“I told you to be sure no one-”
“I know,” she said, “I know. I know. But what was I meant to make of that? I thought of flu, someone sneezing in her face, Tommy being a fuss pot husband because I didn’t understand, don’t you see that, Tommy? How would I know because this is Helen we’re talking about and this is Belgravia where it’s supposed to be…and a gun, why would I ever think of a gun?”
She began to weep in earnest then, and St. James told her that she’d said enough. But Lynley knew she never could have said enough to explain how his wife, how the woman he loved…
He said, “What then?”
St. James said, “Tommy…”
Deborah said, “No. Simon. Please.” And then to Lynley, “She was on the top step and her door key was in her hand. I tried to rouse her. I thought she’d fainted because there was no blood, Tommy. There was no blood. Not like what you would think if someone is…I’d never seen…I didn’t know…But then she moaned and I could tell something was terribly wrong. I phoned triple nine and then I cradled her to keep her warm and that’s when…On my hand, there was blood. I thought I’d cut myself at first and I looked for where and how but I saw it wasn’t me and I thought the baby, but her legs, Helen’s legs…I mean, there was no blood where one would think…And this was a different sort of blood anyway, it looked different because I know, you see, Tommy…”
Even in his own despair, Lynley felt hers, and that was what finally got through to him. She would know what the blood of a miscarriage looked like. She’d suffered how many…? He didn’t know. He sat, not next to Deborah and her husband, but across, on the chair that Terence Fire had been using.
He said, “You thought she’d lost the baby.”
“At first. But then I finally saw the blood on her coat. High up, here.” She indicated a spot beneath her left breast. “I phoned triple nine again and I said, There’s blood, there’s blood. Hurry. But the police got there first.”
“Twenty minutes,” Lynley said. “Twenty God damn minutes.”
“I phoned three times,” Deborah told him. “Where are they, I asked. She’s bleeding. She’s bleeding. But I still didn’t know she’d been shot, you see. Tommy, if I’d known…If I’d told them that…Because I didn’t think, not in Belgravia…Tommy, who would shoot someone in Belgravia?”
Lovely wife, Superintendent. The sodding profile in The Source. Complete with photographs of the smiling superintendent of police and his charming wife. Titled bloke, he was, not your garden variety sort of cop at all.
Lynley rose blindly. He would find him. He would find him.
St. James said, “Tommy, no. Let the Belgravia police…” And only then did Lynley realise he’d said it aloud.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You must. You’re needed here. She’ll come out of theatre. They’ll want to speak to you. She’s going to need you.”
Lynley headed in the direction of the door but this, apparently, was why the uniformed constables had been hanging about. They stopped him, saying, “It’s in hand, sir. It’s top priority. It’s well in hand,” and by that time St. James had reached his side as well.
He said, “Come with me, Tommy. We won’t leave you,” and the kindness in his voice felt like a crushing weight on Lynley’s chest.
He gasped for breath, for something to cling to. He said, “My God. I’ve got to phone her parents, Simon. How am I going to tell them what’s happened?”
BARBARA FOUND that she couldn’t bring herself to leave even as she told herself she wasn’t needed and probably wasn’t wanted either. People milled about everywhere, each one of them in a personal hell of waiting.
Helen Lynley’s parents, the earl and countess of whatever because Barbara couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard the title so many generations in their family, were huddled in misery and they looked frail, more than seventy years old and unprepared to face what they were facing now.
Helen’s sister Penelope rushing in from Cambridge with her husband at her side, tried to comfort them after herself crying out, “How is she? Mum, my God, how is she? Where’s Cybil? Is Daphne on her way?”
They all were, all four of Helen’s sisters, including Iris on her way from America.
And Lynley’s mother was tearing up from Cornwall with her younger son, while his sister hurried down from Yorkshire.
Family, Barbara thought. She was neither needed nor wanted here. But she could not bring herself to leave.
Others had come and gone: Winston Nkata, John Stewart, other members of the team, uniformed constables and plainclothes officers whom Lynley had worked with through the years. Cops were checking in from stations in every borough in town. Everyone save Hillier had seemed to put in an appearance during the course of the night.
Barbara herself had arrived after the worst sort of journey from North London. Her car had refused to start at first up on Wood Lane, and she’d flooded its engine in a panic trying to get the bloody thing running. She’d sworn at the car. She’d vowed to reduce the Mini to rubble. She’d strangled the steering wheel. She’d phoned for help. She’d finally got the engine to sputter into life, and she’d sat on the horn trying to clear traffic out of the way.
She’d got to the hospital just after word had been given to Lynley about Helen’s condition. She’d seen the surgeon come to fetch him and she’d watched as he’d received the news. It’s killing him, she’d thought.
She wanted to go to him, to say she’d bear the weight of it with him, as his friend, but she knew she didn’t have that right. Instead, she watched as Simon St. James went to him, and she waited until Simon had returned to his wife to share with her what he had learned. Lynley and Helen’s parents disappeared with the surgeon, God only knew where, and Barbara understood that she could not follow. So she crossed the room to speak to St. James. He nodded at her and she was furiously grateful that he did not exclude her or ask why she was there.
She said, “How bad is it?”
He took a moment. From his expression, she prepared herself to hear the worst.
“She was shot beneath the left breast,” he said. His wife leaned into him, her face against his shoulder as she listened along with Barbara. “The bullet evidently went through the left ventricle, the right atrium, and the right artery.”
“But there was no blood, there was almost no blood.” Deborah spoke into the jacket he was wearing, into his shoulder, shaking her head.
“How can that happen?” Barbara asked St. James.
“Her lung collapsed at once,” St. James told her, “so the blood began filling the cavity that was left in her chest.”
Deborah began to cry. Not a wail. Not an ululation of grief. Just a shaking of her body that even Barbara could see she was doing her best to control.
“They would have put a tube in her chest when they first saw the wound,” St. James told Barbara. “They would have got blood from it. A litre. Perhaps two. They would have known then that they had to go in at once.”
“That’s what the surgery was.”
“They sutured the left ventricle, did the same for the artery and the exit wound in the right ventricle.”
“The bullet? Have we got the bullet? What happened to the bullet?”
“It was under the right scapula, between the third and fourth rib. We have the bullet.”
“So if she’s repaired,” Barbara said, “that’s good news, isn’t it? Isn’t it good news, Simon?”
She saw him withdraw inside himself then, to a place she could not know or imagine. He said, “It took so long to get to her, Barbara.”
“What do you mean? So long? Why?”
He shook his head. She saw-inexplicably-that his eyes grew cloudy. She didn’t want to hear the rest, then, but they’d waded too far into these waters. Retreat was not an option.