Free Second Opinion by Claire Rayner Page A

handkerchief, and as he pulled it away from his face to speak more clearly, George could see that he had a gap in his teeth. Just knocked out now? Probably. She looked down at the floor to see if she could see it. An absurd idea. The floor was amess of broken glass, blood and spilled fish and chips. If there was a tooth there it certainly couldn’t be salvaged.
    ‘All right, doctor,’ the policeman said even more soothingly. ‘We’ll see you at the hospital, Dr —?’ And he waited invitingly.
    ‘Choopani. Diljeet Choopani,’ snapped the other, at last climbing into the ambulance to be taken away as the policeman returned gratefully to the cluster of people in the front of the shop.
    Gus had his man handcuffed now, as the other policeman bundled the second one to the back of the police car. Its blue light was still rotating on the roof, lifting the whole scene into a lurid facsimile of a discotheque, since there were traffic lights just outside the shop which added their lollipop colours to the mixture. George began to feel a little shaky at the knees as she watched the rest of the proceedings; the two men, now in the car, were being driven off as yet another police car arrived and disgorged a couple of uniformed men who began to shepherd the spectators into the shop to take notes from witnesses.
    Gus seemed to have noticed how she felt, because suddenly he was beside her, one hand tightly holding her elbow.
    ‘All right, ducks. You did good there. That fella could have been a goner, bleeding like that.’
    ‘Hardly,’ she said a little sardonically, regaining her equilibrium. ‘It takes a bit more than that. I just did a bit of first aid. What the hell was all that about?’
    ‘A good question,’ he said, his voice grim. ‘We’re about to find out. But from all accounts, it was a racist attack. He’s a well-known chap, the one they went for. Local GP.’
    ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I knew I’d heard his name before.’
    ‘We’ve got two of the blokes who went for him, and there are one or two people here who think they know who the other was. So we’ll get ‘em sorted, you’ll see. God, Ihate this racist stuff. We’ve been getting a damned sight too much of it lately. I think —’
    She gave him no chance to say anything more. ‘I think the evening’s over, Gus. You stay here and get to work. I know you’re dying to, and I’d be the last to stop you. I’ll see myself back. See you around.’
    ‘Yeah, I’ll see you,’ he said, but he wasn’t listening to her. She knew that. His whole attention was focused on The Job. She went back into the restaurant to collect her bag, picking her way over the beautiful broken glass, and then slipped out to go back to her flat.
    All the way to the bus stop she thought about the way Dr Choopani had blazed his rage at the three men who had attacked him and wondered why they’d chosen so public and dangerous a place to do it. They must have realized they’d be caught, surely? Had he provoked them into action in some way? Whatever he’d said and done they’d had no right to behave so, but it would be interesting to know if he’d contributed in any way to what had happened.
    She paused before she reached the bus stop that would see her on her way back to her little flat and pondered; it was late, but not that late. After a little more thought, she turned and began to walk rapidly towards Old East. She’d call into Accident and Emergency to see how he was, and maybe find out some of the whys and wherefores. It’d be interesting, she decided, to learn a bit more about him anyway, remembering the way the nurse on Paediatrics had spoken of him this morning.
    And of course, thinking about Dr Choopani was a lot easier than thinking about what Gus had said.

6
    
    A & E was surprisingly quiet when George got there. She had expected it to be humming with activity as it dealt with the results of the fracas at Gus’s restaurant, but realized, once she got