I hadn’t gotten in touch with Heather before today. Somehow, I thought surprising her would be better, but as I walk up the road to her house, buffeted by a chilly late winter wind, I’m questioning the wisdom of that decision. Just what everyone wants: to be ambushed. Well done, Amanda, what a winning start.
I ring the doorbell. Fuck it. The worst she can do is say no.
“Who is it?” a suspicious voice asks from behind the door. I have no doubt I’m being peered at through the spyhole in the door.
“I’m a doctor, Dr. Maclean. I treated your husband.”
The door swings open. “Are you lying?” Heather asks, her face pinched and gaunt. “It would be a horrible thing to—”
“I can show you my hospital pass,” I say, pulling my NHS ID card out of my bag. “See, that’s me. I work at Gartnavel Hospital in the A and E Department. Euan was brought to us by air ambulance on November 1.”
Heather takes the card from me and puts a hand to her mouth, her face starting to collapse into tears. “You were one of the last people to see him alive.”
This hadn’t occurred to me. I can’t believe now that it hadn’t—it’s an appalling omission for my mind to have made—but I barely treated him. He was already at death’s door when he came to A and E. I never saw him conscious. To me, that is a distinguishing factor. To his wife, it doesn’t matter. I saw her husband when she was still his wife, not his widow. I saw him in his final breaths, gave him morphine to make sure if he was any pain it wouldn’t be felt, called out the numbers on his time of death.
“Can I come in?” I ask softly. “I’m so sorry I didn’t phone you, or ask, I just . . .” She waves my excuse away and beckons me inside. The door is quickly slammed shut behind us and she turns three locks. Wiping away tears from her cheeks, she points at the locks and says, “There’s been a lot of journalists. I don’t trust them. I don’t like people knowing where I live.”
The mantelpiece in the living room has a range of pictures, all in frames clearly given by children and grandchildren. Frames with “Best Dad in the World” and “I Love my Grandad” engraved into the wood. This is a place of family and comfort, a house lived in for a long time.
Heather offers me water and apologizes for the lack of biscuits—the food shortages are biting for us all at the moment—and sits, looking at me. I feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea that she’s welcomed me into her home under a false pretense. I did treat her husband but I didn’t hear any last words, I had no emotional connection with him. He was dying when he arrived into my care and died shortly afterward.
“I need you to know,” I say, desperate at the very least for this interaction to be based on honesty, “that I’m here because I have to find out how your husband became ill. I treated Euan but I never spoke to him. He was very, very ill when he arrived at A and E.”
“That’s okay,” Heather says, quietly before narrowing her eyes as a dark look crosses her face. “Are you writing an article for a newspaper?”
“No, no nothing like that. I’m here as a doctor. I want to understand where the Plague came from, and then, if I manage that, to pass the information on to the scientists around the world working on a vaccine. I think it could help.”
Heather looks torn. I can see her mind ticking back and forth between the two options. Chuck this doctor out, stay quiet, keep my world small and safe. Or, help. Make things better, for the price of even more attention. “Please,” I say. “At least hear my questions and then decide what to do.”
She nods. I’m aware that I have jammed a foot in the door of a grieving widow’s day and am demanding that she help me but fuck it. I’m a grieving widow and mother too. I’m trying to do the right thing.
“Was Euan doing anything out of the ordinary in the days before he started to feel unwell? In particular, I’m interested in what he was doing forty-eight hours before he started showing symptoms.”