‘He had to go and do something,’ Joanna said, having no idea where the baby’s father had disappeared to. She grimaced as another pain came.
Emily came to the bedside and held her hand until it passed. ‘I’ll stay with you,’ she said. ‘Jim might have to go back to work if it’s a long time.’
‘Thanks,’ Joanna said. ‘Did I ever tell you how glad I am you and Jim got together?’
‘Oh, a few times,’ Emily said.
There had been some tough days to get through, after the case was solved and the reaction kicked in, and Emily had to come to terms not just with her father’s death but her father’s murder. But in her grief and turmoil she always turned towards Atherton for comfort, not away from him, and through it all their relationship strengthened. And what with that, and the rounding up of her father’s estate to complete, and the hundreds of requests for interviews, and the memorial service to arrange, and the book she had decided to write about him to start researching, she had decided she was not going to go back to New York. There was too much now to keep her in England. Atherton’s relief had been mute but profound.
Emily’s hands, Joanna noticed, were covered with scratches from playing with the cats. Greater love, she thought.
At last Slider came back, followed by a very young man in grey flannels and a tweed jacket, with a black shirt and dog collar underneath. The hospital chaplain. Joanna started to laugh. ‘Really? Not really?’
‘Why not?’ he said, grinning sheepishly. ‘Father Bennet doesn’t mind.’
‘But is it legal?’ Atherton said. ‘Sorry, Father, no offence meant.’
‘It’s perfectly legal,’ he said. ‘It’s part of my duties to carry out priestly functions for patients in extremis.’ He blushed as this struck everyone simultaneously as an unfortunate phrase, and he lurched in a different direction. ‘But you don’t have to call me Father, you know. Richard is all right.’
‘I’ll stick with Father, if you don’t mind,’ Slider said.
‘And you do have to have the Marriage Authority with you?’
‘I’ve been carrying it around in my wallet for ages.’
‘Is it still all right?’ Joanna asked.
‘They don’t go off, like milk, you know,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you want to marry me?’
‘Of course I want to marry you. Only can we wait a sec, because I’m having another pain. Talk to Jim and Emily for a minute.’
Shortly after that, Joanna became the second Mrs Slider, courtesy of Father “Call me Richard” Bennet, with James Atherton and Emily Veronica Stonax as witnesses. Slider even had the wedding ring to hand. He had bought that ages ago, too, and had snatched it up from the bedside cabinet drawer when he collected her to bring her to the hospital – not with Father Bennet in mind, but in a sort of desperation, thinking that at least he could give it to her to comfort her for his failure to get organised in time.
And shortly after Father Bennet pronounced them man and wife, Joanna’s waters broke and she was wheeled away to the delivery room.
‘Just got in under the wire,’ Atherton remarked. ‘Talk about last-minute conversions.’
‘I think that was the nicest wedding I’ve ever been to,’ Emily said. ‘And I’m thrilled to be on the wedding certificate. I wonder if they’ll let us be godparents.’
Not terribly long after that – though it seemed like an awfully long time to the protagonists – Baby Derek made his first appearance on this or any stage, squashed, red and wearing what appeared to be an ill-fitting black wig.
‘The teapot with the spout,’ Joanna said proudly when they told her it was a boy.
‘We’re not really going to call him Derek, are we?’ Slider asked her anxiously.
‘I thought we could call him George after my favourite husband,’ she said. Slider’s name was actually George William, but he had always been called Bill to distinguish him from his father, who was also George.
They called him George, and James after Slider’s favourite lieutenant, and Edward after Emily’s father, since she was on the wedding certificate and they meant to ask her to be godmother. Emily cried when they told her, but they were the only tears that attended George James Edward Slider’s birth.
Atherton had dashed out to get a bottle of champagne while Joanna was in labour, and had sweet-talked a nurse into putting it in the staff fridge to chill. It was interesting to Emily to watch his technique, because he had never used it on her. And so they wet the baby’s head with Bollinger, in plastic cups, and none the worse for that.
And after that, there was still the monster bash to look forward to.