JUST ENVY HER THAT PERFECT… DISTANCE? I INVITE YOU TO CONSIDER THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM. TRUE FREEDOM. HAVE YOU EVER REALLY CONSIDERED IT? I'M SORRY ABOUT THE OTHERS. TRULY. I SHALL NOT INSULT YOUR INTELLIGENCE WITH PLATITUDES ABOUT ENDS AND MEANS BUT OFFER IN MITIGATION THE THOUGHT THAT A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING OFTEN HAS AN APPROPRIATE MARGIN OF ERROR. IT'S ALL ABOUT PRESSUBE, DETECTIVE INSPECTOR THORNE, BUT THEN YOU'D KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT. SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, TOM, MAYBE I'LL CALL YOU SOMETIME.
Pressure…
Thorne looked around, his heart thumping. Whoever left the note must be close – the car hadn't been there long. All he could see were grim-set, rain-soaked faces, and Holland dodging the puddles as he loped across the road towards him.
'Sir, the boyfriend's just arrived. You must've passed him on your way out.'
The look on Thorne's face stopped him dead in his tracks.
'Alison is not a fuck-up, Holland.'
'Of course not, sir. All I meant was-'
'Listen. This is what he wants.' He pointed back towards the hospital. 'Do you understand?' His shirt was plastered to his back. Rain and sweat. He could barely understand it himself. He could hardly believe what was struggling to come out of his mouth. Holland stared at Thorne openmouthed as he spoke the words that would cost him so much. Words which even as they formed on his lips, told him he should never have agreed to become part of this.
'Alison Willetts is not his first mistake. She's the first one he's got right.'
Tim's not handling this very well. He had that funny choke in his voice when he was talking to Anne. Anne? First-name terms and we've never met. She sounds nice, though. I like our chats in the evening. Obviously a bit one-sided but at least somebody knows there's something going on in here. There's still somebody going on in here.
Did I mention the tests by the way? Absolutely fucking excellent. Well, some of them. Basically there's some sort of kit, literally a kit, in a special case, which tests if you're a complete veggie or not. To see if you're in Persistent Vegetative State. PVS. Which I keep mixing up with I/'PL but PVS is a bit more serious. They just test all your senses. Banging bits of wood together to see if you can hear, to see if you react. Not quite sure what I did, really, but they seemed pleased. I could have done without the pinpricks and that stuff they waft under your nose that's like the stuff you inhale if you've got a really bad cold. But the taste test makes up for it. They give you whisky. Drops of whisky on your tongue. This is my kind of hospital. Anne did the tests. She looks dead attractive for somebody quite old. I can't see her very well but that's the image I get of her. I'm not even seeing shapes, really. More like the shadows of shapes. And some of those shadow-shapes are definitely policemen. Tim sounded really nervous when he was talking to one of them. He was pretty young, I reckon.
The man outside the house with the bottle of champagne did.., what? Turned me into a pretty dull conversationalist but what else? Hurt me somewhere but nothing feels like a wound.
Everything feels like a scar.
Did he touch me? Will he be the last one ever to touch me?
Come on, Tim. I'm alive. It's still me. More or less. You're cracking up and I'm the one singing 'Girlfriend In A Coma' to myself…
It was nice that Carol and Paul came in. Christ, I hope all this business didn't bugger up the wedding.
TWO
'Are we looking at a doctor?'
As soon as he had asked the question, Thorne knew what Holland would be thinking. It was undeniable that Anne Coburn was the sort of doctor most men would look at. About whom most men would contrive painful jokes about cold hands and bedside manners. She was tall and slim. Elegant, he thought, like that actress who was in The Avengers and plays the old slapper in that sitcom. Thorne put her in her early forties, maybe a year or two older than he was. Although the blue eyes suggested that her hair might once have been blonde, he liked it the way it was now – short and silver. Perched on the edge of a small, cluttered desk, drinking a cup of coffee, she seemed almost relaxed. By comparison with the day before at any rate.
She'd sent him away from the Royal Free with a flea in his ear. Thorne could still hear the laughter of thirty-odd medical students as he'd trudged away up the corridor. It was evidently a treat to take a short break from brain scans to watch the teacher give a high-ranking police officer a thorough bollocking. Anne Coburn did not like to be interrupted. She'd apologised for the incident over the phone when Thorne rang to rearrange their appointment back at Queen Square where she worked. Where she treated Alison Willetts.
She took another swig of coffee and repeated Thorne's question. Her speech was crisp, efficient and easy on the ear. It was a voice that could certainly wow impressionable medical students or frighten middle-aged policemen. 'Are we looking at a doctor? Well, certainly someone with a degree of medical expertise. To block off the basilar artery and cause a stroke would take medical know-how. To cause the kind of stroke that would induce locked-in syndrome is way beyond that… Even if someone knew what they were doing, the odds are against it. You might try it a dozen times and not succeed. We're talking about fractions of an inch.'
Those fractions had cost three women their lives. Thorne flashed on a mental image of Alison Willetts. Make that four women. Perhaps they should count their blessings and thank God for this lunatic's expertise. Or, more likely, worry that now he thought he'd perfected his technique he'd be eager to try again. Dr Coburn hadn't finished.
'Plus of course, there's the journey to consider.'
Thorne nodded. He'd already started to consider it. Holland looked confused.
'From what I can gather, you're presuming that Alison had her stroke at home in south-east London,' said Coburn. 'He would have had to. keep her alive until he could get her to the Royal London, which is at least…'
'Five miles away.'
'Right. He'd have passed any number of hospitals on the way. Why did he drive all the way to the Royal London?'
Thorne had no idea, but he'd done some checking.
'Camberwell to Whitechapel, he'd have passed three major hospitals, even on the most direct route. How would he have kept her alive?'
'Bag and mask's the most obvious way. He might have had to pull over every ten minutes or so for half a dozen good squeezes on the bag but it's fairly straightforward.'
'So, a doctor, then?'
'I think so, yes. A failed medical student possibly – chiropractor, perhaps.., a well-read physiotherapist at a hell of a stretch. I've no idea where you'd even begin.'
Holland stopped scribbling in his notebook. 'A hypodermic needle in a haystack?'
Coburn's expression told Thorne that she'd found it about as funny as he had.
'You'd better start looking for it then, Holland,' Thorne told him. 'I'll see you tomorrow. Get a cab back.'
Every step that he and Dr Coburn took towards Alison's room filled Thorne with something approaching dread. It was a terrible thought but he would have found it easier had Alison been one of Hendricks's 'patients'. He couldn't help but wonder if it might not have been easier for Alison too. They walked through to the Chandler Wing then took the lift to the second floor and Medical ITU.
'You don't like hospitals, do you, Detective Inspector?'
An odd question. Thorne couldn't believe that anybody liked hospitals. 'I've spent too much time in them.'
'Professionally or…?' She didn't finish the question because she couldn't. What were the right words? 'On an amateur basis?'
Thorne looked straight at her. 'I had a small operation last year.' But that wasn't it. 'And my mother was in hospital a long time before she died.'
