The safe house

‘When I was at university I was part of a group of hunt saboteurs. For a bit. I was arrested and cautioned.’

‘Yes, we know.’

‘Well, how do you know she’s safe with me?’

‘You’ve taken the Hippocratic oath, haven’t you?’

‘Doctors don’t take the Hippocratic oath any more. That’s a myth.’

‘Oh,’ said Baird, disconcerted. ‘Well, please don’t kill her, Dr Laschen. The investigation’s going slowly enough as it is.’

I looked at my envelope once more.

‘I have friends, a child, people coming to the house. What am I supposed to tell them? I’ve already told Danny – my, uh, boyfriend – who she is.’

‘It’s best to keep it simple. Complicated stories have a way of going wrong. Couldn’t she be some sort of student, staying with you? What about that?’

I was silent for a long time. I couldn’t deal with this.

‘I’m not interested in all these cloak-and-dagger games. I can’t manage it and it’s not going to be much help to Finn.’

‘That’s why we’re making it as simple as we possibly can. Dr Laschen, I know this isn’t ideal. Other arrangements would probably be worse.’

‘All right, I suppose I’ve already agreed.’

‘She could be helping you.’

‘I wish.’

‘And you don’t have to change her name much. Call her Fiona Jones. That should be easy for us all to remember.’

‘All right. But listen to me, Rupert, I reserve the right at any time to terminate this arrangement. If you don’t agree to that, you can take her away with you now. If, at any time, I feel this charade is bad for me, bad for my daughter or, for God’s sake, bad for Finn, then it ends. All right?’

‘Of course, Dr Laschen. But you’ll be fine. We all have great confidence in you.’

‘If that’s so, then your confidence is too easily earned.’

When we returned inside, I asked Dr Daley to help me take the mugs back to the kitchen. I wanted to talk to him alone. There was no chance of Finn following us through. There seemed to be no chance of that poor damaged girl doing anything at all.

‘Sorry to lure you into the kitchen,’ I said. ‘We should have had a proper talk before Finn arrived, but it all seems to be beyond my control. Which I don’t like.’

Dr Daley smiled with an automatic politeness. I stepped forward and looked at him.

‘How are you?’

He returned my assessing stare. He had very deep eyes, opaque. I liked that. Then his face relaxed into a smile.

‘It’s not been a good time,’ he said.

‘Are you sleeping?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to impress me. You can save all that for your practice manager. I like vulnerable men.’

He laughed and then was silent for a moment. He lit a cigarette.

‘I feel I could have handled this better. And I’m sorry about all this as well,’ he said, gesturing with a vague kind of grace, as if at the whole situation in which we found ourselves. ‘I’ve only been obeying orders.’

I didn’t say anything. He began talking as if he couldn’t tolerate the silence.

‘Incidentally, I wanted the chance to tell you that I read your article in the BMJ, ‘The Invention of a Syndrome’, or whatever it was called, the one that caused all the fuss. It was splendid.’

‘Thanks. I didn’t think doctors like you would read it.’

His colour rose slightly and his eyes narrowed.

‘You mean a GP out in the provinces.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. I meant a doctor outside the speciality.’

It was an awkward moment, but then Daley smiled again.

‘I can remember a bit of it by heart: “dogma, based on unexamined premises and unsupported by demonstration”. The stress counsellors must have needed some counselling of their own after reading that.’

‘Why do you think I’m out here in the sticks setting up my own unit? Who else would employ me? By the way, I mean “the sticks” in the nicest possible way.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Dr Daley. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and picked up the mugs. ‘You wash, I’ll dry.’

‘No, you wash and then put them in the rack and they can dry on their own. How is Finn?’

‘Well, the superficial lacerations…’

‘I don’t mean that. You’re her doctor, what do you make of her?’

‘Dr Laschen…’

‘Call me Sam.’

‘And call me Michael. If you mean her mood, her degree of shock, then I’m talking beyond my field of competence.’

‘That doesn’t stop other people. What do you think?’

‘I think she is severely traumatized by what happened. Understandably traumatized, I would say.’

‘How is her speech?’

‘You mean from her injuries? It has been affected. There is some degree of laryngeal paralysis. There may have been minor lesions in the vocal cords.’

‘Any stridor or dysphonia?’

Daley paused in his scouring of a mug.

‘Is this your field?’

‘More like a hobby. It’s one up from stamp-collecting. Or one down.’

‘Perhaps you should have a word with Dr Daun at Stamford General,’ said Daley, returning to his scrubbing. ‘Anyway, she’s all yours now.’

‘No, she isn’t,’ I replied. ‘She’s your patient. I insist on that. This is irregular enough as it is. I’m helping out in an informal, I hope, supportive way. But I understand you’ve been her GP for years, and it’s absolutely essential that you should remain in place in her eyes as the doctor. Is that acceptable to you?’

‘Sure. I’ll do anything at all to help.’

‘I hope you’ll come to see her regularly then; you’re her only link to the world she comes from.’

‘There we are, finished,’ he said, having washed up not just the mugs but my breakfast things and yesterday’s dinner things as well. ‘I should say that I felt dubious about this. I mean about this as a plan. But the way it’s worked out, I don’t think Finn could be in better hands.’

‘I hope everybody is going to carry on being this supportive of me when it has all gone wrong.’

‘Why should it go wrong?’ Daley asked, but he laughed as he said it, his eyebrows slanting into a dark upturned ‘V’. ‘The only thing I want to say is that I’m worried about Finn being so cut off from her normal surroundings, from people she knows.’

‘I feel the same, I promise.’

‘You know about these things, but if I could just make a single suggestion, it would be that we should arrange for her to see people. Assuming that’s what she wants and the police agree, of course.’

‘We’ll take it slowly for a bit, shall we?’

‘You’re the doctor,’ Daley said. ‘Well, I’m a doctor as well, but what I mean is you’re the doctor.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I protested. ‘I’m a doctor. You’re a doctor. And we’ll just try to make the best of this stupid and tragic situation that we possibly can. Meanwhile, I shall want the details of medication, history and so on, and your number. I don’t