Questions Of Trust: A Medical Romance (16 page)

Chloe had no idea what Tom had meant by his last, cryptic remarks about having to leave Pemberham because he understood what was going on, and because he knew she wasn’t the one who’d made the allegations. But she knew she’d find out; would
have
to find out. It was a challenge to be overcome, a problem to be solved, nothing more. She knew also that she had her work cut out for her. Because in the morning, her hunt for the truth would begin.

Chloe had come home with Jake, fed and bathed him and put him to bed after the customary story, then set to work. Not on anything to do with Tom, but on the article about the Stratwell estate and the town council’s neglect. She worked with single-minded purpose, allowing nothing to distract her until, after midnight, she’d given the manuscript a final read through, pronounced herself satisfied, and emailed it to Mike Sellers.

Tomorrow she’d be up with the lark and get hold of a copy of that grubby muckraking rag, the
Pember Valley News
, steel herself, and read with as dispassionate and forensic an eye as she was able the lies the paper had printed about Dr Tom Carlyle. And then she’d get to work investigating every single rumour, every sly distortion of the truth, and she would demolish them all. She’d bring down the paper and its editorial staff if need be.

She was one hundred per cent committed to proving Tom Carlyle’s innocence, because he was a decent man who was being made the target of a malicious smear. Because as far as she could tell, he had nobody else to stand by his side.

And because she loved him.

Yes, she’d admitted it to herself as she was driving back home to the cottage after the encounter with him outside the surgery that afternoon. The words had risen, unbidden, into her mind, and all of a sudden the world had shifted into pure, crystalline focus. For all Chloe’s constantly renewed commitment to self-honesty, she understood that she’d been living in a fog of self-delusion for the last few months, and most especially in the last week since their kiss.

She, Chloe Edwards, loved Tom Carlyle. The realisation, once out of the box, was never to be stuffed back in. And all of a sudden it didn’t matter that she’d been widowed for hardly longer than a year and therefore might be seen to be disloyal to the memory of her late, much-loved husband. It didn’t matter that Tom was a doctor, and that a doctor had allowed her husband to die.

She loved Tom Carlyle. And although she’d lost him, and he was going away, she owed it to him and to her love for him to clear his good name.

Lying in bed, Chloe thought it would be as well to focus on the negative feelings now, to give them free rein, the better to get them out the way so that they didn’t linger and distract her from what she needed to do in the coming days.
Regret
: that was one of the negative feelings, possible in the long run one of the most corrosive of all. In her case, the regret was for the way she’d allowed love, so potentially joyous and healing, to lie lonely and unrecognised under layers of guardedness and pride. And she had only herself to blame for it. She knew Tom was attracted to her; she didn’t know if he loved her. But if he did, or had, she couldn’t fault him for trying to get close to her in order to allow love to bloom. Chloe had been the stand-offish, cool one, always keeping him at arm’s length. He’d done his best, within the bounds of acceptable behaviour, to break through her reserve, and it was hardly his fault that he hadn’t been successful.

Another negative feeling was frustration, and this time the feeling was directed at Tom. How could he throw in the towel like this, planning to pack up and move away on the basis of a few scurrilous rumours? He’d sounded completely sincere when he said they were baseless, so why didn’t he stand his ground and fight for his name? Why was he giving in like this? Yes, the next few days and weeks were going to be highly unpleasant, and people were going to talk behind his back. His life in Pemberham, and his work, were going to be made exceedingly difficult. But people were decent and reasonable, on the whole, Chloe believed. Given time, and the evidence, the community would come to understand that Tom was the victim of an injustice, and would learn to trust him once more. Running away, as he was intending to do, would just make people more suspicious that he was guilty, that there was no smoke without fire. 

The third negative feeling Chloe acknowledged within herself was anger: a slow, simmering fury that she’d last experienced in the months after Mark’s death, when the evidence had become clear to her of the incompetence of the doctor who’d misdiagnosed him. This time round her anger was less focused, directed towards a murky, unknown person who was bringing the allegations against Tom, and towards the
Pember Valley News
for taking part in this witchhunt. Of the negative emotions, this was probably the most useful. As long as she didn’t let it heat up to a point at which it affected her judgement, Chloe could use it to sustain her when things became difficult, as they no doubt would very quickly.

Her thoughts kept returning to the love she felt for Tom. Like a brilliant, multifaceted diamond it shone and sparkled before her, mesmerising her, lulling her finally into sleep.

***

Tom was a walker. As a child he’d rambled in the hills around Pemberham, and as a moody teenager, feeling rejected and misunderstood by every other human being on  earth, he’d used to wander the streets on his own at all hours, thinking to himself, trying to make sense of a confusing world. Even later, when he’d been at medical school in London, after an especially stressful day’s work or a more-than-usually exhausting on-call shift, his favourite and most effective way to unwind was to stroll alongside the River Thames for miles or head through one of the city’s parks, relishing the simple pleasure of locomotion, and of course benefiting from the exercise in the process.

Since Kelly had been born his opportunities for solitary walking had of course been limited. Kelly was a lively, active child, and was more than happy to go for rambles in the countryside, which he enjoyed. But having to keep a constant eye on a four-year-old who was liable to race off at the slightest provocation meant that Tom couldn’t indulge in the sort of untrammelled, free-form thinking he’d found so comforting and useful before.

He could have done with some solitary walking time now.

Instead, with Kelly tucked up in bed, the dishes washed, and every other possible opportunity for distraction exhausted, he stood in the middle of the living room and gazed around him. He looked at the trappings of country life, some inherited with the house, some added by him, still others contributed by well-meaning visitors anxious to help him fit in to his new life. There was the hand-carved sideboard he’d snapped up for a song at a local auction. Here was a matching set of antimacassars and doilies, terribly twee for his taste but donated by the ladies of the local Women’s Institute and therefore on obligatory permanent display in case any of the good ladies dropped in to visit. All reminders that he, and Kelly, had left one life behind and adopted a very different one here in Pemberham. A simpler, more satisfying one.

And now, a mere eight months after they’d arrived, he was going to have to uproot them once more.

He wandered about the room, picking objects up, studying them as if for the first time. One print on the wall caught his attention: a Turner watercolour, showing an impressionistic ship in the centre of a violent storm at sea. He knew the feeling.

During the day his suspicion had been growing as to what the malicious allegation was all about, but he hadn’t allowed his speculation full rein until after he’d met Chloe in the car park outside the surgery. Up until that point, he’d entertained the notion that she might just possibly be the person who’d phoned the paper. One look at her face, at the horrified way she reacted to his anguish, persuaded him that she had nothing to do with it, and he immediately felt ashamed that he’d ever considered such a thing. From that moment on, he’d realised what was going on.

Rebecca was behind it. She’d made plenty of veiled threats, dropped hints on at least two occasions that her gloves were coming off, that she’d get custody of Kelly back come hell or high water. He’d dismissed all this as histrionic bluff. Well, he was discovering now just how far she was prepared to go, and he knew this was only the beginning of the trouble he faced.

She’d either phoned in the allegations herself, or - much more likely - had put somebody else up to the job. Tom wouldn’t know until more details emerged in the Pember Valley News tomorrow. But he supposed an actual accuser would come forward to be interviewed, and that couldn’t of course be Rebecca. she’d be there in the background, however, pulling the strings.

The allegations would turn out to be baseless, of course. Nobody would be able to prove anything. But, equally, Tom himself wouldn’t be able to prove his innocence. He wasn’t required to according to English law, but people’s minds didn’t always work as tidily as that. An absence of proof of guilt didn’t necessarily mean proof of innocence. Probably Tom would face no disciplinary action, and there’d be no stain on his record. But people would point fingers, and gossip. Every contact of Tom’s with a female patient would be subject to the closest scrutiny. And people had long memories, especially in a small country town. Tom’s reputation would linger, perhaps even after he was dead and gone. He’d be forever known as
that doctor who there was all the fuss about
.

So Rebecca’s plan was a masterful one. It didn’t matter whether Tom was innocent or guilty. He assumed that she’d file for custody while the scandal was breaking. Now, his previously unblemished record as a parent would count for very little. Now, the court would see a young mother fighting to wrest back custody of her little girl from a doctor accused of sexual misconduct with a patient. Tom wouldn’t stand a chance. And even if he invested every penny of his money, every second of his time, in appeal after appeal, the resulting legal wrangle, played out against the backdrop of the investigation into his professional conduct that would be featured regularly in the local media, would put him but most of all Kelly through unimaginable stress for weeks, possibly months. It would shatter the girl’s innocence, warp her fragile, developing emotional self. And, most devastatingly of all, ruin forever the trust a child was supposed to have in her parents and in the idea that they were kind, loving people in whom she could always rely.

No. Rebecca had clearly thought this through from every angle. She’d won. Tom had to recognise that. Rebecca would have to have custody of the girl. The best Tom could do now was limit the damage the whole affair was going to cause, and to continue to play as big a part in his daughter’s life as he possibly could.

Which meant leaving Pemberham and following Kelly wherever her mother took her. If Rebecca had been serious when she’d talked about moving to France, Tom would have to go there too. He spoke schoolboy French, nothing more. He had little knowledge of the Gallic system of medicine, though he supposed it couldn’t be vastly different from Britain’s. But all of that was immaterial. Wherever Kelly ended up, he, Tom, had to be nearby. For his daughter’s sake; but, Tom had to admit, for his own as well. Because worse than anything he could imagine, worse than losing his job or even his licence to practise medicine, was the idea of being separated from Kelly.

He’d miss the surgery here in Pemberham. He had in his eight months at the practice developed fond attachments to his colleagues, most of all Ben Okoro, his fellow GP. He had a genuine liking for the vast majority of his patients and their families, for the range of personalities that made up his population. He’d miss the often frantic but workable way of life he’d set up for his little family unit.

And he’d miss Chloe. God, how he would. The thought stabbed through him, white hot, searing. Suddenly all the guilt he’d felt after their kiss last week, all the reasons he’d told himself as to why their getting together would be a bad idea, evaporated in the heat of his desire for her. He realised all at once that he’d looked forward to catching a glimpse of her every day over the last month or two, that a smile and a wave from her could delight him unduly and sustain his mood through the day, that a full-on conversation with her was as cherishable as gold dust.

She didn’t share his feelings, that was clear, even if there was a degree of simple animal attraction there. So leaving Pemberham had, in a perverse way, its advantages, at least as far as his love for her was concerned. To remain would be forever to be wounded by her presence, so near and yet so out of reach. And one day Chloe would find a man of her own, perhaps a local fellow. To see her with this hypothetical man, however decent he was - and Tom was sure she’d choose a decent one - would be too much for him to bear.

Tom went into Kelly’s room and sat by her bedside, watching the rise and fall of her chest as she slept, so peaceful, so utterly without guile. His throat constricted so that he thought for a moment he’d have to flee before his choking woke her.

Oh, Kelly,
he thought.
What are we doing to you?

He knew that he, too needed sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, perhaps one of the longest of his life.

Chapter Ten

Sabrina Jones’s address was easy enough to find. Chloe started by searching a few online directories as well as the local electoral roll, but was unsurprised that the woman wasn’t listed. Nevertheless, the street on which the woman lived had been mentioned, presumably with her consent, in the article the
Pember Valley News
had published. Chloe drove to the street in question and learned the location of the block of flats in which Ms Jones lived from the occupier of the third house she approached. Once at the block of flats, and not seeing the name
Sabrina Jones
over any of the buzzers, Chloe pressed the buttons randomly until somebody answered.