or don’t want to go on. In your case, time will heal your wounds, and, as I’ve told you, what time can’t heal, surgeons can. We’ve come a long way in our ability to treat burn victims.’
He patted her on the arm, a gesture of comfort and assurance that he had probably made to his patients a thousand times before, and she hated him for it, hated him for his lies, and his blank visage, and for even thinking he could get away with patronizing her. He sensed that he had overstepped some mark, so he turned his back on her and began putting away his equipment and dressings. Still, her obvious antagonism seemed to have goaded him, and he could not resist attempting to assert his superiority over her.
‘You should have gone to a hospital, though,’ he said. ‘I warned you at the beginning: had you submitted to proper care, I might be more optimistic about any possible outcomes. Now we’ll just have to do our best with what we have.’
The boy appeared beside him. The doctor had not even heard him enter the room, and so it seemed to the older man that he had somehow materialized out of the shadows, drawing black atoms from the ether to reconstitute himself in the gloomy room. In his hand the boy held a photograph of a girl aged sixteen, perhaps a little younger. Her hairstyle and mode of dress indicated that the picture had not been taken recently. He turned the photograph so that it faced the doctor, like a conjuror displaying the crucial card in a sleight-of-hand trick. The doctor paled visibly.
‘Remember your manners, Doctor,’ said Darina. ‘Don’t forget who disposed of the evidence of your last botched procedure. Use that tone with me again, and we’ll bury you next to that girl and her fetus.’
The doctor said nothing more, and left the room without looking back.
Now here she was, out of bed for the first time since that bitch had scarred her. She wore a loose, open-necked shirt over a pair of sweat pants, and her feet were bare. It was hardly elegant, but wearing a buttoned shirt meant that she did not have to pull anything on over her head, and the sweats were comfortable and nothing more. The boy had brought her a glass of brandy at her request. She sipped it through a straw in order to avoid stinging her damaged lips with liquor. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mix alcohol and painkillers, but it was only a small glass, and she had been thirsting for a proper drink for days.
The boy began playing with his toy soldiers in their big wooden fort. They were knights on foot and on horseback, made from tin and carefully painted. She had bought them for him at a booth in Prague’s Old Town Square. The artisan who sold them also made imitation medieval weapons, and heavy gauntlets and helms, but it was the soldiers that had caught her eye. She bought hundreds of dollars worth of them: sixty or seventy in total. The boy was only a year old then. She had left him in the care of a nanny in Boston, the first time she had been separated from him since his birth, and had traveled to the Czech Republic to retrace his steps. All she knew was that this was the country to which he had departed in his final days, the last place in which he had drawn breath before that stage of his existence was ended, and a new one begun. He had no memory of it, and so could not recall the trauma of his dying. It would come as he grew older, but she had hoped to unearth some clue as to what had occurred there. She found nothing: those responsible had covered their tracks too well.
But she was patient, and the boy would have his revenge.
It surprised her how the old and the new could co-exist inside him. He was so like a regular child now, lost in games of war, but this was the same boy who had helped her to torture Barbara Kelly to death. At times like that his older nature took over, and he seemed almost surprised at the damage that his hands could wreak.
She checked email on her laptop, and began listening to the messages that had been left on her various phones. There was nothing of consequence on the main numbers, and it