St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,34

week for more than three years. The grave was in the eastern part of the cemetery, well positioned to catch the morning sun, which was one reason he preferred to visit at this time of day. He picked it out with ease from a distance, despite its simplicity: a small plot with a simple marble headstone.

Fin laid the flowers before the headstone and straightened, gazing down at it.

In our hearts and memories, the inscription read. Catherine Finmore-Gage. Her date of birth followed, then her date of death. July 17, three years ago.

He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and slipped back effortlessly to that day. July the seventeenth.

He and Catherine had been living in a different flat from the one he owned now, in Notting Hill. The journey to St Matthew’s each day took up precious time but Catherine, who was a junior partner in a law firm, worked within walking distance of the flat and he was happy to oblige her. It was a hot summer’s evening, the flat’s air conditioning failing to keep the humidity of the city at bay, and Fin sat at his desk with the window open, preparing a lecture he was going to deliver at a conference in Edinburgh the following week.

As the light began to fade, he became gradually aware that Catherine wasn’t around. Looking up from his work, he realised she’d been gone some time. He checked his watch. Two hours. It hit him, then, that she’d put her head in at the door and said she was going out to the supermarket for some milk and bread, and would be back in fifteen minutes. He’d been so absorbed in what he was doing that he’d failed to notice she hadn’t returned.

Alarm turned to panic as he roamed through the flat, established that she was indeed still not home, and then began ringing their local neighbours and friends, on the off-chance that she’d stopped in to chat with one of them. Nobody had seen her. He put down the receiver after the last call and the phone rang. Fin snatched it up immediately.

Catherine was in the Accident & Emergency Department at the local hospital, not St Matthew’s. She’d been brought in an hour ago but it had taken some time to locate an address and phone number for her as all she’d had by way of identification was a credit card with her name on it. The credit card company had supplied her contact details and the hospital had rung Fin.

Catherine had been hit by a car as she was crossing the road on the way back from the supermarket. The driver had, according to eyewitnesses, been speeding, and hadn’t stopped after hitting her. She was unconscious on arrival at the hospital and had suffered multiple injuries.

Fin dropped the receiver and sprinted out of the flat and to his car, tearing through the streets and at one point narrowly missing a group of pedestrians – now wouldn’t that have been ironic – before pulling up outside the hospital in a howl of tyres. He burst through the doors of the A&E Department and raced from cubicle to cubicle, trailing a chorus of angry and confused shouts.

He found them in the resuscitation room, Catherine supine on the bed and an army of doctors and nurses working on her. One of the nurses tried to steer him back out but he explained tersely who he was and what he did, and after a glance at the consultant emergency specialist, she nodded for him to stay.

‘Tell me,’ he snapped at the consultant, who was the most senior doctor in the department.

‘Your wife has a skull fracture with an extradural haematoma, as well as a significant crushing injury to the chest. Cardiac tamponade.’

Catherine had bleeding on the brain, and blood in the sac surrounding her heart, putting growing pressure on the organ. Both severe, life-threatening injuries. In her case the heart problem was the more urgent one.

The A&E consultant explained that he’d carried out pericardiocentesis, the draining of blood from the sac. Fin looked at the heart monitor. The rhythm appeared normal.

He said, ‘She needs a pericardiectomy.’

The consultant shook his head. ‘Not indicated. Her heart’s looking good.’

‘The tamponade might come back.’

‘Then we’ll drain it again.’

Fin was accustomed to taking heroic measures. A pericardiectomy was an invasive procedure, an operation to cut open part of the sac surrounding the heart to ensure all the blood and other fluid was removed. He stepped forward, seized the other doctor