderstanding due to her inexperience.

Sarah had got the facts straight in her head but the facts were not the cause of her unease - they were the cause of her anger and frustration. Feelings of disquiet were associated with questions that arose from them. If she was right and McKirrop had been on the road to recovery, then what was she really suggesting? That someone else had made a mistake? Or that someone . . . had deliberately murdered John McKirrop? Surely the notion was just too ridiculous, but the question remained. She needed a scientific way of dealing with it.

The post mortem on McKirrop would of course, define the extent of his injuries when they got round to doing it but the pathologist would probably be Hugh Carfax, a friend of Derek Logan. Not that she was suggesting that Carfax might be influenced by Logan's notes and conclusions on the case but people were people and human nature was human nature. McKirrop had been a nobody; he hadn't mattered in life. Why should society care about his death or more specifically, the exact cause of it?

Sarah felt embarrassed at the cynicism she was displaying. She felt the need to be more positive but how? What could she do on her own? Suddenly she saw the crux of the matter. Tyndall had said that he doubted the unusual angle of McKirrop's forehead would have been enough to protect him from serious brain damage. Logan had in effect confirmed this view by recording a flat line on the patient's scan, indicating that McKirrop's skull had been pushed back into his brain causing massive damage. Why didn't she take a look?

Sarah sat upright in the chair and her pulse rate quickened at the thought. McKirrop's body would be lying in the mortuary. She could simply go along and see for herself. Any probing she would have to do would be disguised by the wound site. The pathologist need never know that she’d interfered with the body. The thought made her pulse beat even faster. 'Interfere with the body'? That sounded serious. She supposed it was.

For a medical practitioner to interfere with a cadaver before a legally required post mortem sounded like a very serious offence indeed. 'Taking a look' could turn out to be professional suicide if she was found out and someone chose to make it so. Despite the fact that she would not be altering or trying to cover anything up, the thought that Dr Derek Logan might be consulted in any repercussions if she were caught was not a comforting one. What should she do?

Sarah's need-to-know triumphed over the temptation to play safe. She just had to know about that head wound. She checked her watch; it was just after nine fifty. The others wouldn't be back until around eleven. That gave her plenty of time if everything went smoothly. She returned briefly to her room to change into a sweater and slacks and slip on a leather blouson.

Sarah hit the first hurdle as she hurried along the bottom corridor to the stairs leading down to the basement where the mortuary and post mortem suite were located. She suddenly realised that the mortuary would be locked! She knew that she could get a key at the front office but that would mean signing it out and then it would be known that she had visited the mortuary. There was another key, she remembered. The hospital porters had a key of their own for use when a patient died during the night and they had to remove the body from the wards. It was kept beside the 'dead cart', the nickname given to the covered trolley used to transport the dead from the wards when the occasion arose. The cart itself was kept in a little outhouse attached to the porters' lodge by the front gate.

Sarah left the main corridor by a small side door and made her way to the porters' lodge. There was little in the way of lighting on the road between the main hospital and the lodge so it would be unlikely that she would be seen. But with each step that brought her closer to the trolley shed, she felt more afraid. Her mouth became dry and something inside kept urging her to go back. Forget about it! It's not worth the risk! Her feet refused to listen; she was almost at the porters' lodge. Light spilled out from the mess room where she could see three men inside. One was reading a newspaper, the other two were arguing about something. She could hear their raised voices.

The trolley shed was comfortingly dark. She turned the handle slowly and felt the door release. The hinges squealed as she pushed it open and she froze with her fingers on the handle, trying to think what she would say if the lodge door opened and the porters found her there. It remained shut as the argument inside continued. Sarah let herself in and closed the door behind her, her teeth clenched as she tried to avoid making it squeal again. She was safe for the moment.

She knew that the mortuary key was kept on a hook on the wall with a skull and cross bones above it. Some porter had seen fit to add this refinement in the past with red and black marker pens. This was largely the reason for her remembering the existence of the key. She had seen it when she and the other new house officers had been shown around the hospital on their first day - their ‘orientation tour'. Right now, it was too dark to make out the skull and cross bones but Sarah felt along the wall until her fingers touched the key and closed around it. At that moment she heard the phone ring in the lodge through the wall.

Her heart skipped a beat as she imagined the worst possibility. There had been a death in one of the wards and the porters were being called out to remove the body. Any second now they would open the door and find her there. She stood there, clutching the key in her hand with her eyes tightly shut as if in prayer. The door of the lodge opened and the voices were suddenly loud.

'That's the third time that bloody staff nurse has called us out,' complained one.

'Maybe she needs the company,' said another.

'I know what she bloody needs.'

The door of the lodge closed and the voices started to fade as the two porters moved off. Sarah let her breath out slowly and tried to steady her nerves. As soon as everything was quiet again she let herself out of the shed, steeling herself to do it as silently as she could when all her instincts told her to make a run for it, but there was still a porter left in the lodge. With a final look round as she moved off, she started out for the mortuary.'

The fluorescent lighting stuttered into life as Sarah clicked the switch. Her heart was beating so strongly that she had to rest for a moment leaning against the wall. There's nothing to worry about, she told herself. You're almost there. She looked at the row of refrigerated body vaults in front of her. Her first task was to find McKirrop's body. There was a card index held in a metal holder on the front of each vault door indicating who lay inside and on which tier - there were three tiers to each. John McKirrop lay on the middle tier in vault 4.