“No way!”
Grabianski had his hands locked, one over the other, arms tensed straight; he leaned forward and began to pump hard against the man’s heart. One, two, three, four … Glancing at Grice, threatening him with his eyes. Five, six, seven … Allowing himself a breather. There, eight, nine, ten and one for luck. Grice was still hovering, holding himself back. “Are you going to do this or not?”
“Give myself a mouthful of whatever he’s been chucking down all day? Forget it!”
“Give him mouth to nose, then?”
Grice looked disgusted. For a moment he thought, genuinely, that he was going to be sick. Grabianski elbowed him aside and repeated the mouth to mouth, twice, remembering to let the chest fall.
Move fast, more bumps to the heart. He could only keep this up so long, and without help what was the point? He would be losing him.
Grice was thinking the same things. “Look,” he said, “Jerry, I know what you’re trying to do. Other circumstances, you know, it’s the right thing to do. But here … we got to leave him.”
Grabianski jumped up from a couple more mouth-to-mouths and hit Grice across the face, more of a slap than a punch, not too hard but hard enough. “You don’t give a shit what happens to him, fine. Just think what kind of charge they’ll give us if they find out. Eh? Think about that and get to the phone. Call emergency, tell them they’ve got about five minutes.” He glanced round at Hugo Furlong. “Less.”
There wasn’t time to see that Grice was doing as he was told. Grabianski checked the pulse again. Shit! Already his arms were beginning to weaken, muscles aching; his own breathing was becoming ragged. He thought it possible Grice might have left the house without phoning, left them both where they were. But then he heard the receiver being replaced. The hospital, the ambulance station, both were less than a mile away.
“Come on,” Grabianski yelled at the body below him, “whoever the hell you are. Don’t die on me now.”
As he pumped his mind continued to race. From somewhere he pulled the fact that the brain could last out three minutes after the blood had stopped flowing from it. He hoped that was right, fact and not fiction. He had no thought of still being there when the ambulance crew came barging in, all hi-tech trained, armed to the teeth with electric paddles, their-what was the word for it? — defibrillator.
In less than two minutes he heard the siren.
He covered Hugo Furlong’s mouth with his own for the last time. Exhaled. Watched the chest rise and fall. “Good luck,” he called, heading not for the rear window, but the front door, sliding the catch down on the lock so there was no way it could slam shut. The siren seemed to be only in the next street and as he ran he caught sight, reflecting off the buildings, of the swirl of blue light.
Thirty
Jack Skelton had scarcely slept at all and when he had he had stirred restlessly, a ragged turning from one side to the other. Even so, it was his wife who woke first, alerted by the cautious opening of the door.
“Jack,” she said, hushed, her hand pushing at his back. “Jack, wake up.”
With a small groan, Skelton rolled towards the center of the bed, levering himself into a sitting position. Kate stood in shadow just inside the doorway, looking towards them. When Skelton spoke her name she turned and left the room, the door open behind her.
Standing, Skelton refastened his pajamas and slipped on his dressing gown. “Go back to sleep.” He kissed his wife high on the cheek. It was a little after three in the morning.
Kate sat on one of the kitchen stools, dribbling honey from the blade of a knife down on to a slice of bread she had already smeared with peanut butter. Her skin was sallow spots, small and white and without heads, clustered above and below the corners of her eyes and close to her hairline. When she had arrived back from the police station the previous afternoon, she had gone straight to her room and locked the door. Aside from visits to the bathroom, she had not emerged until now. Sandwiches and tea that had been left on a tray outside had remained untouched. She had not spoken a word to her parents, not to either of them.
Skelton watched the thin sweet line falling from his daughter’s hand. In rather less than three hours there was a meeting at the station, the latest information to be appraised, final decisions to be taken, briefings to be given. All of that had to happen, regardless.
“They’ll send me to prison, won’t they?”
“No.”
“’Course they will.”
“I shouldn’t think it will even go to court.”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t.”
“Because of who I am, you mean?”
“No, that isn’t what I mean.”
“Yes, it is. ’Cause I’m your daughter.”
“That won’t have anything to do with it.”
“Yeah!” Kate laughed harshly, turning her head sharply away. “Not much it won’t.”
“You make it sound as though you want to be convicted.”
“They send some poor twenty-year-old with a baby to Holloway for not paying her TV license, why not me?”
Skelton fidgeted on his stool, sighed. “Because of your age, the lack of previous convictions, all manner of reasons.”
“Like my family.”
Skelton looked at her.
“That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what the solicitor or whatever will say. Good home, caring parents. Good family. They’ll say that, won’t they?”
“Probably.”
He looked at her for a while and then asked. “Would it be so far from the truth?”
Kate twisted the knife then put the end of the blade between her lips, licking it clean. “Not what the papers will say, is it? If they get hold of it.”
Skelton wanted to make another cup of tea; he wanted to go to the bathroom and pee. He watched as Kate began to spread the honey here and there across the peanut butter, as though making a painting with a palette knife. He knew all too well what the newspapers would make of it, should it get out.
“Kate …”
He stopped himself, but not before she had followed where his eyes were pointing. Some of the honey had started to run across the surface of the table. “That’s it,” she said, “your daughter’s been done for shoplifting and all you’re worried about is getting the kitchen in a mess.”
“I’m sorry,” Skelton said.
She jumped up and tore away several pieces of kitchen roll. “Here,” pushing them into his hands, “wipe it up. Clean and tidy before she comes down.”
“Kate …”
“There, go on. Every last little …”
Skelton threw the paper in her face, lunged forward with his arm and swept everything from the table. The knife clattered against the front of the microwave, the bread landed face down, the honey jar shattered and stuck where it fell. For the first time since she had been very small, Kate looked into the anger of her father’s face and was frightened.
“Jack?” came the voice from the stairs. “What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s all right. Go back to bed.”
“I heard a crash.”
“It’s all right.”
Slippered steps and the closing of the bedroom door. Kate opened the cupboard beneath the sink to take out a dustpan and brush.
“Leave it,” Skelton said.
“It won’t take a minute.”
“Kate. Kate. Please. Leave it be.” He reached out to take the dustpan from her hands and she flinched as if he were going to strike her. Skelton stepped back, shoulders slumped. When she looked at him, her face was still angled away.
“All right,” she said.
“What?”
She ran the tap and lifted a glass down from a cupboard, drank a little of the water before turning the glass on to the draining board, face down. “Now this has happened,” she said, back to him not looking at him, “there’s no way you can’t find out the rest.”
“Is that the baby?” Kevin Naylor asked, struggling from sleep.
But, of course, Debbie was already awake.