MICHAEL DOBBS
The Touch of Innocents

DEDICATION

To the memory of my mother,Who had to fight harder than most.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Her eyes were distracted, dazzled. One moment the country lane had appeared anonymous and empty in the swirling night rain, the next it was a blaze of incoherent light which screamed of danger.

The brain responded immediately, but inadequately. It could not tell that the fool on the tractor, suddenly aware he was blocking the path of an oncoming car, had panicked and switched on all the headlights; there was only that state of alarm that sends the senses cartwheeling, freezing the mind, where instinct rather than intellect takes control.

Isadora Dean would never remember what happened next, the confusion and sense of fear as the source of light came closer, the clarity of understanding that ahead lay disaster, the struggle with rubber and brakes which seemed to adopt a logic of their own as they danced and pirouetted amidst the leaf-strewn mud of an English autumn, the numbing slide away from light into darkness and the unknown, a feeling of weightlessness, of being in space, spinning off into another world, eternity.

Eternity. Death. Her death. Damn, what a waste.

She had already crossed into the underworld, it seemed. The car had left the road and was carving a tunnel of light through the tangle of wood that pressed around. Skeletal, leaf-stripped branches leapt out from the darkness to snatch at her, to drag her to disaster as a kaleidoscope of images flashed past faster than the eye could capture or brain decode.

Fear began only as her mind turned to the children. Benjamin. Little Bella. She released the breath caught in her lungs long enough to begin a strangulated cry. ‘Hold tight!’ How absurd. The boy was still soundly asleep, comprehending nothing, and how could a six-month-old baby hold tight to anything other than a mother’s breast?

She saw the bole of the gnarled oak but barely; it could have been a rock-face, a bolted door, the bottom of the deepest well. But she knew it was Immovable Object. Disaster. The End. Izzy felt nothing, not as her body began to lift from the seat and tear against the restraining belt, not when the inertia lock snatched back at the belt and threatened to carve her in two, not even when her head hit the roof of the hire Renault as it began to roll and the windscreen exploded into a thousand pieces of razor-tipped stardust.

And she would remember nothing. For as the point of her head just behind her hairline came into contact with the pressed-steel frame of the car, a shock wave like that of an earthquake passed through her brain, shaking it, stretching it, causing the cells to vibrate and become microscopically displaced. The damage was at first subtle, but decisive. As the cells twisted away from each other the chemical balance of the brain was disturbed, turning the neurological pathways from a running track into a synaptic slough, tangling and entrapping the electrical messages which perform the brain’s work.

She lost consciousness and when, in a while, she came round, she would still lack coherence and focus because many of the higher functions of the mind remained lost in what had become the ensnaring tar pit of her brain. She was unable to assist the terrified and penitent farmer who ran to drag her and her children free from the wreckage, found it impossible to respond to the concerns of the paramedics who tended her, didn’t notice the shrugs of the firemen who arrived too late to save anything from the burning metal carcass.

Yet there was still worse. Even as her body gave the impression of making some revival from the initial assault, the bruised and insulted brain was swelling.

And would continue to swell.

A small vein inside the inner brain had burst, spilling blood, creating pressure under which the nearby brain cells and their surrounding nerves would no longer operate, so reversing that original revival and pressing down her senses ever more deeply into the pit of tar.

The eyes opened but did not see, the ears heard but could not comprehend, the senses drifted away on a moonbeam until all coherent memory of the scene would be gone.

Of the crash.

Of the fire which brought terror to half the night life in that usually tranquil Dorsetshire woodland, and of the sirens and flashing lights which did for the rest.

Of her arrival at the Weschester General on a desperately busy night in A&E with its confusion and barely controllable clamour after some drunk had pulled a fire alarm.

And of the rush to get her to the intensive therapy unit as the medical staff began to realize that, instead of recovery, something with their patient was going devastatingly wrong.

Sunrise in San Francisco. A tantalizing purple and pink cast stretched across the horizon, the mist obscuring where parched hills stretched up to kiss the Californian sky, with only the lights of Oakland flickering their daily welcome from across the water to indicate where earth met heaven.

The first Boeings of the day stood out like angry fireflies against the still-dark clouds while two endless lines of automobile traffic swarmed across the Bay Bridge, mimicking the relentless march of worker ants; another half hour and the march would be but an agonizing crawl.

He stood by the open window, a salt-brushed breeze snatching at the smoke from his cigarette as night gave way to the lighter, noisier tones of day and the dawn chorus of streetcars called for their first passengers.

It was like no other city on earth, he thought; at the very frontiers of paradise. So relaxed, so uninhibited, so unlike the bureaucratic jungle of DC where the women didn’t even wait until winter to freeze.

Over the Bay the early-morning flights were beginning to stack up; he’d be catching one back in a few hours’ time. It brought him yet again to pondering how long it would be before his own baby was up there with them. The MPAA. Conceived by computer, gestated in committee, and about to be delivered unto Congress. The lightweight Multi-Purpose Attack Aircraft, the state-of-the-art fly-by-wire variable-geometry radar-reflective Mach-3 aerial acronym that only required a pilot, so they said, to tell it when to go home. The collaborative brainchild of trans-Atlantic aerospace firms which was supposed to solve most of NATO’s and all of his own problems for the next twenty years. Project Sure Hit, as it had originally and less than tactfully been known. Project Shit, as it had been immediately redubbed.

So the President, angered by the sniggers of a sceptical press conference and eager as ever to shower himself in righteousness rather than ridicule, had on the spot rechristened it Project Dust. ‘And Thine enemies shall lick the dust,’ he had thundered, not textually entirely accurately. But who amongst the reptiles of the White House Press Corps would ever know?

So, the Duster was expensive, but what did they expect of the most technologically innovative piece of military hardware in a generation? So it was already a Cold War cowpat, a weapons system in search of an enemy, a huge and wasteful distraction in a world where the term superpower rang like a ghostly echo through the lengthening dole queues, bread lines and back-street abortion clinics of Middle America. But, after years of recessionary compromise and Congressional gutlessness, it was the last chance, the very last chance, to glue back together the design teams and production lines that had saved the West a hundred times over when the liberal pedlars of compassion had prematurely announced ‘peace in our time.’

The Duster would get built – had to get built. For Joe Michelini there was no alternative. No prospects, no job, no future, no understanding finance company, not for a forty-three-year-old planning director with a lifetime of service in an industry that would effectively cease to exist.

So it would get built. Even if it meant his kissing the backside of every procurement officer in the Pentagon and sucking the toes of anyone and his mother who had the vaguest connection with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

DC made him think of Izzy, home. If you could call it home, with a wife who – more often than not – wasn’t simply in some other city but on an entirely different continent. She didn’t even use his name.

He glanced at his watch. It was Sunday; over in Europe it would be early afternoon, surely she had to be home this time. Once more he picked up the telephone, listened to the ringing tone; once more it remained unanswered, another of his messages that seemed lost in space. Not just a different continent, another planet. The story of his married life. And this time she’d disappeared with the kids. Nothing, for more than a week.

‘Bitch,’ he snapped quietly, patience and cigarette finished. Through the open bedroom door he could hear the rustle of sheets and saw an elegant, bronzed thigh protrude from beneath the covers to hang limply over the edge of the bed. He shrugged. Somehow, here in California, there seemed to be no ill winds.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and with the fingers of one hand rearranged his rumpled hair; it was thinning, a few years ago he would have needed to do battle armed with a brush. But so many things had changed in these last few years.

With his cigarette stub he made a slow, deliberate mess in the ashtray, taking a deep lungful of fresh air to fill his chest and flatten his stomach. Then he went back to bed.

They had laid her out on the bed in the far corner, where it was quietest, to die.

The mass of monitoring equipment suggested that the major body functions remained normal but the scan had revealed the problem. The offended segment of the brain had swelled, the white cells and the surrounding grey-coloured nerves which should have stood out sharp and distinct had become blurred, sucked into the neurological mire, and now even the lower physical functions were beginning to decay.

The teaching sister shone the beam of a pencil torch into the patient’s opaline eye; the pupil reacted, but insipidly, not as it should, and not as much as yesterday. She unclipped the pulse oximeter from the tip of the middle finger and pinched the soft part of the nail which would normally produce an irritated flexing of the digit.

Nothing.

The brain was no longer responding to the stimuli of shocks, commands, smells, noises, pressures, pains. The sister, Mabel McBean, a woman of middle age and generous girth whose hips rolled and shoes squeaked as she crossed the vinyl floor of the ITU, who had half a lifetime’s experience of the self-destructive tendencies of others yet who managed to retain the innate Tayside compassion of her childhood, glanced across at the student nurse and shook her head.

‘I wonder who she is,’ the student nurse, an Australian out of Wagga Wagga by the name of Primrose who carried her birthright with shy fortitude, mused for the fifth time that week.

‘Extraordinary. I’ve never known a lass like this to be so anonymous,’ the sister responded. ‘It’s no’ as if she’s a tramp or been living in a cardboard box.’ She picked up the hand once more. ‘Manicure’s expensive.’

She gave the nail another pinch. No response.

She replaced the oximeter and like a fussy mother hen readjusted the cuff which monitored the blood pressure, looking once more into the handsome face of the patient, a woman in her thirties with fine bone structure and rich, fox-red hair.

‘Bonny make-up job, too.’

The bruised lids of the eyes had turned a vivid purple and pink as though treated by a trainee beautician taking her first tentative steps at colour coordination, and there was a tiny nick below the left eye caused by the fragmenting windscreen which looked angry but had needed no stitches and would have left perhaps only the faintest of scars. If only it were granted the time to heal. Otherwise the face seemed at peace, resting, not dying.

It was a compelling face, handsome if a little too expressive for McBean’s traditional eyes, broad around the eyes and tapering from elevated and faintly oriental cheekbones to pointed chin with a finely carved nose and full, expressive lips. Loving lips. Contemporary cover girl rather than classical beauty, particularly with the carefully cropped hairstyle. The skin was fresh complected, out of doors, the orthodontics out of this world.

Yet there was also a suggestion of suffering, McBean thought, an overdose of experience that had etched a little downward crease at the corners of the mouth as though the woman had made a deliberate choice not to live off her fine looks but instead to compete, to join the daily struggle with the rest of the world. Beneath the battered eyes the skin had the stretched, pale mauve hue of fatigue and the red undertones which mark where tiredness turns to exhaustion and starts eating away inside. More than the strains of motherhood. Implying … what? Stubbornness? Pain? A certain lack of fulfilment? McBean sighed; it seemed they might never know.

Primrose interrupted the sister’s thoughts. ‘Can’t the police trace the car?’

The student nurse was seated at the head of the bed, brushing the hair as she had done every night of the last week, trying to remove fraction by fraction the large clot of blood which had matted and tangled and ruined its deep red lustre. They could have cut out the clot, of course, and destroyed the carefully created short style, but there would be so little chance for it to regrow. Even in death there should be dignity.

Sister McBean shook her head. ‘Renault. Left-hand drive. Could have come from any one of a thousand places in Europe. And the fire destroyed everything, even her identity, poor girl. Got out wi’ nothing but the clothes she was wearing and they were precious little help. Italian silk, American denims, a rainforest wristband and sneaker shoes they reckon might have come from somewhere east of India. Upper class Oxfam.’

‘What about the little boy?’ Primrose persisted.

‘Osh-Kosh. The bairn was wearing nothing but Osh-Kosh which is as common as an English Duchess. The poor mite’s too young to talk properly, they reckon no’ even three, and they can squeeze no’ a thing from him. May be suffering from shock, although he seems to understand English. And a smattering of French.’

‘And the baby?’

‘Perhaps I should try a little Gaelic on him. I wonder if they’ve thought of that?’

‘The baby,’ Primrose insisted, but found her answer in McBean’s sad eyes.

‘You’d have thought that the father or some other relative might have enquired,’ the student nurse murmured. ‘Surely someone must be missing them?’

‘If I had the looks of this lass I’d expect half the men I knew would be missing me.’

‘So where are they, then …?’

‘What the hell you mean, “she’s gone missing”?’ Grubb hissed down the phone. The foreign editor of World Cable News looked in agitation around the noisy Washington DC newsroom, anxious about who might be eavesdropping, uncertain what was hitting him. Excuses, for sure, but close behind excuses usually came a heavy shower of shit.

‘She left no number? No contact?’ Grubb couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It had never happened before, one of his foreign correspondents simply deciding to go walkabout, leaving no means of contact, simply gone missing from the most important foreign beat they had, covering the whole of Europe. Izzy was one of the best but now the stupid bitch had landed him right in it. Already he could hear the shower head beginning to splutter. And it was not the time to be smelling of anything other than roses, not with the cable news network on its financial uppers and looking for more cutbacks.

He groaned as the young producer, three thousand miles away in Paris, tried to explain. ‘Not those damned kids again? Chrissake, we gave her six weeks spawning leave and she’s only been back a few months. How much more blood does she want?’

The young producer was reassuring; it had been a difficult time for her, she had wanted to get away, clear her head; she was under a lot of domestic pressure, personal things to sort out. For just a couple of days. Yes, he knew it had been more than a couple of days, more than a week now, but he could handle everything, it was all under control. No need to panic.

Grubb, a short and fleshy man of uncertain middle European descent with razor burns on his dark cheeks and a chin that sagged like a feeding bag, demurred. He thought it was an excellent time to panic. When the piece he needed from London came over the following day fronted by the producer rather than their top foreign correspondent, there would be no hiding place, only retribution.

He decided to get his retribution in first. He glanced across at the managing editor’s door, which was ajar. The feeding bag shook, his voice rose to a shout.

‘I don’t put up with this sort of crap. Damn it all, I pay you to give me results, not excuses, and you don’t go letting her out of your sight without she gives you some means of contact. Jesus H. Christ, there’s a major Government reshuffle in Britain and you tell me she’s off changing nappies. What am I running here, a newsroom or a nursery? If you can’t find her in the next couple of hours you’re gonna have to do the piece yourself – you better make it good, boy, right on the button, d’you hear? Heavy-duty stuff, something that’ll sandbag those bastards over on the networks while they’re still checking their zippers and fiddling their expense sheets. My show’s the best in the business, and that’s how it’s gonna stay!’

Grubb glanced around furtively. His raised voice had attracted the attention of the entire newsroom and out of the corner of his eye he could see the managing editor standing at the door of his office, brow wrinkled and mouthing obscenities as he investigated the commotion. It was time for the full effect; he stood up, the full five and a half feet of him, to deliver his coup de grace.

‘And then you find her, pronto. Dig her out from under whichever stone or stud she’s hiding, and you tell her from me that she’s got her lily-white tits caught in a wringer this time.’

He slammed the phone down, not needing to act the role of outraged editor, before looking around the newsroom to wave away their rapt attention. He could handle this one. And if he couldn’t he’d made sure that everyone, and particularly the managing editor, knew it wasn’t his fault.

On the other side of the Atlantic the producer of WCN’s European bureau smiled to himself. He was twenty-eight and about to get his first break on screen. If he did well, really well, they might continue to let him fill in, avoid the unnecessary expense of flying over another foreign correspondent, at last recognize his true talents rather than condemning him to the mindless fetching and carrying of coffee cups and arranging satellite feeds for others. This was his big chance and he had no intention of letting it escape. Perhaps he ought to be contacting someone to report a missing person, making enquiries; on the other hand he had a job to do, a flight to book and not a hell of a lot of time. From their Paris base in a matter of hours she could have disappeared to any of a dozen countries; who was to know which? And he needed a haircut.

Already in his mind he was writing the intro to the piece he would deliver to camera from in front of the great black door at Ten Downing Street.

He didn’t mind if she never turned up.

Nobody had noticed the problem with the spleen. The buffeting caused by the pressure of the seat belts just below the ribs had caused the smallest tear in the soft surface tissue, no more than half an inch, and it had been oozing blood ever since. Not enough blood to cause a major physiological problem, indeed, scarcely enough to register any change on the monitors, just a slow, steady drain on the oxygen supply to the nervous system which had begun to degrade even the basic autonomic responses and which everyone attributed to the gradual dysfunctioning of a swollen and chronically damaged brain. But the bleeding had weakened the tissue surrounding the tear until, as spleens sometimes do, abruptly it ruptured. Spleens are the washing machines of the blood, designed to produce white corpuscles and break down the worn-out red corpuscles; they are not intended to haemorrhage and squirt blood into the abdominal cavity. When they do, patients normally have no more than a couple of hours to live.

Primrose was flustered. Less than forty minutes had passed since the grand parade of registrars, house officers, anaesthetists and physiotherapists had swept through ITU on the thrice-daily rounds, rushing around with their earnest faces and silly jokes, treating the nurses around them with as much consideration as uncomfortable pieces of furniture. Particularly student nurses. Yet now the anaesthetist, the one with the blond hair and salon tan, was on the phone, summoning her. She hadn’t even realized he knew her name. What did he want; had she fouled up?

The other nurses exchanged knowing smiles; after all, he had the tightest and best-known glutei maximi any of them had seen in or out of surgical trousers.

So that was it. An emergency, he explained, of a distinctly non-clinical nature. These emergencies she’d been handling since she was fifteen. Patiently she explained she couldn’t, not this week when she was working nights, trying to phrase her refusal so he wouldn’t be unduly deterred, wondering how far the tan went beyond the forearms, when the air-conditioned calm of Weschester General’s intensive therapy unit was shattered by the shrill insistence of an alarm. Alarms in ITU may sound if a patient rolls over and disturbs a sensor, or when a monitor is switched off for a bed bath or some other treatment. But patients in comas don’t roll over, and there wasn’t a nurse within twenty feet.

She cut off the anaesthetist without explanation and rushed for the bed, but already McBean was ahead of her and checking the monitor. Blood pressure dropping, catastrophically. The breathing, once so serene, abruptly shallow and rasping. Now the alarm on the ECG monitor joined in the drama as it detected a heartbeat beginning to race. The body was in shock; death was calling.

‘Not so soon, not so soon, my lovely,’ McBean breathed quietly. It was too sudden, too unexpected to give up the fight just yet. ‘Hold on, a wee while longer. Don’t go giving up on us, not now.’

Even as she called for the doctors to be summoned back the sister was making a further inspection of the patient, using her trained eyes, probing with her fingers, letting her years of experience block out the wailing of the monitors while she searched for the cause of crisis.

And quickly it was found. A distended abdomen, taut, a drum.

‘Get a theatre ready,’ she snapped across the ward. ‘We’ll be needing it in a hurry or I’m too old for this job.’

Calmly, she turned to the patient and began stroking her hand, which was trembling in shock. ‘We’ll maybe get you through this after all. And then we can find out who you really are.’

The pavement across the road from the famous doorway was cluttered with the paraphernalia of modern news gathering which, in spite of the microprocessor revolution, still seemed to consist primarily of middle-aged men, each more dog-eared than the next, raising their voices to hurl baited questions in the direction of passing politicians. They stood like fishermen crowded along a river bank, overweight, overcoated and many thermally underpinned, hoping to lure their quarry into a sound bite.

‘This is a traditional British game called a Government reshuffle,’ intoned the producer-turned-novice foreign correspondent. It was the hour of day when the minds of most journalists descend to their stomachs and they begin the detailed process of planning lunch, but the twinges of hunger were deadened for the young American by the knowledge that it was peak breakfast viewing time back home, and he had it live.

‘Into Ten Downing Street behind me in the past few hours have passed Britain’s most able, and most ambitious. For some the door is the threshold to still greater fame and preferment; for others, it’s the open jaws of the political crematorium. The game for us is to guess who has got what they want, and who has just joined the living dead. One junior minister has already let the cat out of the bag. When he left Downing Street just a few minutes ago, he was in tears. Others react differently. When he reappeared after his chat with the Prime Minister, the much criticized but usually voluble Defence Secretary could utter nothing more than a strangled “Nothing to say”, while the Transport Secretary seems to have vanished completely. He went in through the front door of Downing Street some time ago, but it seems he must have left from the back.’

The correspondent turned to glance down the narrow Georgian street which, as though switched from the studio, became bathed in late autumn sunlight. Behind him one of the heavy net curtains at a first-floor window was disturbed by a shadowy figure – a curious secretary enjoying the fun, perhaps. Or the Transport Secretary seeing if the coast were yet clear. But the correspondent’s attention was turned to a tall figure striding towards him from the direction of the heavy wrought-iron gates that shielded the entrance to Downing Street.

Even at a distance the bearing was notable. Many of the visitors to Downing Street that morning had appeared skittish and overflowing with nervous energy, others had been cautious, prowling, like stalking cats. This visitor seemed relaxed, self-confident, as though walking in the country, which, indeed, frequently he did. Yet his three-piece suit was all town, immaculately tailored and showing scarcely a trace of unintended creasing, the gold watch fob accurately suggesting an heirloom from a long line of distinguished and wealthy ancestors, while the highly polished shoes which caught the pale sun announced that this man was both meticulous enough to require they be polished daily, and of sufficient means to ensure he did not have to bother with such matters himself.

As he drew closer to the cameras the image of good grooming and close attention to personal detail became enhanced; the spare frame, the face healthily weathered rather than lined, a controlled expression difficult to read and suggesting a man who did not share his emotions lightly. Perhaps with his masculine manner and evident self-confidence he did not feel the need to share his emotions at all. The thick hair was laid straight back from the temples, its mixture of black ink and steel grey implying a man in his early fifties. A man, like a good malt, improving with age. And moist, pale blue eyes. He had the women of his local party association dangling from his Jermyn Street belt.

‘And here’s a man who seems to be relishing the game,’ the young American continued brightly, but failing to realize that the name he offered viewers was being swept away in a sudden deluge of shouted questions. ‘He’s arriving not by car, but on foot, in full view of the cameras, denying himself any hiding place when he leaves. He’s either very bold, or very optimistic. But this is a man hotly tipped for promotion.’

The politician turned his face to the cameras on the far side of the street and gave half a wave, but did not smile.

The correspondent held a hand to the side of his face to guard his earpiece; a voice that sounded very much like Grubb was bawling indecipherably at him. Something about an unnamed bastard.

‘In his previous job at the Employment Ministry he made his name as a political tough-guy by defeating one of the most bitter rail strikes in recent memory, while in his current role as Health Secretary he’s established a reputation as a radical reformer …’

More squawking in his earpiece.

‘… whatever he’s doing tomorrow, in many people’s view this is a man who could eventually go all the way and one day be working on the other side of that Downing Street door.’

On cue a duty policeman saluted, the door swung open and without a backward glance the politician disappeared inside as Grubb’s voice echoed across the satellite link, at last intelligible if deeply inelegant.

The young broadcaster drew a deep breath, no mistake this time, the words mouthed with almost excessive precision.

‘We are likely to be hearing a lot more about Paul Devereux.’

The senses were stunned, literally. A blast of sheer white light had entered the eye, which had been unable to cope. The pupil struggled to exclude the glare but had found it an impossible task; the light beams felt as though they were tearing around the skull, harassing the brain like a pack of mongrels let loose in a school yard. The olfactory nerve, under assault from a powerful and nauseatingly pungent odour, jammed in revolt; the nostrils flared in disgust, but found it impossible to escape. A sharp pain shot up through the nerve tendrils of the left arm from somewhere near its extremity, travelling through the brain stem like an angry, malevolent wind, blowing away cerebral cobwebs, rattling closed doors and throwing open the windows of the mind as it passed. The sensation it created was intense and unpleasant, yet in response her body could manage nothing but a slight, almost contemptuous curling of the little finger.

Around the bed, the reaction to pain generated smiles. ‘You were right, Sister,’ the consultant neurologist, Arnold Weatherup, sighed. ‘Once again,’ he added with feigned reluctance. ‘I thought this one had passed us by, but it would seem the main problem was a leaky spleen all along. You have a sixth sense about these things; not so long ago women like you would have been burned at the stake.’

‘And no’ so long ago, Mr Weatherup, doctors like you were robbing graves for anatomy specimens.’

The consultant laughed. There was always much laughter in this ward; it helped to ease the distress of frequent failure.

‘The medical profession has always required its sacrifices,’ the anaesthetist joined in, staring intently at Primrose.

‘I don’t think we need to prod or poke around any longer, Sister McBean,’ Weatherup concluded, examining the fresh scar on the upper left abdomen through which the leaky spleen had been removed. ‘I shall leave it to you to weave your charms and spells and hope that this recovery might continue.’ He smiled. ‘By the way, Burke and Hare, the grave robbers – Scots, weren’t they?’

‘No, doctor. Only the corpses they sold. Nothing but the best for the medical profession.’

None of this banter registered within the damaged brain, which was still dazzled and largely blinded by the unaccustomed light. The tar pit, although drying out, still delayed and frustrated the reawakening army of neurological messengers. They leapt from stepping stone to stepping stone, trying to find a way through. Most still failed and some, like those bearing short-term memories, would perish entirely, but others were more persistent, reinvigorated by the blood’s fresh supplies of oxygen, trying first one route, then another, until slowly they came nearer their goal. The stepping stones were growing larger, more messengers were getting through, yet many still arrived out of sequence, jumbling their messages and confusing the brain.

Of the several hours before the accident and all the many days since there would be no coherent memory, nothing but a dark void. Only through dreams, which have their own unscrambling process for memories, would she be able to revisit any fragment of the torment she had endured, and one fragment she would touch only in her nightmares. A meaningless, unconnected and untranslatable memory but one which was insistent.

The memory of a face.

Pale. Gaunt. A young woman with exhausted eyes and drained spirit. A face of parchment skin and the pallor of an aged, extinguished candle. Split across by chapped and shrunken lips. A haunted demeanour squeezed dry of humour, of hope. Trembling.

The face spoke only of despair, a despair that was to haunt every one of the nightmares which recurred both during the period of wakening and after Isadora Dean had woken from her coma.

For in every one of those nightmares, the girl was running off with Izzy’s baby.

Michelini couldn’t identify the precise moment he had made up his mind. Perhaps it was because the decision hadn’t been made by him at all; others had made it for him. Maybe it was that weekend in San Francisco spent humping the chief policy adviser to the Californian Congressman who occupied the chair of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee. No sooner had she seen him off at the airport with the promise of the Congressman’s ear – she seemed to control most parts of his anatomy – than he had caught the eye of a United stewardess as she kneeled down to retrieve the linen napkin he had dropped from his dinner tray. It was one of those looks practised by world-weary adults which leaves nothing unspoken. When she returned with a fresh napkin, it had her telephone number on it.

He knew he had only a few years left before he fell firmly into the category of middle age, when stewardesses would regard his appetites as primarily gastronomic, when they would see only the sagging flesh beneath his eyes instead of the suggestiveness within them and start asking him if he took medication rather than home phone numbers. He couldn’t deny – didn’t want to – that he was fascinated by sex, new conquests; it had been inculcated upon him at his father’s knee and in those days the women simply turned a blind eye and got on with housework and motherhood. At least in first-generation Italian-American families.

Times changed, women changed. And he, too, had changed. He was no longer the bandito, the sexual athlete of his twenties, yet what he nowadays lacked in stamina he made up for in technique. He loved women. Not just one woman, many women. And he was on a roll, maybe the last one he’d get. Marriage, at least to a wife like his, had just been one of those rotten ideas.

At the start they had seemed so compatible. She was no innocent maiden but a professional woman in her thirties who knew what it was all about when he had invited her back to his apartment in the Watergate. He had learnt as much as he had taught. As she had mentioned later, it was not the view outside the window that had drawn her there, she’d seen that many times before.

They had seemed to share similar interests: a defence contractor and a television correspondent both headquartered in the American capital, both used to the frequent travelling and separations of business, both physically relishing their reunions. Marriage had been the great mistake. It was a commitment she seemed incapable of honouring. She had promised to settle down, stop the globetrotting, the foreign adventures, assignment after successful assignment.

‘Just one more year,’ she would ask. ‘It’s going too well to walk away from it right now. Just one more year and I’ll get a Stateside editor’s job. Or maybe a slot anchoring my own programme.’

Then a year had turned to eighteen months, the promises had fallen like last year’s leaves and she had been posted to the European bureau in Paris as their top foreign correspondent, taking the kids with her, flying back every three weeks. Vowing this would be the last time.

And he realized he was burned up with it all. Not just the absences, although that was difficult enough to deal with. ‘How’s the wife?’ they would ask. ‘How the fuck would I know?’ he had begun to respond. Now she had been out of contact for more than two weeks.

It was more than the absences. More even than the frustration of reunion when she would arrive back exhausted, emotionally drained, too tired even to cook a proper meal let alone light fires in his bed. It had hit him at the cocktail party in Georgetown the other night. As her professional success had grown, increasingly he came to feel as no more than an appendage.

‘Oh, you’re married to Isadora Dean. How wonderful!’ yet another breathless matron had exclaimed. Not ‘Joe Michelini, how nice to meet you and tell me all about yourself’ but ‘Mr Izzy Dean’ all over again and twenty minutes discussing her career before he could break away and grab another Scotch.

She hadn’t even taken his name – ‘for professional reasons’. Used to be there was a clear division of responsibilities within a family, the man as bread-winner and the woman as breadbaker, not these endless arguments about where and when they might be able to meet and who should do what and screw whom.

It was killing his self-esteem. Now it was on the point of killing his career.

‘Joe, we have a problem,’ Erskine Vandel, the president of Fox Avionics, pronounced in a manner which left not a shred of doubt that it was not he, but Michelini, who had the problem. They were in the presidential suite overlooking a wind-lashed Potomac, the early bite of winter adding exaggerated emphasis to the overcast atmosphere within the room. The president was seated in considerable pomp and splendour on one side of the desk, leaving the planning director stranded in space on the other, entombed in a chair that was deliberately four inches lower. It made Michelini feel uneasy, inferior, by design.

‘You know that the MP-Double-A means everything to this company,’ the president continued. ‘To you, Joe. To everyone else who works here. Without it we’re about as much use as a fart in a wind tunnel.’

Vandel had a strong anal orientation – ‘I’m a seat-of-the-pants guy,’ he would explain to new female acquaintances. ‘You get no bullshit from me. Nothing but the real thing.’ Yet behind the foul mouth there was an astute technologically based mind which had managed to build one of the most successful component supply businesses in the military aviation industry. It was scarcely his fault that the industry itself was less than half its size of Cold War days and was threatened with being permanently grounded. ‘Know how to run a successful small business?’ he would offer to any Congressman within hearing. ‘Build a successful big business, like avionics. Then let the Government piss all over it.’

‘So we have this problem, you see, Joe.’

Joe didn’t, not yet.

‘Wilbur Burns, that half-ass who owns WCN, has got it into his mind he wants to run for President. Not one of us, Joe. He’s the sort of moralizing bastard who’ll step out of the shower just to take a piss. Intends to use his station to trail his conscience like a stuck pig trailing guts and, so’s he can establish his credentials, wants to offer up a sacrifice. Us. The MP-Double-A. You. Me. The whole show. And all the while pretending that the funds needed to develop it will pay for the dreams and votes of every mother between here and hell. Horse shit,’ the president snapped.

Like an affectionate father he began stroking a gold-plated model of the Duster which occupied pride of place on a desk top littered with executive toys and silver-framed portraits of his three daughters. ‘Joe, how long you been with this company?’

The voice was softer now and Michelini felt the prickle of sweat beginning to foregather on what used to be his hairline. He’d entered difficult territory and did not yet know which way to jump.

‘Nearly twelve years,’ he muttered.

‘Eleven years and eight months on Friday,’ his president stated. ‘And in all that time no one has ever had cause to question your loyalty. Done a damn fine job for Fox Avionics. That’s why I made you planning director. Gave you a great salary and an expense account twice as big as my own. Surprised you haven’t put on even more weight than you have.’

‘I work it off. On your business,’ Michelini responded defensively.

‘Never any doubt. You kiss ass over on the Hill like those Senators have got mistletoe dangling from their belts, and get laid so frequently I sometimes think you must be running for President yourself. Eh, Joe?’ He started a laugh which echoed around the large office, but in return Michelini could offer only a taut smile.

‘Never any doubt, Joe.’ Vandel was leaning forward across his desk, the humour gradually subsiding. ‘Until now. Trouble is, there’ll be split loyalties. You here at Fox, and your wife the flavour of the month at WCN. Likely to get her own show soon, I understand.’

‘Crap!’ Michelini responded. ‘Erskine, there’s no way I would …’

But already the president was waving down his protest.

‘Exactly what I said when some of the boys raised the matter with me. Capital K-R-A-P. Not old Joe, I said. But …’ He flapped his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘This is too big to take any chances. They said. WCN’s the opposition and we can’t afford the risk of having one of our top executives hanging out with them. Sleeping with the enemy. It’s not as if this is the sort of job you can leave behind in the office every night, it’s a twenty-five-hour-a-day commitment.’

Michelini bit into his lip, angered. ‘If you know what’s going on at the station you’ll also know that my wife is currently based on the other side of the world. This is ludicrous.’

‘And every three weeks she flies back here for … well, I guess, a marital update?’ Vandel countered, trying for once not to take the coarse line before quickly abandoning the unfamiliar approach. ‘Shit, Joe, it’s not as if she’s just another one of your casual pick-ups you can fuck and forget. Chrissakes, she’s your wife.’

Michelini began to laugh through his nose. A hollow, scornful sound. Pillow talk! They were worried about pillow talk! Hell, what was he going to tell them? That he and his wife hadn’t made love – had scarcely even slept together – since the moment she knew the second kid had been conceived. That the baby had been a last and desperate attempt by her to glue back the pieces of a marriage which had been falling apart. That it turned out to be a lovely baby, and a pathetic mistake. The marriage would never be put back together, and now there was an extra child to complicate matters.

‘You don’t need to worry, not about my wife,’ he said.

‘But I do, Joe, I do.’

‘I don’t even know where the hell she is. You do not need to worry. The chance of me and my wife having a meaningful conversation about anything other than the kids is absolute zero. Believe me.’

And then he knew it for certain.

‘There’s something you should know, Erskine. Tomorrow I file for divorce.’ There. It was out. Already he felt better, in control. ‘From now on, the only talking me and my wife are going to do is through lawyers.’

London was in for a meteorological mugging. Bursts of cold November rain from off the North Sea squabbled their way up the Thames estuary, annoying the seagulls and blowing them inland where they cartwheeled and complained before settling on the turbulent water, only to be disturbed once more by the river taxis forcing passage upstream against the ebb tide. The persistent rain had made the river angry; it scowled at the great city along its banks as it passed. A day for cancelling appointments, for crosswords, for drying out socks. A day when even Detroit seemed to have its attractions.

In his new office overlooking the Thames, Paul Devereux sat content. While others had been battered by the changing winds, he had flourished. He had the gift which all politicians crave yet which is accorded only to the few, that of luck. Others might have his natural abilities, some of them might even work as assiduously, but none in the last few years had enjoyed the favours of the press and the preferment of the Prime Minister as had he. From insignificance to Secretary of State for Defence in less time than it had taken even his own father.

He spun the ornate antique globe at his side, another Whitehall reminder of a bygone era with its profusion of exotic and extinct countries ablaze with the distinctive imperial red which coloured the old empire, the world of his stamp-collecting school-days. Gossip had it that this was the globe the private secretary had used to explain to Devereux’s predecessor precisely where was to be found the tiny colonial outpost of Belize with its small but expensive British military garrison and fetid tropical climate that rotted the turbine fans on the Harrier jump jets almost as quickly as it sapped the men’s morale. Faced with the need for yet another round of economies, the Minister had sacrificed the lot, releasing the tiny Latin American country to the predatory clutches of its neighbours. As the story went, although the Minister couldn’t find Belize on the map, neither could he find it on the list of critical Government-held constituencies …

With a sigh, Devereux turned once more to the unmarked leather-bound folder lying open on his lap which, in the most concise of forms, contained briefing on all issues of substance and urgency that his civil servants thought appropriate for the new Secretary of State.

‘… the SoS can expect renewed pressures from HM Treasury in the forthcoming expenditure round, in spite of recent assurances … These Treasury demands must be resisted at all costs … unforeseen scope of our commitment to the UN peacekeeping operations in South Africa … expected increase in threat from the dispersal of former Soviet nuclear scientists and weapons technologies … rising nationalist extremism in Germany … unpublicized visit last month of Joint Chiefs to Downing Street to discuss their growing concerns … hostile questioning can be expected from the Government’s own backbenches …’

Devereux smiled. It was a catalogue of horrors worthy of any group of civil servants about to go into budgetary battle with their sceptical and unimaginative Treasury colleagues, who were capable of sinking more aircraft carriers in an afternoon than an entire Nazi wolf pack.

One item was more specific than most, the language less florid.

‘23. In particular, HMG has undertaken to resolve its position on the MPAA, the proposed joint-venture fighter aircraft, by the end of this year. The project, much desired by the US Administration, faces considerable opposition within the Congress. It is unlikely to win Congressional approval without the full-hearted backing of the European allies. Most of our European partners are diffident, recognizing the military value of the MPAA in the increasingly unstable security environment but balking at the expected costs. Germany and Spain have let it be known that they will participate only if Britain does. On that decision will rest US approval itself.

‘24. Therefore the role of HMG and the SoS personally is likely to be decisive.

‘25. The funding requirements for developing MPAA are significant, but spread over ten years. Moreover, we are in a strong position to negotiate a substantial part of the design and manufacturing work and consequent employment benefits for this country, which will give the SoS a powerful hand in bilaterals with the Treasury on development funding and other aspects of the MoD budget …

‘27. Considerable public and international attention will inevitably be given to whatever decision the SoS makes.’

Devereux snorted.

‘Considerable public and international attention will inevitably be given …’

Encouragement? Or threat? While there was no recommendation contained within the briefing, its positive tone left no doubt as to the desires of the MoD bureaucracy. The Duster was their virility symbol, the project which would redeem them in the eyes of their Whitehall colleagues after years of being squeezed dry by Governments in search of another billion or so with which to build a reelection platform.

Mentally he ticked off the three alternatives. He could refuse to back the project, thereby earning the gratitude of his hard-pressed Cabinet colleagues. Yet it would also earn him the relentless opposition of those powerful and privileged men within the defence establishment who had killed off more than one of his predecessors. Anyway, political gratitude, Devereux had learned, could be exhausted more quickly than a soda siphon.

On the other hand he could fight for the project in a public battle which would inevitably be bloody. But whose blood? In victory he would be cast as the most dynamic and successful Minister in the Government, an international figure of stature, a skilled negotiator, visionary politician and ever-rising star, the man most likely to. He could write his own accolade.

Yet if he fought, and lost, it would be a personal disaster. The successor shorn of success. The defence chief who retreated. Who came, who saw, who surrendered.

What would his father have done? Got drunk. Then beaten his wretched wife and disappeared to that end of the manor house where the housekeeper lived. The young housekeeper. There had been a steady stream of housekeepers passing through the manor house, all of them young, and all chosen by his father.

Devereux bit his lip. His father would have fought, and failed. But Devereux wasn’t like his father. He wouldn’t fail.

And, anyway, he had no need for young housekeepers.

In the blackness of her mind there was life.

She couldn’t identify it as such, it kept changing shape, colour, intensity. But it was there. It was as though she and her senses were floating in the vacuum of space, approaching each other, recognizing each other, almost touching, with only the slightest nudge needed to bring them together but unable to find that final extra adjustment.

Frustration. Anger. I feel, therefore I am. More frustration.

The bundles of stimuli which were her inchoate thoughts passed by and were lost in the blackness or burned up like a lost body re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

She preferred those which burned. She took comfort in the light, and all the time there seemed to be more brilliance entering her world.

Then came the moment when the light turned into the recognizable colours of a rainbow and the dark veil began to lift.

‘Mummie-e-e-e-e!’

The first time she had comprehended any sound, the first time Benjy had uttered any word, since the accident. Her eyes opened, were assaulted by the light but struggled and blinked and gradually found focus until she could see those around her – the diminutive consultant neurologist, Weatherup, with a constrained smile of professional triumph; Primrose, the student nurse, whose smiles showed no restraint at all; McBean, who radiated a quiet sense of privilege at having been party to another of life’s minor miracles, and on whose ample blue-cottoned bosom wriggled the animated form of a young, dark-haired boy.

‘B … Ben … Benjamin?’ She formed the sound in the way a foal attempts its first step. Quickly they took away the cuffs and clips of the monitoring equipment so that mother and son could be reunited in an uninhibited and uninterrupted embrace. Soon Benjamin, overwhelmed, had fashioned a face like that of a latex troll and was tearfully expressing his pleasure and relief. Tears began to form in the corner of his mother’s eyes, too, but as yet she had not found the strength or understanding to express her emotions.

‘Where am I? What happened?’ she whispered eventually, her hand reaching out instinctively to straighten the young boy’s hair, but the effort proved too much.

‘Och, so you’re from across the water. American, are you?’ McBean responded to the noticeable accent. ‘And tell me. What’s your name?’

‘Is … Isadora Dean. Izzy.’ The reply was tentative, sounding almost a question. But a start. ‘My fath …’ She started upon her habitual self-conscious explanation that she had been named after Isadora Duncan, the avant-garde dancer and teenage idol of her father, a Wisconsin dentist who hid a number of unpredictable passions behind the crisp formality of his dental mask, but the excuse was absurd and the attempt exhausting. She subsided and concentrated on trying to engage her thumb against her son’s cheek to push away his tears.

‘You’ve had an accident, lassie. Been in a wee bit of a coma. But you’re a strapping girl, you’ll pull through it fine. Won’t she, Mr Weatherup?’

The consultant, who was gently checking the pulse in her wrist, nodded. ‘Your spleen was giving you a little trouble, Mrs Dean, so we had to take it out. But that’s not a problem. You won’t even notice it’s gone, apart from a very small scar on the left side of your abdomen. And you’ve been asleep quite a while, but I think you’re going to be absolutely fine after a good period of rest. So long as young Benjamin here lets you breathe. Steady on, young man,’ he protested with a chuckle, turning to Benjamin whose arms had locked around his mother’s neck in a gesture which defied anyone to take her away again.

‘He’s … all right, doctor. Seems he’s got a lot of hugging to make up for,’ she countered.

‘You led us a merry dance, Izzy,’ McBean said. ‘Until this moment we had no idea who you were. You are American, aren’t you?’

Izzy nodded.

‘Your son has been through quite a shock, too, was unable to talk,’ Weatherup continued. ‘It was something of a risk, bringing the two of you together. We hoped it might be just the thing to snap the both of you back into form yet we couldn’t be certain how he would respond, if it might drive him deeper within himself. But I’m delighted …’

‘My baby? Where’s Isabella?’ The voice, until now weak and hesitant, had taken on new strength.

‘Mrs Dean, you mustn’t excite yourse …’

The question came again, slow, precise, unavoidable. ‘Doctor, where is my baby?’

The neurologist appeared suddenly uncomfortable, couldn’t meet her gaze, buried his hands deep in the pockets of his white coat and cast his eyes towards Sister McBean. She sat on the edge of the bed, placing a hand on both mother and son. Her words were slow, softly formed, trying to wrap the hammer in velvet.

‘I’m so desperately sorry, Izzy, my love.’ McBean paused, fighting her own emotions. There was no easy way. ‘I’m afraid your baby’s gone. She didn’t survive the accident.’

Hammer fall. Destruction. Inside something fractured, forever beyond repair.

Her face did not move, betrayed no pain, but in the flicker of an eyelid it had lost its flexibility and returning life, become a mask. With agonizing care, the lips sought for a response.

‘Didn’t deserve that. Not my poor Bella,’ she whispered, then nothing more. Her eyes went to McBean, beseeching some form of denial, but there was only compassion. A noise began to grow inside her, from deeper within than seemed imaginable, torn out by its roots, which was to burst forth in a sickening wail of grief. And of dismay. Of lost love. Of recrimination. Of guilt. Particularly of guilt.

A cry for an innocent lost.

TWO

Grubb rapped on the door, hesitating fractionally before he entered. Characteristically he was a man who pushed his way around life ignoring the sensibilities and wishes of others and wouldn’t think twice about barging into hospitals, funerals, bedrooms and even ladies’ washrooms in search of his prey, but the managing editor had only recently taken over and was something of an unknown quantity.

Hugo Hagi, of West Coast Japanese-American stock via Wharton Business School and IBM, knew relatively little about TV news and had the good sense not to pretend otherwise. Instead of constantly watching television on one of the half-dozen screens which hid his office wall he would embalm himself in front of the computer screen which sat on the end of his desk. He was not, as Grubb would complain after a couple of beers, ‘batting from the same dugout’. The whole industry was being taken over by accountants who cared nothing for the professional pride of a world scoop and the exhilaration of dumping all over rival channels but who got their rocks off by studying bottom lines. Maybe they didn’t reproduce, didn’t know how to, just split in two like amoebae.

The new man had the frustrating habit of switching off the screen every time someone entered his room, as if he were protecting some great secret with which others couldn’t be trusted. Hell, there were no secrets in an open-plan newsroom where you had to raise your voice even to proposition one of the graduate researchers, but Hagi’s office was alien turf. Behind his back they called him ET on account of the unnatural green glow of the computer screen which normally lit his sallow features, and because everyone wished he would go home.

‘Hugi, got a minute?’ Grubb enquired, using the foreshortened soubriquet the Japanese-American hated only marginally less than ET.

The switch was thrown and the green glow subsided. The alien emerged in human form with a thin smile on his well-groomed features. He was considerably the younger, a three-hour marathon man, lacking the rough edges and dusty aura which hung around the foreign editor. There were no family photographs on the wall, only his framed MBA and a signed photograph of Wilbur Burns. It left Grubb feeling both resentful and nervous.

‘How can I help, Eldred?’ Hagi emphasized the name, retaliating in kind, insisting on the formal version of the foreign editor’s name rather than the more familiar Ed. How could you run a news room with people calling you ‘Eldred’, Chrissake?

‘Thought you’d like to know … Hugo,’ Grubb added, withdrawing from the field of battle under cover of a smile. ‘Problem solved. We’ve just heard from Izzy Dean, seems she’s been in a mother of a car smash and got herself stuck in a coma in some hospital in the West of England. She’s gonna be OK. Bad news about the kid, though. The young ‘un didn’t make it.’

Hagi seemed to be taking his time digesting the information, and by the vinegary expression on his face it seemed to have given him wind. ‘Did you say the problem was solved?’

It was the turn of the foreign editor to wrinkle his brow. ‘Sure. I mean, we know where she is. She hasn’t disappeared.’

‘But is she back working? Is she gracing our screens, pulling in the viewers?’

‘Hell, Hugo. She just lost a kid. Nearly killed herself, too. What’s the friggin’ problem?’

‘The problem, Eldred, is that Izzy Dean is once more not doing the job we pay her for.’

The screen flickered back to life as Hagi checked the details. He always checked details.

‘In May and June she was off the air for more than six weeks.’

‘That was maternity leave. She was entitled. Hugo, she worked right up to the wire. Even had the baby induced so’s she could get back in time to take the Paris posting. What more do you want?’

‘And two years ago it was another six weeks maternity leave. Makes me wonder where her priorities lie, making news or making babies,’ Hagi continued.

‘She’s a woman …’ Grubb began to splutter, but subsided; he could see the direction in which his superior was headed. His tone grew suddenly more practical. ‘She is one of the best.’

‘Not if she’s off screen, she’s not.’

Vivid language came drifting through the door as a young female production assistant exchanged views with a supplier who had thus far failed to deliver the promised portable satcom system to a correspondent on the point of leaving for the civil war in South Africa. Newsrooms could produce as many casualties as a civil war, except in civil wars they were less likely to bayonet the wounded.

‘Izzy’s in line for a presenter’s job,’ Grubb continued, ‘maybe even her own show. That’s what …’ He was about to say that’s what Ira Weiss, ET’s predecessor, had hinted, but Ira was yesterday’s man and his name now dirt. ‘That’s what … was thought.’

ET raised an eyebrow at the green screen. ‘She’s pushing forty.’

In fact she was thirty-seven, but Grubb wasn’t going to contest the point.

‘Let me put this on the table, Eldred. I think the strategy should be to present the younger face of news, not to be worrying whether our presenter is going to come out in a hot flush all of a sudden. Don’t you agree?’

It was time for the foreign editor to join the game. He had considerable admiration for Izzy, it was impossible not to, but there was no shared personal chemistry. He found her prissy, and she didn’t fuck. Not him, at least. And if someone’s job was going to be on the line under the new management, sure wasn’t going to be his. He rubbed his razor burn thoughtfully.

‘You know, Hugo, there’s no denying that this motherhood thing gets in the way. Not that she’s complained. Apart from the maternity leave, she’s never missed a day for mumps and measles and the rest.’

He wanted to be fair. It would make the betrayal so much more effective.

‘She’s very professional.’ Pause. ‘For a woman. But you know, Hugo, it’s not easy. For us, I mean, you and me. We need to send our people into some of the toughest spots in the world, into the middle of wars, revolutions, natural disasters, you name it. She’s never backed off, not that you’d know it. We even gave her some of the most difficult assignments, Gaza, Bosnia, the Colombia drug cartels – that’s where they shot up her car and she got winged – just to test her, to see if she was tough enough, had the balls for the job.’

He looked hard into ET’s eyes, trying to calculate the mood.

‘But that was before she got herself elected to the club. What are we gonna feel like now if we send her into some war zone, she gets her fanny shot away and we’re responsible for two motherless brats?’ He corrected himself immediately. ‘One motherless brat. We’ve got to live with that. It just …’ – he waved his hands – ‘complicates things.’

‘Getting pregnant once you could put down as an accident, one of those hormonal things. But twice looks like she’s making a career out of it. Not, of course, that I’m against equal opportunities,’ Hagi insisted, covering the legal niceties as if some federal agency had his office bugged, ‘but going into battle with babies clinging round your neck inevitably …’ – he nodded in deference to the foreign editor’s own phrase – ‘… complicates things.’

There was a brief silence.

‘So what d’you want me to do?’ the foreign editor enquired.

‘Why, Eldred, I want you to send her our best wishes for a speedy recovery and get our star foreign correspondent back to work, pronto. Doing what she’s paid to do.’

‘And if not?’

ET tapped a couple of buttons and the screen flickered. ‘I see you’re already over budget this quarter. There’s no money to provide additional cover, nor to run a nursing service, either.’ He turned from the screen, bathed in its eerie glow. ‘If not, Eldred, as foreign editor you will have a sad and very painful decision to reach.’

She had just got to her favourite bit, where she always felt a tug of excitement even though she’d read it a hundred – well, possibly a dozen times, when the balloon is about to smash into the African mountain top and plunge the great adventure to disaster and death.

She had loved Jules Verne ever since she was a kid in bed with chicken pox and discovered that tearing round the world in eighty days with an intrepid Victorian explorer and his rag-bag of companions was far more fun than school. Somewhere at home she had a rumpled cloth-backed copy with her name written inside in careful, childhood letters, each individually and patiently crafted. ‘Isadora Dean. Age 10³/₄.’

They had encouraged her to go back a little, to the things which had stuck and were important, which her memory could embrace with comfort and certainty, to build from solid foundations so she might begin putting into their proper place the scrambled recollections that lay strewn about her mind.

Of the accident, and of a significant period both before and afterwards, there was nothing but a void penetrated by occasional flashes of light which had disappeared even before she could identify the elusive images they illuminated. Why had she come here, to Dorset? Perhaps because her grandfather had been born in this part of England, somewhere in the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, but she couldn’t be sure. Even memories of the days immediately after her recovery from coma were fitful and confused.

Most distressingly, much of the previous couple of years lay scattered like the shards of a mosaic attacked by vandals. Personal things, things of great value. The name of her godson. When she had last been back home. What she had given Benjamin for his birthday. Too much of the short time she had been given with Bella.

The process of recreating the mosaic was agonizing; she would reach for a piece only to find it had eluded her once more and she was grasping at thin, empty air. Often it was also humiliating. The previous day she had telephoned her producer in Paris, only to discover from his wife that he was no longer her producer. Had she forgotten they’d left both his legs behind on a mountain road above Sarajevo after he’d stepped on a Serbian mine while trying to take a piss, the trembling voice demanded in accusation.

Then it all came flooding back, the agony, the guilt, the shattered bones and screams, his own brave reasoning that he could have been knocked down crossing the Champs Elysées – a justification that somehow satisfied no one, not his wife, not even those who had shared the risks with him. Some memories she wished could remain hidden.

One image plagued her mind, lingering in its shadows, refusing to step into the light. She would attack, only for the image to recede deeper into the shadows; she would draw back in exhaustion and it would creep to the edge of the circle of light, tantalizing, mocking. Ghostly. Hollowed eyes. Shrunken lips.

Aged before its time.

The girl. With Bella. Always the two together. Inseparable. An image of death.

They had found a video player for her and every morning one of the nurses with access to satellite TV brought in tapes of the previous day’s WCN coverage. Even though it quickly glued back together much of the missing mosaic – she’d even forgotten who was Vice President, but then, she excused, so had half the American public – it was exhausting for her to watch. It reminded her there was a world out there which was working and warring and getting along perfectly adequately. Without her. The reassurances of her new producer that everything was under control and that she need not worry had precisely the opposite effect; she found it difficult to fight her way through the mist of depression which settled around her.

They told her it was normal, to be expected, part of the recovery process after brain damage, a frequent side effect of the drugs, but she was not convinced. It was more than the medication. It was the guilt.

‘You should call home,’ Weatherup told her. He was sitting on the end of the bed, no longer in ITU but a general recovery room. She needed to share the pain, not lock it up, he encouraged, she needed the support of family. Izzy had insisted that she be the one to break the news to her husband, but wasn’t it time?

‘I …’ she had begun, but shrank into the pillows. Something inside was holding her back. Made her uneasy.

‘Look, Izzy, I know it must be difficult, but think of what you still have. You have Benjamin. Your family. A fine career. So much to look forward to.’

Somehow the neurologist’s words didn’t gel.

‘Will … will I be able to continue?’

‘With a career or motherhood?’ he asked.

‘Both.’

He smiled and reached for her hand. ‘You’re making excellent progress. Just three days out of a coma and you’re reading, watching television, taking an interest, regaining your strength. You’ve nothing to worry about.’

‘Doctor.’ She beckoned him to lean closer so she could whisper directly in his ear. ‘Bullshit.’

He gave her a long, calculating stare. ‘OK, Izzy. If you want the full picture, I think you’re strong enough to take it. The truth is no one can yet be sure. Your brain took an almighty beating inside, and sometimes there are lingering after-effects. Some memories may never return. You’re bound to be emotionally unsettled for a while. It’s possible – not likely, you understand, but possible – you may be susceptible to epilepsy in later life, but we have drugs for that. You might find some areas of your brain don’t want to work as well as they did. We know there is some damage and brain cells don’t repair themselves, but the system has an amazing knack of compensating, finding another way of getting the job done. You’re in excellent physical shape, you’re recovering remarkably well. I can guarantee nothing, but if you were a horse personally I’d back you in the Grand National.’

‘If I were a horse you’d already have shot me.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Weatherup insisted, laughing. ‘Climb Mount Everest. Have another ten babies. Just don’t attempt it all at the same time!’

‘Mothers don’t always get a choice,’ she replied, but the mist of depression had lifted a fraction.

‘Tell me, Izzy. It’s a personal question, do you mind?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘I’ve wondered about it ever since you were admitted. You have a remarkable scar, just …’ He glanced down as though trying to examine himself, suddenly uncomfortable.

‘Just here, on my breast.’ She ran her fingers over her nightdress just above her left nipple.

‘We had to examine you thoroughly, you understand,’ he explained hurriedly, not wishing to imply that his thoughts were focused on anything other than sound medical practice. Even so, she was a remarkably fine-looking woman …‘A strange injury. We couldn’t decide what it was.’

‘Bullet wound. Probably from a nine millimetre Uzi. Badly stitched. My car got shot up in Colombia by a drugs gang I was investigating. The head of the cartel promised me exclusive access for a week assuming I would sleep with him. When I didn’t he took exception, for some reason didn’t want either the tape or me getting to the airport. Wrecked the car but this hole was the only damage they managed to do to me or my crew. If only they were as pathetic with their other business operations.’

She made it sound matter-of-fact, as if she were reporting on someone else’s problem.

‘Good God,’ Weatherup muttered in astonishment, sounding very English. ‘We don’t get too much experience at this hospital with wounds from machine guns.’

‘Sub-machine guns,’ she corrected.

‘And that’s what you want to go back to? My dear girl, you must be quite crazy. But very brave.’

‘Not really. Screwing him would have been brave, but there are parts of me that even my editor doesn’t own. Anyway, I was five months pregnant.’

‘More crazy than I thought!’

‘Not at all. I used the bump to smuggle out a world exclusive in my knickers and underneath my sanitary wear. The good Catholic border guards just wriggled, far too embarrassed to look closely.’ She smiled, but his words had hurt. Had she been a man the doctor would have been not amazed but enthralled, excited by the challenge, relishing the danger, anxious to hear more. Instead, he had patronized her, unintentionally and nowhere near as badly as she was patronized in her own office, but still a grating reminder that already she was re-entering the world she had left, and all the contradictions and torments it held for her came flooding back.

Like the missed birthdays and broken promises which she hoped Benjamin was yet too young to understand or be hurt by. The searing pain when he seemed to treat the nanny as more of a mother than her. The games and rhymes she had so much wanted to teach him but which he’d already learned. From someone else.

The insanity of arriving back from the death camps of civil war scarcely three hours in almost any direction from Charles de Gaulle, in time to wash for Sunday lunch.

The anxiety when she discovered that from her ‘happy box’ of essential travelling supplies were missing the dozen clean syringes she carried to avoid the infected needles of a war zone, and the blind fit of anger with a two-year-old when she discovered Benjamin had taken from it the tiny compass without which she couldn’t guarantee locking onto the satellite. On such small things might hang her life and the story, although she did not care to ask which her editor valued more highly. Gambling her own wits against snipers from Beirut to Bosnia for an audience she knew was so jaded by nightly overkill they might just as well be watching their laundry spin and who thought the Golan Heights were a suburb of Cleveland.

Waiting on the sandy beach outside Mogadishu as the execution by machine gun of two army deserters was held up, even as they stood blindfolded and bound tight against empty oil drums, trousers fouled. Held up, not by God or a quixotic judge, but by a BBC cameraman while he changed his clapped-out battery.

Returning to receive not accolades or understanding but a relentless demand for more, more, more, knowing they were pushing her harder than anyone else, waiting for the little woman to plead cramps or hormones or simply to break down and make a mess of her make-up. The pigs.

Balancing the lust for a story against the demands of self-preservation, conquering your own fear and crawling that extra exclusive maggot-infested mile before remembering you were a mother with responsibilities back home.

Home. It was time to call her husband. Her nervousness, for which she had no explanation – or, at least, none she could remember – came flooding back.

A ring. An answer.

‘Joe?’

A silence. A long silence.

‘Joe, it’s me. How are you, darling? Have I interrupted you?’ God, it was pathetic. Sunday morning, what could she have interrupted?

Another long silence.

‘Where are you?’ he muttered.

‘In England, Joe.’

‘I thought you’d disappeared to Mars.’

‘Joe, please. I’m in hospital. There was a car crash. Did you hear me?’

He didn’t seem to have made the connection. His mind was blocked, struggling to find the things he wanted to say. ‘You gonna be there long?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe another two weeks …’

‘Anything broken?’

‘No, but …’

‘Give me the address.’

‘You’re coming over?’

A silence.

‘No, I can’t. I’m up beyond my butt in work. Just give me the address, will you?’

‘Joe, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘I’ve got something for you, too. Didn’t want to do it like this, but …’

A pause while he struggled for the long-practised words and failed.

‘Hell. I’ve had enough. Of you disappearing, of being left on my own, knowing that I come about as low on your list of priorities as root-canal work. I’m out, Izzy. Out. I want a divorce. I just hope we can make it quick and clean. Be mature, eh? For the sake of the kids?’

Perhaps he might have expected the silence that followed, but he showed no sign of it. ‘Come on, Izzy, it can’t have come as that much of a shock to you. Christ, it’s not as if there’s anything left between us. Let’s just formalize it so we can both get on with our own lives. I’ve got all the details prepared for you to look at. Just give me the address.’

‘You’re trying to deliver divorce papers to me while I’m lying in hospital?’ she gasped. There was a sudden avalanche of memories, of pain, exposing the hard rock-face that had become their relationship. She recalled it clearly now. The rows, his growing frustration turning to bitterness, a marriage that had become no more than an accommodation.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ he continued. ‘You left me with no option; I haven’t known where you’ve been for more than a month. Did you expect me to wait until you finished playing Marco Polo in your own sweet time?’

‘Joe!’ she pleaded, all the carefully considered phrases swept away. ‘For God’s sake, listen to me. Please. Bella. Our baby. She’s dead.’

There was nothing from the other end of the phone. The scalding of a man’s heart makes no sound.

‘Joe, she was in the back of my car when we went off the road. Benjy’s fine but … Bella’s gone, Joe. I’m sorry.’

The voice at the other end, when at last it came, had a strained, unnatural quality.

‘You killed Bella?’

‘Don’t, Joe, please.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I can’t remember, I just don’t know. Joe, come see me. Grab a plane. Let’s not talk about this on the phone.’

‘Where are you?’

She gave him the details. ‘You’re coming to see me, then?’

The voice on the phone was like the hissing of a serpent. ‘The only thing you’ll get from me are divorce papers. You killed Bella, you irresponsible … selfish … bitch!’

She did not know how long she lay back on her pillow, eyes closed, the tears forming twin cascades that soaked into her hair. She did not cry for her lost marriage; even with her scrambled memories she could not persuade herself she had lost something of irredeemable value. The tears were for the loneliness and sudden sense of vulnerability which settled around her like a marsh fog of autumn, for the frustration and anger as thoughts and memories collided within her head to undermine her sense of self-control, for the lack of familiar landscape in a world which in a few weeks had been shattered almost beyond recognition. But most of all she cried from aching guilt. The guilt which insisted that she might, after all, have been responsible for the crash. Her fault that Bella was dead.

Her eyes opened. She could look back no longer, not when it meant grappling with memories filled with so much pain. There was only one way – forward, no matter what, and build something new and brighter for herself and Benjamin, if she could.

She picked up Jules Verne. Her long-loved friends were still unrescued, on the very edge of disaster as they clung precariously to the balloon’s basket. She threw them in the wastebin.

Devereux sat in the corner of the New York bar and watched with a practised eye. The bar was on the lower West Side on one of those blocks where the street language was Spanish and sunlight never reached the pavement. He liked these type of places, where he could get away from it all, the officials, the papers, the constant flow of formality and urgent business which dominated his other world. This was so different: classless, outgoing, utterly un-English. A challenge. And he enjoyed a challenge.

He’d flown to Washington on his first overseas trip to flex his muscles on the Duster. The US Administration wanted this project, wanted it badly. The hot breath of Congressional concern was gusting through the basements of the Pentagon; the project’s proponents were anxious to embrace any good friend they could find and Devereux was one of the few. The deal was not yet done, there was still more juice to squeeze from the lemon, but already he had made his mark in the capital of the most powerful country on earth.

And now he had escaped. Some shopping in New York before he flew home, he had explained, letting slip the shackles, sliding away from the pathways of power to this bar, where he was no longer Minister but Man, where there were no middle class moralizers, Protection Squad heavies or Fleet Street hacks. Nothing but a good, old-fashioned challenge.

He watched as an elderly and hugely overweight woman entered the bar, dragging a plastic sack behind her and jangling a large bunch of keys suspended around her waist. She had come to restock the vending machines, wheezing as she crossed the room, pausing only to take a long pull at her cigarillo. Her jaw dropped like a fish as she gulped for breath before taking yet another pull.

Wheeze, gasp, puff, jangle, wheeze; the sounds punctuated her slow progress. In a querulous voice she announced that she had to have her back operated on again. She appeared to invite a general conversation but only the barman responded, and that after a delay of several seconds.

‘Your back again, eh?’

Another delay. Like Ground Control to Mars.

‘Not until New Year.’ She began attacking the cigarette machine. Wheeze. Puff. Jangle. ‘Not getting laid up over Christmas.’

The barman offered no response, forcing her to continue the conversation on her own. ‘I guess I’m gonna go one of three ways. Lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver or a broken heart.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Think I’ll give up men. Too damn dangerous. Hell, I’m only sixty-four. Lotta life left in me yet.’ The guppy jaw dropped several times while she hitched up her sagging support tights through the folds of her woollen cardigan. The barman polished glasses.

‘They better have a cigarette waiting for me at the door of the hospital. And a drink. Going in and coming out.’

The barman raised an eyebrow; she heaved her sack and her tights slipped once more. She paused to light another cigarette from a second pack in her pocket, not a cigarillo this time but menthol. Her attempt at safe smoking, cutting the risks. Then she dragged her sack in the direction of the condom machines in the men’s toilet, barging through the door without knocking.

As her sagging frame disappeared, Devereux laughed inside. Not at her, but with her. She knew she was ludicrous, spicing her nicotine with the occasional menthol in the pretence of delaying or avoiding the inevitable process of consumption inside her lungs, but she was doing it her way and would go out on her own terms. Unlike most politicians. Unlike his father.

Know thyself, and thy weaknesses, the better to understand and if necessary to exploit the weaknesses of others, he muttered. The old woman was a hag, but no broken reed. His father, at his bitter end, would have envied her.

Devereux turned the whisky around in his glass. Life was full of challenges and risks; it took an exceptional man to confront and vanquish them and, in vanquishing, to become great. He was an exceptional man, and would become great. He wouldn’t be his failed father’s son forever.

But one challenge at a time. He finished off his drink, ordered another, and gazed with interest and anticipation at the two women who were arranging themselves at the next table.

Izzy was pissed off. Deeply pissed off, in the way that gets you out of bed in the morning in spite of hospital routine.

Every day she would find herself waiting with growing anticipation for the videotapes of yesterday’s WCN newscasts, and this morning she’d set it up, punched the appropriate buttons and settled back in her chair.

And seethed. The tape had included a major slot from the new Mafia corruption trials in Palermo, the one involving a cardinal, an actress and two former prime ministers. Her territory. Now being squatted by that testicularly challenged little jerk of a producer.

She was jealous, hacked off with the producer, but mostly with herself, surprised that even from a hospital bed it could matter so much.

The door to her old world was beginning to open a fraction. Then K.C. Craven arrived and kicked the bloody thing off its hinges.

K.C. was black, doe-eyed and had flown in that morning from Washington DC. She was Eldred Grubb’s assistant, by far the finest of his few redeeming features. In her first week at WCN, with innuendo sweeping the newsroom as to why the foreign editor had hired an attractive mahogany-skinned assistant who was both taller and graduated from a far better university than he, she had been asked to explain her name.

‘Katherine? Connie?’ a colleague had enquired.

‘Why, bless you child. No,’ K.C. had responded in a mock Southern drawl, lashes fluttering. She enjoyed being theatrical; the entire newsroom was listening. ‘I was named K.C. ‘cause my mamma said she conceived me during an unscheduled time-out with a basketball player during play-offs in Kansas City. Best time of her life, she said. So even if she forgets who, ain’t never gonna forget where.’

Later Izzy discovered that K.C.’s father was a much-respected doctor in Minneapolis and her librarian mother had never been to Kansas City in her life, but Izzy was sworn to silence. K.C. was a good friend and the first enjoyable recollection to come alive for Izzy from what seemed like another, distant life.

‘It’s great you could come,’ Izzy said, not for the first time, as they walked arm-in-arm through the gardens.

She was making her first trip outside the hospital walls and Izzy had found the air unexpectedly damp, her mind still unadjusted to the lost weeks and changing seasons. The last few days had been frozen crisp, clean, the leaves on the old oak guarding the hospital entrance hung limp in the still air. But a storm was on the way, heralded by a tumultuous sky that seemed as though Turner had thrown his entire palette of paints across the heavens.

K.C. wrapped herself more tightly in her cloak. She had been careful to explain that Grubb had sent her, she couldn’t stay more than a few hours, yet to Izzy it was as though her friend had trekked alone across the Antarctic.

‘You’re the first thing from my life before the accident which hasn’t brought me pain. The divorce. Bella. Watching Fido pretend he can do my job.’ Even as she spoke she realized that her life was still a jumble of conflicting priorities. That, at least, had not changed.

‘What do you feel about the divorce?’

Izzy shook her head. ‘What’s to feel? Not angry, just – empty. I’ve always known he was unfaithful, got his brain in his boxers and his privates forever on parade, but funny thing is I’m finding it hard to be bitter. The marriage was a mistake, I think I can see that now.’

‘How a mistake?’

‘I was feeling pressured. Well into my thirties. The clock was ticking, the tubes beginning to get tired. Time was running out on me. I didn’t know how to handle it; everything else in my life had been planned, set into neat periods. College, grad school, internship, climb the ladder, PA, producer, correspondent … but this wasn’t going to be so tidy. The hormones were nagging away: do your bit for posterity, time to stretch the flesh. The job meant everything to me, yet suddenly … it wasn’t enough. I wanted the job and the kids. After Gaza it became something of an obsession.’

‘What happened in Gaza?’ K.C. pressed, wrapping the cloak still more tightly around her. As the day and its more spectacular hues began to fade, the wind was creeping in to claim its place. The storm was gathering.

‘It was during the Intifada, just before your time. The Palestinian riots had flared up again and I was over there with Dan Morrison from NBC to get an Arab’s-eye view. Interviews with local leaders, mullahs, the teenagers who were causing the trouble, that sort of thing. Lots of pictures of the rioting from behind Arab lines as they were throwing stones, petrol bombs. Nothing we hadn’t done a thousand times before.’

‘Dan Morrison?’ K.C. puckered her brows. ‘Was he one of us?’

‘That’s one hell of an epitaph,’ Izzy rebuked. ‘But you’re right. What do any of us leave behind? That’s really my point. Dan was like a big brother to me, we’d covered so many stories together. Never once got out of hand, the closest I got to his bed was the times I laid him out on it when he’d got blind drunk. Which was pretty often.’

She tried to smile at the memory, but there was no joy in her face.

‘Dan and I were shooting from pretty much the same location, great position where the camera could see it all over our shoulders, the Arab kids throwing stones and burning barricades right up to the Israeli lines beyond. Someone had to go first, we tossed a coin and he cheated. The sonofabitch was always cheating me, but only on silly things. Said he liked getting me riled, best entertainment he could find in a foxhole.’

She drew in a deep breath full of sorrow. ‘So, he stepped out half a pace to give his cameraman the full perspective and started to roll. He was talking about religion, about how both sides invoked divine justice and from their knees proclaimed their devout interest in peace. So long as it was their peace, of course. Then, they shot him. Through the back of the head. A single bullet; he was still talking as he fell. I helped drag him back and he died right there in my lap.’

‘Who were ‘they”? Who shot him?’

‘Who knows? It was an Israeli rifle but the army said the bullet was fired from a stolen weapon, intentionally to stir up anti-Israeli feeling in America. Either way, didn’t matter much to Dan.’

She sighed, there were no tears, she was too professional for that. Although sometimes tears help.

‘OK, so it’s the risk we all take. Could have been anyone. Would have been me, if Dan hadn’t cheated. But it got me thinking, what do you leave behind? What did Dan leave behind after all those years of screwing and drinking his way around the world? Of finding the back doubles to every airport and putting his neck on the line so some armchair producer back in the States can fill in the airtime between the sponsor’s messages? What? A better world? All Dan left behind was a grieving mother, a busted Chevvy and an empty apartment in Greenwich Village on which he still owed fifteen years’ payments. And I didn’t even have a mother to grieve, K.C., so I knew I had to get on and have those kids or I’d end up just like Dan. Does that make sense?’

‘Does the sun rise, stupid?’

She shook her head wistfully. ‘So I panicked. Married Joe. I’d known him for more than two years, although I realized later that in all that time we’d spent less than three months physically together. And I understand why he wants out. It’s an occupational hazard in my job and his. And men change after kids, you know. The first one is a mystery to them, a mixture of fascination and terror; by the second it’s simply a matter of mechanics. Your plumbing gets torn and twisted, you end up running on a damaged undercarriage and you find that once-passionate lover starts approaching you with all the sensitivity of a mechanical shovel.’

‘And only one gear.’

‘Joe was lousy about pregnancy. Resentful, jealous even. The baby had taken my body and his place beside it, and the more I swelled and the baby wriggled the more he simply moved away from it. From me. Like his life had been invaded. With Benjy he was bad, with Bella even worse.’

A silence hung between them. For the first time, as she found the words to describe her husband’s reaction, she knew without doubt that it was over. A chapter now closed, one she had never dared read out loud before.

‘But somehow I can’t find the energy to be angry. Hell, I’m almost relieved. I’ve been trying to balance Joe and the kids and the job for so long I was feeling like a bridge too far, slowly cracking in a hurricane; this simplifies things, one less weight to carry.’

The frost-dried leaves were beginning to chatter on the trees like the dying rattle of the day, falling around the women like the tears Isadora had been unable to shed.

‘How long are you going to be here?’ K.C. enquired.

‘Everyone seems delighted with my progress. Maybe just another two weeks. Then perhaps I’ll take a month off to get Benjy straight, sort things out with Joe. He’s bitter at the moment, but he’s not a bad man, he’ll come round. I need time for myself, too. I haven’t even been able to say goodbye properly to Bella.’ The voice, so used to talking of death, was steady but very quiet. ‘No tears yet, no mourning. They cremated her, did you know that? An unidentified little baby, no claimants, so they cremated her. I can’t even bury my baby.’

‘That’s … barbaric,’ K.C. shook her head in disbelief.

‘No. Just bureaucracy. Mindless bloody bureaucracy, as it is all over the world.’ She fashioned a smile of defiance. ‘Don’t worry, Izzy Dean will be back, I shall insist on it. I need just a little time for the bruises to heal. New Year.’

K.C.’s eyes grew large and swam with tears. ‘Oh, shit,’ she stammered. Leaves rustled round their ankles like rattling leg chains.

‘I’ve had a crack on the skull, K.C., but I haven’t lost all command of my senses. The Great Grubb doesn’t hand out trans-Atlantic air tickets like cups of coffee. You’re here to do a job, his job, I’ve known that ever since you arrived and I’m sure you’ve come bearing more than our beloved foreign editor’s best wishes. But you are also my friend, I won’t forget that. What is it?’

K.C.’s eyes begged apology. ‘You know the pressure he’s under. The money people have moved in, they’ve laid off another fifty staffers, the newsroom looks like the Alamo.’

‘Before or after Santa Anna arrived?’

‘Izzy, you’re the best we’ve got, even Grubby has to admit that, but it also means you’ve got one of the best foreign postings we have and there are fifty people sniffing around to see if they can take it from you.’

‘That’s a compliment.’

‘Even your little pimp of a producer has put in an official request to join the reporting staff, based on what he’s done in the weeks he’s been filling in for you.’

‘How long is it now?’ She furrowed her brow and tapped her forehead. ‘God, there are still things in here which simply don’t connect.’

‘We’re into December, Izzy. Nearly six weeks since you last had anything on air. And they’re building up for a civil war in Ukraine. Grubby wants you in Kiev not …’

‘Not flat on my back with my feet up in some part of the world he’s never heard of.’

‘You’ve got it.’ She hesitated. ‘You’ve also got this letter, Izzy.’ She reached inside her shoulder bag and retrieved an envelope. ‘It says three weeks. It says be back in three weeks, by Christmas, or they are terminating your contract. That taking off without letting anyone know where you were going was a hanging offence. That in the last three years you’ve clocked up more sick leave than anyone in the office.’

‘Being pregnant is not an illness,’ she replied testily.

‘Izzy, I’m sorry.’

‘I know you are.’

‘You’ll be back. Please say you’ll be back. Don’t let those miserable men with the clammy hands push you out.’

The night was silent. The wind had dropped as the rain began to make itself known, the storm was almost upon them. They were back beneath the great oak, but the leaves had stopped falling. They were all gone. The tree stood stark and bare. Winter had arrived.

‘My baby. My husband. And now my job?’ Izzy replied at last. She shook her head. The words of her award-winning report from Gaza, unscripted, the camera no more than a blur through the tears, the blood of her friend still damp on her hands, were forcing their way back into her memory.

‘In this land there are no victors, only victims. No children who are not soldiers, no difference of view which does not make enemies, no freedom which does not mean the persecution of others, no justice. In this land the utmost barbarities are committed in the name of God and love by extremists on all sides. And tonight they have claimed one more innocent victim. His name was Dan Morrison. He was my friend.’

In a green and pleasant land many miles away from Gaza, the tide of personal injustice seemed to have become a flood and about to carry her away as just another helpless victim. The rain began to fall, heavily, trickling down her face.

‘I’ll let Benjy decide. I’ve still got him. I’ll let Benjy decide.’

But it was not to be.

Michelini slammed full into the wall, the impact driving the breath from his lungs and forcing the taste of bile into the back of his throat. His heart hammered against his aching ribs, a searing pain like a razor-cut stretched from his left ankle all the way up to the back of his knee. He thought he might vomit. He was about to slump to his knees but knew that in doing so he would concede not only the game and the ten dollars but also his sense of virility. He would die standing up, not on his back. On second thoughts, dying on his back offered amusing prospects, but not during a game of squash. Instead of expiring, he settled for a slow and methodical retightening of his shoe lace. He had found himself retying his shoe laces a lot recently.

‘Can’t you afford new laces, Joe?’ his opponent enquired with a knowing smirk.

‘With what you lawyers charge? Gimme a break.’

‘OK. Last game. You win and I’ll buy lunch and new laces.’

‘Yeah. And charge it back to me in your bill with a goddamned mark-up. Creep.’

‘You’re the one who’s been creeping. You put on more weight or something?’

‘Screw you.’

‘We aim to please. But you know I charge by the full hour. Way out of your endurance league.’

Michelini decided to save his breath and responded with a gesture involving his little finger and its pinky ring before retrieving the ball from a far corner of the court. So he was a pace slower today; he was as fit as ever – well, would be if he gave up smoking once again – but he’d not been in the mood since he had heard about Bella. He’d been home most evenings alone, brooding, trying to work out the anger which had been growing within.

He felt cheated. He had scarcely seen Bella for more than a few weeks during her short life and then only at nights when he wasn’t travelling or working late. There had always seemed to be plenty of tomorrows for catching up. He was too used to not seeing her; he scarcely knew her, his own baby. Couldn’t even focus on what she looked like. And because he also felt ashamed that he did not feel her loss so very much more, he turned the sense of shame into anger aimed at his wife.

Then, last night, there had been a knock at his apartment door. A neighbour, a woman newly arrived in the Watergate complex with whom he’d exchanged pleasantries in the elevator about the turning of the leaves and the previous weekend had lent a hand with some bulky shopping. She had knocked about half eight, thanked him once again for his help and asked if he’d had dinner, would he fancy a hamburger and bottle of wine? He was about to explain that he’d already eaten and anyway was on a diet and didn’t want to be disturbed when he noticed she was already carrying the McDonald’s and Montrachet. She meant business.

He had stuffed two quarter-pounders and finished most of the bottle himself while, in between hamburgers, she had satisfied some of her own appetites. They hadn’t even left the sitting-room floor and he could still feel the carpet burns. When it became apparent that she’d be going for more, both before and after apple pie dessert, he’d had to fake it, and he wasn’t as good at that as he used to be.

This morning he’d felt like one of last night’s french fries; no wonder he was a pace slower. And he still didn’t know her name. Better ask the concierge.

It had been the first time he’d done it in the family home. He had a sense of family ethics that you didn’t cheat on your wife in her bed or on her living-room rug, you kept that for elsewhere, separate from the family. But he felt that she – it was ‘she’, not ‘Izzy’, he’d already embarked upon the mental process of divorce – that she had cheated him far more fundamentally than he had ever cheated on her. He was not even two full generations away from the old country concepts of family and vendetta; somehow it passed through the blood that there were no situations in which no one was to blame. This had to be someone’s fault. Her fault.

Usually he’d announce some of the more adventurous details of his conquests to his lawyer, Antonini, just before they played an important point so as to consume his opponent with titillation and second-hand lust just when he needed all his powers of concentration. He decided against it this time; it might seem inappropriate and even incriminating on the day they’d agreed to extend the game into lunch in order to discuss his matrimonial problems. In any event, he felt invigorated by the memory and once again set about persuading himself that he looked, felt and played younger than he was. He pummelled the ball and started the new game.

They were towelling themselves dry when Antonini got down to business.

‘You sure, Joe? About this divorce?’

‘I’m sure. The marriage is going nowhere, doesn’t really exist. She’s never here, always off with God knows who doing God knows what.’

‘Double values, Joe? You’ve been no saint, either.’

‘All that counts is it’s over. One big, fat zero.’

‘Pity. I thought you two had such a good thing going. I’d hate to think you were – you know, simply going through one of those phases.’ He’d meant to say ‘patches’, but now it was out. ‘A lot of men do, Joe, and regret it like hell after.’

Michelini’s eyes flared. ‘What? You think I’m going through the male menopause?’ His tone was aggressive; he was naked, suffering that feeling of inadequacy borne by many men in the locker room, and covered that inadequacy with belligerence. ‘Thanks, Toni, but my hormones are working great – good enough to give you another thrashing on the court any time you want. No, I’m not going through one of those phases, it simply that my marriage is down the pan and I want you to help me clean the mess up.’

Antonini backed off, waving his hands. ‘Fine, Joe. I hear you loud and clear.’

But Michelini was in gear, wanted to get it out of his system. ‘It’s never been much of a marriage. All she wanted was kids so she chose me as some form of farmyard stud. Rent-a-dick. “Is it your fertile time of the month, dear, or shall I roll over and reread yesterday’s newspaper?” I’ve felt like I’ve been drowning in her hormones. She goes on about motherhood yet there she is every day trying to prove to the entire fucking world she’s got bigger balls than the next man. I wanted a wife, a real woman, Toni, not some flak-jacketed Amazon who travels the world with a camera lens poking out of her knickers.’

He threw his damp towel bitterly across the room where it flopped into a large hamper. ‘She wouldn’t even call herself Mrs Joe Michelini. What’s wrong with that, for Chrissake?’

The lawyer’s tone was smooth, professional, but pressing. And once more inappropriate. ‘Have you thought about the kids?’

‘Kid, Toni. Kid. We’ve only got one now. She killed Bella, remember?’

Michelini, completely naked, squared up to the lawyer with his arms hanging stiffly at his side and his fists clenched. He felt guilty about Bella, wanted to take a swing at someone. He was beginning to attract the attention of others in the locker room.

‘Easy, Joe. I’m only doing my job, I have to ask these questions. You’ll thank me for it later.’

‘The kids should never have been dragged halfway round the world by a mother who even then would take off at the drop of a hat and disappear for a week or more. Kids need a mother, not to be dumped with a string of agency nannies who don’t even speak proper English.’ His chest heaved as he fought to control his own passion. ‘They also need a father, yet because of her I scarcely knew them. Now with Bella I’m never going to get the chance.’ He jammed a college ring back on his finger with a violence that must have hurt, but he did not flinch. Rather his voice grew quieter, more disciplined, the words like ice.

‘She is a completely irresponsible mother, Toni, and in a million years I’ll never forgive her.’

‘Try not to make it all too bitter, Joe. That’s the way things get messy. Expensive.’

‘No worries. My company’s backing me on this one, it’s agreed to pay every cent of my legal costs. No expense spared this time around. Don’t let it go to your head, you bastard. Just make sure I win.’

‘If it can’t be done neatly and cleanly, she’ll fight. She’s got to protect her professional image as Miss Clean, won’t accept being pilloried as an unfit mother.’

‘But she is an unfit mother. That’s the whole point. And she may find it more difficult to contest than she thought.’

‘What do you mean?’

Michelini turned to look into the mirror as he adjusted his silk tie. He was all control now. ‘Because she’s away so much she left it to me to sort out the bills and family finances, that sort of thing. Gave me power of attorney in case anything happened to her.’ He finished the knot with a flourish and turned to face the lawyer. ‘I have control of her bank accounts.’ He paused. ‘Sadly, we hit a lot of unusual family expenses recently. When she gets round to looking into her accounts, she’ll find nothing but a rainstorm of red ink.’

‘You cleaned her out? But she can sue the pants off you for that.’

‘If she wants all her dirty underwear spread out in public, sure. And if she can find a lawyer to work for her for love and no money. So I’ll be reasonable, we’ll compromise. I shall let her have a clean and quiet divorce. I won’t drag her reputation through the mud. I’ll even replenish her bank accounts. All on one condition.’

‘Which is?’

‘She killed my baby girl. I’m not going to let her have that chance with my only son, Toni, not if I have to fight her in every court in the land.’ He slipped into his jacket, flexing his shoulders as though the well-tailored suit was his armour and he was once again ready to do war with the world. ‘I want custody.’

She stared without comprehension at the face at the foot of the bed. Too much had collided in her mind that day and it had left her drained and disorientated. Shortly after breakfast she’d heard he was looking not just for a divorce but custody. War, with Benjy as the battlefield and her fresh out of ammunition.

There was physical pain, as though someone were wrenching out a tree which had its roots growing deep within her. She saw life through a haze of unreality, the sterile and polite conversations around her bed echoing like the hollow laughter of a cocktail bar, the walls drawing in, closing down her world, stifling her. While she was there, idle, they would be plotting to grab Benjy. She had to get out.

When she had raised her intention of discharging herself, they had not been unsympathetic. Her physical progress was excellent, her neurological signs improving, as long as she didn’t overdo it the change of scene and stimuli might do both her and the child good. They had suggested – firmly, to the point of insistence – that she spend ten days as an out-patient in the neurology department and then, with fortune and continued progress, she would be free. Another check-up in three months, again six months after that, and they could pronounce her recovered. A minor miracle of the medical profession on which they could congratulate themselves.

It was only at the point when she began to focus on escape as reality rather than theory that she came to realize what a huge step it entailed. She was a woman in a strange land, penniless, with neither possessions nor friends, and a young child in her charge, lacking even a means of proving her identity. Such practicalities had seemed so unimportant – up to now. Where did she start trying to pull it all back together?

She was stumbling through an undergrowth of tangled personal details when out of the blue he was there, waiting to catch her as she fell.

‘Hello. How are you getting on?’

She gazed at him in some bewilderment. ‘I know you but …’

A hand reached out. ‘Paul Devereux. Remember? You interviewed me, a few months ago.’

‘Of course …’ The soft, watery pale blue eyes, the clipped sentences. ‘I’m sorry. It’s as though you’ve stepped out of a past life. I don’t associate you with this world.’ She waved her hands around her, extending one to meet his greeting. The lights were beginning to switch on. ‘You gave me an exclusive.’

‘And you gave me a bloody hard time.’ His expression implied no hard feelings.

‘If I remember correctly,’ she replied, tenaciously but not unkindly, ‘you played the male politician and expected me to play the little lady. Foreigner, too. Easy meat, you thought.’

He took the challenge in his stride. ‘Indeed, it hadn’t passed my attention that you were both a foreigner and an attractive woman – if one is allowed to remark on such things in these politically correct days of ours.’ He shrugged to indicate he was a hopeless case. ‘And by the time you’d finished I felt in need of a visit to one of my own casualty departments.’

‘Something like that,’ she nodded approvingly.

‘No need to worry. The scars have almost healed.’

‘I wasn’t worried, Mr Devereux,’ she assured him, rejecting with a smile his appeal for the sympathy vote.

‘No, I didn’t suppose you were. I see you are regaining your strength. Practically fighting fit, I’d say.’ He was enjoying the banter. ‘I’m delighted.’

‘Why?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Sorry. I mean, why are you here? It’s not every day a Government Minister drops in to check my vital signs.’

He chuckled. ‘As Secretary of State for Health, hospitals were very much part of my world, and this hospital in particular. This is Weschester, my constituency, you see, and I make a point of dropping by every month.’

‘I don’t have a vote, I’m afraid.’

‘Voters hold sway perhaps once every four or five years, Miss Dean. Chickenfeed compared with the power wielded by you and your colleagues in the media. But this is merely a social call. Heard what a remarkable recovery you’ve staged. Wanted merely to find out how you were progressing.’

She told him she was leaving hospital. He seemed dutifully concerned. She admitted that it was going to prove rather more complicated than she had realized. Should’ve asked K.C. for help, but hadn’t thought …

‘As your local Member of Parliament ad interim, perhaps I can help.’ His smile was warm, well practised. A political smile. To be ignored. Yet in those remarkable blue eyes, where feelings can rarely be hidden, she thought she could detect more than a merely professional interest. Not entirely avuncular, either.

‘I have nothing, absolutely nothing, but the hospital gown I am wearing.’

Aware for the first time that she was a shade underdressed, she moved across the room to her dressing gown.

As she put it on she couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. She hadn’t lost weight as quickly as she would have liked after the second birth, her breasts were heavier and she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the muscle tone she’d been building to lift and tuck everything back to its former shape had largely dissolved with the extended bed rest. It bothered her that he was looking, but only because she wasn’t at her best. The style in her dark red hair was gone and she felt dowdy, unattractive. Very post-maternity. Once again she was left wondering if there could be life after birth.

By contrast he saw a handsome woman of above average height who, although still frail, moved with grace across the room and who even in her anonymous hospital cotton was unquestionably feminine. The skin was clear, fresh, the hair brushed lustrous and her green eyes bright, active, questioning, eyes that were not made up but which scarcely needed artificial highlights, eyes he had seen many times on reports from the danger zones of the world where make-up would have looked faintly ludicrous. Green eyes, his favourite. Eyes that had danced in the midst of a room crowded with grizzled correspondents and that had helped him pick her out for the benefit of an exclusive interview.

It was the first time a man had stared at her like that since she came to hospital, and he made no attempt to hide his appreciation; self-consciously her mind brushed over the tiny root-like veins on her leg which had erupted during pregnancy and which she had resolved to have cosmetically removed. When she had the time.

Suddenly her thoughts struck her as strange. She had been faithful to her husband throughout their marriage yet here she was already worrying about what other men might think of her, and she of them. Such sensations were smudged with sadness, yet she could not deny the kernel of excitement that was also there. At least she was starting to feel something again.

‘And technically I have trouble in proving I exist. All my identification was lost in the crash.’

‘No problem. If you’ll allow me I’ll kick some backsides at the US Embassy. Get someone down to see you.’

‘You’re very kind. Should have done that myself but, before today, I hadn’t really given it a thought. Such things seem irrelevant when you’re lying in hospital with your memory rattled to pieces. I suppose I’d better get hold of my bank and find some means of living and dressing; social services are finding a boarding house in the town for Benjy and me to stay while I sort things out.’

She was thinking out loud, not beseeching help, but he responded without hesitation.

‘Look, you’re trying to get well, not bury yourself in problems. Allow me to cut through all this for you. Please. Not often a politician can do anything about real problems, we’re always too busy pretending we’re saving the world.’

She was amused by his modesty.

‘I have a house in Bowminster, about fifteen miles from here. Stacks of room, empty during the week while I’m in London. You and your son would be very comfortable, and very welcome. There’s thatch and plenty of land and a gardener who can be your chauffeur and run any errands. Give you the time and freedom to sort everything out.’

‘That’s far too generous …’

‘Don’t make me out to be something I’m not, Miss Dean.’

God, how incredibly modest and English he was, she thought. For a brief moment she looked into his moist eyes, flecked with the strange upper-class confection of authority and inbred decay, and wondered if all those stories were true and he was an archetypal English fag, before she realized she was being revoltingly cynical. Still, if he were, it meant she had nothing to worry about by staying in his house …

‘Since I have no family living with me any longer …’

OK, a closet fag. Christ, Izzy, the guy’s trying to help you!

‘… I hate the thought of the house standing empty for so much of the time. I’d be very happy. Telephone bill’s already enormous so don’t worry about that. And as for clothing and the rest, that’s easy.’ He plunged into his jacket pocket for his wallet. ‘You have to be a good credit risk. Here’s two hundred pounds to get you going. Give it back when you’re on your feet.’

‘But I can’t accept money from …’ – she was about to say a strange man but it sounded too pathetic – ‘… from a politician. The Secretary of State for Health.’

‘Oh, but I’m not!’ He clapped his hands, delighted to be able to overwhelm her argument. Unlike last time. ‘You missed it. The reshuffle. I’m now Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Defence. And you, Miss Dean, are a foreign correspondent. If my attempt to help bothers you, simply treat it as a bribe.’

They both laughed; she felt desperately vulnerable, it was time to stop fighting. She thanked him, and he arranged for his gardener to pick her up at two that afternoon.

Only later did the realization dawn that this was the man in whose hands were now held the future of the Duster and with it her vengeful husband’s fortunes.

A sense of well-being began to build inside Izzy as she collected Benjy and began to gather up the few items of clothing and second-hand soft toys that had appeared from the various streams of helpers and benefactors which trickle through any hospital. She had her son, whatever his father planned, and at last she was making a start on piecing her life back together again. She was no longer alone; things couldn’t get any worse, she told herself.

The Devereux driver would be arriving soon and it was time to bid her goodbyes. She made the round between ITU and the neurology department and up to the toddlers’ ward, all the places which had been her world for the last few weeks, shaking hands, receiving wishes, congratulations and gratuitous advice, offering her thanks.

It was in the toddlers’ ward amidst the muddle of bright colours and overstuffed animals, at the cot next to Benjy’s, that she came across preparations for another departure.

‘Time for us to go, sweetheart,’ a young black woman was instructing a small and very white child. The child, a girl, was scarcely a year old and protesting vigorously; the woman was of West African origin by her heavy accent.

Izzy felt a tug towards the girl, vigorously red-haired like Bella had been and not much larger, and her gaze wandered back and forth between woman and child.

The woman, noting Izzy’s interest and confusion, let forth an amused whoop. ‘No, I’m not her mother,’ she beamed.

Izzy returned the good humour. ‘Somehow I didn’t think so …’

‘I take her to meet new parents,’ she explained, before realizing this was scarcely an explanation at all. ‘I am from the social services. My name is Katti. This little thing is being adopted.’

‘Poor thing,’ was Izzy’s instinctive response, but she was immediately contradicted.

‘No, no, dear. She is lucky. Nice new home. Two cars. Loving parents.’ Katti lowered her voice to offer a confidence. ‘See, the natural mother is a single lady, only fifteen, from some place around Birmingham. Come here to have her baby. Lot of these girls come here, it’s quiet, by the sea, away from friends and parents, you know. Very private. First she says she wants to give the child for adoption, then the silly thing changes her mind. But her parents won’t let her back, see?’

‘I see. But I find it difficult to understand.’

‘Right. So the girl gets scared, thinking the baby be taken from her. Runs off and lives for months in squats, hiding, caring for the baby all by herself.’ Katti’s eyes, huge and encircled with dramatic dark rings, rolled in pain. ‘And she starts thieving and doing God knows what else for food and baby clothing. By the time we find her, the little baby is like a scrap of paper, so underweight, sleeping in a cardboard box.’

‘So you have taken the baby away from its mother?’

‘Goodness, no. We talk with the girl, and talk and talk. No rush. We never do anything in rush down here.’ She laughed at what was obviously a standard Dorset line. ‘In the end she agrees it’s best for her and for baby that she stick to the first plan and let the little one be adopted. No way she can cope. We don’t blame her, poor thing, she tries so hard.’

At this point the baby, indignant at having ceased to be the centre of her minder’s attention, threw up over the clothes in which only moments before she had been dressed. Izzy smiled and the black woman scowled in mock offence, but Benjamin pointed at the baby and gave a whoop of laughter.

‘Baby thdick, baby thdick,’ he gurgled. His eyes shone with impish joy. It was the first time he had laughed since the accident.

Still a month short of his third birthday, Benjy’s speech had been in any event rudimentary and the trauma of the accident had initially destroyed his willingness to persevere, yet since Izzy’s reawakening she had spent much of every day teaching him once again the basic lessons which fear had forced from his mind. For Benjy, and even more so for Izzy, every lisping phrase represented a major victory.

Now he was laughing, too. Fighting back. Growing again. Izzy’s eyes brimmed with pride.

‘Baby’s leaving hospital, Benjy,’ Izzy told him, straightening his collar. ‘You and I are going to leave hospital, too.’

‘Dake baby wid us.’

‘No, Benjy, this little baby’s going to go to a new mummy and daddy,’ she started explaining, but Benjy’s humour had instantly turned to petulance and childish frustration. Since the accident and her traumatic albeit temporary ‘desertion’ his emotions had become fragile, more clinging, impatient.

‘Not dat baby. Dake our baby wid us. Baby Bella.’

She gathered him in her arms and smothered him in kisses, clutching him possessively as though someone were about to snatch him from her, hiding within the curls of his hair the tears that were beginning to form.

‘Baby Bella can’t come with us, darling.’ The words hung bittersweet on her breath. ‘Baby’s dead and gone to Heaven.’

‘No!’

‘I’m sorry, Benjy …’

‘No, no, Mummy. Bella nod dead,’ he responded indignantly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lady came an took Bella away.’

THREE

With great tenderness Izzy sat Benjamin down, smoothed his hair, hugged him again, and gave herself time to recover. Patiently, with difficulty, she tried to explain to her son that he was mistaken. That he must have imagined things.

The boy would have none of it, sticking firmly to his claim. He had some concept of death, it was one of the first lessons that children picked up when seeing the scenes of suffering on which Izzy reported. Death was a child who went to sleep. Never to wake up.

‘Lady dake baby Bella. An Bella cry.’

‘Which lady? A lady like this, Benjamin?’ she asked, indicating Katti, the black social worker who had begun to take an interest in the plight of mother and child.

‘No, no. Different.’

‘A lady like me, then?’

Benjamin studied his mother as if for the first time, concentrating. ‘No.’

In an instant the image had returned to Izzy and, with it, dread. Fear burned a pathway up her spine, searing along the back of her neck and beneath the skin of her scalp until it had set her mind ablaze. In the flickering light cast by the flames she saw the same lurid mask as in her nightmare.

The girl. Eyes now full of terror. Melting away.

And taking Bella with her.

She grabbed a crayon and piece of paper on which Benjy had been scribbling. She drew a face, thin. Long straggles of hair.

‘Like that, Benjy? Hair like that?’ she enquired, haltingly.

He nodded.

‘An old lady, Benjamin? Was she an old lady?’

‘No, Mummy,’ he answered impatiently, shaking his head in disagreement.

‘And eyes?’

She drew two circles, but he looked blankly at her work. Then she began drawing around the circles, roughly, unevenly, until the eyes had grown small and the surrounding shadows distended and dark.

‘Yes. Dat her!’

And now Izzy fell silent, appalled, frozen in torment. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

‘Can I help?’

It was Katti. Izzy turned slowly, waking from a dream, part nightmare, part fantasy, but which nevertheless she felt certain was a dream.

‘My baby died. Here in this hospital. A few weeks ago.’

Katti’s eyes widened in sympathy.

‘I know very little, really, haven’t wanted to. Until now. Few details, no death certificate. But it’s time to sort everything out. How do I do that, Katti? Do you know?’

‘Your baby dies here in this hospital? Sad. But no problem. I tell you, I can sort all this out for you. Here, my card.’ She thrust a flimsy card with her details into Izzy’s hand. ‘You don’t worry. I find out everything, you call in a couple of days. OK?’

Weakly Izzy smiled her thanks and the torment began to recede. But, as hard as she tried, it would not disappear, for glowing in the embers of her torment was also hope. Pathetic, pointless, desperate new hope.

An idea struck her. A foolish one, she knew, but one which could do no harm, might banish the illusions and end the agony. Help make her certain. She left Benjamin on the ward, explaining she still had one more person to thank.

It was not difficult to find, though badly signposted. Those who needed it knew where it was. As she had regained her strength and begun to move about the hospital she had noticed the steady trickle of vans with no rear windows or apparent identification disappearing in the direction of the far corner of the car park.

It consisted of scarcely more than a prefabricated cabin. Above a set of large double doors was hung a small, unembellished sign, the only relief to its otherwise total anonymity.

‘MORTUARY.’

She stepped inside.

She was in a room which acted as a corridor. Down the centre of the corridor ran a grille covering a drainage gully. In one corner stood a mop and bucket, in another a tubular metal trolley and behind that a large wall chart on which, in numbers from one to sixteen, were charted names and measurements. The wall opposite was dominated by grey metal doors some three feet high, stacked in double rows, with corresponding numbers. One set of doors had a hand-written placard taped to it.

‘LONG TERM. DO NOT LEAVE UNLOCKED.’

The room was cool. From somewhere further within she heard a clattering sound, a metal tray being dropped, perhaps, and she followed the noise. She passed an open door through which could be seen a small wood-panelled chapel of rest, outside of which was arranged a row of cheap stacking chairs on which someone had left a pair of freshly washed wellington boots. As she turned the corner, the floor colour changed from grey to green; before she knew it she was through another set of double doors.

The room was considerably larger than the previous one, set out like a hotel kitchen with sinks and counters and plastic dustbins and scales and scrubbing brushes and spotlessly clean utensils of all sorts. Hanging from a hook on the far wall was a circular saw.

In the centre of the room stood two stainless-steel benches, each with a surface consisting of a shiny metal grille. On one lay a clutter of scalpels, hammers, saws, chisels, scissors, shears and other tools which would have made her late father, an enthusiastic woodworker, envious. On the other, under a spotlight which made the damp table gleam, was a small mound of material which was being attended and sorted by a small man in green overalls, apron, latex gloves and rubber boots. The floor around where he stood was damp. The strains of a Mozart symphony were being broadcast from a radio on a nearby counter and, as he leaned over the table, back towards Izzy, he clenched his buttocks in time with the music.

Pom. Pom-Pom. Pom-Pom-Pom-Pom-Pom-Pom.

While his lower body rose and fell with the rhythm, the rest of him remained utterly still, fixed upon his work. It was some time before he realized he was not alone.

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