said for the umpteenth time, his voice cracking. Samantha got up, moved past Shirley, and put her arms around Miles, kissing his thick hair, speckled with gray, breathing in his familiar smell.
Shirley said, in a high, strangled voice, “I’m not surprised she wouldn’t come. I’m not surprised. Absolutely appalling.”
All she had left of her old life and her old certainties was attacking familiar targets. Shock had taken almost everything from her: she no longer knew what to believe, or even what to hope. The man in theater was not the man she had thought she had married. If she could have returned to that happy place of certainty, before she had read that awful post…
Perhaps she ought to shut down the whole website. Take away the message boards in their entirety. She was afraid that the Ghost might come back, that he might say the awful thing again…
She wanted to go home, right now, and disable the website; and while there, she could destroy the EpiPen once and for all…
He saw it…I know he saw it…
But I’d never have done it, really. I wouldn’t have done it. I was upset. I’d never have done it…
What if Howard survived, and his first words were: “She ran out of the room when she saw me. She didn’t call an ambulance straightaway. She was holding a big needle…”
Then I’ll say his brain’s been affected, Shirley thought defiantly.
And if he died…
Beside her, Samantha was hugging Miles. Shirley did not like it; she ought to be the center of attention; it was her husband who was lying upstairs, fighting for his life. She had wanted to be like Mary Fairbrother, cosseted and admired, a tragic heroine. This was not how she had imagined it —
“Shirley?”
Ruth Price, in her nurse’s uniform, had come hurrying into the room, her thin face forlorn with sympathy.
“I just heard — I had to come — Shirley, how awful, I’m so sorry.”
“Ruth, dear,” said Shirley, getting up, and allowing herself to be embraced. “That’s so kind. So kind.”
Shirley liked introducing her medical friend to Miles and Samantha, and receiving her pity and her kindness in front of them. It was a tiny taste of how she had imagined widowhood…
But then Ruth had to go back to work, and Shirley returned to her plastic chair and her uncomfortable thoughts.
“He’ll be OK,” Samantha was murmuring to Miles, as he rested his head on her shoulder. “I know he’ll pull through. He did last time.”
Shirley watched little neon-bright fish darting hither and thither in their tank. It was the past that she wished she could change; the future was a blank.
“Has anyone phoned Mo?” Miles asked after a while, wiping his eyes on the back of one hand, while the other gripped Samantha’s leg. “Mum, d’you want me to —?”
“No,” said Shirley sharply. “We’ll wait…until we know.”
In the theater upstairs, Howard Mollison’s body overflowed the edges of the operating table. His chest was wide open, revealing the ruins of Vikram Jawanda’s handiwork. Nineteen people labored to repair the damage, while the machines to which Howard was connected made soft implacable noises, confirming that he continued to live.
And far below, in the bowels of the hospital, Robbie Weedon’s body lay frozen and white in the morgue. Nobody had accompanied him to the hospital, and nobody had visited him in his metal drawer.
III
Andrew had refused a lift back to Hilltop House, so it was only Tessa and Fats in the car together, and Fats said, “I don’t want to go home.”
“All right,” Tessa replied, and she drove, while talking to Colin on the telephone. “I’ve got him…Andy found him. We’ll be back in a bit…Yes…Yes, I will…”
Tears were spattering down Fats’ face; his body was betraying him; it was exactly like the time when hot urine had spilled down his leg into his sock, when Simon Price had made him piss himself. The hot saltiness leaked over his chin and onto his chest, pattering like drops of rain.
He kept imagining the funeral. A tiny little coffin.
He had not wanted to do it with the boy so near.
Would the weight of the dead child ever lift from him?
“So you ran away,” said Tessa coldly, over his tears.
She had prayed that she would find him alive, but her strongest emotion was disgust. His tears did not soften her. She was used to men’s tears. Part of her was ashamed that he had not, after all, thrown himself into the river.
“Krystal told the police that you and she were