another, so it was tight and safe, and pulled it out of the jacket.
'There!' He stood, put the tank on the easel, and went into the living room to mix up the Kodak D76 powder.
Smurf was snoring in an unhealthy way and bluebottles flocked around the wound on her leg. Where had they all come from, Benedicte wondered. From nowhere it seemed, magically secreted by the walls, the carpet, the curtains. From time to time when the dog stopped snoring Benedicte could hear how silent the house was beneath them, nothing on the move down there, not a creak or murmur, only the faint helicopter buzz of the flies, and the incremental change of temperature as another summer's day ticked by…
But something was different. Benedicte felt it rather than knew it. The troll hadn't come back last night. She didn't dare to imagine what that might mean for Josh.
There must, she decided later, be a brain chemistry linked to full-blooded, angry desperation, because suddenly she started to feel strong. Something odd and preternatural descended on her a cool, pearly calm. Fler spine felt harder now that she knew she was going to die and she made a decision to see her child and husband one last time. Whatever had been done to them she wanted to see them, see their eyes.
She examined the handcuff again, jerking on it. She ran her fingers around the copper piping there were stories sometimes in the National Enquirer about lumberjacks carrying their own arms across miles of hickory and balsam forest. Maybe she should hack off her foot the papers said that Carmel Peach had nearly severed her hand trying to get out of the handcuffs. My God, is she a better mother than I am because she almost pulled her own hand off?
She sat back and looked around the room. Featureless. She palmed her way along the skirting-board, trawling for telephone wire and when she found nothing she sat, her hands pressed against the radiator, coaxing her tired, desperate brain. Could she get under the floorboards? Maybe find a joint in the piping? Slide the cuffs off the end of it?
'If it kills me,' she muttered. 'If it kills me.'
'Not again,' the nurses whispered to each other, exchanging glances when Alek Peach was brought into I.C.U. The endoscopy staff thought they could see a stress ulcer down there Mr. Friendship, the consultant, knew a stress ulcer instantly, they were a common problem in Intensive Care: shock could starve the intestines and stomach wall of blood, but although patients were routinely prescribed cimetidine, occasionally one boomeranged back and turned up a few days after discharge 'hosing blood', as Friendship put it. Endoscopy had shot a dose of adrenaline into Peach's ulcer, to try to stem the blood loss, but it looked as if it had already developed into peritonitis potentially fatal if they couldn't pump him with enough antibiotics. This time Friendship wasn't taking any chances: the press were interested enough as it was and he intended to guard Alek Peach's life like Cerberus.
Ayo Adeyami hadn't been on duty when he was admitted. She arrived this morning fresh from two days off after all the champagne she'd drunk with Ben she'd only had the energy to lie around on the sofa and feel the baby move inside her. She hadn't expected to come back to a ward in chaos. Police officers were at both entrances and all the nurses were twitchy. One of the juniors, the one who drove Ayo mad sometimes with her speculating and gossip, naturally had a story about the Peaches. This time even Ayo had to admit it was worth listening to. When the ward had settled a little they sat in the nurses' coffee room, drinking machine coffee and eating a family-size bag of cheesy footballs, the windows open, a delicious breeze shifting calmly across them. In the hallway outside, an armed officer, in full body armour, sat discreetly next to the door.
'Well, listen, OK?' The nurse turned to face Ayo, crimping one hand casually at the side of her face to shield her mouth from the police officer. 'My sister, yeah?' she mouthed, orange-painted lips moving with precision.
'Yeah.'
'Well, she's a medical secretary and guess who she works for?'
'I dunno.'
'For their doctor. The Peaches' doctor.'
Ayo, who in spite of her reservations spied the makings of a prime piece of gossip, glanced at the doorway then turned her body round, getting her stomach comfortable by wedging it sideways against the chair back. She pulled her eyebrows down and moved a bit closer, mirroring the nurse's hand gesture. 'Ree-uh-lly?'
'Yes, really. And, anyway, she took a call from the mum about a month ago. She was in tears, said she wanted to see the doctor, that her hubby had hit the little boy because '
'God.' Ayo looked nervously around herself, trying not to lick her lips. 'That wasn't in the papers.'
'I know. She wanted to see the doctor because the little boy had been pissing on things. You know, really weird, like on the carpets and stuff.'
'An eight-year-old?'
'Uh-huh.' The nurse licked her fingers and used it to press a curl against her cheek. She flashed a smile across at the officer as if they were talking about nothing more important than Friends or The X Files, then turned back to Ayo and covered her mouth again. 'Never kept her appointment and the next they heard Dad's in hospital and the boy's well, you know…'
'That's screwy.'
'Isn't it?'
'Creepy.' Ayo tapped her teeth, thinking about a child peeing on a bed. Just like Ben's old dog had done. Just like Josh had done in the bathroom.
'So you think that's why they're here now?'
'You watch, I think we'll know soon enough.'
Rebecca was cold. It was bright outside her flat, the top of the Greenwich roofs all rusty-coloured against the blue, but this wasn't a weather cold: it was a different cold, a cold inside her, like stone. She stood in the kitchen unloading shopping-bags three cartons of orange juice, milk, two bottles of vodka and a ready-made meal, chicken and tarragon. She knew she needed to eat she had been drunk all yesterday, hadn't eaten and had slept for just three hours, waking with the sun, her skin damp, her hair matted. The flat had been a mess some time in the night she'd broken another glass, in the studio this time, and there were rolled-up edges of Rizla packets everywhere. No food in the kitchen, only a year-old bottle of Bailey's, curdled in the heat on the window-sill. Her brain had been swooshing around so much that she'd had to take a deep breath, get her keys, and venture out to get paracetamol. Now she put her hand on her head and stared at the groceries.
No paracetamol. She had gone out intending to get paracetamol but had come back with vodka.
Oh, God. She didn't think she could face going out into the sun again so instead of pain-killers she found a dusty glass in the back of the cupboard, rinsed it, opened one of the bottles of Smirnoff and poured herself a weak vodka and orange. Just to soothe her head and send her off to sleep again she wasn't going to get drunk but, God, it's so difficult to sleep when the sun is up. She sniffed the drink, turned the glass around, and tasted it. After the first sip it didn't taste bitter it tasted sweet. She rolled up her shirt-sleeves and took the drink into her studio to close the shutters and that felt better. Now all of Greenwich couldn't look in and see how transparent and substanceless she was. The sunlight had found a way in from the kitchen, so she went back in there and closed the blinds, stopping to refill her glass on the way.
'Jack,' she muttered, walking unsteadily back into the studio, 'Oh, God, Jack '
In the relatives' room at King's Hospital I.C.U, Caffery woke up with a jolt, as if someone had said his name. He lay there for a while blinking, trying to piece together why he was here. Last night Souness had come over to the unit and together they had tried a little pressure on Mr. Friendship. But for health professionals the police come a long way down the chain of priority, and the answer was: no, not yet. 'There's a life to be saved whatever it is can wait until he's stabilized.'
So Souness went home with Paulina, and Caffery spent another night away from home, sleeping on a banquette in the relatives' room, waiting for news. The relatives' room could have been Gatwick airport for all the makeshift sleeping arrangements. Except for the tears. A woman with a massive brain haemorrhage had come on to the ward in the night, and her husband, unable to bear his wife's almost dead face on the pillow, sat in a corner on his own, staring at the floor, not moving. He hardly seemed to notice the baby in the car seat on the floor next to him, who cried and made faces and curled its little fists and didn't have any idea how wildly its future was pivoting in the neighbouring ward.
Blinking, Caffery sat up and rubbed his face. His neck was sore from sleeping on the banquette. He went straight to the main doors of the intensive care unit, straightening his shirt, flattening his hair back with his palm.
