Under Orders

CHAPTER 16

They finally allowed me in to see Marina around four.

First I had to don the regulation outfit of blue smock, with matching dishcloth hat. And I had to wear a mask over my mouth and nose. I wondered how she would know who I was, but I needn’t have worried, she was deeply asleep.

She looked so defenceless lying there, connected to the machines, with the tube still in her mouth. Her breathing was being assisted by a ventilator and the rhythmic purr as the bellows rose and fell was the only sound. A rectangular blue screen showed a bright line that peaked with the beat of her heart. Go on heart, I said to the machine, keep pumping.

I sat to one side, opposite the ventilator, and held her hand.

There were other patients in the unit but partitions rather than curtains separated the beds and these provided a fairly high degree of privacy.

I spoke to her.

I told her how much I loved her and how dreadfully sorry I was to have brought all this on her. I told her to fight, to live, and to get better. And I told her that I would get the man who had done this. And then we’d see. Maybe I’d take up gardening as a career, though one-handed gardening might be a problem.

And I asked her to marry me.

She didn’t reply. I told myself she was thinking it over.

A nurse came to tell me that there were some people to see me outside. Not more police, I thought. But it was Charles, and he had brought Jenny with him.

‘Hello, Sid,’ she said. She leaned forward and gave me a peck on the cheek. ‘How is she?’

Charles and I shook hands.

‘She’s doing OK — at least, I think so. The nurses seem optimistic, but I suppose they would. Certainly her colour is much better than earlier.’

‘Jenny picked me up from Paddington,’ said Charles. ‘I called her on the way up on the train and she wanted to come. You know, to give support.’

Or to gloat, I thought. But maybe that was unfair of me.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I said. ‘Both of you.’

I looked past Charles and was astonished to see Rosie still sitting on one of the chairs opposite the lifts.

‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘why don’t you go home?’

She turned and looked at me with sunken eyes. She was clearly in no state to leave the hospital on her own. There was no sign of the Superintendent or his sidekick. What were the police thinking of, I thought, to leave her here without help?

‘Charles, Jenny, this is Rosie,’ I said. ‘Rosie works with Marina. She was there when Marina was shot. She saved her life.’

Jenny sat down next to Rosie and put her arm round her shoulder. The human contact was too much and Rosie burst into tears and sobbed, hanging on to Jenny as though her life depended on it.

‘We’ll look after Rosie,’ said Charles. ‘You go back to Marina. We’ll be here when you need us.’

He ushered me back to the unit door and almost pushed me through. It was such a comfort to have them there but I felt a little guilty at leaving them out in the corridor.

‘Sorry, just you,’ said the nurse when I asked. ‘And only then because she’s your fiancée.’

I stayed with Marina for what seemed like a long time. Every few minutes, a nurse would come to check on her and twice Mr Pandita, the surgeon, came in too.

‘She’s doing fine,’ he said on his second visit. ‘I’m more hopeful.’

‘More hopeful’ didn’t sound wonderful but a lot better than ‘less hopeful’.

‘It’s been more than two hours now since she left theatre,’ he said. ‘Her blood pressure is still low but that’s a good thing. It reduces the chance of internal bleeding. We will leave her sedated overnight and attempt to bring her out in the morning.’

‘Bring her out?’ I asked.

‘From the induced coma,’ he said. ‘Only then will we really know.’

We stood at the foot of the bed looking down at the unconscious figure.

‘I think I’ll go and get something to eat,’ I said. It was a while since I’d left my uneaten lunch on the floor of the sandwich bar, and even longer since dinner the previous night. ‘Then I’ll come back, if that’s all right?’

‘There are no visiting times on this ward. We run a twenty-four-hour service here.’ He smiled. At least I think he smiled. Due to his mask, I couldn’t see his mouth but there was a smile in his eyes.

Charles, Jenny and Rosie were still there when I came out.

They had made themselves at home and were surrounded by the remains of bacon rolls and chicken mayonnaise sandwiches with salad. Empty polystyrene coffee beakers stood in a row on the bottom of an upturned waste bin that had doubled as a table.

Rosie looked much better for having had something to eat and other people to take her mind off the horrors of earlier.

‘Hello,’ said Charles, looking up from a newspaper. ‘How’s she doing?’

‘The official bulletin is “more hopeful”.’

‘That’s great,’ said Jenny.

‘I’m starving,’ I said. ‘I see that you’ve all had something but I need some food. Where’s the hospital canteen?’

Charles stood up, put all the trash in the reinstated bin, and gathered up his newspaper.

‘A policeman came and gave me these,’ he said, holding out my car keys. ‘He said to tell you that your car is in the hospital administrator’s parking space to the left of the front door.’

‘Fantastic,’ I said.

‘He also told me to tell you that he was only just in time to stop the bomb squad blowing it up.’

I laughed. The first time since…

‘He also wants you to move it as soon as possible as the hospital administrator could arrive at any time and demand his space back.’

‘I’ll drive it home now and put it in the garage,’ I said. ‘We could get something to eat there, and I could put on a clean shirt.’ It seemed like a very long time since I’d dressed to go to Harrow.

‘The policeman didn’t really want to give me the car keys but I told him I was your father-in-law.’

‘And I told him I was your wife,’ said Jenny.

That must have confused him.

My car was where it was promised and I drove the four of us back to Ebury Street. Rosie didn’t want to go home on her own and Jenny and Charles were happy to have her stay with us.

‘Hello, Mr Halley,’ said Derek at the desk. ‘Delivery for you.’

He held out an envelope to me. I just looked at it as he put it down on the marble top.

‘Did it come by taxi?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘About an hour ago.’

‘You didn’t get the number of the taxi, I don’t suppose?’ I asked.

‘No, sorry.’

‘Could you identify the taxi driver?’

‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Flat number 28 have been moving today and there have been a load of people through here. Not only the removal men but the gas and electricity, to read the meters and so on.’

‘Do you have security film?’ I asked, pointing at the bank of monitors.

‘Yes, but we only have cameras in the garages and round the back. There are none in reception.’

Dead end.

I looked at the envelope. It was white, about four inches wide by nine long, with ‘SID HALLEY — BY HAND’ written in capital letters on the front, as before.

‘This is the same as I received last time,’ I said to Charles. ‘After Marina was attacked.’

‘You ought to give it to the police,’ he said. ‘Don’t touch it.’

‘The envelope’s been handled by the taxi driver and by Derek,’ I said.

‘And Bernie,’ said Derek. ‘He took it from the taxi driver.’

Bernie was another of the team of porters/security.

I used Derek’s pencil to turn the envelope over. It was stuck shut. It looked like a birthday card.

‘I’ll open it,’ I said.

I used another sheet of paper to hold the envelope down on the desk and used the pencil to slit it open. Only touching the sides I withdrew the contents. It was a card but not a birthday card. It said, ‘Get Well Soon’ on the front, along with a painting of some flowers. I used the pencil to open it.

There was some writing, again in capital letters:

‘NEXT TIME SHE’LL LOSE A HAND. THEN SHE’LL BE A CRIPPLE, JUST LIKE YOU.’

Charles drew in his breath sharply. ‘Not much doubt about that, then.’

‘What does it say?’ said Jenny, coming closer and reading it. ‘Oh!’

‘Don’t let anyone touch this. I’m going to get something to put it into for the police,’ I said.

‘Can you get fingerprints off paper?’ said Charles.

‘I’m sure you can,’ I said.

‘You can also get DNA from saliva,’ said Rosie.

I turned to her. ‘So?’

‘If someone licked that envelope to stick it shut then they will have left their DNA on it,’ she said.

I stared at her. ‘But won’t it have dried out by now?’ I asked.

‘The DNA will still be there.’

‘Could you get a profile from it?’ I asked.

‘I can get a profile from a single fruit fly you can hardly see,’ she said, smiling. ‘This would be a piece of cake.’

‘Shouldn’t you leave that to the police?’ said Jenny.

‘There’s plenty of stick for both of us,’ said Rosie. ‘I would only need a tiny bit of the envelope. And I really want to do it.’ She looked at me.

‘So do I,’ I said. ‘I’ll fetch some scissors and two plastic bags.’

Derek had stood listening to it all.

‘Like something out of Agatha Christie,’ he said. ‘Death on Ebury Street.’

‘No one’s died yet,’ I said. At least not here. But I thought of Huw Walker and Bill Burton.

We went up to my flat and I raided the refrigerator to find some food. I made a plateful of ham and mustard sandwiches and found some bananas lurking in a fruit bowl behind the kitchen television. The others kindly let me have first go but then they also tucked in with relish.

I went into my office to find Marina’s parents’ number. I tried to call them but there was no answer. I wrote down their address to give to the police, just in case.

I went back into the sitting room. Rosie was on a mission and she wanted to go off to Lincoln’s Inn Fields straight away with her bag containing its piece of envelope.

‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked. ‘It takes hours for the stuff to move in that gel anyway.’

‘Not with the machine in my lab,’ said Rosie. ‘I can get results much quicker than Marina could. The whole thing would take me less than an hour.’

I knew that Rosie was desperate to do something that, in her eyes, would compensate for what she saw as her failure to keep Marina from harm and I wasn’t going to stop her. I was also interested to know if there was DNA on the envelope and if it matched our previous sample. It wouldn’t, however, give us the answer to the puzzle.

‘Do whatever you like,’ I said. ‘I’m going to change and then I’m going back to the hospital. I’ll call the Superintendent after I’ve gone and tell him to collect the card from reception. I don’t want to spend another age being interviewed.’

‘I don’t mind going with Rosie to her lab,’ said Charles. ‘We’ll come on to the hospital after.’

‘And I’ll go with Sid,’ said Jenny.

I left the car in the garage and we took two taxis. It was a long time since I’d been in a taxi alone with Jenny.

‘Just like old times,’ I said.

‘I was thinking the same. Funny old world.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Here I am, going with you to see the woman who’s taken my place and I am desperate that she should be all right.’

‘Are you?’ I asked.

‘Of course. I liked her last Sunday. You two go well together.’

I looked out as we passed Big Ben and absentmindedly checked my watch.

‘I do want you to be happy, you know,’ she said. ‘I know we’re divorced but it doesn’t mean I don’t care for you. I just couldn’t live with you. And…’ She tailed off.

‘Yes?’ I said. ‘And what?’

She didn’t answer. I didn’t press her. I really was glad she was here and I didn’t want to have a scene.

We arrived at the entrance to St Thomas’s and I started to get out of the cab.

Jenny put her hand on my arm, the real one. ‘I’m not sure how to put this,’ she said. ‘And obviously it’s not the reason I want her to get better but,’ she paused, ‘Marina… takes away my guilt.’

I sat back in the seat and looked at her. My dear Jenny. The girl I had once loved and ached for. The girl I thought I knew.

‘Are you getting out, guv’nor?’ asked the driver, breaking the trance.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

Jenny and I climbed out of the taxi, paid, and went into the hospital.

Dr Osborne in Casualty had said that the first three hours would be critical, but he had said that over four hours ago and Marina had survived so far. Every passing minute must surely improve her chances.

When we arrived at Intensive Care, Jenny said she would wait on the same chairs outside by the lifts, and read. I noticed that she had borrowed a book from my flat. I was surprised to see that it was an autobiography by a leading steeplechase trainer, someone I had ridden for regularly, and someone Jenny and I used to argue about.

I put on the regulation blue uniform and went in to be met by the police guard that had belatedly appeared in the unit. Yes, a nurse agreed, she could vouch for Mr Halley; he’s Miss Meer’s fiancé. Pass, friend.

Marina looked the same as when I’d left her.

I sat down as before and held her hand. It seemed natural to talk to her so I did, albeit softly.

I told her about all sorts of things. I told her about leaving my car on the pavement and how the bomb squad had been called out to check it. I told her that Charles had come up to London and how he had arrived with Jenny. I told her about Rosie and that she might be staying the night but not to worry because Charles would be there too as a chaperon. I didn’t tell her about the card and its violent message. I was pretty sure that she couldn’t hear me but I didn’t want to distress her, just in case.

‘And do you know,’ I said to her, ‘Jenny says you take away her guilt. Her guilt for leaving me. Now there’s a shock, I can tell you. I’ve never thought she felt guilty for a moment. The irony is that I had felt guilty, too, because I hadn’t given up riding when she wanted me to.’

I stroked her arm and sat there for a while in silence. For all its intensiveness, the Intensive Care Unit was a calm, quiet place with subdued lighting and almost no noise. Just the hum of the ventilator pump and the slight hiss of escaping air.

‘But I don’t feel guilty any more,’ I said.

‘Guilty about what?’ said a voice.

I jumped. Mr Pandita, the surgeon, had entered the cubicle silently behind me.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘you nearly gave me a heart attack.’

‘There are worse places to have one,’ he smiled. ‘I have a friend who had a heart attack at a hotel where hundreds of cardiac surgeons were having a convention. They almost fought over him as he toppled off a bar stool.’

‘Lucky him.’ I nodded at Marina. ‘How’s she doing?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I think I would refer to her condition now as serious but stable. It’s no longer critical. I do believe your girl is going to live.’

I could feel the welling in my eyes, I could sense the tightening at the bridge of my nose and the pressure in my jaw. I cried the tears of relief, the tears of joy.

‘Provided we can bring her out of the unconsciousness safely tomorrow then she should make a complete recovery. But we’ll keep her sedated for the night just to be on the safe side.’

‘What time in the morning?’ I asked.

‘We’ll stop giving her the sedative in the drip around seven. We’ll remove the ventilator, and then we’ll see. Everyone is different but, if I was a betting man,’ he smiled again, ‘I’d say she should be awake by noon at the latest. That is, of course, if her brain wasn’t starved of oxygen, but I think that’s unlikely. There were no reports that she had stopped breathing at any time.’

‘Should I stay here the night?’ I asked.

‘You’re welcome to if you want,’ he said, ‘but it’s not necessary. She’s over the danger time. There shouldn’t be much change overnight and we can always call you if there is. The best thing you can do is to go home and get a good night’s sleep and be here for her tomorrow. She won’t be feeling too well, I’m afraid. The sedative tends to make patients feel rather sick.’

‘Thank you, doctor,’ I said.

‘Actually I’m a mister.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Off the street?’ I smiled at him.

‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘It stems from the time when surgeons were all barbers. They were the only people with sharp enough blades. Can you imagine? “A quick shave, sir, and I’ll whip out your appendix on the side.” In those days, doctors saw it as a failure to have to cut open their patients, and most surgery proved fatal. It was the option of last hope. So surgeons weren’t doctors and they were called mister. And it’s stuck. Now you progress from being a mister to a doctor and then finally back to a mister.’

‘For jockeys, mister means an amateur.’

He laughed. ‘Well, I don’t think I’m an amateur.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think not. You saved her life.’

He waved a hand. ‘All in a day’s work. Bye now.’

He moved on. There were probably others more needful of his skills.

I waved at the silent policeman as I went back out to Jenny. I thought it would be too soon for Charles and Rosie to be there but they appeared out of the lift at the same moment as I came through the door.

‘Great news,’ I said. ‘The official bulletin is now that Marina is no longer critical and she is expected to make a full recovery.’

‘Thank God,’ said Charles.

Rosie clasped her hands to her face but it did nothing to stem the rush of tears down her cheeks. Her shoulders shuddered with sobs at the same time as her mouth opened in laughter. The release of tension was tangible for us all.

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Jenny.

Yes, indeed, it was very much all right.

‘I only have three bedrooms,’ I said when Jenny said she wanted to come back to Ebury Street with the rest of us. ‘So who are you going to share with?’

I thought for a moment that she was going to say she’d share with me, but good sense prevailed.

‘I’ll go home later,’ she said, ‘and I’d better give Anthony a call. He may be wondering where I’ve got to.’

‘Haven’t you called him?’ Charles said.

‘No. I’m often out when he gets in from the office. And other times I wait in and he doesn’t come home for hours. He goes for drinks or dinner with a colleague. He doesn’t usually phone me. It’s the way we are.’

How sad, I thought.

We went straight down to the street and set off back to my flat in a black cab.

‘Well?’ I said to Rosie.

‘No match,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘We’re looking for two people then.’

‘Yes,’ said Rosie. ‘And this one’s a woman.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely.’ She sounded rather hurt that I’d questioned her. ‘I got a good profile off that piece of envelope and it didn’t match the first one at all. Men and women have different chromosomes and different DNA. It’s easy to tell from the two profiles that it was a man who punched Marina last week, and a woman who licked the envelope tonight.’

A wife, perhaps, or a girlfriend? Could anyone stick that envelope shut without knowing the contents? I doubted it. A man had attacked Marina outside my flat last week; Marina had his skin under her fingernails. And this week the message came with the saliva of a woman. Maybe I was searching for even more than two people.

‘So what are we going to do now?’ said Charles.

‘No idea,’ I said. ‘I thought I could at least discount the female half of the population from suspicion, but now…’

‘It can’t be that bad,’ said Charles.

‘Almost,’ I said. ‘And there is one thing that really bothers me. Is race fixing sufficient motive for murder?’

‘Money is always a motive for murder,’ said Jenny.

‘But we’re not talking big money here. Huw Walker was offered a few hundred a time to fix a race. He told me that himself.’ And Chief Inspector Carlisle has the tape, I thought.

‘If really big money was involved then you would be likely to offer the jockey a bit more than a few hundred. That’s not much more than his riding fee,’ I said.

‘It might seem a lot to a jockey from the valleys,’ said Charles.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but Huw had been around a long time and had been used to earning good money.’

We arrived back at my flat, piled out of the taxi and went inside.

‘I come back to the race fixing,’ I said when we were all safely settled and I had provided sustenance in the form of more ham sandwiches and a bottle of wine.

‘Who could gain sufficiently for it to be worth the risk of killing a jockey in broad daylight with sixty thousand members of the public close to hand? The era of an individual running a big betting coup is past. Drug dealing has killed the ability for the crooked gambler to pull off the big con.’

‘Why?’ said Jenny.

‘Because drug dealing produces such huge amounts of cash that banks and governments have introduced a whole raft of money-laundering checks. These days, it’s almost impossible to pay for anything in cash without six pieces of identification and a reference from the Pope. Gone is the time when you could sidle up to a bookie with a hundred thousand in readies to stick on number two at Cartmel in the three-thirty. He’ll likely tell you now to get lost or place the bet by credit card.’

‘And you’re not going to do that if you’re doing something dodgy,’ said Charles.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Far too easy to trace.’

‘So what could be the motive for the murder?’ said Rosie.

‘That’s the million dollar question,’ I said. ‘Kate Burton, that’s Bill’s wife, told Marina that Huw Walker had said to her that the whole race fixing thing was more about power than money.’

‘But money gives you power,’ said Jenny.

‘Indeed it does,’ I said, ‘but if you have enough money, there may be the urge to have power merely for its own sake.’

‘Sounds too complicated for me,’ said Charles. ‘Power to me means a broadside of twelve inchers.’

Charles could usually apply a naval sea battle analogy to most situations.

‘So what’s the order of the day tomorrow?’ asked Jenny. ‘Please say I’m needed again. Today, for all its trauma, has been the most exciting day in my life for years.’

She looked at me and smiled. I don’t think she truly realised what she had just said.

‘I’ll go to the hospital early,’ I said. ‘They’re taking Marina off the sedative at seven and I want to be there when she wakes. As far as I’m concerned, you can all come. In fact, I’d love it if you did — so long as you don’t mind more sitting around in the hospital corridor.’

‘I should go to work,’ said Rosie.

‘I’m sure no one would mind if you took a day off, especially after today’s events.’

‘My flies would,’ she said. ‘They don’t stop turning from larva into pupae and then into flies just because someone gets shot.’

‘Give them a day off,’ said Charles. ‘I’m sure that Marina will want you there when she wakes up.’

‘I’ll see how I feel in the morning.’

‘I’ll need to get some food in tomorrow morning before I go to the hospital,’ I said. ‘Marina will want more than ham sandwiches when she gets home.’

‘I suspect she’ll need lots of rest, too,’ said Charles.

‘Nonsense,’ said Jenny. ‘What she’ll need is shopping. Trust me, I’m a woman. Things get better with shopping. And the more expensive, the better. Retail therapy and all that.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ I said. ‘And she’s been nagging at me for ages to take her to Bond Street to buy her some designer dresses. Armani, I think she wants.’

‘Blimey,’ said Jenny. ‘You never treated me to anything so grand. I hope you’ve got your gold card ready.’

‘They can’t be that expensive,’ I said.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Jenny. ‘You won’t get any change from a couple of grand for each dress. Then there’s the matching shoes and the handbags. You’ll need one of those big gambling coups yourself just to pay for it all.’

‘Really,’ I said. But I wasn’t paying attention. My mind was replaying the image of a long line of designer dresses with matching shoes that I had seen in Juliet Burns’s wardrobe.