Sleepless Nights

He said goodnight in Nepali to the doorman before turning and striding away, leaving her staring after him, halftempted to call him back.

But she didn’t and moments later, without looking round, Neal went out of the gate and disappeared.

Sarah spent the free morning before the group’s departure by air to Lukla wandering round town, grappling with the realisation that she didn’t really want to go. She wanted to see Neal again more than she wanted to do the trek. Perhaps she would have felt differently if the others in the group had been more congenial. But they weren’t, and she knew that situation wasn’t going to improve with closer acquaintance.

After a while she went into the garden behind Pilgrims Book House and ordered a pot of jasmine tea. There were not many people there that morning but presently another woman on her own wandered in and sat down not far from Sarah. She looked interesting and Sarah would have liked to start up a conversation but the other woman began writing postcards.

Some time later she rose and hurried in the direction of the lavatories, leaving her pack at the table. Either she was unusually casual about her belongings or her errand was urgent.

While she was gone, more people passed through the garden, either coming from the bookshop or going in by the back way. Sarah kept an eye on the pack. Perhaps there wasn’t a high risk that an opportunist thief would steal it, but such things did happen.

Suddenly the pack’s owner reappeared, very unsteady on her feet and covered with blood. She reeled back to her table and sank down, looking as if she might pass out at any moment.

At this point a waiter arrived with her order, took in the streams of blood and said worriedly, ‘Is there are a problem?’

‘Yes, there is,’ said Sarah, taking charge. ‘This lady needs medical attention. Please call a taxi...quickly.’ She bent over the injured woman, trying to determine how seriously she was hurt. ‘What happened? Can you tell me?’

‘I was sick...it made my head swim...I fell against something hard. I think I knocked myself out I’m not certain...’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you,’ Sarah said reassuringly. Luckily, she had the address of a recommended clinic on a slip of paper in her passport. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Rose Jones.’ She burst into tears.

The clinic’s waiting room, leading off the reception area, was crowded with people when Sarah and Rose arrived. But, seeing the state Rose was in, the woman on duty at the desk quickly arranged for a colleague to show them to a room at the back of the premises.

‘The doctor won’t keep you long,’ said the second woman.

Rose, by now a bit more composed, sat down and closed her eyes. Sarah looked round the room. In the centre was a high examination couch. Everything was very clean and orderly. She knew that the clinic was staffed by foreign doctors and was famous for its research into the causes and treatment of the illness jokingly known as the Kathmandu Quickstep.

Moments later the door opened and Neal walked in. His left eyebrow shot up in surprise at the sight of Sarah. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What are you doing here?’ she countered.

But already he’d switched his attention to Rose. ‘Hello...I’m Dr Kennedy. Let’s get you up on the couch and I’ll be taking a look while you tell me what happened.’

As he drew her to her feet and assisted her onto the couch, Sarah gaped at him in astonishment. He had told her he was a journalist, a staff writer on The Journal. He’d said nothing about being a doctor. Had he misled her deliberately? If so...why?

CHAPTER THREE

ALTHOUGH she had flinched and quivered when Sarah had tried very gently to clean up round the injury, Rose submitted to Neal’s examination without any nervous reactions. She repeated her explanation of what had happened and lay still while he worked on the wound.

‘It’s actually quite superficial,’ he told her. ‘The vomiting sounds like a food poisoning. Where did you eat last night?’

She told him, describing her meal which had finished with apple pie and curd, as yogurt was called locally.

‘Could be the curd,’ he said.

Sarah watched him perform various routine tests, including making Rose follow with her eyes the movements of his finger from side to side and from the tip of her nose to a point several feet away from it.

He then asked her what shots she had had before coming to Nepal and when she had last had a tetanus booster.

‘Right: the nurse will give you a shot to settle your tummy and then you can rest upstairs for half an hour before going back to your hotel. Take it easy for the rest of the day. Tomorrow you should feel OK,’ he told her.

Before leaving the room, he said quietly to Sarah, ‘I’ll have a word with you later...while she’s lying down.’

A few minutes later a nurse came to give Rose an injection. Then, with Sarah following, she helped Rose up two flights of stairs to a small room with a bed in it.

‘You won’t leave me,’ Rose appealed to Sarah, while she was having a blanket spread over her.

‘No, I may pop out for a coffee, but I’ll be here when you come down,’ Sarah promised.

In the light of what Rose had confided on the way to the clinic, she was in no state to be left on her own.

Neal was at the foot of the staircase when Sarah returned to the ground floor. ‘We’ll go round the corner for a coffee,’ he said briskly. ‘How did you come to get involved?’

As they left the clinic, Sarah explained what had happened from her point of view.

‘Now perhaps you’d explain why you fed me all that stuff about being a journalist,’ she finished indignantly.

‘I am a journalist... a medical journalist. I qualified as a doctor, then came to the conclusion it would be more useful to write about how to stay healthy rather than spend my time lobbing out pills to people who, in many cases, had wrecked their health either from lack of information or from deliberate disregard of the basic rules of self preservation,’ he added sardonically.

‘You didn’t say you were on the staff of this clinic.’

‘I’m not. I’m a friend of someone who is and as they were under pressure when I came by to tell him something, he asked me to take a look at Rose Jones. Is she here on her own or with friends?’

‘She’s alone at the moment. She came with her husband. It’s their honeymoon...but it’s gone wrong. He’s somewhere up in the mountains and she’s by herself. I gather they had a big row and she came back to Kathmandu on her own.’

‘It’s not the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last,’ Neal said dryly. ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. She didn’t like the rough and ready conditions in most of the trekking lodges. The very basic amenities were too much for her delicate sensibilities. She’d had no idea how tough it was going to be.’

‘I don’t think either of them had. They’d done some fell-walking together and Rose enjoyed that. But this trip went wrong from the moment they arrived. Apparently it was arranged by some people who run a small shop in their home town and have Nepalese connections. Even the hotel in Kathmandu where they spent their first night, and where she’s staying now, isn’t up to the standard they expected. But I can’t understand her husband letting her come back alone.’

‘Perhaps he can’t understand her being prepared to desert him so soon after marrying him,’ said Neal.

Preoccupied by her concern for Rose, and by Neal’s revelation that he was a qualified doctor, Sarah had been paying no attention to her surroundings. Only now did she realise that they were in familiar territory. The building looming ahead was the Yak and Yeti where they had come the night before last.

In the bar they sat at the same window table where they had had drinks.

‘Coffee...tea...or something stronger?’ Neal asked.

‘Tea for me, please.’ Reminded by where they were of the woman called Julia, she wondered if, yesterday, they had got together.

‘It could be tricky contacting Rose’s husband,’ he said, looking thoughtful. ‘Have you any idea when they were due to get back if their trek had gone to plan?’

‘I didn’t go into that. She was crying...on the verge of hysterics. I just tried to calm her down. I think she was fairly distraught before she threw up and knocked herself out in the loo. It’s a nervous-making situation: being alone in a nasty hotel in an unknown city after a major row with your bridegroom.’

Neal said, ‘Where did you go for your honeymoon?’

For a few seconds the question fazed her. Then she collected herself and said calmly, ‘I’ve never been on a honeymoon.’