sure that she understands what she has to do. Melanie can take over the desk again now that she’s finished with her patient.’
‘Fine,’ Leanne agreed immediately. She smiled at the young Frenchwoman, signalling that she should follow her. Opening the door to one of the immaculately furnished treatment rooms, she indicated that Chantal should wait there while she fetched the medication.
Emergency contraception—commonly called the morning-after pill—consisted of two high-dose oral contraceptive pills taken as soon as possible after intercourse. They were followed twelve hours later by a further two pills. Although the treatment wasn’t one hundred per cent guaranteed to work, it was effective in most cases.
Nick would explain to Chantal Dupré that, if she missed her next period, she would need to take a pregnancy test in a month’s time, just to be certain, Leanne thought as she signed for the tablets. The poor woman obviously wouldn’t be pleased to discover that she was pregnant after she had taken steps to avoid it.
She sighed as she made her way back to the treatment room. Had her own birth mother been dismayed when she had found out that she was pregnant? She must have been otherwise she would never have given her daughter up for adoption.
It made Leanne wonder if her friends had been right and if she was making a mistake by trying to track down the woman who had given her away. After all, her adoptive parents had given her all the love she could possibly have needed, so was it wise to go raking up the past when she might be disappointed by what she discovered? Maybe she had always longed for brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins, but there was no guarantee that she would have much in common with them if she did find them. Nick had obviously made a conscious decision to escape the ties of his family.
That thought made her frown. Maybe she was reading too much into the situation, but she had a feeling that there was a reason why he had cut himself off like that and that it hadn’t been just a desire to travel either. What had happened to make Nick decide to leave his family?
For some reason it seemed important that she find out.
‘Merci, mademoiselle. Au revoir.’
Nick closed the door after Chantal Dupré finally left then glanced at his watch. The woman had been so delighted to find someone who could understand her that she had kept him talking. He was very aware that the report he needed to submit was lying on his desk, half-finished. Even though he loathed paperwork, he usually got down to it, but it seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time that day. The trouble was that his mind kept skipping off at tangents all the time.
He squared his shoulders, refusing to let himself be sidetracked again. He had spent enough time thinking about Leanne Russell for one day. He hurried back to his office but he had barely sat down when there was a knock on the door and Robert Ashford, one of the duty doctors, poked his head into the room.
‘Sorry to bother you, Nick, but I’ve got a guy with me I’d like you to take a look at.’
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, immediately getting up.
Robert was from Tennessee and he was spending six months in the UK before he took up a residency at a hospital in his home town. Nick had found him to be extremely competent and didn’t doubt that there was a genuine problem if Robert had seen fit to ask for his opinion.
‘It’s very vague—fever, lassitude, quite noticeable enlargement of the glands in his neck.’ Robert shrugged. ‘He’s obviously unwell, there’s no doubt about that, but I can’t put my finger on the problem.’
‘Have you ordered blood tests?’ Nick asked, accompanying him from the room.
‘Yessiree. I’m waiting on the lab. They’ve promised to get back to me a.s.a.p. I just thought it might help if you had a look in case I’ve missed something,’ Robert replied laconically.
Nick nodded. ‘Fine by me.’
He followed the younger man into one of the treatment rooms and introduced himself to the patient. ‘I’m Nick Slater, acting head of the clinic. Dr Ashford has asked me to take a look at you.’
‘Take as many as you like,’ the middle-aged man replied, making an obvious effort to sound cheerful. ‘If you can work out what’s wrong with me, I’ll be eternally grateful. I’ve felt like hell these past few days, I can tell you.’
Nick smiled as he picked up the chart Robert had filled in. ‘We shall give it our best shot. It’s Mr Jacobs, is it, and you work for the Foreign Office?’
‘That’s right. Been with them for twenty years now. I’ve been working on overseas aid and development for the past three,’ Ian Jacobs replied.
‘Really? That must be interesting. Do you get to go overseas a lot, or is it mainly a desk job?’ Nick carefully checked the man’s neck. He nodded to Robert when he felt how enlarged the glands were.
‘A bit of both, actually. I’ve been to quite a lot of places in the past few years—India, Africa, places like that.’
‘And were you ever ill when you were away on any of these trips?’ Nick asked, trying to get a full picture of what might be wrong with the man.
‘Not that I can remember…’ Ian Jacobs frowned. ‘A bit of a tummy upset in India, but several members of the party suffered with it, as I recall. The sanitation where we were staying left a lot to be desired.’
‘That’s the problem with so many of these Third World countries,’ he observed lightly. ‘Anything else? Were you bitten by a dog, scratched by a cat, made a meal of by mosquitoes?’
Ian laughed ruefully. ‘The mosquitoes had a field day with me! I was covered in bites most of the time. But I was very careful about taking precautions, Dr Slater. I was on anti-malarial tablets throughout each trip and continued using them after I came home as per instructions. Do you think it’s possible that I might have contracted malaria?’
Nick shook his head when he heard the worry in the man’s voice. ‘Not if you took the medication exactly as you were advised to do. Most modern antimalaria treatment is effective. I assume that you used the ones best suited to the countries you were visiting? There are different strains of malaria so any preventative medicine must take account of that.’
‘Oh, yes. We were given the most up-to-date information before we travelled. One thing the Foreign Office is good at is looking after their employees when they are in the field,’ Ian Jacobs assured him.
‘That’s good to hear. Now, just to recap. Dr Ashford told me that you’ve been suffering from bouts of fever; is that right?’
‘Yes. I can’t recall ever experiencing anything like it, not even when I came down with flu several years ago. And I feel so worn out all the time, as though I can barely make the effort to do anything,’ the man confessed.
‘I see. And there’s nothing else at all that you can add? Something quite insignificant, perhaps.’ Nick smiled reassuringly but he was as puzzled as Robert was about the case. ‘We work a bit like Sherlock Holmes—if we eliminate the possible and find ourselves left with the improbable, then it is quite often the answer.’
‘Well, there’s an insect bite which has been a bit of a nuisance…But I really can’t see that it’s the cause of how ill I’ve been feeling.’
‘Let’s
