The Consultant's Italian Knight. Maggie Kingsley

of a smile curved his lips. ‘My department could do with people like you. ’

      ‘And that is not an answer,’ she pointed out, and he sighed.

      ‘Yes, we had a tip-off about him. It happens sometimes. Just last week we picked up a girl from Colombia who turned out to have two kilograms of snow stuffed down her bra. ’

      ‘Snow?’ she repeated, and he nodded.

      ‘“Snow”, “Charlie”, “coke”, “nose-candy”—cocaine goes by as many names as it does uses. You can snort it, smoke it, inject it, or mix it with heroin. I understand that rubbing it onto somebody’s genitalia and then licking it off is considered very stimulating. Not that I’ve ever tried it myself, of course,’ he added.

      ‘Right,’ she said, all too aware that a tide of heat was creeping up the back of her neck, and irritated beyond measure that it was.

      Good grief, she was a doctor. She’d probably seen more female—and male—genitalia in her time than this man had eaten hot dinners, so what he was saying shouldn’t be making her blush, but it was.

      ‘Who tipped you off about Duncan?’ she asked, deliberately changing the subject.

      ‘His fixer.’

      ‘His fixer?’ she repeated. ‘But, why would the man who recruits the body-packers tip you off about one of his own?’

      ‘Because the fixer knows we can’t search every passenger who comes off a plane,’ Mario replied, ‘so sometimes he’ll phone us anonymously and give us a name. We arrest that mule or body-packer and somebody else on the plane, somebody who’s carrying perhaps twenty-five times the amount of cocaine of the person we’ve been tipped off about, walks free.’

      ‘So Duncan Hamilton could simply have been nothing more than an unwitting decoy?’ she said in disgust, and Mario smiled, a small bitter smile.

      ‘It’s a dirty business, Kate, but it’s also a very lucrative one. £6.6 billion is spent on drugs in Britain alone every year. There’s a huge demand for it, and the farmers in the poorer countries of the world are only too keen to supply that market.’

      ‘But why can’t they grow something else?’ she protested. ‘Why can’t they grow something that will help the world’s population, not destroy it?’

      The bitter smile on Mario’s face faded to be replaced by a gentler one.

      ‘Kate, if you were a dirt-poor farmer in Colombia, and coffee was selling on the world market for 35p a kilo while cocaine was fetching £2,000, what would you be growing? And £2,000 a kilo is peanuts compared to the mark-up. By the time that kilo has reached the UK it has a street value of around £35,000.’

      ‘Then you’re saying it isn’t ever going to change!’ she exclaimed. ‘That there’s nothing you can do that will stem the tide.’

      ‘No, I’m not saying that. The things I’ve seen, Kate…Kids as young as twelve acting as body-packers, pregnant women…’ His face became suddenly strained. ‘I have to believe I can somehow—even in a small way—stop the death and destruction that these drugs cause. If I didn’t believe it, I couldn’t do my job.’

      And he did it well, she knew he did. She could see the complete commitment in his deep blue eyes. It was a commitment she understood, a commitment she shared towards her own profession, and she wondered if he’d had to pay a price for that dedication. She’d had to. Her dedication had cost her the love of a man who had once pledged to spend the rest of his life with her. Had Mario Volante needed to pay a similar price?

      ‘Mario…’ She came to a halt as the door of her office opened, and Terri’s head appeared. ‘Problem?’ she asked, and the sister shook her head.

      ‘I just wanted to tell you—in case you were concerned by the thud earlier—that it was nothing to worry about. Colin had a crasher in cubicle 6.’

      ‘Thanks, Terri,’ Kate replied and the sister’s head disappeared again, but not before she had glanced from Mario to Kate, then back again, with patent curiosity.

      ‘It’s amazing how often it’s not the patient who faints,’ Mario observed once they were alone again, ‘but the person who brought them in.’

      ‘How do you know that a crasher is somebody who’s fainted?’ Kate asked curiously. ‘Come to think of it,’ she added. ‘How do you know about August being the worst time to come into hospital if you’re a patient?’

      ‘Because I originally qualified as a doctor, but I found the hours a real killer.’

      ‘Yeah, right,’ she said, not bothering to hide her disbelief, ‘and a policeman works nine to five, with every weekend off. Why did you give it up?’

      He raked his fingers through his too-long black hair, and smiled a little ruefully.

      ‘It was a mistake for me to go into medicine in the first place. My parents were both doctors, you see, and though they didn’t pressurise me into following in their footsteps I suppose I just sort of assumed I would. I became an A and E doctor—was eventually promoted to specialist registrar—but when I hit thirty…’ He shook his head. ‘I realised it wasn’t for me.’

      ‘But why?’ she asked, bewildered.

      ‘I’d spent six years treating car crash victims, victims of domestic abuse, neglected children, people completely spaced out on drugs, and I thought…’ He frowned, as though groping for the right words. ‘Setting broken bones, patching up injuries…I wanted to stop the broken bones from happening, nail the idiots who drove at 100 miles per hour in a 40 mile zone, collar the drug pushers who offered hits for fifty pence a time to ensnare the unwary, the unhappy, the desperate.’

      ‘You wanted to make the streets a safer place for all of us.’ She smiled, and abruptly he got to his feet.

      ‘Something like that,’ he muttered. ‘And now I must go. I’ve taken up more than enough of your time.’

      He had, but now that he was going, she didn’t want him to leave. She wanted to ask him why he’d chosen the drugs squad rather than any of the other police specialisations, to persuade him to tell her more about himself, and that, she thought wryly, was more than enough reason to push him out the door.

      ‘Will I have to appear in court?’ she asked as she followed him out of her office and down the corridor. ‘I mean, if you catch Duncan Hamilton’s fixer, will I be needed as a witness?’

      ‘I doubt it,’ he said, but he didn’t meet her gaze.

      Which was odd, she realised, because she was normally all too aware of his blue eyes burning into her.

      ‘Mario—’

      ‘There you are, Kate!’ Paul exclaimed, coming out of the treatment room clutching a clipboard. ‘Terri said you were talking to an old friend…’ The specialist registrar’s eyes took in Mario’s creased leather jacket, faded denims and beat-up trainers, and his lip curled slightly. ‘So I thought I’d better remind you—in case you’d forgotten—that you’re due at an M and M meeting in fifteen minutes.’

      Of course she hadn’t forgotten, she thought acidly. She wished she could. Morbidity and mortality conferences were a necessary evil after a patient died, but all too often the conferences became an occasion to embarrass the consultant in charge, and she was all too aware that there were more than enough people at the General longing to see her fall flat on her face.

      ‘That was very thoughtful of you, Paul,’ she replied as evenly as she could. ‘Is everything OK in the treatment room?’

      ‘Naturally,’ he said airily. ‘We had a gomer in cubicle 2 earlier but I turfed him.’

      A gomer. A and E shorthand for Get Out of My Emergency Room. A derogatory term applied to a geriatric patient who had multiple complicated medical problems rather than one acute one.