‘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?’
THREE
Steven was back in London before one o’clock. He parked the Porsche in the underground car park at Marlborough Court and went upstairs to check that the flat was okay before setting off for the Home Office. He and Tally had decided that he should hold on to the property for a while when he moved to Leicester because the housing market was so dire, a decision that had proved fortuitous with his return to Sci-Med. It might well be the flat in Leicester they would be looking to sell if Tally managed to get a consultancy in the capital.
Jean Roberts, John Macmillan’s secretary welcomed him with her usual good humour and asked after Jenny.
‘She’s growing up far too fast,’ complained Steven. ‘Seems like only yesterday she was a baby.’
‘It’s frightening,’ agreed Jean. ‘My godson’s getting married in a few months and I still think of him as a schoolboy with grubby collars and scraped knees.’
John Macmillan, hearing the voices, emerged from his office and invited Steven through. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings about your friend. Must have put a damper on your weekend.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Steven assured him. ‘I think I will go to the funeral if that’s still all right with you?’
‘Of course. The computer’s been rather quiet for the past week or so.’
Sci-Med had a sophisticated computer system which gathered information about anything unusual happening in the world of science and medicine by scanning all newspapers and relevant magazines and journals for significant articles.
‘Mind you, it’s been picking up on a strange story about the vilification of researchers working on ME.’
‘What’s that all about?’ Steven asked.
‘Apparently sufferers are fed up with the suggestion that there’s a psychological element to their condition. They think it supports the yuppie flu argument and brands them as lazy, shiftless, work-shy malingerers. They’re particularly incensed that so much government funding is being poured into this aspect of research when they’d prefer the money to go into the hunt for the real cause of the problem as they see it. They’re sure it has a biological basis.’
‘I thought a virus was identified a couple of years ago?’ said Steven.
‘A false dawn, I’m afraid. It turned out to be a contamination problem. No one could ever reproduce the reporting team’s results.’
‘Messy.’
‘It’s messy all round. Researchers are saying that ME. sufferers would rather be thought to be suffering from a serious but unknown viral condition than have any suggestion of mental health problems attached to them. Needless to say, the mental health lobby are not too delighted about that. They claim it perpetuates the stigma attached to mental problems.’
‘So what form has the "vilification" been taking?’
‘Threatening letters to researchers, paint daubing, broken windows. There’s also an accusation doing the rounds that scientists would prefer not to find the virus responsible because that would put them all out of a job. They’re accused of being quite happy with the suggestion of a psychological factor because they know that’ll go on for ever and go nowhere.’