Then I saw the man and his dog.
There’s always a man and a dog, isn’t there? While the rest of us luxuriate in the final hour in bed the dog walkers are up and out, rain or shine, discovering the dark deeds the night has spawned. Stumbling over shallow graves, corpses.
He was a small man, middle-aged, glasses and a neat moustache. He wore a waterproof jacket and a woolly hat. He looked shocked when he first saw me, then concerned as we drew closer. You couldn’t blame him. Clad in a T-shirt, smashed-up face, spattered red. The dog was small, brown, nondescript, friendly enough. It tried to lick the blood off my leg.
‘Get an ambulance,’ I said to the man, ‘and the police.’
‘Has there been an accident? Are you all right?’ He pushed the dog away from me gently with his foot. ‘Get down, Shep.’
Shep! I felt a giggle inflate in my belly. ‘Yes, please hurry. Tell them there’s a man with head injuries, up at Malden’s, you know where…’
He nodded. ‘Come on, Shep.’ He began to run, really run, the dog at his heels. I turned back for Malden’s.
Above me I heard the roar of a plane ascending from the airport. The sky was too cloudy to see it but I could hear it climbing. Full of passengers bound for sunny holidays. Up for hours already, they’d have been. Stomachs sour with lack of sleep and food at funny times, wondering whether to risk the curdled eggs and the strange sausages on the in-flight meal.
I leant over the road and retched. Thin, foamy bile.
Don’t let him die.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Agnes was still beside him, pressing my sweatshirt to his head. He was still breathing, just. I sat beside her, told her help was on its way. I closed my eyes and waited.
A second ambulance was summoned by the first. Goulden was given immediate emergency treatment before being moved. The police took initial statements from us. The bare bones of the story that had brought us here, leaving us shocked and bloodied. We were wrapped in blankets and led blinking into the bright daylight to the ambulance.
At the casualty department people came and went checking pulse and temperature. They let me ring home. Ray answered, relief catching at his voice. I told him where I was and that I’d be home as soon as they’d checked me out. I didn’t tell him what had happened. I wasn’t sure. Had I killed a man? Brain-damaged him?
I couldn’t get warm. They took my clothes and left me a paper gown which was open at the back and one cellular blanket. I asked for more blankets. They never came. There weren’t even any rolls of paper sheeting I could make use of. We were waiting again, for an X-ray, for a doctor, for a diagnosis, for ever. Shock dulled my comprehension but I didn’t dare sleep.
At last someone offered us tea. Oh, yes, yes! When it arrived, pale grey in Styrofoam cups, I nearly wept with disappointment. It didn’t even seem to help my raging thirst. More police came. They spoke to Agnes and me together.
They managed to note down the main points of our story and our conspiracy theory without too many incredulous looks. I asked about Goulden. He’d been taken to another hospital; there were no intensive care beds free at this one. They didn’t know how he was.
The doctor checked us over, pronounced our X-rays clear and agreed we could be discharged. They cleaned us up first. They decorated my nose with seri-strips, which looked stupid, and strapped up my wrist. Agnes had badly bruised legs from the kicking she’d received. They dressed them for her. We were both given some painkillers to take with us, a poorly photocopied leaflet on hypothermia, shock and concussion and what to look out for, and our choice of old clothes from the Hospital Friends Box. I was going to ask about my own clothes until I realised with a rush of fear that they might constitute evidence of my assault on Goulden. Did they need evidence when I’d told them all about it?
It was well after lunchtime when we were escorted to Agnes’ in a police car. I insisted that someone go in with Agnes and check the house out.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.
‘Your phone’s cut off,’ I said. ‘Your door was open half the night, anyone could have been in.’
‘It’s best we check it out, madam,’ said the driver, and he and his partner got out.
‘I’ll ring BT,’ I said, ‘order a repair.’
‘No,’ she objected.
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘Sal, I’m perfectly capable of going next door to use my neighbour’s phone to do that. I don’t need looking after,’ she admonished me.
‘Sorry.’ I made a note of the neighbour’s number in case I needed to contact Agnes and the police did the same when they returned and pronounced the house secure. She watched us go from the doorstep. I turned to keep her in view as long as possible. I had an urge to run back and stay with her. Agnes and I, we’d been somewhere terrible together; no one else could ever really know what it had been like. And we’d survived. I took a deep breath and sat back in my seat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Digger was inordinately pleased to see me. Made me feel guilty as hell seeing I have so little regard for the animal. Still, unrequited love doesn’t seem to faze him.
Ray paled when he saw me and he fussed round me until I gave him something to do. ‘Ray, please, I want a pot of tea, strong. And porridge, loads, with golden syrup.’
‘I know how you take your tea,’ he retorted.
He’d contacted the police when I’d failed to return. The police had found my car but had not got any further in their efforts to find me.
Sheila arrived back from lectures as I was eating the first mouthful. ‘Oh, you poor thing. Is it broken?’
‘No, just bruised.’
‘You’ve got black eyes.’
‘No,’ said Ray, ‘more like purple. Prettier than last time.’ He put down my tea, pulled out a chair.
‘Has this happened before?’ Sheila was aghast.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ said Ray.
‘That was a gun,’ I said, ‘this was a fist.’
‘You were hurt,’ he raised his voice, ‘you were hurt then and you’re hurt now.’
‘I know. Don’t shout at me. I don’t like being hurt, I don’t try to get hurt. It frightens me too.’
For a beat or two the unspoken argument hung in the air. We’d been through it before. Ray would never like the risks the job brought with it and would never understand why I persisted in it. But I loved my work. In spite of the bad breaks and the dull days there was nothing else I could imagine being halfway happy doing.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it.’
‘What?’ I swallowed a mouthful of tea, then another. Bliss.
‘From start to finish. I’ve been up all night worried sick, talking to police, trying to convince them I wasn’t being neurotic, covering for you with the kids, imagining you floating down the Mersey or crumpled into a wheelie bin somewhere. The very least I expect is a blow-by-blow account of what’s been going on.’
He got it. Sheila too. And the telling of it helped relieve me of some of the awful tension that had my shoulders up near my ear holes and my guts like macramé. They were suitably appalled at the central image of people being given diseased brain matter as a means of pushing forward the search for a cure for Alzheimer’s. I finished with an account of our planned attack on Goulden.
‘I ran out and found a man walking his dog. He called an ambulance. I still don’t know how Goulden is. They took him to intensive care in Chester.’
Sheila swallowed and Ray was quiet, lost for words. I couldn’t deal with their shock as well as my own.