to an inner scrub room and another set of double doors. A number of plastic aprons were hanging on pegs and white Wellington boots stood in a row below. He pushed open one of the inner doors and found the light switch. Several fluorescent tubes stuttered into life. It was a post-mortem suite, tiled and smelling slightly of formalin and antiseptic.
Dunbar thought the table seemed unusually large. He approached it and ran his fingers along its smooth metallic surface and drainage channels leading down to the large stainless steel sink at the foot. There was a puzzling system of wheels and wires in the ceiling above it, but apart from that everything seemed normal. Trays of instruments sat on a long bench by the wall, gleaming knives and scalpels, saws and drills and a chain-mail glove used by pathologists to wear on their non-cutting hand to avoid accidental injury from the knife they were using. Dunbar shivered although it wasn’t cold.
He found he was wrong in his assumption that there would be a way up to the ground floor at the far end of the corridor. There wasn’t. He had to return the way he had come. He thought it odd but then supposed that having the PM suite at the far end meant that ‘passing traffic’ would hardly be welcome. As it was, very few people would have occasion to visit that end of the corridor. Dunbar was thinking about this when a door to his left suddenly opened and startled him. The orderly who emerged from the store-room pushing a trolley was equally surprised.
‘Who are you?’ stammered the man. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘I was curious,’ replied Dunbar. He showed the man his ID.
‘Oh right, I heard about you. The government busybo — inspector, right?’
‘Something like that. And you are?’ said Dunbar.
‘Name’s Johnson. I’m one of the porters. I’ve been picking up some equipment.’
‘Like working here?’
‘Money’s better than what I was getting. It’ll do me.’
Dunbar noticed the symbol on the side of the cardboard boxes on Johnson’s trolley. It was a wine glass.
‘Wine glasses?’ he asked.
‘For the PR party tomorrow.’
‘What’s that all about?’
‘The press have been invited to see the little girl they operated on, the one they took on for free.’
‘Oh I see.’
‘I guess she can’t insist on confidentiality like the others,’ said Johnson.
‘I suppose not,’ agreed Dunbar. It was something he hadn’t considered. They had come to the parting of the ways. Johnson stopped outside the mortuary door. ‘I’m going to use the lift in here,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘I’ll take the stairs. You and the trolley will just about fill it.’
As soon as the words were out, Dunbar regretted them. He had just admitted to knowing about the lift and its size. That was tantamount to admitting he had been snooping around earlier. He thought he saw a questioning look in Johnson’s eyes but that could have been just his imagination. After all, he was known to be an inspector. He was expected to be nosey. The problem might come when people compared notes and wondered what he was doing in the basement when he had told Ingrid he was going to Radiology.
Dunbar paused for a moment at the head of the stairs, wondering whether or not he should go on with his plan to take a look at the second floor or go directly on to Radiology. ‘In for a penny,’ he decided and walked briskly along to the main stairs. He ran up the steps to the first floor and the signs announcing the transplant unit, then walked up the next flight.
‘ OBSTETRICS AND GYNAECOLOGY ’, said the sign at the head of the stairs. Dunbar suddenly had the feeling that this was as far as he was going to get. Two Arab gentlemen sitting on chairs outside the entrance doors rose to their feet and barred the way.
Dunbar showed his ID card and one of them examined it in some detail before handing it back with a shake of the head. Faced with the two unsmiling faces in front of him and the thought of what they might be carrying inside their jackets, he shrugged and retreated downstairs. It was obviously time to visit Radiology.
Erland Svensen was a man who took life seriously, as became painfully apparent to Dunbar over the course of the next hour. The tall, fair-haired, lantern-jawed Dane was completely devoid of anything resembling a sense of humour. When Dunbar attempted to lighten the atmosphere with a joke, he simply looked blank for a few seconds, then continued his monologue on his sole interest in life, radiology. Having been warned that Dunbar would be visiting his department he had assembled facts and figures on all items of equipment in his department and proceded to justify them in comparison with rival systems by subjecting Dunbar to an in-depth technical appraisal of their relative performance figures.
When Svensen finally had to stop for breath, Dunbar quickly interjected, ‘That all makes perfect sense to me, Doctor.’
The comment seemed to take the wind out of Svensen’s sails. He had obviously expected some kind of cost- cutting argument from Dunbar and was surprised when none materialized.
‘It does?’
‘Of course. You’re obviously a man who knows his job inside out. The patients expect the best and they’re getting it. As long as they’re being charged enough for your excellent services, I’ll be happy.’
‘I don’t work out the charges,’ said Svensen weakly. ‘Mr Giordano’s office deals with that.’
‘I thought that might be the case.’
‘Would you like to meet the staff while you’re here?’
‘I certainly would,’ replied Dunbar. Anything would be better than more technical details of X-ray machinery.
‘I have two radiographers and a dark-room assistant,’ said Svensen, leading the way out of his office.
Dunbar had a bet with himself that the radiographers would be glamorous young women.
‘Girls, I’d like you to meet Dr Steven Dunbar,’ said Svensen as they entered the main X-ray suite. ‘This is Melissa Timpson and Annabel Waters.’
Dunbar stepped forward to shake hands with two glamorous young women. His smile was as much about winning the bet as it was about social nicety. What was it, he wondered, that attracted women who looked as if they belonged on a yacht in the Med to become radiographers? Once before, when he had wondered this aloud, his girlfriend at the time had offered the cynical opinion, ‘The plan is to marry a doctor. It’s either that or become a trolley-dolly and hit on a pilot.’
Melissa and Annabel had been talking to the service engineer about some problem with one of the machines. Dunbar decided to let them get back to it, rather than do a bad impression of a member of the royal family asking questions for the sake of it. ‘What’s through here?’ he asked Svensen, moving towards an exit route.
‘This is my pride and joy,’ replied Svensen breaking into a smile that boded ill, thought Dunbar. He was about to get enthusiastic again.
‘A small tumour radiation facility,’ announced Svensen. ‘A brand-new development in the treatment of such tumours.’
‘What’s special about it?’ asked Dunbar with some trepidation.
‘I’ll show you,’ replied Svensen. ‘Come, put this on.’ He handed Dunbar a protective apron and put one on himself. ‘Not that we need it with this machine, but rules have to be obeyed.’
Svensen put an X-ray plate on the table beneath the front lens of the radiation head and then put a radiation-detection meter very close to it. He used a tungsten light source in the head to align the target and then said, ‘Do you see how close the light circle is to the meter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Watch the meter.’
Dunbar looked at the needle but it didn’t move when Svensen triggered the radiation source. ‘Nothing happened,’ he said.
‘Exactly,’ said Svensen triumphantly. ‘This machine is so well focused we can hit the tumour without fear of damaging the surrounding tissue. We can use higher doses than before and there’s much less risk to the patient.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Dunbar, getting the point of such a negative display.
Svensen walked across the room to where an illuminated sign said, DARK ROOM KEEP OUT. He pressed the button of an intercom on the wall and said into it, ‘Run this one through for me, Colin, would you?’
