Lethal Intent

Fifty-six

Dan and Elma Pringle were in a place that had been beyond their reach or their worst imagining, but which they had reached nonetheless.

They sat side by side in the small office in the Royal Infirmary. Their surroundings might have been brighter and more modern than in its predecessor, the vast Victorian village where Ross had been born and where Elma's father had died, but they noticed not at all. Wherever they were, they would simply have held hands and stared at the wall.

The door behind them opened. Neither turned; they sat and waited as the consultant took his seat behind his desk. His name was Lewis Curry, and they had seen him before, on the day of their daughter's admission, when it had been his duty to tell them that the best they could hope for was that she would live the rest of her life in total helplessness, with no idea of who they were or of what she had been or might have become.

'Hello again,' Mr Curry said quietly. 'Have you been to see Ross?'

'We looked in on her before we came along here,' Elma replied. She had taken on the role of spokesperson. 'She looked very peaceful; it doesn't seem so bad when you see her asleep like that. Who knows? We're expecting her brother back from Hong Kong tomorrow. Maybe she'll just wake up and it'll be all right.'

The consultant looked down at his hands. 'No, Mrs Pringle. She will not awaken tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. I wish I had grounds for offering you a different prognosis than at our last meeting, but I don't. The fact is that things have resolved themselves since then. Your daughter seems so peaceful for one reason: there is nothing going on inside her head, no dreams, no reaction to light or sounds around her, nothing at all. What little brain activity we were able to detect following her admission has disappeared; only the vital centres continue to function, because of the ventilator. In my opinion and in that of my colleagues, she is clinically dead.'

Elma was struck dumb; her mouth fell open. Dan's eyes flickered, then his head dropped, and his shoulders began to shake.

The consultant had seen it before, all too often. Even in the strongest, most confident and most intelligent of people, there was always an element of denial. It was worse for them in a way: when the truth eventually hit home, it hit harder. 'Would you like to see someone?' he offered. 'We have a hospital chaplain and he'll be pleased to talk with you.'

'No,' Elma whispered. 'We don't know him and he doesn't know us. Anyway, he couldn't change what you've told us. What happens next?' She asked for Dan's sake: they both knew the answer for they had discussed the question, but she felt that he needed to hear it from Mr Curry.

'At the moment,' he said, 'the machine is keeping her breathing, and her heart beating. You may continue that, or you may ask us to switch it off.'

'And if we did, what would happen?'

'If the brain is dead, the body must follow. If she can't sustain respiration on her own, her heart will stop.'

'So if we ask you to switch the machine off, we're taking a gamble that she'll be able to breathe on her own?'

'I wouldn't call it a gamble.'

'Can we have a few minutes alone?' Dan mumbled, from somewhere down in his chest.

'Of course.' The consultant rose and left the room.

The Pringles sat there, still hand in hand. Eventually Dan lifted his head and they gazed at each other. Neither spoke, but he gave a single tiny nod, then looked away.

Mr Curry returned a little later. Elma looked up and him and whispered, 'Yes.'

He led them along to the small one-bed room where Ross, their only daughter, lay; the electrodes they had seen earlier had been removed from her head, but the thick tube was still in her mouth. There was a chair on either side of the bed, as if she had been expecting them. Her father sat on her right, her mother on her left, and each took one of her hands in theirs. When they were settled, Lewis Curry reached across and withdrew the tube, then signalled to his registrar, who switched off the ventilator.

If they had looked up at the monitor at the bedside, Dan and Elma would have seen the steady peak of her heartbeat grow irregular, until it stopped and became a straight line on the screen.