watching Keith trying to explain to their two young children, who’d been woken by the noise, why Granddad was there and their mummy was crying. ‘I’m back,’ he announced.
There was no response. The living room was empty; it seemed cold and alien with the television off. Thinking that May might have gone to bed, he had started in the direction of the bedroom when he glanced along the hall and saw a light under the door of Michael’s room. He went along and opened it slowly to find May sitting on Michael’s bed with photographs in her hands and spread all over the bedspread. She didn’t look up when Brian came in but knew he was there. ‘Do you remember the holiday in Kinghorn?’ she said, holding up a print. ‘That awful, bloody caravan and the sound of the rain on the roof…’
‘Aye,’ said Brian. ‘Rained every bloody day.’
‘But Michael loved it… happy as Larry in his wellies, he was.’ She finally looked up, pain etched all over her face. ‘What am I going to do?’
Brian sat down beside her, hands clenched between his knees. ‘We’ll get through it, hen. You and me, eh? We always do.’
May had a faraway look in her eyes.
TEN
‘Did you get your report off to St Raphael’s?’ Cassie Motram asked her husband when she arrived home from evening surgery to find him preparing what he’d need for the excavation at the end of the week.
‘I did.’
Thinking that she detected some unspoken qualification in the reply, Cassie asked, ‘A problem?’
‘Far from it. The donor seemed a perfect match for his highness in every way…’
‘But?’
‘What I really can’t get my head round is why they asked for my opinion in the first place. Many of the tests they asked for seemed utterly pointless in the circumstances.’
‘As you said, they wanted the best and they could afford it,’ said Cassie. ‘You’re the top man in your field.’
‘All they needed to do was make sure that blood group and tissue type were compatible for the transplant. All the other stuff they asked for was quite superfluous, an attempt to inflate the bill, if you ask me.’
‘Always better to have too much information than too little,’ said Cassie. ‘And it’s their money.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Why look a gift horse in the mouth? If they want you to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, it’s their business, and if it helps to pay for your excavation at Dryburgh, who are you to complain?’
‘You’re right.’ Motram smiled. ‘I should just take the money and run.’
‘At last, some sense. Expecting wet weather?’ Cassie was looking at her husband’s Wellington boots, standing beside the rest of the gear he was getting together.
‘The weather forecast from Thursday onward isn’t good,’ said Motram. ‘Heavy rain across the north of England and the Scottish Borders.’
‘In which case you should pack sunscreen,’ said Cassie. ‘You know what long-range forecasts are like.’
In the event, the forecast proved accurate. Motram had to drive up to Dryburgh on Friday through torrential rain propelled along by a gusting westerly wind. His hope that the latter might help the rain clouds pass over quickly was not encouraged by a persistently dark sky to his left. There was no sign of Blackstone or the two Maxton Geo- Survey men when he arrived although their vehicles were in the car park, as was a surprising sign saying that the abbey was closed to visitors for remedial work. Motram guessed rightly that the others had sought shelter in the hotel. He joined them for coffee and asked about the sign.
‘Change of plan,’ said Blackstone. ‘After what Les said about the press last time, I thought it would be wise to keep the place completely closed off during the dig. We can do without that kind of attention.’
Motram looked out of the window at the rain. ‘Doesn’t look as if we’ll be inconveniencing too many people on a day like this anyway.’
‘Mmm,’ agreed Blackstone. ‘We’ve just been discussing whether or not to call the dig off until the weather improves.’
Motram felt a wave of disappointment wash over him but managed to hide it. ‘I suppose it’s up to you guys,’ he said, looking at Smith and Fielding. ‘I don’t want anyone putting themselves in danger because of unstable ground or mud slides.’
‘It’s not so much the instability I’m worried about as the possibility of flooding,’ said Fielding. ‘We plan to create a forty-degree slope down to the wall of the chamber. If it’s still raining when we reach the stonework, the water’s just going to run down the slope and start accumulating.’
‘Couldn’t you use a pump?’
‘We could, but it’s a question of where would we pump the water to. There’s a fair stretch of ground to cover before you reach the ditch to the south of the abbey; that’s about fifty metres away and we don’t want excess water seeping down into the abbey foundations.’
‘We certainly don’t,’ Blackstone put in.
‘Well,’ Motram sighed philosophically, ‘I suppose our hosts have been waiting seven hundred years; another day or two isn’t going to make that much difference.’
It rained all day Saturday and Motram paced indoors at home like a caged animal, bemoaning his luck and insisting to Cassie that God had it in for him personally. Always had done, he insisted.
‘It’s just Britain,’ countered Cassie. ‘When have you ever known it not to rain when you’ve planned something outdoors? When I was a girl I used to think all invitations had to have “If wet, in church hall” on them.’
John asked if Cassie would like to go out somewhere. ‘We could go into town. Dinner? A film?’
‘Let’s just stay in,’ said Cassie, joining him at the window and giving his arm an encouraging rub. ‘We can open a bottle of Cotes du Rhone and watch some telly?’
‘Celebrity paint drying?’ said John.
‘As a prospective celebrity nail technician, you should be taking notes about how to behave on these programmes. You could be on next week… toenail cutting… on ice.’
John watched some rugby on the television in the sitting room, then went through to the kitchen to get some coffee when the final whistle blew. A news bulletin was showing on the small TV set that Cassie kept in a corner next to the coffee machine. The sound level was low — background noise as Cassie, who was sitting at the table reading a cookery book, called it — but Motram’s arm shot out to turn the sound up as a photograph of a young man appeared on the screen.
‘What on earth…?’ exclaimed Cassie as the sudden increase in volume startled her. Her annoyance faded when she saw the look on her husband’s face. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I have.’ Motram had gone pale. He sat down beside Cassie at the table, eyes still glued to the screen until the report concerning the death of a young Royal Marine in Afghanistan had ended. ‘I knew him.’
Cassie’s eyes opened wide. ‘How?’ she asked.
‘He was the donor I was asked to screen in London.’
‘Did you know he was a soldier?’
‘No. He wasn’t in uniform when I met him and the subject of what he did for a living didn’t come up. We were under instructions to keep everything on a professional level. No idle chit-chat.’
‘His poor family,’ said Cassie; then, as doubts entered her mind, ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t have thought there had been time to get back to Afghanistan… Are you absolutely sure it’s him? Did you get his name?’
Motram shook his head. ‘He wasn’t introduced to me at the hospital. It was part of the secrecy thing: the patient was Patient X and the donor was, well, the donor. But I’m sure it’s him. I liked him; he was a nice chap, a bit nervous about the procedure, ironic really when you consider what he was engaged in abroad.’
‘How bizarre,’ said Cassie. ‘How on earth did a Royal Marine serving in Afghanistan come to be donating bone marrow to a Saudi prince in South Kensington?’
‘It is bizarre,’ agreed Motram. ‘He must have gone back to Afghanistan almost immediately after donating his
