Doctor and Protector
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Meredith Webber
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CHAPTER ONE
‘GOT a minute, Cassie?’
Dr Cassandra Carew, Medical Superintendent of Wakefield Hospital, looked up from the nearly illegible letter she’d received from a local doctor, and smiled at her visitor. Dave Pritchard was the officer in charge of the local police station, but he’d also been a friend from when they’d both started in year one at Wakefield State School.
‘Dave! Nice surprise to see you in the office for a change. I can say, with total honesty, I’m pleased to see you, which I never am when you come in through the emergency entrance.’
‘No, I’m usually bad news down there,’ Dave agreed, turning towards a tall, black-haired figure in ancient cords and a faded football jersey who’d followed him into the room. ‘This is McCall.’
Heavy-lidded eyes blinked once as Cassie inspected the stranger.
‘McCall someone, or someone McCall?’ she asked Dave, although she smiled politely at his companion to take away any offence.
‘It’s Henry, actually, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is not a name destined to gain acceptance in an Australian schoolyard, so I’ve always been called by my surname.’
It was McCall himself who explained, in a clear, precise voice, walking past her desk and peering out the window. She knew from doing it often herself that the view over the laundry and the gardeners’ shed was uninspiring, particularly at the moment when water restrictions caused by the drought in this part of central Queensland meant the usually lush green grass beyond the outbuildings was dry, brown and brittle.
Dave, meanwhile, was depositing his lean, uniform-clad figure in one of the visitors’ chairs.
‘I’m assuming this isn’t a social call,’ Cassie said, watching the second visitor slouch over towards the filing cabinet in the corner of her room and pick up one of the family photos she kept on the top of it.
‘No, I wanted to introduce you to McCall and explain—’
Dave’s own explanations were cut short by a squawk from his two-way radio.
‘Domestic at the Churchers’,’ he said to Cassie, obviously recognising both the code and the street address. ‘I’ve got to go. McCall will explain.’
‘You’ve got five minutes,’ Cassie told McCall. ‘Then I’ll be summoned to A and E to attend to whichever of the Churchers lost today’s argument. I might have the grand title of Medical Superintendent at this hospital, but like all country superintendents I’m still a working doctor.’
‘It won’t take five minutes—more like five seconds,’ McCall told her, turning from her filing cabinet with a photo still in his hands. ‘I’m your shadow.’
Before Cassie could query this bizarre remark, he held up the photo and continued, ‘Fine-looking family. All girls?’
‘Until the twins arrived,’ Cassie said, standing up and coming around her desk, feeling obscurely anxious about this stranger holding an image of her family in his hands.
As if he understood her anxiety, he handed her the photo—one of herself, Emily and Anne, with Abigail their mother, taken not long before Em had gone away. Cassie looked at it, seeing the similarities between the four of them in the thick, honey-blonde hair and strongly boned faces, though Anne’s cheekbones, at sixteen, were still partially disguised by the remnants of her early plumpness, and her hair was, at the moment, a teenage-rebellion black.
Cassie touched her finger to Anne’s face, and closed her eyes as a terrible anguish, so strong she had to repress a cry, clutched at her body.
She wasn’t worried about dying herself. She’d prefer not to, of course, if she could possibly avoid it, but the panic really clutched at her when she thought of not being here to see Annie’s cheekbones come through.
To not see her flower into full, vibrant womanhood…
‘You’ll be all right,’ McCall said, as if he could somehow feel the gut-wrenching moment of fear himself. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘That’s why you’re here?’ Cassie pulled herself together sufficiently to question this weird statement. ‘What are you? Some kind of bodyguard?’
Then the absurdity of such an idea struck her and she looked in McCall’s face and laughed.
‘No, of course you can’t be! Not even Dave could be so dense as to think that would work!’
McCall saw eyes as green as emeralds scan his face, and felt a twist of the same fear he’d seen in her involuntary shudder a little earlier. What could he, an academic, do to protect this woman?
This very attractive woman…
‘Not a bodyguard,’ he said, smiling inwardly at the confluence of his thought with what he was about to say. ‘A boyfriend. Though surely I’m too old to be called a boyfriend, and you’re probably too old to have one, but Dave’s idea—’
‘Boyfriend? Too old? Where do you get off—?’
The woman Dave called Cassie broke off as if her indignation was too immense to be put into words.
‘I’m doing this badly,’ McCall apologised. ‘But to put it bluntly, Dave wanted me up here, and because you’re the latest recipient of threats, he thought it would be best if I was close to you. His idea is that you and I met when you were on holiday recently, and I’m here following up our holiday romance.’
‘Holiday romance!’
The words spluttered from Cassie’s lips, which, McCall realised, were as attractive, in their own way, as her eyes. Soft and full, the lips, demurely and naturally coloured a dusky kind of pink.
See, an internal voice snapped at him. I told you you’d be no good at this. Too easily distracted.
Now he’d missed what she was saying. Something to the effect that she hadn’t been on holiday?
‘But you’ve been away,’ McCall argued, sufficiently off track that he’d forgotten most of Dave’s briefing. Something—he guessed anger at his denseness, or perhaps at Dave for arranging this—was raising a tinge of pink beneath the lightly tanned skin of her cheeks.
‘I’ve been away rescuing my nephews from the useless lump of ectoplasm who fathered them. The lying hound fought my sister for custody, on the grounds she was doing a season in Antarctica, then had the hide to head off for the Himalayas himself, on an expedition he’d obviously been planning for at least a year, leaving the twins with his pleasant but quite dotty mother, who has less idea of child-rearing than my dog.’
‘But you have been away,’ McCall reminded her, determined to stick to the facts, though his over-developed sense of curiosity would have liked more detail about the obviously dysfunctional family she’d just described.
More detail on the dog, come to that—he was fond of dogs, though his lifestyle at the moment precluded having one.
These thoughts drifted through his head as he watched Cassie turn away from him, heading back to her desk with two long strides and lifting the receiver of the shrilling phone to her ear.
‘Cassie Carew!’
So she didn’t stand on ceremony. Was that good or bad? McCall didn’t know, any more than he knew if the attraction he was feeling for this woman he’d just met was going to be a help or a hindrance in the days that lay ahead.
Whatever—it was something he’d have to hide from her. From the no-nonsense way she was speaking into the telephone he could tell she wouldn’t appreciate him taking advantage of a feigned relationship.
Not that he would, of course.
‘Well, that’s the call,’ she said to him as she replaced the receiver. ‘I’m on my way. Perhaps we could continue this totally incomprehensible conversation some other time.’
Sarcasm rode shotgun on the words, but McCall found himself liking her attitude. He waited, still standing by the filing cabinet, while she shrugged into a white coat which had been flung over the back of her chair, then pulled a stethoscope out of its pocket and slung it around her neck.
‘You’ve got to go now,’ she told him, frowning as she glanced his way—obviously displeased to find him still in her office.
‘I am,’ he told her, crossing to open the door and wave her through. ‘After you!’
Cassie seethed with aggravation as she walked out of her office. What on earth was Dave up to, saddling her with this man?
And surely he couldn’t be serious about the ‘boyfriend’ scenario?
‘You can’t come with me,’ she said, turning towards the big man who appeared to be following her. ‘I’m going into Accident and Emergency—to work—to patch up bleeding, injured people. It’s not a spectator sport.’
‘I won’t interfere,’ he said. ‘Just hang around.’
Cassie stopped dead, and turned to face the man. He might be big—he might even, if he really was a bodyguard, be strong—but he was obviously as thick as two bricks.
‘Even if you were my boyfriend—which you aren’t—do you think I’d let you hang around in A and E—in any part of the hospital, in fact—watching me work? My patients are entitled to their privacy, you know.’
His gaze slowly scanned her face, giving her time to take in smile wrinkles pressed into the skin at the corners of the brown eyes. Deep smile wrinkles, as if he smiled a lot.
But he was also tanned, so maybe he usually worked out of doors and the wrinkles weren’t from smiling but from squinting against the sun.
As if it matters, Cassie, she mentally yelled at herself, then realised McCall was speaking again.
‘Nurses, aides, office staff are all involved with patients within the hospital,’ he said, after what seemed an age but which might only have been seconds. ‘One more person isn’t much extra in the way of an invasion. In fact, in big hospitals there are security people as well.’
Annoyed that she’d let wrinkles—of all things—distract her, Cassie straightened to her full five ten and glared at him.
Glared up at him. He was tall…
‘They are staff and covered by the rules and regulations of the hospital regarding privacy and discretion and duty of care.’
‘I might be staff,’ McCall told her. ‘As far as the patients are concerned, I could be a doctor so enamoured of you I’ve come up to see if working here at Wakefield with you might suit me. You know, whether we get along at work as well as we do at play—that kind of scenario. And I’d have to try the place to see if I’d enjoy working in the country. I could be a doctor on trial.’
He beamed at her, as if his brilliance in figuring out this new deception should garner high praise.
Unable to believe his effrontery, Cassie turned away and continued down the corridor, grumbling loudly at him as she went, ‘Pretending to be a doctor would not only be unethical, it would be illegal, so forget it, sport!’
She pushed open the swing door into the small A and E treatment area, where Cheryl Churcher was being cleaned up by Betty Stubbings, the nurse on duty.
‘Nice area,’ a precise voice said behind her, and she turned to find McCall had followed.
‘You can’t come in here!’ she told him, spinning around and whispering the angry words so neither Betty nor Cheryl could hear.
‘Of course I can. I could be the patient’s friend.’
‘Patient’s friends wait in the waiting room,’ Cassie said, aware her furtive argument was attracting the attention of the other two women.
McCall smiled, the effect on his rather sombre face so unexpected Cassie was thrown—but only momentarily. She was rallying for another argument when he added, ‘Then I’ll have to be your friend!’ He smiled again, as if the simplicity of it all was delightful. ‘And as the boss, surely it’s up to you to say who can and can’t come in.’
‘I think this gash needs stitching.’
Betty’s quiet words reminded Cassie of her first priority.
‘I’ve already said you can’t come in,’ Cassie reminded her unwelcome companion, but her words lacked strength as her mind was already racing ahead to her patient and wondering just how many head wounds one head could suffer and survive.
She gave up on McCall. Maybe she could ignore him—pretend he wasn’t there—though mentally rendering someone his size invisible wouldn’t be easy.
‘I thought you and Bill had promised never to fight again,’ she said to Cheryl, coming to stand beside the high, wheeled bed.
‘He started it,’ Cheryl said, repeating the accusation whichever of them was admitted after a fight always used.
‘He started it, you started it, I don’t care,’ Cassie said, examining the open scalp wound that stretched from above Cheryl’s temple down to behind her right ear. ‘You two use up more of my sutures than anyone else in this town.’
‘Is that all you care about, your stupid sutures?’ Cheryl grumbled at her. ‘What about my head?’
‘What about your head?’ Cassie retorted. ‘You don’t care about it so why should I? The way you’re going, you’re running out of skin to stitch. Pretty soon, I’ll be putting stitches in the stitches.’
She turned away as she answered, washing her hands in the sink beside the bed, then drying them and pulling on gloves.
‘Ha, ha,’ Cheryl grumbled. ‘You used that joke last time.’
‘I wasn’t joking—then or now,’ Cassie told her, working as she spoke, deadening the nerves around the wound with local anaesthetic before picking up the pre-threaded needle she’d need for her fancy work.
‘What do you fight about?’
The voice, coming from behind Cassie’s right shoulder, startled her, but Cheryl seemed unfazed.
‘Who’re you? New doctor?’
Cassie couldn’t see McCall’s face but she could hear the fatuous smirk he was surely offering in the silky tones of his reply.
‘Not yet—maybe one day.’ Pause. ‘Actually, I’m a friend of Cassie’s—checking out the place.’
‘Woo-hoo—and about time! Cassie’s got a boyfriend!’ Cheryl sang, while Cassie wondered which of them she’d stab, the patient or McCall, with the handy suture needle.
‘We fight about anything and everything,’ Cheryl continued. ‘Today it was whose turn it was to do the breakfast dishes. Bill said it was mine, and I reminded him I’d done them yesterday, and I’d cooked, and he said, “If you can call it cooking,” so I threw the egg-beater at him, and he threw a cup, then I threw a plate—copped him a beaut, I did, right on the nose. That wouldn’t half have made his eyes water. Then he hit me with the frying-pan. It was still dirty, too. I hope you cleaned out any gunk!’
The final remark was obviously directed to Cassie, who’d heard similar scenarios described dozens of time. She continued inserting, knotting and snipping off sutures.
‘You sound as if you’ve had plenty of practice at this,’ McCall—a man who was apparently unaffected by black looks—said admiringly to Cheryl. ‘Has anyone ever filmed one of your fights?’
‘Filmed us? Why would anyone want to film one of our fights?’ Cheryl demanded.
‘You could send it to one of those funny home video shows—make some money.’
‘You having me on?’ Cheryl was eyeing McCall with a mix of suspicion and hope.
‘No way—I think it would be great!’
‘Especially if one of them ended up dead or maimed for life—and the whole thing was caught on film!’ Cassie offered waspishly.
She finished the job, asked Betty to put a dressing on the wound and, cutting the man a look that said, Follow me, led the way out of the room into the relative privacy of the storeroom.
‘How could you do that?’ she demanded when he’d followed her into the limited space between the shelves.
‘Suggest they film their fights? I thought if they saw what they were doing, it might act as a deterrent. It’s a technique being trialled by some psychologists in connection with behaviour modification.’
Somewhere in Cassie’s head the question of why a bodyguard would know about behaviour modification surfaced, but that wasn’t the issue at the moment, so she ignored it.
‘I’m not talking about your suggestion to Cheryl, though you had no right to be talking to her at all. I’m talking about you telling her you’re my boyfriend.’ Even in her own ears the conversation was convoluted, but she struggled valiantly on. ‘Don’t you know anything about country towns? I can’t keep Cheryl in here with a scalp wound, and that story will be all over town within an hour of her walking out the door.’
McCall, looming over her in the small area, smiled smugly.
‘But that’s exactly what we want,’ he said with maddening complacency.
‘It’s not exactly what I want,’ Cassie reminded him. ‘My mother works in town—she’ll hear it from one of the office juniors coming back from lunch. What’s she supposed to think? That I’ve been having some wild affair and not told her about it?’
‘Do you always tell your mother about your wild affairs?’
Wondering what the consequences would be of braining a man with a heart monitor, Cassie counted to ten—then to twenty to make sure she wasn’t going to damage hospital property.
‘Get out of here,’ she said, pleased to find no tendrils of smoke escaped from her fury to curl around the words.
‘But I thought you wanted me to follow you in here,’ he said, and she was close enough to guess he was enjoying teasing her.
‘I did—so I could say goodbye. And I’m saying it now. Goodbye! I want you out of here—out of this hospital and out of my life. Talk about overkill! I mention to Dave I’ve received a couple of funny letters and suddenly I’ve got a bodyguard.’
‘Your mother already knows. Dave took me to meet her this morning—before we came here.’
It took a moment for Cassie to get a handle on this remark, going back as it did to an earlier bit of the conversation. But getting a handle on it didn’t make it any more believable.
‘Dave took you to meet my mother?’
McCall nodded.
‘I can’t believe he’d do a thing like that. The last thing she needs at the moment are more worries.’
‘She’d already talked to Dave. She knew you’d had at least one letter.’
The man’s words, though quietly spoken, stopped Cassie cold.
‘How do you know that? How did she know?’
McCall shrugged ridiculously broad shoulders—of course bodyguards would have to be well built—and said, ‘Something to do with a child going into your room? I think that’s what Dave said happened.’
The twins, one day last week. Apparently they’d not only emptied all the lower drawers in her wardrobe but had been through her desk as well!
‘Mum should have said something to me, not gone running to Dave!’ Cassie muttered, more to herself than to McCall. ‘What if I’d opted not to bother Dave with this?’
‘Dave is there to be bothered, and only an idiot would not report anonymous mail.’
‘Well, label me idiot, then,’ Cassie snapped. ‘There’s no way I’d have mentioned it if I hadn’t remembered something Lisa Santorini said to me not long before she died. Something about nuisance letters.’
‘Lisa? The woman who drowned? Did you tell Dave this?’
Suddenly aware of a change of atmosphere in the small, enclosed space they still inhabited, Cassie looked up at this man who’d materialised so suddenly in her life.
‘Yes, I did tell Dave, but what do you know about Lisa? It’s too late to do anything about her death, so why did Dave mention it to you?’
‘Background,’ McCall said, but, though Cassie could accept it was reasonable Dave would pass on her concerns about Lisa’s death, she didn’t entirely believe McCall’s answer.
Too swift. Too glib.
An uneasiness close to distrust skittered through Cassie’s mind, but before she could demand more answers they were interrupted.
‘OK, you two—out of there. Go canoodle somewhere else! I need to get some dressings to restock the trolley.’
‘Canoodle!’ The word escaped through Cassie’s gritted teeth, but Betty’s voice had reminded Cassie of where they were, and she didn’t need to see the wrinkles at the corners of McCall’s eyes crinkle and his lips twist into a beguiling smile to know exactly what he was thinking.
Their interlude in the storeroom had strengthened the lie he’d told earlier—that there was something going on between the two of them.
‘Oh, for gosh sakes!’ Cassie mumbled, pushing past him to escape both the culprit and the situation. She’d phone Dave and tell him he had to get rid of this man.
She didn’t have to phone Dave. He was there—right in front of her—when she emerged, probably flushed scarlet, from the storeroom.
‘I came up to check on Cheryl. Bill’s here, too. He’ll drive her home.’ Dave held up his hand as if he knew exactly what she was about to say. ‘And I’ve given them both an official warning. I don’t care who starts it, who finishes it or who gets hurt, next time I’m taking them both in and charging them with disturbing the peace. The station first, hospital later if necessary, but it’s time this nonsense stopped.’
He nodded to McCall as if seeing him emerge from a hospital storeroom was no surprise.
‘That’s the only way I can take legal action against them,’ Dave continued, explaining the local knowledge to McCall. ‘If one charges the other, the charges are always withdrawn before it gets to magistrate’s court.’
Cassie frowned at Dave. He had no business explaining things to McCall—the man didn’t belong here. He’d be moving on.
Just as soon as she’d given Dave a piece of her mind…
‘Can I see you in my office?’ This to the policeman.
Dave nodded and followed her out of A and E. Cassie didn’t look, but she was reasonably sure the bodyguard was tagging along as well. She couldn’t make a scene here, but she didn’t have to let him into her office.
‘Of course he has to come in.’ Dave overrode her protests and ushered McCall into the room, where once again he didn’t sit, but prowled, finishing up at the window, not right behind her because she could still see him in her peripheral vision, but far enough out of the way to give the impression he wasn’t part of the conversation.
‘I doubt the gardener or any of the laundry women are good enough snipers to shoot me through the window,’ Cassie told him. ‘And if you’re trying to render yourself invisible, I’d give it up. You’re too big, for a start, to pass unnoticed anywhere but at a basketballers’ convention.’
‘I know,’ he said mournfully. ‘But I’m not a sitter. I tend to think better when I prowl.’
Good to know you can think, Cassie wanted to say, but the manners drummed into her by her mother made her hold her tongue.
She turned her attention—or most of it—to Dave.
‘Look, Dave, I’m sorry if I bothered you with those letters, and that you’ve gone to this trouble, getting McCall here from wherever, but, honestly, I can look after myself. And we don’t know for sure the deaths are linked to the letters. I checked back over the hospital statistics at the weekend, and a run of fatal accidents is unusual but not way off the charts statistically.’
Dave nodded.
‘Our stats told much the same story, and I wouldn’t have done any more, but Mrs Ambrose’s daughter—the one who’s been living in the US—came home last week. Albert, Mrs A.’s brother, had just shut up the house and left it until Roslyn arrived to sort out what’s in it. She found these, neatly filed under “N”, perhaps for nuisance.’
He passed Cassie a small wad of A4 paper, held together with a paper clip.
Cassie took it, conscious of the other man turning from the window and stepping towards her as if to read over her shoulder.
‘Mrs Ambrose?’ she whispered, as she clutched the papers against her chest, unwilling to look at them. ‘Mrs Ambrose got letters? Her death wasn’t an accident?’
‘Yes, she got letters, but as for the accident…Those are photocopies,’ Dave said, then added bleakly, ‘Not that we’re likely to learn anything from the originals. Computer-generated, no fingerprints—the envelopes might have been a help but Mrs A didn’t keep them.’
Cassie forced herself to release her death grip on the thin file. She glanced at the first note, a single sentence printed in the middle of the page, then looked up at Dave.
‘Mrs Ambrose had pets? Like dogs and cats? I didn’t know that. She always travelled so much I didn’t think—’
‘I don’t think the writer meant those kinds of pets,’ the precise voice said, and Cassie turned towards the man who’d spoken. ‘Dave tells me she was a high-school teacher. Pets as in favourites?’
Cassie heard the words, but what registered more were the man’s eyes. Beneath the heavy lids, which gave an impression of a slumberous lethargy, keen brown eyes peered intently at her. He might smile easily—causing the little wrinkle lines—and his bulk and lazy way of moving might give the impression he wasn’t the shiniest bauble on the Christmas tree, but…
Disconcerted by her thoughts and the effect of this scrutiny, she turned back to Dave.
‘I wouldn’t have said that—would you?’
‘I don’t think that’s the issue, Cassie, though it does suggest a local author,’ Dave told her. ‘Read the other notes.’
She flicked through them, reading the nastiness that escalated into one final, unmistakeable threat.
You had pets.
You were unfair.
You think you’re so smart.
You will be sorry.
You won’t see seventy.
‘And she didn’t,’ Cassie said bleakly, her fingers trembling slightly as she handed the papers back to Dave. ‘There is someone, isn’t there?’ she said quietly. ‘My letters are printed in the same way—a single line in the centre of the page.’
For the first time she felt not the mild irritation the first letter had produced or the anger that had grown with the second and third, but cold, bone-chilling, tremble-inducing fear.
‘You’ve had three?’
It was McCall who asked and though she glanced towards him, she directed her own question to Dave.
‘You’ve shown them to him?’
‘Of course. He has to know the background. In fact, he has to know everything you can tell him, which is why it was best to put him close to you. You knew Lisa well, Judy Griffiths less well, but you know the town and the people in it probably better than anyone. Talk to McCall. The more he knows the easier it will be to protect you.’
Cassie wanted to protest the protection angle, but disbelief that this could be happening blocked all other thoughts. She looked at Dave and shook her head. How could she need protection in a town of six thousand souls—the town where she’d grown up?
Because someone in this town was killing people?
Might kill her…
‘But they could all have been accidents. Lisa drowned swimming at night after she’d been drinking, Mrs Ambrose could have hit the accelerator instead of the brake as she drove down into her garage, and Judy was the victim of a hit-and-run accident—these things happen,’ she said weakly, going straight into deep denial in order to cope with the magnitude of her thoughts.
‘Yes, they could,’ Dave agreed, ‘but is it likely, given what we now know?’
‘We can’t take that risk,’ McCall said, coming around in front of the desk and resting his hands on the back of the second visitor’s chair—leaning forward towards Cassie as he spoke. ‘Can we?’
Big moment here! Cassie was only too aware of it, but she was also annoyed at being forced into a situation not of her own making. Well, she thought that was the cause of her annoyance…
‘Surely there’s some other way of doing this, without wasting McCall’s time hanging around me. Think about the cost. I don’t know how much bodyguards get paid but he must get paid something and I know taking on an extra person at the hospital would play hell with the budget so I guess the same applies to your police budget, Dave.’
‘Don’t worry about the police budget,’ Dave told her, though he’d paused before he’d replied and Cassie was almost sure she’d caught a look she couldn’t read passing between the two men. ‘By rights, I should have a whole investigating team up here, but I couldn’t get that on suspicion and veiled threats so I got McCall.’
McCall smiled. It was obviously meant to be a reassuring smile—an ‘I’m as good as a whole investigating team’ kind of smile—but it struck Cassie that someone else seeing the smile might interpret it differently.
Some women might even consider it downright sexy.
