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‘She’s fine, Dr Addison. It’s all back under control here, but the nursing staff are very shaken. Judy Newlands was looking after her and raised the alarm. If she wasn’t as organised and level-headed as she is, it could have been a total disaster,’ Brian said. ‘Someone had switched off the ventilator alarms and switched oxygen and nitrous oxide inputs to the ventilator—she was breathing a 50-50 mix of nitrous and air.’
‘That’s impossible, Brian, the connectors are different. You can’t screw an oxygen supply to a nitrous inlet, or vice versa.’
‘I know that, but that’s not how they did it. They cut the tubing and used clip-on joiners to switch the tubing. Nitrous comes out of the wall, and halfway along the tubing it changes into the oxygen tubing input of the ventilator. And the opposite for the oxygen supply.’
‘This is serious, Brian. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Have hospital security and the police been notified?’
‘The place is crawling with them right now, Dr Addison, and somehow the press has been informed. There are at least two newspapers here already and security tells me there’s a TV news van setting up a satellite dish out the front.’
Joel let out one sharp expletive. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
A group of journalists approached Joel as soon as he headed for the front doors of the unit. ‘Dr Addison? You’re the new director of Melbourne Memorial’s innovative new ICTU. Do you have any comments on Kate or Tommy Lowe’s condition? Has this incident or accident in the unit involved either of them?’ one of them fired at him.
‘I’m sorry but I am not at liberty to discuss patient details with anyone other than close family members,’ he said, and made to brush past.
‘Dr Addison, there are rumours that Kate Lowe tried to kill herself and her son, and there are rumours that an attempt was made on her life in the early hours of this morning in your unit. Do you believe there is a major weakness in security in the new unit? Could anyone just walk in and interfere with patients?’
‘Is the public safe in your unit, Dr Addison?’ another journalist persisted.
‘Please, get out of my way,’ Joel said, swiping his pass key to enter the building.
He located Brian Willis and almost frog-marched him into his office. Once there, the door shutting behind them with a snap, he asked Brian to fill him in on events of the night in detail.
‘Whoever did this didn’t realise about all the other separate alarms,’ Brian said. ‘The first thing to go off was the alarm on the pulse oximeter. Then the heartrate alarm went off at the desk. We were a bit short on staff, and had a one-to-three nursing ratio for about fifteen minutes down that end of the unit. Judy had gone to mix an antibiotic dose for Tommy, I was in the office. Judy heard the first alarm and came back in. The ventilator seemed to be working fine, she saw the alarms were off and switched them back on, and of course they all started sounding off. Oxygen sats had dropped to 70 per cent, so Judy just disconnected Mrs Lowe from the ventilator and hand-bagged her. Her obs came back to normal. She then reset all the ventilator settings and reconnected her, but within a minute all the alarms went off again.
We decided the ventilator was faulty. We bagged her while one of the unused machines was brought across by Chris Farmer, the orderly. We set her up on it on its bottle supply and it worked fine, so we disconnected the wall supply, moved out the old one, moved in the new one, connected the wall supply to the new one, then all the alarms went off on the new one. We knew the wall supply must have been OK because it’s driving every other ventilator in the unit. It’s just didn’t add up. Then Chris found the connectors and switched-over tubing—one loop of it, with the connectors, was concealed under the equipment trolley in the corner of the cubicle.’
‘This is not just sabotage, Brian, this is attempted murder,’ Joel said.
‘I agree. The police think so, too. They’re interviewing Judy and Chris now. I gave a statement a while ago. They want to talk to you at some point.’
‘Were there any relatives in the unit?’
‘There were people coming and going earlier in the night, up till pretty late actually,’ Brian answered. ‘You know what it’s like in here sometimes, we allow relatives as much contact as possible. That boy that came in the other day—you know, the spinal injury? His parents have barely left his bedside. I think his sister and girlfriend have been in, too, but it’s impossible to keep track of everybody in a unit as big as this.’
Joel ran a distracted hand through his hair. ‘I know … it’s hard to tell people to stay away when it could be the last time they see the patient.’ His hand fell to his side. ‘Has Mrs Lowe’s husband been informed?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was his reaction?’
‘Apparently pretty cold and dismissive about it,’ Brian said. ‘Quite frankly, I don’t think he’d care if someone pulled the plug on his wife.’
Joel frowned. ‘Was he in the unit at any time during the night?’
‘I’m not sure, I’d have to check with the nursing staff. Do you think he did this?’
‘It’d be a pretty stupid thing to do under the circumstances,’ Joel said. ‘The finger of blame would point straight at him.’
‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. But he must be extremely cheesed off about it all the same. The kid isn’t doing so well. Mr Lowe will probably lose it if his son doesn’t recover or if he’s left permanently brain-damaged.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be permanent,’ Joel said, at the same time as his phone rang.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Brian said and made his way out.
‘Joel, it’s Patrick Naylor here,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘What the hell is going on in the unit? I just had a call from Switchboard that the press and the police are crawling all over the place.’
‘There’s been an incident in ICTU with a patient,’ Joel explained, pinching the bridge of his nose with two fingers to release the tension he could feel building behind his eyes. ‘It’s under control now but the press will expect a statement from one of us—if it’s me, I want you to clear it before I make it. You’d better come in and I’ll fill you in with the details.’
‘For God’s sake, man, it’s four a.m.!’ the CEO said. ‘Can’t it wait until morning? I normally don’t get in till eight-thirty.’
Joel dropped his hand and rolled his eyes, actively forcing himself to remain polite. ‘If that’s what you’d prefer.’
‘Good. I’ll see you in my office at eight-thirty. And get Security to get rid of the press. I don’t want to be harassed by journalists getting from my car to the lifts.’
‘Fine, but if it’s going to be eight-thirty I can’t be held responsible for whatever unenlightened speculation appears on the front of the Melbourne papers,’ Joel said, but the CEO had already hung up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘DID you hear what happened last night in ICTU?’ Margaret Hoffman, the anaesthetic registrar, said the next morning as she came into the main operating theatre change room where Allegra was changing for the first case on Harry Upton’s long list.
‘No, I came straight up here. I’m doing my round later. What happened?’
‘Someone tried to kill Kate Lowe.’
‘What?’ Allegra’s eyes went wide. ‘How?’
‘They tampered with the ventilator, cut and switched nitrous and oxygen gas lines into her ventilator.’
‘That’s incredible! Have they caught the person responsible?’
‘No, but I bet it was the father,’ Margaret said.
‘It could have been anyone,’ Allegra said, not sure why she was springing to Keith Lowe’s defence. ‘It might have even been a member of staff.’
Margaret frowned as she tightened the waist ties on her scrub trousers. ‘But if it was a staff member, they would have known how the alarm system worked and circumvented it. That woman would be dead by now and I know a few people who would be glad of it.’
‘Come on, Margaret, that’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? The police haven’t even established whether it was an attempted murder-suicide.’
Margaret handed her the newspaper from inside her locker. ‘Haven’t you read this morning’s paper?’
Allegra unfolded it and looked down at the front-page story, her stomach sinking in alarm. There was a fairly recent picture of Kate and Tommy and below, the stark black headlines couldn’t have been more condemning of the mother’s motives.
‘She’s as guilty as all get-out,’ Margaret said. ‘Look at her. She looks the type, all dowdy and depressed. The inside story is the husband asked for a divorce and it sent her crazy. She didn’t want to give up custody of the little boy so decided to take matters into her own hands.’
Allegra refolded the paper and handed it back. ‘She’s still entitled to a fair trial.’
‘Yeah, right, where she gets some hot-shot lawyer to get her to plead temporary insanity and she gets off scot-free,’ Margaret said in a scathing tone. ‘What’s fair about that? How does that help that poor little kid hooked up on that ventilator?’
‘What would help both Tommy and his mother would be the staff getting on with their job of taking care of their recovery instead of gossiping and speculating about them,’ Allegra said.
‘Surely you don’t think she’s innocent, do you?’ Margaret asked. ‘How can she be when she was high on drugs and drink? She was driving the car, remember, no one else.’
‘I know …’ Allegra sighed as she stepped out of her skirt. ‘But I just can’t get my head around the idea of someone trying to kill their own child, not unless they were actually not in their right mind.’
‘I feel sorry for the husband,’ Margaret said. ‘It said in the paper how he’d done everything he could to try and save the marriage.’
Allegra frowned as she tied her hair with a bandana. ‘And yet the paper said he asked for a divorce.’
‘Well, everyone has their limits,’ Margaret said. ‘Maybe he’d finally had enough and found someone else. That’s the trend, isn’t it? Trade in the old wife for an updated version?’
Allegra turned to face her, a contemplative expression beginning to settle on her features. ‘Or get rid of the old wife.’
Margaret’s mouth dropped open. ‘But how would he have done it? When it happened he was in Melbourne. He’s got an iron-clad alibi.’ She folded her arms across her chest and added, ‘Now who is doing the speculating?’
‘You’re right,’ Allegra said with a rueful twist to her mouth. ‘We’d better leave this stuff to the professionals while we get on with what we’re trained to do. Is Harry here yet? I want to get on with the list so I can do some preliminary work on Tommy and his mother.’
‘So you’ve managed to convince the new director, have you?’
‘I wouldn’t go as far as using the word “convince”,’ Allegra said. ‘He has a lot of reservations. And this latest drama is not going to help things. Everyone will be as edgy as all get-out around there. But unless Kate or Tommy wake up, we’re never going to know what happened—the truth might never come out. Maybe a murderer will walk free. As I see it, my project is now doubly important.’
‘But what if the truth is she did try to kill her son and herself? How is the little boy going to cope with that?’
Allegra sighed as she reached for her theatre clogs. ‘How does anyone cope with the truth? It hurts for a while but somehow you have to pick yourself up and get on with life. Kids are amazingly resilient and incredibly forgiving.’
‘I can tell you one thing for free—if that woman was my mother, I would never forgive her,’ Margaret said with feeling. ‘That kid is likely to be brain-damaged for the rest of his life. That’s beyond forgiveness, if you ask me.’
‘No one is beyond forgiveness, Margaret. There isn’t a person alive who hasn’t made a mistake some time during their lives. We don’t know the circumstances of Kate Lowe’s life, or at least not firsthand. She might have felt completely different on another day. That’s the hardest part of it to comprehend. What loomed so large in her life might have been dealt with totally differently, given a few hours either way. And as for Tommy, well, at this stage we don’t know the extent of his brain injury,’ Allegra reminded her. ‘For all we know, he could make a complete and full recovery.’
Margaret gave her a sceptical look as she shouldered open the change-room door. ‘You really do believe in miracles, don’t you?’
‘We have to sometimes, Margaret,’ she said. ‘Science can’t fix some things, and it can’t tell us our values. If we haven’t got values, we may as well go downstairs and turn off the ventilator now.’
‘God, I hope it doesn’t ever come to turning off Tommy’s ventilator.’ Margaret grimaced. ‘Especially not so soon after Alice Greeson.’
‘It won’t come to that, Margaret,’ Allegra said with determination. ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure of it.’
Allegra had not long finished Harry’s list, which had run overtime due to a complication with a patient, when she received a call from the CEO, insisting on an immediate meeting with him in his office. ‘But I have to get down to ICTU,’ she said, hoping to put him off.
‘Why?’ Patrick’s tone became resentful. ‘So you can have a little rendezvous with the new director? I heard about your cosy little dinner last night.’
Allegra felt her hackles rising. ‘Look, Patrick, I’m sorry but I’m not interested in a relationship with you. What I do in my spare time is my business. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the way it is.’
There was a tense little silence.
‘It’s all right, I understand, but can’t we just meet as friends?’ Patrick asked, his tone now sounding more than a little emotional. ‘You’ve been wonderful to me lately, that’s why I supported your project so strenuously, apart from the fact that I do think it has merit. I felt I owed it to you for being such a good friend to me when I most needed it. Meet for a drink tonight at the Elgin Street bar at seven-thirty. That’s all I’m asking. Please, Allegra.’
Allegra suppressed a sigh of resignation. Patrick was right. He had gone out on a limb for her and she owed him her friendship at the very least. ‘All right, just one drink. But as friends, nothing else,’ she relented.
‘That’s fine,’ Patrick said. ‘But I still thought I should warn you about getting involved with the new director. You’ll only get hurt.’
She felt her tension increase slightly. There was a hint of something in the CEO’s tone that made her blood feel a little cold in her veins. ‘What are you saying, Patrick?’ she asked.
‘Look, I know he’s a damn good intensivist but I can tell you right now he only asked you out last night to keep you away from the unit. He doesn’t want you messing with the Lowe boy.’
‘Come on, Patrick, that’s an outright lie,’ she said, but the black, long-legged spider of doubt was already crawling insidiously across her mind as she recalled Joel’s totally-out-of-the-blue dinner invitation. They had barely been seated at the table when he’d brought up the topic of her study and the dangers of involving Kate and Tommy Lowe in it.
‘Go and ask him,’ Patrick challenged her. ‘He won’t deny it. He doesn’t want you to interfere with how the unit is being run. The press attention has been damaging enough. They’re making the unit sound as if anyone can walk in on any patient in there. And if they get to hear of you waving crystals or scented candles about, we’ll be a laughing stock.’
‘But you said—’
‘I know what I said and I still stand by it. I do think your project has potential but I’m afraid I’m with Joel Addison on this particular case. There’s just too much at stake. Just keep that in mind if he asks you out again. He could be operating under false pretences.’
‘Don’t worry, I will,’ she said, and after a quick goodbye stuffed the phone back in her pocket.
Joel was returning to his office after the X-ray review meeting in the radiology department when he encountered Allegra stalking up the corridor towards him, her face looking like a brewing storm.
‘Just the person I was hoping to run into,’ he said with a smile. ‘Got time for a quick coffee in my office?’
Allegra gritted her teeth. ‘Why? So you can keep me out of the unit and away from my project for a little longer?’
He frowned at her tone. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Surely you don’t need me to spell out your own despicable motives for you.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.’
She gave him a glowering look. ‘Why did you ask me out for dinner last night?’
He met her glittering green gaze head on. ‘Why does any man ask a beautiful woman out for a meal?’
Allegra had to force herself not to be mollified by his compliment and injected even more venom into her tone. ‘If you were any other man, I would have answered that you wanted to get to know me, but I am well aware of your real reasons for taking me out.’
‘All right,’ he said with a crooked smile. ‘I admit it. I had an ulterior motive.’
There was a three-beat pause.
‘Well,’ she said with a dark frown, ‘aren’t you going to come clean?’
He took her by the hand before she could stop him and pulled her into a storeroom off the corridor and closed the door. She opened her mouth to rail at him but his mouth came swooping down and covered hers with a hot drugging kiss that left her breathless and totally disorientated in the dark, suddenly intimate confines of the small room. His body was pressed so tightly against hers she could feel the small buttons on his shirt through the thin cotton of her top and his belt buckle against her stomach. She had trouble containing her reaction to him. It seemed to come from deep inside, out of reach of her brain, which insisted she remove herself from his embrace.
He lifted his mouth from hers and flicked on the light switch near her left shoulder, his dark eyes smouldering with desire as he held her gaze.
‘You had no right to do that,’ she said, wishing her voice had sounded a little more strident and infuriated, instead of breathless and weak.
‘You asked me to explain my motives. I thought it best to demonstrate them instead.’
‘What you just demonstrated is your incredible gall. You only asked me out last night to lure me away from the unit so don’t bother denying it.’
