Maggie Kingsley – The Consultant's Italian Knight (страница 7)

‘None as far as I know,’ she said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Don’t you trust anybody?’ she exclaimed, and his lips curled as he wrote something down in his notebook.

‘God perhaps, but everyone else I regard as a suspect.’

‘Wow, but with that sort of attitude you must have a real fun social life,’ she said without thinking, then winced as she waited for him to explode, but to her amazement his mouth twitched into a reluctant smile.

‘You’re right, I don’t,’ he murmured. ‘What can you tell me about Paul Simpson, your specialist registrar?’

‘Paul?’ she echoed, desperately trying to marshal her thoughts, and not think about why a man with looks like Mario Volante should have a lousy social life. ‘Not a lot, really. He’s worked in the department for almost a year. He’s bright, efficient, and very organised.’

‘And you don’t like him,’ he said shrewdly.

She didn’t, and it had nothing to do with Paul’s capabilities. He was bright and efficient, but she also had the distinct impression that he didn’t like working for a woman. It wasn’t because of anything he’d said—he was far too astute to leave himself open to an accusation of sexual bias—but there had been the occasional look, the odd throwaway comment, that had more than ruffled her.

‘I can’t like everybody,’ she declared, suddenly realising Mario was expecting her to reply, ‘and as long as he continues to work efficiently I’ll have no complaints. ’

‘Colin Watson?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know him well enough to comment. He just qualified last month, and this is his first week with us.’

‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘The dreaded August intake. Never be ill or have an accident in August because that’s when all the still-wet-behind-the-ears newly qualified doctors are let loose on the wards.’

‘Exactly.’ She could not help but laugh. ‘And before you ask me about the nursing staff,’ she continued, seeing him glance down at his notebook. ‘As far as I’m concerned, they’re all terrific, and if you want personal details about them you’ll have to ask Terri. The only other member of staff I know well is our porter, Bill, who’s worked in the department for twelve years, and is an absolute gem.’

Mario closed his notebook, and extracted a sheet of paper from his pocket.

‘This should be an exact transcript of what you told me on Saturday night. Could you read through it, then sign it if you agree that it’s accurate?’

She took the piece of paper from him, scanned it quickly, then reached for her pen.

‘What about the photographs you wanted me to look at?’ she said, scrawling her signature across the bottom of the page.

From his other pocket he pulled out a plastic envelope but before he could shake its contents out onto her desk, they both heard a distant thud.

Kate half rose to her feet, then slowly sat down again. If anything major had happened in the treatment room, Terri, or somebody else, would come for her. She knew that. She was fully aware of that, but the thud had sounded as though something or someone had fallen over. Maybe she ought to check it out, but Paul was on duty, and despite the fact that she didn’t like him, he wasn’t an idiot. Having said which…

‘Your department isn’t going to collapse simply because you’ve taken a half hour break,’ Mario declared, watching her, and she flushed.

‘I know.’

‘It’s just you don’t think anybody else can do the job as well as you can,’ he observed. ‘So which are you—a control freak, or an over-compensator?’

John had asked her that once, too, she remembered with a stab of pain. She’d yelled back at him that nobody ever questioned a man’s dedication to his work, and he had stared back at her for a long, silent moment, and then he’d walked away.

‘Kate?’

Mario’s eyes were fixed on her, curious, thoughtful, and she sat up straighter.

‘I thought you wanted me to look at some photographs?’ she declared.

For a moment she thought he was going to press the subject but, to her relief, he shook the photographs out of their packet onto her desk, then sat back.

‘Take your time. Don’t rush at it, but examine each one carefully.’

She was sorely tempted to tell him she wasn’t an idiot, but didn’t. Instead, she did as he asked, but when she’d reached the last one she shook her head.

‘I’m sorry. Nobody looks even remotely familiar. As I said before—’

‘You don’t run out into the waiting room and stare at the people sitting there,’ he finished for her. ‘Don’t worry about it. It was a long shot anyway, and thanks for trying.’

‘Is that everything?’ she asked.

‘Almost.’ He gathered up the photographs and pocketed them. ‘You might be interested to know we’ve got a full ID on Duncan Hamilton. He was originally from London, and had been doing casual work around Aberdeen for the past ten months. According to his widowed mother, he was a Grade A student who dropped out of university and had never been in trouble before.’

‘Then how in the world did he ever get mixed up in something like this?’ Kate said, and Mario’s face grew grim.

‘As I told you on Saturday, it can happen to anybody. The fixers prey on the weak and the unhappy. People who are in debt, people who think they’ll only have to be a mule or a body-packer once, and then all their worries will be over.’

But it was such a waste of a life, she thought, as she remembered Duncan Hamilton’s face as he’d thrashed and gasped in agony on the trolley. He ought to have had his whole life ahead of him, and now his body was lying, cold and stiff, on a mortuary slab.

And then something else occurred to her.

‘Your department knew Duncan was a body-packer, didn’t they?’ she said slowly. ‘I mean, if somebody collapsed in front of me, my first thought—even though I’m a doctor—wouldn’t be “body-packer”, and yet the security guards at the airport immediately thought that. They were expecting him, weren’t they?’

A glimmer 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?