‘Hang on.’ Bella walked towards the calendar that hung on the kitchen wall, where she’d marked all her days off with a smiley face. She had to go past Kate, who didn’t seem to notice. She was sitting at the table, staring into space.
‘Hey, it’s only two weeks away.’
‘Great. Tell Kate we’d love to see her if she wants to come with you.’
Bella turned her head to pass on the invitation. Kate hadn’t moved a muscle and she looked… weird.
‘She might have better things to do,’ she said experimentally. ‘She’s got a new boyfriend.’
Yup. There was no reaction from Kate at all. She was in another place entirely, staring at nothing at all.
Looking as though she’d seen a ghost.
7
‘Where’s Dr Graham?’
‘In the morgue.’ The technician was one of the reduced number of people who worked in the laboratory to do the work that couldn’t fit in to the busy day shift. Most of the benches in the area were deserted at the moment and the whirr of electronic machinery was no more than a background hum.
‘Is she busy?’ Connor knew that Kate was getting involved in the forensic side of pathology. Maybe there’d been a suspicious death that needed urgent investigation.
‘Something to do with a research trial. She said she didn’t need any help. Go on in. Kate won’t mind.’ The technician smiled at Connor. ‘She might be glad of some company.’ The smile turned into a grimace. ‘Company that can talk back, anyway.’
Clearly, some of the things that happened in the basement of St Pat’s were well out of the comfort zone of this young girl. Autopsies were out of the comfort zone of most people.
Including himself?
Yes. Connor walked slowly through the laboratory to the back entrance of the morgue, where bodies were stored in their refrigerated cubicles. This wasn’t an area he could enter with any great enthusiasm. If he stopped to think about it, it was downright weird that he was drawn to a person that was more than comfortable with it all. Someone who had a passion for it, even.
But drawn he was. The piece of news he had, that the sparkly new microscope had been delivered upstairs, could easily have waited until tomorrow. It could have been passed on with a phone call or an email. But Connor had seen it as a compelling reason to go and see if Kate was still at work and, if she wasn’t, he would have headed straight for her house.
And he would have felt surprisingly comfortable turning up unannounced on her doorstep, he realised. Almost as if they were dating. Except they weren’t, of course. They’d been spending a lot of time together setting up the mini pathology lab in Theatre. There’d been lots of coffees and even a dinner, but Connor was still treading carefully, at a loss as to precisely what direction he was treading in.
It wasn’t heading away from Kate, though, was it?
He walked through the chill of the room where the bodies were stored. Empty to all outward appearances but Connor felt far from alone. He looked through the wide glass window of the partition into the next area.
A body lay exposed on the stainless-steel table in the centre of the room. A middle-aged male with an open chest that suggested the autopsy was well under way. Kate, bent over the body and completely focused on her task, was dressed in what looked like theatre gear with a heavy-duty plastic apron over the gown. The clothing was baggy and made Kate look smaller somehow.
Or was that because she was working alone in a place that already made Connor feel isolated and uncomfortable? Even from this distance he could sense the clinical detachment with which Kate was working. She had learned how to deal with this environment by closing herself off from reactions that were at an emotional level. She was good at that, wasn’t she? A lesson she had probably learned as a child and a big part of who she was. And thank goodness there were people who could do that because this kind of work might be distasteful to many, but it was a vital part of the world of medicine.
‘Hey…’ He poked his head through the door. ‘Is it okay if I come in?’
Kate looked up, surprised. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Do I need to put any gear on?’
‘Some booties would be good but you don’t need anything else, unless you want to get your hands dirty.’ She smiled at his expression. ‘It’s okay, I’m almost done. I won’t ask you to help.’ She was lifting an organ from the body. The heart. ‘This is the bit I was after.’
Connor was already hating the smell but he went closer, following Kate as she took the heart to a set of scales hanging over a bench. His gaze skittered past the body on the table. ‘Interesting case?’
‘Part of a research trial.’ Kate activated a recording device to dictate the weight and external appearance of the organ and then took the heart from the bowl of the scales and laid it on a dissection board that had an impressive array of scalpels and other surgical instruments laid out beside it. ‘It’s looking at sudden death in patients who are known to have heart failure.’
‘How come?’
‘Well, it’s commonly thought that many of the deaths are due to an irregular heart rhythm that becomes fatal, but it appears that a high percentage – maybe up to 75 per cent – of these people have actually had a heart attack and if that’s the case, different drug therapy may well protect them.’
‘Hmm. International trial?’
