It was daylight when Saracen came round and opened his eyes. The pain inside his head brought on a sudden wave of nausea when he tried to move so he lay quite still for a moment, trying to put his thoughts into some kind of order. He remembered the incident outside the mortuary and assumed, correctly as it happened, that he had been attacked from behind. But where was he now?
The silence and cold, grey light suggested that it might be dawn but if the dull rainy weather had persisted from the previous day it could be any time, he reasoned. It was particularly hard to tell for he was not lying outside on the road. There was a ceiling above him and the air, although unheated, was perfectly still.
“Nurse!” Saracen croaked, in the hope that he might be in a hospital bed but somehow he knew that he was not. It felt all wrong.
Still unwilling to move his head for fear of awakening the pain dragon, he felt about him with his hands and discovered that he was lying on something hard. It was metallic…cold smooth metal…stainless steel perhaps?
At intervals his fingers sank into narrow slots that ran longitudinally. Was that the word? Saracen found it hard to concentrate. Try as he might he just could not think clearly. Was it the head wound or was it something else, he wondered for there was a smell in the room, a heavy, sickly sweet smell, a smell that was now more of a sensation really, as if his senses had been overloaded with it after a long period of inhalation.
Had he been chloroformed? No, he decided, it wasn’t chloroform, neither was it ether. It was something else, another chemical that he felt sure he should recognise but could not because he could not think clearly.
Unable to make any progress through deductive reasoning Saracen tried moving his head. He tried shifting it slowly to the right but found it difficult, not because of the pain, but because the back of his skull seemed to be resting in some kind of mould. The mould was not metal for he could feel it warm through his hair and it was softer than metal though not much…He had it…It was wood!
All at once Saracen realised where he was and the shock made him sit bolt upright. An agonising pain reminded him that this had been a mistake and momentary blindness followed a wave of nausea. Fear and pain vied inside his skull until he opened his eyes and peered out through the fingers that cradled his head. A long row of bone handled knives on the wall confirmed his worst fears. He was lying on a post-mortem examination table.
It was another full minute before Saracen could bring himself to try moving his legs off the table. He slid the left one slowly over the edge of the steel table and let it dangle down while he brought the right one round to join it. Then, holding his breath, he attempted to stand up. It was a disaster. His legs buckled beneath him and, as he fell, his fingers caught in one of the channels that were etched into the table for the drainage of blood and body fluids. His wrist was wrenched painfully as he slid to the floor.
Saracen cursed in frustration as he dragged himself up on to his hands and knees. He had to stop at that and hang his head for a moment as the pain increased in successive waves like an incoming tide. He knew that he was going to be sick but there was little he could do about it. He just had to let it happen and threw up on the floor. The involuntary convulsing of his stomach brought on an exhaustion that made him feel faint. He felt that consciousness was slipping away from him fast and his last act, before passing out, was to push himself to one side so that he would not fall into his own vomit.
When Saracen came round for the second time he felt icy cold and was shivering uncontrollably but this time he could think more lucidly. He had to get to a telephone. There was one in the room and he knew where it was, it was just a matter of reaching it. He did not attempt to stand up this time. Instead he dragged himself across the floor, keeping as horizontal as possible to maintain the blood supply to his head and having cause to be grateful to the smooth, sluicable surface that minimised the friction factor in his progress. He reached the far wall and risked pulling himself up into a sitting position by reaching up and gripping a metal hose reel that was mounted low down on the tiled wall. He could see the pathologist’s telephone sitting invitingly on the desk above him. It encouraged him to make the final effort and he stretched up to take it from the hook.
“It’s Doctor Saracen…I’m in the PM room…send someone.”
The voices in the tunnel suddenly lost their echo and began to make sense.
“So you are back with us!”
Saracen understood the words but could not reply at first.
“Care to tell us what happened old man?”
Saracen opened his eyes and recognised Martin Saithe, the Physician Superintendent at Skelmore General, a man he did not much care for but contact between them had been minimal so this had not become a problem. Standing beside Saithe was Alan Tremaine and beside Tremaine a policeman in uniform. The face of Sister Vera Ellis swam into view and told Saracen that he was in Ward Four, the ward immediately above A amp;E.
When the power of speech had returned, Saracen told the assembled group of the incident outside the mortuary and how he had been hit from behind. He was puzzled to find that no one seemed particularly surprised. Saithe nodded and said, “Yes, we had concluded as much. You had the misfortune to disturb our intruders last night.”
“Intruders?” asked Saracen.
“Thieves,” said Saithe with an air of distaste. “Dr Garten informs me that a new compressor due to be fitted to the refrigeration system in the mortuary was stolen last night. A grubby little crime.” Saithe adopted the expression that Saracen associated with him most, a narrowing of the eyes and the adoption of a pained expression that was meant to convey to his fellows that an extreme sensitivity to things vulgar and distasteful. Saithe now betrayed a restlessness and obvious desire to be off. “Well,” he said, eyeing his watch, “I think it’s quite clear what happened. You got a nasty crack on the head but nothing too serious. Dr Garten will have to soldier on without you for a few days but then you’ll be back, right as rain.”
The idea of Garten ‘soldiering on’ made Tremaine look at Saracen and cover his mouth with his hand. He was grateful that Saracen, in his present state, did not feel much like smiling.
Saithe said to Saracen, “Perhaps you might tell the constable here anything that you think might be useful or helpful in the investigation.” With that, he gave a dutiful smile, said thank-you to the ward sister and left the ward.
“If there is anything you could tell me sir,” said the constable. “Anything at all.”
“Yes, I’m going to be sick,” said Saracen.
“Nurse!” Sister Ellis conjured up a student nurse with a suitable receptacle before Saracen could even contemplate defiling her smooth blanketry or mirror shine floors.
The stomach convulsions ceased and Saracen lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes until the throbbing in his head had subsided. When he felt better he turned to the young policeman and said, “There were three of them.”
The policeman looked pleased and started to write in his notebook. “Did you get a good look at any of them?” he asked.
Saracen told him about the overalls and visors.
The policeman nodded thoughtfully and said, “That could be very helpful. From what you say it sounds like the sort of gear they wear to strip out asbestos from old buildings and the like. That could be a valuable lead.”
“Good,” said Saracen without much enthusiasm for he still felt ill.
“I’ll let you get some sleep sir,” said the officer getting to his feet and pocketing his notebook. He placed his helmet on his head using both hands coronation style and adjusted it well before nodding to Saracen and Tremaine and saying good-bye for the moment.
“You look awful,” said Tremaine when he and Saracen were alone.
“I feel awful,” conceded Saracen.
“You know,” Tremaine began cautiously, “The bump on your head isn’t that bad and the X-Rays were perfectly OK…I’m surprised you’re having so much discomfort.
Saracen’s first thought was to hit Tremaine but physical effort was beyond him for the moment. “There was more to it than the bump on the head,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Saracen screwed up his face at the question he himself had invited but could not answer. “I don’t know exactly but I think I may have been poisoned. There was something in my lungs when I came round, something that stopped me thinking clearly.”
“You’re serious?” exclaimed Tremaine.
“When I came to, my chest felt as if I had been breathing in some sickly sweet gas. It was heavy, unpleasant, but by the time I awoke I had been inhaling it for so long that I couldn’t recognise it. Were you one of the people who came down to the PM room when I called?”
“Yes I was.”
“You didn’t notice any strong smell?”
“Formaldehyde, but you’d expect that in the PM room.
“Formaldehyde,” repeated Saracen slowly. “It could have been that but there would have to have been an awful lot of it. You didn’t come across a broken bottle did you?”
“No, but then I really didn’t look. We were all too concerned with getting you out of there. If you like I’ll go down and check.”
“I’d be obliged. Tell me, did you go into the mortuary itself?”
“The connecting door between it and the PM suite was locked.”
“It’s not usually kept locked.” said Saracen.
“Probably to keep these fridge engineers out of the autopsy room. Mortuaries are bad enough in themselves for the morbidly curious but PM paraphernalia tends to lend wings to already vivid imaginations.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
Tremaine got to his feet and said, “Do you know what I’m going to do now?”
“What?”
“I’m going to call Garten and tell him that you will be out of action for a few days. That should obviate our leader’s need for a morning laxative. He is going to have to come in.”
“Who are the housemen on A amp;E today?”
“Doctors Prahash Singh and Chenhui Tang,” Tremaine announced.
Saracen closed his eyes and pursed his lips silently.
“Exactly,” said Tremaine. “Neither outstanding in their command of English.”
“How is your Urdu and Chinese?” asked Saracen.
“Not good enough to practise in Pakistan or China,” replied Tremaine.
“Point taken,” conceded Saracen. “But push off now will you, I feel like death.”
Tremaine smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He turned as he got to the door and said, “If there’s anything you want, just yell out.”
Saracen nodded.
By late afternoon Saracen felt a whole lot better, so much so in fact that he signed himself out of the ward at four thirty, assuring Sister Ellis that he was now perfectly all right. The speed of his recovery had surprised even him but reinforced his view that he had been subject to some mild form of poisoning. When the substance had cleared from his system he had immediately begun to feel better, just as if he had been suffering from an alcoholic hangover. Now, all that was wrong with him was a sore head and not out of keeping with the minor knock that Tremaine had declared him to have taken.
Saracen had to walk round to the back of the hospital to collect his car which was still where the Gate Porter had left it the previous night. He was trying to remember what he had done with the keys when he came to the mortuary doors and paused for a moment to take comfort in the fact that everything looked normal again. There were no strange vans, no men in hoods and black visors and the door was securely locked. He examined the padlock and wondered for a moment about the door lock when a sudden whiff of ammonia filled his nostrils and made him reel back from the doors. “What on earth?” he exclaimed but the smell had already gone.
It was over so quickly that Saracen began to wonder if the smell had ever really been there at all for now there was no trace of it. On the other hand a breeze had sprung up with the stopping of the rain and that could just as easily have taken away the gas. He approached the doors again and sniffed. Nothing. It must have been his imagination, some trick of his olefactory system, still upset after the events of the night before.
Saracen shrugged and turned. He now remembered having dropped his keys beside the car in the darkness and went to look for them. Finding them in daylight presented no great problem and he was back at his flat within fifteen minutes, pouring himself a large whisky.
Saracen took a gulp before placing a Vivaldi album on the stereo and adjusting the volume before sitting down and picking up the local paper. The big news, as it had been for the past three weeks, was concerned with predictions of Skelmore’s success in attracting the giant Japanese company, Otsuji Electronics to the area. True, the final agreement had not yet been signed and there were other towns competing for the factory, notably in Scotland and the industrial North-East, but all the signs were that Skelmore was the favourite and it was all over bar the shouting. There was, in fact, nothing new at all in the newspaper story but, in this case, Saracen found the euphoric repetition excusable for this was more than just an industrial story; it was something that meant life for the whole area.
In the time that Saracen had been in Skelmore he had seen the industrial heart ripped out of the town. The giant steel works of Lever Hanah had closed, the iron foundry had gone and the local colliery had been declared no longer economically viable, and shut down after a bitter strike.
The economic depression had cast a great shadow across the area and it showed in the streets where boarded up shops and For Sale signs sprouted like weeds reclaiming the earth; it showed in the faces of the people in whom hope had been destroyed. A greyness and a passive submission to the yoke of hard times had replaced the air of cheerful optimism that had once been the hallmark of the town. Crime had risen, particularly cases of violent crime where larceny might have been the crime predicted to increase most. It seemed that people at the end of their tether ran on an extremely short fuse. Minor irritations became major bones of contention in a town without a future.
But then came the news of Otsuji and the prediction of not only five hundred jobs from the company alone but a great many more created through a knock on effect as smaller firms flocked to the area like pilot fish to satisfy the requirements of Otsuji for components and services. Already the building trades in the area were flourishing and new housing was springing up on every available plot of land. Capital was being ventured on the well proven assumption that prosperity and home ownership went hand in hand.
The new air of optimism was not confined to the private sector alone. New council departments with grand sounding names seemed to materialise overnight to deal with the floods of trade enquiries and brightly coloured brochures were being rushed off the press to extol the virtues of Skelmore and surrounding district as the development area of the future.
There was even talk of the hospital modernisation programme, which had been on ice for the last five years, being brought down from the shelf and dusted off. There seemed to be a real possibility that essential renovation work at Skelmore General might actually be carried out before the place fell down.
Skelmore General was a disgrace; at least it was a disgrace to anyone who believed in the highest standards of medical care, those befitting a nation that considered itself so abrasively often to be superior to the rest of the world. Of course, if you had lived in Britain for the last five to ten years then Skelmore General was fast becoming the norm in a health service at odds with government philosophy. Understaffing, low pay and impotent resentment manifesting itself in Trade Union bloody mindedness had all conspired to bring morale to a dangerously low ebb.
Even the Press seemed to realise this and had stopped whipping an all but dead horse. Stories of leaking ceilings and cockroaches in hospital kitchens no longer appeared under crusading headlines. It was a waste of time for there was no incompetence or laxity left to expose. Britain’s Health Service was simply falling to bits for lack of money.
Skelmore General felt the effects of economic stringency particularly badly because it had been a rambling Victorian slum of a building to start with. Its plumbing and electrics were antiquated and the style of its design with high ceilings and arches made it prohibitively expensive to heat. The same reason made it impossible to keep clean.
Frequent outbreaks of diarrhoeal illness in the wards was the norm and almost certainly due, though never admitted publicly, to dirty food standards. Ironically this problem tended to work in the General’s favour for any kind of outbreak that looked as if might be infectious allowed the hospital to unload affected patients on to the Infectious Diseases Unit of Skelmore’s County Hospital, a ploy that the County was only too well aware of.
On the last occasion of a transfer Saracen’s friend and opposite number, David Moss at the County Hospital had good naturedly claimed that anyone who farted too loudly in the General was in danger of finding themselves in an ambulance on their way to the County. Saracen had countered with the claim that Moss had deliberately pushed two of his geriatric patients downstairs during the previous week in order to have them admitted to the General’s Orthopaedic Unit.
Saracen was idly wondering what to do with his unscheduled two day break when the telephone rang; it was Nigel Garten.
“Hello James. I’ve just been up to Ward Four to see you, ‘found you’d flown the coop. How are you? All right?”
“I feel a lot better thanks.”
“Excellent. Nasty business all round really, still, can’t be too bad if you signed yourself out eh what?” Garten gave a forced laugh to augment his one-of-the-chaps act. Saracen could see what was coming. He was right.
“Soon be back in harness eh?” continued Garten, still forcing the laugh.
“Shouldn’t be too long,” agreed Saracen flatly. There was a pause.
“Any idea exactly…how long?” probed Garten.
Saracen smiled at being proved right. “A couple of days,” he said.
“Of course you mustn’t come back until you feel absolutely well again. I’m sure sick leave can be arranged.”
“I’m not taking sick leave Nigel; I’m due a couple of days off anyway.” Saracen left out the ‘at least.’
“Oh absolutely old chap, no question about it. It’s just that, well you know what A amp;E is like. Having you off will be an added strain on all of us…”
“A couple of days.”
“Right, well then, look after yourself and of course, if you do happen to feel better in the morning…”
Saracen put the phone down, swore once and went back to his newspaper. He skipped through the advertisements that comprised eighty percent and found the weekly feature on the history of Skelmore and surrounding district that he particularly liked. This week’s offering was entitled ‘The Curse of Skelmore’ and recounted the legend of the Skelmoris Chalice, a vessel reputed, like so many others over the course of two thousand years, to have been the Holy Grail, the dish Christ had eaten from on the occasion of the Last Supper.
According to the story the chalice had been brought to Skelmoris Abbey, a Dominican monastery, which, in the fourteenth century, had occupied the site where the town of Skelmore now stood. The vessel had been brought there from London for some unrecorded reason and handed over to the Abbot, one Hugo Letant, for safe-keeping.
Unknown to the Church authorities Letant and the brothers of Skelmoris could hardly have been a worse choice for they were, in fact, evil men who preyed on travellers unwise enough to seek food and shelter at the abbey. The story went that God, in his anger at having seen the chalice fall into the hands of such villains, had struck them all dead and, in the years that followed, a similar fate had befallen any other mortal who had approached the abbey in search of the vessel. In the end the place had been destroyed by fire. The legend of the chalice had died with the abbey and only the story had survived the mists of time.
The Chronicle reported that interest in the abbey had been awakened recently with the arrival in Skelmore of an archaeological team from the University of Oxford to begin exploratory excavations. Saracen smiled and had to put down the paper as the phone rang again; this time it was Alan Tremaine.
“I checked out the PM room. I didn’t find any broken formaldehyde bottles I’m afraid.”
“Just a thought,” said Saracen.
“It’s funny; I thought the place actually smelled of ammonia not formaldehyde.”
Saracen felt his pulse rate rise a little. He had been right. It had not been his imagination after all. “Really?” he said non-committaly.
“God knows what they’d want with ammonia in the PM room,” said Tremaine.
Saracen agreed but somewhere in the back of his mind a vague memory had begun to stir, there was something he could not quite recall, some kind of a connection between formaldehyde and ammonia, if only he could remember…”
“Garten was up looking for you,” said Tremaine.
“Yes, he called me.”
“Asking if you would be back tomorrow?” asked Tremaine.
“Something like that,” agreed Saracen.
“I hope you told him what to do.”
“I said I would be taking a couple of days off.”
“That man is incredible. Do you think he ever worked himself?”
“I’m on leave. I don’t want to think about him,” replied Saracen.
“Enjoy the break. You deserve it,” said Tremaine.
Saracen put down the phone and stared thoughtfully out of the window. There was something decidedly odd about the whole affair at the mortuary, something that tales of thieves in the night did not answer satisfactorily. Apart from the unexplained chemical smells there was another detail that had begun to bother him. The man who had opened the door at the mortuary could not have picked the lock with the speed he had. He must have had a key and that implied an inside job, someone on the maintenance staff maybe or perhaps someone connected with the refrigeration firm.
Saracen permitted himself the luxury of a second drink and lingered over the pleasing thought that he did not have to go out tonight. There were no patients to consider, he could get stoned out of his head if he had a mind to. He did not intend to but it was nice to know that he could. He added a little water to the whisky and sat down with the glass between his palms. Good whisky was one of the few luxuries that he allowed himself, not a single malt for he had no real liking for malt whisky but a deluxe blended whisky, The Antiquary.
He sipped it from a crystal glass, one of a set of six that he had won a long time ago as a prize in an essay competition at medical school.
Saracen followed the engraving in the crystal with his thumb nail and remembered how different his world had been then. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He had been bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to take on the whole world but instead he had taken on the medical establishment and come a poor second.
Saracen had been a very new doctor in his first residency having obtained a position in a world famous professorial unit as befitting the top student of his year. He had set out to impress his chief, Sir John MacBryde with his capacity for study and hard work but it was this zeal that had led him to probe a little too deeply into the case histories of a group of MacBryde’s patients being used to illustrate a point being made by the great man.
MacBryde had submitted a paper to The Lancet and Saracen had discovered that he had falsified certain aspects of the data in order to make his proposed ‘MacBryde Effect’ even more pronounced. No one had been at risk over the misrepresentation and no one would have come to any harm but Saracen, with all the holier than thou rectitude of the young, had exposed the misdeed publicly. MacBryde’s reputation had been destroyed and he had retired a broken man.
While outwardly praising his vigilance in the matter, the medical establishment had never forgiven Saracen for putting feet of clay under John MacBryde. Nothing had ever been said to that effect; he had been left to figure it out for himself as one career avenue after another had closed in front of him and all applications for research grants and fellowships were now politely declined where before he had appeared to have had the Midas touch.
When he had finally realised what was going on, Saracen had been filled with impotent anger, impotent for there was nothing to be done about it. No one would ever tell him to his face why he had not been appointed to a particular position. That was not the way things were done. He had been black- balled by a club that would not even admit its existence. The affair also destroyed his marriage. Being married to a loser had not figured in Marion’s plans.
Saracen had been captivated by Marion from the day he had first met her. She was beautiful, she was charming and she was vivacious to the point of being larger than life. Other women paled into insignificance in her presence. She had all the assurance and confidence that stemmed from being the daughter of a career diplomat and for some strange, but wonderful reason, she had always made Saracen feel that he belonged where, without her, his much more humble origins as the only son of an insurance clerk, would have said that he did not.
Saracen had been beside himself with joy when Marion had agreed to marry him in the face of all the odds, for Marion captured the hearts of all the men who met her — and was loathed by just about as many women for the same reason. They had been married in the university chapel on the day after Saracen had graduated first in his year and Saracen had felt that there was nothing he could not do, no goal was beyond reach. With Marion at his side he could ride the wind, catch the stars, and talk to the angels.
True, money had been a consideration, especially when he had found out that Marion’s dress allowance from her father was actually more than twice what he would be earning as a houseman but Marion’s father, although never in favour of the marriage, had been prepared to indulge his daughter until such times, and it could only be sooner rather than later, that Saracen became a successful consultant. When Saracen suddenly found himself having to take any job that he could get, invariably junior posts in unpopular specialities in third rate hospitals, things began to change.
There had never been a big scene between Marion and himself. Instead, Marion had started seeing more of her old friends, taking advantage of the legion of admirers ever willing to wine and dine her while her husband worked all the hours that God sent. Being Marion she had always been quite open about it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do and, for her, it was. Saracen had been sad but, strangely, never angry. He had tried to keep a beautiful butterfly in a net and that had been against the laws of nature.
What bitterness and anger there was in the situation came between Saracen and his father-in-law and it was to prove final. Saracen stubbornly refused all offers of financial help to set himself up in private practice, having resolved to rehabilitate himself in ‘real’ medicine rather than pander to the, often imagined, ills of the rich. It was an attitude that Marion’s father could not accept and Saracen could never fully explain but what relationship they had, and it was never very good, foundered over it. Marion’s father had set out to break up the marriage and recover his daughter from the ‘failure’ she had wed.
Apart from being an inveterate snob Saracen’s father-in-law was a clever and devious man, as befitting his profession, and he had succeeded in distancing Marion from Saracen in a number of seemingly innocent but effective ways. Marion’s mother had died some two years before and her father’s need for a woman to play diplomatic hostess was used to the full. He managed to persuade Marion more and more to accompany him on trips abroad until finally she just wasn’t there at all.
In the interim, Saracen had moved three times, changing from one dingy little flat to another, the fate that his father-in-law had prophesied for him, as he took the only jobs in medicine that were left open to him. Accident and Emergency Units were rapidly becoming ‘his thing’ largely because working in them was so unpopular with his contemporaries. The hours were appalling, the work more often social than medical and the prospect of advancement practically nil. Consultancies in A amp;E were rarer than hen’s teeth.
In his own mind Saracen bitterly regretted having exposed the short-comings of John MacBryde, not because of what had happened to himself over it, but because the consequences for MacBryde had far outweighed the crime. All the good that the man had done had been wiped out and forgotten. He would only be remembered as a cheat. The man had been destroyed and he, James Saracen would have it on his conscience for the rest of his life.
It had been two years since Saracen had last seen Marion and he had come to terms with the fact that his marriage was over. The hurt and pain had even cleared enough for him to be able to see the faults in his wife that love had made him blind to for so long. Like many beautiful things she lacked substance, she was weak, fragile, ephemeral and now she was gone.
The loss of Marion and deep self criticism over the MacBryde affair had led to Saracen becoming something of an expert in human nature and his own personality had changed accordingly. He had become a loner, a spectator at the game rather than a participant. No longer fettered or driven by professional or social ambition he had discovered the practise of medicine for its own sake and, in that; he found a satisfaction beyond all expectation.
This fact seemed to communicate itself to colleagues and patients alike and he was universally regarded and respected for his genuineness. He said what he thought or nothing at all. He had no acquired bedside manner, no instant smile etched with insincerity, no eye to the future in whatever he said or did. Being a loner did confer on him a certain remoteness but it was not a hostile remoteness and the shutters only went up when anyone tried to get too close to him. But even that was done with elegance. He simply side-stepped anything he saw as an intrusion into his privacy with a, by now, practised ease and charm. He had a quiet intelligence that inspired confidence and an air of gentleness that the nurses in particular regarded more highly than any of his other qualities.
The staff in A amp;E at Skelmore General knew that Saracen was a far better doctor than Nigel Garten, the unit chief, and had even been known on occasion to voice that opinion within earshot of Saracen. But he would have none of it. He had never been known to say a word against Garten in public, something that only made the staff respect him more.
Nurses had been known to feel something more than respect for Saracen, for women found him attractive, not that he was overly handsome in the classical sense but his gentleness, his dark eyes and the enigma of his being a loner ensured that female company was always available should he desire it. And desire it he did, but only ever on a casual basis; that was always made clear from the start; friendship and fun was as far as the relationship was likely to go. It was for this reason Saracen tended to avoid involvement with young, impressionable student nurses who might conceivably see sex as a bargaining measure. Relationships with older woman were always more relaxed and satisfactory.
Saracen looked out of the window and wondered what he should do with his time off. He considered going up to the hospital in the morning and poking around the mortuary in search of some answers to the things that troubled him and then he considered just forgetting the whole thing. The whisky helped him see the attraction of the latter option. It seemed a shame to spend a precious day off at the hospital. Why not do something entirely different? Why not?…Saracen thought for a moment and then he had it. Sea air! That’s what he needed. A good brisk walk by the sea would clear away the remaining traces of poison from his lungs. He would drive down to Gerham-on-sea and walk along the beach. It was only a ten mile drive and he could have lunch at the Ship Inn. That’s what he would do.