Anne Fraser - Top-Notch Men!

‘DID you hear what happened last night in ICTU?’ Margaret Hoffman, the anaesthetic registrar, said the next morning as she came into the main operating theatre change room where Allegra was changing for the first case on Harry Upton’s long list.

‘No, I came straight up here. I’m doing my round later. What happened?’

‘Someone tried to kill Kate Lowe.’

‘What?’ Allegra’s eyes went wide. ‘How?’

‘They tampered with the ventilator, cut and switched nitrous and oxygen gas lines into her ventilator.’

‘That’s incredible! Have they caught the person responsible?’

‘No, but I bet it was the father,’ Margaret said.

‘It could have been anyone,’ Allegra said, not sure why she was springing to Keith Lowe’s defence. ‘It might have even been a member of staff.’

Margaret frowned as she tightened the waist ties on her scrub trousers. ‘But if it was a staff member, they would have known how the alarm system worked and circumvented it. That woman would be dead by now and I know a few people who would be glad of it.’

‘Come on, Margaret, that’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? The police haven’t even established whether it was an attempted murder-suicide.’

Margaret handed her the newspaper from inside her locker. ‘Haven’t you read this morning’s paper?’

Allegra unfolded it and looked down at the front-page story, her stomach sinking in alarm. There was a fairly recent picture of Kate and Tommy and below, the stark black headlines couldn’t have been more condemning of the mother’s motives.

‘She’s as guilty as all get-out,’ Margaret said. ‘Look at her. She looks the type, all dowdy and depressed. The inside story is the husband asked for a divorce and it sent her crazy. She didn’t want to give up custody of the little boy so decided to take matters into her own hands.’

Allegra refolded the paper and handed it back. ‘She’s still entitled to a fair trial.’

‘Yeah, right, where she gets some hot-shot lawyer to get her to plead temporary insanity and she gets off scot-free,’ Margaret said in a scathing tone. ‘What’s fair about that? How does that help that poor little kid hooked up on that ventilator?’

‘What would help both Tommy and his mother would be the staff getting on with their job of taking care of their recovery instead of gossiping and speculating about them,’ Allegra said.

‘Surely you don’t think she’s innocent, do you?’ Margaret asked. ‘How can she be when she was high on drugs and drink? She was driving the car, remember, no one else.’

‘I know …’ Allegra sighed as she stepped out of her skirt. ‘But I just can’t get my head around the idea of someone trying to kill their own child, not unless they were actually not in their right mind.’

‘I feel sorry for the husband,’ Margaret said. ‘It said in the paper how he’d done everything he could to try and save the marriage.’

Allegra frowned as she tied her hair with a bandana. ‘And yet the paper said he asked for a divorce.’

‘Well, everyone has their limits,’ Margaret said. ‘Maybe he’d finally had enough and found someone else. That’s the trend, isn’t it? Trade in the old wife for an updated version?’

Allegra turned to face her, a contemplative expression beginning to settle on her features. ‘Or get rid of the old wife.’

Margaret’s mouth dropped open. ‘But how would he have done it? When it happened he was in Melbourne. He’s got an iron-clad alibi.’ She folded her arms across her chest and added, ‘Now who is doing the speculating?’

‘You’re right,’ Allegra said with a rueful twist to her mouth. ‘We’d better leave this stuff to the professionals while we get on with what we’re trained to do. Is Harry here yet? I want to get on with the list so I can do some preliminary work on Tommy and his mother.’

‘So you’ve managed to convince the new director, have you?’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as using the word “convince”,’ Allegra said. ‘He has a lot of reservations. And this latest drama is not going to help things. Everyone will be as edgy as all get-out around there. But unless Kate or Tommy wake up, we’re never going to know what happened—the truth might never come out. Maybe a murderer will walk free. As I see it, my project is now doubly important.’

‘But what if the truth is she did try to kill her son and herself? How is the little boy going to cope with that?’

Allegra sighed as she reached for her theatre clogs. ‘How does anyone cope with the truth? It hurts for a while but somehow you have to pick yourself up and get on with life. Kids are amazingly resilient and incredibly forgiving.’

‘I can tell you one thing for free—if that woman was my mother, I would never forgive her,’ Margaret said with feeling. ‘That kid is likely to be brain-damaged for the rest of his life. That’s beyond forgiveness, if you ask me.’

‘No one is beyond forgiveness, Margaret. There isn’t a person alive who hasn’t made a mistake some time during their lives. We don’t know the circumstances of Kate Lowe’s life, or at least not firsthand. She might have felt completely different on another day. That’s the hardest part of it to comprehend. What loomed so large in her life might have been dealt with totally differently, given a few hours either way. And as for Tommy, well, at this stage we don’t know the extent of his brain injury,’ Allegra reminded her. ‘For all we know, he could make a complete and full recovery.’

Margaret gave her a sceptical look as she shouldered open the change-room door. ‘You really do believe in miracles, don’t you?’

‘We have to sometimes, Margaret,’ she said. ‘Science can’t fix some things, and it can’t tell us our values. If we haven’t got values, we may as well go downstairs and turn off the ventilator now.’

‘God, I hope it doesn’t ever come to turning off Tommy’s ventilator.’ Margaret grimaced. ‘Especially not so soon after Alice Greeson.’

‘It won’t come to that, Margaret,’ Allegra said with determination. ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure of it.’

Allegra had not long finished Harry’s list, which had run overtime due to a complication with a patient, when she received a call from the CEO, insisting on an immediate meeting with him in his office. ‘But I have to get down to ICTU,’ she said, hoping to put him off.

‘Why?’ Patrick’s tone became resentful. ‘So you can have a little rendezvous with the new director? I heard about your cosy little dinner last night.’

Allegra felt her hackles rising. ‘Look, Patrick, I’m sorry but I’m not interested in a relationship with you. What I do in my spare time is my business. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the way it is.’

There was a tense little silence.

‘It’s all right, I understand, but can’t we just meet as friends?’ Patrick asked, his tone now sounding more than a little emotional. ‘You’ve been wonderful to me lately, that’s why I supported your project so strenuously, apart from the fact that I do think it has merit. I felt I owed it to you for being such a good friend to me when I most needed it. Meet for a drink tonight at the Elgin Street bar at seven-thirty. That’s all I’m asking. Please, Allegra.’

Allegra suppressed a sigh of resignation. Patrick was right. He had gone out on a limb for her and she owed him her friendship at the very least. ‘All right, just one drink. But as friends, nothing else,’ she relented.

‘That’s fine,’ Patrick said. ‘But I still thought I should warn you about getting involved with the new director. You’ll only get hurt.’