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George said. She got to her feet and turned to the door. ‘Oh, well, I suppose you’re right. It’s not important who sent the note. The important thing is to tell the coroner I’m not happy.’
    Didier St Cloud was on his feet too. ‘Really? Is there something fishy?’
    ‘Fishier than three in a row?’ George asked. ‘Isn’t that fishy enough?’
    ‘I doubt it would be for a coroner,’ Didier said. ‘Would it? You’d know that better than me, but I imagine even coroners know that these things just happen sometimes. Like my twins. Like the
parents
‘ twins. No, what I meant was, is there something fishy about the PM? What did you find?’
    ‘A dead baby,’ George said with some asperity, ‘and no more than that, dammit. It’s difficult to tell what he died of. Or even when, come to that It’s harder to pinpoint thesethings in infants, of course. It looks like a cot death inasmuch as it doesn’t look like anything else, so —’
    ‘So a cot death it is, surely?’ Didier said. ‘Why make a hoohah with the coroner about it?’
    George looked at him sharply. ‘Are you suggesting I let it through on the nod?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Didier said. ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because sudden infant death syndrome isn’t a diagnosis of a cause of death. It’s an admission of failure to find out what really was the cause. And I’d like to know why you want me just to nod it through. What does it matter to you?’
    ‘Not a thing, personally,’ Didier said, coming round the desk to reach the office door and lead the way out. ‘I was just thinking of the parents. It’s bad enough their baby died, why make life harder for them by fussing with the coroner so that their funeral has to be delayed? That upsets them as much as the death itself, in my experience.’
    George opened her mouth to retort that she was as concerned about the parents as he was, but along the corridor a light began to flash over one of the labour suites as a bell started its din overhead. St Cloud lifted his hands in a resigned here-we-go-again gesture and dragged his too-tight mask up over his mouth and nose again. ‘Gotta go. Can’t argue with an urgent uterus,’ he said. ‘Well, whatever you do, it’s all a damn shame. Me, I don’t like dead babies.’ And he was gone in a long loping run down the corridor, leaving George to snap into the empty air where he had been, ‘Any more than I do …’
    She stood there for a moment or two, undecided, as the Maternity department went on its usual frantic way around her. Babies could be heard bawling from all directions and somewhere down the corridor a labouring woman was letting the world know, in no uncertain terms, that as the contractions became stronger and more enthusiastic she personally had changed her mind about the whole damned business of motherhood and wanted no more to do with it,whilst down in the ward kitchen at the far end of the corridor a bad-tempered ward orderly was banging pots around in a cacophony of resentment and all-round loathing of absolutely everything.
    She sighed, and went, glad to escape the smell of the place as much as the noise. She preferred the heavy dead earthiness of her own mortuary to the somewhat sickly reek of scented talcum and disinfectant, laundry, milk and sex which seemed to her to permeate the Maternity Unit’s airspace. How anyone could work in so frenetic an atmosphere for hours on end, day after day, was beyond her, she thought as she headed for the staircase and thence the underground walkway which would take her from Red Block through to Green Block and Paediatric Outpatients. She needed a word with one of their people before she finally made up her mind what to do about the death certificate for Baby Popodopoulos.
    It wasn’t till she’d made her way downstairs and on past Physio. and Occupational Therapy to the Outpatient Department for Green Block that she remembered the Children’s new Unit had been opened at last, and swore softly under