IAN O'DOWD
The record arrived in Mara’s hands three years after the child had been declared dead.
It was a photocopy of a photocopy, folded twice and passed across a hospital canteen table by a clerk who refused to meet her eyes. Most of the identifying fields had been obscured. The one that mattered had not.
TRANSFER DESTINATION UNRECORDED.
Mara read the line again. She had worked long enough in maternity and respiratory care to know that hospital records were rarely as complete as their neat boxes suggested. But there was a difference between an omission and a sequence that made no sense.
A transfer required a destination. This record gave none. It was the sort of omission that could be called clerical until someone tried to follow it.
“Where did you get this?” Mara asked.
The clerk stared into a cold cup of tea. “You didn’t get it from me.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s all I can tell you.”
Outside the canteen window, ambulances slid through the rain. The city kept its own ledger of emergencies, each one arriving with a name, a time and a request that might or might not be granted.
Mara folded the copy along its existing creases. On the back, in smaller type, was the mother’s name.
Dr Elara Quinn.
Everyone in the hospital knew it. Brilliant researcher. Architect of a system that promised to alter the arithmetic of survival. A woman whose public speeches Mara had seen on ward televisions, usually while attending to a patient whose recovery had become another number on a screen.