Normal people think M&Ms are an appealing chocolate treat, designed to make your day more enjoyable. For doctors, M&M means ‘morbidity and mortality’. So the Wednesday M&M meetings are a benign way of describing a horrible process—it’s when some poor sucker of a junior doctor has to stand up in front of the senior surgeons and present all the patient cases where somebody has fucked something up and the patient got sick and died. It’s always a bloodbath. The only bright spot is that Dr Prince will be there.

I rush into the room, ignoring the Joker’s glare and obvious glance at his watch, and see the only seat left is next to the Smiling Assassin. I accidentally grimace too obviously, which she notices.

‘You’re late again,’ she whispers forcefully in retaliation, as I sit down. ‘You and I are going to have a talk after this.’

‘I was signing my timesheet!’ I try to explain, but she purses her lips. ‘Shhh.’

I can’t help but smile when, five minutes on, someone arrives even later than me. There are no seats left, so Dr Prince stands up the back in a dark corner. The Shark’s eyes follow him closely. The temperature in the room immediately goes up by about a hundred degrees.

‘Glad you could make it, Jack,’ the Shark says, looking anything but. ‘Here’s a question to start the meeting off. Do you think it is acceptable when senior staff don’t answer their mobile phones when they’re on call?’

Dr Prince doesn’t respond, even though the question is clearly directed at him. I’d heard the Joker telling the Smiling Assassin on the round on Monday that Dr Prince hadn’t answered his phone quickly enough on Friday night and the Shark had been forced to go into the hospital instead. I suspect Dr Prince failed to answer his phone because he spends his Friday nights having fun on his yacht or attending glamorous art functions with billionaire buyers of Greek antiquities, probably looking at exhibits painted by his wife.

‘I seem to remember, Richard, a patient of yours who died a few months ago,’ Dr Prince replies from the back corner, ‘and you never really took any responsibility for it but blamed your registrar.’ ‘Is that an accusation?’ The Shark’s face has gone so red his head looks like it’s about to blow off.

‘Just pointing out we shouldn’t throw stones from glass houses,’ Dr Prince says in his usual mild tone.

‘You’re standing in a glass house, Jack,’ is the retort, as murmurs from the other surgeons begin to grow louder. ‘But you know that already.’