Lethal White

by Galbraith, Robert

  The curtain rustled and a nurse entered the cubicle, stolid and practical in her overalls. Seeing that he was awake, she gave Strike a brief, professional smile, then took the clipboard off the end of Jack’s bed and went to take readings from the screens monitoring his blood pressure and oxygen levels. When she had finished, she whispered, ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

  ‘Is he doing all right?’ Strike asked, not bothering to disguise the plea in his voice. ‘How’s everything looking?’

  ‘He’s stable. No need to worry. This is what we expect at this stage. Tea?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks very much.’

  He realised that his bladder was full once the curtain had closed behind the nurse. Wishing he’d thought to ask her to pass his crutches, Strike hoisted himself up, holding the arm of the chair to steady himself, hopped to the wall and grabbed them, then swung out from behind the curtain and off towards the brightly lit rectangle at the far end of the dark ward.

  Having relieved himself at a urinal beneath a blue light that was supposed to thwart junkies’ ability to locate veins, he headed into the waiting room close to the ward where, late yesterday afternoon, he had sat waiting for Jack to come out of emergency surgery. The father of one of Jack’s school friends, with whom Jack was meant to be staying the night when his appendix burst, had kept him company. The man had been determined not to leave Strike alone until they had ‘seen the little chap out of the woods’, and had talked nervously all the time Jack had been in surgery, saying things like ‘they bounce at that age’, ‘he’s a tough little bugger’, ‘lucky we only live five minutes from school’ and, over and over again, ‘Greg and Lucy’ll be going frantic’. Strike had said nothing, barely listening, holding himself ready for the worst news, texting Lucy every thirty minutes with an update.

  Not yet out of surgery.

  No news yet.

  At last the surgeon had come to tell them that Jack, who had had to be resuscitated on arrival at hospital, had made it through surgery, that he had had ‘a nasty case of sepsis’ and that he would shortly be arriving in intensive care.

  ‘I’ll bring his mates in to see him,’ said Lucy and Greg’s pal excitedly. ‘Cheer him up – Pokémon cards—’

  ‘He won’t be ready for that,’ said the surgeon repressively. ‘He’ll be under heavy sedation and on a ventilator for at least the next twenty-four hours. Are you the next of kin?’

  ‘No, that’s me,’ croaked Strike, speaking at last, his mouth dry. ‘I’m his uncle. His parents are in Rome for their wedding anniversary. They’re trying to get a flight back right now.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Well, he’s not quite out of the woods yet, but the surgery was successful. We’ve cleaned out his abdomen and put a drain in. They’ll be bringing him down shortly.’

  ‘Told you,’ said Lucy and Greg’s friend, beaming at Strike with tears in his eyes, ‘told you they bounce!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, ‘I’d better let Lucy know.’

  But in a calamity of errors, Jack’s panic-stricken parents had arrived at the airport, only to realise that Lucy had somehow lost her passport between hotel room and departure gate. In fruitless desperation they retraced their steps, trying to explain their dilemma to everyone from hotel staff, police and the British embassy, with the upshot that they had missed the last flight of the night.

  At ten past four in the morning, the waiting room was mercifully deserted. Strike turned on the mobile he had kept switched off while on the ward and saw a dozen missed calls from Robin and one from Lorelei. Ignoring them, he texted Lucy who, he knew, would be awake in the Rome hotel to which, shortly past midnight, her passport had been delivered by the taxi driver who had found it. Lucy had implored Strike to send a picture of Jack when he got out of surgery. Strike had pretended that the picture wouldn’t load. After the stress of the day, Lucy didn’t need to see her son ventilated, his eyes covered in pads, his body swamped by the baggy hospital gown.

  All looking good, he typed. Still sedated but nurse confident.

  He pressed send and waited. As he had expected, she responded within two minutes.

  You must be exhausted. Have they given you a bed at the hospital?

  No, I’m sitting next to him, Strike responded. I’ll stay here until you get back. Try and get some sleep and don’t worry x.

  Strike switched off his mobile, dragged himself back onto his one foot, reorganised his crutches and returned to the ward.

  The tea was waiting for him, as pale and milky as anything Denise had made, but after emptying two sachets of sugar into it, he drank it in a couple of gulps, eyes moving between Jack and the machines both supporting and monitoring him. He had never before examined the boy so closely. Indeed, he had never had much to do with him, in spite of the pictures he drew for Strike, which Lucy passed on.

  ‘He hero-worships you,’ Lucy had told Strike several times. ‘He wants to be a soldier.’

  But Strike avoided family get-togethers, partly because he disliked Jack’s father, Greg, and partly because Lucy’s desire to cajole her brother into some more conventional mode of existence was enervating even without the presence of her sons, the eldest of whom Strike found especially like his father. Strike had no desire to have children and while he was prepared to concede that some of them were likeable – was prepared to admit, in fact, that he had conceived a certain detached fondness for Jack, on the back of Lucy’s tales of his ambition to join the Red Caps – he had steadfastly resisted birthday parties and Christmas get-togethers at which he might have forged a closer connection.

  But now, as dawn crept through the thin curtains blocking Jack’s bed from the rest of the ward, Strike saw for the first time the boy’s resemblance to his grandmother, Strike’s own mother, Leda. He had the same very dark hair, pale skin and finely drawn mouth. He would, in fact, have made a beautiful girl, but Leda’s son knew what puberty was about to do to the boy’s jaw and neck . . . if he lived.

  Course he’s going to bloody live. The nurse said—

  He’s in intensive fucking care. They don’t put you in here for hiccoughs.

  He’s tough. Wants to join the military. He’ll be OK.

  He’d fucking better be. I never even sent him a text to say thank you for his pictures.

  It took Strike a while to drop back into an uneasy doze.

  He was woken by early morning sunshine penetrating his eyelids. Squinting against the light, he heard footsteps squeaking on the floor. Next came a loud rattle as the curtain was pulled back, opening Jack’s bed to the ward again and revealing more motionless figures, lying in beds all around them. A new nurse stood beaming at him, younger, with a long dark ponytail.

  ‘Hi!’ she said brightly, taking Jack’s clipboard. ‘It’s not often we get anyone famous in here! I know all about you, I read everything about how you caught that serial—’

  ‘This is my nephew, Jack,’ he said coldly. The idea of discussing the Shacklewell Ripper now was repugnant to him. The nurse’s smile faltered.

  ‘Would you mind waiting outside the curtain? We need to take bloods, change his drips and his catheter.’

  Strike dragged himself back onto his crutches and made his way laboriously out of the ward again, trying not to focus on any of the other inert figures wired to their own buzzing machines.

  The canteen was already half-full when he got there. Unshaven and heavy-eyed, he had slid his tray all the way to the till and paid before he realised he could not carry it and manage his crutches. A young girl clearing tables spotted his predicament and came to help.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Strike gruffly, when she had placed the tray on a table beside a window.

  ‘No probs,’ said the girl. ‘Leave it there after, I’ll get it.’

  The small kindness made Strike feel disproportionately emotional. Ignoring the fry-up he had just bought, he took out his phone and texted Lucy again.

  All fine, nurse changing his drip, will be back with him shortly. X
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  As he had half-expected, his phone rang as soon as he had cut into his fried egg.

  ‘We’ve got a flight,’ Lucy told him without preamble, ‘but it’s not until eleven.’

  ‘No problem,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Is he awake yet?’

  ‘No, still sedated.’

  ‘He’ll be so chuffed to see you, if he wakes up before – before—’

  She burst into tears. Strike could hear her still trying to talk through her sobs.

  ‘ . . . just want to get home . . . want to see him . . . ’

  For the first time in Strike’s life, he was glad to hear Greg, who now took the phone from his wife.

  ‘We’re bloody grateful, Corm. This is our first weekend away together in five years, can you believe it?’

  ‘Sod’s law.’

  ‘Yeah. He said his belly was sore, but I thought he was at it. Thought he didn’t want us to go away. I feel a right bastard now, I can tell you.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Strike, and again, ‘I’m going nowhere.’

  After a few more exchanges and a tearful farewell from Lucy, Strike was left to his full English. He ate methodically and without pleasure amid the clatter and jangle of the canteen, surrounded by other miserable and anxious people tucking into fatty, sugar-laden food.

  As he was finishing the last of his bacon, a text from Robin arrived.

  I’ve been trying to call with an update on Winn. Let me know when it’s convenient to talk.

  The Chiswell case seemed a remote thing to Strike just now, but as he read her text he suddenly had a simultaneous craving for nicotine and to hear Robin’s voice. Abandoning his tray with thanks to the kind girl who had helped him to his table, he set off again on his crutches.

  A cluster of smokers stood around the entrance to the hospital, hunch-shouldered like hyenas in the clean morning air. Strike lit up, inhaled deeply, and called Robin back.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, when she answered. ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch, I’ve been at a hospital—’

  ‘What’s happened? Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. It’s my nephew, Jack. His appendix burst yesterday and he – he’s got—’

  To Strike’s mortification, his voice cracked. As he fought to conquer himself, he wondered how long it had been since he had cried. Perhaps not since the tears of pain and rage he had shed in the hospital in Germany to which he had been airlifted away from the patch of bloody ground where the IED had ripped off his leg.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered at last, the only syllable he seemed able to manage.

  ‘Cormoran, what’s happened?’

  ‘He’s – they’ve got him in intensive care,’ said Strike, his face crumpled up in the effort to hold himself together, to speak normally. ‘His mum – Lucy and Greg are stuck in Rome, so they asked me—’

  ‘Who’s with you? Is Lorelei there?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  Lorelei saying ‘I love you’ seemed weeks in the past, though it was only two nights ago.

  ‘What are the doctors saying?’

  ‘They think he’ll be OK, but, you know, he’s – he’s in intensive care. Shit,’ croaked Strike, wiping his eyes, ‘sorry. It’s been a rough night.’

  ‘Which hospital is it?’

  He told her. Rather abruptly, she said goodbye and rang off. Strike was left to finish his cigarette, intermittently wiping his face and nose on the sleeve of his shirt.

  The quiet ward was bright with sun when he returned. He propped his crutches against the wall, sat down again at Jack’s bedside with the day-old newspaper he had just pilfered from the waiting room and read an article about how Arsenal might soon be losing Robin van Persie to Manchester United.

  An hour later, the surgeon and the anaesthetist in charge of the ward arrived at the foot of Jack’s bed to inspect him, while Strike listened uneasily to their muttered conversation.

  ‘ . . . haven’t managed to get his oxygen levels below fifty per cent . . . persistent pyrexia . . . urine outputs have tailed off in the last four hours . . . ’

  ‘ . . . another chest X-ray, check there’s nothing going on in the lungs . . . ’

  Frustrated, Strike waited for somebody to throw him digestible information. At last the surgeon turned to speak to him.

  ‘We’ll be keeping him sedated just now. He’s not ready to come off the oxygen and we need to get his fluid balance right.’

  ‘What does that mean? Is he worse?’

  ‘No, it often goes like this. He had a very nasty infection. We had to wash out the peritoneum pretty thoroughly. I’d just like to X-ray the chest as a precaution, make sure we haven’t punctured anything resuscitating him. I’ll pop in to see him again later.’

  They walked away to a heavily bandaged teenager covered in even more tubes and lines than Jack, leaving Strike anxious and destabilised in their wake. Through the hours of the night Strike had come to see the machines as essentially friendly, assisting his nephew to recovery. Now they seemed implacable judges holding up numbers indicating that Jack was failing.

  ‘Fuck,’ Strike muttered again, shifting the chair nearer to the bed. ‘Jack . . . your mum and dad . . . ’ He could feel a traitorous prickle behind the eyelids. Two nurses were walking past. ‘ . . . shit . . . ’

  With an almighty effort he controlled himself and cleared his throat.

  ‘ . . . sorry, Jack, your mum wouldn’t like me swearing in your ear . . . it’s Uncle Cormoran here, by the way, if you didn’t . . . anyway, Mum and Dad are on their way back, OK? And I’ll be with you until they—’

  He stopped mid-sentence. Robin was framed in the distant doorway of the ward. He watched her asking directions from a ward sister, and then she came walking towards him, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her eyes their usual blue-grey and her hair loose, and holding two polystyrene cups.

  Seeing Strike’s unguarded expression of happiness and gratitude, Robin felt amply repaid for the bruising argument with Matthew, the two changes of bus and the taxi it had taken to get here. Then the slight prone figure beside Strike came into view.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said softly, coming to a halt at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Robin, you didn’t have to—’

  ‘I know I didn’t,’ said Robin. She pulled a chair up beside Strike’s. ‘But I wouldn’t want to have to deal with this alone. Be careful, it’s hot,’ she added, passing him a tea.

  He took the cup from her, set it down on the bedside cabinet, then reached out and gripped her hand painfully tightly. He had released her before she could squeeze back. Then both sat staring at Jack for a few seconds, until Robin, her fingers throbbing, asked:

  ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘He still needs the oxygen and he’s not peeing enough,’ said Strike. ‘I don’t know what that means. I’d rather have a score out of ten or – I don’t fucking know. Oh, and they want to X-ray his chest in case they punctured his lungs putting that tube in.’

  ‘When was the operation?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. He collapsed doing cross-country at school. Some friend of Greg and Lucy’s who lives right by the school came with him in the ambulance and I met them here.’

  Neither spoke for a while, their eyes on Jack.

  Then Strike said, ‘I’ve been a bloody terrible uncle. I don’t know any of their birthdays. I couldn’t have told you how old he was. The dad of his mate’s who brought him in knew more than me. Jack wants to be a soldier, Luce says he talks about me and he draws me pictures and I never even bloody thank him.’

  ‘Well,’ said Robin, pretending not to see that Strike was dabbing roughly at his eyes with his sleeve, ‘you’re here for him right now when he needs you and you’ve got plenty of time to make it up to him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, blinking rapidly. ‘You know what I’ll do if he—? I’ll take him to the Imperial War Museum. Day trip.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Robin kindly.

&nbs
p; ‘Have you ever been?’

  ‘No,’ said Robin.

  ‘Good museum.’

  Two nurses, one male, one the woman whom Strike had earlier snubbed, now approached.