The first step into the hospital hit me like a tidal wave. It was all there, the unceasing blur of noise, the relentless parching heat, but most of all that smell: disinfectant layered thickly over utter pollution, hundreds of bodies and sicknesses and terrors crammed together in too little space. The place felt like a weapon expertly crafted to strip you of all humanity, hollow you to a shell creature that would do anything it was told for the slim chance of someday getting out into the living world again. I almost turned and ran.
Somehow I managed to explain the story to the pancake-faced woman on reception, but I forgot her directions the second I turned away and ended up lost in a maze of corridors and stairwells, miles of rubbery blue floor tiles, people in scrubs bustling past me without a glance, wards jammed with metal beds and jaunty pale-blue curtains and drawn gray faces, things beeping and someone moaning and a guy on crutches dragging himself along with a terrible thousand-yard stare that I knew only too well. I had lost track of what floor I was on and I was fighting a flutter of panic—no way out, trapped here forever—when I turned a corner and saw a lean dark figure at the far end of the corridor, back to me, hands deep in overcoat pockets. Even against the numbing white light I knew it was Rafferty.
In that place he looked like salvation. I limped towards him as fast as I could, and he turned.
“Toby,” he said. He was shaved and crisp and alert, smelling of that sprucey aftershave; the hospital didn’t seem to have affected him at all. “I was waiting for you.”
“Where is he?”
Rafferty nodded towards a set of double doors. Next to them was an intercom with a large sign above it saying “THE BELLS,” which set a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in my throat. I managed to swallow it down. “They’re just getting him into a bed. They said we can go in once he’s settled.”
“What happened?”
“Not sure yet. I left him around half-ten last night. He was tired, wanted to get some kip, but he was in good form; joking, even, telling me if he was getting one last weekend away from home he would’ve rathered Prague. I made sure someone would check on him every half hour, see if he needed anything, wanted a doctor.” It seemed to me that Rafferty should have sounded at least a little defensive, Hugo had been in his care and now look, but he didn’t; he was cool as ice, he might have been filling in another detective on the night’s events. “According to the officer on duty, he got to sleep somewhere between eleven and half past. No complaints, not in pain, not feeling sick, didn’t want anything. The last check was at six: he was asleep, breathing fine. I got in at twenty past. He was on the floor, unconscious. We got the ambulance straightaway. I told them about his cancer, and the seizures.”
I couldn’t see anything through the double doors, empty corridor, white and blue and chrome— “What did they say? The doctors?”
“Not a lot. They checked him over in the ER, took him for a CT scan; then when they came out, they said they were heading here to ICU. I’m not family, they can’t tell me much. But they said”—Rafferty moved to catch my eye, I couldn’t stop jerking my head around, trying to get a handle on the place, all the perspectives seemed off—“Toby. Mostly, when someone who’s in custody gets taken to hospital, we keep an officer right next to them at all times. In case they try to do a runner, or attack someone, or they say something we need to hear. With your uncle, the doctor said no need for that, I could wait out here.”
“But,” I said. He was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. “If it was a, another seizure, they’ve got drugs for that. They can do things—”
The door wheezed behind me and I whipped round. It was a stocky white-haired guy in green scrubs, pulling off latex gloves. “Are you here with Hugo Hennessy?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m his nephew. What happened? Is he, is he OK?”
The doctor waited for me to go to him. He had to be about sixty, wide-shouldered but flabby with it, but he moved like a boxer, that