12

A MONTH HAD PASSED since Goldblatt had started on the unit. He still hadn’t worked out what Ludo was supposed to be doing.

Every day he did a round with the HO, which is the time-honoured way for registrars to thwart the well-meaning attempts of house officers to harm their patients. Ludo was supposed to be on the rounds as well. Sometimes she was. Goldblatt spent a lot of time trying to define the pattern of her attendance until he realized it was a trick question. There was no pattern. After a while he understood that a tacit agreement had developed between them. The only problem was that he couldn’t say for certain what he had agreed to.

The Prof had never had an SHO before she set out on her Seriousness Drive, of which this was the latest achievement. It wasn’t an unalloyed triumph, it had to be admitted, because she had been forced to agree to share the new half-and-half SHO with the Dermatologists, who were her bitterest rivals. Dr Mowbray, in particular, was always trying to get hold of Fuertler’s patients on the laughable grounds that Dermatologists were best able to treat their skin lesions. But the Dermatologists had previously had a whole SHO, and now they only had a half, whereas she now had half an SHO, and previously she hadn’t had one at all, so that was the same as the gain of a whole SHO if you took into account the Dermatologists’ loss. This surely must have removed the last shred of credibility from their claim to be able to treat any aspect of a disease as serious as Fuertler’s. And the Prof realized that, from her own perspective, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to have only half an SHO, because apart from raising the seriousness level of her unit, it wasn’t clear that there was actually anything for an SHO to do.

If the Prof did know what the SHO was supposed to do, she was staying decidedly quiet on the matter.

Emma, following her Fuehrer’s lead, was staying silent on the matter as well. It was therefore Goldblatt who had to cope with Ludo moping around the ward every day, whining about not having anything to do, and then disappearing as soon as a solution to her complaint seemed likely to appear. Naturally, Ludo wasn’t the innocent whiner that she appeared. She perceived perfectly well the unique power of her position on the Prof’s unit. As its first SHO, there was no precedent for her role, and the absence of instructions from the Prof left open both of the two possible routes for an SHO on a unit that also has a house officer: dividing the patients with the HO and slaving away as a pseudo-HO, or floating along as a kind of pseudo-registrar providing an extra level of supervision to the HO.

Ludo knew exactly which role she wanted.

She laughed in Goldblatt’s face.

After a week of watching Ludo do absolutely nothing except drink the coffee that she coerced him to buy for her, and promise to fill out the Prof’s Fuertler’s files, Goldblatt had suggested that she should divide the patients with the HO. When she had finished laughing in Goldblatt’s face, Ludo fixed him with an expression of superb Balkan haughtiness. She was senior enough, she reminded him with disdain, to have failed the first part of the Royal College exam five times. She was senior enough, she continued, to have passed it on her sixth attempt. And she was senior enough, he shouldn’t forget, to be preparing, even now, for her first attempt on the second part. Divide the patients with the HO? He must be joking!

Ludo’s response to Dr Morris was identical in intent but different in presentation, demonstrating a finely honed ability to tailor her tactics to her audience. When Dr Morris suggested that she divide the patients with the HO, Ludo gazed at him with an expression of abject Balkan imprecation. She had failed the first part exam five times, she reminded him tearfully. She had only barely scraped by on her sixth attempt, she continued. And now, she wailed, she felt her chances of passing the second part, which was so much harder than the first part, were slim. What was to become of her if the job left her no time to study for the exam? What, oh what would become of her?

Eventually Dr Morris sued for peace and agreed to speak to the Prof and let her decide. Ludo may have thought she had already won. Apart from a couple of ambiguous remarks on her rounds, the Prof hadn’t actually addressed a single word to her. No one could say for certain whether the Prof knew she existed. The Prof laid that mystery to rest when she called Ludo down to her office and suggested that she divide the patients with the HO.

Ludo slumped, broke into tears, swore that both Goldblatt and Dr Morris had promised she wouldn’t have to do it, alleged that the HO wouldn’t let her do it, and told any number of other lies until the Prof relented. In the cafeteria afterwards she laughed about it. She confessed shamelessly to having told the Prof that Goldblatt made incessant demands on both her and the HO and treated them severely when they failed to meet his expectations, while tearfully emphasizing the unhappiness this caused.

Goldblatt stared at her in disbelief. ‘I do not make excessive demands!’

‘I had to make her feel sorry for me, Malcolm.’

‘So you lied to the Prof about me? You don’t think I’ve already got enough trouble with her?’

‘And whose fault is that?’ retorted Ludo. ‘Who decided that he doesn’t manipulate beds? Well? Was it me? I don’t think so.’

‘How do you know about that?’

Ludo raised an eyebrow.

Goldblatt shook his head. Then he put his head in his hands. ‘Ludo! What have you done?’

‘I didn’t lie about you, Malcolm. You do make excessive demands. What about yesterday when I was late for the round?’

‘You were late for the round!’

‘At least I came.’

‘I don’t know why you bothered.’

‘That’s not very nice,’ said Ludo, and pretended to be hurt.

‘Ludo, if you’re going to be there, you should be there on time.’

‘See? That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘We said we’d start at nine. Do you call that an excessive demand? You didn’t turn up until a quarter to ten. We’d finished! And what exactly did I do to you? What was it that was so severe? I told you to be on time next time.’

‘It was the tone, Malcolm. You’re not very sensitive.’

‘I suppose you said that to the Prof as well.’

Ludo didn’t reply.

Goldblatt groaned. He had already deduced that Ludo wouldn’t hesitate to use anything he had said, in or out of context, if she thought it could help her. Now he realized she was prepared to use anything he hadn’t said as well.

‘I had a good reason for being late.’

‘What? A Dermatology round?’

Ludo tossed her head scornfully. ‘Buy me a cup of coffee.’

‘Why should I?’ demanded Goldblatt angrily.

‘Oh, go on, Malcolm,’ Ludo whined.

Goldblatt stared at her. He almost had to suppress a smile at the slovenly, shameless appeal in Ludo’s voice. Ludo! When she agreed to do something, she dumped it on the HO as soon as he left the room and brazenly blamed the HO later if it wasn’t done. She flung excuses around without concern for decency, probability or even the flimsiest appearance of consistency. Ludo seemed to think that her role as the Dermatology SHO provided her with a justification for any level of absenteeism from the Prof’s ward. Either she wasn’t very inventive or she was too lazy to think of any other reason. Probably both. To judge by Ludo’s excuses, there was a tremendous epidemic of skin disease gripping London, and the Dermatology service was stretched well beyond breaking point. Apparently there were two, three, four, or even five rounds each day on the two patients that the Dermatologists had in the hospital, and outpatients’ clinics that sprang up randomly across the week, coinciding uncannily with the periods when the workload on the Prof’s unit was at its peak.

It didn’t seem to worry Ludo that a single call to the Derm reg would have exposed her. Goldblatt didn’t even need to make the call. He knew that most of Ludo’s Dermatology clinics didn’t exist. Ludo knew that he knew, and took no special steps to hide the fact. If Goldblatt offered to buy her a coffee, she cancelled her Dermatology clinic with a snap of her fingers. Her brazenness would have been insulting had there not been a certain magnificent, imperturbable insouciance about it.

‘How many Dermatology clinics do you have?’ Goldblatt enquired with genuine interest after he had bought Ludo another coffee.

Ludo sipped the coffee defensively. Information was power, she knew. ‘Millions.’

‘Millions?’

‘I know, Malcolm. It’s awful. And they want me there for all of them, if I possibly can be.’

Why did they want her there for all of them, if she possibly could be? The amount of Dermatology that Ludo knew could have been scratched in capital letters across the back of an eczematous hand, and she herself had told him that the whole business was so boring that she still hadn’t succeeded, after a month, in memorizing whether you gave steroid cream for eczema and tar cream for psoriasis, or vice versa. Whichever it was, she had managed to give tar cream for the wrong condition on her first day, and the lucky recipient of her prescription, who had smeared himself head to foot in the wonderful new cream that no one had even suggested to him before, now composed half of her inpatient caseload in the hospital. After that Ludo was too scared to prescribe anything but an antifungal for athlete’s foot.

‘What do you do there?’ asked Goldblatt, thinking about the tar cream debacle.

Ludo frowned. She had backed herself into a corner. ‘I need a good reference,’ she said at last.

‘And what about the Prof? Don’t you need a good reference from her?’

‘The Prof doesn’t know I exist!’

‘Yes she does. She called you into her office today. Remember? So you could complain about the incessant demands I make on you.’

Ludo sipped her coffee. She gave Goldblatt a sidelong glance. ‘Oh, Malcolm, I didn’t really mean it. The Prof knew that.’

Goldblatt gazed at her sceptically. What did Ludo do all day, apart from thinking of lies to tell about him? Not that he wanted to stop her doing whatever it was that she did. It would have been nice just to... know.

She was always in the cafeteria, it seemed, or always trying to get there. As each species has its natural habitat, so the yellow Formica tables, green vinyl chairs and cheap blue carpet tiles of the cafeteria constituted Ludo’s. ‘Coffee?’ was her inevitable suggestion when anyone made the mistake of admitting they had five minutes to spare. And once she had inveigled Goldblatt down there, she never seemed to leave. She always said she’d stay for just a few minutes more when he had to go. Five minutes stretched with miraculous elasticity into fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, or even longer once Ludo arrived in the cafeteria and the limitless, Formica-lined vista of the time-space continuum opened before her.

The cafeteria was the nerve centre of whatever operation Ludo thought she was running. It was there, while she was sitting with Goldblatt, that she would receive the incoming bleep of the Dermatology registrar who was looking for her so they could start the round that was supposed to have started fifteen minutes earlier. Goldblatt would watch her answer the bleep from one of the phones on the cafeteria wall. And where was she when she received Goldblatt’s bleep when he was looking for her to start a round that should have started fifteen minutes before? With a Dermatology patient, of course, Ludo would reply, over a hum of conversation and a certain familiar clinking of crockery in the background.

And suddenly Goldblatt understood. After four weeks, it came to him in a moment of blinding clarity. When you boiled it down, when you reduced it to its essentials, when you stripped away the flimflam and glitter... Ludo’s role on the unit was to hang around in the hope of persuading someone to go down to the cafeteria and buy her a cup of coffee.

Ludo Madic was running the risk of being left with nothing. Or very little. It happens to lots of people in the system. They get their first part exam and they do their SHO jobs and then they just don’t progress any further, and end up as clinical assistants like the ones who worked in Professor Small’s Fuertler’s clinic, piece-workers who don’t have any ongoing care of patients of their own, which in the medical profession is the crucial test of a doctor’s dignity, and are therefore secretly, or not so secretly, looked down upon by everybody else.

Having passed her first part, to have any hope of getting a foot on the ladder of specialist training, Ludo still had the second part to pass, which was an even tougher set of exams consisting of written papers, oral questioning, and examination of patients live in front of examiners, all of which tests a vast range of knowledge and is designed to put the candidate through the most pants-wettingly pressurized experience of his or her life. Even outstanding candidates are known to fail the second part. Ludo wasn’t an outstanding candidate. Failing the first part five times was outstanding, in a sense, but not in the sense that made her an outstanding candidate.

Ludo had spent so long in passing the first part that she couldn’t afford the same repetitive head-banging run of failures this time around. By now, bright young things one or even two years behind her would be getting their second part, and soon she’d appear too old or too ordinary to compete with them for jobs. Three or four attempts at the second part stretching over the next couple of years would be the end of her. Passing it like that would mean consigning herself to the worst registrar jobs in the most dishevelled hospitals in the country, the sort of jobs that are usually occupied by graduates from the developing world who do a year as a registrar in England and go home in glory to practise as full-blown experts. Yet there was no evidence that Ludo was planning a future as a specialist in Nairobi, even assuming anyone there was desparate enough to give her a job.

There was no evidence that Ludo was planning anything. She was burned out after years as an overworked SHO in a succession of drab jobs in undistinguished hospitals, and had reached the point where the most important consideration in her choice of posts was the amount of sleep she would get. Yet the job on the Prof’s unit should have been a gift to her. It’s a time-honoured practice for SHOs preparing for the second part exam to find themselves jobs on overstaffed units like the Prof’s and spend half their time studying, and it’s a time-honoured practice for consultants to create overstaffed jobs precisely to enable them to do this. Ludo should have been studying her oversized butt off. Goldblatt could have understood it if she was bunking off the ward to bury herself in the library or practise her examination technique on complicated patients around the hospital. He would have helped her bunk off even more.

Goldblatt and Dr Morris both did what they could, practising the traditional method of medical teaching intensified with the second part examination in mind: hurling barrages of difficult questions on subjects drawn from the footnotes of medical literature in the most embarrassing circumstances possible.

The aim of these Teaching Attacks was for the victim to develop the ability to regurgitate vast amounts of obscure information under incredible pressure, with the prospect of belly-laughing, thigh-slapping derision hanging constantly over her head, which is what you have to be able to do in order to pass the second part. They were launched in front of patients, nurses, orderlies, cleaners, radiographers, visitors, and anyone else who might get a laugh out of watching a doctor squirm. Ludo was ordered to reel off lists of symptoms, signs, causes, diagnoses, prognoses, investigations, medications, and treatments, just as she would be asked to do in the exam. She had to put up some kind of effort for Dr Morris, who was a consultant and therefore a potential source of a reference, but she felt free to treat Goldblatt with as much contempt as was necessary to cover up her ignorance. She shrugged, or said she couldn’t think, or she was just about to study that topic, or simply lapsed into sullen silence while Goldblatt’s hand, with clenched fingers ready to snap out at each item on the list, stayed thrust in front of her nose. The HO was always champing at the bit to give her answers, most of which were wrong, and Goldblatt almost had to restrain her physically so that Ludo could try. Ludo never tried, or at best gave one desultory response and listened sourly while Goldblatt reeled off the remainder of the list.

Lists were good for you. This was what Ludo refused to understand. Hadn’t she ever been to medical school? Medical exams at any level, undergraduate or specialist, are largely great brainless tests of recollection, and no one can pass them without memorizing millions of lists. There were whole books of medical lists. What was her problem? Lists are the magic charms of the profession. Lists are the entry ticket. Lists are power.

‘Lists are good,’ Goldblatt cried in exasperation in the doctors’ office one afternoon, when Ludo had refused to give the six chief causes of combined enlargement of the liver and spleen, one of the most basic lists in medicine, which even an undergraduate might be expected to know. ‘Get it into your head, Ludo. Lists are good! Lists are your friend! Say it. Lists are good.’

Ludo grimaced. Of course lists were good. She knew that. That’s why everything was so easy for people like Goldblatt, who could remember them.

‘If we were bats,’ Goldblatt said suddenly, ‘what would our CT scans look like?’

‘What sort of a question is that?’ demanded Ludo.

‘One that has an answer. Well?’

‘Rorschach blots!’ said the HO. ‘They look like bats.’

‘They look like bats to you,’ Goldblatt said.

The HO frowned, pondering Goldblatt’s obvious but strangely troubling remark. She was sitting at the computer, where she had been transcribing lab results into the patients’ notes. The hospital had invested a huge sum of money in a computer system that could flash up a patient’s latest results at the click of a mouse, and had invested nothing in printers for the doctors’ offices, or a porterage system that could deliver a hard copy of the results quickly enough for them to be of any use. Consequently, every HO in the hospital had to spend an hour at the end of each day sitting in front of a computer terminal manually transcribing the results from this space-age system with the medieval implements of pen and paper.

‘Well?’ said Goldblatt, turning to Ludo again.

Ludo stared at him for a moment. Then she shrugged combatively.

Goldblatt shook his head. Ludo didn’t want to think. She didn’t even want to try. That was half her problem.

There was no evidence at all of any knowledge seeping into her brain. She kept saying the same dumb things on ward rounds, and if she was learning anything at all, if she was steadily accumulating the huge amount of knowledge you need in order to pass the second part, she was nothing short of brilliant at hiding it.

And she knew the risk she was running. That was the most frustrating thing about her. She knew it, and yet all she could bring herself to do about it was whine. Admittedly, she whined very competently, subjecting Goldblatt to many exquisitely honed laments over cups of coffee at headquarters. Yet whining, in Goldblatt’s view, was unlikely to improve the situation.

She needed to take control of her life. She needed to vault the hurdle of the second part with one staggering leap and get out into the field where the race for meaningful jobs began. She needed to study. She needed to build her knowledge. She needed to find other doctors who were preparing for the second part and practise her examination technique with them so she could reproduce it flawlessly when the time came in front of two eagle-eyed examiners who wanted her to fail. Goldblatt told her all these things just about every time he ended up in the cafeteria with her, building up a real head of motivating steam in an attempt to drag both himself and her out of the apathy and depression that she insisted on sharing with him. And for a moment, he would see Ludo’s back stiffen and her chin tilt with determination. Yet soon her back had sagged and her chin had dropped again, and Goldblatt would find himself back in the cafeteria saying the same things once more. She needed to work out a programme of revision and she needed to construct a schedule and she needed to allocate her time and she needed to stick to it obsessively...

And she needed a fuck.

Or to put it less bluntly, intimacy. A pair of eyes looking into her own, the touch of a hand on her skin, the sense of wholeness that comes from being wanted.

Everything about her cried it out. Nothing was right. The flat she had rented was too expensive, the girl she was sharing it with was awful. The books she had to study were boring, the other SHOs who said they’d study with her never turned up. Ludo’s whole despondent demeanour, her sad, slow and defeated posture, her lack of energy and self-motivation, her hopeless conviction that she’d fail her second part at least three times in a row, cried it out like a howling Greek chorus in a play that couldn’t decide if it was tragedy or comedy.

They were in the cafeteria, inevitably, when the thought came into Goldblatt’s mind. Just as it did, Ludo turned and looked at him with those half-closed lids low over her blue, drowsy irises, as if she could tell exactly what he was thinking.

Goldblatt looked back at her. There were moments, he had to admit, when there was a smoky, seductive salaciousness about Ludo. Most of the time she just looked heavy, slovenly, and slow. And yet there were these moments... moments of extreme haughtiness and egotism, a degree of naked, unabashed selfishness, which was so naked, so unabashed, that it was magnificent, voluptuous, sexy. Her slovenliness just made it all the more sexy.

‘What are you thinking about, Malcolm?’ The words came out of Ludo’s mouth like smoke curling into the air, sluggishly, sinuously.

‘Nothing,’ he said. His mouth had gone dry. He stood up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

The Fuertler’s files were the answer to Ludo’s problem. Not all her problems, and not even the most important one. Just the one about not being appreciated by the Prof, who had shown no recognition of her existence except for that one conversation in which Ludo had cried and lied to avoid being an HO.

Volunteering to fill in the Fuertler’s files was therefore a strangely smart move on Ludo’s part. It was so smart that Goldblatt thought she must have made it by mistake, and was expecting the HO to come and tell him that Ludo was making her do the work. But the HO didn’t tell him anything, and Goldblatt was finally forced to conclude that, hard as it may have been to believe, Ludo had known exactly what she was doing and actually intended to carry out her promise.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so surprised. If there was one thing Ludo would know, having practised the art of evading responsibility in at least five different hospitals, it was how to do just enough work to appear occupied and, if possible, overworked. The Fuertler’s files were perfect. For the price of spending half an hour filling in a file on each patient, Ludo could claim to be involved in the care of every patient on the ward – and in a way the Prof couldn’t help but notice.

Anyone who has ever worked for a professor with a special interest in an uncommon disease knows that filling in research records is just as important as providing their patients with care. And since it’s much easier to get a patient out of hospital alive than to get medical staff to keep accurate records on them, and since records live a lot longer than patients, most professors spend a lot more time worrying about their records than about their patients. It was a dead certainty that any professor who kept something called Fuertler’s files would let the SHO just about write her own reference if only she could keep the files up to date. In comparison with this service, the HO’s Sisyphean labours in clerking the patients in, guiding their stay through the endless delays imposed by human physiology and hospital bureaucracy, and sending them out again, would count for nothing. In short, Ludo’s move had all the makings of a step towards stardom.

On the other hand, it also had the makings of a step towards oblivion. Just as the Prof would swoon and salivate in ecstasy over Ludo if she kept the files up to date, she would decapitate her with her bare hands if she failed to complete them.

And this was where Ludo’s strangely smart plan was falling apart. Something had gone wrong. For once, not because of anything she had done. Much as she wanted to fill in the files, Ludo was finding it impossible to do so. Funny how something as simple as taking responsibility for a set of brown Manila folders can push you into a war zone. Without knowing it, Ludo had positioned herself dead centre in the crossfire.

It was Ludo herself who realized that something more than mere coincidence was at work. Being naturally trusting, Goldblatt was reluctant to believe it. But Ludo whined and whined, and eventually Goldblatt was forced to listen to her allegations.

‘Emma keeps telling me she’ll show me how to fill them in,’ Ludo whined, ‘but she hasn’t done it yet. She always says she’s busy. Last week she told me she’d do it on Monday and it’s already Thursday.’

Goldblatt knew what day it was. ‘I’m sure she’ll show you,’ he said impassively.

‘I don’t think she will,’ replied Ludo.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just don’t think she will.’

She didn’t.

‘How hard can it be to fill in a Fuertler’s file?’ demanded Goldblatt a week later, as a troubling sense of déjà vu settled over him in the cafeteria.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ludo. ‘I’ve never done one.’

‘You’ve never done one? What have you been doing for the last month? Who’s been filling out the files?’

‘Who do you think?’ retorted Ludo venomously.

Goldblatt frowned. It was starting to look as if Ludo’s sense of victimization, for once, had a basis in reality.

‘Emma said she had to show me. She said if everyone doesn’t fill them out in exactly the same way they’ll lose consistency.’

‘Ludo, have you even looked at one of the files?’

‘No.’

‘What do you think will happen if you just take a peek?’

They went up to the ward. Goldblatt opened one of the brown folders that were lying around on the desks in the doctors’ office. Ludo half cowered behind him.

Nothing. No one was vaporized. No explosion ripped through the room, no demonic apparition leaped off the page.

The first sheet in the file gave the patient’s personal details, then there was a page with an account of the patient’s medical history, followed by the record of the examination and tests taken the first time the patient was seen by the Prof. After that there was a standardized page for every subsequent visit to the Prof’s Thursday clinic. Finally there was a series of stapled three-page entries for each ward admission. According to these, when the patient came into the ward, Ludo was meant to go through a set of questions about specified symptoms, do an examination, and record the results of certain tests that the HO was supposed to order as part of the Fuertler’s work-up. No big deal. There were even pre-printed outlines of the human body – front, back, face, and hands – to make it easier to record the patient’s skin lesions. The only part they couldn’t decipher was a series of tests of skin laxity that Goldblatt had never heard of, with names like ‘Dorsal Hand Stretch’ and ‘Sternal Pinch’, which Ludo was supposed to score. Ludo followed Goldblatt into the hospital library to find out what they were. From the way she looked around, you would have thought she’d never been in there before. They couldn’t find the tests described in any textbooks. Goldblatt deduced that the Prof had probably made them up herself. No problem.

‘No problem?’ repeated Ludo incredulously. ‘I told you, Emma refuses to—’

‘Ludo, when you’re with the patient, you’re going to be with someone who’s seen the tests done hundreds of times before.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘The patient! On themselves!’ Goldblatt rolled his eyes in exasperation. ‘If you can’t figure out a way to get them to show you what the tests are, you don’t deserve to call yourself a doctor.’

Ludo gave Goldblatt a disdainful glance. But he was right, of course. Suddenly Ludo frowned. ‘Malcolm, what if the Prof asks who showed me? What if she asks me to show her how I do them?’

Ludo should be so lucky, thought Goldblatt, that the Prof would ask her anything.

The answer was simple. ‘Tell her Emma showed you.’

‘But Emma didn’t show me.’

‘Exactly,’ said Goldblatt. ‘And we’ll let Emma say why.’

Ludo laughed. She liked that idea. Goldblatt had known she would.

But Emma wasn’t beaten yet. Next, the folders disappeared from the ward.

‘They’re gone,’ said Ludo.

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you looked under the desks?’

‘Malcolm, please. They’re gone!’

‘Where?’

‘Don’t, Malcolm,’ Ludo pleaded. ‘Not today. It’s the wrong time of the month.’

And that was more information than he needed.

‘I’m not joking, Malcolm. We’ve got to do something.’

‘We’, thought Goldblatt. How rarely Ludo used the word – how telling when she did.

The folders had gone, but that didn’t necessarily implicate Emma. There was one other place to look.

They went down to the Prof’s secretary on the first floor, who sat in front of a wall of shelves on which the Fuertler’s files stood in long, brown, dusty ranks. The Prof’s secretary hated the files, which made her room look like some kind of archive. None of the folders for the patients on the ward was there. Those for the patients who were booked to come in during the next week were gone as well. When Goldblatt asked to see the book where people signed the files out, the Prof’s secretary looked at him as if he came from another planet. Or at least from a medical unit where people knew how to do things.

Of course, thought, Goldblatt. Why would you want a book? Why on earth would you want to be able to trace the whereabouts of a set of files containing unique information that had never been copied, catalogued, or entered on to a computerized database, and therefore could never be retrieved if the hard copies were lost? Why would you want to do anything to discourage people from just walking off with them and never putting them back? And why would you worry about people never putting them back, when even a few small gaps could render the whole lot useless for the purpose of drawing statistically reliable conclusions?

Goldblatt asked the Prof’s secretary who had taken the missing files. She gave him another look. The meaning of this one was even clearer.

Goldblatt felt a new respect for the Prof’s secretary. She was surly, dismissive, and unhelpful, but she had a real knack for communicating without saying a word.

Hiding the Fuertler’s files was crude, thought Goldblatt, but effective. He couldn’t resist the challenge.

‘They’re in her office,’ said Ludo when they retreated to the cafeteria to think the problem over. ‘They have to be.’ Ludo’s shoulders were hunched and she was leaning forward conspiratorially with a desperate gleam in her eye. She looked as if she was capable of anything – absolutely anything – except thinking of a way to get the files back from Emma.

Goldblatt nodded.

‘The Prof will forget I even exist if Emma doesn’t let me fill them in.’

Goldblatt shook his head. The Prof wouldn’t forget she existed. She would remember, only too well.

Ludo stared at him in despair.

‘We’ll just have to go in there and get them,’ said Goldblatt at last.

‘How? Emma always keeps her door locked.’

Goldblatt thought about that. ‘Then we’ll need a little bit of guile.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Trickery.’

‘Ooh, Malcolm! I love it when you talk dirty.’

Guileful plans, Goldblatt had learned, always work best when fronted by the least guileful person you can find.

‘But why do I have to tell Emma the Prof’s looking for her?’ asked the HO, looking back apologetically at the patient they had dragged her away from.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Goldblatt.

‘It’s for your own sake,’ added Ludo. ‘The less you know the better.’

The HO peered suspiciously at Ludo. Then she turned back to Goldblatt. ‘Malcolm, what’s going on?’

‘Don’t worry. If Emma asks later, just say I was the one who told you the Prof wanted her.’

‘What if she asks when I tell her?’

‘She won’t. Trust me.’

The HO did trust him. The trouble was, the HO didn’t trust Ludo, and for the first time she could remember, Goldblatt and Ludo seemed to be telling her to do the same thing.

‘Wait one minute after I go into her office,’ said Goldblatt. ‘No more. Then come running in and say the Prof’s in clinic and she’s been looking for her everywhere.’

‘Everywhere!’ shouted Ludo, demonstrating what was required. ‘She’s been looking all over—’

‘Thanks, Ludo. We get the picture.’

‘What if she asks why the Prof didn’t bleep her?’ said the HO.

‘She won’t. Trust me. Just come running in and make it look real. And then stand back.’

‘Stand back?’

‘We don’t want you getting hurt.’

An enraged bull elephant would be as nothing to Emma Burton once she thought the Prof was looking for her.

The HO hesitated.

‘All right?’ said Goldblatt.

‘All right,’ said the HO.

‘Good.’ Goldblatt turned to go to the SR’s office, which was on the other side of the nurses’ tearoom. He looked back at the HO. ‘One minute.’

He knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’ said Emma.

Goldblatt went in.

A minute later, the HO came tearing into the room. ‘The Prof!’ she cried. ‘The Prof!’

‘What? What?’ demanded Emma, jumping to her feet.

‘She wants you! In clinic! Now! She’s been—’

The HO jumped out of the way, just in time. And Emma was gone, flying out of the room in a flurry of white coat.

Goldblatt gazed at the HO with genuine admiration. ‘That was excellent.’

‘I did some acting at university,’ said the HO. ‘Ibsen, Chekhov. My Portia in the Merchant of Venice was...’ The HO stopped. She shook her head, mirroring Goldblatt’s own gesture. ‘No? Well. There we are. Um... Anything else, Malcolm?’

‘No. Thanks.’

The HO left. Goldblatt looked around the SR’s office. It was a dank, windowless little room with a desk and a set of shelves. It must originally have been intended as a bathroom. There was a small sink against the wall with two stoppered pipes sticking out of the plaster. The room was a terrific mess, with papers and files and patient records that Emma had taken with her because she never managed to dictate her letters in time, despite the fact that you weren’t supposed to remove patient notes from clinic. Suddenly Goldblatt understood why the spotty youth from Medical Records was always hanging around the ward looking for missing notes. There were mugs of cold, scummy tea. Funny that the nurses were always complaining that their tearoom next door was chronically short of mugs.

And there, in a pile on the floor, was a stack of brown Manila folders.

Goldblatt picked them up.

Ludo appeared in the doorway.

‘Here,’ he said, putting the Fuertler’s files in Ludo’s arms. ‘Enjoy.’