“Of course. I’m Cressida, the senior midwife. Dr. Saunders, one of the obstetricians, is expecting you.”
She escorted me into the ward. From side rooms came the sound of babies crying. I’d never heard hours-old babies cry before and one sounded desperate, as if he or she had been abandoned. The senior midwife led me into a relatives’ room; her voice was professionally caring. “I’m so sorry about your nephew.”
For a moment I didn’t know whom she was referring to. I’d never thought about our own relationship with each other. “I always call him Tess’s baby, not my nephew.”
“When is his funeral?”
“Next Thursday. It’s my sister’s too.”
The senior midwife’s voice was no longer professionally caring, but shocked. “I’m so sorry. I was just told that the baby had died.” I was thankful to the kind doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning for not turning your death into pass-the-day-away gossip. Though I suppose the subject of death in a hospital is more talking shop than gossip.
“I want her baby to be with her.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And I’d like to talk to whoever was with Tess when she gave birth. I was meant to be with her, you see, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even take her call.” I started to cry, but tears were completely normal here, even the room, with its washable sofa covers, was probably designed with weeping relatives in mind. The senior midwife put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll find out who was with her and ask them to come and talk to you. Excuse me a moment.”
She went into the corridor. Through the open doorway I saw a woman on a gurney with a just-born baby in her arms. Next to them a doctor put his arm around a man. “It’s customary for the baby to cry, not the dad.” The man laughed and the doctor smiled at him. “When you arrived this morning, you were a couple and now you’re a family. Amazing, isn’t it?”
The senior midwife shook her head at him. “As an obstetrician, Dr. Saunders, it shouldn’t really amaze you anymore.”
Dr. Saunders wheeled the mother and baby into a side ward and I watched him. Even from a distance I could see that his face was fine-featured with eyes that were lit from the inside, making him beautiful rather than harshly handsome.
He came out with the senior midwife. “Dr. Saunders, this is Beatrice Hemming.”
Dr. Saunders smiled at me, totally unselfconscious, and reminded me of you in the way he wore his beauty carelessly, as if unacknowledged by the owner.
“Of course, my colleague who spoke to you earlier this morning told me you were coming. Our hospital chaplain has made all the necessary arrangements with the undertakers, and they are going to come and get her baby this afternoon.”
His voice was noticeably unhurried in the bustle of the ward; someone who trusted people to listen to him.
“The chaplain had his body brought to the room of rest,” he continued. “We thought that a morgue is no place for him. I’m only sorry that he had to be there as long as he did.”
I should have thought about this earlier. About him. I shouldn’t have left him in the morgue.
“Would you like me to take you there?” he asked.
“Are you sure you have time?”
“Of course.”
Dr. Saunders escorted me down the corridor toward the lifts. I heard a woman screaming. The sound came from above, which I guessed to be the labor ward. Like the newborn baby’s cries, her screams were unlike anything I had ever heard, scraped raw with pain. There were nurses and another doctor in the lift, but they didn’t appear to notice the screams. I reasoned that they were used to it, working day in, day out in the Kafka hospital world.
The lift doors closed. Dr. Saunders and I were pressed lightly against each other. I noticed a thin gold wedding ring hanging on a chain just visible round the neck of his scrubs top. On the second floor everyone else got out and we were alone. He looked at me directly, giving me his full attention.
“I’m so sorry about Tess.”
“You knew her?”
“I may have, I’m not sure. I’m sorry, that must sound callous but …”
I filled in, “You see hundreds of patients?”
“Yes. Actually we have more than five thousand babies delivered here a year. When was her baby born?”
“January the twenty-first.”
He paused for a moment. “In that case, I wouldn’t have been here. Sorry. I was at a training course in Manchester that week.”
I wondered whether he was lying. Should I ask him for proof that he wasn’t around for the birth of your baby, and for your murder? I couldn’t hear your voice answering me, not even to tease me. Instead, I heard Todd telling me not to be so ridiculous. And he’d have a point. Was every male in the land guilty until one by one they could prove their innocence? And who said it had to be a man? Maybe I should be suspicious of women as well, the kind midwife, the doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning. And they thought
“Our stop next.”
Still not able to hear your voice, I told myself, sternly, that being beautiful does not mean a man is a killer—just
