The Good Sister by Gillian McAllister

Author:Gillian McAllister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

She took the baby’s rectal temperature. The police would want it to time the death. If it was suspicious. They used a nomogram, which Amanda vaguely recalled learning about in some extra training session given on an evening a couple of years ago. Some calibration between the ambient temperature of the room where the death occurred, the rectal temperature in the body upon discovery, and the weight of the body. With that, they were able to estimate the time of death to within minutes.

Layla was taken to the morgue by a porter, her skin now the exact shade of the gray linoleum floor passing quickly underneath her. Just hours previously, she had slept in a Moses basket. Amanda blinked, and thought perhaps she wouldn’t be a doctor for much longer. She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. She should go home, get some sleep.

She left the resus room and had a moment to herself, just for twenty seconds. Deep breaths in and out. Feelings weren’t feelings. They were tangled mixtures of hormones: cortisol, adrenaline, rushing through her system, telling her lies. She knew this, and still they felt real.

It was time to tell the parents.

She didn’t immediately spot the mum. She usually did straight-away—it was obvious. Maybe she was tired, at the end of a night shift, her body wrecked and tense. But no, she thought afterward. Really, it was because the woman—Becky, she later learned—was acting strangely.

It had been something about her stance. Too upright, and expectant, like somebody waiting to make a complaint, not to hear the fate of her child.

“Yes?” Becky said, when Amanda ventured forward, which Amanda thought was stranger still.

“Are you the mother?”

“On a plane. I’m the aunt,” Becky said.

She would have to do this twice. For just a moment, Amanda felt like she could never do it again.

“I’m very sorry . . .” Amanda said.

And that was all it took. The rest of it was normal. The immediate bending over double that everybody did upon being told of a death. The hollowing of the cheeks, as though the wind had been knocked out of them. Eyes downcast, darting, thinking: Can this be?

And so it followed the usual patterns. Becky’s tears. The hysterical call to Martha, the mother, as her airplane taxied along the runway. Becky had to repeat herself three times to get the message across to her sister.

But Amanda had not forgotten those initial reactions. And then, when the scans were done, the postmortem complete, and the arrest had taken place, she had thought: Yes.

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