by Henry Porter
‘Age cannot wither her,’ he murmured to himself as he touched the flank of the sphinx, ‘nor custom stale her infinite variety … She makes hungry where most she satisfies: for vilest things become themselves in her.’
He knew too much about the damned needle and it reminded him of the obsessed, cocksure young intelligence officer who thought he had all the answers.
He walked round the end of the sphinx to look over a short flight of steps, to the wide stone platform that projects from the line of the embankment into the Thames. There was no sign of Tomas so he moved past the obelisk to the second sphinx, whereupon he stopped and peered again. Nothing. He looked up and down the road as a shoal of seven or eight cars was released by the traffic lights a little further to the east, and then mounted the steps that led to the platform. He found him hidden, sitting on a ledge directly beneath the monument. He called out to him but Tomas didn’t turn. He had his hands over a pair of earphones and he was staring down the river towards Waterloo Bridge and the illuminated cupola of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Harland moved in front of him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He noticed that the stone was covered with a thin film of mud so he sat down beside Tomas and lifted his feet to the ledge. He was about to say something but was silenced by the view. He had never imagined London could be so still. Even the city’s permanent background hum of traffic had faded with the approach of Christmas Day.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what are we going to do about all this?’
Tomas looked at him. He was shaking a little and his face was pinched with cold, like the first time Harland saw him.
‘What if my mother had come here that day? Would I have been born, I wonder? Would I have grown up with you as my father? Would I have lived in London? Would Flick be alive today? I was thinking about those things.’
Harland opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
‘I don’t know the answers to all that,’ he said. ‘But I’m certain that you should now tell me everything you’ve held back from me. Then we can decide what we’re going to do about them. Maybe we should call your mother and get things straightened out.’
‘I have not talked to my mother in two years.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she deceived me about my father, because I could not talk to her about the things I had seen and done – things that I cannot talk to you about, Mr Harland.’
‘Call me Bobby, for heaven’s sake. I’d find it a lot easier.’
‘Bobby,’ he said bleakly.
‘Spit it out,’ said Harland gently. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to the police and tell them what you know about Flick’s killers. Otherwise, they’re going to think you had something to do with it.’
‘Well, I did. I did cause her death, just like I caused the death of the man in Bosnia.’
‘Bosnia? Why the hell are you talking about Bosnia?’ His mind was flooded with all kinds of connections, but he wasn’t going to push things. He told himself to allow Tomas to speak in his own time.
It had begun to spot with rain. Tomas got up, walked to the parapet and turned to Harland. He was about twenty feet away and reduced almost to a silhouette by the three floodlights that were ranged along the top of the parapet to light the obelisk. Harland watched the raindrops fizz on the floodlights and waited for his son to speak.
‘It all begins here,’ said Tomas, throwing out his hands. ‘Everything in my life begins here. Tell me, is there somewhere like that in your life, Bobby, some very significant place?’
‘Yes,’ said Harland after a while. ‘Here.’
‘How strange that is.’ There was a hint of a smile in his voice.
Suddenly his hand jerked upwards and he staggered forward. Then his body folded like a hinge at the abdomen and he was pushed back with a terrible force. Harland’s mind took in two further shots. One hit the middle floodlight and caused it to explode; the second cracked into the parapet about a foot from where Tomas’s head had come to rest. He flung himself forward to Tomas’s body. Another shot came and ricocheted with a long whine between the parapet and the obelisk. He looked at Tomas and in an instant knew he was dead.
He scuttled back crab fashion to the steps which on his side were ten deep, as against the six on the other. He edged into the shadow of the obelisk and peeped over the top step. A flash in the shrubbery across the road told him the gunman’s position. But he didn’t register the sound of the shot, just the burst of mud and stone some fifteen feet behind him. He looked again. There was a slight disturbance in the bushes. The gunman was leaving. Maybe he was coming after him.
He crawled back to Tomas and looked down into his lifeless face. There was a mass of blood pooled by a wound in his throat and he appeared to have been hit in the stomach also. Harland felt the uninjured side of his neck where there wasn’t a trace of a pulse. So he picked up a hand and fumbled beneath the cuff of Tomas’s jacket. There was something, a very faint flicker of life, although he wasn’t sure whether he was feeling his own racing pulse.
He looked up again and saw a movement. Someone was running across the road. Maybe there were two of them. He crouched down again and made for the gap in an iron railing which allowed access to a steep flight of steps running down to the river. He could see in the light from the street that their surface had been greased to a treacherous finish by the tide. He lunged to his left, found the handrail and plummeted down the steps, slipping and falling, but never quite losing his grip on the handrail.
He had some notion that he would be able to escape along the sandbank which was showing at the edge of the water into the shadow of the embankment wall. But that idea ended with the snapping fire of a different type of gun behind him and a sudden, livid pain in his shoulder. His hand instinctively released the handrail and he fell forward, somehow managing to propel his weight around the corner of the massive Victorian stone buttress and into utter dark.
He was convulsed with pain, but he was certain his wound wasn’t serious. For one thing he could still clench and unclench the fist of his right hand. He hugged the wet stone, clinging to the crevices with his fingernails, and waited for his breath to subside. He strained to work out what was going on thirty feet above him, but the groans of an old pleasure boat buffeting against the wooden piles nearby made it impossible to hear. He waited. There was a brief sound of a siren and the squeal of tyres. More gunfire. Then right behind him there came a sloshing noise and a voice croaked in the dark, ‘Hey, you! What’s happening up there?’
He swung round to find a dim torch a couple of feet from his head and beneath it a very old face, much of it covered by a grey beard. The torch appeared to be part of some kind of headgear because every time the face moved the torch did. Harland was aware of a fretful pair of eyes looking at him.
‘Get that light off,’ he said under his breath, ‘unless you want to get killed.’
A hand reached up and switched off the torch. ‘What’s going on up top?’
‘Someone’s been seriously injured – my son. Who the hell are you?’
‘Saint George,’ said the figure, apparently unconcerned by the news. ‘Cyril St George – mudlark. This is my patch. Been here twenty-two years. Before that in Southampton – under the old pier there. Maybe you know it.’
Harland didn’t reply. He realised that the old man must work the riverbank at low tide for coins.
‘Can you get me out of here?’ he said. ‘I’ve been hit.’
‘Not for a few minutes, I can’t. Wait for the tide, because sure as eggs is eggs it won’t wait for you.’ He switched the lamp on and looked at a watch pinned to one of his many outer garments. ‘Five minutes or so and we should be all right. Good conditions this evening. Couldn’t miss a tide like tonight’s.’
They waited without speaking, the old man’s breath rasping in Harland’s ear.
‘Right, let’s be having you,’ he whispered, and took hold of Harland’s left hand and placed it on the hem of
some very coarse material. ‘Don’t lose your grip and follow me. If I take off into the current, don’t be afeared. I know what I’m doing down here – I should do after all these years.’ He coughed a laugh.
They set off and edged along the wall immediately below the obelisk in about a foot of water, then turned right so they were wading across the current.
Harland wondered why the old man didn’t carry some sort of stick but he seemed to know his way. They moved out of the shadow of the wall into a part of the riverbank where there was more light. In the shallower areas he could see a number of weighted traffic cones which he guessed the old man had appropriated to serve as markers when the tide was not fully out.
‘Nobody can see you down here,’ he said. ‘You think they can, but they can’t. Don’t you go straying now.’
They stopped while Cyril St George caught his breath.
‘Guns!’ he said with contempt. ‘I find a lot of guns in here. They throw them in the river after they done their shooting and they ’spect them to stay put. But the tide brings them to me and I take ’em straight to the police. It’s not just guns I find down here. Saint George knows where to look, see, and he finds rings and jewellery and very many ancient artefacts. And I see bodies. The suicides and murder victims all come past my bank.’
Harland could barely take this in. His shoulder was burning and it required all his concentration to stand still in the water without crying out. They set off again, tacking slowly towards a pontoon which was moored about a hundred feet ahead of them. The water was getting deeper and Harland felt the combined strength of the outgoing tide and the flow of the river. The tugging and sucking at his legs took him back to the East River and he wondered whether this time the water would win. Twenty feet from the pontoon the old man stopped.
‘You’re on your own now, son. It’ll go over my waders if I carry on. I’ll wait down here until the coast is clear, then take the steps.’
Harland edged round the old man and went ahead, struggling to control himself. He was certain that at any moment he would put his foot down and find nothing and be swept away. Such was his fear that he had difficulty in committing himself to each step, but the old man urged him on until he was within a few yards of the pontoon. He made out a metal ladder fixed to the end but saw that the pontoon was rising and falling with the swell of the river. He realised he would have to time his launch so as to catch the bottom rung before it rose out of reach. He watched the pontoon and tried to accustom himself to its motion, all the while hearing the sounds of the water reverberating in its huge buoyancy tanks. As the ladder reached the zenith of its climb, he dived forward praying that he’d meet it on its way down. A few desperate strokes and he caught the rung with his good hand just as his legs were being dragged under the pontoon. The whole structure reared upwards with the next wave, pulling him out of the water like a bottle cork. A few seconds later and he had clambered up the ladder and was sprawling on the deck of the pontoon.
‘Go on my son,’ came the voice behind him.
Now the only thought in Harland’s mind was for Tomas. He ran the length of the pontoon, climbed the gangway to the bank and scaled the padlocked gates at the end. He couldn’t see any movement around the obelisk, but a police car was slewed across the carriageway on the far side of the road. Its blue light was flashing and both doors were open. Only when he reached Cleopatra’s Needle did he see the bodies of the two policemen lying in the road. A car had just pulled up behind their vehicle and the driver was standing in the road speaking into his mobile. Harland shouted that there was another badly injured person on his side of the road, then leapt over the steps. Tomas was where he had left him. He knelt down and felt for the pulse again. He’d been right. There was something. A flicker of life.
He ripped off his own shirt, bunched some of the material together and held it against the neck wound with his right hand. At that point he realised that he himself had bled profusely. While he pressed the bandage home, he felt his own back with his free hand and located a shallow gouge aross his shoulder blade to the upper arm. He returned his fingers to Tomas’s wrist, willing the pulse to continue.
They operated on Tomas for six hours, extracting a bullet from his stomach without much difficulty and patching the wound where a second had passed clean through his shoulder. But the greater proportion of that time was spent on a delicate procedure to remove a bullet lodged in his brain stem, the area at the base of the brain which leads to the spinal cord. The shot had been deflected off a metal clasp on Tomas’s jacket and passed through his throat into his brain.
While Harland was being treated one of the surgeons came to see him to explain what they were doing. She said it was touch and go because Tomas had lost a lot of blood. At this Harland suddenly jerked up from the bed he was lying on. He’d remembered his own blood group which he had inherited from his father. Rhesus-null was one of the rarest in the world and the point about it – as he had discovered before his cancer operation – was that it clashed with O negative, which was used as a match-all in emergency operations. He told the woman that this might be a possibility. She looked at him strangely, then phoned through to the operating theatre.
As Christmas Day dawned, Tomas was placed in intensive care. The surgeon returned together with a distinguished-looking man in his fifties, who the nurses had informed Harland was Philip Smith-Canon, a leading neurosurgeon. The specialist introduced himself and asked Harland if he’d like some coffee in a nearby office.
‘So I gather from the blood group of the patient that you’re next of kin.’
Harland shook his head.
‘I will be tracing his mother in the Czech Republic. It would be better if you regard her as his next of kin.’
Smith-Canon looked puzzled, but decided to ignore it.
‘I ask because there are likely to be some difficult decisions to take over the next ten days or so. The patient is in an extremely serious condition and even if he survives the immediate threat to his life from this bullet and pulmonary infections, he is likely to face severe disability.’
‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘If you were to press me, I’d say it’s probable that he will suffer total paralysis and lose the ability to communicate. I’m sorry to be so blunt but I cannot hide that the prognosis is very poor. This kind of injury is the equivalent of a brainstem stroke or a serious tumour in that region of the brain. Whatever the etiology, that is to say the cause, we can predict the outcome with a relatively small margin of error. He’s still at considerable risk, of course, but he’s young and strong which may mean he’ll live to regain consciousness.’
His voice softened. ‘Mr Harland, he will wake to experience quadriplegia, mutism and facial paralysis, which may include the ability to blink. This is only half of it. There’ll be numerous smaller symptoms, respiratory problems, altered breathing patterns, involuntary movements of the face, incontinence of bladder and bowel. You understand what I’m saying? We’re talking about a state of extreme privation, fear and discomfort. But inside he will be aware of what’s going on and able to think normally.’
‘There’s never any chance of better recovery than that?’
‘Not in my experience. The trauma suffered in his brain stem was very considerable and although he may not experience all the symptoms I describe, essentially my prognosis is right.’
‘I see. But you knew this when you were operating to remove the bullet.’
‘Not until we were well into the operation. But you have put your finger on something we must talk about and that’s the question of resuscitation. There may be occasions over the next week or so when we will be faced with the decision of whether or not to continue to treat him. Often in these cases the patient is susceptible to pneumonia. That may be regarded – with the proper management – as a way out.’ He paused and drank some coffee. Then he looked at Harland with genuine sympathy. ‘I believe you to be his father, Mr Harland. I won’t hazard at the reasons f
or your wish to hide this fact, but the blood group match is almost irrefutable evidence. There are questions which cannot be dodged. If your son lives there are enormous problems to be faced concerning specialised treatments and care. No person in this condition can live without round-the-clock attention.’
Harland thought for a moment.
‘Look, as you have guessed, I am his father. I have known this for less than a week. The circumstances are extremely difficult to …’ His voice faded. He felt almost drugged.
‘How long is it since you’ve had a decent night’s sleep, Mr Harland?’
‘I can’t think. Three days?’
‘I suggest that you get some sleep soon.’
‘Let me just finish. I was going to say that I cannot tell you why anyone would wish to kill Tomas, but I suspect that there is a very evil man behind this shooting and the death of Tomas’s girlfriend. It will help me greatly if you do not reveal that Tomas is my son.’
‘You are asking me to lie?’
‘No. If the police ask you, I would not want to prevent you from telling the truth. It’s just that I don’t believe that the police will ask you. After all, they have no reason to interview you.’
Smith-Canon nodded.
‘Very well, I agree, and I will tell Susan Armitage, who came out with me just now, to do the same. But we will still need a next of kin to consult over the next few days. What of his mother?’