beneath the surface. But there was something more than apathy or mere distaste involved this time. I’d really had a fright.
An awful shock.
And all in the mind, as I’d realised soon enough. A last, stray echo of things left well behind me. But still – sitting here, pen poised – I could feel the way my guts had clenched inside me. I wasn’t about to go through that again.
It had been a fortnight ago; we’d been bringing soup to an enclave of the homeless near Waterloo. Quite a crowd had gathered round our van, to slurp from steaming beakers in the dimness. I’d started out by making conversation – and ended up quite absorbed. Chewing the fat with a wryly funny Scotsman not long out of a psychie unit – and a well-spoken accountant type, who’d ended up on the street with what sounded like petrifying suddenness.
‘Gissa hand, will ye?’ the Scots bloke asked at length, taking a fresh beaker in each hand and jerking his head towards the people still crouching in the shelter of the nearby bridge. ‘Some o’ yon lads’re too tired to bloody stand …’
I nodded, grabbed a couple more helpings of oxtail and followed him over. Hands reached up gratefully from the foxholes of cardboard and blankets. I glimpsed someone sitting apart from the others, almost submerged in the deeper gloom beneath the arch, and made towards him with my last beaker.
I was only a few feet short when I suddenly stopped dead. So suddenly that the soup slopped out, scalding my wrist between sleeve and glove. So dead, I scarcely felt it.
The person ahead of me was squatting with their back against the brickwork: wrapped up in an old black greatcoat. A battered, wide-brimmed hat was pulled right down to cover the face beneath; black as the coat, but smudged and smeared with ashy grey.
I suddenly felt like a knife was being pushed into my belly. Pushed and twisted. My skin grew instantly cold. I took a tiny step backwards.
The bowed head never moved.
‘… one over here, lassie …’ the Scotsman said cheerfully. He sounded a long way off.
The shadow-shrouded figure didn’t stir. Probably asleep, of course. Exhausted, hungry, and about to miss his chance because of my ridiculous unease. Yet all I could do was back away, my heart now racing like a drum-roll.
The Scotsman had to clap me on the shoulder to snap me out of it: the casual grip of his grimy hand was more welcome than I’d have ever dreamed. With a last, wary look towards the shape beneath the bridge, I turned towards the faces I could see, and made an effort to return their smiles and quirky greetings. But all the time I could feel the chilly sweat of that moment: trapped under my clothes, and slowly soaking in. And even after I’d got home, and showered, and scrubbed it all off, my jumpiness remained. My stomach felt sick and sore. Even though I told myself, again and again, that it couldn’t have been her. It couldn’t have.
And of course, it hadn’t been: I surely knew that now. Not Razoxane.
Because Razoxane was dead and gone – to Hell.
Three years ago, I found out what Hell meant.
I’d been just another nurse; an A&E Night Sister getting on with her job. Then she had come in off the street, and Hell had followed with her. I’d thought she was a psychie case at first, which was scary enough – but then she’d revealed the magic in her madness; opened my startled eyes, and made me see. Comfortable certainties had crumbled to dust. And then she’d dragged me into her feud with a firm of Physicians as evil and old as she was: and the blood-bags really hit the fan …
I found the top was in my fingers once again: I’d fished it up from my drawer without thinking. Turning it over in my free hand, I put Michelle down for the Late – then gave in to the temptation, and set it spinning one more time.
Maybe I should just tell them I can’t spare the time, I thought glumly, watching it move. Maybe I’ll even manage not to make it sound too selfish …
Maybe.
The little top toppled, and spiralled to a stop before me.
Ace of bloody Spades.
The next day I passed a uniformed policeman in the downstairs corridor: a bag of sandwiches from the foyer shop in one hand, a coffee in the other – and a huge black revolver in a holster at his belt. He seemed not to notice my startled double-take. So I was left to speculate – until Jez broke the news at the gossipy tail-end of Report.
‘Heard who they’ve got down on Ortho? Only one of those bloody terrorists …’ You could tell he was pleased with our reaction: his freckled face lit up. ‘Under armed guard. One of the porters was telling me.’ Which made it gospel, of course.
‘I heard it was some gang leader or someone,’ Lucy countered equably. ‘Got shot, and they’ve had to give him armed protection.’ She hesitated. ‘Or maybe he was stabbed …’
The hospital grapevine was obviously working well. I smiled to myself, still writing.
‘Well he wouldn’t be on Bones if he’d been stabbed, would he, Lucinda?’ Jean pointed out beside me: putting on her most sententious tone. The sort with nearly thirty years in nursing to back it up. And I, with less than twelve, might be Sister to her Staff Nurse – but it still sometimes felt like she was the headmistress, and I was just head girl.
Most of it was just an act, of course – though her sense of humour was too dry for some people, who took it all seriously. But Lucy knew the score, and they got on well. No one else would dare call her Lucinda: she hated that.
‘Now, Mr Clarke,’ Jean continued, fixing Jez with shrewd grey eyes. ‘If you would be so kind as to expand upon your information … ?’
He was glad to. ‘Well, according to Bob, he was brought in after the Liverpool Street bomb: leg and back injuries. But something about him didn’t fit. The cops who interviewed him got suspicious. Now they reckon he probably planted the damn thing, and didn’t get clear fast enough …’ His smile had faded now. Like the rest of us who’d been on that night, he was clearly recalling the mess that bomb had made of two hapless human beings.
The second victim had survived his emergency op, and come through to us in the small hours of the following morning. He was still with us now: still struggling. Scarcely a square inch of his skin visible between the bandages, IV sites and ECG electrodes.
‘Bastard,’ Sue muttered, with a glance towards the bed. Hardly an original sentiment; but a sincere one. I added a rider, something about them probably not being sure yet. But I knew it lacked conviction.
I taxed Nick with it when I got home; he confirmed Jez’s version in a roundabout sort of way. Terrorist suspect under guard. There’d been nothing about it on the news as yet. But give it time, I thought.
What most unnerved me was the thought of armed police around the hospital – for all that they were trying to keep the profile as low as possible. I couldn’t forget the look of the pistol that PC had carried – strapped snug into its holster, but still full of latent threat: seeming much bigger and heavier in real life than the guns you see in films. I’d stepped much further aside than I’d needed to let him pass; but while one part of me had shied away, another had stared in morbid fascination.
It would have to be loaded, of course. Live ammunition. And what would happen if someone made a try for their charge? Would they draw those guns in a hospital ward, and start to shoot, with helpless patients all around (and nurses, come to that)? It almost made me shudder just to think it.
So I was glad I had other – happier – things to occupy my next day off. Besides, it was worth it just to see Nick’s face when he walked drowsily into the kitchen to find me having breakfast with a giant yellow teddy bear.
‘… who’s it for?’ he asked again, still eyeing