Mr. Nobody(33)
Either this man genuinely doesn’t understand what she’s saying or he’s a bloody good actor, she thinks. Poole and Graceford get lied to every day and people aren’t usually this good at it.
“Do you understand any of what I’m saying to you, sir?” Graceford asks, louder now. The man looks back to Rhoda again, who nods him on encouragingly. He holds her gaze and shakes his head slowly; he doesn’t want to do this anymore.
Poole tries now. “Sir, can you tell us what your name is?”
The man moves his head to look at Poole. Poole points a finger at his own chest. “Officer Poole,” he says in a labored and heavily accented voice. Graceford has to look down into her lap to stop herself from exploding with laughter. Poole is now pointing toward the patient, who watches him with intelligent eyes. “You?” Poole asks.
The patient nods. He understands. He’s been asked his name. He looks away from the police and the nurse and out at the murky sky. When he turns back he shakes his head, but this shake is different.
He can’t answer their question because he doesn’t know the answer.
16
DR. EMMA LEWIS
DAY 8—TEAMWORK
When I enter the empty conference room, Nick Dunning, the chief executive officer of the Princess Margaret Hospital and until recently its chief of strategic management, is dumping packets of sugar into a steaming coffee, spilling most of it on the table as he, distracted, taps away at his phone. According to Peter, it’s Nick I’ll be liaising with at the hospital. But at the moment he’s mid-email, head bobbed down over his phone. He looks up briefly as I round the conference table and take a seat, and flashes me a friendly harassed smile before plunging back into whatever crisis is playing out in the palm of his hand.
I pull my laptop and notes from my bag. And busy myself with them, fishing out my proposed action plan of tests and diagnostic methods. I study his face as he scrolls.
He’s a lot younger than I thought he’d be, dressed casually, a brushed-cotton collar peeking out from under a chic gray sweater. Stubble, fashionable horn-rimmed glasses that perfectly match the golden brown of his eyes. He’s very attractive.
After a moment he looks up again. “Sorry. Sorry, Emma. Nick.” He stretches his hand across the table and shakes mine warmly. “Rushed off my feet. It’s been a bit crazy around here the last couple of days.” He tips his phone by way of explanation. “I’ve been putting out a lot of fires, as you can imagine.”
“I can.” I smile back blithely. Rushed off his feet is an understatement if ever I heard one. The amount of patient complaints and follow-ups over what happened on the ward last week alone would be work enough. Never mind having to field the level of intense public interest in one particular patient. “It’s no problem at all, take all the time you need, Nick, if you want to finish up.” But he puts his phone away briskly and picks up his coffee cup. I put my notes down and give him my full attention.
“Right,” he says.
“Right!” I say.
We share a moment.
“God,” he adds.
“Yep,” I say with a little nod. “Can I just say straight up front,” I gush, “that the last thing I want is for you to feel like you are crisis-managing this alone, Nick. Or that I am in any way here to take over. I want to work with you, I need to. I don’t know the hospital and I don’t know the case yet. I’m just hoping that we can get this situation sorted out together, quickly, as a team?”
“Yes, exactly.” He tastes a gulp of coffee and grimaces. “That’s exactly what we want here too. I can’t say how relieved I was when they sent over your details. I liked the tone of that misdiagnosis paper. The previous cases you reexamined. It’s reassuring.” He flashes a relieved smile.
He’s definitely not what I was expecting and I bet I’m not what he expected either. I suppose I was expecting the CEO of an NHS Foundation Trust hospital to be, well, older, a bit soft around the center, a middle-aged man in a cheap suit. Not my age and…well, attractive.
But I suppose the next generation of healthcare needs the next generation of management.
He taps a pen gently on the table in front of him. “Are there any questions you’ve got straight off the bat, Emma?”
“Well, I’ve looked through the notes and at this stage it’s looking like a psychiatric condition. I’m thinking post-psychological trauma, but I’m going to need more information, which means more tests. An EEG to check for seizure disorders. I need to be sure we haven’t missed anything physical that could be causing this. But I think our key diagnostic tool is going to be an fMRI. I’ll need to do that as soon as I can.”
His brows furrow slightly. Like most NHS Trust CEOs, he has no specialist medical training. The job of hospital administrator is a nonmedical posting. He’ll have sat in on meetings about the patient, for sure, and he’ll have a degree of knowledge but it will only be lay knowledge.
I explain. “The fMRI will tell me if the patient is lying, faking his symptoms. As I know you know fugue has a bit of a history of that. He could be malingering for some reason or he could be Munchausen’s, meaning he’s doing all this for attention. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t sound like it, but the only real way to be sure is to do an fMRI. That should tell us whether the hippocampus is being activated to access memory. You can’t fake memory loss in a scan.”