George started with the sucker punch. There was no other way to do it.
‘There’s someone I need to tell you about, Darcy. A woman.’
‘A woman?’ she repeated faintly, shrinking away from him.
George sighed, pinched the skin at the top of his nose before looking at her again.
‘I’m sorry, I really am. I should have told you all this before we got so involved. But I thought it would scare you off and—’
‘Just tell me now,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything.’
So he told her. She listened, saying nothing, and he could tell she was trying her hardest not to seem shocked while all this stuff, this awful detail, spewed out of him.
‘Her name is Opal Vardy.’ He felt his mouth twist slightly. He could barely stand the name on his lips. ‘I met her about eighteen months ago and she’s tried to ruin my life ever since.’
‘OK,’ Darcy whispered, somehow managing to sound calm and unflustered, though George knew the probability was that inside her chest, her heart was galloping nineteen to the dozen. She looked as if she might throw up any second.
‘Like you, I’d resigned myself to staying single for the foreseeable,’ he explained. ‘After the heartache of losing my wife, it felt like a positive decision, if you know what I mean. My life felt full enough with Romy and my career. It just seemed simpler not to bring anything or anyone else in to disrupt that.’
She nodded.
‘Anyway, one night, after consuming a bottle of red wine by myself and feeling low, I ended up on an online forum for medical staff, just a way of like-minded people having a moan really. Folks can often get a bit political on there, and in hindsight, it was too close to home. In my senior position, I should’ve never done it.’ He sighed. ‘But I got chatting to a few people about shared concerns we had: funding problems and the never-ending cuts to NHS services. Then Opal sent me a private message asking if I was the same George Mortimer who worked at the City Hospital.’
‘She already knew you?’
George nodded. ‘I was shocked. Like an idiot, I hadn’t realised my messages would appear under my real name.’ He rolled his eyes at his own naïvety. ‘I signed off the forum conversation then but ended up talking to Opal on private messenger. She was on the temporary staff roster, worked in the City Hospital archives and knew of me, but I didn’t know her.’
He hoped Darcy could see how that might be possible. The consultants were very high-profile and respected throughout the hospital. They were right at the top of the medical staff hierarchy and visible to all staff.
‘We chatted online for two or three nights that week, and it turned out Opal had been single for three years. We got on so well, I ended up asking her out for a drink. And it all went downhill from there.’
‘So what happened?’ Darcy swallowed. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’re still involved with her in some way?’
‘No!’ He raised his voice, then softened it again. ‘No. After that initial meeting, we went out several times, maybe four or five. We got on well, but it was just a casual thing. For me, anyway. She was quite full-on, pushing me all the time to see her more. I explained my situation and was honest about the fact that I didn’t feel ready for a full-on relationship.’
‘And she was happy with that?’
‘Seemed to be.’ He hesitated. ‘She said she felt the same way.’
Darcy wrinkled her nose, no doubt disapproving of the obvious ‘friends with benefits’ sort of arrangement he’d just described.
‘Then one day, she came over to Urology to see me, and as she was hospital staff, they let her straight through. I didn’t realise she was standing outside my office door. I was talking on the phone to another consultant, senior to me. Between us, we’d carried out a very difficult and lengthy procedure on a patient, and sadly the man had died on the operating table.’
He looked at Darcy to check she was following, and she nodded. But her guarded expression told another story, like she was wondering exactly where this was going.
‘My colleague asked me, off the record, to tell him exactly what steps I had taken before I’d handed over to him, and I admitted I’d been forced to make a call about a certain course of action and it had turned out to be the wrong one.’ George sighed. ‘I didn’t know Opal was listening. She could only hear my side of the conversation, of course; couldn’t hear my colleague sympathising that such things happened and were part of the job and advising me to say nothing to the family.’
A few minutes after he’d finished the phone call, she’d tapped on the door and asked to see him.
‘She said she’d had second thoughts and wanted us to carry on seeing each other but in a more formal relationship. I told her it would be nice to have a drink together sometime but that I thought our connection had come to a natural end and we should just try to get along as friends.’
Darcy recognised the obvious let-down line and George saw her cringe a little.
‘And how did she take that?’ she asked.
‘Fine! She seemed to take it OK and her contract finished, so she left the hospital soon afterwards. That’s when it all started going wrong.’
Darcy waited for him to continue.
‘At first it was just little things I barely noticed: I’d turn up somewhere and she’d be there. Or I’d take Romy to a pizza restaurant and Opal would walk by the window and end up coming in to chat to us.’
He ran his fingers through his hair, shifted around in his seat.
‘This went on for a few months, but there were long breaks in between incidents so I really didn’t think anything of it. Then other stuff began to happen. Deliveries would come to the department for my attention that I hadn’t ordered. I had a two-day conference in Scotland organised, and when I got to the airport, I found my flight had been cancelled without my authorisation. Annoying, inconvenient things like that.’
‘And you think all this was Opal’s doing?’
‘Oh, I’m certain of it. I called her, asked if we could meet for a chat, but she was having none of it.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘She actually accused me of bothering her. Said that we’d agreed to call it a day and I shouldn’t be calling her!
‘Then it shifted up a notch. Maria, my housekeeper, called me at work one day, said a woman had come to the door claiming to be my girlfriend. She wanted to collect some things I needed that I’d apparently sent her to get. She was quite insistent about gaining entry, but Maria had the sense not to allow her in, thank goodness. When I asked her to describe the woman, it was quite obviously Opal, and when I showed her a photo on my phone, she confirmed it.’