occasionally the computer picked up something that might otherwise have been overlooked. This time it had noted the remarkable similarity between the two nurses’ allegations. Both women maintained that their patients had rejected their transplant because they had been given the wrong organ. Now one of these women was currently dying of cancer and the other, Staff Nurse Fairfax, had been dismissed from her post.
Dunbar checked into his hotel near the city centre and found it pleasantly anonymous. It was also warm, which was a bonus because he was feeling chilled. Scotland always seemed to be three or four degrees colder than the south of England, where he lived. He had noticed this again as soon as he had stepped off the plane. The raw dampness of early March made things worse. He threw his briefcase on to the bed and walked over to the window to look down at the traffic moving slowly below in the wet city streets, their lights reflecting in the puddles that were proliferating as the storm drains struggled to cope.
After a few minutes he closed the blind and turned away. He picked up the phone, called room service and asked for a large gin and tonic, some chicken sandwiches and a pot of strong black coffee. After that he would have a warm bath before getting down to reading through his notes and deciding on a plan of action.
As he lay in the bath with the water lapping just below his chin, Dunbar closed his eyes and wondered about James Ross’s decision to stay on at Medic Ecosse. Ross was by all accounts a popular man, a brilliant surgeon and a highly regarded researcher in his field. But, although clearly dedicated to his patients and well liked by his colleagues, he was still a human being and therefore subject to the laws of human nature. Dunbar set great store by these laws and recognized them as the driving force behind almost everything that happened in society. Very often he had to pick away at various levels of veneer applied by clever, self-seeking people in positions of power but always, underneath, the same rules applied, whether it was on the factory floor or in the boardroom, the operating theatre or the accounts department.
Ross was a proud man — he had every reason to be. He was also a surgeon with the typical extrovert tendencies of the profession. Timidity and surgery did not go hand in hand. Self-doubt had no place in the operating theatre. According to Dunbar’s rules, it didn’t befit such a character to lose face in public as Ross had done. The humiliation of having such savage cuts applied to his research funding with not the slightest suggestion of compromise should have pushed him into a dignified resignation, but it hadn’t.
Of course, it might have been the thought of his colleagues losing their jobs if the hospital closed that had weighed so heavily on him. Being single-handedly responsible for the closure of a hospital would be a heavy burden for anyone to bear. The man, of course, might also be a saint and therefore outside Dunbar’s rules.
He supposed it would be easy enough for him to check on alternative sources of research funding once he had access to the accounts at Medic Ecosse, and he would like to know if a deal had been struck behind the scenes with Medic International; but that still wouldn’t answer his question about why Ross had acted out of character. That was the more important thing.
Having been thinking about Ross, Dunbar decided to go through his notes on the surgeon as soon as he was out of the bath. He didn’t intend going out again or even downstairs in the hotel, so he just pulled on a sweater and jeans and didn’t bother with socks or shoes. He sat cross-legged on the bed with his papers spread out in front of him, the bedside lamp angled to provide light.
James Ross’s career to date had been nothing short of outstanding, with prizes and awards punctuating his progress from medical school in London through appointments at a succession of top hospitals both in the UK and the United States. Early on in his studies Ross had been transferred to a leading medical school in New York, where he had been admitted to a programme that had enabled him to do a PhD at the same time as his medical degree. His research for his doctorate had been in immunology. This explained his intense interest in transplant research, thought Dunbar, and his high standing in the scientific community as well as the medical world.
Many doctors played at being researchers, but the days of significant discoveries being made by candlelight in the ward side room had long since gone. Those times had largely disappeared with frock coats and brass, monocular microscopes. To succeed in the extremely demanding and competitive world of medical research in the late twentieth century, you had to be a trained researcher to start with, with all the background knowledge that that entailed. Ross was just such a person. The fact that he had obtained both a PhD and a medical degree concurrently suggested that he was exceptionally gifted intellectually.
He could, of course, still be a lousy administrator, thought Dunbar. There were lots of intellectually gifted people who ended up in charge of university departments when they didn’t have the managerial capacity to run a pie stall. If Ross was an ivory-tower researcher, it was conceivable that the running of his unit might suffer but, again by all accounts, this was not true. The transplant unit at Medic Ecosse was regarded as one of the most successful in the country and Ross was no absent-minded professor. He was very much a hands-on leader, not at all the sort of man to preside over a unit where a patient could mistakenly be given the wrong organ.
There was some information on Ross’s personal life in the file. He had been married to an American woman, a radiologist he had met while working in Boston, but things hadn’t worked out and they had divorced four years ago after three years of marriage. There were no children. His ex-wife had returned to the States, where she had since remarried. Ross lived alone in Glasgow in the penthouse flat of a modern block of flats in Kelvingrove, although he made frequent working trips to Geneva as a clinical consultant.
In the year to April last, Ross had earned?87,000. He drove a two-year-old ‘5’ series BMW and was a member of two clubs. He held an honorary senior lectureship at the University of Glasgow on account of an agreement to deliver a series of four lectures a year on immunology.
Attached to the file were reprints of four of his most recent research publications. One dealt with something called ‘Immuno-preparation’; the other three were on the possible use of alternative species as donors of organs for human transplant. Dunbar put them aside to read when he had more time. They’d probably demand a deal of concentration. Immunology and transplant surgery were a far cry from his own area of medical expertise, which was field medicine.
The only son of a Cumbrian schoolmaster and his music teacher wife, Steven Dunbar had grown up in the Lake District, in the small village of Glenridding on the shores of Ullswater. He’d studied medicine before completing two residencies, one in Leeds in general surgery and the other in Newcastle in Accident and Emergency. It was around this time that he’d started to question his motives for entering medicine and begun to consider other options. He felt as if he’d been on a treadmill since leaving school. Teachers and parents had been delighted at his success in gaining entry to medical school and he’d been swept along in the approval and pleasure of others. None of them, including himself, he had to admit, had ever considered if he really wanted to be a doctor. It wasn’t until a friend suggested he think about the army that his future had taken shape.
He opted for the rigours of life in the Parachute Regiment and had been extensively trained, first as a soldier and then in field medicine. The next few years brought all the physical challenges he could have ever dreamed of as he served with units of the regiment and occasionally on secondment to Special Forces. It was, though, a lifestyle that couldn’t continue indefinitely, and when the time came for him to stop he knew and accepted it. The big question had been what to do next.
The army ran courses for officers returning to civilian life but Dunbar wasn’t included. He was a doctor; it was assumed he’d be returning to medicine in civvy street. Luckily, he had confided in a fellow officer that he had no wish to continue in medicine, for a while at least. This had led to a suggestion through a friend of a friend that he might be suitable for a job with the Sci-Med Inspectorate. Now, after four years with Sci-Med he felt settled and content.
No two assignments were ever the same; each was demanding in its own way and, being concerned exclusively with problem areas in medicine, he was obliged to keep abreast of the latest advances in his profession. His readiness to move to assignments at a moment’s notice was part of the job, wherever they happened to be in the UK.
The only real drawback to his lifestyle was that he was seldom in one place long enough to establish relationships. At thirty-five he was still unmarried.
Dunbar flipped open the slim file on Amy Teasdale. She had suffered almost continual renal problems from birth. Various treatments had been tried in a variety of hospitals while she waited for a suitable organ to become available, but her condition had deteriorated until, after a period of particularly severe illness, she was admitted to Medic Ecosse. The team there managed to stabilize her long enough for a suitable donor organ to be found.
Unfortunately the story had not had a happy ending. Amy’s body had rejected the organ almost immediately, despite the computerized match being good in terms of tissue compatibility. A copy of the Medic Ecosse comparator
