has fallen.
Chapter 19
I tried to get to her, but the people in the segment behind were screaming and yelling and trying to get back into the building. I heard a voice, my own, shouting 'No! No!' somewhere outside my head.
When the people behind were safely in the foyer I attempted to pull the door open but Annabelle's body was jamming it. Eventually I made a gap and squeezed through to her. I grasped her under the shoulders and reversed out on to the town hall steps, her long legs unfolding as I retreated and broken glass crunching under my feet. I sat there on the top step, with Annabelle cradled in my arms, trying to stem the blood, until the ambulance came and they took her from me.
They lifted her on to a stretcher with infinite gentleness and wrapped her in a bright blue blanket. The stretcher fitted on to a trolley which was exactly the same height as the back of the ambulance. It slid straight in and the wheels folded up. The paramedic closed the door and swung the handle to fasten it. I watched the ambulance slip away into the night, lights flashing, as sirens and other blue lights converged on the town hall.
Inside the station everyone was running around like ants on a pan lid.
An exasperated sergeant kept asking me for a description of the gunman, and couldn't believe that I hadn't seen anything. I sat hunched on a hard chair in an interview room, feeling like a figure of ridicule, while officers ran in and out, shouted instructions and cursed. Bill Goodwin appeared and rescued me from further harassment by taking me to his office. He found a West Yorkshire Police sweater and I swapped it for my jacket and shirt.
'I should have gone with her,' I said.
'No, you'd only have been in the way. You did the right thing.'
I picked up the phone to ring the hospital, but he put his hand over it. 'Give them a few more minutes, Charlie, then I'll ring. They won't know anything yet.' He asked a constable to make us two teas, but I didn't touch mine.
Gilbert arrived, closely followed by Sam Evans. 'Are you all right, Charlie?' Sam asked.
'I'm OK, but I wish I'd gone with the ambulance. Will they know how she is yet?'
'Have you tried ringing?'
'No,' Bill replied. 'I thought we'd give them a bit longer.'
'They might tell me,' said Sam, picking up the phone.
He asked for the sister in Casualty and introduced himself. He listened and nodded and looked grave. We heard him ask: 'Could you let me know as soon as there's any further news?'
I sat up; that meant she was still alive.
'They're taking her to surgery, they'll let us know.'
'I'm getting over there,' I told them, jumping to my feet.
'I'll take you,' Gilbert said. 'You're in no fit state to drive.'
Sam came with us. A police car was parked outside the hospital entrance, its lights switched off. Gilbert and I recognised it as an ARV.
Sam led us expertly down various dimly illuminated corridors until we were in the casualty department. It was rush hour. The place was filled with Friday-night boozers, suffering stab wounds, broken arms and sundry minor injuries. Somebody in a cubicle made gurgling noises as a pipe was passed into his stomach to drain its alcoholic contents.
A youth with a Mohican haircut and gold rings in his nose and eyebrows was complaining that his girlfriend was having a bad trip.
The sister had no further information for us. I supplied her with Annabelle's name and address for the admission forms, but wasn't much help with next of kin. When she asked me my relationship to her I just said: 'Friend.'
A policeman from the ARV, wearing a bulletproof vest over his shirt, was sitting on a chair in the middle of the corridor that led to the operating theatres. He nursed a Heckler and Koch automatic in the crook of his arm. Another cop stood surveying the scene in the waiting room, arms folded, legs apart; as implacable as the Colossus of Rhodes.
Gilbert approached him cautiously and showed his ID. They talked and nodded, and Gilbert pointed to me, obviously telling him who I was.
When he rejoined us I said: 'Look, I'm staying here for as long as it takes, but you two might as well go home. I'm grateful to you both for coming.'
It made sense, so they left. The sister suggested I use the staff canteen, but I declined. She let me wait in her office, and a male nurse brought me a coffee.
Every thirty or forty minutes I stretched my legs in the waiting room.
New faces replaced the ones who were either patched up and sent home or admitted into a ward. The place grew slightly more quiet as the night passed. The occasional boisterous drunk fell silent when he saw the police presence. Several clients appeared to be regulars. A down-and-out who said he had blue spiders crawling all over him was dealt with patiently and then propelled out through the door. Everybody called him George. I wandered down a corridor, between the cubicles, and found myself in the resuscitation room, where the ambulances bring the serious cases. Annabelle would have passed through here. The victim of a hit-and-run was being attended to. Through a gap in the curtains I saw the doctor pull the blanket over the man's head, then wipe the sleep and the sweat from his own eyes.
I went to the bathroom. The walls were covered in graffiti and most of the taps had been left running. When I washed my hands flakes of dried blood from under my fingernails went down the plug hole Back in the sister's office I watched the sky growing grey over the chimney pots and high-rise flats. A porter on the next shift arrived, and left his newspaper on the desk. I glanced at the folded bundle today was the first day of the new football season.
'Mr. Priest?'
I turned towards the voice. It was the sister.
'Mrs. Wilberforce has been taken to the I.C.U. You can see her for a few moments.'
I jumped to my feet. 'How is she?' I demanded.
The sister held up her hand to curb my haste. 'I have to warn you,' she said, 'that she is very ill, and is likely to remain on the critical list for some time.'
'But she'll live?' ' This way. I' 11 take you.'
She led me back through the res us room to the intensive care wards.
We entered one and she introduced me to Annabelle's nurse, but I never heard her name. There were six beds in the room, with Annabelle in the end one.
She was laid out flat, with just a thin sheet over her. A blue device was sticking out of her throat, with a corrugated tube leading to a ventilator machine that was doing her breathing. A thick orange tube came from under the sheet and ended in a bottle on the floor. There was a drip leading into her arm and a battery of instrumentation alongside her bed that wouldn't have looked unreasonable on the flight deck of Concorde.
I couldn't take it all in. What had I allowed to happen to the beautiful, vivacious woman I was with a few hours ago? Last night she'd been giggling like a schoolgirl for the first time in years, and I had congratulated myself for bringing about the change in her. Now she was being kept alive by electrical impulses and motors and pumps; and I was to blame for that, too. Two years ago I had been shot by another madman. I wished it was me again this time.
'What's happening to her?' I whispered.
The nurse tried to tell me, but I didn't catch much of it. She used words like intubated and pneumothorax. Annabelle had a punctured lung and damage to various other organs. She'd lost most of her blood. The nurse said she was responsible solely for caring for Annabelle.
'Please look after her,' I whispered. 'She means a lot to me.'
'We will,' the nurse promised, assuming it was her I was addressing.
'Can I come back later and sit with her for a while?'
'Yes, of course.'
