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Lambert.'
    'Malcolm, for heaven's sake!'
    The sudden impatience in his tone told Lucy he really didn't have time to prolong this, so she repeated his first name quickly, suppressing her awareness of the memories it brought, then stood up and headed for the door. Before reaching it, she stepped aside to let him and Dr Brian Smith hurry through ahead of her.
    They turned right, and ahead of them she heard the urgent voices of medical staff gathered around the patient who'd arrested. They were trying to shock his heart back into life with a defibrillator, and the scene was stark and shocking. A naked chest jumped and fell back each time the current pulsed through the twin paddles of the machine.
    Turning left, she made the correct assumption that she was heading in the direction of 'the cubes'.
    It meant that she wouldn't see much of Malcolm today. In his position as head of department, he would only oversee the non-urgent cases in the most general way. Much of his time would be taken up with administration, paperwork and liaison with other parts of the hospital, and his practice of medicine would be limited to the true emergencies—those patients who occupied the 'trolleys' in the high-tech, open area at the far end of the department.
    Cardiac arrests would command his attention if the more junior doctors, training as emergency specialists, needed his help. Also, he'd see acute asthma attacks, serious road trauma injuries, severe unexplained pain, dangerous bleeding, life-threatening overdoses...
    All the cases, in other words, which needed urgent stabilisation before they could be admitted to the relevant ward or sent for emergency surgery. But he wouldn't see the sort of 'GP cases', as they were some-' times known, which she would be dealing with today.
    Perhaps it would help to have this first day to orientate herself without the added complication of his presence.
    She'd had the weekend to think about it, and had basically found that nothing in her attitude to Malcolm Lambert and what he represented had changed in the past six years. She'd always known exactly how appalled and guilty Malcolm had felt about that one desperate eruption of passion between them. Now, as then, she was going to do all she could to protect him from the need to relive it, dwell on it, bring it into the present.
    There was no need! Who would benefit after all this time? No one! Things were best left as they were. Dismissing the subject, and hoping for the sort of day that would keep her mind busy and her hands filled, she focused on work instead.
    It was a little strange to be working at a large facility like this again after her years at Brewarra Base Hospital in far western New South Wales. They dealt with plenty of emergencies in Brewarra, but not all at once, and things weren't so strictly divided into urgent and nonurgent cases there.
    Brewarra Base Hospital had no triage nurse to prioritise the treatment of each patient, and its staff turned back and forth between an acute asthma attack, a peanut up a toddler's nose and a major heart attack in the same way that the owner of the town's sprawling and eclectic general store turned back and forth between selling a chocolate bar and selling a ride-on lawnmower.
    Here, the set-up was a little more intimidating. The hospital was modern and well equipped, and staff, as much as patients, ran the gamut of human personalities.
    For the next two hours, as she'd hoped, Lucy didn't have time to think about Malcolm. There was a steady stream of Monday morning patients—those who'd done something to themselves on the weekend and had decided overnight that perhaps it really did need treatment, those who'd left it too late to get an appointment with their GP today and those who'd partied hard on the weekend and had been too tired to avoid careless accidents as a result.
    Lucy dressed some minor lacerations, made an old lady comfortable while she was waiting for the doctor, took some blood and gave a local