Chapter 7
Awake early the next morning, the red-haired woman still on his mind, Rick reached for another dose of medication. With luck, the worst of the migraine was over. His stomach rumbled as he limped into the small bathroom. He averted his gaze from the hideous brown sink and bath. A dishevelled pirate stared back at him from the mirror.
Sounds of a disturbance outside filtered into the room. A wave of stomach acid burned his belly and the awful memory of feeling hunted the day before resurfaced. If there were paparazzi outside, he was trapped. He staggered down the stairs, crept over to the front window, staying as low to the ground as possible, and peered through a narrow gap in the curtains.
What the… ?
That was a heck of a lot of cows. The clumsy great beasts were shoving each other around, spilling across from next door’s driveway as they mooed and stamped at the ground. A gnome in a long blue coat, red hat and wellies was skipping about on a raised block and bashing some sort of drum. What the hell were they up to? Some bizarre rustic milking rite?
Rick rubbed the back of his neck and groaned. Why can’t the world just leave me alone? Leaning his forehead on the glass, he watched cows jostle his car. The tenuous grip on his legendary self-control snapped. He erupted from the barn with all the sophistication of a grizzly bear dragged from hibernation far too early. Waving his arms at the gnome doing the weird dance, he yelled, ‘Get your bloody cows off my property.’
A gust of wind caught the door behind him, slamming it shut with a sharp bang. One fraction of a second later, the alarm on his Land Rover Discovery registered rough handling from the cows with an ear-piercing shriek.
Damn it.
Rick scrabbled in his pocket for the keys to shut it off and watched in horror as the frightened cows barged each other aside, desperate to escape the noise.
The entire herd turned as one and cantered up the lane out of sight.
Silence descended.
*
Perplexed at the sudden appearance of a stranger from the empty property next door, and shocked at the distress of the retreating animals, Beth felt a volcanic rage bubble inside her. She jumped down from the mounting block and stormed across the potholed gravel. Each fury-filled step hit the ground with such force that the brim of her hat started creeping down over her eyes. Anger overrode any thought of caution. Starting a fight with someone so much bigger than her was never going to be a smart move.
‘You idiot! You scared the shit out of them.’ She pushed him hard in the midriff with both hands. ‘Why? Why would anyone do that?’
The idiot staggered but managed to stay upright.
Shoving her hat back up her forehead so she could give him the full force of her glare, she froze. ‘Oh my God! It’s you!’ Just as her hormones recognised him and rolled out a welcome mat, her brain brought down the portcullis. How typical! I’ve spent the best part of twenty-four hours dreaming about Mr Perfect only to find out he’s Mr Not-So-Perfect. ‘Don’t you know not to make sudden noises around young cows?’
His eyes widened with shock. ‘I… I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know they’d… they’d—’
‘What? Stampede? Is that the word you’re looking for? It’s the one thing I was trying to avoid. A sodding stampede. Someone could have got hur… oh no! Oh! Shit, shit, shit!’ She gazed up the empty lane. ‘No, no, no, no, no… Oh, please no… not Jack.’ She pointed her wooden spoon at the Wolverine. ‘I swear by all that’s holy, buster… if my Jack’s hurt, I’ll… I’ll… God, I don’t know what I’ll do, but it’ll be bad. Really bad.’ The spoon clattered to the ground and she broke into a run as fast as her welly-clad legs would carry her.
*
The dust settled. The rhythmic scrunch of retreating boot soles on gravel faded. The woman Rick had been dreaming about disappeared out of sight around a bend in the lane. How could he have mistaken her for a gnome?
She’s a warrior queen; small and scary, but pretty damn awesome .
Rick limped in her wake, half afraid of what he might find. Hoping against hope that no one had been hurt as a result of his actions, yet again. He rounded the corner and slowed to a stop. In the distance, the warrior queen was in deep discussion with a slim, blond youth and a burly farmer-type. An irate arm was waved in Rick’s general direction. With no obvious casualty in sight, Rick slunk back to the barn and paced up and down, mentally kicking himself.
You pillock! Any fool knows to be careful around animals. And warrior queen or no warrior queen, pissing off his new neighbours wasn’t the smartest way to stay under the radar. Damn it. Being under that bloody GMC investigation for so long had out-and-out mashed his brain. It was like living with a huge storm cloud permanently stapled to his head, casting grim shadows over everything. It made him question every decision he’d ever made. Doubt things he’d always known were true.
He could do better than this. If he was going to stand any chance of going back and helping Dean, he had to do better. Second-guessing yourself in medicine was an insidious pursuit. The stakes were too high. Get things wrong and people died. Self-doubt, once seeded, multiplies exponentially. Rick was a case in point. He couldn’t trust himself. Work had become swamped with worry about what the next patient through the surgery door might present with. Every day, he’d stared at his list of appointments, no longer seeing patients who needed his help. Instead, they were a quagmire of medical legal complications lying in wait to trip him up. Every day, a voice had whispered in the back of his mind, You might get it wrong.
Doubting himself was a short step from doubting the patients and that was an even bigger problem. Martin, his old training mentor, always said, ‘A GP consultation is a collaboration, Rick, a partnership of trust between you and the patient. They need to believe you can help them. And you need to believe that they’ve given you the information you need to put the pieces of the puzzle together.’
It was true.
Shivering in his barn hideout and hating himself for making a stupid mistake with a herd of cows, Rick suddenly realised the exact moment that had started this whole fiasco.
When Dean Markwell had walked into his consulting room, looked him in the eye and lied, that was the day the foundations of everything he believed in had crumbled.
Now, Rick couldn’t trust anyone, least of all himself.
His warrior queen hated him. Good for her. She was better off without him.