And then they were upon her – an army of officers who could pull the stone back, who could shine their torches into the dank blackness, who could crawl inside.
Frieda stood back. A terrible calm descended on her. She waited.
He couldn’t hear his heart any more. That was all right. It had hurt too much when it was beating hard. The Tin Man was wrong. And he couldn’t make his breath go in and out properly. It caught in small shudders and didn’t fill him up. The fire was gone, and the ice was gone too, and even the hard ground wasn’t hard now, because his body was just a feather trembling on its surface and soon it would be lifted up and floated away.
Oh, no. Please. No. He didn’t want the tearing sounds and he didn’t want the white light shredding his eyes. He didn’t want the staring faces and the clawing hands and the gabble of voices and the jolting movements. He was too tired for more of the story; he had thought the story was over at last.
Then he saw the dancer, the woman with snowflakes in her hair. She wasn’t shouting or running like the others. She stood quite still on the other side of the world with gravestones all round her and she gazed at him and her face was better than smiling. He had saved her and now she had saved him. She bent over him and her lips touched his cheek. The evil spell was broken.
Chapter Forty-two
Frieda stood near the bed, watching. The little figure was still curled in the position they had found him. Then he had been in a state of semi-undress – for in his delirium of death, the boy had ripped off the clothes he had been wearing, the checked shirt a replica of the shirts both twins favoured – and had lain in near-nakedness on the cold earth of the mausoleum. Now he was on a warm-water mattress. He was covered with layers of light cloth and there were monitors attached to his heart. His face, which in the photographs she had seen of him was round and ruddy and full of merriment, was so white it was almost green. His freckles stood out like rusted pennies. The lips were bloodless. One cheek was bruised and puffy. His hands were bandaged for he had ripped his fingers tearing at the stone walls. His hair had been crudely dyed black, with a stripe of red showing at the parting. Only the monitors showed he wasn’t dead.
Detective Constable Munster sat in the corner of the room. He was a young man with dark hair and dark eyes and he’d been on the team looking for Matthew since the first day. He was nearly as pale as the boy, and still, as though he were carved in stone. He was waiting for the boy to return to consciousness. Matthew’s eyes fluttered and closed again. His lashes were long and red; his eyelids were translucent. Karlsson had asked Frieda to stay as well, until the child psychiatrist arrived. Even so, she felt in the way, excluded from the process, the rapid footsteps, the rattle of trolleys, doctors and nurses murmuring to each other. Worse, she understood the jargon that was being used, the intravenous warm saline, the danger of hypovolaemic shock. They were trying to raise his core temperature and she was just a bystander.
The door opened once again and the parents were ushered in. They had the pale, drawn, gaunt faces of people who have spent days waiting for bad news. Now they had hope, which was a new kind of agony. The woman knelt beside his bed, pushing the tubes aside and taking hold of her son’s bandaged hand, pressing her face into his body. Two nurses had to pull her back. The man looked flushed and angrily confused; his eyes darted around the room, taking in all the equipment, the flurry of activity.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
The doctor was looking at the chart. He took his glasses off to rub his eyes. ‘We’re doing all we can but he’s extremely dehydrated and has severe hypothermia. He’s dangerously cold.’
Mrs Faraday gave a sob. ‘My little boy. My beautiful son.’ She raised his hand to her lip and kissed it, and then fell to stroking his arm and neck, saying over and over again that everything would be all right now, that he was safe.
‘But he’ll be all right?’ said Mr Faraday. ‘He will be all right.’ As if by insisting, it would become true.
‘We’re rehydrating him,’ said the doctor. ‘And we’re going to do a cardiopulmonary bypass. It means we attach him to a machine, pump his blood out, warm it up, pump it back in.’
‘And then when you do that, he’ll be all right?’
‘You should wait outside,’ said the doctor. ‘We’ll let you know if there’s any change.’
Frieda stepped forward and took Mrs Faraday’s hand. She seemed in a daze and allowed herself to be led out. Her husband followed. They were shown into a small, windowless waiting room, just four chairs and a table on which stood a vase of plastic flowers. Mrs Faraday looked at Frieda as if she had just noticed her.
‘Are you a doctor?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve been working with the police. I was waiting for you to arrive.’ She sat beside them as Mrs Faraday talked and talked. Her husband didn’t speak. Frieda saw how his nails were dirty, his eyes red-rimmed. Frieda hardly spoke but once Mrs Faraday turned and looked her in the eyes and asked if she had children. Frieda said she didn’t.
‘Then you can’t understand.’
‘No.’
And then Mr Faraday spoke. His voice was gravelly, as if his throat was sore. ‘How long was he in that place?’
‘Not long.’
Too long: Kathy Ripon had called at Dean’s house on Saturday afternoon. Now it was Christmas Eve. Frieda thought of the last few days. Rain, sleet, snow. There would have been water running down the walls. He would have been able to lick it like an animal. She thought of him again, that first sight, his emaciated, bruised body, the eyes open but unseeing, his mouth drawn back in fear. That was the worst. At first he hadn’t realized he was being rescued. He thought they were coming back for him. And there was something else to think about. Where was Kathy? Did she have a damp wall somewhere?
‘What he must have gone through,’ said Mr Faraday. He leaned towards Frieda. ‘Had he been – was he – you know?’
Frieda shook her head. ‘It’s been a terrible, terrible thing,’ she said. ‘But I think he thought of him as his child.’
‘Bastard,’ said Mr Faraday. ‘Have they caught the one who did it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Frieda.
‘He deserves to be buried alive, like my son was.’
A junior doctor came into the waiting room. She was young and very beautiful, with skin like a peach and blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail; her face glowed. And Frieda knew it was going to be good news.
They knelt on either side of the bed, under the brutal lights and among the hanging tubes. They held his bandaged hands and said his name and crooned nonsense words, as if he was a newborn baby. Poppet and sweetheart and muffin and Mattie-boy and pigeon. His eyes were still shut but his face had lost that deathly tinge, its clayey whiteness. The rigidity of his limbs had softened. Mrs Faraday was sobbing and talking at the same time. Her words of love came out in gulps. He was bleary and barely responsive, as if he had been woken in the middle of the night out of a deep sleep.
‘Matthew, Matthew,’ murmured Mrs Faraday, almost nuzzling him. He said something and she leaned in even closer. ‘What’s that?’ He said it again. She looked round, puzzled.
‘He said “Simon”. What does that mean?’
‘It’s their name for him,’ said Frieda. ‘I think they gave him a new name.’
‘What?’ Mrs Faraday started to cry.
DC Munster drew Mr Faraday aside, then leaned over the bed and started to talk to Matthew. He held a photograph of Kathy Ripon in front of the boy’s face. His eyes weren’t able to focus properly.
‘It’s not fair,’ said Mrs Faraday. ‘He’s terribly ill. He can’t do this. It’s bad for him.’