500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(58)

An incredibly beautiful woman answered the door: tanned skin, blond hair tumbling over a pretty, flowing dress. It was a sunny day, and the yellow light pooling into the lane made her appear to glow.

“You’re from the hospital?”

Cormac showed his badge.

“Not the Social?”

The way she said “the Social” sounded odd with her posh accent; it wasn’t, in his experience, the kind of thing women who looked like that and lived in multimillion-pound houses normally said. They normally never met with Social Services at all.

“Just the health worker,” he said, almost adding “ma’am” to it, her tone was so imperious.

She sighed. “I’m sure you feed back to your spy network,” she said.

Cormac wrinkled his brow and tried to imagine what that might be like. “Sorry,” he said. “Is this a bad time?”

She shrugged in bad grace and let him in.

INSIDE THE HOUSE was even more beautiful: architecturally designed, full of light and slick lines. Expensive-looking art books were piled up heavily on the tables; abstract pictures hung on the walls, which Cormac eyed with a newly found interest. It was a haven: it looked like a magazine shoot. Inside the vast light-filled kitchen, which had been extended back over the glorious garden, were folding doors that today were flung open, meaning the indoors and outdoors mingled, and you could hear birds squawking and bees buzzing—the first time, Cormac realized with a start, that he’d heard these things since he’d gotten to London. A tall, incredibly handsome man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a perfectly ironed linen shirt was making a green juice in a blender. He turned it off and gave the same distant smile to Cormac. The pair of them were so tall and beautiful they could be in an advertisement, or identical twins.

“Right,” said Cormac. “So . . . the patient?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “She’s fine.”

The woman led him upstairs, past more pictures and books, set off with expensive lighting and polished wood shelves and the scent of posh candles. She took him into a second-floor bedroom, a beautiful, hand-painted room full of friezes of flowers and fairies dancing, with a soft pale carpet on the floor and a huge armchair, stuffed full of books and toys, including a large dollhouse propped underneath the window. It was a dream of a room for a little girl.

Lying there on the bed was a pitiable figure.

Soaked in sweat, bright red in the face, was a little girl of around eight or nine. She was completely covered in red dots. Cormac looked at her, telling himself not to let the horror show in his face. A Filipino woman was sitting by her head with a rag she periodically soaked in iced water, wringing it and placing it over the child’s forehead.

He moved over.

“Hello . . . Titania,” he said, worried he’d pronounced it wrong. “Hello. I’m Cormac. I’m a nurse and I’m here to see how you’re getting on.”

In response the child burst into tears. Cormac gently took her temperature, then looked at the mother.

“Have you been giving her the ibuprofen?” he said as gently as he could.

“No!” said the woman. “She’s my child! I think I know what she needs! I’m treating her homeopathically!”

“I think that can be very useful,” said Cormac, who thought nothing of the kind, “when given in conjunction with other medicines. And when it comes to beating back a fever, ibuprofen can really help.”

“Well, you would say that,” hissed the woman. “You’re part of Big Pharma.”

Cormac wished that he were and Big Pharma would top up his salary once in a while. The woman’s calm, beautiful expression had gone; she now looked tight-faced and pinched.

“Are you giving her plenty of fluids?”

“Yes!” said the woman triumphantly. “This is Kona Nigari”—she held up a fantastically complicated-looking bottle—“it’s collected from a Hawaiian spring and is the purest water in the world. We get it flown in specially. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for our precious Titania.”

She smiled beatifically at the child, but made no move to actually comfort her.

Cormac wiped the girl’s forehead with a cloth, propping her up a little.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said to the moaning child. “It’s just not very nice for a little while. But soon you’ll be able to watch Hey Duggee again.”

“Actually we believe screen rays are dangerous for children,” said the mother in a sharp voice. “We don’t believe in them.”

Cormac was reasonably sure he’d seen the husband on his phone downstairs but didn’t mention it. Instead he made notes on the form, saw that her temperature was down a little and that she was probably on the mend. But seeing a child suffer for no reason was almost more than he could bear.

“And afterward,” he couldn’t help asking—it was his duty—“when she’s well, will you consider vaccinating against other diseases?”

“Well, she can’t get measles again,” said the mother as if he, Cormac, were being quite the idiot.

“No,” said Cormac. “But you would maybe want to consider rubella?”

“But God knows what the government puts in vaccinations!” she said, almost screaming. “Have you ever seen an autistic child?!”