extra-special protection for the wife – for yet more men to be posted outside the house near the church at Thorpe-on-Ouse, and I believed that the message got through. At the moment they hoisted me, a train came in on Platform Four, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection – head bandaged, I had not bargained on that – and the mortified faces streaming by at the carriage windows.
I was taken by fast-trotting horse to the County Hospital; I tried to say to one of the attendants that I had never expected to go so fast along Monkgate while flat on my back, but that was quite beyond me. It bothered me that nobody spoke back, even so. I was about to try again as we flew along the hospital drive but it suddenly came to me that I'd done a great piss in my trousers, and that silenced me.
I was whirled about the whiteness of the hospital on a trolley, catching some of the words passed between the people moving about me: 'gunshot', 'concussion of the brain', 'fixity of the chest' and 'heart' and 'great vessels'. In a tiny, crowded room a needle came towards me, and somebody was good enough to say 'ether' as they put it in. It put me into a daze, not right out, and I was quite aware of my head being shaved by a very fast woman barber, and then painted, while at the same time my suit was removed, and my undershirt cut by mighty shears that moved from my waist to my neck in three great bites. A man entered the room whom I knew straightaway to be the top man, for he moved a little slower than all of the others. He was looking at my ribs, and I thought I was supposed to be looking too, and I raised my head like an idiot to see an open eye there on my chest. The man pushed my head down, and ordered me to be turned over, where he looked at my back, saying some words I did not care for, like 'lodged bullet', 'traversed the whole thickness of the chest'. Then the bandage was unwound from my head, and I don't believe that he liked the look of that either. I saw the Chief in the room, in his long coat as ever. But not for long, and soon a pair of fat India rubber lips came towards me and put an evil-smelling kiss on my whole face that sent me sinking into the bed below with all the voices roundabout becoming bent out of true.
The top medical man appeared out of nowhere some time later; he was carrying something small and silvery. I was in a long dark room, and there were other people there, all in beds and at the head of each bed was a shuttered window. The man sat on my bed, and his name came out: Kenneth Munroe; we had a conversation, but I cannot recall it, except that he made it clear the wife was quite safe. He returned again some time later, when I was still in the same place, with all the beds, and the closed shutters as before, but this time sunlight was fighting to come through them. He carried the silver object, also as before, and he placed it in my hand. He was smiling a very beautiful sort of smile, but there was a better one behind him: the wife, without the baby… free of the baby She watched me as Kenneth Munroe said, 'These are for you', in words as clear as a bell. I raised my hand and saw a pair of forceps. His speech ran on just as clearly, like a stream, but he spoke a little faster than I could understand.
'Bullet forceps,' he said,'… they grip the bullet with great force… seize it, you know, with no entanglement of the soft parts… smoothly rounded blades as you see… It is the extractor of preference for the British army.'
Everybody – for there were some more people around the bed by now – waited as I said, 'It is a very pretty instrument.'
'Thank you,' said Kenneth Munroe, 'they are constructed to my own design.'
He said that I might keep them, adding, as he rose from the bed, and the wife replaced him there, that he had many more besides.
'Where's the baby?' I said, and the wife said, 'Oh, he's…'
But I had fallen back to sleep already.
When I woke I had my hand to my head, feeling the bandage. I saw the bullet extractors on the cabinet beside me, and there was a thing like a metal tooth beside them: their trophy, the bullet itself. Kenneth Munroe was there again, and now the shutters had won their fight against the light outside; it was night time, the gas low in the long room. He explained that I had taken a bullet to a lung; it had gone clean through without causing over-much damage.
'If you must be shot,' he said, 'be shot in a lung.'
But there had been worse bother higher up. I had fractured my skull on falling and a fragment of bone had become lodged in the crack, like a penny in a 'Try Your Weight' machine, and Kenneth Munroe proudly told me that he had fished it out with his little fingernail. There had been no compression of the brain, and after telling me this he walked away into the darkness once again.
The bullet had notched a rib, and my chest was strapped. I was put on a low diet, and the next little while was all gruel, beef tea, and darkness followed by the swelling light at the shuttered windows. I would cough some blood from time to time, but it was always quickly wiped away by the nurse, as though it was an embarrassment over dinner and nothing more. I was in the room for head cases rather than lung cases, and here the rules were darkness, perfect quiet and regular dreams of Paris and babies.
After a while, I became more aware of York beyond the shutters: trotting horses in the far distance, faint cries of the drivers and church bells. The Chief came with two cigars, a bottle of John Smith's, a pen – the Swan – and with my report, which he said I might finish in due course. He would not speak about the manhunt that was going on across the city. It would agitate me too much. When he went away, the cigars were removed without a word by the nurse, although she opened the beer for me.
… But I couldn't face it.
A little while later, I drank it, flat, while sitting up and continuing with the report, writing at a lick, and setting down all of Sampson's words just as I remembered them, and putting the confession of Lund quite out of my mind, except to wonder whether he had perhaps made it to The Chief himself by now… But the matter did not seem very pressing for it was now all in the same category as the dreams.
The wife returned at some point. She kissed me, and I gave her the report. She read it on my bed, the press of her body making me realise I needed a fuck.
'Firstly,' she said, when she'd finished, 'you can't spell.'
'Can't spell what?'
'Anything.'
'Can't spell hardly anything, you mean.'
'Second of all,' she continued, 'you must send the London police to the left-luggage place in Charing Cross Station because I'm sure he means to collect the money he left there.'
'We've already done that,' I said with a grin.
'Well then…' said the wife,'… I thought you would've.'
She coloured up (for she'd thought nothing of the sort).
It was night time, no light at the shutter edges, when the Chief came again. He looked sad, and placed a large brown paper sleeve on my bed. Inside was a photograph. I began to pull it free, and stopped halfway, but he nodded at me to continue.
The photograph showed a long white head sleeping in a hat box. It was turned a little to one side, just as if resting between the long spells of hard work that might be the lot of a head trying to make its way in the world without benefit of a body. Around it was blood, but not the colour of blood.
I sat upright, and stared at the Chief, who said, 'Three of his fingers were found in the hat box besides', at which the quantity of beef tea that had been set whirling within me sprang from my mouth. I had done this to Lund. As far as Sampson and Mike were concerned, he and I were in league. What had they asked and not been told three times? Had they, even with a manhunt going on, come by 16A and, finding it empty, tried to discover the house to which I had removed – the place where the ticket might be? Or where, failing that, the clean sweep might be made as a settling of accounts?
The nurse came and took away the stained top cover as the Chief waited with hands in his pockets.
'Can we get a nip of something?' he said.
She shook her head, walking away, adding that if we were to talk, we must do it in whispers. As she moved off, the Chief muttered, 'I have my hip flask about me…' before nodding at the photograph and continuing more loudly, 'The box was found on Platform Six yesterday, and carried over to the Lost Luggage Office by a porter.' 'Just as it was meant to be,' I said. 'Lund had been missing for three days,' said the Chief. 'Whether they came upon him at his home, about the station or somewhere in between, I couldn't say.' 'He put me on to the whole investigation,' I said, 'out of conscience at what he'd done.' The Chief said nothing. '… He killed the Camerons,' I went on. 'He let on to me, but I kept it back because I didn't want to see him swing.' I repeated all of Lund's confession to the Chief, and he lost interest by degrees as I did so. He was looking down at his boots as I added:
