Secrets to Keep Read Online Free PDF

haven’t even
tried
to do anything for her. Some bloody doctor you are!’
    Incensed that she should dare question his medical skills, he responded coolly. ‘I’m afraid there’s no mistake. She was already dead when I got here.’
    Aidy stared at him for several long moments before, bottom lip trembling, she uttered, ‘But she can’t be ’cos … ’cos … she’s our mam. We can’t do without her.’ Then she beseeched him, ‘Please,
please
, just try to do something for her? Please, Doc, please?’
    The look he returned told her she was wasting her time. Jessica Greenwood was beyond help.
    Aidy’s whole body sagged and she stepped back toslump against the wall as she tried to take this in. Then, with a look of horror filling her face, she wailed, ‘How the hell am I going to tell my sisters and brother that our mam is dead? And my gran too … This’ll kill her, I know it will. She worshipped her daughter. How could Mam die just like that, Doc? She wasn’t ill. Got the stamina of an ox, she used to tell us. We could all be down with colds and she’d never catch them off us.’
    ‘So she hadn’t been complaining of any pains in her chest or feeling more tired than usual recently?’ he asked.
    Aidy shook her head. ‘Not to me. The only ailment I knew she suffered from was a bad back which used to give her gyp now and again, though Mam wasn’t a complainer. But anyway, Gran would have noticed if she wasn’t well and told me. She lives here with Mam, me brother and two sisters. Gran’s the sort who’s got eyes in the back of her head. She misses nothing.’
    ‘Well, if your mother wasn’t suffering from anything you and your grandmother were aware of, then it’s my considered opinion that her heart just gave out. She died from natural causes.’
    There was nothing more to be done here. Ty wanted to get back to the surgery or he risked still being there until midnight at this rate, but despite how annoyed he was at what he perceived to be thiswoman’s disrespectful attitude towards him, he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave her on her own.
    ‘Your father ought to be informed,’ he told her. ‘Maybe a neighbour could go and fetch him for you, if you know where he’ll be?’ He thought to himself, Most likely in the pub. That’s where the majority of the men around these streets seem to head straight from work.
    There was a flash of anger in her eyes and a harshness to her voice when she responded, ‘Knowing me dad, he’ll be in the pub … but
which
pub is anyone’s guess. We ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since before our Marion was born and she’s eight.’
    Ty wasn’t surprised by this information. There seemed to him to be quite a number of absent husbands locally, some admittedly having been forced to seek work further afield, the depression that had started in America now making its ill effects felt in England and jobs being less easy to find. But just as many men had selfishly abandoned their wives to struggle to raise their children alone, merely because they’d better things to go off to. ‘Then your grandmother needs to be summoned back home then. A neighbour will maybe oblige?’
    Aidy was fighting hard to comprehend and accept this terrible turn of events. She was hardly listening to Ty but aware that he had said something and automatically muttered, ‘Yes … yes, Doc.’
    ‘
It’s Doctor Strathmore
,’ he reminded her again. ‘Look, I really need to be getting back to the surgery. If you’ll call in the morning, I’ll have the death certificate ready for you.’ And of course there was the matter of his fee, but it would be very remiss of him to mention it or expect her to in these circumstances. He would bring up the subject when she called to collect the death certificate in the morning.
    Picking up his bag, he made to depart but was stopped in his tracks by the back door opening and the arrival of a small elderly woman. She was dressed in a well-worn black