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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER ONE

      BIG BEN struck midday, and the sound, though muffled by the roar of London’s traffic, struck clearly enough on Letitia Marsden’s ear, causing her to put down the recovery tray she had been checking and look expectantly towards the doors separating theatre from the recovery room. Mr Snell had begun a Commando operation some three hours earlier; at any moment now the patient would be handed over to her care. The doors swung silently open at that very moment and she pressed the buzzer which would let the orderly know that she must come at once, and advanced to meet the theatre party and receive the still figure on the trolley from the hands of the scrub nurse.

      ‘Hi, Tishy,’ said that young lady in a cheerful whisper. ‘Everything’s OK, buzz if you want any help.’ They cast a combined professional eye over the unconscious man between them. ‘He’s been a nasty colour once or twice, so keep your weather eye open.’

      Letitia nodded. ‘What’s next? A cholecystectomy, isn’t it?’

      Her friend and colleague nodded. ‘Yes—this one should be fit to move before Sir gets through with it, though. The anaesthetist will be out presently—he’s new by the way, filling in for Doctor van den Berg Effert.’ She raised her brows in an exaggerated arch. ‘Super, too.’ she handed over the theatre slip, cast an eye on the clock, murmured: ‘So long,’ and slid back through the doors.

      Letitia began her work, silent save for the muttered word now and then to the attendant orderly, one Mrs Mead, a middle-aged lady of great good sense, who had the added virtue of doing exactly what she was asked to do without arguing about it—her whole mind, save for one minute portion of it, concentrated upon her task, and that tiny portion concealed so deliberately beneath her calm cringed away from the grotesque appearance of the patient; the flap of skin already grafted, later to be used to cover the extensive operation on his throat, gave the man, lying so still, a quite unhuman appearance, and yet she was fully aware that later, given skilled nursing, expert skin grafting and time, his appearance could be made perfectly acceptable even to the most sensitive. She noted his pulse, his pupil reactions and his breathing, charted her findings, and because his colour wasn’t quite to her satisfaction, turned on the oxygen. She was adjusting it when the door opened and a gowned and masked figure came unhurriedly in, to join her at the patient’s side. A large man, very tall, and when he pulled down his mask, extremely handsome with it, with fair hair already flecked with grey, bright blue eyes and a long straight nose whose winged nostrils gave him a somewhat arrogant expression. But his mouth was kind when he smiled, and he was smiling at her now. She didn’t smile back; since her unfortunate experience with the Medical Registrar she distrusted men—that was to say, all men under the age of fifty or so. She frowned at him, her eyes beneath their dark brows as bright a blue as his, her ordinary face, with its run-of-the-mill nose and large generous mouth, framed by the theatre mob cap which concealed the great quantity of dark brown hair she wore in a well-ordered coil on the top of her head.

      ‘OK?’ asked the giant mildly.

      She handed him the chart with its quarter-hourly observations. ‘His colour isn’t quite as good as it was,’ she stated, ‘I’ve started the oxygen.’

      He nodded and handed back the chart, looking at her now, instead of the patient. ‘Call me if you want me,’ he answered her, still very mild. ‘The name’s Mourik van Nie.’ He turned on his heel and slid through the doors, making no sound, and moving, considering his size, very fast.

      She got on with her work, saying what was necessary to Mrs Mead, her mind on her patient. It was only after an hour, when the giant had been back once more, pronounced the patient fit to be transferred to the Intensive Care Unit and gone again, that she allowed herself to speculate who he was. Dutch, she supposed, like Doctor van den Berg Effert, one of the few men she liked and trusted and wasn’t shy of; but then he was married to Georgina, her elder sister’s close friend; they had trained together and now Margo was Sister on the Children’s Unit, and Georgina lived in the lap of luxury and a state of married bliss in Doctor van den Berg Effert’s lovely home in Essex. She and Margo had been there to stay once or twice and Letitia, living in a fool’s paradise in which the Medical Registrar was the only important being, had imagined herself living like that too—only it hadn’t turned out like that at all; he had taken her out for a month or two, talking vaguely about a future, which she, in her besotted state, had already imagined into a fact which wasn’t fact at all, only daydreams, and then, when she had

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