are the new consultant?’ Madison pretended to check, running a slightly dismissive eye over his jeans and T-shirt.
‘Oh.’ Guy let out relieved laugh and started to rummage in his pocket. Madison watched in horror as he pulled out an ID badge and hung it around his neck.
‘Thanks for reminding me!’
‘So how was your first day?’ Helen beamed, pulling open her front door and ushering Madison inside. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘I am,’ Madison agreed, nodding gratefully as Helen held up the kettle. She collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. ‘How was Emily?’
‘Great,’ Helen answered brightly. ‘She didn’t miss you for a second! So? Don’t keep me in suspense—was it busy, any dramas on the first day?’
Madison was saved from answering by noisy five-year-old footsteps running in from the garden where Emily had been playing with Helen’s son. And with her first genuine smile for the last twelve hours lighting up her face, Madison scooped Emily up and hugged her fiercely for a moment.
‘Did you have a good day at school?’ A vague nod was Madison’s only answer, but from the bright stains all over her dress, clearly she’d been painting. And how about last night, were you good for Helen?’ A tiny guilty glance in Helen’s direction was followed by a beat of a pause. ‘Richard and me were talking until late, and Helen had to tell us to be quiet.’
‘Richard and I,’ Madison corrected, but Emily just frowned.
‘No, it was Richard and me who were talking.’
‘Well, next time you go to sleep when Helen tells you,’ Madison lightly scolded, smothering a smile at Emily’s response.
‘So how was your day?’ Emily asked. Her pretty rosebud mouth deftly changed the subject and for the first of a hundred times in any one day Madison could see Mark, Emily’s father, etched in every feature, from her winning smile and stunning looks right down to her ability to shift a subject from anything remotely serious. ‘Did anyone die?’ Emily asked, with all the tact of a five-year-old. ‘Did you look after any kids that were sick? Was the vending machine filled up in time for the hospital opening?’
‘Yes, yes, and yes,’ Madison answered, grateful that the only answer Emily was really interested in was the last one. The emergency waiting room’s vending machines held an in inordinate amount of fascination for Emily and many evenings were spent asking exactly how the empty racks were going to be filled, how the special ‘lady’ who stocked it when the waiting room was quiet was going to get her hand up through the tiny space at the bottom and fill all the slots. Madison hadn’t actually had the heart to tell her daughter that the ‘lady’ actually had a key that opened the glass door!
‘Here,’ Madison said, pulling two chocolate bars out of her bag, uncharacteristically not asking Helen if it was too close to dinner for Richard to have a treat. ‘I got you these from the vending machine. As it turns out, you were the first customer. Go and give one of these to Richard and play for ten minutes. I’ll call you in soon.’
‘What happened today?’ Helen asked as Emily scampered off, her voice filled with concern.
‘How do you know anything happened?’
‘Well, it’s the first time in living memory you’ve given the kids chocolate so close to dinner, and the first time you haven’t pulled out Emily’s homework diary to check that it had been filled in.’
‘Am I that predictable?’ Madison sighed.
‘Wonderfully so.’ Helen grinned, placing a steaming mug of coffee in front of Madison and waiting till she took a long grateful sip before resuming the conversation. ‘So what went down today?’
‘Gerard Dalton collapsed and died.’
There had been no easy way to say it, so Madison had just gone right ahead, nodding grimly at Helen’s shocked expression to confirm the terrible news. ‘We’d both arrived at work, there was no one else in the department and we were going over the day’s plans. He’d just made me a coffee…’ She gave a tiny ghost of a smile as Helen, with a rather startled look, promptly put down her own mug. ‘Sudden death isn’t catching, Helen!’
‘Sorry,’ Helen mumbled. ‘Go on.’
‘So, it was just the two of us in the department, the new consultant had arrived, but the emergency doors were closed and he was locked outside. We were going around to meet him when I realised Gerard wasn’t walking with me. I turned around and he’d collapsed.’
‘Did he say he had chest pain?’ Helen asked, clearly stunned but her medical brain trying to fathom out what had happened.
‘He said nothing.’ Madison blinked into her coffee. ‘Nothing. One minute we were chatting, and I headed off to go and the next I turned around and he was sliding onto the floor. Looking back on things, I think Gerard was actually dead before he hit the ground. He didn’t stand a chance.’
‘So what caused it?’
‘We don’t know yet.’ Madison gave an exasperated shrug. ‘There’ll be an autopsy, of course, but for now it could be anything—cerebral, cardiac or a PE maybe. For a moment there it looked as if it could be a ruptured aneurysm—he’d been complaining of mild back pain but, as I pointed out, he’d strained his back lifting a box the night before.’
‘You’d get a bit more warning with an aneurysm, you’d think,’ Helen pondered out loud. As a surgical nurse she’d seen her fair share. ‘I mean, he’d have been pale and sweaty, in some sort of distress.’
‘He was nothing like that,’ Madison said. ‘Given it’s Gerard, I’m sure the autopsy will take place very quickly and I’d expect we’d have some answers by tomorrow. Not that it’s going to help. You should have seen his poor wife and children, they were absolutely devastated. It came completely out of the blue. They’re such a close family.’
‘And you were there on your own?’ Helen gasped.
‘Only for a couple of moments,’ Madison corrected. ‘Like I said, the new consultant had arrived and even though he couldn’t get in straight away, he saw what was happening through the glass doors and raced around.’
‘Poor thing,’ Helen sighed. Madison was grateful for the coffee and sympathy, glad to peel off her shoes for five minutes and dunk a chocolate biscuit in her coffee. But when Helen continued talking, with a jolt Madison realised her sympathy hadn’t been aimed towards her. ‘It must have been awful for him. Imagine that happening on your first day!’
‘He seemed to deal with it all OK.’ Madison chewed her lip as she thought back over the day. ‘He just got on with it, I guess.’
‘Only because he had no choice,’ Helen pointed out. ‘Imagine starting a new job and your mentor and senior dropping dead. Poor thing, I bet it was all left for him to carry.’
‘Not all of it,’ Madison answered, but her response was a touch too quick, just a tad too defensive. As busy and as awful as her own day had been, for Guy it must have been far worse. Despite the fact the hospital was brand-new, they’d had a generous number of patients and Guy, with no senior on hand and no orientation day behind him, had had to deal with the lot. From critically ill patients to just
