Old Lovers Don't Die Read online

  About the Author

  Paul Anderson lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is a surgeon who specialises in upper gastrointestinal and hepatobiliary surgery. Born in Rotorua, New Zealand, his tertiary education began at Waikato University before he went on to further studies in Scotland, California, and South Africa where he completed both a Ph.D. and a medical degree before becoming a surgeon. The passion for writing has latently manifested, thanks to the encouragement and direction of many friends.

  Paul G. Anderson

  Old Lovers Don't Die

  Copyright © Paul G. Anderson (2015)

  The right of Paul G. Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781784555313

  www.austinmacauley.com

  First Published (2015)

  Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

  25 Canada Square

  Canary Wharf

  London

  E14 5LB

  Does It Hurt To Die, Medical Mystery Thriller by Paul Anderson, 2nd Edition available online www.doesithurttodie.com.au

  If you see the stable-door setting open wide;

  If you see a tired horse lying down inside;

  If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;

  If the lining's wet and warm -- don't you ask no more!

  Foreword

  With any writing, there are many contributions. They are all extremely valuable, each in a unique way adding to the vibrancy of the story and hopefully the pleasure of reading. Pre-eminent on the ladder of gratefulness, is the family that supports you. They are biased, but there are days when you need and love their bias. Their belief in your writing and its value to others as entertainment is an invaluable spur when the creative well has only a few lonely drops in the bottom.

  Gabrielle, a more wonderful sister you could not have, and my favourite son, Jordan. Independently both are of inestimable value. Gabrielle’s unswerving and consistent enthusiasm astounds me. Jordan has read so many books that it embarrasses his father; but in having done so, he provides invaluable analysis and critique. Peter, your reaction to the first novel, Does It Hurt to Die, was the greatest encouragement, which provided momentum for this sequel. Richard, for the ongoing reminder two of the important things in life are, fishing, and green tea. Moreover, that you ignore them at your peril. Vanessa, thank you for your analysis and encouragement of this manuscript as it surfed the rough waves of its beginning.

  There are many others, far too many to name, who in a world enamoured with critique, run contrary to the herd and encourage. If I named them all I might run the risk of offending some, who might inevitably leave out.

  Prologue

  A terrorist attack on a church in Cape Town in 1989 kills twenty people. Jannie de Villiers, a well-known liver transplant surgeon, narrowly avoids death, but is seriously wounded. The uproar over the killings by a radical black group hides the more sinister involvement of the apartheid government. Two weeks later, while recovering at home, Jannie de Villiers is murdered. With too many inexplicable circumstances surrounding her husband’s death, Renata takes her four year old son Christian to live in Australia.

  As Christian grows up, he becomes more and more interested in what his father might have been involved, in South Africa. He repeatedly researches the death of his father on the Internet, trying to find the reasons he might have been killed. There is little to satiate his curiosity until one day he discovers a blog site set up by an old anti-apartheid activist. The blog site claims that his father worked for the Bureau of State Security in the old apartheid government, which was implicated in atrocities against black and coloured population groups. Initially, Christian is devastated by the discovery, as the little that he had been able to read up to that point had all been positive about his father. He then becomes convinced that there is a mistake, and wants to return to South Africa to find out more about his father's work.

  His mother, Renata, is initially opposed to Christian returning to South Africa, fearing that some of those who might have been involved in her husband’s death may threaten her son. Christian pleads with his mother and returns to Cape Town shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Unbeknown to him, his return to South Africa is monitored by the National Intelligence Agency and a white underground Afrikaner supremacist organisation. They both have knowledge of Christian’s father's genetic research on racial profiling and believe that he also had a folder containing highly sensitive material on chemical and germ warfare. Both organisations consider that Christian may have information which will help them find his father’s folder with its racial research and highly embarrassing links to international governments.

  Christian, when he arrives back in Cape Town, finds changes under the new post-Mandela South Africa; however, vestiges of the past are everywhere. While legal separation is no longer constitutionally enshrined, years of separation and brutality live on in attitudes, undermining trust and harmonious living. Friends of his father help Christian build a picture of what it was like for his father growing up in apartheid Africa. As he meets more and more people associated with his father, he begins to understand his father’s involvement with the previous government, and he realises that he is being watched by someone or by some unknown organisation.

  Christian’s search for the truth about his father is then further complicated when he meets Isabella, the beautiful daughter of his father’s theatre scrub nurse. He falls in love with Isabella but is shattered when she turns out to be his half-sister. After much anguish and soul-searching, they determine to complete the journey of discovery together. Christian discovers his father’s research in an old folder buried in the garden of their house in Wynberg, after one of his father’s old friends delivers a cryptic note. Included in the folder is evidence of the apartheid South African government’s involvement in germ and chemical warfare programmes and the development of nuclear arms. Christian shares the contents of the folder with Isabella and it becomes increasingly apparent to them both that their father was heavily involved in and a trusted member of the apartheid government's President’s Council. A council so secret, they discover that it was answerable only to the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister. The primary aim of the Council was to be able to use any means possible to preserve the white government in perpetuity.

  Within the folder are also details of the apartheid government’s involvement in the development of nuclear weapons with Israel, and germ and chemical warfare programs with nations who were openly opposed to apartheid. They soon realise that the information has never been released, and understand that it has the potential to embarrass many governments who covertly supported the apartheid government. In a section which has his father's name at the top of it, Christian and Isabella find encrypted genetic research on racial groups, which his father had discovered during his research into the rejection of liver transplants. Christian recognises that the encryption has a code not dissimilar to code that he noticed on the back of a photograph of his mother and himself in Adelaide. He suggests to Isabella that if he can get his mother to find that code and send it to him, they may be able to decipher his father's research.

  Once it is know
n that the folder has been discovered, the National Intelligence Agency and a secret white Afrikaner supremacist group pursue Christian and Isabella openly. Christian and Isabella are taken hostage by the white supremacist group who demand the key to the genetic research, which they now know that Christian's mother Renata has. Held in an underground mine, Christian and Isabella have to persuade Renata to send the code to unlock their father’s research, knowing that it may be used by the white supremacists to eliminate thousands in the black population in the pursuit of a new white homeland. Once the code is supplied may mean their deaths.

  Saved from the white supremacists, Christian and Isabella find their relationship frustrated by the distance between them. They, with great reluctance and heartbreak, return to their respective countries Australia and South Africa.

  Chapter 1

  “De Villiers!”

  Bolt shouted across the sanitised white Emergency Room at the Royal Adelaide hospital. Christian felt his name reverberate off the walls as interns and nurses turned to look at the source of the minatory guttural sound. The voice belonged to Dr. Adrian Bolt, the senior surgical registrar who had become the scourge of the trauma unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

  Adrian Bolt liked to give the impression the trauma unit was his own medical fiefdom. Within the confines of his personally constructed kingdom, judgement and commands were to be acted upon instantly. His word, he considered, was fundamental law and as with many short men, he had inherited the gene for belittling taller male individuals with acid sarcasm.

  “De Villiers, stop trying to bloody chat up that nurse and get your stupid slack arse over here! We may have a gunshot trauma coming through that door; there is no time to be organising when you next get laid. I need you to be thinking resuscitation - not sex, and to be able to react instantly.”

  Christian stopped talking and returned Bolt’s stare. Bolt was daring him to respond; the insecurity of his size desperate to manifest in a more belittling comment. Christian considered a cutting reply; this was his last week in the trauma unit before he went overseas for a year. It would almost be worth the vitriolic holocaust that would ensue to repay Bolt’s abuse in kind.

  Adrian Bolt had passed his fellowship in surgery six months previously and was hoping to become a full consultant. That he had not yet been appointed clearly irked him. For most every other senior registrar, it was an automatic acclamation after graduation. The delay suggested to everyone that Bolt was either not good enough or not well enough liked. Christian had seen that he was a good surgeon. The only reason he could imagine that he had had not been appointed was that he had seriously pissed off the authorities in the Department of Surgery.

  In contrast to his meticulous medical knowledge, Bolt cared little about his appearance. His black hair was receding on both sides; a few small tufts remained above each ear accompanied by unruly irregular strands crawling down his neck. Bolt allowed the hair uncontrolled growth for months. Periodically, he would sweep it out of the way with a carefully manicured hand, unconcernedly showering dandruff in every direction. This created a mini snowstorm, from which the medical students took sudden and evasive action. On a bad day, he had no shame and would take some of the lubricating jelly from the trolley on the ward and plaster his hair into place.

  Medical students on ward rounds over the years had listed Bolt’s hair plastering as one of the ‘official’ causes of nausea. Ranked fifth on the list, it was a favourite answer at the annual quiz night, the answer which students had learned over the years and would shout out ‘Bolt’ at the appropriate time with great alacrity and laughter. Christian personally thought that the great tufts of unruly black primal hair emanating from his ears should have been added to the list. However, that was overruled when he had suggested it to the student committee; it was not considered truly nauseating, as they were difficult to see consistently if you were below average height. For someone who was so unconcerned about his personal appearance, Bolt’s approach to general and personal hygiene was also somewhat unusual. He insisted that on the ward all students and nurses fastidiously use the alcohol wash bottles.

  “Do not bloody infect patients; wash your hands,” was one of his favourite invectives.

  Yet his personal hygiene appeared to lack the same consistent rigor. His hands were clean from the constant use of the alcohol antiseptic bottles, but his body odour suggested that the rest of him needed a good bath. Stale sweat impregnated his blue surgical overalls; mixed with old blood and fast food, it created an olid reaction under the hot fluorescent lights of the Emergency Department. Another inexplicable peculiarity of Bolt’s was that he did not change his surgical overalls regularly; he seemed oblivious to the pungent smell which had started days before he decided to change them

  The blue surgical overalls, which Bolt favoured in the emergency department, were a curiosity in themselves. All overalls for use in the department were delivered from the central sterile supply room neatly folded. Bolt’s overalls appeared on the ward with ironed creases. The strange thing was no one seemed to care about whether his or her overalls were ironed except Bolt. That created another favourite question on student quiz night for which no one knew the correct answer. He did not have a girlfriend and none of the nurses liked him, which ruled both out as surreptitious ironing women. There was a rumour that he sent them to his mother who lived in the small town of Whyalla. Small packages wrapped in brown paper, with a Whyalla postmark, turned up at the Emergency Department every two to three weeks addressed to Dr. Adrian Bolt. That however was just medical student speculation, for no one really knew, and no one dared ask.

  The other strange thing about Bolt’s surgical overalls was that they always seemed a size too small. The cuffs squatted a good five cm above his surgical clogs, suggesting they were two sizes too small. On closer inspection, this was due to the fact the overalls rode up under his crotch. Bolt took the trousers and rolled the top down before tying them tightly below his waist. As a result, the trousers pulled up into his crotch, displaying various parts of his anatomy not normally visible. Christian thought that not only did it look uncomfortable but also it must have made standing up to pee almost impossible. The medical student’s analysis was that in pulling his pants into his crotch, it made him feel taller than he was. Christian thought that was too simplistic an explanation and wondered whether there was something a bit more perverse, knowing Bolt the way that he did. In that strange mind of his, it was more likely Bolt was trying to demonstrate that not all of his anatomy derived from the same gene that had dictated his height.

  Adrian Bolt’s only redeeming feature that Christian could see was that he was damn good at surgery. The unshakeable belief in his own knowledge ensured that he had a good base from which to teach. Coupled with the desire never to display weakness or fear meant that if you could tolerate the sarcasm, excellent medical and surgical learning was almost compulsory. Not that Christian was enthusiastic when the time came at the thought of doing another rotation with Bolt. He could easily recall with the embarrassment the first time when Bolt had picked on him as a medical student. The medical students and Bolt had been rehearsing positions for a potential trauma. Marked out on the floor in the trauma unit were positions for each of the assisting staff as well as the senior registrar or consultant. Footprints in different colours permanently glued to the floor indicating where everyone was to stand. This was to ensure rapid and effective deployment of medical staff. Christian could remember that in his haste to get to the yellow footprints as the third assistant, he had ended up standing at the first nurse’s station. Bolt at that time had taken great delight in pointing out his stupidity and making him kneel in his position as they went through the rehearsal.

  “While you're down there, pray that you are not as stupid again. We are here to save lives, not to have you lose them.”

  Christian could distinctly remember the look of disgust from Bolt at committing so basic an error, but also the pleasure he got from belittling
him in front of the other students. Christian enjoyed neither. Opting to do six months as a surgical trainee meant possibly more of the same abuse. He had thought long and hard about whether he wanted to endure that again and then rationalised that despite Bolt being arrogance personified, he was the best teacher. Christian also knew he had learnt a lot from this first rotation despite the regular humiliations. He knew that to be a surgeon, he needed the exposure to significant trauma, which provided an excellent background to dealing with other surgical emergencies. Enduring six months of Bolt would, in the overall scheme of his training, be worth it.

  “Can't you move any faster than that, de Villiers?”

  Bolt’s voice sliced through the silence that had now descended upon the Emergency Room as Christian moved to take up his position where a potential trauma victim might be waiting.

  “And don't just stand there like some lanky beanpole without a brain, make sure you have some large bore intravenous catheters and the peritoneal lavage set in your hands ready to go.”

  Christian was again tempted to say something confronting. He fought the urge and reminded himself there would be learning in this exercise and he would shortly be going overseas. He thought about asking a question and then remembered that even asking a question was to invite a comment on one's stupidity. Bolt expected everyone to learn by watching what he did; seeking verbal clarification indicated that you were not concentrating sufficiently. There was some small consolation. Bolt dispensed his arrogance without favour to all who ranked below him: doctors, medical students, nurses, and orderlies. The only real exception was if you were significantly taller than Bolt, then you had to expect a greater dose of sarcasm.