‘DO YOU THINK THAT’S normal, Malcolm?’ asked Lesley, when Goldblatt regaled her with the tale of Emma’s concealment of the Fuertler’s files and the improvisatory piece of street theatre he had staged with the HO in order to recover them.
Goldblatt frowned. Normal? What kind of a question was that? Nothing was normal on the Prof’s unit, and by now Lesley knew it. But he was quite proud of the street theatre, and all he really wanted from Lesley was for her to tell him how clever he was. He had already told himself how clever he was, a number of times, but it wasn’t the same as hearing it from someone else.
But Lesley wasn’t in a congratulatory mood. He could already hear it in her voice.
‘I’d be worried if someone I worked with did that to me.’
‘Really?’ he said.
‘I’d be worried about what she was going to do next.’
Goldblatt sighed. ‘What can she do, Les?’
‘Don’t laugh, Malcolm.’
Goldblatt laughed.
‘That’s all you ever say. “What can they do?” You’re hopeless! It’s not the first time. You never see it coming. People do things, Malcolm. Haven’t you learned that by now?’ Lesley stared at him in despair. ‘You’re blind to it. You know what your problem is? You think it’s a joke. You think everything’s a joke. You can’t believe anyone’s going to take anything seriously – and then they do. And they stab you in the back. You never believe they’re going to do it, and they do.’
‘Like who?’ demanded Goldblatt. ‘Just give me one example.’
‘Dr Oakley.’
Good example. ‘Well he was just... he was just...’
‘He was what? “He’ll support me, Les. Dr Oakley will back me up, Les. Dr Oakley will stand up for me, Les.” Do you remember that, Malcolm? Do you remember what you said? And then what did he do?’
Dr Oakley was a consultant on the unit where Goldblatt had held his last substantive post. They both knew perfectly well what Dr Oakley had done, and the impact it had had on Goldblatt’s career. Goldblatt was still feeling the effect. Was there really any need to drag it all up again?
‘You’re the one who asked for an example, Malcolm.’ Lesley shook her head. ‘How do you keep getting yourself into these situations?’
‘What situations?’
‘These situations.’
Goldblatt was silent. Lesley gazed at him.
‘It’s not so bad, Les.’
Lesley held up her hands, as if she wasn’t going to say anything else.
Goldblatt knew she would. In another minute or two. She could never stop until she had said everything she wanted to say. And she hadn’t said everything yet, he could tell. Not by a long shot.
He smiled to himself, watching her as she finished off her salad with sharp, jabbing thrusts of her fork. That was one of the things he loved about her. The way she couldn’t help herself when there was something to say.
She put the fork down. She was staring at her plate. It was coming. He could see it. Another moment... Another moment...
‘I’m sorry, Malcolm, but do you know what I see? I see a professor who can’t cope with what’s going on in her own unit and doesn’t even want to know. I see a locum specialist registrar who’s got some kind of a complex and seems to be sabotaging what everyone else is supposed to be doing. And then I see you, Malcolm.’
‘At least there’s a bright spot somewhere.’
‘You see? There you are! A joke! This is the weirdest, most dysfunctional, most...’ Lesley shook her head impatiently, searching for the words, ‘... fucked-up unit you’ve ever worked on. And now you do this thing with these... files. You just keep waving the red rag, don’t you? You can’t help yourself. Why didn’t you let this SHO sort things out for herself? Why do you have to get involved?’
Goldblatt didn’t say anything.
‘I thought the last place was bad, but this one? Malcolm, honestly, what do you think is going to happen if you keep going like this?’
Goldblatt sighed. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Be smarter.’
‘You usually tell me that’s my problem.’
Lesley rolled her eyes.
‘Look, what difference does it make? I’m on a fucked-up unit, you said it yourself.’
‘It isn’t the first.’
‘Thank you. Is it my fault?’ Suddenly it was all coming out of him, as well. ‘What do I do about it? Another fucked-up unit! That’s what you get as a locum, Les. You get fucked-up units, all right? And then you end up getting another locum job on another fucked-up unit. And another one. And another one. And it never fucking ends!’ He was breathing heavily. ‘Thank Andrew Oakley!’
‘Of course. Blame him, as always.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t you think you might have had something to do with it? Don’t you think you might have contributed?’
‘I’m not going to go into it again. It’s ridiculous!’
Lesley stared at him. ‘Look how angry you are.’
‘I’m angry?’
‘No, of course not. Not you. Not Malcolm Goldblatt. He’s always in control.’
Goldblatt was silent for a minute. ‘The other day my house officer said she thought I was angry,’ he said quietly. He looked at Lesley and smiled disbelievingly.
‘Malcolm,’ said Lesley, ‘have you taken a look at yourself recently?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t believe you. I just don’t believe you any more.’ Lesley got up from the table. She leaned against the wall, arms folded, her head shaking in exasperation. ‘And don’t tell me about the old Jewish lady, all right? Just don’t tell me about her.’
‘Which old Jewish lady?’
Lesley looked at him with astonishment. ‘What do you mean, which old Jewish lady?’
‘Which old Jewish lady?’
‘The one you’re always talking about.’
Goldblatt looked at her uncomprehendingly.
‘The one who was vhizzy, Malcolm.’
Goldblatt smiled incredulously. ‘Have I told you about her?’
‘Malcolm, are you serious?’
Goldblatt preferred not to answer questions like that.
‘You’ve told me about her.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. The orange tablets? The Helmstedt accent?’
‘The Helmstedt accent... the orange tablets...’ repeated Goldblatt slowly ‘I have told you about her, haven’t I?’
‘Yes, Malcolm. You have.’
‘When?’
Lesley laughed.
‘How many times?’
Lesley shook her head in amazement. ‘How many times? She’s in your head, Malcolm.’
‘No. She’s dead.’
‘Exactly. She’s dead and she’s gone to live inside your head.’
Goldblatt frowned, wondering. Had he told Lesley about the old Jewish lady? He must have, but he couldn’t remember. He looked back at Lesley. ‘I wasn’t going to mention her, anyway.’
‘Well, don’t!’
‘I won’t.’
‘Good. Because I never want to hear about her again.’
Goldblatt shrugged. Since it seemed that she knew about her, what did Lesley have against the old Jewish lady? It didn’t hurt to hear about her now and then.
But maybe this wasn’t the moment. Lesley was gazing at the floor, arms folded tightly across her chest. She looked angry. Why was she angry? Hadn’t she just said that he was the one who was angry? He wasn’t angry. Not until now, anyway. Maybe now he was angry.
He wondered how angry Lesley really was. He wondered if she was so angry that she wasn’t going to want to have sex with him that night. But if she was angry and then they made up, they’d have even better sex. Make-up sex with Lesley was awesome, easily the best make-up sex he’d ever had. The best sex he’d ever had, make-up or not.
He glanced at her again, wondering.
Lesley noticed him. For a moment, her glance was unrelenting.
Then she smiled. She couldn’t help it.
Goldblatt grinned. She probably knew exactly what he was thinking.
Suddenly her gaze was serious again. ‘Be careful of that SR, Malcolm. All right? Watch out for her. People do things. You never see it until it’s too late.’
Goldblatt laughed. ‘What’s she going to do, Les? Bite me?’
It really hadn’t occurred to Goldblatt that he had to be careful of Emma.
He had managed to figure out that things weren’t going well between them, and he had even had a conversation with her to try to smooth things over, which had turned out to be fine, which was worrying. But that Emma would actually do something, that was another thought altogether. Lesley was right. He never saw it coming. Life had poked him in the eye with so many sharpened sticks – some of which, he had to admit, he had wielded himself – that when each new poke came he tended to blink, wipe away the blood, pick up any stray scraps of retina, and keep going. Even when he hadn’t done it himself, he just never seemed to respond by figuring out how he could poke the poker back. Sometimes, he wished that he was the kind of person who did. But whenever he set out to do it, he just couldn’t motivate himself to bother. It seemed ridiculous. But other people did bother, apparently thinking he had poked them in the first place. They poked him even when he didn’t see how they could possibly believe he had poked them to start with.
If Lesley was right, Emma was the kind of person who bothered. It was obvious that Emma and he were spectacularly ill-suited to be working together. It was madness that she had been positioned as his SR and he as her junior. It wasn’t that Goldblatt thought Emma lacked competence – she just lacked experience. And inevitably there were going to be incidents where inexperience showed.
As when Emma tried to get a colonoscope shoved up Mr Siepl’s rectum just because the Prof had requested it. Goldblatt didn’t believe for a second that Emma, without the Prof’s prompting, would have ordered that test, given the story that Mr Siepl told. But a more experienced registrar would have known that the Prof had requested it because she couldn’t be bothered taking a proper medical history in clinic, which in turn was because the Prof was a terrible clinician, ten times worse as a clinician than Emma herself. You only had to sit through one of those head-banging corroborees the Prof called a ward round to see that. All those desperate scufflings through the notes, those hesitations that were disguised to sound like thoughtful speculation, those furtive glances at Dr Morris...
An experienced registrar would have known that this isn’t an unusual phenomenon in a major teaching hospital, where a proportion of appointments to consultant posts are made largely on the basis of academic achievement. Academic achievement bears no relationship to clinical skill, and consequently, teaching hospitals teem with academically inclined consultants who are fine researchers and terrible clinicians. Goldblatt had worked with some who were truly appalling. In Professor Small, Goldblatt recognized the signs – not the academic achievement, but the lack of clinical acumen. Like all terrible clinicians, she relied on tests to make up for her deficiency, ordering investigations that would have been unnecessary if she were able to practise the art of taking a history and examining her patients properly. Emma, apparently, defined her role in life as ensuring that every one of these tests was done. An experienced registrar would have done the opposite. She would have known that terrible clinicians like the Prof secretly know how terrible they are and will turn a blind eye to reasonable revision of their tests by competent subordinates. In fact, they more or less expect it to happen and come to rely on it.
The problem as Goldblatt saw it was simple. Emma had risen too far too fast.
But he was wrong. Or not entirely right. Emma had risen too far too fast, that was true, but that was barely the half of it. The other half of it lay in the nature of the relationship that had developed between Emma and Professor Small before he had even arrived on the unit. Goldblatt hadn’t yet recognized the intensity of the Prof’s fear of disrespect and her craving to be loved – his understanding of the relationship between the Prof and her locum SR was even murkier.
And yet there were really only two things he needed to know to understand this relationship. The first thing was that the Prof gave Emma concert tickets. The second was that Emma took them.
No one had been more surprised than Emma Burton herself when she got the job as registrar on Professor Small’s unit.
After eighteen months of drudging SHO jobs in district hospitals in the Midlands, she passed her second part and decided to try for a registrar post in London. Suddenly she found herself competing with people who had done two or even three years as SHOs in London teaching hospitals, and who seemed to project an air of vastly more confidence, knowledge, and capability than she had. Job after job slipped past her. Following each abortive interview she was advised to come back after another year as an SHO, but she had begun to wonder whether that was just another way of saying that she needn’t bother coming back for a job in London at all. She had almost resigned herself to looking for a reg post elsewhere, when she was notified that she was shortlisted for the registrar job on Professor Small’s unit, for which she had applied a couple of months earlier. She almost didn’t bother coming for the interview, but at the last minute decided to... and got the job!
She still didn’t understand why. She couldn’t see her advantages over the other candidates, who all came from well-known teaching hospitals in London. They had all seemed much cleverer and more experienced than her when they had been speaking to each other while waiting for the interviews to start. She had barely opened her mouth.
The reg job on Professor Small’s unit was a big step up for Emma. It wasn’t only her first registrar job, it was her first job in a major teaching hospital. She found it difficult. She had never supervised her own HO, and found it hard to be decisive. People expected her to know more than she did, and she worried about her want of medical experience. The administrative demands often seemed overwhelming, and she feared that Professor Small would think she lacked organizational ability. The competitiveness of the academic environment was confronting, and she didn’t know what to say when other doctors asked about her non-existent research interests.
Emma felt uncomfortable about other things as well. She had moved in with her sister, who was an accountant with a firm in the City, and was embarrassed that she didn’t live independently. Or with a boyfriend. She didn’t even have a boyfriend, and that embarrassed her too. In reality she didn’t have any friends at all, at least not in London, and that wasn’t only embarrassing but created real difficulties whenever the Prof gave her a pair of concert tickets and she had to find someone to take.
None of these things was a surprise to the Prof. She recognized in Emma a version of herself – shorter and plumper, but still in many ways a version of herself – as she had been in her own early days, before her Fuertler-fuelled rise to power. Wasn’t that, after all, the reason she had chosen to give her the job?
The Prof soon had good reason to be satisfied with her choice. Her new registrar wasn’t at all like the snippety, uppity London-trained registrars she had had before. Emma was desperate to please. She had never worked within shouting distance of a professor, and in her uncorrupted mind a professor, any professor, was only one step lower on the ladder of infallibility than a god. She listened seriously to the Prof’s medical prognostications, and paid her more homage and attention than the Prof could remember having been paid by another doctor in years. Every wish of the Prof was her command, and she would stay back until all hours of the night or come in on weekends to fulfil them, even though she was hopelessly disorganized and committed herself to do so much that she rarely managed to achieve half of what she promised to do. She was like moist, malleable putty in the Prof’s hands and the Prof was going to mould, fashion, and shape her. She had every intention of holding on to Emma for as long as she could – she just wasn’t going to let her know that.
Emma, for her part, began to see a golden vista of a career opening up for her under the aegis of Professor Small, if only she could hang on to her job. First the reg post, then a research degree in the Prof’s lab, then the SR job on the Prof’s unit, then a consultancy. Why not? Was it too much of a dream?
Unaware of the degree to which the Prof valued her pliant ineptitude, Emma lived in terror of this vista suddenly being snatched away in some cataclysmic act of punishment. She was petrified that the Prof would discover that she had little confidence, and hardly ever managed to get any of her work finished on time. Consequently, she drove herself into a frenzy, falling behind in her work and pretending to be confident. If only she had realized that it was precisely these qualities that the Prof had already discerned and most cherished in her, she could have relaxed and enjoyed the natural defects of her ways. Instead, her anxiety grew, and with it her obsequiousness, making her ever more attractive to the Prof, who, as a result, was ever more careful to do nothing to let Emma see that she knew all about her, staging carefully managed displays of anger at some administrative folly once every fortnight, and driving her into further agonies of self-doubt.
They were in a circle, Emma and the Prof. Whether it was vicious or virtuous, they were chasing each other around it at ever increasing speeds.
The relationship grew closer, warmer, stickier. They became a familiar sight in the hospital corridors – bony, hair-sprayed Andrea Small, dressed in one of her chic grey or brown suits with an orange or yellow Liberty’s scarf thrown elegantly over her shoulders, and chubby, pink Emma Burton trundling along beside her in her white coat. The Prof never went to see a patient without Emma in tow, not even her patients in the private wards of the hospital on the ninth floor. Emma soon started including the private patients on her daily rounds with the house officer, sensing that the Prof would appreciate it if she did. By way of reward, the Prof bleeped Emma every Monday afternoon and asked her to come and help out in her private Fuertler’s clinic.
While the SR routinely went to the Prof’s NHS clinic on Thursdays, it was a great compliment for the registrar to be asked to come and help out in her private clinic on Mondays. But it was also a great disruption, because that just happened to be when the SR did her ward round. At the clinic, Emma invariably found herself doing nothing more useful than sitting in the Prof’s consulting room and observing the technique of the great Fuertlerologist. Had one been less terrified by the prospect of one’s golden vista turning into an ashen apocalypse, one might have wondered whether the Prof wasn’t merely trying to get one away from the SR, like a jealous mother who can’t stand her daughter having her own friends. One might even have been quite ambivalent about the apparent indispensability one had suddenly acquired.
There were a lot of things in the relationship that developed between Emma Burton and Professor Small that one might have been ambivalent about. An intricate array of rewards and punishments was woven into its fabric to which only the Prof held the code. Emma’s mood oscillated from euphoria to black despair, and it was the Prof who pushed the pendulum. As registrar, Emma was required to dictate summaries on patients who had been discharged, which were sent to their GPs. The Prof made a point of reading them before they went out. It took Emma agonies of procrastination and uncertainty to dictate each summary, and she was soon a long way behind. For week after week the Prof would just read the trickle of summaries, not saying a word. The tension built. Emma became frantic with the knowledge that she was falling further behind and with the fear that the Prof must be growing increasingly unhappy. The Prof’s silence made it worse. By the time the Prof asked her into her office to enquire about the backlog in discharge summaries it was almost a relief. The Prof would look at Emma and shake her head in mute disappointment. Emma tried to explain. The Prof shook her head some more. Emma started crying. Crying wasn’t going to help. The Prof told her that it wasn’t good enough. Emma left. Ten minutes later the Prof bleeped her to tell her not to worry, that she, the Prof herself, would come in on the weekend and do some of the summaries. Herself? Yes, the Prof said, herself. On the weekend? Yes, the Prof said, on the weekend. Emma told her that she’d come in on the weekend as well.
They would both be there on the weekend. But they wouldn’t do any discharge summaries, or one or two at the most. The Prof would take Emma out to lunch in one of the cafes nearby, and give her two tickets for a concert that night. Knowing perfectly well that Emma had no one to take but her sister, the Prof would tell her to let her know who she went with. Discharge summaries weren’t mentioned again for another month, when the Prof suddenly discovered that it still wasn’t good enough.
The Prof soon began hinting that she might be able to extend Emma’s registrar year until Emma could find a place to do her research degree. Then she started hinting that the Fuertler’s Foundation might come up with the money for an MD for Emma in the Prof’s lab, side by side with the foul-mouthed Russian post-doc Bolkovsky, who could supervise her.
Occasionally, the Prof hinted that the Fuertler’s Foundation money might fall through.
All of this had been going on for months by the time Goldblatt arrived. It was so far outside what he understood as a relationship one has with one’s boss that he probably wouldn’t have known how to deal with it even if he had recognized it from the start. Which he didn’t. He simply fell into the middle of it, as if out of the sky.
Because one day the SR walked out.
The Prof didn’t like the SR. She had never really liked her, but at the time there had been complicated political reasons involving favours owed and obligations to be created that had made it prudent to appoint her. The SR had all sorts of ideas and criticisms, and didn’t approve of the way the Prof did anything. In the Prof’s opinion, she was haughty, uppity, and opinionated, and the Prof was glad to see the back of her. In fact, looked at from a certain perspective – or from almost any perspective – it might even have been said that the Prof had helped her on her way.
But losing the SR, however welcome, did create a problem. The SR’s contract was supposed to have run for another eight months. After that – although there would be the tedious charade of interviews to go through – the position was spoken for. It had long been promised to a registrar who was finishing his MD on Fuertler’s of the lungs in Tom de Witte’s lab. Tom de Witte claimed that the heir apparent couldn’t possibly finish his research in under eight months, as he and the Prof had originally agreed. The Prof said she needed an SR now, and hinted that she might advertise the post as a substantive job, which had to be for a minimum of a year, and dump the heir apparent. Tom de Witte was outraged. The heir apparent had come to him from a cardiologist friend who used him as the respiratory consultant for all his private patients, so there was a lot to play for. Six months, said Tom de Witte, mentally turning the screws on the heir apparent, who was a lazy dog and should have finished his research by now anyway. Done, said the Prof.
Six months. Who could fill the gap for six months?
Emma Burton hadn’t even been a registrar for that long. She was still finding her feet, and the feet she had found were decidedly wobbly.
But the Prof couldn’t face another bout with someone like the old SR, and impulsively reached for the one person she knew who would never give her that kind of aggravation.
‘Emma,’ asked the Prof, having summoned her to her office, ‘how would you feel about taking over as the SR?’
‘As SR?’ replied Emma weakly.
‘Yes,’ said the Prof, ‘for the next five or six months.’
Emma looked towards the Prof uncertainly, fixing her gaze on the flaming, red-hot diadem that the Prof was holding out invisibly for her to don.
‘It will be good for you,’ said the Prof.
‘All right,’ said Emma.
‘Just all right?’
‘No. Thank you, Prof.’
The Prof gave her a pair of tickets she just happened to have for a concert that evening so that Emma could go out and celebrate her temporary promotion.
But that only created another vacancy. The Prof eventually realized that she should have waited to see the quality of the applications she got before choosing to make Emma the locum SR. The usual morass of clapped-out locums with experience in obscure and unsavoury hospitals sent in their names, but then the Prof came across Goldblatt’s CV and suddenly discovered that she had turned up an outstanding – or at least not heartsinkingly mediocre – candidate. She selected him immediately. Perhaps she felt, deep down, that if Emma was the SR, someone on the team actually needed to know what they were doing. Yet the consequences shouldn’t have been too hard to predict. Emma barely had the self-confidence to tell an HO what to do. What the Prof thought she was going to do when it came to managing Goldblatt was something that Goldblatt, for one, never managed to figure out.
At the precise moment when all of Emma’s self-doubt had been brought to an exquisite height of sensitivity by her premature promotion, here came Malcolm Goldblatt, swaggering on to the ward like a walking magnifying glass to amplify her insecurity.
And to add insult to injury – or injury to injury, from Emma’s perspective – as registrar, Goldblatt got the running of the ward, and with it the lion’s share of chances to fulfil the Prof’s bidding. In one fell swoop, the care of the patients, the arrangement of the admissions, the dictation of the discharge summaries, and, most crucially, the filling of the Fuertler’s files, had been taken out of her hands. In the careering rollercoaster ride of favour and emotion on which Professor Small was taking her, the one certainty Emma had fashioned for herself was that her capacity to stay aboard depended on her ability to demonstrate, continuously and convincingly, her unwavering loyalty, indispensability, and adulation to the Prof. In order to do this Emma needed ward patients. She needed Fuertler’s files. She needed some incompetent turtle of a registrar so she could come riding back on to the ward and save the day, restoring order to the unit, hope to the sick, and the light to Professor Small’s eyes. Instead, she got Malcolm Goldblatt, who was five times as experienced as she was.
Of course, complained Emma bitterly to her sister – who heard every excruciating detail of Emma’s travails each night when she came home from her accountancy job, and often on the phone during the day as well – Goldblatt had offered to let her keep any of the registrar functions she wanted. Very magnanimous! She knew that offer for what it was, a cynical ploy to steal the SR role from under her nose. Well, the Prof had made her SR, and she had made her SR for a reason. The registrar could do the registrar jobs!
Yet those were the jobs she craved. Without them, all Emma had were the Prof’s ward round and Thursday clinic to serve her. And Goldblatt, of course, was at the Prof’s round as well.
Emma was choking. Already she could feel herself gasping for the oxygen that flowed in the form of the Prof’s approval. If it hadn’t been for Goldblatt’s suicidal refusal to manipulate beds she might have gone out of her mind with anxiety. But that was nothing but the barest lifeline, a mere trickle of opportunities to demonstrate her reliability and loyalty, and what a villain Goldblatt was by comparison. And the only reason she got even that was because Goldblatt, the lilywhite, had turned it down. Goldblatt, with his big announcement that he didn’t ‘manipulate’ beds.
Before she had heard Goldblatt say that, Emma had always thought it was a privilege to help the Prof when there was a patient she wanted to admit. Somehow Goldblatt had managed to make her feel dirty for doing it. Yet she couldn’t just stop. Someone had to do it, she said bitterly to her sister. It was all very well for Goldblatt to tell her that she should tell the Prof to talk to him. You couldn’t tell the Prof who to talk to. She couldn’t, anyway. And you couldn’t just tell the Prof she couldn’t admit somebody she wanted to admit. Did Goldblatt think that just because he had made his big announcement, anything had actually changed? The Prof still expected beds to be manipulated, and Emma was still manipulating them, doing Goldblatt’s dirty work because he was too pure and high-minded to do it himself. Just because he thought he was the only one who was allowed to have principles.
Well, she had principles too! Plenty of them, she told her sister. Only she didn’t necessarily shout about them all the time. She had better manners. She didn’t necessarily want to humiliate other people by sticking to them.
And what about that other ridiculous principle of his? He had humiliated her then, too. No one could know every principle in the world. She didn’t know the Broderip–Anderssen Principle. So what? It didn’t mean he had to make a fool of her in front of the Prof. He could have said: ‘This is a very obscure principle that very few people know.’ Or he could have said: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten it.’ That’s what she would have done. She wouldn’t have gone ahead and given a lecture on it.
And there were all the other things. There was the way he had got rid of Simmons, for instance, as if Simmons wasn’t even sick enough to be in hospital. He could have waited for her round. She would almost certainly have sent Simmons home, wouldn’t she? He could have let her make the decision.
Emma hated him. Slowly, surely, her hatred grew.
Lesley knew. Instinctively, without even having met her, without having heard about half the things that had happened, Lesley knew what was going on in Emma’s mind. Even if Lesley had heard about nothing else, the story about the hiding of the Fuertler’s files, alone, would have been enough to alert her.
But Goldblatt laughed it off, as he always did. Even after Lesley told him to be careful, he couldn’t take it seriously. So Emma and he didn’t get on. So she disliked him. What could she do? Talk behind his back? What could she say? She was the one who had admitted Simmons, she was the one hiding Fuertler’s files amidst the mounds of illicitly purloined notes in her office. Who was the one behaving reasonably, and who was the one flailing around out of her depth? Surely anyone looking at the situation fairly and objectively would see that at once.
Besides, even if she wanted to talk behind his back, who would she talk to?