"Yeah, right," said Shan, turning to the window, looking out at the motorway, following the lights of the passing cars with his eyes. "Iona and the George I rapes, it was the same person…" He said it in an undertone, but Maureen caught the name.

She gasped, sucking smoke so deep into her lungs that it hurt. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah," said Shan, calmly flicking the ash from his cigarette under the table. "Do you believe me?"

"Why do you think it was him, for God's sake?"

"It's a long story," he said.

Maureen squashed her fag out and stood up. "I need a drink," she said. "I'm getting a beer. D'you want one?"

Shan lifted his head and looked at her. "What, an alcoholic drink?"

"Yeah."

He put his hand in his jacket pocket. "No, no, I'll get it," said Maureen. "What d'ye want?"

"Any whisky? Auch, naw, that's bad, actually, I'm driving."

Maureen shrugged. "It's up to yourself. You're allowed one, aren't you?"

"Auch," he said, clearly gasping. "Auch, aye, get us a whisky if they've got it."

Maureen negotiated her way through the tables and around the trestle walls to the deserted island of food in the center of the cafe. She bought a whisky miniature and a cold can of Kerslin, an extra-strong lager with a bitter taste caused by the artificially heightened alcohol content. As she passed the till she picked up two plastic cups and four sugar sachets, which she tucked deep into her pocket under the beeper.

Shan was slumped over the table, chin in hand, watching the traffic on the motorway. He took the whisky from her, poured it into the plastic cup and sipped carefully. Maureen smiled and sat down. "You don't drink much, do you? I'd have walloped that back in a oner."

Shan looked at her can of lager. "How the fuck can you drink that stuff? It tastes like ethanol."

"Yeah," she said. "That's why I like it. How do you know this, Shan?"

"Like I said, it's a long story," he said, his head bent over the glass of whisky, enjoying the smell. He whistled a sigh and looked out of the window. "It wasn't long ago, I went to work one day and before I got changed into my uniform one of the cleaners came running into the staff room. Someone was crying in the toilets. I went in." Shan was talking quickly, quietly, as if he were giving a case report. "It was Iona. She was in a cubicle. I couldn't get her out. I climbed over the wall. She was sitting on the floor with her knickers around her ankles. She was scratching at herself, at her fanny. I got her to stop it and said come upstairs and see a doctor. She started scratching herself again." He took one of Maureen's fags without asking her and lit it, downing the rest of the whisky before he exhaled.

"When was this?" asked Maureen.

"Eight…," he said, scratching his forehead and thinking about it. "Eight? No, nine weeks ago-"

"Seven weeks before Douglas was killed?" said Maureen.

"Yeah. I knew Iona from the Northern. I was working in George I when the mysterious rapes were happening, yeah? We were all moved, even the female staff. The agency nurses were sent home and never employed again. Jill McLaughlin was agency. She was up for a full-time job at the Northern. Never worked again."

"That's why she was so jumpy when I phoned."

"Yeah. Only the senior staff weren't moved, they weren't even stigmatized. We didn't know Iona had been raped then. She didn't have a rope mark on her, no one suspected. I take it you know what I'm talking about when I say 'rope marks'?"

"Yvonne Urquhart's still got one on her ankle."

"Yvonne?" His face brightened. "How is she? Have you seen her?"

"You don't want to know how Yvonne is…"

Shan watched her carefully. "Okay, I can imagine anyway," he said, his voice dipping to a whisper. "Yvonne had a stroke… after… So, anyway, Iona wouldn't come upstairs with me. She said she wanted to go home, that's all she would say, she wanted to go home. I decided to drive her to her house, stay with her till the panic's gone, limit the damage. She wouldn't speak. When we got to the house she told me that he hurt her then. She knew what she meant and I knew what she was telling me. I asked her if she wanted to go to the police and she started pulling at her skin again so I took her over to Jane Scoular at the Dowling Clinic, it's all female staff there, and she got an emergency admission. The next day she hung herself in the staff toilets."

"Did you tell the police?"

He looked desperate. "Tell them what, for Christ's sake? Someone's been accused of a disgusting rape by a woman who's killed herself and also had a lifelong psychiatric history? She wasn't exactly a good witness, you know."

"Yeah," said Maureen, "I know exactly. Did you speak to Douglas?"

"No, that was later. I didn't know what the fuck to do."

"How many women were there?"

"Four that we knew of, five including Iona."

"Surely one of them would want to testify?"

"Maureen," Shan said, using her name for the first time, "after Douglas got the list from the office we went to see all of them. We even went to see some that were just on the ward at the time. They either can't talk or they're terrified at the mention of his name. Most of them can't even say it."

"Did Douglas know it was him?"

"Yeah. I told him a couple of weeks after Iona killed herself," continued Shan. "I was in the Variety Bar and I saw Douglas, pissed to fuck, coming up the stairs from the toilet, so I called him over. Man, he was so drunk, he almost couldn't breathe. You know that labored way?" He mimicked someone breathing heavily. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," said Maureen, not much the wiser.

"Douglas wanted me to order a drink for him, the barman had refused him. He was behaving strangely, he kept crying and laughing, and when I asked him where he lived he'd point in different directions and wouldn't say, so I took him up to mine to crash. On the way home he started to sober up a wee bit and by the time we got to mine he was more or less lucid. We sat up with a bottle and he was acting crazy, like crazy mood swings, and then he told me that Iona had hung herself. She was a colleague's patient and Douglas knew they were having an affair. He knew and did nothing and she killed herself. He said she always seemed fine to him, he thought she was all right. He'd been keeping an eye on her."

"And he felt guilty because he knew about it and did nothing," she said, taking a cigarette out and lighting it with Shan's lighter. "Did he know it wasn't an affair?"

"No, he really thought it was consensual. I could tell by the way he was talking about it." Shan smiled uncomfortably. "When I read about you it all made a lot more sense. That's why he wouldn't report them for having an affair."

"But I wasn't his patient," she said, lowering her eyes. "I was at the Rainbow but I was Angus's patient. I didn't have a professional relationship with Douglas."

"That's a bit thin," said Shan. "Fucking a patient is fucking a patient, whichever way you look at it."

Maureen inhaled heavily and kept her eyes on the table. She needed to believe she wasn't a victim just as much as Douglas had. "It might be a bit thin… but it's still different, isn't it?"

"No." Shan shook his head adamantly. "It's not. Doctors and nurses shouldn't fuck patients. That's fundamental. We all know that. Douglas knew it, we all know it."

Maureen took a heavy gulp of the bitter lager. "All right, it's a fine distinction," she said. "But it is still a distinction."

"Bollocks," said Shan. "Don't fuck the patients. How complicated is that? You're either fucking the patients or you're not."

Shan was right and Maureen knew he was.

"People who do things like that," said Shan, "they always say to themselves, 'This is different because yada-yada-yada, because I'm not her therapist now, because she's better-''