Questions Of Trust: A Medical Romance (14 page)

‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’

‘I
can’t
tell you any more, Chloe. Tomorrow at half past nine?’

‘Yes. I’ll be there.’

‘And Chloe?’

‘Yes?’

‘Keep this under your hat, will you?’

Her instinct, after Mike had rung off, was to phone Tom immediately. Even if not to pry into what was going on, she thought she could at least sound him out, gauge his state of mind, offer her support in some undefined way. But Mike was now a source of information, and one of the primary rules of a good journalist was that you protected your sources. So Chloe held off, and tried to turn her attention back to her work.

She knew as she did so that there’d be little more she’d accomplish that day; nor would her sleep be especially peaceful.

***

For Tom, it all began on Tuesday morning.

He was finishing the second of two cups of coffee while Kelly dawdled over her muesli at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. The doorbell rang and he glanced at the clock on the wall, a novelty timepiece based on Salvador Dali’s melting clock. Seven ten.

Nobody rang the doorbell at this hour.

Padding to the front door in his socks, he saw a human silhouette looming through the frosted glass in the small panel set at head height. Cautiously he opened the door and peered out.

A woman of about forty whom he didn’t recognise stood on the top step, dressed in a denim jacket and wielding a microphone the size of a small club. Slightly behind her a man hefted a camera which began clicking and whirring at soon as Tom put his head out.

‘Dr Thomas Carlyle?’ the woman said. ‘Leah Foster,
Pember Valley News
. I was wondering if you might be prepared to answer some questions.’

Tom glared at the cameraman who was snapping away as she spoke. The
Pember Valley News
was Pemberham’s other weekly paper. Tom hadn’t looked at it, but he knew it was a downmarket rag, built on appealing to the townspeople’s baser and more prurient appetites.

‘Questions about what?’

‘May we come in?’ asked the woman, taking a step forwards. Tom retreated and began to close the door. What was this – some sort of profile of local public figures? But why without appointment, and at seven in the morning?

‘I haven’t time for this now,’ he said curtly. ‘I’ve got to get to work and my daughter to nursery.’

He’d almost closed the door completely when the woman’s voice came through: ‘It’s concerning the allegations made against you.’

Tom stopped, pushed the door open once more.

‘Allegations?’

‘May we come in?’ she asked again.

‘No. Not until you tell me what this is about.’

Holding the microphone closer towards him, she said, ‘Dr Carlyle, do you deny the allegations?’

‘For heaven’s sake,
what
allegations?’ Tom regarded himself as an even-tempered man, but he was close to losing it. ‘And you can switch off that thing.’ He jabbed a finger in the direction of the camera.

The woman glanced round at the cameraman who lowered his equipment, nodding and smirking. ‘Got some good ones already, anyway,’ he muttered.

‘Allegations,’ Leah Foster recited, ‘that you behaved in an inappropriate manner with one of your female patients.’

‘What?’ Tom was appalled. What was the woman talking about?

‘Do you claim, then, that you haven’t even heard of these allegations?’ The reporter looked triumphant, as if she’d just landed a major scoop.’

‘No! I mean, yes, that’s exactly what I’m claiming.’ Tom was aware that he was starting to sound as if he were blustering, caught off guard. Which of course he was.

From behind him he heard a small voice: ‘Daddy, what’s going on?’

‘Kelly? Go back in the living room, darling. Daddy’s just having a word with these people.’

She lingered, looking suddenly smaller than usual, and scared. He forced a grin on to his face and gave an encouraging nod, and Kelly disappeared again. Tom turned back to the duo on the doorstep, glaring at the cameraman to make sure he hadn’t taken any pictures of Kelly.

He stepped outside again in his stockinged feet, let the door swing shut behind him. The reporter and the cameraman were forced to take a step back.

‘Look,’ Tom said. ‘I have nothing to deny, or confirm, or whatever, because I’ve never heard of any such allegations before now. I don’t know where you’ve got your information from, but it’s clearly an unreliable source, so I suggest you spend a little more time checking your facts beforehand and a little less time hounding innocent people on their doorsteps first thing in the morning. Now kindly remove yourselves from my property.’

‘Dr Carlyle –’ the woman began. Tom folded his arms.

‘Go. Now.’

‘Just a few questions –’

‘I have nothing to say, and I’ll be lodging a formal complaint about your conduct with your office. Now leave.’

They stayed put, staring at him, defiant. He shrugged.

‘Then I’ll have the police remove you.’

He went back inside and closed the door. By the time he’d reached the living room, ruffled Kelly’s hair reassuringly and picked up the phone, he saw the reporter and the cameraman through the front window, making their way back to a van parked up on the kerb outside. Only when they’d pulled away and the van was out of sight did he put down the phone and let out a long breath.

And it wasn’t until he’d glanced at the clock, shooed Kelly into the hallway to put on her shoes and grabbed his own loafers, jacket and briefcase that it hit him, the physical aftershock of an unexpected and distressing encounter that left his legs slightly weak and his hands shaking.

Had it been some sort of prank? But who’d do such a thing, involving the local press? And what sort of allegation had the
Pember Valley News
heard that was robust enough that they saw fit to pursue it, to the point of doorstepping people at seven in the morning?

In a way, Tom was thankful he was running late, because it gave him less time to muse on what had happened. But even as he wrestled with the rush-hour traffic on the way to the nursery, he found his thoughts returning again and again to the encounter.

…You behaved in an inappropriate manner with one of your female patients…

The idea hit him as he was turning into the street where the nursery was located, and it caused him almost to run into the back of a car that was stopped round the corner.

Was it Chloe? Did she make a complaint, after what… happened that evening between us?

It was an absurd notion. They’d been outside the work situation and she wasn’t his patient, she was Ben Okoro’s. Plus, he couldn’t imagine Chloe doing such a thing. It was true that they hadn’t spoken since the encounter nearly a week earlier, but he hadn’t sensed that was because of a brooding animosity towards him on her part. Rather, he assumed she felt as awkward about it as Tom himself did, and was leaving a period of time for them both to cool off before they sought contact again and broached the subject.

But still… Tom couldn’t, for the life of him and in all honesty, imagine who could have brought such an allegation otherwise. As a doctor he was well aware of the dangers of inappropriate conduct towards patients, given the imbalance of power between a suffering individual and the professional he or she had placed their trust in to help and heal them. As a single man in his early thirties, he was even more acutely aware of the potential pitfalls that could arise in his dealings with women patients. It was why he never, ever consulted a female patient without a chaperone present, whether the practice nurse or one of the receptionists or even one of the patient’s own family members. Tom could, with his hand on his heart, assert that his behaviour had been professional at all times.

Misperceptions could, and did, occur, of course. A handshake that was thought to linger too long, a friendly remark that was interpreted out of context... the potential for misinterpretation in human communication was inexhaustible. So it was possible that somebody had misconstrued his behaviour and found it offensive. Fair enough; he was quite prepared to discuss this, and to apologise unreservedly if necessary for any offence cause. But surely this wasn’t the way to go about addressing the grievance - to approach the press, first, before raising the matter with Tom himself, or even with the practice manager?

His mind swarming with possibilities, speculations, all tumbling about in a swamp of confusion, Tom dropped Kelly off at the nursery and headed for work, wondering what the next chapter in this bizarre new story was going to reveal.

***

After her meeting with Mike Sellers, Chloe went for a walk through the historic town centre, wandering among its medieval churches and authentic Tudor houses and yet seeing nothing.

She felt dazed, listless. What she’d heard in Mike’s office had left her almost concussed, as if she’d had a physical blow to the head that had shaken her mind loose from one or two of its moorings.

She’d arrived at the
Pemberham Gazette
’s offices on time, Jake deposited with a fellow mum this time instead of Mrs McFarland, and Mike had ushered into his pivate room and, coffee poured, had got straight to the point.

‘You know Tom Carlyle, I assume.’

‘Yes, he’s my son’s GP. Saved his life once, as a matter of fact.’

Mike nodded, as if it was the kind of story he’d heard many a time about Dr Carlyle. ‘There’s been an allegation against him. One of sexual harrassment.’

Chloe didn’t believe it. ‘By whom?’

‘A woman phoned the
Gazette
on Friday afternoon. I sat on the story for the rest of the day before mentioning it to Simon that evening in an email, and I suggested he pick it up on Monday. I didn’t count on him inadvertently copying his reply to everybody on the paper’s email list.’

‘What did this woman say? The caller? And who was she?’

‘Some lady in her thirties. She claims she was a patient of Dr Carlyle’s, and that he made advances to her during a house call he made a couple of weeks ago. She’d phoned asking for a doctor because she was too ill to attend the surgery, he went round, allegedly made sexually suggestive remarks to her, then groped her. She says she was too shocked and embarrassed to do anything about it immediately, but as time’s gone on she’s realised other women might be vulnerable too and she feels she has a duty to blow the whistle.’

Chloe sat back in her chair, her cooling coffee cup forgotten in front of her. This was so unlike the Tom Carlyle she recognised, she hardly knew where to begin.

She said, ‘But why did she contact the
Gazette
? Why not go to the GMC?’ Chloe knew the General Medical Council was Britain’s regulatory body for the country’s medical practitioners, legally authorised to discipline transgressors and in extreme cases revoke permanently their licence to practise.

Mike turned his palms upwards. ‘Who knows? She may yet do that. But she hasn’t gone just to our paper. She’s approached the other side, too. Yesterday evening.’

Chloe closed her eyes briefly. “The other side” was the
Pember Valley News
, the Gazette’s main rival in town, though their markets were quite different. The tabloid would have a field day with this story.

‘Mike, this is crazy,’ she said. ‘I don’t know Tom Carlyle all that well, but I know him well enough. He’s not the sort to do something like this. He’s too professional. He’s not exploitative.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you. But we can’t ignore the story. We have to follow up on it. It’s a genuine public-interest matter.’

Chloe watched him for a few seconds, then said: ‘Let me have it. This story. Let me do the digging.’

‘No.’

‘Mike, please.’

‘No. I’m not willing to debate it.’

‘Why?’

‘A couple of reasons.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘First, I’ve given it to Simon. He’s a staff reporter. I can’t very well take it away from him all of a sudden and give to a freelancer, even one as respected and admired as you, Chloe. Second,’ he went on as she opened her mouth to protest, ‘you’ve demonstrated by what you’ve just said that you’d be too biased. There’s no such thing as completely objective journalism, as I think we all recognise. But you sound too convinced that there’s nothing in this story. An attitude like that, however justified it might turn out to be, would jeopardise the investigation. So I’m sorry, Chloe, and no disrespect intended... but no.’

‘Can I help Simon then? For free? I could do the ferreting around, the legwork. He  could write the copy.’

Mike looked at her curiously. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

Because I know these allegations are baseless
, Chloe wanted to say.
Because I want to clear Tom Carlyle’s name. Because I… because I feel he deserves better.
Instead she shrugged. ‘Just seems like the sort of story I could get my teeth into,’ she said. ‘But I realise you’re not here to provide work experience for me.’