sorry to say that he died from heart complications. He had not received an overdose—that was established. The press got hold of the case and they asked how somebody could die from taking a licensed medicine. Well, I could have given them an answer to that, but they were not in the slightest bit interested in a rational explanation about inevitable risk. They put pressure on the minister and they took another look at my report. They discovered that the doses I had described did not match a new set of lab reports on the blood. The figures were way off. And they also discovered that I had not declared a conflict of interest when I published that case note. I should have told them that I had received a research grant from the company that made the drug. And they were right: I should have done that. I don’t know why I didn’t. It was some years ago. It must have slipped my mind.
“There was an internal enquiry and I was censured. They said that I had been negligent in not checking the blood results when they were so obviously exceptionally high. They said that a prudent doctor would have had the samples tested again. They censured me, too, for not disclosing the conflict of interest and the journal published a withdrawal of my case note.”
He stopped and looked at Isabel. The air of defeat had returned. He seemed flattened, almost as if the breath had been knocked out of him—winded.
Isabel felt that she needed to think. She rose to her feet and stood before the window, looking out over Princes Street below. A train had emerged from the tunnel underneath the National Gallery and was moving slowly west. She looked at her watch. That was the Glasgow train, which left every fifteen minutes.
“So what they did,” she began, “is to conclude that you were negligent. Is that it? They didn’t conclude that you had deliberately falsified anything?”
Her question seemed to unsettle him. He looked down at his hands for a few moments before he replied.
“There was no falsification,” he said. “There was an error in the transcription of the results somewhere along the line. It’s possible that it was a slip by a medical student who was attached to my unit at the time. They accepted that. They said, though, that I should have rechecked and should not have relied on a medical student. They said that I was careless. That was the actual word used:
“And do you think you were?” asked Isabel.
He closed his eyes. She noticed that his right eyelid was twitching. “Yes. I should have checked. And I should have declared the conflict of interest. I failed to meet the standards expected of a doctor of my experience.”
There was something that Isabel was unsure about. Was this failure directly linked with the Glasgow case? She asked him this, and again he took a little while to answer.
“According to the press it was,” he said. “One or two of the papers went so far as to accuse me of…” He faltered. “Of killing the patient in Glasgow. They said that if I had done my work properly, safeguards would have been put in place. The drug would not have been given to somebody with a history of heart problems—which that man had. They blamed me for his death.” The next words were chiselled out. “Publicly. Unambiguously.”
Isabel reached out and put her hand on top of his clasped hands. “But you weren’t responsible for that,” she said. “Somebody made a mistake. That’s all.”
But there was something she still needed to know. Why had he not checked the results, if they were so out of line with what might have been expected? She asked him.
His answer came quickly, and Isabel thought that it sounded rehearsed. But then she realised that repetition may have the same effect as rehearsal. He would have had to explain himself a hundred times before, sometimes, perhaps, even to himself; of course it would sound rehearsed. “It didn’t cross my mind,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me that the results could be wrong. I took them on face value.”
They spoke for a few more minutes. Isabel asked him the name of the assistant who had worked with him, and he gave it to her. But he added, “It was definitely not his fault. It really wasn’t.” Then Stella appeared, hovering anxiously about the door. Isabel said good-bye to Marcus, who had sunk back in his chair and started to stare out of the window again.
Glancing behind her, Isabel whispered to Stella. “He looks very depressed,” she said. “Has he seen a doctor?”
“He won’t,” Stella replied. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything.”
“All right,” said Isabel. “Give me a week. Maybe ten days. Then telephone.”
Stella reached out and briefly held Isabel’s arm. “You’re a saint,” she said.
The compliment surprised Isabel. She did not conceive of herself in those terms at all; it simply would never have occurred to her to do so. A saint with a young boyfriend, she thought. And a taste for New Zealand white wine. And a tendency to think uncharitable thoughts about people like Dove and Lettuce. That sort of saint.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PEOPLE DON’T REALISE IT,” Cat had said. “They don’t realise what running your own business is like. It’s always there. Day in, day out. And you can’t get away when you like. You’re tied down.”
“Like having a baby,” said Isabel.
She had not intended to make the comparison, but it had slipped out. And it occurred to her that even if this was true for most women who had babies, it was hardly true for her, with her resources, with Grace to support her. If tact required that one should not complain about those respects in which one is better off than others, it also required that one should not complain about things that others did not have at all—such as children. Isabel was unsure about how Cat felt about not having a child herself, even if she had a boyfriend now—“the one after the last” as Grace had called him.
The last had been an apprentice stonemason, although Isabel still thought of him as a bouncer, the job he had been doing before he started to work with stone. He had the physique of a bouncer—and the physiognomy, too, including a protruding jaw that must have been such a tempting target for those whom he was called to expel from the noisy, subterranean club in Lothian Road that had employed him. Isabel had met him a couple of times and had suppressed the urge to stare at him in a way which would have revealed her astonishment that such a man should be the choice of her niece, as if Cat’s choices said anything about Isabel—of course they did not, she told herself,
