Doctor and Protector Read online

  POLICE SURGEONS

  Love, life and medicine—on the beat!

  Working side by side—and sometimes

  hand in hand—dedicated medical professionals

  join forces with the police service for the very best

  in emotional excitement!

  From domestic disturbance to emergency-room

  drama, working to prove innocence or guilt, and

  finding passion and emotion along the way.

  Dear Reader,

  Stalkers, murders, bodyguards! What are these things doing in a medical romance? They’re there to show it as it is. Our stories are fiction but bad things, sadly, happen in real life and that’s what we medical writers try to portray. With a lot of romance as well, of course!

  This story is part of the Police Surgeons series, and as I was living in a small country town when I wrote it, I set it not in my own town, but in a fictional town which, in my mind, was just down the road. Country towns are fascinating in that people know so much more about each other—small, intimate details of who did what to whom and when, right back to school days. So policing is both easier and harder. The sergeant might know Joe Blow well enough to know he’s the only person who could possibly have done the crime, but having been at school with Joe and being married to his cousin makes it more difficult to arrest him.

  I really loved my characters in this book, especially the twins. They were real twins, grandchildren of friends, and when I dropped by their house one day—the house in the book—one of the twins was crossing the drive, his arms slung across the back of the golden Labrador dog, and the scene stuck in my mind until the day I had to write it into a book. This book!

  I hope you enjoy it.

  Meredith Webber

  Doctor and Protector

  Meredith Webber

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘GOT a minute, Cassie?’

  Dr Cassandra Carew, Medical Superintendent of Wakefield Hospital, looked up from the nearly illegible letter she’d received from a local doctor, and smiled at her visitor. Dave Pritchard was the officer in charge of the local police station, but he’d also been a friend from when they’d both started in year one at Wakefield State School.

  ‘Dave! Nice surprise to see you in the office for a change. I can say, with total honesty, I’m pleased to see you, which I never am when you come in through the emergency entrance.’

  ‘No, I’m usually bad news down there,’ Dave agreed, turning towards a tall, black-haired figure in ancient cords and a faded football jersey who’d followed him into the room. ‘This is McCall.’

  Heavy-lidded eyes blinked once as Cassie inspected the stranger.

  ‘McCall someone, or someone McCall?’ she asked Dave, although she smiled politely at his companion to take away any offence.

  ‘It’s Henry, actually, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is not a name destined to gain acceptance in an Australian schoolyard, so I’ve always been called by my surname.’

  It was McCall himself who explained, in a clear, precise voice, walking past her desk and peering out the window. She knew from doing it often herself that the view over the laundry and the gardeners’ shed was uninspiring, particularly at the moment when water restrictions caused by the drought in this part of central Queensland meant the usually lush green grass beyond the outbuildings was dry, brown and brittle.

  Dave, meanwhile, was depositing his lean, uniform-clad figure in one of the visitors’ chairs.

  ‘I’m assuming this isn’t a social call,’ Cassie said, watching the second visitor slouch over towards the filing cabinet in the corner of her room and pick up one of the family photos she kept on the top of it.

  ‘No, I wanted to introduce you to McCall and explain—’

  Dave’s own explanations were cut short by a squawk from his two-way radio.

  ‘Domestic at the Churchers’,’ he said to Cassie, obviously recognising both the code and the street address. ‘I’ve got to go. McCall will explain.’

  ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ Cassie told McCall. ‘Then I’ll be summoned to A and E to attend to whichever of the Churchers lost today’s argument. I might have the grand title of Medical Superintendent at this hospital, but like all country superintendents I’m still a working doctor.’

  ‘It won’t take five minutes—more like five seconds,’ McCall told her, turning from her filing cabinet with a photo still in his hands. ‘I’m your shadow.’

  Before Cassie could query this bizarre remark, he held up the photo and continued, ‘Fine-looking family. All girls?’

  ‘Until the twins arrived,’ Cassie said, standing up and coming around her desk, feeling obscurely anxious about this stranger holding an image of her family in his hands.

  As if he understood her anxiety, he handed her the photo—one of herself, Emily and Anne, with Abigail their mother, taken not long before Em had gone away. Cassie looked at it, seeing the similarities between the four of them in the thick, honey-blonde hair and strongly boned faces, though Anne’s cheekbones, at sixteen, were still partially disguised by the remnants of her early plumpness, and her hair was, at the moment, a teenage-rebellion black.

  Cassie touched her finger to Anne’s face, and closed her eyes as a terrible anguish, so strong she had to repress a cry, clutched at her body.

  She wasn’t worried about dying herself. She’d prefer not to, of course, if she could possibly avoid it, but the panic really clutched at her when she thought of not being here to see Annie’s cheekbones come through.

  To not see her flower into full, vibrant womanhood…

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ McCall said, as if he could somehow feel the gut-wrenching moment of fear himself. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘That’s why you’re here?’ Cassie pulled herself together sufficiently to question this weird statement. ‘What are you? Some kind of bodyguard?’

  Then the absurdity of such an idea struck her and she looked in McCall’s face and laughed.

  ‘No, of course you can’t be! Not even Dave could be so dense as to think that would work!’

  McCall saw eyes as green as emeralds scan his face, and felt a twist of the same fear he’d seen in her involuntary shudder a little earlier. What could he, an academic, do to protect this woman?

  This very attractive woman…

  ‘Not a bodyguard,’ he said, smiling inwardly at the confluence of his thought with what he was about to say. ‘A boyfriend. Though surely I’m too old to be called a boyfriend, and you’re probably too old to have one, but Dave’s idea—’

  ‘Boyfriend? Too old? Where do you get off—?’

  The woman Dave called Cassie broke off as if her indignation was too immense to be put into words.

  ‘I’m doing this badly,’ McCall apologised. ‘But to put it bluntly, Dave wanted me up here, and because you’re the latest recipient of threats, he thought it would be best if I was close to you. His idea is that you and I met when you were on holiday recently, and I’m here following up our holiday romance.’

  ‘Holiday romance!’

  The words spluttered from Cassie’s lips, which, McCall realised, were as attractive, in their own way, as her eyes. Soft and full, the lips, demurely and naturally coloured a dusky kind of pink.

  See, an internal voice snapped at him. I told you you’d be no good at this. Too easily distracted.r />
  Now he’d missed what she was saying. Something to the effect that she hadn’t been on holiday?

  ‘But you’ve been away,’ McCall argued, sufficiently off track that he’d forgotten most of Dave’s briefing. Something—he guessed anger at his denseness, or perhaps at Dave for arranging this—was raising a tinge of pink beneath the lightly tanned skin of her cheeks.

  ‘I’ve been away rescuing my nephews from the useless lump of ectoplasm who fathered them. The lying hound fought my sister for custody, on the grounds she was doing a season in Antarctica, then had the hide to head off for the Himalayas himself, on an expedition he’d obviously been planning for at least a year, leaving the twins with his pleasant but quite dotty mother, who has less idea of child-rearing than my dog.’

  ‘But you have been away,’ McCall reminded her, determined to stick to the facts, though his over-developed sense of curiosity would have liked more detail about the obviously dysfunctional family she’d just described.

  More detail on the dog, come to that—he was fond of dogs, though his lifestyle at the moment precluded having one.

  These thoughts drifted through his head as he watched Cassie turn away from him, heading back to her desk with two long strides and lifting the receiver of the shrilling phone to her ear.

  ‘Cassie Carew!’

  So she didn’t stand on ceremony. Was that good or bad? McCall didn’t know, any more than he knew if the attraction he was feeling for this woman he’d just met was going to be a help or a hindrance in the days that lay ahead.

  Whatever—it was something he’d have to hide from her. From the no-nonsense way she was speaking into the telephone he could tell she wouldn’t appreciate him taking advantage of a feigned relationship.

  Not that he would, of course.

  ‘Well, that’s the call,’ she said to him as she replaced the receiver. ‘I’m on my way. Perhaps we could continue this totally incomprehensible conversation some other time.’

  Sarcasm rode shotgun on the words, but McCall found himself liking her attitude. He waited, still standing by the filing cabinet, while she shrugged into a white coat which had been flung over the back of her chair, then pulled a stethoscope out of its pocket and slung it around her neck.

  ‘You’ve got to go now,’ she told him, frowning as she glanced his way—obviously displeased to find him still in her office.

  ‘I am,’ he told her, crossing to open the door and wave her through. ‘After you!’

  Cassie seethed with aggravation as she walked out of her office. What on earth was Dave up to, saddling her with this man?

  And surely he couldn’t be serious about the ‘boyfriend’ scenario?

  ‘You can’t come with me,’ she said, turning towards the big man who appeared to be following her. ‘I’m going into Accident and Emergency—to work—to patch up bleeding, injured people. It’s not a spectator sport.’

  ‘I won’t interfere,’ he said. ‘Just hang around.’

  Cassie stopped dead, and turned to face the man. He might be big—he might even, if he really was a bodyguard, be strong—but he was obviously as thick as two bricks.

  ‘Even if you were my boyfriend—which you aren’t—do you think I’d let you hang around in A and E—in any part of the hospital, in fact—watching me work? My patients are entitled to their privacy, you know.’

  His gaze slowly scanned her face, giving her time to take in smile wrinkles pressed into the skin at the corners of the brown eyes. Deep smile wrinkles, as if he smiled a lot.

  But he was also tanned, so maybe he usually worked out of doors and the wrinkles weren’t from smiling but from squinting against the sun.

  As if it matters, Cassie, she mentally yelled at herself, then realised McCall was speaking again.

  ‘Nurses, aides, office staff are all involved with patients within the hospital,’ he said, after what seemed an age but which might only have been seconds. ‘One more person isn’t much extra in the way of an invasion. In fact, in big hospitals there are security people as well.’

  Annoyed that she’d let wrinkles—of all things—distract her, Cassie straightened to her full five ten and glared at him.

  Glared up at him. He was tall…

  ‘They are staff and covered by the rules and regulations of the hospital regarding privacy and discretion and duty of care.’

  ‘I might be staff,’ McCall told her. ‘As far as the patients are concerned, I could be a doctor so enamoured of you I’ve come up to see if working here at Wakefield with you might suit me. You know, whether we get along at work as well as we do at play—that kind of scenario. And I’d have to try the place to see if I’d enjoy working in the country. I could be a doctor on trial.’

  He beamed at her, as if his brilliance in figuring out this new deception should garner high praise.

  Unable to believe his effrontery, Cassie turned away and continued down the corridor, grumbling loudly at him as she went, ‘Pretending to be a doctor would not only be unethical, it would be illegal, so forget it, sport!’

  She pushed open the swing door into the small A and E treatment area, where Cheryl Churcher was being cleaned up by Betty Stubbings, the nurse on duty.

  ‘Nice area,’ a precise voice said behind her, and she turned to find McCall had followed.

  ‘You can’t come in here!’ she told him, spinning around and whispering the angry words so neither Betty nor Cheryl could hear.

  ‘Of course I can. I could be the patient’s friend.’

  ‘Patient’s friends wait in the waiting room,’ Cassie said, aware her furtive argument was attracting the attention of the other two women.

  McCall smiled, the effect on his rather sombre face so unexpected Cassie was thrown—but only momentarily. She was rallying for another argument when he added, ‘Then I’ll have to be your friend!’ He smiled again, as if the simplicity of it all was delightful. ‘And as the boss, surely it’s up to you to say who can and can’t come in.’

  ‘I think this gash needs stitching.’

  Betty’s quiet words reminded Cassie of her first priority.

  ‘I’ve already said you can’t come in,’ Cassie reminded her unwelcome companion, but her words lacked strength as her mind was already racing ahead to her patient and wondering just how many head wounds one head could suffer and survive.

  She gave up on McCall. Maybe she could ignore him—pretend he wasn’t there—though mentally rendering someone his size invisible wouldn’t be easy.

  ‘I thought you and Bill had promised never to fight again,’ she said to Cheryl, coming to stand beside the high, wheeled bed.

  ‘He started it,’ Cheryl said, repeating the accusation whichever of them was admitted after a fight always used.

  ‘He started it, you started it, I don’t care,’ Cassie said, examining the open scalp wound that stretched from above Cheryl’s temple down to behind her right ear. ‘You two use up more of my sutures than anyone else in this town.’

  ‘Is that all you care about, your stupid sutures?’ Cheryl grumbled at her. ‘What about my head?’

  ‘What about your head?’ Cassie retorted. ‘You don’t care about it so why should I? The way you’re going, you’re running out of skin to stitch. Pretty soon, I’ll be putting stitches in the stitches.’

  She turned away as she answered, washing her hands in the sink beside the bed, then drying them and pulling on gloves.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Cheryl grumbled. ‘You used that joke last time.’

  ‘I wasn’t joking—then or now,’ Cassie told her, working as she spoke, deadening the nerves around the wound with local anaesthetic before picking up the pre-threaded needle she’d need for her fancy work.

  ‘What do you fight about?’

  The voice, coming from behind Cassie’s right shoulder, startled her, but Cheryl seemed unfazed.

  ‘Who’re you? New doctor?’

  Cassie couldn’t see McCall’s face but she could hear the fatuous smirk he was surely offering
in the silky tones of his reply.

  ‘Not yet—maybe one day.’ Pause. ‘Actually, I’m a friend of Cassie’s—checking out the place.’

  ‘Woo-hoo—and about time! Cassie’s got a boyfriend!’ Cheryl sang, while Cassie wondered which of them she’d stab, the patient or McCall, with the handy suture needle.

  ‘We fight about anything and everything,’ Cheryl continued. ‘Today it was whose turn it was to do the breakfast dishes. Bill said it was mine, and I reminded him I’d done them yesterday, and I’d cooked, and he said, “If you can call it cooking,” so I threw the egg-beater at him, and he threw a cup, then I threw a plate—copped him a beaut, I did, right on the nose. That wouldn’t half have made his eyes water. Then he hit me with the frying-pan. It was still dirty, too. I hope you cleaned out any gunk!’

  The final remark was obviously directed to Cassie, who’d heard similar scenarios described dozens of time. She continued inserting, knotting and snipping off sutures.

  ‘You sound as if you’ve had plenty of practice at this,’ McCall—a man who was apparently unaffected by black looks—said admiringly to Cheryl. ‘Has anyone ever filmed one of your fights?’

  ‘Filmed us? Why would anyone want to film one of our fights?’ Cheryl demanded.

  ‘You could send it to one of those funny home video shows—make some money.’

  ‘You having me on?’ Cheryl was eyeing McCall with a mix of suspicion and hope.

  ‘No way—I think it would be great!’

  ‘Especially if one of them ended up dead or maimed for life—and the whole thing was caught on film!’ Cassie offered waspishly.

  She finished the job, asked Betty to put a dressing on the wound and, cutting the man a look that said, Follow me, led the way out of the room into the relative privacy of the storeroom.

  ‘How could you do that?’ she demanded when he’d followed her into the limited space between the shelves.

  ‘Suggest they film their fights? I thought if they saw what they were doing, it might act as a deterrent. It’s a technique being trialled by some psychologists in connection with behaviour modification.’