little dizzy suddenly.
‘You can sit down and fill it in,’ she said.
Snapping back at her, he shouted, ‘I SAID I CAN MANAGE!’
People all around looked up from their hard grey plastic seats, startled.
But she didn’t appear to notice as she took the form back. ‘Please take a seat and a nurse will come and see you shortly.’
‘Three hours?’ he said.
‘I’ll tell them it’s urgent,’ she said flatly, then watched warily as the strange man with long, straggly brown hair, a heavy moustache and beard, and large, tinted glasses, wearing a baggy white shirt over a string vest, grey slacks and sandals, walked over to an empty seat, between a man with a bleeding arm and an elderly woman with a bandaged head, and sat down. Then she picked up her phone.
The Time Billionaire unclipped the BlackBerry from its holster, which was attached to his belt, but before he had time to do anything, a shadow fell in front of him. A pleasant-looking, dark-haired woman in her late forties, in nursing uniform, was standing over him. The badge on her lapel read Barbara Leach – A&E Nurse.
‘Hello!’ she said breezily. ‘Would you come with me?’
She led him into a small booth and asked him to sit down.
‘What seems to be the problem?’
He raised his hand. ‘I hurt it working on a car.’
‘How long ago?’
Thinking for a moment, he said, ‘Thursday afternoon.’
She examined it carefully, turning it over, then comparing it to his left hand. ‘It looks infected,’ she said. ‘Have you had a tetanus injection recently?’
‘I don’t remember.’
She studied it again for a while thoughtfully. ‘Working on a car?’ she said.
‘An old car. I’m restoring it.’
‘I’ll get the doctor to see you as soon as possible.’
He went back to his chair in the waiting room and turned his attention back to his BlackBerry. He logged on to the web and then clicked on his bookmark for Google.
When that came up, he entered a search command for MG TF.
That was the car Cleo Morey drove.
Despite his pain, despite his muzzy thoughts, a plan was forming. Really quite a good plan.
‘Fucking brilliant!’ he said out loud, unable to control his excitement. Then immediately he shrank back into his shell.
He was shaking.
Always a sign that the Lord approved.
65
Reluctantly cutting short his precious hours in Munich, Grace managed to board an earlier flight. The weather in England had changed dramatically during the day, and shortly after six o’clock in the evening, as he went to get his car from the short-stay multi-storey car park at Heathrow, the sky was an ominous grey and a cold wind was blowing, flecking the windscreen with rain.
It was the kind of wind that you forgot even existed during the long, summer days they’d had recently, he reflected. It was like a stern reminder from Mother Nature that summer was not going to last much longer. The days were already getting shorter. In little over a month it would be autumn. Then winter. Another year.
Feeling flat and tired, he wondered what he had achieved today, apart from earning another black mark in Alison Vosper’s book. Anything at all?
He pushed his ticket into the machine and the barrier rose. Even the rorty sound of the engine as he accelerated, which ordinarily he liked listening to, seemed off-key tonight. Definitely not firing on all cylinders. Like its owner.
As he headed towards the roundabout, taking the direction for the M25, he stuck his phone in the hands-free cradle and dialled Cleo’s mobile. It started ringing. Then he heard her voice, a little slurred, and hard to decipher above a raucous din of jazz music in the background.
