“DS Royle,” he said, not understanding why it was important to state his rank to this civilian. That wouldn’t help here. Death would not be scared off by official seniority.
“DS Royle… yes. The doctor asked me to let him know once you arrived. He’d like to talk to you, if that’s okay.”
He reached out and Vanessa’s hand found his. He squeezed it, looked down at her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Go and see the doctor. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed him back.
He followed the nurse back out into the corridor, where she led him to a small, cramped room. The door was open and a middle-aged doctor sat behind a desk, squinting at a computer screen.
“Doctor Gable,” said the nurse. “Mr… sorry, DS Royle is here.”
The doctor looked up. He had a large, open face and a grey goatee beard. He blinked several times, smiled, and nodded. “Thanks, nurse. Please, DS Royle… won’t you come in?”
The nurse hurried away. Royle stood in the doorway for a couple of seconds, unsure of what to do, and then he stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him.
“Sit down, please.” The doctor leaned back in his chair. He had a big belly and thin arms. His medical coat was ill-fitting, as if they hadn’t quite been able to accommodate his odd shape.
“What’s wrong with my wife?”
The doctor grabbed a pen off the desk and rolled it between his palms. “As you know, she was brought in here a few hours ago. She called an ambulance complaining of pains and they wasted no time in getting her here. A woman of her age… well, we can’t afford to take any risks.”
Royle nodded. “Go on.”
“We did an ultrasound and found something unusual.” He paused.
Royle waited for him to continue.
“There’s a growth, DS Royle. It’s attached to the wall of her womb. At first we thought it might be an underdeveloped twin. That happens sometimes, one twin is stronger than the other and the weaker one expires.”
“Twins?”
“No. Not twins. That’s just what we thought at first. I’m afraid your wife has a tumour. We can’t tell if it’s benign or malignant at this stage, but one thing’s for certain — it needs to come out. We have to operate, and we have to do it quickly.'
Royle stared at the window behind the doctor’s head. The sun was almost full up; the sky was lightening by degrees, the clouds parting. “How soon can you do it?”
“You have private health care. That means we can bump her up the list and do it almost immediately — certainly in the next twenty-four hours, here at the hospital. We need to monitor the situation first, get the results of a biopsy. We’re not sure how serious this is, but I need to warn you both that it might be very serious indeed. If the tumour is malignant… well, I’m sure you understand what that might mean.” The doctor stopped playing with the pen. He placed it on the desk, then touched it a couple of times with the tip of his finger, rolling it a few inches back and forth across the surface. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “We’ll do everything we can.”
Royle stood and backed away from the desk. “Yeah. Thanks.” He needed to get out of there, to get away from the hideous little man and his distracted demeanour. He couldn’t take it all in; the world was coming apart at the seams, letting in impurities from whatever lay beyond the veil. The dark seed at his centre was starting to flower.
He stumbled out of the room and back along the corridor, falling against the wall, dragging his feet along the tiled floor. He entered the ward and went straight to Vanessa’s bed, where he held her hand and stared into her eyes.
“I love you,” she said, simply and honestly.
“This is it,” he said. “This is the moment. This is what it all comes down to: you and me, in a hospital room, praying for the life of our unborn baby. Everything else is bullshit. The past cases, the crimes I could never solve, the drink, the stupid fights and arguments… none of it matters. Just this. This moment.”
She nodded, closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy, baby… take care of things while I have a little rest.”
He squeezed her hand. He knew exactly what she meant. For the first time in his life, he understood her completely. They were back together, just like he’d wanted. Every other problem in their relationship slipped away into the darkness, dwarfed by the immensity of this current situation.
He’d do that. He’d sort everything out; make it so that the world was ready for the arrival of their baby. Nothing else mattered.
Just then his mobile phone started to ring. He stood, glancing towards the nurse’s station, and fumbled it out of his trouser pocket. The nurse he’d spoken to earlier gave him a dark look. He shrugged, mouthed the word “sorry” and headed out of the ward, raising the phone to his ear.
“Where are you?”
It was Detective Superintendent Sillitoe, from the station.
“Sorry, sir, I’m at the hospital. It’s my wife… she’s been brought in. It’s an emergency.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know, sir, but everything’s in hand. I’m just on my way back to the station.'
“Don’t bother. Stay where you are. They’re bringing her in.”
“Who?”
“Ah, yes, you don’t know… it’s Wanda.”
“Miss Wandaful?”
“Yeah. She should be there any minute. She was found on Grove Road early this morning by a jogger, in a bad way. I don’t want to say much over the phone, because you’ll need to see this one to believe it… but she’s in a really bad state.”
“Okay, I’ll head down to Casualty now. That’s where they’ll take her.”
“If she’s talking, get what you can and report back here. There’s some weird shit going down, and I have a feeling this might just be the start of it. Remember that scarecrow?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, it’s gone missing. And just to cap it off, this morning there was an identical one in the garden of each of the houses where the parents of two of those other missing girls lives… two of them: Jacobs and Warren. Royle, each of them has one of those fucked-up photographs taped to its face. It’s like some kind of twisted message. Like someone’s playing a game.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Let me know as soon as you know anything. It’s all kicking off at the Concrete Grove. We now have reports of gunshots on the estate. What is it with these fucking people?”
The phone went dead before Royle could respond.
The separate pieces of some huge plot were slowly moving together, shifting slowly, like tectonic plates. Royle suspected that he would never be able to see the full picture, only these separate sections. But hopefully that would be enough to take care of things, to rearrange into the correct order those parts of his life that were currently misaligned.
He rushed to the fire exit and down the stairs, heading for the Casualty Department. Just as he arrived there, on the ground floor at the rear of the hospital building, there was a lot of commotion. Two white-coated men were pushing a sheet-covered gurney through the reception area, followed by a nurse shouting orders. He followed them, pulling out his ID.
“Police! Who do you have there?”
The nurse turned towards him, her face slick with sweat and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She was breathing heavily. “She’s one of yours… from the lab at the station. There’s severe trauma to the lower abdomen
