A good-looking young woman. Taciturn, dark – thick black hair piled high on her head in an out-of-the-way-for-work, no-nonsense fashion. She asked him his full name, as though she did not have such information from Anna, and wrote down what he told her on a form of many dashes and lines. She listened to his heart and chest through a stethoscope. Then she showed him the examination table, told him to stripoff and pulled the screen around him.
It was thorough handwork – they flew over him, fluttering like birdwings, kneading him like catspaws, pinching at him like the mandibles of insects. Compared to hers, Anna and Fitz’s once-over seemed almost perfunctory. Her hands read his body like braille.
‘That was quite a war you had, Mr Troy.’
She touched the raised seam of the scar on his right thigh. One that had never seen a physician. The shallow tear of a .22 bullet. Hand-stitched from a sewing kit in a hotel bedroom. Ragged like a torn hem. Detective Inspector Cobb’s parting shot in 1956.
‘I wasn’t in the war.’
She raised an eyebrow at this. She knew bullet wounds when she saw them. The tiny ridge above the hairline, left by a Browning 9mm. Detective Inspector Cobb, again. The Webley .38 scar on his right arm. A captain of His Majesty’s Household Cavalry, 1940. The punctured slash in his side where they had dug a Colt .45 slug from his left kidney and cut out half the kidney with it. Diana Brack, 1944.
‘I mean I wasn’t in the forces. I’m a policeman. Have been for nearly thirty years.’
The hands moved to his side, pressing into him, above the appendix he had lost at seventeen, the one on top of the other.
‘So you’re quite high up then?’ she said, and he could not be at all certain how idle a question it was.
‘Inspector?’ she mused. ‘Chief Inspector?’
‘Commander,’ he said.
It meant nothing to her. There were so few commanders.
‘Have you considered some other line of work, Commander Troy? This one looks like the death of a thousand cuts. I’ve seen the odd body as battered as yours, but their owners had survived the Burma Railway or the Battle of the Bulge.’
Troy said nothing.
‘OK. You can get dressed now.’
He emerged from behind the screen, tying the knot in his tie. Something he had never managed to do without thinking about it. She was hunched over one of her forms, filling it in at the speed of light, talking to him without looking at him.
‘How old are you, Commander Troy?’
The drawn-out vowels of a careless routine.
‘Forty-seven, I’ll be forty-eight in August.’
‘Are you a married man?’
Troy knew where this was leading.
‘Just get to the point, doctor.’
She looked up. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Forget your form. The statistics don’t matter a damn. I have no dependants, and plenty of money. Just spit it out.’
She put down her ballpoint pen. The slightest pause for breath, then she did exactly what he asked, and it still shocked him.
‘You have tuberculosis, Commander Troy.’
Troy said nothing.
He was furious. She must have known. Anna must have known that day she phoned him at the Yard and asked him to ‘pop’ in. Everything since had been check and double-check, but she had to have known. He’d give her hell for doing this to him.
The doctor misread his blankness, his manic self-absorption, for disbelief.
‘I can show you on the X-ray if you like.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for that. How long?’
‘How long have you got? Mr Troy, it needn’t be fatal. These days it hardly ever is—’
‘I meant. How long have I had it?’
‘Hard to say. Tuberculosis can lie dormant for ages. I’ve known some strains to appear fifteen years after the presumed infection. I doubt that’s the case here. You’ve a specific and readily identifiable strain. Quite rare. There’ve been very few cases in Britain, but in Eastern Europe they call it Khrushchev Flu. Of course it isn’t flu – nothing to do with flu. I’d say you’ve been incubating it for about six months or so, perhaps less, eight at the most.’
Moscow. Fuckit Moscow. He’d caught the damn thing in Moscow. Fuck Moscow. Fuck Charlie. Fuck Anna.
‘Six months?’
‘Give or take, yes.’
‘So it’s early days?’
She fumbled.
‘I . . . er . . .’
‘I mean. I don’t have it bad.’
‘Oh dear. I’m so sorry. No. It’s not early days. I’m rather afraid you do have rather a bad case. Mr Troy, you’re going to have to prepare yourself. You’re going to be off work for a long time.’
‘How long? A month?’
She said nothing.
‘Six weeks?’
She said nothing.
‘Three months?’
She shook her head vigorously enough for all three questions at once.
‘We can’t play this game. A year, maybe more, but at least a year.’
Troy said nothing.