Gone to Ground (21 page)

Will had stayed with her for almost an hour, during which time he held her hand and told her repeatedly that she was going to be okay. Whether or not she heard him, he didn't know.

"She'll be woozy for a while," the nurse had said, "while the anesthetic wears off."

Will had nodded and continued to sit, watching for each small sign of movement, the flicker of an eyelid, anything. Once she did open her eyes and speak—a sound, at least, a garbled word such as his son might utter from the midst of sleep—before relapsing back into silence.

When Helen's parents arrived—rushed, nervous, panicking with concern—followed closely by her sister, he gave up his chair and moved away, standing behind the glass wall at the end of the room and looking in. Helen's face was so pale against the white pillow it almost disappeared.

As if underwater, nurses moved methodically, almost silently, behind him, going from patient to patient, bed to bed, checking, recording.

Helen's father gently lifted one of her hands and held it to his lips, and, embarrassed, Will looked away.

When a doctor came out from one of the side rooms opposite, walking fast, white coat flapping, Will tried to intercept him, but he swept on past.

"Excuse me..." His words left hanging on the sterile air.

Controlling his impatience, he waited for the doctor to return. His own heart, racing earlier, seemed to have slowed to the point where he could scarcely feel it beating. Aside from wanting to know about Helen, he wanted to know more about what had happened and how close they were to finding those who were responsible; he wanted to talk to Malcolm Rastrick in the incident room that had doubtless been set up at the station, but overwhelmingly he felt the need for reassurance first. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. How in fuck's name could the time move so slowly?

At last, he saw the doctor heading back down the ward, the same earnest stride as before, and went to meet him, setting himself squarely in his path. Sandy-haired, glasses, the equal of Will's height if not more, he fully expected Will to step aside.

"Helen Walker," Will said.

"Would you mind moving out of my way?"

"Helen Walker," Will said again. "She's a police officer. She was brought in last night after being attacked."

"You're her husband? Partner?"

Will shook his head.

"Family?"

"No."

"Then I'm afraid..."

"We work together," Will said.

"I see." The doctor looked into Will's face for the first time. "I'll tell you what I can. She was brought in having received a single stab wound to the abdomen, some eight or nine centime-tres deep. Fortunately, no vital organs were damaged. Nevertheless, your colleague had lost a great deal of blood. We had to operate to stop any further bleeding and repair the damaged tissue."

"And she'll be okay?"

"Oh, yes," the doctor said. "She's fit. She's strong. She did sustain other injuries, but these were comparatively minor, certainly not life threatening, and I would say, yes, there's every indication she'll make a full recovery, given time."

"Other injuries?" Will said. "What other injuries?"

"Not surprisingly, there was some bruising at the entrance to the wound, caused, most probably, by the hilt of the knife or the assailant's fist or both. There's also quite severe bruising to other areas, as a result of blows she received, in addition to cuts on her forearms and the palms of both hands."

Defense wounds, Will thought, Helen trying to protect herself from the blade.

"As I say, no need to concern yourself unduly," the doctor said. There was a faint smell of eucalyptus on his breath.

Will thanked him and stepped aside and the doctor hurried on his way.

Malcolm Rastrick was in his early fifties, a thin, near cadaverous man with a sallow complexion and sucked-in cheeks. He had transferred down from North Yorkshire fifteen or more years previously, and the accent still clung to him like burrs on a dog's coat. A stickler, that was the word. Slow to take offense, slower to forgive. No lover of fools. Will had worked closely with him a time or two before, and held him in respect.

He greeted Will now with a quick handshake and a nod of sympathy. "You've been to the hospital?"

"Yes."

"How's she bearing up?"

"Okay, apparently. Still not come round properly after the operation. Doctor says she'll be fine."

"She's a strong lass," Rastrick said, and then, "You'll want to know what's what."

Will nodded.

"Some of this you'll likely know already, some you might not. She'd been out with friends, Helen, girlfriends, four altogether. A few drinks, something to eat—that Turkish place on King Street—a couple more jars before calling it a night. Walked one of her pals as far as Market Street, saw her into a taxi and set off to walk the rest of the way home alone."

"She should have got a cab herself."

"Ten minutes from there to where she lives. Fifteen tops. Wanted the fresh air, I dare say. Clear her head."

"She should have got a cab," Will said again.

"Best as we can tell, and this is conjecture, so far, nothing more—we're taking witness statements now—Helen saw a fight going off down on the Quayside, to the right of the bridge, Magdalene Bridge. A bunch of blokes, a dozen or so, maybe more, kicking all tomorrow out of two men on the ground. Not just kicking. Clubs, baseball bats, you name it. Seems like Helen waded in, tried to put a stop to it, haul 'em off."

"She didn't call it in? Ask for help?"

Rastrick shook his head. "Likely thought if she didn't act then, someone might get killed. What happened, of course, they turned on her. Some of them, anyway. You've seen the result. Stabbed her and ran off, cowardly bastards that they are. Left her bleeding out onto the pavement. Luckily someone coming across the bridge saw her and stopped, called emergency services, did what he could to halt the bleeding. The ambulance was there inside seven minutes."

"Any idea who they were? These blokes?"

"Early days."

"Christ!"

"Come on, Will. We'll get there."

"You said witnesses..."

"Not so many this far. There'll be some, heard the disturbance, decided they didn't want to know. Besides, it was dark. Taxi driver, though, saw two groups of men coming off the other side of the bridge, running fast, sprinting. One lot got into a white van. They're arguing the toss over the details now. The others he lost sight of."

"Two groups, you said?"

"Apparently. One lot—four of them, he thinks, could be five—went off in the van. We're bringing in all the CCTV footage we can. It'll take a while, but we'll have a sighting, with any luck."

"And the two who were attacked?"

"One's still not regained consciousness. Maybe never will, poor sod. Officers talking to the other one now." Rastrick checked his watch. "Back any time."

"They're gay? The pair who were set upon?"

"Who's to say?" A smile flickered across Rastrick's face. "Used to be, I was a youth, ring in your ear and a few dangly bits, dead giveaway. Not anymore. We'll have to bide our time, see what laddie's had to say for 'isself. But if I were a betting man..."

The two detectives were back from the hospital within the next half hour. The victim they had been able to speak to was a twenty-two-year-old student from Hong Kong, currently in his second year at the Department of Architecture, following a special interest in environmental design. His companion was a twenty-six-year-old Roman Catholic from Honduras, studying theology.

They had been drinking with friends in a pub in the city with a large, but not exclusively gay clientele, and, a clear night, not too cold, had chosen to stroll down to the river. They were within sight of the bridge when several men started shouting abuse at them from across the street. At first the students ignored them, merely quickening their pace, but the abuse had got louder and more strident and then, when a half-brick was thrown in their direction, and they decided to cut and run.

Fifty metres along, several more men jumped out of a doorway in front of them. They tried to make their escape along the Quayside, but the architecture student slipped and lost his footing, his friend hesitated. And once that had happened, the men were all over them, punching and kicking, yelling more abuse, and then, once they were down, hitting them with clubs or sticks or whatever weapons they had with them.

The student said he was certain they were both going to be killed. Would have been killed, had not a woman tried to intervene, only to have several of the gang set about her as well. One man in particular, the student said, had attacked her with some kind of club, a baseball bat perhaps, and knocked her off her feet. Somehow, she had managed to get up, but then another man grabbed hold of her from behind and swung her round and then seemed to punch her in the stomach. At which point the student himself had been hit on the head—kicked, he thinks—and must have lost consciousness for quite a while, because the next thing he could remember there were ambulances and flashing lights and he was told his friend was being taken off to hospital. When he asked about the woman, he was told that she was already on her way.

"Bastards," Will said softly. "Bastards."

"Don't fret," Rastrick said, a hand to Will's shoulder. "We'll get them. We'll see they pay."

LESLEY HAD SOME VAGUE IDEA OF HAVING BEEN THERE before, Broadstairs, without remembering clearly when or why. Most of her early life, her childhood certainly, she had lived with her family in Derbyshire, and holidays, following her parents' inclinations, had been spent camping in the Lakes. Midges and mint cake and endless trudges up this or that mountain, most often in search of a view that, when they eventually arrived, was lost in mist. Damp visits to the Pencil Museum in Keswick.

But Broadstairs? The southeast? That nub of land that jutted bluntly out into the Strait of Dover, the watery point where the English Channel and the North Sea met.

Ramsgate, Margate, Broadstairs.

Stephen and herself playing cricket with their father on the sand, building castles that collapsed into the tide. An ice cream parlour, Italian, on the far side of the promenade and reached by a set of steps. Her mother reading Dickens—was it
David Coppeifield?
—and taking them to look at the house where the writer had lived.

She couldn't be making all that up. But how had it happened?

She had a vague recollection of going with her parents to visit some family friends who'd moved somewhere south of London. Had it been when they'd stayed with them?

Until recently, she would have called Stephen or sent him an e-mail. Am I going crazy, Steve, or...? Something squeezed tight high in her chest, rose in her throat. She could never now do that again.

Seeing a lay-by ahead, she pulled off the road and sat there for fully fifteen minutes, her face in her hands, sobbing, tears trickling through her fingers and running down her neck.

Gordon Hedden's house was one of several medium-sized villas on the road that rose slowly upwards from the centre of the town in the direction of Ramsgate and Pegwell Bay. Like the others, it was neat and unobtrusive, quintessentially English—a certain kind of English—with its low painted gate and privet hedge and window boxes green with daffodils that were yet to flower.

A chill wind rose off the sea as Lesley got out of the car and, despite the sun, shivered and fastened the buttons of her coat.

Hedden had seemed less than enthusiastic when she had first phoned, but in the end she had won him round. His voice had sounded a little tremulous and uncertain, but the man who opened the front door now and came down the path to meet her was spry enough, despite his years. No more than medium height, small-featured, silver-haired, he was wearing a beige cardigan over a broad check Viyella shirt, which like his cavalry twill trousers, had almost certainly been in his wardrobe for years. Decades, even.

There was a faint tremor in his hand when he shook hers, but otherwise his grip was firm.

"You found it all right, then?" he said pleasantly.

Lesley assured him the journey had been no problem and, after a brief exchange about the weather and some moments spent admiring the view out to where a container ship laboured along the horizon, they went inside.

The interior was as neat and spruce as Hedden himself, and Lesley was reminded of her parents' home in Kirkby Stephen: a place for everything, as her mother liked to say, and everything in its place.

Hedden ushered her into a room that smelled of furniture polish and bade her sit down. There was a three-piece suite, an upright piano against one wall, a circular table by the window. On a tray at the centre of the table, there was a rectangle of fruitcake on a white plate, several slices ready cut, cups and saucers close at hand.

"I take it you'd like tea?" Hedden said.

"Please. That would be nice."

"Nothing too fancy, I'm afraid. The tea is only PG Tips."

"That's fine," Lesley said, and smiled.

The cake was rich and crumbled against her fingers when she picked it up. He asked her more about her interest in Stella Leonard and
Shattered Glass,
and she told him about Stephen, coming close again to tears when she spoke of his death. Was it some kind of delayed reaction that it was affecting her more now than it had closer to the event itself?

To change the subject, she asked, looking across the room, if he played the piano himself, and Hedden shook his head.

"I used to, an hour or more a day. Nothing too difficult. Mozart. Brahms. Just the shorter pieces. Nothing fancy. But now, with these hands..." Arm angled outwards, he raised his right hand to shoulder height. "...Even the gentlest lullaby comes out sounding like something from
The Sting.
"

Lesley shook her head. She could remember the film from television—Robert Redford and Robert Shaw—but not the music.

"Ragtime," Hedden said. "Always makes me think of Winifred Atwell. You're far too young to remember her, of course. But she was a trained concert pianist. A big woman, too. West Indian. A lovely smile. She came over here hoping to perform Rachmaninoff at the Royal Albert Hall and ended up playing these tinkly little numbers on the radio and round the music halls. "Coronation Rag," that's one I remember. "Black and White Rag." That would have been the time we were working on
Shattered Glass,
of course, her heyday. Not that it's the kind of music I associate with that film." Hedden laughed. "Too cheerful by half. No, slow jazz in a smoky cellar bar, that's
Shattered Glass.
"