a white T-shirt, tracksuit top and baggy trousers, body stooped, her straggly blonde ringlets covering her face.
'Michael still hasn't turned up. Where is he, Mark? Surely to God you must know?'
As the nurse finished her call, the phone beeped and she started talking again.
'I've no idea/ he said. 'I have absolutely no idea.'
She looked at him hard. 'But you guys have been planning this for weeks - Lucy said you were going to get even with Michael for all the practical jokes he played on the others before they got married.' As she took a step back from him, tossing hair from her forehead, Mark could see her mascara had run. She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.
'Maybe the guys had a last-minute change of mind,' he said. 'Sure, they'd come up with all kinds of ideas, like lacing his drink and putting him on a plane to some place, but I managed to talk them out of it - at least I thought I had.'
She gave a wan smile of appreciation.
He shrugged. 'I knew how worried you were, you know, that we'd do something dumb.'
'I was, desperately worried.' She glanced at the nurse, then sniffed. 'So where is he?'
'He definitely wasn't in the car?'
'Absolutely not. I've rung the police - they say that - they say they--' She began sobbing.
'What did they say?'
In a burst of anger she blurted, 'They won't do anything.'
She sobbed some more, struggling to contain herself. 'They say they've checked all around at the scene of the accident and there's no sign of him, and that he's probably just sleeping off a mighty hangover somewhere.'
Mark waited for her to calm down, but she carried on crying. 'Maybe that's true.'
She shook her head. 'He promised me he wasn't going to get drunk.' Mark gave her a look. After a moment, she nodded. 'It was his stag night, right? That's what you guys do on stag nights, isn't it? You get smashed.'
Mark stared down at grey carpet tiles. 'Let's go and see Zoe,' he said.
Ashley followed him across the ward, trailing a few yards behind him. Zoe was a slender beauty, and today she seemed even more slender to Mark, as he laid his hand on her shoulder, feeling the hard bone beneath the soft fabric of her designer tracksuit top.
'Jeez, Zoe, I'm sorry'
She acknowledged him with a faint shrug.
'How is he?' Mark hoped the anxiety in his voice sounded genuine.
Zoe turned her head and looked up at him, her eyes raw, her cheeks, almost translucent without make-up, tracked with tears. 'They can't do anything,' she said. 'They operated on him, now we just have to wait.'
Mark stood still, staring down at Josh, whose eyes were closed, his face a mess of bruises and lacerations, the bed surrounded by racks of machinery. There was a drip line cannulated into his hand, and another opaque line was forked into his nostrils. A thick breathing tube, fed by black bellows, distended his mouth. Wires ran out from the sheets and from his head, feeding digital displays and spiky graphs. What flesh Mark could see was the colour of alabaster. His friend looked like a laboratory experiment.
But Mark was barely looking at Josh. He was looking at the displays, trying to read them, to calculate what they were saying. He was trying to remember, from when he had stood in this same room beside his dying father, which were the ECG, the blood oxygen, the blood pressure readings, and what they all meant.
And he was thinking. Josh had always had it made. Smooth good looks, rich parents. The insurance loss adjuster, always calculating, mapping out his life, forever talking about five-year plans, ten-year plans, life goals. He was the first of the gang to get married, as he wanted to have kids early, so he would still be young enough to enjoy his life after they'd grown up. Marrying the perfect wife, darling little rich girl Zoe, totally fertile, allowed him to fulfil his plan. She'd delivered him two equally perfect babies in rapid succession.
Mark shot a glance around the ward, taking in the nurses, the doctors, marking their positions, then his eyes dropped to the drip lines into the back of Josh's hand, just behind the plastic tag bearing his name. Then they moved across to the ventilator. Then up to the ECG. Warning buzzers would sound if the heart rate dropped too low. Or the blood oxygen level.
Josh surviving would be a problem - he'd lain awake most of the night thinking about that, and had come to the reluctant conclusion it wasn't an option he could entertain.
Courtroom One at Lewes Crown Court always felt to Roy Grace as if it had been deliberately designed to intimidate and impress. It didn't carry any higher status than the rest of the courtrooms in this buildIng, but it felt as if it did. Georgian, it had a high, vaulted ceiling, a public gallery up in the gods, oak-panelled walls, dark oak benches and dock, and a balustraded witness stand. At this moment it was presided over by a bewigged Judge Driscoll, way past his sell-by date, who sat, looking half asleep, in a vivid red-backed chair beneath the coat of arms bearing the legend. 'Dieu et mon droit'. The place looked like a theatre set and smelled like an old school classroom.
Now as Grace stood in the witness stand, dressed neatly as he always was for court, in a blue suit, white shirt, sombre tie and polished black lace-ups, looking good outwardly, he felt ragged inside. Part lack of sleep from his date last night - which had been a disaster - and part nerves. Holding the bible with one hand, he rattled his way through the oath, glancing around, taking in the scene as he swore for maybe the thousandth time in his career, by Almighty God, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The jury looked the way all juries did, like a bunch of tourists stranded in a coach station. An untidy, ragbag of a group, gaudy pullovers, open-throat shirts and creased blouses beneath a sea of blank faces, all white, ranked in two rows, behind water jugs, tumblers and a mess of loose-leaf jottings. Haphazardly stacked beside the judge were a video player, a slide projector and a huge tape recorder. Below him, the female stenographer peered primly from behind a battery of electronic equipment. An electric fan on a chair swivelled right then left, not having
