The Angels of Lovely Lane Read Online Free PDF

another move on the chessboard in the battle for superiority and the unspoken acknowledgement of the position of senior consultant under Dr Gaskell. Mr Scriven took a long and carefully controlled breath. He knew perfectly well that his colleague had not yet finished taunting him.
    ‘We are busy too, you know. They have allocated me an extra registrar and a houseman. It seems even the working classes are buying motors now. Just operated on a young lad with bilateral femoral shaft fractures from a scooter accident. Reckon there’s going to be a lot more of that in the future. I wonder why they didn’t just increase the size of your firm? Why bring in a new consultant? Regardless of how busy you are, it makes it look as though they don’t trust your opinion, or the quality of your work.’
    Bang. It was a direct shot and had hit its mark. Mr Scriven flinched.
    He drank his tea to delay answering, because he had no idea what to say. He had asked himself the same question. He almost gave a sigh of relief as the call bell rang. Mr Mabbutt looked up at the consultants’ alert board on the wall and saw it was his light flashing just as the telephone rang. He leapt up from the chair, splashing his tea all over his knee as he did so.
    ‘Yes, on my way back up,’ he barked down the receiver before slamming it down. ‘Right, that was a short break. My last one is throwing an extended rigor in the recovery room and the anaesthetist can’t raise his blood pressure out of his boots. Neither houseman nor theatre sister is happy. Poor lad, he’s only sixteen. I feared he might not survive the shock. I didn’t even touch the fractures. I was saving them until he was stable. All I did was sew up what cuts I could manage. l must have cleared half the dock road out of his wounds.’
    He picked up his cup and swallowed what remained of his tea. As he walked towards the door he couldn’t resist a parting shot. ‘Anyway, do you know if you will be sharing a team, or will the new chap have his own housemen and registrar?’
    Even in the midst of an emergency, he was not going to allow his advantage to slip away. He stood holding the door open, waiting for a reply.
    ‘His own, of course. I told Matron I can’t spare any of my team. We’re working flat out as it is.’
    ‘Ah, that’s even worse, if you ask me. Competing teams on one ward, who needs it?’
    His words hung in the air as the door swung shut.
    Martha may have worked at the hospital since she was fourteen, but she was far from stupid. Mr Scriven had attempted to present a brave face to Mr Mabbutt, but Martha could tell he was both seething and miserable. She noticed that his hair, which a year ago had been grey only at the temples, was now grey all over. He had taken to wearing glasses, and she had thought it strange that, if anything, the dark glasses and greying hair had added to his attractiveness.
    ‘Bastard,’ she heard him mutter under his breath.
    Without being asked, she refilled his cup and put two arrowroot biscuits on a plate for him. ‘Nothing like a cup of tea and an arrowroot biscuit to cheer you up,’ her mother had said every time an air raid was over and they slipped back into the house after a night in the shelter. It had seemed to work for her mam.
    Mr Scriven was deep in thought. Leaning forward now in his chair, elbows on knees, fingers interlinked before him, he tapped his straightened index fingers repeatedly against his pursed lips.
    ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ she said, as he automatically reached up to relieve her of the tea.
    And that was when it happened. The moment when she crossed the line, broke the rules, set in train the events which would destroy her world and everything she knew in life to be good and true. Those words, that impulsive moment of caring and compassion, would be responsible for pain and deceit, secrets and lies, and, the very worst of all, a death.

Chapter two
    A village on the outskirts of Belmullet, County Mayo,