Bob Wilkinson shook his head. ‘Been and gone. Early hours.’
Kate cast a critical gaze over him, seeing more than the usual world-weariness in his eyes. ‘You been here all night?’
‘Yeah. Three more stabbings came in after this one.’
‘You know what I think they should do?’
‘Go on.’
‘Ban knives.’
Bob laughed dryly. ‘Why not? Sure as shit worked for drugs.’
Kate turned and held her hand out to the intern who was coming out of the high-dependency room. He was in his twenties with a face still shy of the pessimism she imagined he would soon learn to develop. Hospitals boiled the optimism out of you as powerfully as they tried to wipe out germs. The nurse in her forties behind him looked as though she could eat him and three more like him for breakfast.
‘Doctor Kate Walker. I’m a police surgeon.’
The doctor shook her hand with a surprisingly powerful grip, glancing back at his comatose patient. ‘I’m Doctor Hake.’ He smiled slightly self-consciously. ‘Timothy. You were the first person attending at the scene?’
‘I was. The sergeant and I were on our way back from a domestic call and found him unconscious off the road. If a slightly drunk young lady hadn’t tried to take a pee in the alleyway there we might never have found him.’
The young doctor nodded. ‘You probably saved his life.’
‘He’s going to come through?’
Doctor Hake gave his shoulders the slightest of lifts. ‘I don’t know. That’s why I said “probably”. You don’t know how long he was out there before you found him?’
‘No idea.’
‘He lost a lot of blood and there were hypothermia complications because of it. We’re trying to stabilise him, but there are internal bleeding issues – together with the wound, the shock, the possibility of serious infection.’
‘I know the score, doctor. I was a forensic pathologist for quite a number of years.’
Hake looked at her, puzzled. ‘You were? And now you’re a police surgeon?’
‘Not just that. I work here on the teaching staff and in the students’ clinic.’ Kate smiled. ‘I’m a multitasker. The police-surgeon work is just the odd shift here and there.’
‘Voluntary.’
‘More or less.’
‘So isn’t that …’ He hesitated. Trying to find the right words.
‘A backward step?’
‘Well, yeah. I’m looking to make consultant by the time I’m your age.’
Kate laughed. ‘Good luck. And yeah, in career terms maybe it is a backward step. But I prefer working with people when they still have a chance to make it, if you know what I mean,’
Timothy Hake smiled back. ‘Yeah, I can see how that works.’
‘So. If you had to make a call …’ She nodded towards the patient in the room. ‘He going to make it?’
‘I could give you all the statistics, my medical background, my professional analysis …’
‘But?’
‘You might as well flip a coin.’
He nodded apologetically and moved off, the nurse ahead of him like a linebacker running defence.
Bob Wilkinson ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Fifty-fifty. I’d take those odds on the dog track sometimes.’
‘You would on a red-hot favourite. But you wouldn’t bet your mortgage on it. Or your life.’
‘True.’
‘We know who he is yet?’
‘Nope. No ID on him. No one’s come forward to report him missing.’
‘And what’s the new DI doing about it?’
‘He’s got uniform canvassing the vicinity but this is Camden Town we’re talking about. North London. Monkeyland.’
Kate shot him a quizzical look and Bob Wilkinson put his hands over his ears, eyes and mouth in succession. ‘Only not so wise,’ he said.
Kate looked back at the patient. The steady beat of the heart monitor like a grandfather clock counting down.
‘Did you read the story last year about the chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden?’
‘No. What about it?’
