There was that grin again. ‘The entire crowd from this side of the lake being exactly eight locals, led by Doreen Kettle who takes her elderly mother and her five kids to the football every week and who drives ten times slower than you. The last of the eight will be the coach who drives home about ten tonight. Cradle Lake will have lost—we always lose—and our coach will have drowned his sorrows in the pub. There’ll be no way he’ll be on the roads until after the Cradle Lake constabulary go to bed. Which is after Football Replay on telly, which finishes at nine-thirty, leaving the rest of Saturday night for Cradle Lake to make whoopee.’
‘How long did you say you’ve been away?’ he asked cautiously, and she chuckled. It was a very nice chuckle, he decided. Light and soft and gurgling. Really infectious.
‘Ten years. But nothing, nothing, nothing changes in Cradle Lake. Even Doreen Kettle’s kids. When I left she was squashing them into the back of the car to take them to the footy. They’re still squashing, only the squashing’s got tricker. I think the youngest is now six feet three.’ She brightened. ‘But, then, you’ve changed. Cradle Lake has a doctor. Why are you here?’
He sighed. The question was getting repetitive. ‘I told you—as a locum.’
‘No one’s ever been able to get a locum for Cradle Lake before. The last doctor was only here because his car broke down here just after the war. He was on his way to visit a war buddy and he couldn’t get anyone to repair it. He didn’t have the gumption to figure any other way of moving on.’
Fergus winced. He’d only been in the district for a couple of days but already the stories of the old doctor’s incompetence were legion.
‘Your truck’s still operating,’ Ginny pointed out. ‘So why did you stop?’
‘This is the hospital truck. And I ran my finger down the ads in the medical journal and chose the first place I’d never heard of.’
She stared. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted a break from the city.’
She eyed him with caution. ‘You realise you won’t exactly get a holiday here. This farming land’s marginal. You have a feeder district of very poor families who’ll see your presence as a godsend. You’ll be run off your feet with medical needs that have needed attention for years.’
‘I want to be busy.’
She considered him some more and he wondered what she was seeing. His reasons for coming? He hoped not. He tried to keep his face expressionless.
‘So, by break,’ she said cautiously, ‘you don’t mean a break from medicine.’
‘No.’
She eyed him for a bit longer, but somewhat to his surprise she didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe she didn’t want him asking questions back, he thought, and he glanced at her again and knew he was right. There was something about the set of her face that said her laughter was only surface deep. There were problems. Real and dreadful problems.
As a good physician he should probe.
No. He wasn’t a good physician. He was a surgeon and he was here as a locum, to focus on superficial problems and refer anything worse to the city.
He needed to think about a fractured hip.
They were bumping over yet another cattle grid. Before them was a ramshackle farmhouse, surrounded by what looked like a graveyard for ancient cars. About six ill-assorted, half-starved dogs were on the veranda, and they came tearing down the ramp baying like the hounds from hell as the vehicle pulled to a stop.
‘I’m a city boy,’ Fergus said nervously, staring out at the snarling mutts, and Ginny grinned, pushed open the door and placed the lamb carefully on her seat behind her. She closed the truck door as the hounds reached her, seemingly ready to tear her to pieces.
‘Sit,’ she roared, in a voice that could have been heard in the next state. They all backed off as if she’d tossed a bucket of cold water over them. Three of the mongrels even sat, and a couple of them wagged their disreputable tails.
She swiped her hands together in a gesture of a job well done and then turned and peeped a smile at him.
‘You can get out now,’ she told him. ‘The dragons have been slain. And we’re quits. You rescued me and I’ve rescued you right back.’
‘Thanks,’ he told her, stepping gingerly out—but all the viciousness of the dogs had been blasted out of them.
But the dogs were the least of his problems. ‘Doc?’ It was a man’s voice, coming from the house, and it was a far cry from the plaintive tone that had brought him here in the first place. ‘Is that the bloody doctor?’ the voice yelled. ‘About bloody time. A man could die…’ The voice broke off in a paroxysm of coughing, as if the yell had been a pent-up surge of fury that had left the caller exhausted.
‘Let’s see the patient,’ Ginny said, heading up the ramp before him.
Who was the doctor here? Feeling more at sea than he’d ever felt in his entire medical training, Fergus was left to follow.
Oscar Bentley was a seriously big man. Huge. He’d inched from overweight to obese many years ago, Fergus thought as a fast visual assessment had him realising the man was in serious trouble.
Maybe that trouble didn’t stem from a broken hip, but he was in trouble nevertheless. He lay like a beached whale, sprawled across the kitchen floor. A half-empty carton of beer lay within reach so he hadn’t been in danger of dying from thirst, but he certainly couldn’t get up. His breathing was rasping, each breath sucked in as if it took a conscious effort to haul in enough air. The indignant roar he’d made as they’d arrived must have been a huge effort.
Ginny reached his patient before him. ‘Hey, Oscar, Doc Reynard tells me you’ve broken your hip.’ She was bending over the huge man, lifting his wrist. ‘What a mess.’
The elderly man’s eyes narrowed. He looked like he’d still like to yell but the effort seemed beyond him. His breathing was dangerously laboured, yet anger seemed tantamount.
‘You’re one of the Viental kids,’ he snarled. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m Ginny,’ she agreed cordially, and to Fergus’s astonishment she was looking at her watch as her fingers rested on the man’s wrist. Did she have medical training?
‘A Viental,’ the farmer gasped, and he groaned as he shifted his vast bulk to look at her more closely. ‘What the hell are you doing on my property? Why aren’t you dead?’
‘I’m helping Doc Reynard. Plus I pulled one of your lambs out of the cattle grid dividing your land from ours.’ Her face hardened a little. ‘I’ve been up on the ridge, looking over the stock you’ve been running on our land. Your ewes have obviously been lambing for weeks and at least six ewes have died during lambing. They’ve been left where they died. No one’s been near them.’
‘Mind your own business,’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t call Doc Reynard for a lecture—and I didn’t call you. I don’t want a Viental anywhere near my property.’
‘You called Doc Reynard to get you on your feet again,’ she snapped. ‘There’s no way he can do that on his own—without a crane, that is.’
‘Let’s check the hip,’ Fergus said uneasily, and she flashed a look of anger back at him.
‘There’s no difference in the length of Oscar’s legs. He has breathing difficulties but that’s because he won’t do anything about his asthma. He’ll have got himself into this state because he couldn’t be bothered fending for himself so he feels like a few days in the hospital. He does it deliberately and he’s been doing it for twenty years.’ She glanced around the kitchen and winced. ‘Though by the look of it, it’s gone beyond the need for a few days in hospital now.