Dr Macleod was locking his office door when Professor Karounis appeared at the end of the corridor. ‘Stuart! You’re not going yet, are you?’
‘Well, yes. I don’t have any more patients booked in for today, and I thought I might pick Beverly up from the library.’
‘Have you told her that you would?’
‘No. It’s a surprise. I was thinking of taking her for supper at the Peckham Bazaar.’
‘Perhaps you can treat her another evening. I’ve called the police, and they’re sending an officer over to talk to us. He should be here in ten minutes or so.’
‘You called the police? I thought we were going to give David Brennan a chance to look into it first.’
‘He has. He has combed the building high and low, and he has talked to everybody who was here at the time the foetus disappeared, but he hasn’t found anything to suggest who could have taken it. But somebody must have done, and that is why I called the police. We have a reputation to uphold here, Stuart, at the Warren. Our security must be of the highest order. Who is going to trust us if babies can be taken, even if they are stillborn or have only a limited time to live?’
‘I completely understand your concern, professor,’ said Dr Macleod, as they walked along the corridor toward the lifts. ‘But if we don’t announce that this foetus went missing, who’s to know?’
‘The birth mother knows. She may well be asking, where is it, and what was it like? She didn’t realise she was pregnant, did she? She may ask us for a DNA test to establish who the father was, and what can we say to her then? Oh, sorry, madam, but your foetus has mysteriously vanished, and we don’t know how.’
‘We can simply tell her that it couldn’t survive and that it’s been disposed of.’
‘Yes, but that would not be completely true, would it? And I know that you trust your surgical team, but it would only take one of them to let slip what had happened to the wrong person, and the story would be out.’
They reached Professor Karounis’s office. Once they were inside, Professor Karounis indicated with a wave of his hand that Dr Macleod should sit down.
‘You are deeply worried that this might botch your copybook, aren’t you, Stuart?’
‘Blot,’ Dr Macleod corrected him under his breath, but he didn’t think that Professor Karounis heard him.
‘When you delivered it, the foetus was living and breathing, and its continuing welfare was your responsibility, after all, no matter how deformed it was, or how distressed, until it passed away. I agree with you that there was no chance of its survival, but that is not the point.’
At that moment, Professor Karounis’s secretary knocked at the door and poked her head around.
‘You’ve two visitors, professor. They’re police officers.’
‘Good, thank you, Mandy. Please show them in.’
Two uniformed constables came into the office, one stocky man in his mid-thirties with a crew cut and cheeks that looked as if they had been sandblasted, and a plump young woman with pale green eyes and the smallest nose that Dr Macleod had ever seen on an adult.
‘I thank you for coming so promptly,’ said Professor Karounis. ‘I know that the police are very hard-pressed these days, what with all the stabbings and the lads on mopeds snatching people’s mobile phones. I am Professor Karounis, the director of this clinic, and this is our chief surgeon, Dr Macleod.’
‘You reported a suspected abduction, sir,’ said the young woman constable flatly.
‘I did, yes, indeed. The circumstances are that a woman patient was referred to us complaining of acute pain. A scan showed us that she was pregnant, but the foetus that she was carrying was cataclysmically malformed. Dr Macleod immediately performed a C-section to remove the foetus, but contrary to his expectations, it survived the operation. We were keeping it in isolation in an incubator, under supervision, but it was momentarily left unattended, and in that very short period of time when the nurse was out of the room, it disappeared.’
‘You have your own security staff here, don’t you, sir? And CCTV?’
‘Yes, we do. But they could find no evidence of how the foetus might have been taken. The closed-circuit television covers all the entrances and exits, as well as the landings and the stairs and the lifts, but they recorded nobody acting suspiciously and no comings or goings that could not be accounted for.’
The male constable turned to Dr Macleod and said, ‘The foetus was “cataclysmically malformed”? What exactly does that mean, sir, if you don’t mind me asking.’
‘I think Professor Karounis meant “catastrophically”. It’s not easy to describe it to you, so perhaps I can show you a picture.’
Dr Macleod took out his phone and prodded at it until he found a photo of the foetus in the picture library. He handed it over to the constable, and said, ‘There. That’s it. I took that about five minutes after I removed it from the patient’s uterus.’
Both constables stared at it for nearly ten seconds. Then they looked back up at Dr Macleod, and both of them had stunned expressions on their faces.
‘Is this real?’ asked the male constable. ‘I mean, this isn’t some kind of a wind-up, is it?’
‘He’s real all right. Do you honestly think that we would make up a creature that looked like that, for a joke?’
‘You say “he”?’
‘If you look closely, you’ll see that he has male genitalia. Diminutive, but unmistakable.’
‘Blimey.’
‘Don’t think that I wasn’t as shocked as you are,’ Dr Macleod told them. ‘Probably much more so, because there he was, living and breathing in the palm of my hand. I’ve never seen anything like him, ever, not in all my years as a surgeon, and believe me, I’ve seen some desperately deformed foetuses in my time. Two or three of them would have given you nightmares.’
‘And you think that somebody might have taken it?’
‘It could hardly have left the clinic on its own, could it?’ said Professor Karounis, with a sharp hint of impatience.
‘No, of course not. But can you think of any reason why anybody might have wanted to take it?’
‘There could be any number of motives,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘He might have been taken by a dealer in human organs. A human head can fetch up to five hundred pounds when sold for dissection. Hospitals and universities pay very respectable money for livers and kidneys and other organs. So you can imagine what a dealer might be able to ask for a very unusual specimen like this.’
‘But what would a dealer in human organs be doing, wandering around this clinic?’ asked the female constable. ‘You don’t sell stillborn babies for dissection, do you? Or do you?’
Dr Macleod was about to speak when Professor Karounis raised his hand and said, ‘Please! That question is not at all relevant to this disappearance, madam. Dr Macleod was only making a conjecture. As he said, the foetus could have been taken for any one of a number of motives, and not necessarily for dissection.’
The male constable handed back Dr Macleod’s phone. ‘I’m afraid this is rather out of our league, sir, to be perfectly honest with you. Missing children, yes. Stolen property, yes. Like you say, there must be a reason why this foetus was abducted, but considering its deformity, I think Constable Lake and me need to hand this over to officers who specialise in this kind of thing.’
‘What do you mean, “this kind of thing”?’ said Professor Karounis. “Don’t tell me there are more foetuses like this.’
‘No, sir. I meant cases that are out of the ordinary. Not like your everyday common-or-garden stabbings or robberies or drug-dealing or internet scams. I’m talking about cases that defy rational explanation, and I certainly think that this disappearance has all the characteristics of one of those.’
‘So what action are you going to take?’
‘I’m going to return to the station, sir, and inform the DCI in charge of the Major Investigation Team of the circumstances under which this foetus disappeared. Of course I’ll show him a picture of the foetus, if you can send it to me, please, along with any details such as its size, weight and general physical condition. Do you think it could still be alive?’
‘I simply don’t know,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘I couldn’t even guess. I was staggered that he was still alive after I delivered him. As you saw, his lungs and other organs are external and his heart is no bigger than my fingernail. It depends very much on how he’s been treated by whoever took him.’
‘Okay then, sir. We’ll get back to you just as soon as the DCI has assessed the case and decided how to go forward from here. Is it possible to have a word with your security people before we leave?’
‘David Brennan, of course. My secretary will take you downstairs to his office.’
When the constables had left, Dr Macleod stood staring at the door as if he expected them to come back in again.
‘Why do I think that this is going to have a very bad ending?’
‘I don’t know, Stuart,’ said Professor Karounis. He sat down behind his desk, picked up a folder, frowned at it, and then dropped it. ‘My feeling is that it will have no ending at all, and that we will never find out why that foetus was malformed the way it was, or what happened to it. My feeling is that we will never know the answer to these questions before we are six feet below the ground.’
‘Oh, not me,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘I’m going to be cremated. I never fancied being eaten by grave-worms.’
Professor Karounis gave an odd, off-key bark, like a surprised dog. ‘You’re not intending to donate yourself to science? You surprise me. You’ve just said that your body parts can make very good money.’
*
As soon as he had left Professor Karounis’s office, Dr Macleod called his wife, Beverly. She had already left Peckham Library and was on her way home to Dulwich, and in any case she said that she was exhausted and didn’t feel like going out to eat.
‘Oh well,’ he told her. ‘Maybe another day.’ After talking to the police, he didn’t have much of an appetite himself.
He looked in on Mrs Adams to see how she was recovering from the C-section he had given her that afternoon. She was drowsy but smiling, and her husband was there too, and gave him a grateful handshake that almost broke his fingers.
He was halfway across the car park when his phone rang. It had started drizzling again, so he climbed into his Mercedes and closed the door before he answered it. It was Dr Bhaduri, and he sounded breathy and over-excited.
‘Dr Macleod? Are you on your way home yet?’
‘I’m about to. What is it?’
‘It’s Susan Nicholls. That young woman who suffered a placental abruption.’
‘Yes, I know who you mean.’
Dr Macleod had treated Susan Nicholls yesterday after she had lost her baby at nineteen weeks, which was unusually late for a miscarriage. It was sad, but the operation had gone smoothly and there had been no complications. He had given her a D & C, and she was due to be discharged early tomorrow morning.
‘About two hours ago she started complaining of acute abdominal pain,’ said Dr Bhaduri. ‘It became so severe, ten out of ten, that she couldn’t even speak, and so I put her on an opioid drip. She was vomiting too, which made me wonder if it was mesenteric ischemia, and so I sent her for an urgent scan.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘You were in surgery, sir. And I thought I would wait until I saw the results of the scan.’
‘All right, Dr Bhaduri. Calm down. Have you been given those results?’
Dr Macleod could hear Dr Bhaduri take a deep, quivering breath. He sounded as he were just about to start crying.
‘She’s pregnant. That is to say, she has a foetus in her uterus.’
‘Dr Bhaduri, she can’t be pregnant. It’s less than forty-eight hours since she miscarried. Are you sure her ultrasound hasn’t got mixed up with another patient’s? It has happened.’
‘But it looks like the same foetus, sir. The foetus you removed from Chiasoka Oduwole. The foetus that has gone missing.’
‘That’s impossible. They’ve given you Mrs Oduwole’s ultrasound scan by mistake. They must have.’
‘No, sir. I have double-checked it. I took it back down to the technicians, and they confirmed absolutely that this is the scan of Susan Nicholls.’
Dr Macleod felt chilled all over, and even in his thick Crombie overcoat, he shivered.
‘I’m coming back in,’ he said. ‘Where is Susan Nicholls now?’
‘Two-oh-three. I took her out of the ward because I didn’t want to upset the other mothers.’
Dr Macleod climbed back out of his car and walked quickly through the fine rain back to the centre. The receptionist looked at him quizzically as he strode, grim-faced, to the lifts. As he went up to the second floor, he stared at himself in the mirror in the back of the lift and thought, This can’t be happening. This can’t be true. This is like something out of a horror film.
Dr Bhaduri was waiting for him in the corridor. Dr Symonds was with him, and Sister Rudd. Without a word, Dr Bhaduri handed Dr Macleod the cardboard folder containing the ultrasound scan and nodded toward the open door of room 203.
Dr Macleod went inside. Susan Nicholls was lying on her bed with her eyes closed, attached to an intravenous opioid drip. She was twenty-three years old, quite pretty in a punky way, with her spiky dark brown hair bleached blonde at the tips, a stud in the side of her nose and a tattoo of a mermaid on her left forearm. A nurse was sitting close beside her, but she stood up when Dr Macleod came in.
‘She’s sleeping now,’ said Sister Rudd. ‘She went through more than an hour of absolute agony, and it’s worn her out.’
‘Vitals?’ asked Dr Macleod.
‘Her blood pressure’s slightly elevated, 140 over 90, but apart from that, normal.’
Dr Macleod opened the folder and looked at the ultrasound scan. He couldn’t help shivering again. It showed the foetus that was curled up inside Susan Nicholls’s womb, and it looked exactly like the malformed foetus that he had removed from Chiasoka Oduwole. Its spidery limbs were wrapped around its head so that its angelic face was obscured, but he was in no doubt that if it wasn’t the same creature, it was that creature’s identical twin. It had the same external lungs, although they weren’t inflating and deflating as they had when the foetus was breathing air, and it had the same diminutive genitalia.
Dr Bhaduri pointed to the way in which the foetus was pressed against the wall of the womb.
‘You see? It can only have been lodged there for a very few hours, and yet it has already put out microvilli to attach itself to the lining of the uterus. It is my guess that within a very short space of time it will be taking nutrition and oxygen from Ms Nicholls, like a normal foetus.’
‘Is she aware that she has this foetus inside her?’
‘Not yet,’ said Dr Symonds. ‘We thought it important to discuss it with you before we told her. She’s only just lost a baby halfway through her pregnancy – a baby that she’d already felt moving – as if that wasn’t enough for her to contend with.’
‘She’ll have to know,’ said Dr Macleod. ‘A C-section is going to be the only way to get it out of her, and we can’t do that without her permission. Not unless her life is at risk, and at the moment it isn’t, no matter how bizarre this thing is.’
‘I can’t understand how it got into her,’ said Dr Bhaduri. ‘I mean – did it crawl all the way from Room 207 into the ward? And then what? It’s like some terrible kind of parasite.’
Dr Macleod turned to Sister Rudd. ‘We have to remove this, and as soon as possible. Let her sleep until we’ve organised an anaesthetist and prepped the theatre. When she’s awake I’ll come back and explain how this thing has somehow invaded her body and what we’ll have to do to extract it.’
‘And when we have extracted it?’ asked Dr Symonds. ‘What are we going to do with it then?’
‘What I should have done before. Euthanise it.’
‘It’s not “him” anymore?’
Dr Macleod didn’t answer that. He handed the ultrasound scan back to Dr Bhaduri, then he walked off to tell Professor Karounis that the foetus had reappeared, and that instead of calling for the police, he probably should have called for an exorcist.