if wondering why they weren’t helping him. Felix gritted his teeth. He was here to help the man; the man needed his help; but he couldn’t help him. Not with this. This, he had to do himself.
And Mr Cann tried. Hard. He grunted. He strained. He gasped. He reached and reached and flopped back on his pillow as if exhausted. Then he made one last effort and his desperate fingers hooked the tubing . . .
It pulled the gas cylinder on to its side with a clunk. Then it rolled off the shiny wooden surface.
With the reflexes of the young, Amanda caught it before it hit the floor, and lifted it up, mask swinging beneath it—
‘No!’ Felix stumbled off the stool and she flinched.
‘What?’
But it was too late and Felix bit back his warning. Mr Cann had caught the mask as it dangled over him, and clamped it hard to his face. Now he sucked greedily at the gas as if it were saving his life, instead of ending it.
The agonized breathing stopped almost immediately. His eyes closed . . .
Another deep breath.
‘What?’ said Amanda again, panicking. Felix put his finger to his lips to silence her. Hearing was the last sense to fade, and he didn’t want Charles Cann dying to the sounds of a squabble.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he murmured calmly. ‘Everything’s just right. Everything’s wonderful.’
Mr Cann’s hand twitched twice on the mask, then loosened a little and – after a moment – lolled on to his chest, his fingers curled like those of a sleeping baby. Felix and Amanda stood either side of the bed, silently united in the anticipation of another breath.
It never came.
The dog scratching itself downstairs was suddenly the loudest noise in the house.
Slowly, Felix bent down and touched the side of Charles Cann’s neck. The skin was warm, but the artery was motionless under his fingers.
‘Is he dead?’ whispered Amanda. And when Felix nodded that he was, she burst into tears.
Felix was surprised, but said nothing. There was nothing to say. She would cry and then she would stop. And then they would catch the bus down the hill to Bideford and drink more tea or hot chocolate and talk about how life goes on, and she would feel better, even though it never sounded entirely convincing to him.
He opened his briefcase and placed the bottle and the mask next to his unmolested sandwich, then clicked it shut once more – relieved that in the end it had all happened so fast, for Mr Cann’s sake. He straightened up and cleared his throat. It’s time to go. That’s what the clearing of the throat meant. But Amanda wasn’t hearing. Or stopping. She was proper bawling, as Margaret used to say when Jamie was little. He handed her his handkerchief.
‘Was that wrong?’ she sobbed. ‘I just caught it and he grabbed it and now he’s dead and I feel terrible!’
‘We’re not here to assist physically in any way,’ said Felix patiently. ‘We’re only here to lend moral support.’
‘I know! But he couldn’t reach it! And he wanted it! Because he couldn’t breathe . . .’
‘Not breathing is really the goal,’ he said, hoping to lighten the mood a little, but it just set off a new round of sobbing.
Amanda reached for the dead man’s hand, but Felix stopped her arm gently.
‘Best not to, now that he’s gone,’ he said, and she nodded and then, to his surprise, turned and hugged him instead – her head buried in his chest and her embrace pressing his arms to his sides.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept. ‘I just . . . I mean . . . I didn’t know it was going to be so . . . sad.’
‘There, there,’ he said awkwardly, feeling like a Victorian father trapped by an unwanted public display of affection. He might have patted her on the back, but his arms were pinioned.
Probably for the best.
Amanda took her time finishing her cry, then blew her nose and sighed and looked up at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘That’s perfectly all right,’ said Felix, although he really didn’t think it was, and hoped she would never do it again. He’d speak to Geoffrey. Maybe he could work with another man in future. Or just somebody older. He looked at his watch. They really should be going.
‘I’ve never seen someone actually die before. Not even my nan.’
‘Of course. The first time is always difficult.’
His first time hadn’t been, though. An old woman who was so weak that the difference between life and death had been hard to distinguish. When his fellow Exiteer had confirmed that she was dead, Felix had felt oddly uplifted by the experience. It had been so different from watching his wife and his son die, and his first thought had been that he wanted to see it again – just to know how kind death could be. As if he might blur his old memories with new ones.
Amanda wiped her eyes and blew her nose again. Felix noticed her mascara had run and looked down at his chest. There was a dark smudge on his beige jacket.
‘What happens now?’ she said.
‘Now we leave,’ he said.
‘Just go?’
‘Yes. We’ll go and have a nice cup of tea and a chat.’
‘What about his . . . his family?’
‘When the family get home they will find Mr Cann has passed away and call a doctor. The nitrous oxide does not show up in post-mortem toxicology reports, so the coroner will record it as a death from natural causes. His family will not be implicated in messy legalities. The insurance company will pay up, as they absolutely should. And it will be as if we were never here.’
Amanda nodded, looking down at the man. ‘He does look better,’ she sniffed.
It was true. The mottle had left the man’s skin, and the lines of desperation on his face had relaxed, making him look closer to fifty than eighty.
‘Do we just . . . leave him?’
Felix nodded. He understood that almost overwhelming urge to arrange things – to close eyes, to wipe away dribble, to tuck in hands or feet – to make things look nice.
‘We don’t tidy up,’ he explained. ‘We’ve done our bit. Now somebody else will come and do theirs.’
Amanda nodded again.
‘You did very well,’ Felix said kindly, although really she hadn’t. But they could talk about that at the debrief.
‘Thank you,’ she said. And then added, ‘So did you.’
She was sweet. But she had to understand how even touching the gas cylinder could have compromised them – that it tipped witnessing and supporting death into assisting, which was strictly illegal. It was a technicality, of course, but it was important that the error should not be repeated.
Downstairs the little dog yapped and broke a sombre silence.
‘Right then,’ said Felix, in a tone that any British person would know meant, Let’s go – and Amanda was British, so she left the bedroom and he opened his right arm to usher her ahead of him as they started down the stairs.
There was a sound.
They both stopped and Amanda looked up at him. ‘What was that?’
Felix’s head was still above the level of the landing. He looked around at the open door behind him. Mr Cann was as they’d left him.
Motionless.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll check.’
Felix had witnessed twenty-seven deaths and the gas had never not worked. It was