the stitches in it. Her right arm was across her small chest, enveloped in a sling.
She seemed to stare at him, baleful and defensive. He did not know whether he was recognized, if that was the stare she gave to anyone approaching her bed. The nurse slipped a thermometer into her mouth, which was puffed, with distorted lips.
'She'll be in two or three days, because she lives alone and there's no one to look after her. Problem is that we might ship her out today, and if she starts vomiting or goes to sleep, we've an inquiry to worry about. When the swelling's down on the arm it'll be pinned or plated – and she'll have to manage. That's the way it is, these days.'
'There's a friend next door to her, a good lady. She'll be there.'
'And you said you were a neighbour.' The nurse put down the thermometer, then fixed Malachy with her eye. 'I expect you'll give her a hand – or do you go to work?'
'I'll do what I can,' he murmured. 'I don't suppose you have a vase?'
He had gone to the East Street market. He had considered how much he could spend. The benefit he was entitled to, after deductions, left him with eighty pounds to last for two weeks. Divided up that gave him spending money of five pounds and seventy-one pence each day. He had asked the woman on the flower stall for the best she could do with five pounds.
It was a good display of bright chrysanthemums that he had brought to the hospital.
The nurse reached to the bottom cupboard of the cabinet beside the bed and took out a man's urine-sample bottle, grinned, filled it with water from the basin, and took the flowers from Malachy. As if she'd made the judgement that he wasn't capable of flower-arranging, she did it for him and settled the stems in the bottle. 'The vases all get nicked,' she said. 'It's the best I can manage. Don't stay too long. You shouldn't tire her.' She left him.
Malachy sat on the end of the bed beside the little bump her feet made. He did not know what to say, or whether it was right to say anything. He tried to smile encouragement. She had turned her battered head enough to see the flowers. He felt his inadequacy.
When he was with the dossers, sleeping in the underpass on and under cardboard, drinking with what he had made from begging, and knowing he could not fall further, he had not felt this low. The silence nagged between them.
Maybe an hour passed. She slept and he sat dead still so as not to wake her.
The question cracked in his ear. Brusque. 'What's a piece of shit like you doing here?'
The nephew was behind him. He carried a large, varied bouquet in one hand and a clear plastic bag in the other, packed with apples, pears, bananas, peaches, a pineapple and grapes.
'Why are you here?'
He was shivering. His whisper was a chatter in his teeth: 'I came to see if I could help.'
'Oh, that's good, 'help'. Didn't 'help' enough to walk her there and back – no, no.'
Malachy stammered, 'She didn't ask me. If she'd asked me… '
'No fool, Aunt Millie. Wouldn't have reckoned you up to it, walking her there and back.'
'She didn't ask.'
'You came down from a great height – right? Hit the bottom – right? I know who you were and what you did. I know what they called you. Fancy phrases from the medics, but the truth from the jocks. I know.'
His head drooped into his hands. He sensed the nephew go past him and he heard the kiss placed on Millie's forehead, would have been where the bruises were. More sounds. The splash of water, then the thud in the tin waste-bin, the crackle of the Cellophane wrapping on the bouquet.
He kept his hands tight on his face, could feel the stubble on his palms.
'What I don't know, my friend, my little piece of shit, is where you're going. Are you going to go on failing? That's easy, isn't it? I don't know if the only road you're comfortable with, my friend, is the easy one… Take your bloody hands off your face. Look at her! Does that take guts, looking at an old lady who's been done over for her purse? Look at her and remember her.'
He did. He saw the slightness of her and the bruises in their mass of colours, the thin upper arm in its sling. And he saw the stems of his flowers upside down in the bin, and the glory of the bouquet on the cabinet. He pushed himself up from the bed and turned for the aisle that ran through the ward.
'There's an easy road and a hard one – most, when they've fallen like you have, take the easy one.'
Out of the hospital, he walked on the embankment.
The river seemed sour and dirtied. Rain ran down his face, was not wiped away. He walked on and did not know where, walked until a massive cream and green building – an architect's dream – blocked his path.
Then, he turned, retraced his steps and headed back to the Amersham where he could hide behind a door that was locked and bolted.
Had Frederick Gaunt looked out through his fifth-floor window, reinforced and chemically treated glass that could withstand bomb blast and electronic eavesdropping, he would have seen a man walk on the Albert Embankment towards the wall that blocked further progress to the building where he worked, then loiter and drift away. But there was more on Gaunt's mind that lunchtime than the aimless advance and retreat of another of the capital's work-shy low-life – that would have been his description if he had seen the loafer. His sandwiches were untouched and his bottle of mineral water unopened.
Gaunt's room in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the monolith occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service, was in an isolated corner of the building. Nominally, eight per cent of the Service's budget was devoted to the investigation of organized crime, but the resources made available to this section of the fifth floor's open-plan areas, cubicles and rooms had been pared down to meet the demands of Iraq and the burgeoning al-Qaeda desks. Gaunt did Albania. On another man's back it would have been a hairshirt, an irritation that required continued scratching without relief, but he knew the way the system worked and would have reckoned bloody-minded sulking to be vulgar.
The lunch was uneaten and the water undrunk.
Little that normally landed on his desk, dumped without ceremony by Gloria, required more than dutiful attention. Albania's organized crime was the trafficking of narcotics, firearms and people. His CX reports were carefully crafted, always readable, and painted a clear picture of a society wedded with enthusiasm to criminality. Most could have been drafted when he was half asleep – not the one that now turned in his mind.
'You haven't touched them – you have to eat.'
Gloria put down a further file on his desk, already crowded with seven paper heaps. 'No breakfast, no lunch, and I'll wager nothing proper last night.'
He grimaced. She scolded because she cared about him. The first of the files had arrived the previous morning and the heap had built through the day. Most of the pages now referred to telephone traces sucked down by the farm of dishes on the Yorkshire moors.
Once he had been on the cusp of the Service's investigations – before he was moved aside: a victim of the Service's need to produce scapegoats after its greatest ever, and most humiliating, intelligence failure. Now he was again at the centre. Little, irrelevant, corrupt, fourth-world Albania was top of the tree. He chortled to himself. He had been at his desk till ten o'clock last night, back in at a few minutes after five that morning, and would be there that evening long after the day shifts had finished.
'I really do insist that you eat.'
It had been the day when al-Qaeda came to Albania: what he had lived and dreamed for. He thought they must have almost forgotten, down on the AQ desks, that Frederick Gaunt still inhabited a little corner of their space. A link was made – and he'd have admitted it was a tortuous one – between the kings of the terrorist war and the barons of European criminality. Happy days, happy times.
'Please, Mr Gaunt – please, eat something.'
'What never ceases to amaze me, Gloria, is that they still use the old telephone. God, will they never learn?'
One file listed an address in the city of Quetta in west-central Pakistan, in the foothills of the mountains that straddled the Afghan border – probably close to where the venerable Osama was holed up in a damp cave – with an estimated population of 200,000, and among them was Farida, wife of Muhammad Iyad: listed occupation, bodyguard. She lived there with the kids, but he was long gone.
The second file was of the life and times of Muhammad Iyad: more important, whom he guarded, all choice items.
