Ben nodded. ‘Your facial reconstruction’s important because we can see if it matches the known images of Goya.’
‘I could cheat, mug up on his self-portraits,’ Francis suggested archly.
‘You won’t do that, because if the skull is genuine, just think how much it would do for your career when we release the news,’ Ben replied. ‘Keep you here for at least another fifty years, however many Principals come and go.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Keep it quiet.’
‘Don’t tell me your brother stole it?’
‘No, but news travels fast. I don’t want people to start asking questions, leaking it to the press. If it got out, everyone would be after the bloody thing—’
Francis looked over, his expression dubious. ‘What the hell for?’
‘It’s a relic. An artistic object of worship—’
‘It’s a lump of bone.’
‘It’s a lump of famous bone,’ Ben corrected him. ‘Because it’s Goya’s skull it would be worth a fortune on the open market. Or the not-so-open market. There’s a big trade in art relics.’
‘In that case, someone should find Van Gogh’s ear.’
‘Actually, they said they had found it only a few years ago. Said it had come down the family from the prostitute Van Gogh gave it to originally.’
‘And they didn’t want to keep it?’ Francis replied sarcastically. ‘Mind you, Napoleon’s penis has been going the rounds for decades. Probably getting more action now than it ever did.’
Smiling, Ben tapped Francis on the shoulder. ‘Seriously, keep it quiet. The art world can be a dangerous place. Collectors will pay people to find the skull. By whatever means.’
7
Trying not to show her nerves, Megan Griffiths walked into the Reconstructive Department of the Whitechapel Hospital, situated above the hospital kitchens. The patients in this particular ward were children, the most serious cases sectioned off in isolation wards to allow their wounds to heal in sterile conditions. Not that these areas were only for children. It was to one of the side wards that Abigail Harrop had been taken when she first came to the Whitechapel Hospital. And it was the reputation of Ben Golding – not the surroundings – which had kept her there.
Megan paused, listening. Outside, rain – its rhythm as persistent as a tin drum – scuffed the high windows and dripped from Victorian gutters and lintels. In private clinics around London the rich and famous paid for their treatment, their buttocks filled or noses straightened in privacy. But in the National Health sector burns were treated side by side with deformities and car accident injuries.
Still thinking about Francis Asturias, Ben was preoccupied when he arrived on the ward and surprised to see Megan Griffiths there. Moving into the nurses’ station he paused in front of the electric fire to warm his hands and thought of the heatwave in Spain, hardly able to reconcile the damp London chill with the smouldering dryness of Madrid.
‘How long has she been here?’ Ben asked the sister, jerking his head towards the window which looked out over the ward.
‘About half an hour. Dr Griffiths often comes to see the patients. One of your keener registrars.’
Curious, Ben glanced back through the partition glass, watching Megan examine a patient. The child’s injured head was encased in a metal frame, from which steel rods protruded into her cranium. The metal screws on the helmet were turned twice a day to gradually pull the features into alignment. Brutal. Painful. Necessary.
An old memory came back, unbidden. Of his brother falling out of a tree. Falling flat, like a sandbag, without putting out his hands to break his fall. Leon, bellyflopping into the parched Spanish earth … He had broken his left leg, his jaw and two of his ribs and knocked out four of his teeth. In a Madrid hospital Leon’s jaw was wired back into line and his leg put in traction – and all the time he joked with Ben about why he had fallen.
The tree told me to do it …
What their parents had euphemistically referred to as ‘Leon’s accident’ had determined Ben’s future career. Throughout their teens he had gone through every operation with his brother, sat with him, listened to him, watched him. Known how much the surgery hurt as he observed the slight body pulled back into shape, the face restored, rebuilt. Over a period of years he saw Leon turned from a disfigured misfit back into a normal child. Physically, at least.
Two decades later Ben had notched up over twenty years’ experience as a reconstructive surgeon, treating both adults and children. Twenty years of facial burns, of careless playing with candles, of car accidents, of hit-and-run drivers. Two decades of womb injuries, of nature’s vicious tricks, of hiccups in the DNA. Twenty years, two hundred and forty months, one thousand and forty weeks spent in the company of victims. While his colleagues had made fortunes from facelifts and liposuction Ben Golding had stuck to his principles. He wasn’t interested in making someone perfect; he was interested in making them fit in.
Walking over, Megan interrupted his thoughts. ‘I was reading about one of your cases. Harry Collard—’
‘I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. I’ve got to get back to my office,’ Ben replied, glancing at his watch. ‘Let’s talk as we walk.’
Together they made their way down the main arterial corridor of the hospital, leading to the consulting rooms.
‘Harry Collard’s had over twenty operations, hasn’t he?’ she asked, almost running to keep up with Ben. ‘Isn’t that a lot for a child?’
‘Harry’s twenty-one now.’
‘But he was a child when you started,’ she persisted. ‘And surely the risks of all those anaesthetics is serious? Research shows that they can undermine a person’s resilience, even do long-term harm.’
Pausing, Ben opened the door of his consulting room and showed her in. The room was crowded with research books, piles of X-rays creeping inexorably across the top of the filing cabinets. On the wall, over a black-painted iron fireplace, was a painting of a landscape long gone, the chimney behind leaking a faint odour of soot.
‘We both know serial anaesthetics are bad for a child,’ Ben said evenly. ‘And much as I commend your interest, I think it’s a front.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s be honest, that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about, was it?’
She flushed, surprised by his perception. ‘I’ve got to make a decision about my speciality.’
‘You could do well in reconstructive surgery.’
‘I don’t want to do what you do. I want to go where the money is,’ Megan admitted bluntly. ‘The National Health’s declining. If it was a patient, they’d turn the respirator off.’ She gestured to the high walls, brown wood below the dado, dark anaglypta wallpaper above, the lamp-shade over their heads a cheap inverted bowl design from the 1930s. ‘I don’t like being poor. I want to get on to the reconstructive gravy train.’
‘But there are a lot of cosmetic surgeons,’ Ben replied evenly. ‘Why don’t you do something more worthwhile?’
‘Maybe I’m not the worthy type.’ She held his gaze, but didn’t pull her punches. ‘That little girl, the one we’ve just seen – I don’t think she should be alive. I don’t think she’ll ever have a normal life.’
‘So what are you saying? We shouldn’t try?’
Tactlessly, Megan blundered on. ‘Whatever you do, she’ll still look terrible. People will make her life a misery. I sometimes wonder if you’re doing all this to help her – or to experiment.’
She had gone too far and knew it.
‘Well, do continue to stand in judgement over me,’ Ben replied coolly, ‘especially when you’re taking a litre of fat from some eighteen-year-old’s backside … I don’t experiment. God does that. Life does that. I just try to repair what’s been buggered up.’ He sighed. ‘Don’t try to provoke me, Dr Griffiths. We’re all mechanics. Every surgeon is a mechanic, every body is a machine. What we do is brilliant and pedestrian at the same time.’ He paused, looking at her. ‘One day a doctor went to a garage to get his car fixed—’