Ken McClure - Donor

Dunbar felt uncomfortable. Saying he was sorry seemed in adequate, so he just nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lisa. ‘I shouldn’t be saying these things to a total stranger.’

‘Total strangers are often the best people to say these sort of things to,’ he replied.

She smiled slightly, as if happy at finding someone else who knew that.

‘You’ve given me a problem,’ said Dunbar.

‘How so?’

‘I came here expecting to find a nurse who had got too involved with her patient and who had made a hysterical allegation born of grief. You’re not the type. I find myself believing you, but perhaps you can see my difficulty?’

‘I know what I saw.’

Dunbar’s look suggested to Lisa that her reply was inadequate. She said, ‘Oh, I accept that the right organ was sent and that it arrived safely and checked out, but nothing will convince me that it was transplanted into Amy.’

‘Does the name Sheila Barnes mean anything to you?’

Lisa looked blank. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

‘Sister Sheila Barnes?’

‘A nurse? At Medic Ecosse?’

‘Yes.’

‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Should I know her?’

‘Not really,’ replied Dunbar, getting up out of his chair. ‘I just wondered. Thanks for seeing me. It’s been a big help. I really hope things get better for you.’

‘What’s coming for me won’t go past me,’ said Lisa.

‘Pardon?’

‘It’s a Scottish expression,’ said Lisa. ‘The equivalent of que sera sera.’

Dunbar pulled up his collar and looked up at the stars as he stepped out into the street. It was nice to see a clear sky but the price for it was a temperature now dropping below zero. He was unsettled. Lisa Fairfax was absolutely sure that Amy Teasdale had been given the wrong organ at her transplant operation. From what he’d seen and heard of Lisa, he could not dismiss her as neurotic, nor as someone who had been too involved with her patient. But how could she be right? Where could this ‘wrong organ’ have come from? You didn’t find drawers marked DONOR ORGANS in hospitals. If the correct organ had been sent and received, surely that was the end of it. The rejection response must have been just one of those inexplicable things that sometimes happened. Fine, but in the case of Medic Ecosse it had been two of those things.

The only thing he was sure of as he pulled out into the traffic on Dumbarton Road was that he was going to see Sheila Barnes at the hospice in Helensburgh. He was beginning to feel more than a little uneasy about the whole business.

Dunbar spent the following morning at his desk in the hospital making notes from the figures on the computer disks and asking Ingrid to provide some more information about certain topics. He had identified a lack of information about catering costs at Medic Ecosse and thought that asking her to prepare a breakdown of meal costs over the past eighteen months should keep her busy while he concentrated on other things. He was relieved not to have stumbled on anything that had been missed from the disks supplied by Giordano’s office. The information given to him was on the whole pretty comprehensive.

Halfway through the morning he noticed something else. The patient records had at first seemed satisfactory in terms of listing treatment given and correlating this with itemized costing, enabling him to check billed sums against monies received but, in treating this as an academic exercise to fill in the time, he noticed an anomaly. The records of Omega patients’ bills were not itemized. There was no way of checking on their treatment.

He could see why Giordano’s office had thought he might well be satisfied with only the final sum — it was many thousands of pounds in all cases — but it was something he could ask Ingrid about. In the meantime, he rang The Beeches Hospice on his mobile phone and asked if he might visit Sheila Barnes that afternoon.

‘Are you a relative?’ asked the female voice.

Dunbar paused momentarily to reflect on how often that question was asked every day. ‘No, just an old friend,’ he lied.

‘I see. Well, I don’t see any problem there. We encourage our patients to live as normal a life as possible up to the very end. Shall we say three o’clock? I have to suggest a time so that we can adjust Mrs Barnes’s medication accordingly. It would be a wasted journey if she was asleep when you arrived. On the other hand, we have to keep her as comfortable as possible. It’s sometimes a fine line.’

‘I understand,’ said Dunbar, starting to feel guilty about what he was doing, though not guilty enough to call the whole thing off. ‘I’ll be there at three.’

Ingrid returned shortly before lunch-time with facts and figures about how much patient meals cost to prepare, what the clients were charged and what the profit margins were. ‘I’m sure you’ll find we haven’t been undercharging.’ She spoke pleasantly but managed to convey that she thought she’d been sent on a fool’s errand.

‘It’s as well to have all the figures to hand,’ said Dunbar, hoping he sounded like an accountant.

‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do?’ asked Ingrid.

‘As a matter of fact there is. I’m a bit puzzled about the information given to me on the Omega patients.’

Ingrid’s expression became serious. ‘Really? Why?’ she asked.

‘Well, basically there isn’t any.’

Ingrid looked puzzled. She came over to stand behind Dunbar and peered down at the screen. ‘I was sure I saw figures for them when I copied the disk for you.’ She leaned over and tapped computer keys until patients’ records came up, then kept one elegant finger on the down-key to scroll through them.

‘There,’ she announced, removing her finger and pointing at the screen. ‘There’s one. A ten-day stay, netting seventeen thousand pounds. Not bad, eh?’

‘But for what?’ asked Dunbar.

Ingrid looked at Dunbar in a way he found hard to interpret. She was either puzzled or seeing him as some kind of mental defective. ‘Forgive me, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I thought your interest lay in establishing that we were maximizing our income from clients and getting the best possible return for the investment of taxpayers’ money?’

‘That’s broadly true,’ agreed Dunbar.

Ingrid appeared to have difficulty in controlling her impulses which Dunbar, reading her body language, guessed were to throw her hands in the air, shake her head and shout, ‘Then why in God’s name do you want to know anything as irrelevant as that?’ Instead she said, ‘I suppose we thought that a profit of seventeen thousand pounds for a ten-day stay would be enough to satisfy you without itemizing the patient’s treatment.’

Dunbar mutely agreed that this was the case. He wondered for a moment just how far he should press this point. On the one hand, he wanted to establish that he had the right to ask for any information he wanted. On the other, he didn’t want to push his credentials as the village idiot when all he was doing was thinking up things to keep Ingrid busy. ‘It doesn’t even say what the patient was in here for,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ingrid. ‘It’s this confidentiality thing we have. I suppose we thought you’d be happy with the final income figures. If it’s any help, I can tell you that this particular Omega patient had a baby here. It was feared that there might be complications but in the end everything was fine. In fact, if I remember rightly, all three Omega patients we’ve had were in for obstetrics care. Very rich men are always anxious that their wives have the best of care during pregnancy when problems are thought possible. Would you still like me to organize an itemized costing of their stay?’