She came forward; after a moment he moved to let her have a look down the scope. As he’d said, it wasn’t much use: a triangular fragment of white metal, presumably the tip of some kind of blade, with a weird greyish coating on bits of it. The coating was what worried Greta. Other than metal and blood, it had smelled sulfur-sharp and familiar, as if she’d been around that scent some time before, but she couldn’t place it. And Varney’s reaction to whatever it was had indicated a fairly complicated inflammatory response.
“Can you?” she asked. “Last time I had to get some spectrometry done I had to wait ages for my samples to be processed, there was a queue of several labs ahead of me, and anyway it must cost something awful.”
“Maybe at King’s College you’d have to wait, but this is the Royal London,” Harry told her with a smirk. “As it happens we don’t have a queue for the mass spec just at the moment and this is weird enough to be interesting, so I’m willing to take it on.”
“You’re magnificent,” said Greta, straightening up. “Completely magnifique.”
Harry laughed. “You didn’t get any sleep at all, did you? I can tell. Go away and let me get on with my work. I’ll ring you as soon as I get any results out of this mess.”
She nodded, stifling another yawn, and collected her vast and untidy handbag. “Right. I’ll be in touch, Harry, and thanks. I really do appreciate it.”
He was already packing up the sample to prepare it for the gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer, and just nodded—the same annoyingly distracted little nod she remembered without love from the time they’d spent together. Greta shoved her hands into her pockets and headed out of the laboratory, making a conscious effort to think about something—anything—else.
Greta’s personal life was practically nonexistent, given the demands of her career, and in any case it had been a losing proposition trying to date someone completely outside the world she worked in. She had had a handful of relationships in her adult life, none of them lasting more than a few months and all of them largely unsatisfactory. It was difficult to keep coming up with new and inventive cover stories for her day job, for one thing, and while she defaulted to I run a private clinic for special-needs patients and relied on doctor-patient confidentiality to avoid having to discuss what it was she actually did, Greta found the effort of it exhausting. She had allowed Harry to think that the nature of her clinic tended toward the discreet treatment of diseases one simply did not talk about, but dinner-table how was your day conversations had been a daily minefield to negotiate, and the benefits of being involved with someone had simply not measured up.
He was a useful acquaintance, however, and Greta had from time to time presumed on that acquaintance to get some lab work done—and been very, very glad that Harry didn’t ask questions, particularly those starting with “why.”
She made her way out of the lab building without paying much attention to her surroundings until she was outside again, looking up at the fa?ade.
The original structure of the Royal London Hospital wasn’t a particularly prepossessing building, made out of yellow-brown brick with some cursory pilasters stuck on the front in a stab at classical gravitas. Over the years new bits had been built on here and there, including a vast series of rectangular additions clad in blue glass that contrasted very oddly with the Georgian design of the original building. It was ugly but it was also clearly thriving, busy, and not relying on optimism and duct tape to keep going.
Her own clinic in Harley Street was about as spartan as you could get, and the only reason she was located in that particular hallowed realm at all was that her father had owned the property outright and left it entirely to her on his death, along with just about enough to pay the taxes. These days her neighbors were mostly other specialist clinics rather than the personal offices of famous and/or knighted medical men, but she was still very conscious of her own comparative unimportance. Premises in London’s historic medical VIP area were a bit exhausting to live up to, especially when she couldn’t afford to keep the place looking quite as glossy as the rest of the street, despite the protective illusion wards on the door. What money she could spare after expenses and upkeep went toward helping her more disadvantaged patients with necessities.
Greta let herself entertain a thoroughly idiotic fancy of building some modern blue glass boxes on the roof of the property to create a solarium for her mummy patients, and shook her head. Harry was right. She needed sleep.
She had called her friend Nadezhda Serenskaya early that morning to see if she could possibly take Greta’s office hours for the day; Nadezhda, who was a witch and thus well acquainted with London’s supernatural community, and Anna Volkov, a part-rusalka nurse practitioner, regularly stepped in to help Greta out, but generally with more notice. Now she took out her phone again and dialed the clinic.
It rang three times before Nadezhda came on the line, and Greta knew it would have gone to voice mail if she was with a patient, but there was still a stab of guilt at having to make her friends do the receptionist part of her job as well as the actual doctoring.
“Greta,” Nadezhda said, sounding unruffled. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Dez. At the moment, not a lot.” She couldn’t suppress a yawn. “Thanks again for stepping in on zero notice. How’s it been so far?”
“Hush, you know I like the work, I’m glad to help. Pretty quiet, some walkins but mostly I’m amusing myself tidying up your sample cabinets and dusting your office, which is hilariously disorganized. Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“I’m fine,” she said. She could picture Dez bustling and had to smile. “I just didn’t get any sleep last night—house call, and a bad one; it’s something I’ve never seen before. I think we’re out of the woods, but I’m waiting on test results.”
“Which are going to take forever,” said Nadezhda. “So you ought to go home and get some damn sleep while you can manage it. Don’t worry about the clinic, everything’s under control, and Anna says she can take tomorrow and the day after if you need them, I’ve called her already.”
There was absolutely nothing in that statement that should make Greta want to cry, but much like Ruthven’s latte art it tightened her throat nonetheless. She didn’t deserve friends like these. “Thank you,” she said, and was relieved to hear that her voice sounded entirely ordinary. “I’ll … find something to eat, and then yeah, okay, I will go home for a little while. Thanks, Dez.” What she really wanted to do was hurry back to Ruthven’s to see how Varney was doing, but she knew perfectly well that Ruthven would call her if there was any change.
“No worries. You call me if you need anything, all right?”
“I will,” she told the phone, and “Good-bye,” and swallowed hard. This was fatigue and low blood sugar. Nadezhda was right: food first, and then rest.
With a sigh Greta turned and started off along Whitechapel Road. There was a fairly decent pub just a block away, the Blind Beggar, which ought to be able to provide her with some lunch; then perhaps she might actually have a chance to drive home and get some sleep.