Second Opinion Read Online Free PDF Page B

her breath as she retraced her steps and went the other way through Blue Block to get to the new walkway which had been cut underground to take visitors through.
    It was startlingly different here from the rest of the hospital. Old East was an establishment that had grown over many decades ‘like some sort of wart infestation’, as Toby Bellamy had once said (and she remembered him now with a momentary pang of loneliness; it had been fun when he’d been around), and now lay sprawled over a big slice of Shadwell land with such architectural virtues as the original Georgian building might once have claimed hidden by a welter of Nissen huts and Portakabins and other temporary erections which had been there for decades.
    The Children’s Unit, Barrie Ward, named sycophantically after the creator of Peter Pan in the fond hope that maybethey’d get a bite out of the great man’s estate (a vain hope, since all the cash from that source went straight to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, leaving Old East well out in the charity cold), had been decorated with such cheerfulness and enthusiasm that it made George’s head spin a little. The corridors that led from Casualty in Blue Block, and from the main entrance to the hospital, were painted in the richest of summery yellows, although virtually every inch of available wall space had been taken up with pictures of such unrelenting cuteness that they made George feel positively Scrooge like.
    ‘But I can’t shout “Disney crap” at the top of my voice, can I?’ she had said to Hattie Clements the first time they’d walked through together. ‘However much I yearn to. All these Bambis and Thumpers and Dumbos! It’s enough to make your teeth fall out from being over-sugared.’
    Now, as she hurried by the gaudy colours and the wide dead eyes of the cartoon characters she asked herself what possible relevance this sort of stuff had to dead babies like the small Popodopoulos corpse, now lying in one of her ice-cold drawers in the mortuary, and what effect it might have on frantic parents coming to see a dying child; and then castigated herself for being so sour. The children probably adored it all and the place was here for them, after all, not for cynical forensic pathologists.
    Barrie Ward was, if that were possible, noisier than Maternity had been. Here too children cried, a good deal more loudly and piercingly than the babies over in Maternity, but their din was topped by the joyous shrieks of other children in the playroom, the babble of a TV set from one end of the big central space and the shrill repetition of pop music from a video machine at the other. George recoiled for a moment and then went in search of someone to talk to.
    She identified a tall boy of twenty-two or so in battered blue jeans and a much-scribbled-on T-shirt as a nurse bythe name badge he wore: Staff Nurse Philip Goss; and stopped to talk to him. He was sitting on the floor surrounded by a group of children and got to his feet quickly as she came up to him. The children bawled at his defection and one tugged at his T-shirt, so the boy picked him up and sat him on one hip, patting his back abstractedly as he lifted his brows at George in query and said, ‘Morning! Can I help you?’
    She was struck, not for the first time, by the tenderness these male nurses seemed able to show to children, not a trait they shared with all that many men, she told herself, and smiled at him. He grinned back.
    ‘I’m not sure. I want to talk to whoever did the paediatric checks on Maternity last — let me see …’ She riffled again in her file. ‘On Wednesday night. Any ideas who it might have been?’
    ‘That’s a medical matter, I’m afraid. You’ll have to ask one of them — there’s Dr Kydd by the desk. I dare say she’ll be able to help. Sorry I can’t …’ And he hugged the little boy on his hip who was now tugging on a lock of his curly hair with considerable ferocity and shook himself