NIGHT CREEPS BACK OVER LONDON.
People on their way home, the late workers and the early drinkers, pick up their free copy of the Evening Standard from the piles left next to the ticket barriers, glance at the headlines, then riffle through the rest of the paper, looking at pictures of houses they can’t afford, filling the minutes before their trains arrive to take them home to the cheaper suburbs, where they will eat something, then try and get some sleep before they have to do it all again.
In the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital white blinds are pulled down over night-blackened windows. An orderly does the rounds with a drinks trolley, handing out herbal teas to patients to help them sleep and coffee to the staff to keep them awake. The weary day shift hands over to the night, and medical information and gossip is exchanged. Because of its central position in the city, and the private facilities in the Kensington Wing, there’s often a celebrity or public figure to report. Today it’s the Met Police Commissioner, rushed here after collapsing earlier and now in room 302. Laughton hears two nurses talking about it in the corridor outside Gracie’s room.
Gracie has still not woken. The doctors tell her this is a good thing, and Laughton tries to believe them. The body heals itself best when that’s all that it’s doing, they say, so let her sleep. Yes. Let her sleep. But please God let her wake too.
Laughton looks up in response to a tap on the door and sees the eager face of the constable stationed outside the door. She forces a smile and waves him in.
“Just wondered if you fancied a brew,” he says. Behind him a skinny man in a green orderly’s tunic stands expectantly by a drinks trolley.
“Oh. No, thanks.”
He nods and she watches the door slowly close behind him, the number 322 above Gracie’s name written on a printed sheet.
322. The nurse had said that her father was in room 302.
They were on the same floor.
She looks back at her sleeping daughter, the tube in her thin arm connected to a bag of clear liquid giving her saline, and glucose, and the drug to counteract the toxic effects of the paracetamol.
She looks so small.
Laughton stands and stretches to squeeze some of the tension from her back. Through the window in the door she can see the orderly with the drinks trolley opening another door down the corridor. 326. Her father’s room must be in the other direction.
She looks back down at Gracie, watches the gentle rise and fall of her chest for a moment, this tiny and precious proof of life. Then she shakes her head, like she can’t quite believe something she’s just heard or thought. She blows out a long breath, quietly opens the door, and steps out into the corridor.
The sergeant looks up and moves to get out of his chair, but Laughton holds up her hand to stop him. “Just stretching my legs,” she says. “Will you keep a close eye on her for me?”
“Of course.” The constable holds up his cup. “Black coffee, two sugars—should keep me nice and sharp until the morning shift takes over.”
She smiles. “I’ll just be up the corridor. Shout if you need me.”
“You got it.”
She heads along the corridor, following the decreasing room numbers past the nurse’s station and around the corner where the floor becomes carpeted and the pictures on the walls a little bit nicer.
At the far end of the hallway another uniformed police officer sits on a two-seater guest sofa reading the Evening Standard. He looks up as Laughton approaches, eyes watching her over the evening headline:
SUSPECT IN SUNNYSET MURDER CASE CLEARED WITHOUT FURTHER CHARGE
“I’m not supposed to let anyone in,” he says stiffly, lowering the paper to reveal a drooping gray mustache that makes him seem sad and disapproving.
“I’m not anyone,” Laughton says.
He’ll know who she is. Her picture is on the front page of the paper he’s just been reading. They stare at each other for a long few moments, then he seems to relax and deflate a little.
“OK, five minutes.” He jerks his head at the door to room 302. “But don’t touch anything.”
“Thank you,” Laughton says, then opens the door and steps into the room.
Her father lies in an elevated hospital bed, hooked to various machines that record and monitor the flicker and pulse of his life. Just like Gracie, he has a tube in his arm hooked to a bag of clear fluid, but unlike Gracie, he also has an oxygen mask covering his face.
She steps forward, pulls his medical chart out of the metal well at the foot of his bed, and scans the single page of notes and drug dosages recorded in a hurried and spidery hand. Her medical knowledge is limited and largely involves corpses, so the information on the page reveals little about what is wrong with him. It might as well be written in Mandarin.
“Heart disease.” The voice makes her jump.
She looks up into the half-open eyes of her father. “Idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, if you want to get technical.” The oxygen mask makes his voice sound muffled. “Terminal, unfortunately. Come into the light so I can see you.”
Laughton hesitates, then places the cart back in the well and moves closer. He looks much older and grayer than he did earlier that day. He also looks small, like Gracie does. Maybe everyone lying in a hospital bed is diminished somehow.
“It started when I began feeling tired all the time, then my ankles started swelling up, and then I fainted a couple of times, so I got a doctor friend to check me over who discovered I had an enlarged heart. I thought he’d give me some pills and tell me to stop eating red meat, but instead he told me I had only a fifty percent chance of living another five years, and that was over a year ago now.”
Laughton sits in the chair next to his bed. “Is there anything they can do?”
“I could get a transplant, and I’m on a list for one, but apparently healthy hearts are incredibly scarce. The doc gave me some meds to ease the symptoms and some diuretics to stop my lungs filling with fluid, and I made him promise not to tell anyone how ill I was. I’d helped him out when his eldest son had got into drugs and a few bits of trouble, so he owed me a favor. Thing that annoys me most was that I always ate everything you’re supposed to eat, ran for miles every day, and yet here I am.” He looks down at the tubes coming out of his arms and the ECG monitor beeping softly next to him. “Guess the cat’s out of the bag now.” He looks across at her, the oxygen mask fogging with his every breath. “I heard what happened with Gracie. She going to be OK?”
Laughton freezes in the headlights of his question, a question she hasn’t dared ask herself because she’s so frightened of the answer.
“Her liver is damaged,” she whispers, so quietly it’s like she dares not say the words in case she makes them come true. “They’re trying to stop it getting worse, but she might need . . .”
She squeezes her eyes tight to try and stop the tears, but they burst out anyway. Behind her she hears the door open and lowers her head to the bed, burying her face in her arms.
“It’s OK, Roger,” her father says, and the door closes again.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “Sorry about this, sorry about everything.” He strokes her hair, ending a decade and a half of distance. “I had hoped, when I first found out how little time I had left, that it might be enough to make things right between us. Maybe it still will.”
Laughton opens her mouth to speak, but the words won’t come. Too much time has passed and her heart has become too hardened toward him.
“I don’t know,” she finally manages.
Rees nods, the pain etched on his face from far more than the disease that’s killing him. He strokes her hair and lets her cry.