Sandy shook his head. He felt confused. He didn’t want to make a fuss.
‘Dr Ross says she’ll feel much better tomorrow,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s mainly just a reaction to some of the procedures.’
Sandy again wanted to ask what procedures. He didn’t understand what tests were so vital that dialysis had to be suspended, but on the other hand he didn’t want to make trouble. The hospital had been good to them. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful. He knelt down at Amanda’s bedside, struggling to keep the tears from his eyes at his daughter’s pathetic appearance.
‘How’s my princess?’ he asked, gently taking her hand as if he were afraid it would break.
Amanda gave a wan smile. ‘It’s sore, Daddy,’ she said.
‘What’s sore, Princess?’ he asked. ‘Have you got a pain in your tummy?’
Amanda put her hand to her chest and Sandy ran his hand over it. Despite the gentleness of his touch, he saw her wince. He could feel a surgical dressing under her nightie and worried at its position over her breast bone. He frowned.
‘Nurse?’ he asked. ‘Did Amanda have a marrow puncture yesterday?’
‘I believe she did,’ replied the nurse.
This time Sandy couldn’t stop himself. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘It’s not unusual for transplant patients to have a marrow puncture for immunology typing,’ said the nurse.
‘But Amanda’s already had these tests done,’ said Sandy. ‘She had them done ages ago at the Children’s Hospital. She’s already on the transplant register. It must be in her notes. Her immunology profile is known.’
‘I’m sure Dr Ross had his reasons,’ said the nurse.
Sandy bit his tongue. ‘Of course,’ he said and went back to trying for some response from Amanda.
‘Would you like me to see if I can find Dr Ross for you?’ asked the nurse. Her tone had changed slightly. It was more of a challenge than a question, the response of a professional to what she considered unwarranted lay questioning.
‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ he replied.
‘Oh God,’ sighed Sandy as he and Kate walked to the car. His limbs felt like lead. ‘Maybe we were expecting too much,’ he said. ‘We were looking for magic in a world that doesn’t have any. Like all desperate people, we’ve been fooling ourselves. We wanted to believe in fairies and Santa Claus.’
‘The nurse said Amanda will feel better tomorrow,’ said Kate. ‘It’s probably just the aftermath of the tests she’s been having. She’ll pick up. You’ll see.’
Sandy gave Kate a half-smile and put his arms round her, hugging her to him.
‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘Good on you, kid,’ he said softly. ‘God knows what will happen if we both hit a downer at the same time.’
Dunbar left it until after ten before going into Medic Ecosse and checking his desk. Ingrid had left him the information he’d asked for about patients treated free of charge since the hospital’s opening. It was not a detailed account but it gave him the basics he wanted: the number of patients taken on, the type of treatment or operation they’d received and the notional cost to the hospital to be set off against tax as charitable acts. While most of them were relatively low-risk, high-profile procedures that would have attracted a deal of good publicity, the hospital had in fact taken on three transplant patients. The list was not specific; there were no names, but he knew that Amanda Chapman was the third. Three? This was a big surprise. The hospital apparently had been more than generous with its resources. He stopped short of thinking they had perhaps been too generous, considering the state of their finances. People were more important than money. He put the list away in his desk drawer and penned a note to Ingrid saying that he would be going to London in the morning.
As Dunbar was about to start his car in the front car park, an unmarked black Bedford van came in through the gates and made its way slowly round to the car park at the rear. The driver was dressed in what looked like hospital whites, as was the man sitting beside him. Dunbar’s curiosity got the better of him. He got out of his car and walked quickly round to the back of the building, courting the shadow of the walls.
The van had stopped opposite the green doors that led to the hospital’s basement corridor. The two men had opened up the back doors of the van and were now joined by two other men who came out of the building. All four removed what appeared to be a very heavy patient on a stretcher. It required one man at each corner.
Despite the fact that he had moved closer, using the cover of what few parked cars there were at that time of night, Dunbar could not make out much more than that. The lighting was poor and the patient was draped with a dark top cover.
‘What on earth?’ he murmured as the green doors closed and the van drove off. Why would any patient be brought to the back door under cover of darkness? Then he remembered that the mortuary was located in the basement corridor. It wasn’t a patient they had brought in, it was a corpse.
This new thought was no more understandable than the first. He couldn’t think of a good reason for delivering a body to Medic Ecosse any more than he could a patient to the basement. If he couldn’t work it out in his head he would have to find out for himself, he decided. He returned to his office and considered for a moment before deciding on a direct approach. He would go down to the mortuary and find out who the body belonged to.
He waited ten minutes, which he hoped would be long enough for the attendants to have put the body into the mortuary fridge, and left. He paused to listen at the top of the stairs leading to the basement. All was quiet. He tiptoed down and moved silently along to the mortuary door. He paused again, putting his ear to it. Again, there was no sound. He opened the door and slipped inside, feeling safer when the door had closed behind him. He let out his breath, which he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, then froze again when the refrigeration plant sprang into life and startled him. The sooner this was over the better.
He pulled back the heavy metal clasp securing the door and it swung back revealing, to his surprise, two occupants, both hidden under white sheets. He had expected to find only one. He removed the head cloth from the body in the upper tray and saw the parchment skin of a woman. She’d been in her late sixties, judging by her hair and teeth. He slid out the tray on its runners until he could reach the name tag tied to her toe: Angela Carter- Smythe.
He slid the tray back in and covered the dead woman’s face before shifting his attention to the occupant of the bottom tray. The size told him that this was the corpse he’d seen being carried in from the van. Unusually, the covering over the body was not a traditional shroud, which tended to follow body shape, but appeared to comprise several layers of waterproof material with white top sheets wrapped round it. Maybe this was because the corpse was so large, thought Dunbar. He gripped a loose corner of the material near the head, but couldn’t pull it back because of the sheer weight of the body; he couldn’t support the head with the palm of one hand.
Expecting to find the body of a very heavy, thickset man, he worked with both hands to free the head-sheet and recoiled when he looked down at the snout of a fully grown pig. The smell of it, freed from the waterproof sheeting, assaulted his nostrils. Its dead eyes looked through him.
When he’d recovered his composure, Dunbar searched for rational answers. The kitchen cold store had broken down or run out of storage space? Unlikely and highly unethical. Apart from that, the pig, as far as he could tell on cursory examination, was complete, not the sort of cleaned carcass a slaughterhouse or butcher would supply. This was seriously strange.
Dunbar slid his hand down under the sheeting covering the pig and felt its belly. He kept his hand there for a few moments so that surface cold and dampness from its short time in the fridge would not obscure what he was looking for. He felt his palm become slightly warm. The pig had not been dead long. He was more than a little bemused. He couldn’t make up his mind whether or not his discovery contravened any criminal laws or ethical rules. Why was the animal there? Why had a recently killed pig been brought to Medic Ecosse under cover of darkness?
After a few moments it occurred to him that it might not be any old pig, it might be some kind of experimental animal. James Ross’s research would almost certainly involve the use of animals. All transplant research did. The animal might be a laboratory pig. In the early days of transplant research, when research work had been largely concerned with technique, dogs and monkeys had played major roles; they had been used by surgeons to practise on. In more modern times the emphasis had swung away from technique, which had largely been mastered. Pigs had taken over in the research laboratory as eventual possible donors of organs to humans, once the immunology problems had been sorted out.
