When Professor Karounis returned from his meeting with the hospital’s trust managers in central London, Dr Macleod was waiting for him outside his office.
‘Stuart? Is something wrong?’ asked Professor Karounis as he approached. ‘You look as if your cat just died.’
‘I’m afraid it’s rather worse than that, professor – not that I actually own a cat. I carried out a termination this morning. If I told you that it didn’t quite go as planned, it would be the understatement of the century.’
‘Is it the mother?’
‘No, the mother’s recovering well. It’s the foetus.’
‘You’d better come in,’ said Professor Karounis, opening his office door. His secretary was sitting at her desk close by, and since she was only a temporary, he didn’t want her to overhear anything confidential. Medical liability lawsuits could cost millions.
He closed the door behind them, took off his dark grey overcoat and hung it up, and then crossed over to his huge mahogany desk. He had been director of the Warren BirthWell Centre for eight years now, and although he had developed a certain arrogance, it was probably deserved. He had drummed up huge financial support and made sure that the centre led the country in prenatal and neonatal care, with some of the most advanced techniques and medical equipment anywhere.
He was a small, neat man, with a gleaming bald head like a giant horse chestnut, a close-clipped beard and rimless spectacles, and he had never been seen at the centre wearing anything but his grey three-piece suit and red bow tie.
‘So… what’s the problem?’ he said, sitting behind his desk and indicating that Dr Macleod should sit down too. Dr Macleod remained standing.
‘The mother’s a Nigerian woman, thirty-five years old. She was brought here from A & E suffering from acute abdominal trauma. We scanned her and discovered that she was pregnant, although she couldn’t understand how she could be, since she had only recently had an abortion, and according to her, she had had no sexual relations since.
‘The ultrasound showed that the foetus was congenitally malformed. And when I say “congenitally malformed”, I mean that it was difficult to determine if it was even human. We could see that it was suffering from polymelia, with an unprecedented number of extraneous limbs, a severely underdeveloped body, a small curved spinal column and gastroschisis.
‘Here…’ he said, handing Professor Karounis the green cardboard file. ‘Here are some pictures of it. It has male genitalia, so I suppose to be quite accurate we should call it a boy. But you can see for yourself that it is nothing much more than a head with multiple arms and legs and only rudimentary organs.’
Professor Karounis opened the file and studied the photographs inside. After he had examined them all carefully, he looked up at Dr Macleod, and it was clear that he was shaken.
‘I don’t know what to say, Stuart. I have been in obstetrics for twenty-six years and never have I seen anything like this. Never.’
‘Well, professor, that makes two of us.’
‘All these extraneous arms and legs… and the lungs exposed like this! But the face, Stuart! I mean – O Theós ston ouranó!’
‘I know. He’s like a cherub, isn’t he? But I’m afraid that there’s something even more disturbing about him. I removed him by C-section, but he’s still alive.’
‘What?’
‘He’s still alive, and breathing. He’s in an incubator, in a room of his own, of course, in isolation. We wouldn’t want any other parents to see him.’
‘How can it… he… How can he still be alive?’
‘I have no idea, professor. I was about to euthanise him with morphine, but he opened his eyes, and he started to cry like a normal baby, and I have to admit that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought that if God has allowed such a boy to exist then perhaps He has a reason, and He’ll take him when He sees fit. In any event, I doubt if he can survive for very long.’
Professor Karounis stood up and handed back the file of photographs. ‘I need to see this for myself. Nobody else knows about it, do they? Apart from the team who assisted you with the C-section? It’s very important we keep this confidential. If the media get to hear about it, they’ll be all over us before you can say “freak show”.’
He led the way out of his office and along the corridor. His secretary looked up and said, ‘Professor Karounis—’ but he gave her an abstracted wave and said, ‘Later, Mandy. Later.’
‘How long do you think it can survive?’ he asked Dr Macleod, as they waited for a lift to come up to the third floor.
‘I don’t know. Hours perhaps. Maybe a day, if we feed him.’
‘Is it capable of being fed? Does it have a stomach?’
‘He has a very diminutive digestive system, yes. Whether that can cope with preemie formula or not, I really couldn’t say.’
‘O Theós ston ouranó!’ Professor Karounis repeated. ‘God in Heaven!’
They went down to the second floor. In a large well-lit room, all of the nine premature babies who had recently been delivered at the centre were being kept warm and nourished in incubators or given kangaroo care by their mothers. Professor Karounis looked in briefly, giving the mothers a quick salute, but then he and Dr Macleod continued walking along to one of the small private rooms at the end of the corridor.
As they reached the door, a young Chinese nurse ran to catch up with them.
‘Nurse Chen!’ said Dr Macleod. ‘I thought you were supposed to be in there, keeping a constant watch on him.’
‘I was, doctor. I am. But the formula ran out. I went to fetch more.’ She held up a 200 millilitre bottle of NeoSure to show him.
‘You should have called for the pharmacy to bring it to you. You shouldn’t have left him unsupervised.’
Nurse Chen blushed and lowered her eyes. ‘I also needed toilet, doctor. I’m sorry.’
‘There’s a toilet in there. You could have used that.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Yes, but what?’
Nurse Chen looked up again. ‘It stare at me. The foetus. It stare at me all time. Never blink.’
Dr Macleod pushed the door open. ‘In that case, you should have called for Charge Nurse Rudd to send up somebody to keep an eye on him while you were gone.’
‘Yes, doctor. I’m sorry, doctor.’
They went inside. It was a dull day outside, and so the room was gloomy. Dr Macleod had decided to keep the light subdued in case the foetus’s eyes were hypersensitive. On the right-hand side of the room stood a Dräger Caleo incubator. It was one of the most sophisticated, with sensors to monitor a premature baby’s body temperature, as well as keeping it enclosed in a perfectly balanced microclimate. It was designed with much wider ports than normal incubators so that a mother could have maximum access to her baby for natural bonding, and to allow minor surgical procedures to be carried out while the baby remained inside.
‘Here, professor,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘Tell me what you think.’
As he crossed the room, the grey light from the window was reflected on the incubator’s clear plastic cover, so that he couldn’t see inside it. When he came closer though, he realised that the incubator was empty. The thick white gauze pad on which the foetus had been resting was still dented, but the foetus itself had gone.
‘Stuart,’ said Professor Karounis, coming up behind him, ‘what is this? There’s nothing there.’
‘Where is it, Nurse Chen?’ said Dr Macleod. ‘What’s happened to it?’
Nurse Chen hurried over to the incubator and lifted the cover, as if she expected the foetus to suddenly materialise out of thin air.
‘How can it be disappear?’ she wailed. ‘It can’t be disappear!’
‘Somebody must have removed it,’ said Professor Karounis. ‘But why in the world would anybody remove it? Do you think it could have been one of your surgical team?’
‘Absolutely not. I mean, why would they? Apart from that, none of them would have wanted to go anywhere near him. They found him totally repulsive, if you want to know the truth.’
Professor Karounis took out his phone. ‘I’m calling security. Whoever took it may not have had time to leave the centre yet.’
Dr Macleod looked all around the room. The door to the toilet was open but there was nothing in there except a lavatory and a small washbasin.
‘This is insane,’ he said. ‘Whoever took him must have been waiting outside in the corridor for Nurse Chen to leave him unsupervised. But how could they have possibly known that she would? And surely they would have needed something to carry him off in, wouldn’t they? A bag or a box. I suppose they could have wrapped him up in a coat or a blanket.’
Professor Karounis put down his phone and said, ‘Only two people have left the centre in the past ten minutes. One was delivering a book from Amazon. The other was Nurse Nanda, going off duty, and she was carrying only her handbag. It seems as if our foetus thief must still be somewhere in the building. I have instructed security to search the centre from bottom to top.’
‘Have you told them what they’re looking for?’
‘I simply said that a premature child appears to have been abducted – a child who is badly deformed. I didn’t say how badly deformed. I don’t think they would have believed me.’
‘My God, this is like a bad dream,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘I keep thinking I’m going to snap out of it in a minute, and none of it will have happened.’
Nurse Chen said, ‘I’m so sorry, doctor. Please forgive me.’
‘Never mind, nurse. You shouldn’t have left him alone, but you couldn’t possibly have foreseen anything like this. None of us could.’
‘But what if he dies?’
‘If he dies, quite frankly, I think he’ll be doing us all a favour, including himself. He couldn’t have gone on living for much longer, not like that.’
Professor Karounis said, ‘There’s no CCTV along this part of the corridor, but the landing and the stairs are covered, and so are the lifts. David Brennan is going back through the recent footage now. He said that the only way somebody could have left here carrying our foetus without being caught on camera would have been via the fire escape, but if they had done that, the alarm would have gone off in his office as soon as they opened the fire door.’
‘I still can’t work out why anybody would have wanted to take him,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘How did they even know he was here?’
‘Perhaps the mother mentioned to a friend that she was going to have a termination.’
‘Well, that’s possible. But the impression I got was that she was too embarrassed to tell anybody about it. Her husband left her months ago and went back to Nigeria, and the only man with whom she’s had any kind of relationship is her cousin’s husband. He was the one who made her pregnant before she had her abortion, and she says that after that she warned him in no uncertain terms never to touch her again. Even if he did, and even if it was him that made her pregnant again, that still doesn’t give us any idea why he or anybody else would have taken the foetus.’
‘I have to confess that I am the same as you, Stuart. Berdeménos – totally baffled.’
*
They returned to Professor Karounis’s office.
‘We should call in the team who assisted you with the C-section, one by one,’ said Professor Karounis. ‘They are the only ones who saw the foetus and apart from Sister Rudd and Nurse Chen, they are the only ones who know that it is still alive. Or was still alive, the last time it was seen.’
‘Yes, very well. But I can’t believe that any of them would have taken him. It makes absolutely no sense at all.’
Professor Karounis’s secretary located all of Dr Macleod’s surgical team and called them up to his office. Glenda the midwife was first, and she sat with her mouth open in shock and bewilderment when Dr Macleod told her what had happened.
‘I thought this day was mad enough already,’ she told him. ‘That shook me so much, the state of that foetus, I was just on my way to ask Mary Masimba to take over my next delivery for me.’
‘I’m afraid I have to ask if you took the foetus yourself,’ said Professor Karounis, with his hands steepled in front of his face like a prosecuting barrister. ‘Or, if you didn’t, if you have any idea who might have done.’
‘Of course I didn’t take it! Heavens above! It frightened the wits out of me! That face, and the way it kept staring at me! I shall be having nightmares about it for the rest of my life!’
‘So you can’t hazard a guess as to who might have taken it, or why anybody would have wanted to?’
Glenda pursed her lips and shook her head but said nothing. It was clear that she was deeply upset that Professor Karounis had considered even for a moment that she might have been responsible for the foetus’s disappearance.
When she had left the office, Dr Macleod leaned over and said quietly, ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, I think you need to go a little easy on the accusations. We don’t want to find ourselves in court, accused of harassment.’
‘What are you suggesting? That we forget the whole thing?’
‘Not exactly, sir. Well, maybe we should. How many malformed foetuses do we dispose of every year? This one was unusual, yes, because of the severity of its malformation, but we have to face it – there was no possibility at all that it could have survived for any length of time. We have to ask ourselves whether it was a living human being or simply a collection of malformed tissue.’
‘Stuart – you said yourself that you hesitated to euthanise it, because of the way it looked at you. But in any case, that’s not really the point. The point is that someone breached security and removed a foetus, whether it was alive or dead or somewhere in between. We should call the police. Next time it could be a perfectly healthy newborn, and you can imagine what kind of trouble we would be in then. Our good name would be tattered. That’s the right word, isn’t it – tattered?’
Dr Macleod wasn’t in the mood to correct him. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But before we involve the police, let’s at least wait until David Brennan has finished searching the building and checked his CCTV footage. For all we know, whoever took the foetus made a perfectly innocent mistake. Perhaps it stopped breathing while Nurse Chen was out of the room, and somebody took it away to resuscitate it.’
‘Oh, come on. They took it away to resuscitate it? Something that looked like… I don’t know, something that looked like an octopus? Would you have taken it away? And how would you have tried to start it breathing again? With mouth-to-mouth? I know it has a face like an angel, but I really don’t think so.’
Dr Macleod didn’t answer that. He knew how unlikely it was that anybody had taken the foetus to give it artificial respiration, but he was becoming desperate to think of a logical explanation for somebody to remove it. Regardless of its condition, he was still responsible for it.
Dr Bhaduri knocked at the door. When he came in, Dr Macleod could tell by his expression that he had already found out what had happened. Before Professor Karounis could say a word to him, he lifted both of his hands as if he were under arrest and said, ‘It wasn’t me, sir. I didn’t take it. I swear by Gita.’