The Touch of Innocents

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘And then you find her, pronto. Dig her out from under whichever stone or stud she’s hiding, and you tell her from me that she’s got her lily-white tits caught in a wringer this time.’

  He slammed the phone down, not needing to act the role of outraged editor, before looking around the newsroom to wave away their rapt attention. He could handle this one. And if he couldn’t he’d made sure that everyone, and particularly the managing editor, knew it wasn’t his fault.

  On the other side of the Atlantic the producer of WCN’s European bureau smiled to himself. He was twenty-eight and about to get his first break on screen. If he did well, really well, they might continue to let him fill in, avoid the unnecessary expense of flying over another foreign correspondent, at last recognize his true talents rather than condemning him to the mindless fetching and carrying of coffee cups and arranging satellite feeds for others. This was his big chance and he had no intention of letting it escape. Perhaps he ought to be contacting someone to report a missing person, making enquiries; on the other hand he had a job to do, a flight to book and not a hell of a lot of time. From their Paris base in a matter of hours she could have disappeared to any of a dozen countries; who was to know which? And he needed a haircut.

  Already in his mind he was writing the intro to the piece he would deliver to camera from in front of the great black door at Ten Downing Street.

  He didn’t mind if she never turned up.

  Nobody had noticed the problem with the spleen. The buffeting caused by the pressure of the seat belts just below the ribs had caused the smallest tear in the soft surface tissue, no more than half an inch, and it had been oozing blood ever since. Not enough blood to cause a major physiological problem, indeed, scarcely enough to register any change on the monitors, just a slow, steady drain on the oxygen supply to the nervous system which had begun to degrade even the basic autonomic responses and which everyone attributed to the gradual dysfunctioning of a swollen and chronically damaged brain. But the bleeding had weakened the tissue surrounding the tear until, as spleens sometimes do, abruptly it ruptured. Spleens are the washing machines of the blood, designed to produce white corpuscles and break down the worn-out red corpuscles; they are not intended to haemorrhage and squirt blood into the abdominal cavity. When they do, patients normally have no more than a couple of hours to live.

  Primrose was flustered. Less than forty minutes had passed since the grand parade of registrars, house officers, anaesthetists and physiotherapists had swept through ITU on the thrice-daily rounds, rushing around with their earnest faces and silly jokes, treating the nurses around them with as much consideration as uncomfortable pieces of furniture. Particularly student nurses. Yet now the anaesthetist, the one with the blond hair and salon tan, was on the phone, summoning her. She hadn’t even realized he knew her name. What did he want; had she fouled up?

  The other nurses exchanged knowing smiles; after all, he had the tightest and best-known glutei maximi any of them had seen in or out of surgical trousers.

  So that was it. An emergency, he explained, of a distinctly non-clinical nature. These emergencies she’d been handling since she was fifteen. Patiently she explained she couldn’t, not this week when she was working nights, trying to phrase her refusal so he wouldn’t be unduly deterred, wondering how far the tan went beyond the forearms, when the air-conditioned calm of Weschester General’s intensive therapy unit was shattered by the shrill insistence of an alarm. Alarms in ITU may sound if a patient rolls over and disturbs a sensor, or when a monitor is switched off for a bed bath or some other treatment. But patients in comas don’t roll over, and there wasn’t a nurse within twenty feet.

  She cut off the anaesthetist without explanation and rushed for the bed, but already McBean was ahead of her and checking the monitor. Blood pressure dropping, catastrophically. The breathing, once so serene, abruptly shallow and rasping. Now the alarm on the ECG monitor joined in the drama as it detected a heartbeat beginning to race. The body was in shock; death was calling.

  ‘Not so soon, not so soon, my lovely,’ McBean breathed quietly. It was too sudden, too unexpected to give up the fight just yet. ‘Hold on, a wee while longer. Don’t go giving up on us, not now.’

  Even as she called for the doctors to be summoned back the sister was making a further inspection of the patient, using her trained eyes, probing with her fingers, letting her years of experience block out the wailing of the monitors while she searched for the cause of crisis.

  And quickly it was found. A distended abdomen, taut, a drum.

  ‘Get a theatre ready,’ she snapped across the ward. ‘We’ll be needing it in a hurry or I’m too old for this job.’

  Calmly, she turned to the patient and began stroking her hand, which was trembling in shock. ‘We’ll maybe get you through this after all. And then we can find out who you really are.’

  The pavement across the road from the famous doorway was cluttered with the paraphernalia of modern news gathering which, in spite of the microprocessor revolution, still seemed to consist primarily of middle-aged men, each more dog-eared than the next, raising their voices to hurl baited questions in the direction of passing politicians. They stood like fishermen crowded along a river bank, overweight, overcoated and many thermally underpinned, hoping to lure their quarry into a sound bite.

  ‘This is a traditional British game called a Government reshuffle,’ intoned the producer-turned-novice foreign correspondent. It was the hour of day when the minds of most journalists descend to their stomachs and they begin the detailed process of planning lunch, but the twinges of hunger were deadened for the young American by the knowledge that it was peak breakfast viewing time back home, and he had it live.

  ‘Into Ten Downing Street behind me in the past few hours have passed Britain’s most able, and most ambitious. For some the door is the threshold to still greater fame and preferment; for others, it’s the open jaws of the political crematorium. The game for us is to guess who has got what they want, and who has just joined the living dead. One junior minister has already let the cat out of the bag. When he left Downing Street just a few minutes ago, he was in tears. Others react differently. When he reappeared after his chat with the Prime Minister, the much criticized but usually voluble Defence Secretary could utter nothing more than a strangled “Nothing to say”, while the Transport Secretary seems to have vanished completely. He went in through the front door of Downing Street some time ago, but it seems he must have left from the back.’

  The correspondent turned to glance down the narrow Georgian street which, as though switched from the studio, became bathed in late autumn sunlight. Behind him one of the heavy net curtains at a first-floor window was disturbed by a shadowy figure – a curious secretary enjoying the fun, perhaps. Or the Transport Secretary seeing if the coast were yet clear. But the correspondent’s attention was turned to a tall figure striding towards him from the direction of the heavy wrought-iron gates that shielded the entrance to Downing Street.

  Even at a distance the bearing was notable. Many of the visitors to Downing Street that morning had appeared skittish and overflowing with nervous energy, others had been cautious, prowling, like stalking cats. This visitor seemed relaxed, self-confident, as though walking in the country, which, indeed, frequently he did. Yet his three-piece suit was all town, immaculately tailored and showing scarcely a trace of unintended creasing, the gold watch fob accurately suggesting an heirloom from a long line of distinguished and wealthy ancestors, while the highly polished shoes which caught the pale sun announced that this man was both meticulous enough to require they be polished daily, and of sufficient means to ensure he did not have to bother with such matters himself.

  As he drew closer to the cameras the image of good grooming and close attention to personal detail became enhanced; the spare frame, the face healthily weathered rather than lined, a controlled expression difficult to read and suggesting a man who did not share his emotions lightly. Perhaps with h
is masculine manner and evident self-confidence he did not feel the need to share his emotions at all. The thick hair was laid straight back from the temples, its mixture of black ink and steel grey implying a man in his early fifties. A man, like a good malt, improving with age. And moist, pale blue eyes. He had the women of his local party association dangling from his Jermyn Street belt.

  ‘And here’s a man who seems to be relishing the game,’ the young American continued brightly, but failing to realize that the name he offered viewers was being swept away in a sudden deluge of shouted questions. ‘He’s arriving not by car, but on foot, in full view of the cameras, denying himself any hiding place when he leaves. He’s either very bold, or very optimistic. But this is a man hotly tipped for promotion.’

  The politician turned his face to the cameras on the far side of the street and gave half a wave, but did not smile.

  The correspondent held a hand to the side of his face to guard his earpiece; a voice that sounded very much like Grubb was bawling indecipherably at him. Something about an unnamed bastard.

  ‘In his previous job at the Employment Ministry he made his name as a political tough-guy by defeating one of the most bitter rail strikes in recent memory, while in his current role as Health Secretary he’s established a reputation as a radical reformer …’

  More squawking in his earpiece.

  ‘… whatever he’s doing tomorrow, in many people’s view this is a man who could eventually go all the way and one day be working on the other side of that Downing Street door.’

  On cue a duty policeman saluted, the door swung open and without a backward glance the politician disappeared inside as Grubb’s voice echoed across the satellite link, at last intelligible if deeply inelegant.

  The young broadcaster drew a deep breath, no mistake this time, the words mouthed with almost excessive precision.

  ‘We are likely to be hearing a lot more about Paul Devereux.’

  The senses were stunned, literally. A blast of sheer white light had entered the eye, which had been unable to cope. The pupil struggled to exclude the glare but had found it an impossible task; the light beams felt as though they were tearing around the skull, harassing the brain like a pack of mongrels let loose in a school yard. The olfactory nerve, under assault from a powerful and nauseatingly pungent odour, jammed in revolt; the nostrils flared in disgust, but found it impossible to escape. A sharp pain shot up through the nerve tendrils of the left arm from somewhere near its extremity, travelling through the brain stem like an angry, malevolent wind, blowing away cerebral cobwebs, rattling closed doors and throwing open the windows of the mind as it passed. The sensation it created was intense and unpleasant, yet in response her body could manage nothing but a slight, almost contemptuous curling of the little finger.

  Around the bed, the reaction to pain generated smiles. ‘You were right, Sister,’ the consultant neurologist, Arnold Weatherup, sighed. ‘Once again,’ he added with feigned reluctance. ‘I thought this one had passed us by, but it would seem the main problem was a leaky spleen all along. You have a sixth sense about these things; not so long ago women like you would have been burned at the stake.’

  ‘And no’ so long ago, Mr Weatherup, doctors like you were robbing graves for anatomy specimens.’

  The consultant laughed. There was always much laughter in this ward; it helped to ease the distress of frequent failure.

  ‘The medical profession has always required its sacrifices,’ the anaesthetist joined in, staring intently at Primrose.

  ‘I don’t think we need to prod or poke around any longer, Sister McBean,’ Weatherup concluded, examining the fresh scar on the upper left abdomen through which the leaky spleen had been removed. ‘I shall leave it to you to weave your charms and spells and hope that this recovery might continue.’ He smiled. ‘By the way, Burke and Hare, the grave robbers – Scots, weren’t they?’

  ‘No, doctor. Only the corpses they sold. Nothing but the best for the medical profession.’

  None of this banter registered within the damaged brain, which was still dazzled and largely blinded by the unaccustomed light. The tar pit, although drying out, still delayed and frustrated the reawakening army of neurological messengers. They leapt from stepping stone to stepping stone, trying to find a way through. Most still failed and some, like those bearing short-term memories, would perish entirely, but others were more persistent, reinvigorated by the blood’s fresh supplies of oxygen, trying first one route, then another, until slowly they came nearer their goal. The stepping stones were growing larger, more messengers were getting through, yet many still arrived out of sequence, jumbling their messages and confusing the brain.

  Of the several hours before the accident and all the many days since there would be no coherent memory, nothing but a dark void. Only through dreams, which have their own unscrambling process for memories, would she be able to revisit any fragment of the torment she had endured, and one fragment she would touch only in her nightmares. A meaningless, unconnected and untranslatable memory but one which was insistent.

  The memory of a face.

  Pale. Gaunt. A young woman with exhausted eyes and drained spirit. A face of parchment skin and the pallor of an aged, extinguished candle. Split across by chapped and shrunken lips. A haunted demeanour squeezed dry of humour, of hope. Trembling.

  The face spoke only of despair, a despair that was to haunt every one of the nightmares which recurred both during the period of wakening and after Isadora Dean had woken from her coma.

  For in every one of those nightmares, the girl was running off with Izzy’s baby.

  Michelini couldn’t identify the precise moment he had made up his mind. Perhaps it was because the decision hadn’t been made by him at all; others had made it for him. Maybe it was that weekend in San Francisco spent humping the chief policy adviser to the Californian Congressman who occupied the chair of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee. No sooner had she seen him off at the airport with the promise of the Congressman’s ear – she seemed to control most parts of his anatomy – than he had caught the eye of a United stewardess as she kneeled down to retrieve the linen napkin he had dropped from his dinner tray. It was one of those looks practised by world-weary adults which leaves nothing unspoken. When she returned with a fresh napkin, it had her telephone number on it.

  He knew he had only a few years left before he fell firmly into the category of middle age, when stewardesses would regard his appetites as primarily gastronomic, when they would see only the sagging flesh beneath his eyes instead of the suggestiveness within them and start asking him if he took medication rather than home phone numbers. He couldn’t deny – didn’t want to – that he was fascinated by sex, new conquests; it had been inculcated upon him at his father’s knee and in those days the women simply turned a blind eye and got on with housework and motherhood. At least in first-generation Italian-American families.

  Times changed, women changed. And he, too, had changed. He was no longer the bandito, the sexual athlete of his twenties, yet what he nowadays lacked in stamina he made up for in technique. He loved women. Not just one woman, many women. And he was on a roll, maybe the last one he’d get. Marriage, at least to a wife like his, had just been one of those rotten ideas.

  At the start they had seemed so compatible. She was no innocent maiden but a professional woman in her thirties who knew what it was all about when he had invited her back to his apartment in the Watergate. He had learnt as much as he had taught. As she had mentioned later, it was not the view outside the window that had drawn her there, she’d seen that many times before.

  They had seemed to share similar interests: a defence contractor and a television correspondent both headquartered in the American capital, both used to the frequent travelling and separations of business, both physically relishing their reunions. Marriage had been the great mistake. It was a commitment she seemed incapable of honouring. She had promised to settle down, stop the globetrot
ting, the foreign adventures, assignment after successful assignment.

  ‘Just one more year,’ she would ask. ‘It’s going too well to walk away from it right now. Just one more year and I’ll get a Stateside editor’s job. Or maybe a slot anchoring my own programme.’

  Then a year had turned to eighteen months, the promises had fallen like last year’s leaves and she had been posted to the European bureau in Paris as their top foreign correspondent, taking the kids with her, flying back every three weeks. Vowing this would be the last time.

  And he realized he was burned up with it all. Not just the absences, although that was difficult enough to deal with. ‘How’s the wife?’ they would ask. ‘How the fuck would I know?’ he had begun to respond. Now she had been out of contact for more than two weeks.

  It was more than the absences. More even than the frustration of reunion when she would arrive back exhausted, emotionally drained, too tired even to cook a proper meal let alone light fires in his bed. It had hit him at the cocktail party in Georgetown the other night. As her professional success had grown, increasingly he came to feel as no more than an appendage.

  ‘Oh, you’re married to Isadora Dean. How wonderful!’ yet another breathless matron had exclaimed. Not ‘Joe Michelini, how nice to meet you and tell me all about yourself’ but ‘Mr Izzy Dean’ all over again and twenty minutes discussing her career before he could break away and grab another Scotch.

  She hadn’t even taken his name – ‘for professional reasons’. Used to be there was a clear division of responsibilities within a family, the man as bread-winner and the woman as breadbaker, not these endless arguments about where and when they might be able to meet and who should do what and screw whom.