Cormac gave himself an hour to get to the hospital the next morning, not understanding the layout of London at all, and was surprised to find himself there thirty-five minutes later. It was the oddest thing, he’d found, getting onto the packed tube train and, just by habit, looking around for a face he recognized. Did you get over this? Everyone, regardless of color or how they were dressed, had the same expression on their face: a sort of studied disconnectedness, a complete inability to meet anyone else’s eyes. Even the schoolchildren had it. It must be an animalistic self-protection mechanism, he reckoned. Like dogs. Don’t make eye contact, because you don’t know anyone; you don’t know how they’ll react to you. What a strange way to live. Cormac couldn’t really remember an existence where he didn’t know most people and they knew him. How did people cope? Wasn’t everyone incredibly lonely all the time?

He liked Juan from HR at once, the diminutive form in a suit, phone going off constantly. Juan had smiled apologetically, said that it was great he was here, could he fill in a weekly questionnaire that someone would almost definitely not read, and, by the way, if there were another seventy or eighty full-time nonagency NP staff available just like him up in the Highlands, would he mind terribly bringing them with him next time as they were a bit short-staffed? Oh, and 147 midwives.

Cormac had smiled, realizing what Juan was really saying: Please, please get on with things and don’t bother me. Which suited him just fine, if Alyssa Westcott would just get in touch with him. He knew Jake was going around to see she was all right, and even if he hadn’t known that, he would have guessed it, because that was precisely the kind of thing Jake would do, but, rather to his surprise, Jake hadn’t contacted him. That wasn’t like him at all. Normally he had a score out of ten for any woman between the ages of eighteen and about sixty-five, more if you included Helen Mirren. Maybe this Alyssa was just awful.

He opened up the case notes the hospital had sent him—the kind Alyssa was meant to be annotating for him—and thanked goodness for the GPS system.