Michael Devlin sat alone in the empty hospital corridor. A thousand thoughts crawled through his mind. None stayed long enough for an answer. Instead he was numb. Empty.
It had been less than four hours since he had hung up the telephone. Since he had ended his conversation with Daniel, both amused and bemused, with a promise that they would speak in the morning. Since he had feared that his friend was going to make his life more eventful than he wanted. Those fears now seemed prophetic, but Michael had not foreseen how quickly his world could fall apart.
His bedside telephone had barely woken him at 2 a.m.; he was still half-asleep when he answered. It did not last. The sound of hysterical breathing, sobbing and a distorted woman’s voice saw to that. Michael could neither recognise the caller nor understand what was being said, but it did not matter. Something was very wrong.
Ignoring his own racing heart, he had called upon his skills as a witness handler to manage the caller. To slow her. To calm her. It took several minutes and, when he succeeded, he wished that he had failed. As the voice of Claire Lawrence finally emerged from the traumatised distortion only one word came to his mind: Daniel.
What followed was a blur and even now, hours later, his memory remained sketchy. He had listened to everything Claire had to tell him. The words had hit like bullets. They should have paralysed him. They almost did, until some primal instinct had kicked in. Somehow, from somewhere, an unconscious sense of responsibility had taken over just as his conscious mind had closed down. A sense that had forced him to act as a brother would. After ensuring that the police officers would remain with Claire until he arrived, he rushed to her side.
The Lawrence property’s front gate sat open when Michael arrived barely thirty minutes later. Record time. Not that it mattered now. He had driven the final few hundred feet of the driveway at a safer speed and parked.
The main door to the house had five separate locks. None was secure. Michael did not need to step inside to see why. Before it was halfway open he had been met by the first devastating sight he would see tonight: Claire Lawrence, sitting and sobbing on the lowest step of the main staircase.
Michael had sprinted to her side, past two uniformed police officers stood nearby. His knees had slid the last few feet as he threw his body down, level with Claire’s own. As he came to a stop he had wrapped her in his arms. For a few moments she was his world and he embraced her for all he was worth. As if he could suck the pain from her body and draw it into his own. It had no such effect. Instead she had sobbed harder, clutching at the one thing that still connected her to the man she had lost.
The temptation to remain on the floor, to give in to grief, was overwhelming, but Michael had resisted. Daniel’s priority in life had been his wife and child. Everything he had done had been for them, and now his friend would do the same. Grief would have to wait.
The next hours had been perhaps the most difficult of Michael’s life. Hours in which he contacted Claire’s mother and father, telling them of their loss and arranging for them to come to the house that night. He contacted Daniel’s own parents and told them, as gently as he could, that they had lost their only son. And he did the one thing that he dreaded above all else. The identification of Daniel’s body.
All of this he had done, and it led to where he now sat. On a cold seat in an empty corridor. Just moments earlier he had walked from the hospital morgue with any hope of it all being a terrible mistake erased. He had seen Daniel. So he knew for sure that his friend – the man who’d been like a brother to him – was dead.
Michael stayed seated. This was the third time in his life that he had lost someone he loved. The third time he reacted without tears. They would have been welcome. Any emotion – sobbing; wailing; screaming; even hysteria – would feel better than this emptiness.
‘Mr Devlin?’
The voice came out of nowhere. Looking up he saw that the speaker was the police officer who had driven him to the hospital from Daniel’s home.
‘Mr Devlin, is there anything I can help you with?’
Her voice was gentle. Soothing. Michael found himself enjoying its effect. It gave him something else to think about, if only for an instant. She waited for Michael to respond. He did not.
‘Mr Devlin, are you OK?’
‘Yeah,’ Michael finally replied. ‘I’m OK. I’m sorry, I’ve kept you waiting.’
‘Oh no, you haven’t,’ she replied. ‘You can take as long as you like, Mr Devlin. I just wanted to make sure you were, you know—’
Michael smiled. It could not have been more forced.
‘No, officer, I can’t.’
Michael’s words were directed towards himself as much as anyone else.
‘I’ve got my life to grieve, but not tonight. Tonight I have to be there for his family.’