Rotten Apples (7 page)

Planning to have a bath and perhaps a glass of wine from the latest mixed tasting case she had ordered from the Wine Society, she rounded the last comer before the mews and saw with surprise that several of the windows in the house were wide open.

Either Mrs Rusham had had a mad fit of absent-mindedness before she left the house, Willow thought, or there was something wrong. Hurrying along the street, fishing in her large, squashy suede shoulder bag for her keys, she thought of burglars and wondered if she ought to get some help before she let herself in.

There was no one around, and she thought that she would look an idiot if she summoned a busy policeman on such slim evidence of danger. Nervously unlocking the front door, Willow called out: ‘Hello?'

There was the sound of hurrying footsteps and the kitchen door opening. Mrs Rusham came out into the hall, looking quite unlike herself without her white overall. It was a moment before Willow realised that her imperturbable housekeeper had been crying.

‘Mrs Rusham,' she said at once, moving forward. ‘Whatever's happened? Are you ill? What is it?'

Mrs Rusham shook her head, gasped out an apology, and then said: ‘It's Mr Tom.'

‘Mr Who?' asked Willow, wondering whether one of Mrs Rusham's relations was in trouble. Then it hit her. In a quite different voice, she said: ‘My Tom?'

‘Yes. He's been shot.'

Willow felt as though her insides were being sucked out of her. There was pain, dizziness, a terrifying coldness and the awful, eviscerated emptiness in the centre of her body.

‘Not dead,' she said, not making a question of it

‘No.' Mrs Rusham gulped again and made a visible effort to pull herself together and give all the necessary information as quickly as possible. ‘He's in Dowting's Hospital with wounds to his chest, and he has a fractured skull. They think he most have hit his head awkwardly as he collapsed; He's on a ventilator and drips. They say that he's holding his own. I thought I'd better wait for you. I couldn't just leave a note about something like that.'

‘Thank you,' said Willow mechanically, her mind refusing to absorb the full impact of the news, even though her body was reacting to it all. She held on to the wall with her left hand and rubbed her damp forehead on the shoulder of her suit jacket. Her eyebrows clenched together as she tried to force her brain into some kind of rationality.

‘Where did it happen?' she asked eventually.

‘Somewhere in Kingston. It was his office who rang. They wouldn't give me any details. We've all been trying to find you ever since. They got the news at about half-past six.'

‘I was at the House of Commons. I'd better …' Willow took her hand down from the wall and looked at the fingers. They felt as though they ought to be swollen, but they showed no signs of change. It seemed extraordinary that any part of her could be the same as it had been ten minutes earlier.

‘I'll get over to Dowting's now.' Willow frowned. She couldn't see properly or think and her voice sounded peculiar. ‘And you'd better get off home, I expect. At least, hadn't you?'

Mrs Rusham nodded, blew her nose hard, and blundered back into the kitchen to fetch her shopping bag and jacket Willow stayed in the hall, unaware that the front door was still open behind her. It was not until the pressure of the keys began to hurt her palm that she realised she was still gripping them in her right hand. She moved jerkily to drop them on the pewter plate on the hall table where she and Tom always kept their keys when they were in the house.

‘Holding his own,' she repeated aloud. It sounded dreadful.

The telephone started to ring. Willow did not want to talk to anyone; she moved towards the stairs so that she could change into some clothes that would be comfortable enough for a night spent in a chair by a hospital bed.

Hearing Mrs Rusham coming out of the kitchen again, Willow stopped half-way up the stairs. Something moved sluggishly in her brain and she realised it was gratitude. She managed to unclench her lips and smile.

‘It was good of you to wait so long.'

‘It was all I could do,' said Mrs Rusham, sounding more like her usual efficient, unemotional self. ‘I'll set the alarms and lock up when you've gone. Oh, I do hope … Well, that won't do any good. I'll see you tomorrow.'

Willow nodded and went on upstairs, tripping over her feet, which felt twice as large as usual, and trying to ignore the buzzing in her ears and the clenching pain in the pit of her stomach. It was not until she had buttoned up her loose trousers that she realised it was her own muscles that were gripping tight around the emptiness. She made herself relax them. The pain seemed less intense at once, but she still felt sick and very cold.

‘Tom,' she said experimentally. ‘Oh, God! Tom. Pull yourself to get her and get a sweater. You need to be warm. It won't help him if you have hysterics. Get going. Tom. Take some money and don't forget the keys. Keys. Car keys. They're on the bunch by the door. Check the fuel before you set off. Tyres are all right. You know that. Take the keys. Oh, Tom, please hang on. Holding his own. Help him, for God's sake.'

Muttering to herself, she dressed and went downstairs again. Mrs Rusham was standing in the kitchen doorway, but she said nothing, for which Willow was dimly grateful. They nodded to each other, lips tight and eyes anxious.

Willow went out into the street to unlock her car.

The drive across the river to the big hospital could take no more than eight minutes in the early morning or at night, but then, at the tail end of the rush hour, it took Willow forty-five minutes, creeping along the Embankment and sitting for ten minutes on the bridge itself, breathing in the exhaust from the car in front of her. She could not work out what the burning smell was for ages and even then did not think to shut the ventilators.

Her brain still would not work properly and yet she could not make it ignore what might be happening to Tom. She tried to stop herself thinking by reciting childhood jingles, multiplication tables, and rules for this and that, even running through the proof of Pythagoras's theorem as it had been laid out in her O level maths book.

Eventually she reached the far side of the bridge, skirted the roundabout and found a parking space close to the accident and emergency entrance of the big hospital. She backed her car with difficulty and eventually left it slanting selfishly into the next space.

The smell of the old hospital greeted her in a waft of familiar comfort. It was made up of floor polish, food and drink from the visitors'canteen, disinfectant, recycled air and something else she had never been able to identify. Nowhere else in the world smelled like Dowting's Hospital.

Willow knew lots of people who hated it and everything it represented, but to her it offered instant reassurance. She had never been admitted to the place except to have part of herself mended, and she had never visited friends there who had not been cured of whatever ailed them. Some of the tension eased in her neck and shoulders, and as she walked across to the reception desk she moved less clumsily.

‘Where will I find Detective Chief Inspector Worth?' she asked.

A blankly official expression deadened the smile on the receptionist's face.

‘I'm his wife, Wilhelmina Worth,' she said, reaching down into the depths of her bag for some identification. She found her driving licence and offered that

‘Thank you, Mrs Worth,' said the man, his expression changing to one of intense sympathy. ‘May I say how sorry I am?'

‘Thank you, but I'd rather you told me where to find him.'

‘Of course. He's in a private room at the end of Sidney Ward in the ITU, that's the Intensive Care Unit. Tenth floor.'

‘Yes, I know the way. Thank you.'

Willow made herself wait for a lift, knowing perfectly well that, however long it was before an empty one appealed, it would take less time than climbing ten flights of stairs. Eventually the green bulb above the third lift in the row lit up and a moment later the doors sighed open. There was already an inhabited bed and a green-robed porter inside, but Willow pushed herself in beside the bed and pressed the button marked ten. She turned to smile apologetically at the patient, and, seeing that he was unconscious, raised her eyes to meet the gaze of the porter.

‘You going to ITU?' he said. ‘Visiting's over.'

‘I know. It's my husband. He's in a single room. They'll let me go in, won't they?'

‘He the policeman?'

‘Yes.'

The porter leaned across his sleeping charge, holding out his large, black hand. Willow took it and felt the first tears prickling at her eyes. She was at once touched and appalled by the man's wordless sympathy. That Tom's plight should already be known throughout the hospital made it seem as though he were in even worse danger than she had suspected.

The lift stopped. She looked up to check where they were and when the doors opened stepped out in the quiet dimness of the intensive care wards. A young nurse walked towards her, carrying a stainless-steel kidney bowl that seemed to be full of rubber tubing.

‘Can I help you?' she asked kindly. Willow, who had half expected to be told she should not be there, could not speak for a moment. The nurse turned away to put down her bowl and came back to put a hand on Willow's arm, waiting patiently.

‘My husband,' she said at last. ‘Tom Worth.'

‘Come along. He's down here. I'll take you. He's very fit. He's got a good chance.'

Willow could not answer. She walked through the door that the nurse was holding open and stood at the foot of Tom's bed, just looking.

His eyes were closed and his long, black lashes lay fanned out over the huge, grey-brown arcs under his eyes. His skin was the colour of old, dried-out putty. A great wodge of bandages covered the right of his head and another lay over his naked chest. There seemed to be tubes plugged in all over him.

‘It's just the ventilator, a saline drip, a discharge outlet from the chest wound, and a catheter. Don't let them frighten you.'

Willow hardly heard the nurse's voice or noticed when she left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

Quiet-footed men and women came in and out of the room at intervals during the evening. Someone brought Willow a chair and made her sit down. Later someone else talked to her, trying to persuade her to go to the canteen and eat or drink. She just shook her head and knew that they were whispering about her just outside the door. That did not seem to matter. Nothing mattered any longer except what might be happening to Tom.

As she sat watching him, she had to bite the insides of her cheeks to stop herself yelling. All she could think was that he might die, and all she could feel was a kind of nauseating panic.

It occurred to her later that grief was a lovely word, full of overtones of large-mindedness and dignity, quite unlike the mean, selfish terror that obsessed her as she sat by Tom's still body. She wanted to think only of him, but she could not do it. Every idea in her mind was connected with herself, with her fears and her guilt. Every snappish word she had ever spoken to him returned to accuse her, along with all the moments of insensitivity when she had hurt him or been thick about something he needed. She thought with loathing of the months she had spent dithering as she refused to let herself believe she loved him, or he her.

‘What a waste!' she said, oblivious of the nurses just outside the door. ‘Oh, Tom, I'm so sorry.'

Stop thinking, she commanded herself, knowing that she could not alter his fate however much she tormented herself with her own failings. And it was just possible that her mood might affect him. Rationally she knew that it was unlikely that he could sense anything about her presence in the room, let alone what might be going on in her brain, but for almost the first time in her life she thought that rationality might not be all important. Her mind, perhaps searching for something to distract itself, threw up a memory of his confession of superstition only that morning.

Willow did not wipe away the unaccustomed tears because she did not even notice that they were sliding down her cheeks and dripping on to the thick sweater. Tom's words echoed and re-echoed in her brain: ‘I'm superstitious about that …'

‘Stop thinking,' she commanded herself.

Her vigil was interrupted soon after ten by someone more ruthless than any of the nurses or the doctor who had spoken to her earlier in an effort to persuade her to leave. She did not hear him open the door, but she felt his hand pulling at her shoulder. Shocked at the contact, she turned her head fast and saw a tall, dark, angry-looking man in a crumpled grey suit. Although they had met only three times before, she recognised him at once as Superintendent John Blackled, Tom's immediate superior.

‘Hello, Jack,' she said hoarsely, before she coughed to clear her clogged throat. She became aware of her damp cheeks and wiped them with the palms of both hands, pushing outwards and downwards from the sides of her nose and then shaking her hands to get rid of the dampness. ‘What happened to him?'

‘I'll tell you all about it, but not in here.'

‘He hasn't recovered consciousness yet. He can't hear us.'

‘You never know with head injuries. It's just possible that he can hear. Get weaving.'

Willow breathed deeply and then followed the superintendent out of the dim room, looking over her shoulder at the bed. Despite her protests, Blackled took her downstairs to the visitors'canteen and bought her a bowl of salty, orange-coloured soup and a roll.

‘I know that the unmatchable Mrs Rusham will have left you something much better at home, but you ought to eat. You don't have to finish the bread, but you must have the soup.'

‘I don't think I can swallow,' said Willow carefully, having picked up the spoon and put it tentatively into the soup. Blind obedience to authority had never appealed to her, but she recognised his good intentions.