‘The same. It’s what we all want.’
‘You’re very good to me,’ said Charles. ‘You all are.’
‘You’ve got to go on doing what we tell you, though,’ warned Gaston. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you know what we want you to do now?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. And thank you.’
‘Go and do it then.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Claudine vomited, uncontrollably, over the desk and the headless, tendril-necked body that remained grotesquely upright in its chair, and over Blake who grabbed her and turned her away from the horror. She continued retching, huddled in his arms, long after she couldn’t be sick any more, the empty, stomach-wrenching convulsions turning into constant, violent shaking, uncontrollable again, as the trauma gripped her. She was vaguely aware of Blake and Harding hurrying her from the room, both talking, but she was still deafened by the shot and shook her head uncomprehendingly, unaware that she was crying until Blake started wiping her face. When she saw the contents of the handkerchief she realized, distantly, that it wasn’t tears or even blood he was wiping away but bone and brain debris. She whimpered and the shuddering worsened.
Others crowded around her in the corridor, a man and two women, taking over, and she went unprotestingly into an elevator which took her downwards. She was striving for control by the time it stopped, tensing her arms tightly by her side to stop the twitching, concentrating upon her surroundings – looking for an outside focus – to bring herself back to reality. She still couldn’t hear what the unknown man was saying and brought her hands up to her ears, to tell him it was deafness, not shock.
It was the embassy’s basement gymnasium. She was bustled straight through, past two bewildered men lifting weights, into the women’s changing rooms. At the showers one of the women started to undress her, stripping off the blood – and fragment-covered clothes, but Claudine gestured her away.
She began to recover in the shower, forcing herself to look at the blood-streaked water streaming off her, turning the spray to its hardest adjustment and holding her breath to stand directly under it. It was several minutes before she could make herself actually wash her hair, not wanting to touch what might still be in it. There was nothing. When she squeezed her eyes shut she saw an immediate mental picture of a crimson explosion and a head disappearing and quickly opened them again. Twice there was loud rapping against the glass door. Only when she shouted for the second time that she was all right did Claudine become aware mat her ears were clearing.
She stepped away from the water at last but didn’t immediately try to leave the stall, partially extending her arms and looking down at herself. The tremor was still mere but not as bad. Her ribs and stomach ached from the vomiting. Consciously she closed her eyes again, tightly. There was no head-bursting image.
One of the women was waiting directly outside, offering an enveloping white towelling robe. It had a hood attached but the second nurse handed her a separate towel for her hair.
The attentive man said: ‘Kenyon, Bill Kenyon. I’m the embassy physician. Can you hear me?’
Claudine nodded: there was still a vague echoing sensation but his words were quite audible. She said: ‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re a doctor. You know you’re not,’ the man said. ‘We’ve got a small emergency infirmary here but I think you should go to hospital.’
Kenyon had blond, almost white, hair and rimless glasses. Claudine saw mat the nurse who’d put her arm round her had blood on the side of her uniform. She said: ‘I am a doctor – a psychologist – and I know about posttraumatic stress. I’m not going to your infirmary or to an outside hospital.’
‘You can’t shrug off what’s just happened to you,’ the physician protested.
‘I’m not trying to shrug it off: the very opposite. I’m fully acknowledging it – think I know, even, why it happened – and I believe I can go on.’
‘You’re making a mistake,’ he insisted.
‘If I am then I’ll recognize that, too. I’ll be all right.’
Kenyon shook his head, unconvinced. ‘I could let you have some chlordiazepoxide.’
It could be a useful precaution to have a tranquillizer available, Claudine conceded. ‘That would be very kind.’
By the time Kenyon returned from his dispensary the nurses – the blonde was named Anne, the brunette Betty – had located an embassy-issue track suit in Claudine’s size, still in its wrapping, and training pants for underwear. Claudine said she wanted everything she’d been wearing incinerated. Both nurses tried to persuade her to rest at least for a few hours in the embassy sick bay. She ignored them. As well as the tranquillizer Kenyon gave her his card, with his home as well as his direct embassy number. ‘Call me. I mean it. I’m here. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I want to go back upstairs.’ Claudine was pleased she could remember in which direction the lift had brought her. She still felt suspended between reality and disbelief. The disorienting echo was intermittent in her ears.
‘You’re wrong, you know,’ said Kenyon.
‘No, I do know,’ insisted Claudine. But did she really know how strong she was?
‘I’ll arrange a car to take you back to your hotel,’ offered Betty.
‘I want to find everyone else,’ Claudine said positively. ‘I didn’t take much notice of the route on my way down here. That’s all the help I need.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said Kenyon cynically.
‘I might not be. And if I’m not, I’ve got your numbers.’ She conjured the contact card between her fingers.
Claudine’s arrival in the ambassador’s suite was met with astonishment.
‘I didn’t… I thought…’ groped McBride, standing awkwardly but bringing everyone else to their feet with him.
‘I just want to be here,’ said Claudine awkwardly. ‘I’m all right.’ She saw Peter Blake was the only person in the room without a jacket and remembered his pulling her into him, swamped in Norris’s gore and her own vomit. Then she saw him crossing towards her.
‘You sure this is a good idea?’ he said, too quietly for anyone else to hear.
‘No,’ Claudine admitted. The shaking had gone, but despite the comforting thickness of the track suit she felt suddenly cold.
‘Why then?’
‘Because I want to.’
Claudine was pressing her eyes tightly together again (no blood-red explosion!) when Sanglier arrived close behind Blake. Until that moment she hadn’t been aware of his being in the room.
‘You don’t need to be here,’ insisted the Frenchman.
‘I want to be,’ she repeated. Now she was there, she wasn’t sure that was true.
From behind his protective desk McBride, still standing, said: ‘Dr Carter, I want to say…’ but Claudine, faint- voiced, stopped him.
‘There’s no need to say anything. It’s over.’
Claudine had never known the sensation before: never wanted to know it again. It was as if she were suspended above them all, in an out-of-body experience in which she could hear and see them but they were unaware of her presence. Her uncertain ears even made their words echo, ghost-like, and she had to hold very tightly on to her ebbing and flowing concentration: several times, when it ebbed, her vision actually blurred, merging people together with distant voices.
Claudine clung, like a drowning person to a fragile handhold, to her decision to be there. It was right that she should be. Not to contribute: she wasn’t able to contribute to anything at that precise moment. But she could listen,
