Questions of Trust A Medical Romance - By Sam Archer Page 0,38

slept for an unbroken nine hours, and awoke refreshed and ready for the day.

But with that Monday morning feeling, nonetheless.

She set up the dining room table methodically, her laptop in the centre, her printed notes to one side, her phone and coffee mug to the other. Jake was in her line of sight, playing happily on the rug. Sooner or later she’d need to set up a proper study, in the spare bedroom, but for now this arrangement suited her.

Her email inbox was full; she hadn’t checked it since Friday afternoon, quite deliberately. Chloe supposed catching up with emails was a forgivable indulgence before setting down to work, and didn’t represent Monday morning displacement activity designed to avoid work.

A few of the twenty or so emails were junk messages which had dodged her spam folder. These she deleted immediately. Three more were from friends and former colleagues in London, catching up. She saved these, to be replied to later on, at her leisure and when she could give them the attention they deserved. She’d been neglecting her old friends, she acknowledged guiltily.

The work emails she spent more time on. There were a couple from Mike Sellers, addressed to her personally and following up on a couple of queries she’d sent him on Friday after the interview, in which she’d asked about the ins and outs of the local council’s workings. Other emails were essentially memos, copied to all staff and freelancers attached to the Pemberham Gazette.

One of them was from a staff reporter at the paper to Mike Sellers. Chloe was one of several people copied in, and when she scanned the content she realised she’d probably been added inadvertently to the CC list, as a result of a copy-and-paste job. The email was about a story involving some fundraising event taking place in the town this summer.

Chloe was about to delete the message when an addendum at the end caught her eye:

PS. Thanks for the tip-off about the Dr Carlyle thing. Will look into ASAP and get back 2U.

Chloe read it and reread it. There was only one Dr Carlyle it could possibly be referring to. What was this all about?

She took a sip of her coffee and thought about it. She had to find out what it meant. But wouldn’t it seem intrusive of her if she simply rang up the reporter who’d sent the message and asked him about it? He’d copied the email to her by mistake, but was still responsible for having done so. Still, the correct thing to do in such cases was to delete the email as soon as you realised it wasn’t meant for you, and say no more about it.

Chloe decided that she was a journalist, after all, someone whose job it was to get to the truth even if it involved an indirect and sometimes cunning approach. She’d speak to Mike, her editor, on some pretext, and find a way to steer the conversation as subtly as possible to the subject of Tom Carlyle. It was easy enough to find reasons to speak to Mike given that she was busy writing a fairly major article for him.

She picked up the phone and rang the Gazette’s office. Mike’s secretary answered. The boss was in a meeting, and wouldn’t be out until lunchtime. Would Chloe like to leave a message? Chloe replied that she was calling about the story – Mike would know which one she meant – and wanted to speak to him non-urgently about it.

After she’d rung off, Chloe stared at the message on the screen. The Dr Carlyle thing... Might it be something to do with Tom’s custody problem? But why then would the Pemberham Gazette be interested? In the months Chloe had been associated with the Gazette she’d come to appreciate that it was a serious paper of record, committed to honest and professional reporting of news which might be of legitimate interest to the community. It wasn’t some muckraking rag, bent on stoking up scandal. It was hardly likely to pry into a citizen’s private business.

Had something happened to Tom? The possibility struck her with cold force. Chloe had been out of town for much of the weekend; might Tom have come to some harm in her absence? Surely not, she thought. For one thing, word would have spread already and Mrs McFarland would have been round like a shot to tell Chloe.

Untamed speculation was like weeds rapidly taking over the garden of the mind. Chloe knew