4

The afternoon shift after a night on was, in many ways, a lot worse than the night shift itself. Matt had managed, at most, four hours sleep, so he was tired even before he started. Added to that was the fact that afternoons meant you turned up for work at the point when everyone else had their eyes firmly fixed on five o’clock and out the door. Still, working three to ten wasn’t too bad, he supposed. Especially since Roberro was on nights all this week, which meant that the git wouldn’t be making an appearance until seven.

As soon as Matt arrived, he was sent up to geriatrics to take a patient to the mortuary. It wasn’t the first time, so he’d mastered the dead-body nerves a while ago. But it did mean that he was hooking up with Flynn, a twenty-year veteran of the portering service, who was gold-star material when it came to skiving. It always took two to transfer a corpse, and if Flynn was involved, you could bet that it would be a fairly cushy number. Flynn had the florid look of a “ten pints of Guinness a night” man and drifted through his shifts with a minimum of effort. He was always up for mortuary duty because it was a great way to kill at least half an hour doing nothing but wheeling a trolley of inanimate flesh along miles of flat passageways.

After fifteen minutes of negotiating corridors full of visitors and staff, most of whom bowed their heads respectfully on seeing them, they reached the service lift, which would take them down to the underground maze of tunnels that led to the mortuary. Matt stood at the rear of the “corpse cart,” an adapted trolley with sides and a lid, while Flynn wheezed at the front.

“Ever thought about working in the mortuary, Mike?” Getting Matt’s name wrong was another of Flynn’s endearing little qualities.

“Not really.”

As usual, Flynn didn’t wait for Matt’s answer. Listening wasn’t one of Flynn’s strong points, either. Nor working, hygiene, a basic understanding of the English language, tolerance, and a sense of humour. Not forgetting compassion.

“Bloody cushy number, if you ask me. Stiffs come in, you tag ’em, then hand them over to the coffin jockeys. Don’t even have to listen to them whinging on about their bloody cancer and stuff. Only thing puts me off is the unhealthy atmosphere, you know, down in the basement, like. Dark all the time. Never see daylight. Can’t be good for you.” Flynn proceeded to hawk up a cigarette-fuelled chunk of decayed lung lining and expectorate it neatly onto the floor in the corner of the lift. They completed their descent with a lurch, and the lift doors opened. Moments later, they were pushing the trolley along a corridor lit by flickering fluorescent lights, between lines of hissing pipes. Flynn had given up all pretence of pulling the trolley; even the trailing hand he’d pretended to steer with was quickly abandoned, leaving Matt to do the lot. Apart from the hiss of the pipe-work, the bowels of the hospital were eerily quiet.

“Too spooky for me,” Matt said and decided to throw in, “and with limited prospects. Bit of a deadend job, don’t you think?” The pun flew straight over Flynn’s head like a squadron of Canada geese heading south.

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Mike.” Flynn said, as Matt had known he would. Flynn was one of those people who would argue over anything. Even, more often than not, when you’d agreed with a point he was making. It tended to make conversation with Flynn highly exasperating. “Could be a real money spinner, but Alf and Dwayne—well, you know Alf and Dwayne. I mean they’re good blokes, don’t get me wrong. But they’re too precious about it all. Don’t know if being precious about corpses is quite right, know what I mean? People can get funny ideas. You know…haemophilia and that.”

Matt knew he meant necrophilia, but pedantry had no place in conversations with Flynn, either. Life was way too short.

“Almost went into business once, did me and the boys down here,” Flynn continued. “I had this idea, see. ‘Touched by an Angel,’ I was going to call it. Brilliant, it was. Get Dwayne and Alf to make the stiff look nice with a bit of makeup and that, and then take a picture of it and paste it into a bible scene. You know, like the Last Supper, or Joseph’s Dream? Something tasteful for relatives to remember them by. And if they didn’t like the Bible—say they were Muslims or Buddhas—we could’ve done something with pyramids and a camel. Maybe even some pandas. For a fee, of course.”

“They weren’t interested, I take it?” Matt said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Nah. Lacking in enter-prune-arial spirit, that’s their problem. Said the hospital governors wouldn’t approve. I ask you.”

Imagining propositioning grieving relatives with a cheesy portfolio of biblical scenes sporting a variety of Aunt Madges and Ednas as Mary Magdalene filled Matt with a shiver-inducing disquiet. Screaming silently at the bullshit Flynn came out with was the only thing that helped.

“You’ve met Alf and Dwayne, though, eh, Mike?”

“Yeah, couple of times.”

“You know the drill, then. Go with the flow. They’re harmless enough. Go back a long way, do me and Alf and Dwayne.”

Flynn pushed through the mortuary’s wooden swing doors with their scarred metal facings, and let them clatter back against the trolley with no attempt at helping Matt through. The mortuary reception was a table in front of a squat line of filing cabinets. Everything was spic and span; all paperwork was filed away in labelled box-files, while an ancient PC played a tranquil fishtank screensaver. Another set of doors led to the mortuary proper. Flynn pushed those doors open, calling ahead as he did so.

“Aye, aye. Shop?”

The mortuary’s main room had low ceilings and was well-lit. At the centre stood a large stainless steel table with drains and hoses. Through another door were the fridges. The Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time” boomed out from a little iPod speaker system on the postmortem table. Flynn did a little shimmy as he walked through the door, completely at odds with the rhythm of the song, and said, “I love the Four Tops.”

The smile that crept over Matt’s face at hearing the music died into another silent scream.

Two men looked up as they entered the room. One was a giant of a man. At six-four, twenty-one stone, sporting a full beard and dark-rimmed eyes in a podgy face, Alf didn’t ever say much. In fact, Matt hadn’t heard him say anything, ever. However, the other attendant more than made up for his partner’s reticence.

“Well, well, if it isn’t WMD Flynn. What poor mug have you brought with you?”

“It’s Mike,” said Flynn. “You met Mike?”

“Mike?” said Dwayne, looking past Flynn towards Matt with a puzzled frown. “Flynn, his name’s Matt. As in Mathew.” Dwayne shook his head in despair at Matt.

“Whatever,” Flynn said. The chances of Flynn ever admitting a mistake were as remote as the average hill town in Nepal. “Got a customer for you. Eighty-eight-year-old heart attack. Found him DIB.”

“Her name is Mrs. Settle, and she’s eighty-seven,” Matt said, sending Flynn a questioning frown but getting a blank look for his efforts. “Cause of death was pneumonia. But the ‘found dead in bed’ bit is right.”

“Exactly,” Flynn said with stunning disregard. He proceeded to unwrap a chocolate bar and eat it while peering under the shrouds covering a couple of corpses.

“We got the word from ward nine,” Dwayne said, shaking his head. Matt was struck by the sympathy in his voice. “Been expecting Mrs. Settle. Alf, why don’t you and Flynn sort the paperwork? Matt can help me move Mrs. S.” It was couched politely, but there was no doubt that it was an order rather than a request, delivered with Dwayne’s customary cheerfulness.

Alf nodded and began to walk towards Flynn, who looked for a moment like he might object, having visibly flinched at the suggestion of doing something that involved the word “work.” But then he did the maths and realised that paperwork, although distasteful, did not involve anything physical. Besides, Alf was already moving towards him. So, like Napoleon faced with the advancing Russians, retreat was the only option. Dwayne watched them leave the room.

“Lazy sod,” Dwayne said as the doors to reception swung shut behind them. Up close, Matt saw that Dwayne’s complexion, like Alf’s, was parchment-white, with dark circles around his eyes accentuated by a liberal application of mascara and lots of jewellery. A cursory count gave up a figure of nineteen piercings in all, eyebrows, cheek, tongue, lips all glinting in the harsh light. Dwayne fetched a long, solid plastic board, which he began to slide under Mrs. Settle as Matt tilted her. In seconds, the board sat half on the corpse cart and half on the mortuary cot.

“On three,” Dwayne said, and he pulled while Matt pushed. The Pat slide was a very simple piece of kit that relied on the very low friction between cotton sheets and its smooth plastic coating, which meant that patients of any weight could be slid across from one bed to another easily. All it required was that the puller and the pusher brace themselves to overcome the initial inertia of the body. Once the mass started moving, it did so effortlessly.

So why, this time, Matt’s back foot began to slide the moment he applied pressure to the inanimate Mrs. Settle, he had no idea. But slide it did, losing purchase and causing him to lunge forward. Instead of using enough force to push her three feet, Matt’s turbo thrust was enough to put her into the next county. The result was that Mrs. Settle shot across towards the surprised Dwayne, who ended up frantically juggling the stiff corpse that now jutted out, rigid as an ironing board, its top half hovering precariously over the edge of the mortuary cot.

“Shit, shit, shit. Sorry,” Matt said, yanking on the sheets to bring Mrs. Settle back from the brink. To his credit, Dwayne said nothing, the strain on his face preventing speech for a couple of very long seconds, until Mrs. Settle had…settled.

“That was close,” he said. “Not easy explaining how a corpse breaks its neck after death.”

“I slipped,” Matt said, mentally cursing his rubbish luck once again.

Dwayne came around to Matt’s side of the cot, knelt down, and picked up a plastic chocolate wrapper, which had provided the banana-skin effect between Matt’s foot and the polished mortuary floor.

“You into Lion Bars, Mathew?”

Matt shook his head.

“What odds would you give me for this being WMD Flynn’s break-time confectionary of choice? The bloke is a bloody disaster. If he was a horse, he’d be forty thousand tubes of UHU by now.” Dwayne pulled the sheet back from Mrs. Settle’s face to reveal the grin of her rigor-stiffened features. “Poor thing. I mean, look at her hair, for crying out loud. Those bastards on ward nine haven’t washed it for days. She’ll have to have the works.” He strode, using quite short steps and bent elbows, to a whiteboard and wrote up “SETTLE-WCB.”

“WCB?” asked Matt

“Wash, conditioning, and blow-dry. To be honest, I could do without it this afternoon. There’s a couple coming in from a fire and they’ll stink the place out. All that fat running everywhere—”

“But Mrs. Settle,” Matt said, dragging the conversation back to the point at which his mind had hit a speed bump. “I mean, who is going to mind if she doesn’t have her hair washed?”

“Mind? Her, of course. If she could speak, it’d be the first thing she’d say. Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to look her best.” Dwayne sounded piqued.

“Fair enough,” Matt said.

“I’m surprised at you, Matt. You’re spending too much time with the likes of Flynn. Even if there’s little dignity in the way they die, down here they can have dignity by the sackfull.” He tweaked at a nose ring, his expression softening. “We all have a calling in life, Matt. Yours, I would say, is not tied up with transferring corpses onto slabs in mortuaries. But while you’re doing it, you might as well do the best you can, eh?”

Matt frowned, more in surprise than disdain at what he was hearing. Wisdom in the Mortuary would be a great name for a book. That, or Dwayne the Philosopher Mortician.

“Do you believe in bad luck, Dwayne?” Matt asked, sensing that Dwayne was someone who might not scoff as he began stripping the sheets from Mrs. Settle, ready for the laundry.

“Of course I believe in bad luck. I’ve got more four-leaf clovers stuck in my bobble hat than you’ve had hot dinners.”

Matt was quiet for a few seconds, and then asked, “So, do you think that someone could be doomed to be permanently unlucky?”

“Doomed. That’s an odd thing to say, Mathew. I’m not so sure about doomed, but it’s possible to have more than your fair share, I suppose.” Dwayne put out a hand and his fingers touched Matt’s arm. They were icy cold on his skin. “Luck’s a funny thing, though. All depends on how you look at it. Take poor old Watkins, over there,” Dwayne nodded towards a human shape under a white sheet on the other side of the room. “Retired for one year, and then drops dead from a massive heart attack as he is about to putt for the best round of his life on the eighteenth hole.”

“That’s unlucky,” Matt conceded.

“You might think so. But when we opened him up, we found an aneurysm the size of a plum in his head. That bursting would have won him a cabbage-stuck-in-a-bed first prize. His heart would not have had to do anything much and he might have survived for a few more years yet, dribbling and having someone change his nappy twice a day—if he was lucky.” Dwayne grinned. “And once that was explained to him, he was a much happier bunny,” he added under his breath.

Matt looked up. “What did you just say?”

Dwayne looked up, his face all mock innocence. “Who, me?”

The moment was lost as a shout emerged from the vicinity of reception.

“Mike,” Flynn appeared in the door. “Ready?”

“Two seconds,” Matt said, and began bundling the sheets into the corpse wagon.

“Yes, hurry up, Matt,” Dwayne said, making eyes to the ceiling. “You don’t want to keep a busy man like Flynn waiting.”

Matt grinned and watched as Dwayne went to the iPod and changed tracks. D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” started up as Dwayne began removing shampoo and conditioner from a cupboard.

“One question,” Matt said as he began to trundle the corpse cart out. “Why WMD Flynn?”

Dwayne picked at a small scab on the mast of the sinking ship tattooed on his arm and grinned. “We gave him that name when Blair was Prime Minister. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Iraq? You know, like Flynn, mysterious ethereal things—”

“—that you can never find when you desperately want to,” Matt said finishing off Dwayne’s sentence for him with a grin and a nod.

“You’re a smart bloke, Matt. Things’ll work out. You’ll see.”

In the lift, Matt considered telling Flynn what he thought he’d heard Dwayne say about Mr. Watkins, but just as he got round to mentioning it, the radio on Flynn’s belt crackled into life and the switchboard asked him to go the car park to help transfer a pregnant woman to the delivery suite.

“Top car park,” Flynn explained to Matt with a grin. “Long way. If I go via the main entrance, I’ll have time for a fag before I get there.”

“But that way’s twice as long,” Matt pointed out.

Flynn tapped his nose. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Mike.”

Not from you, though, said a wary voice in Matt’s head. “Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”

Flynn looked at Matt with suspicion. “Someone say that, did they?”

“Churchill,” Matt said.

“That bloke from stores?”

“No, Churchill. World War II Prime Minister?”

“Nah, doesn’t ring any bells. Sure you got that name right, Mike?”

Matt didn’t bother to say goodbye as the lift stopped and Flynn walked off with no offer to help return the trolley. As before, Matt was too busy doing a mental impression of Edward Munch’s The Scream. In a way, Flynn was the ghost of Matt’s future. An ignorant, bigoted, lazy sod of a ghost who represented the very worst aspects of what lack of ambition and total absence of any aspiration could lead to. Matt had no doubt that Flynn knew how many paid sick days he could have every year, took them all, and did so with a guiltless conscience and an immense pride in his achievement. He’d steal ten minutes at the beginning and end of the day, never volunteer to do anything he wasn’t asked to, and considered it all his right as a working man to do so. And if Matt wasn’t careful, unless he got his act together, he might be Flynn in twenty years’ time.

Shuddering at the thought, Matt got out and began trundling the corpse cart back to its station on the fourth floor. He thought about Dwayne, and about what he’d said, and knew that WMD Flynn was pretty much as wrong about everything and everyone as it was possible to be. How did people get like that? Was it simply pig ignorance? Or did they have to work at it? For Flynn to badmouth Alf and Dwayne was more than a tad hypocritical. As far as Matt could see, the mortuary seemed about the most positive place he’d come across in the hospital, which was as madly arse-backwards as things could possibly be.

Matt frowned again at the memory of what he’d heard Dwayne say about Mr. Watkins, but then shook his head. Of course Dwayne hadn’t said that Mr. Watkins had been reassured by being told he’d had a narrow vegetative-state escape. The bloke was already bloody dead. So if Dwayne hadn’t said it, Matt had either heard it wrong, or made it up. And as far as Matt knew, his hearing was fine. Great. So now he could add inventing weird imaginings to his long list of mental glitches. The psychologist was going to have a field day at their next meeting.

A&E stayed quiet until around eight, when the punters decided that now was the time to pitch up with the back strain that might keep them from going to work the next day. He caught a glimpse of the Uruk-Hai cheerleader as she was leaving the building and got a thousand-yard stare for his trouble. But Linda Marsh was clearly not in the mood to stop for a chat.

As regards Matt’s luck, things weren’t too bad, if you discounted Mrs. Settle and the Lion Bar wrapper and an episode in the men’s toilets when the cistern overflowed after Matt had flushed it. It had taken a wedged kidney dish on top of the ball cock to sort that one out, but sort it out he had. Roberro didn’t even dip onto his radar until later. He’d seen the sphincter strutting about, whispering sweet nothings into the buxom med student’s ear at every opportunity. Though, judging by the smirk on his face, they were likely to be as sweet as lime vinegar.

By nine-thirty, things had quieted down again. The punters who chose to be ill at eight had decided that enough was enough and, faced with a further two hours’ wait, had buggered off home to self-medicate with paracetamol and wine. Meanwhile, the poor sods that would be there at two AM, having fallen over and cut their heads open with a full cargo of lager or cheeky Vimtos on board, were setting out from home for a night on the town.

Word had gone out on the floor that there was to be a crash drill sometime that evening, but it had yet to happen. With a bit of luck it would be after ten, when Matt was on his way home to bed. The only slight, niggling concern he had, as nine-thirty came and went, was that Roberro had been designated the trigger, and Roberro was enough of a prat to pick the worst possible moment for Matt.

At nine-forty, as Matt returned from wheeling a patient with a twisted knee from X-ray, the buxom med student put her hand on his arm. This close, Matt saw that she wore a lot of foundation, through which small excrescences had begun to poke. But her eyes were big and her lipstick was freshly applied and she flushed a pleasing pink when he looked up at her.

“Matt, sorry, but the woman in cubicle three has just left and there’s a bit of a mess.” She made a face.

Matt shrugged as he parked the twisted knee. “I’ll sort it,” he said.

He couldn’t remember the woman in cubicle three, but unless her visit had involved some significant fetching or carrying or wheeling or pushing on his part, there would have been zero contact. The curtains were still drawn, the bed unmade, scattered tissues on the floor. No bodily fluids—that was one good thing. But there was something on the floor between the wall and the locker adjacent to the bed.

Matt had seen lots of things on the floors of these cubicles, ranging from used needles courtesy of junkies who thought they might as well shoot up while they waited for someone to set their broken arms, to a lump of human waste moulded into a perfect tennis ball courtesy of a schizophrenic (he’d been nicknamed Federer by the staff).

But there were also less esoteric items that found their way to the least accessible corners. Things that were forever falling out of handbags and hurriedly grabbed coats when people got the all-clear to leave. Perhaps it was his past experience of lost phones and keys, or that he was still distracted by Dwayne and WMD Flynn, or that he recognised an innocuous-looking chapstick and comb next to the tip of the intriguing-looking pink thing, that put him off his guard. Whatever it was, he didn’t bother with the plastic gloves that hung in boxes on the wall. After all, it was obvious that these items had slipped out of a pocket or a bag and rolled under the locker.

Matt had to squat to reach them. He felt for, and picked up, the chapstick and comb first, then reached blindly for the long pink thing with the fingers of his left hand.

It felt smooth, if a little tacky to the touch, and he had to feel for it to get a hold. It was only when it was out from under the locker that he realised that it had an unscrewable bottom and a battery compartment. He’d had it in his palm for at least twenty seconds when the acrid smell caught in his throat and made his eyes water.

His shouders slumped and he went slack as the sick realisation of what this was sank in.

He groaned and managed to utter, “You cow”—though the med student was nowhere near enough to hear him—before the crash alarm sounded.

At that point, it all became perfectly clear. The dildo was about the thickness of a very large banana, and Matt’s hand was very well wrapped around it. That meant lots of contact area. And the person who had smeared the bloody thing with superglue knew that, too.

Outside the cubicle, people were running around, rushing to the crash drill, which his pager was telling him was in the minor ops room. It was a timed exercise, and they were expecting him there. The stopwatch was pressed when the last member of the team arrived, and he was as much part of that team as the anaesthetist or the nurses. Matt hesitated in the cubicle, running mental fingers over the very pointy tips of the dilemma he hovered above. He could slope off, wrap a blanket around his arm, and pretend that he’d never heard the alarm. That route led straight to serious disciplinary action. Might as well hand in his notice here and now.

Or, he could tough it out, penis in hand.

There was only one thing he could do.

They were all in place as he walked through the door to the minor ops room: anaesthetists, medics, nurses, med students, and, of course, Roberro.

“You’re late,” Roberro said.

Matt nodded. “Had a spot of bother with some superglue.” There was no point trying to hide it, so he waved his trophy for all to see. “Seems like the lady in cubicle three is missing a friend.”

The laughter went on for several minutes. One of the nurses asked if she could touch it. Someone else suggested that the woman in cubicle three might have been a Hobbit, as Matt had clearly found “Dildo Baggins,” which segued with a guffaw into, “What am I going to do without my precious?” The buxom med student wouldn’t look Matt in the eye. Roberro was in his element, however, calling Matt a moron for falling for that old trick, waiting for the other stuff to die down before spitting out, “Still, that proves it. We always suspected you were a bit of a prick, Matt.”

It got a laugh, but one tinged with a couple of derisory jeers for its banality. “Bet you’ve never held anything that big before, eh?” Roberro added. The laughter dwindled to one or two giggles. “Still, we all know what to call you now, eh, Matt?” Roberro leaned in, his malicious eyes gleaming with triumph as he bellowed out the word as if he were on the terraces at Chelsea, or wherever the hell it was he came from. “Wan-ker. Wan-ker. Wan-ker.”

No one laughed at all that time. As Matt glanced around he could see that they were all uncomfortable with this little tableau, suspecting for themselves what Matt already knew to be the truth: that the whole thing had been set up just for this moment. So that Giles Roberro could stand there and call Matt a spiteful name. All the doctors in the room had been to medical school, some of them even to British ones. They knew that med school humour was puerile stuff, excused on the basis that, in the sort of hothouse learning environment that produced doctors from raw schoolkids, steam was generated and had to be let off.

But mostly people matured out of it. At least until reunion nights. So, to see it so blatantly trotted out again like some old and sick pantomime horse was uncomfortable. Particularly in what was meant to be a professional environment, in close proximity to the general public. But Roberro couldn’t see it. He dished out the lumps because he was in a position to do so. And he did it behind a skin so thick it would require an armour-piercing shell to get through to him.

Well then, thought Matt. Lock and load.

“Funny you should mention names,” said Matt. “Because this thing has one already.” He held up the marital aid. Now that he’d stopped waving it about, it was clear that a piece of flesh-coloured dressing tape had been applied. Matt ripped it off with a flourish. Written along its length like “United States” on an Atlas rocket, was the word GILES.

This time, the laughter was genuine. Everyone howled. Everyone, that was, except Giles Roberro. He turned purple, became progressively flustered, and tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the drill. But no one wanted to leave in a hurry, not when they really were enjoying the joke. In the end, it was Roberro who left first, muttering, “Some of us have actual work to do, you know,” to no one in particular.

Several of the female nurses volunteered to get Matt’s hand free.

“No,” said the charge nurse. “I can see the video on YouTube now, and the blog that’ll follow. Come on, Matt, in here out of the way.”

It took five minutes of superglue remover and gentle prising to get Matt’s hand free. There was no pain; they’d had lots of practise with sixth-form toilet seats and tender bums over the years. “Quick thinking, putting Giles’s name on it like that,” the charge nurse said.

“He’s a git,” Matt answered. “Okay, a laugh’s a laugh. But with him…” he shook his head. “And what is it with him and women? He never seems to have any difficulty. Is it charm?”

“Charm? Yes, if charm was spelled P, E, R,V, E, R, and T. Most of them give in after a while to shut him up and stop him bothering them. You need to watch your back, though, young Mathew. He’s got it in for you.”

“But what the hell have I done?” Matt asked in a plaintive soprano voice.

“You’re male, young, the girls think you’re cute, and the other staff all like you. You’re stealing the golden boy’s light. What more reason do you want?”

“Oh, for crying out loud, that’s pathetic.”

With one final bit of kneading, the penis came free and the charge nurse held it up. “Hit the nail on the head there, Mathew. That’s Giles Roberro for you. Pathetic.”

It was food for thought, and Matt chewed it cudlike for the half an hour until the end of his shift. It was as he was leaving, threading his way along the corridor towards the main reception area, that Roberro pigeonholed him. There was no one within five yards as he moved in close, wearing a grin bright enough to burn a hole in the ozone layer. To the casual observer it would have looked like a couple of mates bidding each other good night. But Matt could see the real fury under the fixed smile and feel it in the powerful squeeze of Roberro’s fingers on his arm.

“You ever do anything like that to me again, and I’ll break your arm,” Roberro promised.

“Don’t tell me—De Niro in Godfather II?”

Roberro squeezed Matt’s arm a little harder. “I mean it, fuckwit.”

Matt returned the squeeze on Roberro’s biceps. “Know what they say? If you can’t stand the heat, don’t throw stones.”

Roberro looked momentarily confused, but then shook his head. Both men released their grips as a nurse passed by. Roberro waited until she’d turned the corner before continuing. “You think you’re the Alsatian’s testicles, don’t you? Always the unfunny answer. I’ve got some advice for you, wannadoc. You’ll never make it. Too clumsy. They’re not going to let you near patients, you klutz. So go and teach English to the Poles, there’s a good moron.”

Blood was pumping through Matt’s head. He wasn’t sure whether he should laugh out loud or thump Roberro in the face. The guy was a joke. A childish, bigoted sphincter. And there was no doubt now that the git had somehow accessed his file. But Matt sensed, too, that violence was what Roberro wanted. Grounds for dismissal. Exactly what Matt didn’t need on his CV. How on earth they had managed to let this idiot get through med school was beyond him. Okay, the days of putting medics on pedestals were long gone. They’d been political scapegoats and the subject of spin for far too long. “Overbearing” and “superior” had replaced “knowledgeable” and “humane” a long, long time ago in the British way of thinking about the medical profession (which put Matt at the top of the throwback league when it came to motivation).

But he also knew that some still clung to the idea of an oath, which had been put forward twenty-four centuries before. Doctors were in privileged positions, and as such should show a degree of probity, set a good example, demonstrate a degree of moral fibre. The downside was that, when doctors fell from grace, they often did so spectacularly. Okay, Roberro was no Crippen or Shipman, but Hippocrates would have had him shot on sight. And it was that which irked Matt the most.

“Tell me, Giles, have you been an arsehole all your life, or have you matured into it?” As a scathing riposte it lacked almost everything, but as a from-the-gut insult, it did the trick.

“Keep going, fuckwit. We’ll see what you can come up with as a joke when you’re shovelling crap from the blocked toilets next week.”

“The toilets aren’t blocked,” Matt said.

“They will be on your shift.”

The finger nail in the palm trick wasn’t doing it for Matt. He could hear the enamel of his back teeth squelching and grinding together. “Give me one, just one reason why you’re being such a total shit, other than the fact that you’re a complete twat. I’d really like to know what I’ve done to get under your skin.”

Roberro snorted. “It’s a jungle out there, turd-face. People need to know their place in the food chain. My job is to educate you and help you understand that whatever you do, you’re going to fail.” He made his fingers into a gun barrel and used his thumb to mimic the hammer coming down. “Ergo, omnino inutilissme. That’s Latin for total loser.”

“Sounds like Latin for total crap, from here,” Matt said.

“You pathetic little oik,” Giles sneered. “Piss off back to whatever little provincial backwater pond you crawled out of with the rest of the algae.”

Matt’s fists were now balled tight. He was close, so very close, to smacking Roberro one right in the mouth, and screw the consequences. But something stopped him. His ears felt odd, as if they were going to pop, and there was a distinct tingling in his scalp. It was difficult to put his finger on it, but he got the weirdest impression that something had changed.

They both saw her in their peripheral vision at the same moment, swivelling their eyes like target range-finders to stare. She stood looking in from the reception area, her smile confident and happy, cheeks tinged red from the cold. She walked straight through the security doors and no one tried to stop her as she strode across the floor. Matt saw that Roberro seemed to have lost control of the muscles in his lower jaw before he realised that his own mouth was gaping open, too. She moved straight towards them, her eyes dancing with amusement. It was Roberro who took the chance. Never one to miss an opportunity of playing the macho medic card, he looped his stethoscope around his neck and moved forward to meet the girl before Matt had a chance to move.

“I’m sorry, this is a restricted area,” Roberro said, but with enough saccharin to sweeten a bag of limes. “Have you booked in? Here, let me help you.”

He took her arm and tried to steer her back towards reception, still wearing his best winning grin. The girl didn’t budge. She looked at his hand on her arm, put a long, elegant finger on her chin and made pensive eyes at the ceiling.

“I don’t remember giving you permission to touch me,” she said.

Roberro pulled his hand back as if it had been scalded, his smile curdling into crushed consternation. The girl gave him a glance that you could have shaved with an icepick before turning to Matt and breaking out a hundred-watt grin.

“Hello, Mathew,” she said and walked towards him, not stopping until she had both hands on his cheeks and was kissing him full on the mouth.

Matt was paralysed. Totally dumbstruck. For two seconds, he couldn’t even respond to the kiss. But being male and heterosexual, things soon started stirring, and he returned it with interest. She was the whole package—the look of her, the feel, the smell. Especially the smell. It was one of the things he’d missed the most. He never had found out what perfume it was she wore. She’d been vague about it when he’d asked, but it was a heady mix of wonderful aromas—bergamot, vanilla, amber and chocolate, and something else from his past that seemed able to reach in and press lots of his buttons without asking. The kiss wasn’t bad, either. It was a warm, hungry, wild kiss full of promise and desire.

But then, that was her all over. That was Silvy.