The Secret

In the event, Steven did not commit to taking over at Sci-Med but did agree to go back and take a look at something that had been troubling Macmillan greatly, the sudden deaths of a number of people including a former health minister who’d been involved in a series of health service reforms some twenty years before. It was during the course of this investigation that Macmillan underwent surgery and amazed his doctors by making a good recovery against all the odds. He was now back at Sci-Med in full charge of all his faculties and the organisation he had founded.

Steven, who had resigned his job with the pharmaceutical company in order to carry out the investigation, was still with Sci-Med but ever mindful of how Tally felt whatever she said — something that constantly caused him to overstate the routine nature of what he was doing, hoping to convince her that being in danger was very much the exception rather than the rule. Tally didn’t really believe it and he had to concede that she did have a point. He had come perilously close to losing his life on more than one occasion in the past few years.

Tally hadn’t come with him to Scotland this weekend: she’d agreed to provide cover at the children’s hospital for her boss whose mother had died after a short illness. Steven had driven north alone to spend time with his daughter Jenny and the family she had lived with since his wife Lisa’s death. Jenny had been a baby at the time but was now moving into the ‘seniors’ at her primary school in the village of Glenvane in Dumfriesshire where she lived with Lisa’s sister, Sue, her solicitor husband Richard and their own two children Peter and Mary.

Tally and Jenny got on just fine but Steven had given up harbouring dreams about his daughter’s coming to live with them on a permanent basis and all of them playing happy families — a notion of domestic bliss he’d entertained for some years, albeit to happen at some unspecified time in the future. He now recognised it as being both impractical and unrealistic. Jenny had lived too long with the folks in Glenvane and was happy there, accepted and much loved as one of the family. Having a ‘real daddy’ who came to visit whenever he could was a bonus in her life not an alternative. Sue and Richard had agreed with this assessment, having no wish at all to lose their ‘second daughter’.

Apart from this, Tally had a career of her own to pursue and no thoughts of giving it up. In fact, Steven’s return to Sci-Med had encouraged her to start applying for a consultant’s post, the next step up from her current senior registrar’s position and something she’d been delaying because of Steven’s having given up so much to come and live with her in Leicester. Success in this would almost certainly mean a move to another town or city, but with Steven living in London through the week Leicester was no longer their natural base. A position in a London hospital would suit them both down to the ground.

Steven paused in his progress along the water’s edge to pick up a handful of stones and begin throwing them out as far as he could, straining to hear the splash against the sound of the wind in his ears. Each successful one seemed to trigger a new thought about Simone. Whereas he had gone off to join the army as soon as he’d finished medical school, Simone had gone off to do what she could for the sick and the suffering in the third world. She would never follow the traditionally comfortable career path of the medic to middle class affluence and status. She would use her skills and dedication to help those who needed her in Africa and Asia throughout a career which had come to an abrupt and unfair end for whatever reason.

She had been working for some years for MSF, prepared to go wherever they chose to send her, but she was also a very charming and persuasive woman who had been used by the organisation to seek funding and practical help from big business — mainly the pharmaceutical industry — on many occasions, something she’d proved good at, with company executives often complaining with good humour that she could pick their pockets without their realising what had happened.

Steven had first met her when he had been seeking information about an outbreak of Ebola in one of the African countries where she had recently been working. He had been trying to identify the source of a possible case being held in a UK isolation unit. They had liked each other from the outset and their friendship had been cemented when Simone spoke of the difficulties of performing surgery in the bush and Steven was able to help her with tips and suggestions gained from his own wide experience of field medicine. Carrying out emergency surgery on the wounded in the deserts of the Middle East and in the depths of the South American jungle had given him a lot to pass on.