Night Sisters. John Pritchard

said it put him in mind of a particularly nasty backstreet abortion he’d had to deal with in his last job. I took his point, but open-heart surgery was hardly the sort of thing you practised on your kitchen table. It was Karen, in particularly ghoulish mood, who’d suggested that the animal experimentation labs had started dissecting people instead, seeing as the Great British Public was obviously more concerned about animal welfare than the human derelicts on their doorsteps.

      We’d had a cynical smile over that one, and a couple more crackpot coffee-break theories besides. Resigned now to the fact that we were none of us any nearer the truth: no more than we’d been on that first awful evening, when the body had been wheeled away; leaving me standing in a room that looked as if, to coin Mike’s phrase, someone had loaded a sawn-off shotgun with spaghetti sauce, and let rip with both the barrels.

      So life had gone on; until

      JOHNSTON, MICHAEL arrived in our department. This was a month or two later, and too many patients had come in through the doors for us to be giving the Kaufmann case more than the occasional thought. Mr Johnston – the late Mr Johnston – had been a more urgent admission than most, having just driven a stolen car full-tilt into a brick wall.

      Into Resus he’d come, bloody and wrecked and yet still raving. The ambulance crew had to help us hold him down. The team crowded round in that brightly-lit room, and once again it was all beginning to look routine. We scissored off his clothes and pulled them clear, while the doctor set about checking bones, and wounds, and reflexes: bending in close to shine his penlight in the patient’s rolling eyes.

      ‘What’s his name?’

      One of the ambulancemen supplied it.

      ‘All right, Michael. Michael? can you hear me, Michael?’

      But Michael was in a world of his own: a private hell of pain and panic. From his disjointed ramblings, I gathered he didn’t like doctors much. Well, he’d come to the wrong place. The doctor – it was one of the locums that night, Sayeed or someone – slipped his stethoscope back around his neck. ‘Right … I’ll need X-rays of left tib & fib, pelvis, chest, both arms … and a CT scan. That first of all, I think.’

      I nodded, told Brenda to get the duty radiologist on the phone. When she answered, Sayeed conversed with her while we cleaned Johnston up as best we could and prepared him for his transfer to the CT unit on the other side of the building. He seemed quieter now; his eyes glazed over. With everything under control, I stepped outside for a moment, and found a couple of policemen hovering vulture-like in the corridor – par for the course with RTAs.

      ‘You won’t be able to talk to him for a while yet,’ I pointed out, a little impatiently. ‘He’ll probably be in theatre for the rest of the night.’

      The taller of the two shrugged. ‘We’ll hang on for a while anyway.’

      ‘Joyriding, was he?’

      ‘Dunno. We get a report of a stolen car, and then whammo. He didn’t even slow down, according to the eyewitnesses.’

      ‘You’ll want to breathalyse him, presumably.’

      ‘At some stage.’ He glanced round. ‘Anywhere we can get coffee round here?’

      ‘There’s a machine round the front,’ I told him, and went on into the cubicle area to see how things were going there.

      They managed to get their coffee; they never got their interview. Nor their breath sample. Michael Johnston died at ten past six that morning.

      According to the CT scan, his skull was still intact, but his brain had suffered irreversible damage.

      And some of it was missing.

      Another post-mortem. More puzzles for the pathologists. Because Johnston too seemed to have undergone recent surgery. Brain surgery. Which came as quite a surprise, because the only medical history he’d had with us was one of drug addiction. A policeman who’d spoken to him a week or so before the accident reported that he’d seemed rational enough – yet after what had been done to his cerebral cortex, he’d have been practically a walking zombie, driving that car by sheer desperate instinct alone. There was another finding, too. Though the trephine and lobotomy seemed at one level to have been sophisticated – even audacious – there was indication once again of a certain crudity. And evidence that it had been carried out under conditions that were far from sterile.

      ‘Another backstreet job?’ Mike had wondered cheerfully. Me, I was just waiting for the tabloids to pick up on it all with screaming POLICE HUNT DERANGED DOCTOR headlines. And what had Johnston been muttering? Something about doctors, ‘fucking doctors … still after me. Still coming …’ Except he hadn’t called them doctors but something else – a more specialized term he could only have picked up from professionals.

      Clinicians. He’d called them clinicians. A cold word. But I’d wondered why its mention made me shiver.

Three

      The phone rang as I was typing in the third name.

      Startled despite myself, I reached over the keyboard for it, spilled the last of my coffee, and was still swearing as I brought the receiver to my ear.

      ‘If I’d wanted the Scatology Department,’ Mark said mildly, ‘I’d have dialled 221.’

      ‘I think that’s Pathology you’re thinking of, Dr Drew,’ I pointed out with completely informal formality: still checking to see whether I’d managed to get any over my uniform. ‘And by the way, where are you?’

      ‘The on-call room.’

      Which was just up the corridor. ‘So why didn’t you just shift your bulk round here, you lazy sod?’

      He grinned: his voice was full of it. ‘It’s what the telephone was invented for. But I might stagger round in a minute, if you insist.’

      ‘I won’t hold my breath.’ After a pause I added: ‘You guess where I was?’

      ‘And what you were doing.’ Some of the banter had faded from his voice. ‘Why don’t you let them rest in peace, Rachel?’

      That left me nonplussed for a moment. Then: ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

      ‘You know. Always poring over the same cases. You know you couldn’t have saved them – and the police have got nowhere. So what are you looking for?’

      Silently, I had to admit I wasn’t sure. Certainly the deaths had been bizarre enough to have a morbid fascination of their own – but it wasn’t just that. Something about these particular cases still gave me the strangest feeling. A dull, persistent niggle of unease: like a slow, dripping tap in the darkness of my mind.

      He took it upon himself to break the lengthening silence. ‘I’ll be round in a minute. See you.’

      ‘See you,’ I echoed, absently, as he hung up. I’d already guessed that recent events had a lot to do with my digging now. Jenny’s baffling fate; my own close encounter. A week’s inactivity to brood. And the cases had been weird enough to start with; but now, almost despite myself, I was beginning – just beginning – to wonder who the hell was really out there.

      The third death had shaken me the most; and that a week or so before Jenny’s own murder. That was a night when the drip … drip … drip … had strengthened briefly to a startling, chilly trickle.

      ALISON SCOTT

      The full admission summary was unfolding onscreen as Mark stuck his head round the door, then came over to sit in the chair next to mine: wearing his sterile greens like pyjamas, his white coat unbuttoned over them. I gave him a sidelong glance: he hadn’t shaved yet, but otherwise looked quite fresh – his sandy hair tidied and brown eyes clear. Then again, he, at least, had had the best part of a night’s sleep. He returned my look, eyebrows innocently raised – then