‘Thanks,’ he said softly.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and the impact of it was enough to make Kelly feel as though she had been winded and bruised by an unexpected blow.
‘I’d better go and talk to the mother,’ she said quickly, but he didn’t seem to hear her. He was too busy pushing a fine syringe into the damaged area of the child’s face with delicate precision even to notice Kelly’s departure.
Heart hammering, Kelly picked up the casualty card, rang through to the reception desk, and asked for the mother of Gemma Jenkins to be sent along to the doctor’s office.
She sat down, noticing dispassionately that her hands were actually trembling. She had never thought that she would see Randall ever again, she really hadn’t—or perhaps that had been wishful thinking. But even given the notoriously closely knit world of British medicine, she certainly hadn’t considered that just the merest glimpse of him, just the sound of that seductive mellifluous voice would be enough to shatter her composure and make her feel like the insecure seventeen-year-old she had been when she’d first met him.
She sighed. Nine long years ago. Where had they gone? Nine years of study, study, study and work, work, work.
And she had imagined that she had acquired a little sophistication on the way, had thought that she had become a little more worldly-wise. Was she going to let just the sight of Randall rip away all the complex layers of emotional maturity she had carefully constructed over the years?
Like hell she was!
There was a soft rap on the door, and Kelly instinctively sat upright in her chair, pulling her narrow shoulders back and arranging her features into a neutral expression.
‘Come in!’ she called.
Gemma’s mother had, predictably, brought the boyfriend in, clinging possessively on to his arm, as though he were the first prize in a raffle. He had lurid tattoos over every available inch of flesh and he stank of booze. Kelly swallowed down the feeling of revulsion, determined to remain impartial. She had been taught, over and over again, that emotionally involved doctors who made value judgements were simply not doing their jobs properly.
The mother could have been little more than twenty-two—a woman who looked little more than a girl herself. She’s younger than me, thought Kelly, with a jolt of surprise. And yet there was a grimy greyness to her complexion which told of a life lived inside, in high-rise blocks far away from the fresh air and the sunshine. She wore cheap, ill-fitting clothes. Her legs were pale and bare and she had squeezed her feet into tight, patent shoes, obviously new, though they were spattered with mud. On her heels she wore plasters where the shoes had obviously cut into her flesh. Her blonde hair was full of gel with little bits spiking upwards like a porcupine’s, and already the dark roots were an inch long. Stooping, sad and pathetic, she stared back at Kelly with blank, disillusioned eyes and Kelly cursed a society which could allow the cycle of deprivation which had made this woman into one of life’s losers. And would now probably do the same for her daughter.
She schooled her face into its listening expression. ‘Mrs Jenkins?’ she asked politely.
‘It’s Miss!’ interrupted the man. ‘That bastard didn’t bother marrying her when she had his kid.’
‘And your name is ...?’ prompted Kelly.
‘Alan,’ he swaggered. ‘Alan Landers.’
‘How’s ... how is Gemma?’ the woman asked, her voice a plaintive whine.
At last. ‘The doctor is suturing her face now,’ said Kelly briskly. ‘Given his skill, and the fact that your daughter is young enough to heal, well—we’re hoping for the best, but I have to warn you that she will have a scar, though the surgeon is doing his best to ensure that it will be as small and as neat as possible.’
She took a deep breath. The police would investigate, but the A & E department themselves would need details of what had happened. ‘Just for the record, would you mind telling me how it happened?’
Mr Landers screwed his face up into an ugly and menacing scowl. ‘Stupid kid was winding the dog up. That dog wouldn’t hurt no one.’
Refraining from pointing out the obvious flaw in his logic, Kelly thought that if she had been a man and not a doctor nothing would have given her greater pleasure than to punch this ignorant lout on the nose, but even if she had done, that wouldn’t have been the answer. He had probably grown up fighting violence with violence, and as soon as he was old enough had gone out and bought an aggressive dog as a kind of ferocious status symbol, supposed to demonstrate just how much of a man he was.
Kelly looked directly at the man. ‘Did you witness the attack?’
‘Nah.’
‘But it was your dog?’ persisted Kelly, her fountain-pen flying as she wrote on the casualty card.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you weren’t there when it attacked?’
‘That’s right,’ he said again.
Kelly had to bite back the incredulous question of how someone could leave a big, violent dog alone with a small child. ‘So where were you when the attack took place on Gemma?’
This provoked a raucous belly laugh. ‘In the bedroom,’ he leered, and his eyebrows lifted suggestively as his gaze dropped to Kelly’s breasts. ‘Want me to tell you what we was up to?’
‘That won’t be necessary, Mr Landers,’ said Kelly crisply. She turned to the woman and her totally vacant expression.
‘You do know, Miss Jenkins, that I’m going to have to call in Social Services?’
‘Do what?’ The grey-faced woman was on her feet at once. ‘And get some nosy-parker social worker sticking their oar in?’
Kelly looked at them both sadly. Didn’t they realise that if the child was deemed to be at serious risk she could be taken away from them? God forgive her, but in a way she wished that Gemma would be free of them, if she hadn’t also known that often children in care suffered from a different kind of neglect. ‘I am also going to have to report the injury to the police—’
‘What for?’ the man demanded belligerently.
Kelly put her pen down. ‘Because this category dog is supposed to be muzzled, Mr Landers—as I’m sure you know. It certainly shouldn’t have been left alone in a room with a toddler ...’ Kelly paused, recognising that, despite all her pep-talking to herself, she had done the unforgivable—she had sounded judgemental. But doctors were human too, and she wondered seriously whether anyone in their right mind could have stopped themselves from adopting a critical tone with a case of this sort.
But it was when the man stabbed an angry finger in front of her face that she realised that if she wasn’t careful, he really could turn nasty. She had better let him have his say. Even in her three short weeks in A & E, she had learnt that ‘verbalising your feelings’, as one of the social workers put it, also tended to defuse pent-up emotions.
Mr Landers’s face was contorted into an ugly mask. ‘You listen here to me, you little bitch—’
‘What’s going on in here?’ came a deep, aristocratic drawl.
The three of them looked at the door, where the tall, dark and rangy form of Randall Seton stood surveying them through narrowed eyes.
The man replied in time-honoured fashion. ‘Push off, you stuck-up git!’
There was a silence of about two seconds, and then Randall moved forward, his whole stance one of alert, healthy and muscular readiness. He radiated strength and he spoke with quietly chilling authority; but then, thought Kelly somewhat bitterly, that was the legacy of privilege too.
‘Listen to me,’ he said softly. ‘And listen to me carefully. Dr Hartley has just been caring for your daughter in Casualty. So have I. I’ve just stitched together the most appalling wound inflicted by an animal that I’ve ever seen, praying as I did so that it will leave as little scar tissue as possible. An anaesthetist is currently pumping air down into her lungs, because where the dog’s teeth ripped at her throat it caused such swelling that if an ambulance hadn’t been on the scene so promptly, her airway could have been obstructed and your daughter could have died from lack of oxygen.’
The mother gave an audible gasp of horror, as though the reality of what had happened had just hit her.
‘She is shortly going to be admitted to the children’s ward,’ he continued, ‘where she will be looked after by another series of staff. Now we’ve all been doing our job, because that’s what we’re paid to do and that’s what we chose to do. What we do not expect is to be criticised or insulted for doing just that. Have I made myself perfectly clear, Mr— Mr—?’ The dark, elegent eyebrows were raised in query, but there was no disguising the dangerous spark of anger which made the grey eyes appear so flinty. At that moment, he looked positively savage, thought Kelly, but he somehow managed to do it in a very controlled kind of way. But there again, Randall was the master of self-control, wasn’t he?
‘Landers,’ gulped the man. ‘Yes, Doctor. I understand.’
‘Good.’ Then the dark-lashed grey eyes swept over Kelly. ‘Can I see you for a minute?’
Nine years, she thought, slightly hysterically, and he asks can he see me for a minute. Breaking up with Randall—not that such a brief acquaintanceship really warranted such a grand-sounding title—had been the best thing which had ever happened to her. But she had often wondered, as women always did wonder about the first man who had made them dizzy with desire, just what would happen if they saw each other again. What would they think? What would they say?
She had never imagined such an inglorious reunion taking place in a tiny and scruffy little office in one of London’s busiest A & E departments, nor him saying something as trite as that.
He looked ...
Admit it, Kelly, she thought reluctantly. He looks like a dream. Every woman’s fantasy walking around in a white coat.
