Illegal Action

33

“A girl, you think. Are you sure of that, Miss?”

Liz looked up from the cheap plastic chair, relieved that she was no longer seeing two of everything, though her head still throbbed and she felt very sick. “I said it was a female. I don’t know how old she was.”

Liz had already been three hours in St. Thomas’s, which she supposed wasn’t actually too bad for Accident & Emergency this late at night. In the waiting room overhead fluorescent strips cast a bright, unforgiving light over the crowded room of waiting casualties. A couple sat right across from Liz—the man holding one arm and moaning in pain, while his girlfriend fiddled with her nails. In the corner a smelly old drunk in a dirty raincoat stretched over three chairs, snoring. A teenage boy, equally the worse for wear, had been sick on the floor and no one had come to clear it up.

There had been nothing to do but wait patiently, skimming through the battered copies of Hello! magazine, willing her eyes to focus, until at last they’d called her name. The nurse had cleaned the long, painful scrape on her forehead, then taken her to Radiology for her shoulder, which was bruised and incredibly sore from hitting the concrete. When she came back, the two policemen had been waiting for her.

“Did you get a look at her? Could you describe her?” asked the younger of the two. He was tall, with an earnest expression on his face and searching eyes.

“Not really. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and the next thing I knew she’d grabbed me from behind. I think she was wearing something on her head.”

“A balaclava probably. To hide her face,” said the older policeman. He had a puffy, beat-up face that looked as if he had seen it all.

“Did she say anything?” asked the young policeman.

“Not much. She said something like, ‘Don’t move and you won’t get hurt.’ Then once she’d got my bag she said, ‘I’ve got what I wanted.’” She thought those had been the words, but Liz remembered even more vividly the Stanley knife and her instinctive sense at the time that it wasn’t the bag the woman wanted. Not that Liz was going to tell these policemen that.

Fortunately, the older cop seemed content to treat it as a simple mugging; he was keen to get out of there. His younger sidekick was less sure. “It seems odd,” he was saying now, “a mugging by a single female. They usually work in packs.”

Liz said nothing, and the older cop spoke up. “Happens more and more these days. I arrested a girl last week in Tulse Hill who’d robbed an old man at knifepoint—believe me, you wouldn’t have wanted to meet her in a dark alley.”

He laughed but the young cop frowned. Leave it alone, Liz pleaded silently. The last thing she wanted was any kind of investigation. It wouldn’t take them very long to find out that there wasn’t much to “Jane Falconer”—she dreaded having to ask Brian Ackers to ring Special Branch and have them call off the dogs.

“Are you through with Miss Falconer, officers?” It was the nurse from the desk. “The doctor wants to see her now.”

The young one hesitated, but the old pro nodded. “Yeah, we’re done all right.” He gave Liz a smile. “You look after yourself, young lady, and we’ll be in touch when we have any news.”

“Thank you,” said Liz, more grateful than he knew.

The doctor had a thin moustache and looked harassed as Liz came into his small, stuffy consulting room. He motioned her impatiently to a chair sitting at right angles to his unadorned desk, and told her that the X-ray showed nothing broken. He argued only briefly when Liz declined to stay in overnight for observation.

“All right,” he relented, “I’ll get an ambulance to take you home. Have you got someone there to look after you?”

“Yes,” she said, trying not to think of the cold, bare flat in Battersea she was going back to. “My mother,” she added. Which at least was potentially true, since Liz knew if she needed her, her mother would come up right away.

“Stay in bed for a day or two,” he said, “and just let yourself recover in your own good time. If you’re sick, or your eyes go out of focus again, come back here straightaway. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting a bit weepy—you’ve had one hell of a shock. It’s just one of those things, I’m afraid. It could have been anyone they attacked—pure bad luck that you got picked.”

As she waited for the ambulance Liz thought about this. Maybe it had been a random thing after all, she told herself. But no, she had an instinctive feeling that the attack had been professional—well planned and targeted specifically at her. But what did that mean? What would a professional attacker want from her? In her present half-concussed state, she wasn’t able to work it out. Even thinking about it made her head throb more. So she parked the thought at the back of her mind to return to later.

As her transport arrived at last, Liz suddenly shivered; she saw again the knife two inches from her throat. That woman hadn’t been after her handbag; she’d been after Liz. And as a nurse helped her up into the ambulance, she suddenly heard in her head the twittering sound of Dimitri’s telephone.