Thicker Than Water

Taking it very slowly, I made a tentative pass at the whole complicated business of sitting up and then standing. It hurt a lot, but in some ways it had the abstract fascination of a crossword puzzle: finding joints that still pivoted and muscles capable of doing some actual work, and putting them together so that I moved in the directions I wanted to go.

Moving forward was even more of a challenge, because my head was full of fizzing static and my eyes were still refusing to focus or even to combine their efforts and look in the same direction. A concussion? That would be bad.

Inching my way along the rail, I made it to a fence and - after a few false starts - scrambled-slid-slipped over it into a narrow alley that led out onto st l I the street. I had some vague idea in my head about knocking on the first door and asking them to call an ambulance, but a woman with a yappy little dog screamed when she saw me and in no time I’d drawn a small crowd. Someone helped me to sit down again, at the side of the kerb, and I hovered at the ragged edge of consciousness while another someone called for an ambulance. ‘Love Walk. Love Walk in Peckham. Yeah, I think he’s been mugged. His face is covered in blood and he’s—’

What? Luckier than he had any right to expect? Probably, because when I surfaced again for real underneath a sardonically winking strip light in the corridor of some cavernous casualty unit (back at the Royal London, by a grim irony) floating on the wave of amiable invulnerability that comes with tramodol, it was to the good news that most of my internal organs seemed to be intact and functioning: two cracked ribs were a minor nuisance, or would have been if one of them hadn’t punctured the lining of my left lung. The broken finger on my right hand was scarcely worth mentioning, and my nose hadn’t broken after all, although it had swollen up spectacularly and the orbits of my eyes were deep purple.

The young Australian doctor decided to keep me overnight for a brain scan and a bit more prodding about in my chest cavity to see if the lung itself had been damaged in any way. But he was cheerfully optimistic about the whole concussion thing because I could count to five without clues and I knew who the prime minister was.

So all things considered, I’d come out ahead of the game. My attacker had come from the Salisbury: he was nothing to do with Rafi, so our cover was still safe. I hadn’t been killed or even crippled. And I knew something about that dead man that might come in handy somewhere down the line.

All the same, I decided, enough was enough. It was time to take a leaf out of Juliet’s book, and start going for some throats.

12

‘They feeding you okay?’ Nicky asked, taking a tentative sniff of the plastic pitcher of orange cordial - I’m using the word ‘orange’ to refer to the colour, not to the taste - that stood on my bedside table. Evidently it was less enticing than wine breath. He put it down and shoved it away firmly to arm’s length.

‘You any good at syllogisms?’ I countered.

‘Socrates is my bitch.’

‘Then work it out. Everyone in a hospital eats hospital food. Everyone in a hospital is sick. Conclusion?’

‘Right. I heard it was even worse than the shit they give you in prison.’

‘Makes sense. In prison, most people are strong enough to fight back.’

It was around lunchtime of the next day, and a lot of my aches and pains were maturing rather than fading. I had a huge dressing on my cheek that made me look a little bit like Claude Rains as the Invisible Man, and I was doped up to my eyeballs on drugs that had lightened my discomfort by shutting down large and important par viblts of my brain.

Things being how they were and the day being overcast, Nicky had volunteered to come around in person and fill me in on the progress he’d made with my data. He normally prefers to avoid away games and make me come to him, but I think he was curious to see how badly I was damaged. Of course a hospital is a safe, antiseptic environment, cooled by air-conditioning and wiped clean regularly with powerful disinfectants: that hits Nicky where he used to live. And on top of all that he was enjoying the attention, aware that the orderly who’d come through briefly with the medicine trolley had run off to tell all the junior doctors that they had a zombie in the place, and that a small horde of them were now watching him from the nurses’ station while pretending to sign prescriptions. They were all aching to dissect him and to debrief him about life after death at the same time. The ones with the strongest curiosity and the weakest morals would probably end up on Jenna-Jane’s staff at the Queen Mary MOU.