‘Thank you,’ Debbie echoed.
He nodded again, pursed his mouth slightly, turned and walked away.
‘She should wake,’ I thought. Not she would.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The young female doctor we had met in the Emergency Room earlier brought us into Penny’s room. She lay attached to a drip now, an oxygen mask covering her face again, her skull wrapped in bandages, her forehead stained a dark yellow below the bandage line. Her face looked paler than I had ever seen it. Despite her age, despite her increasing maturity, she looked lost in that bed, surrounded with such equipment.
Her hand was cold, her nails, painted pink yet still ragged with biting, were smaller than I remembered. I stood to one side of the bed, her hand in mine, and touched her cheek with my index finger. Debbie stood on the opposite side of the bed, holding her other hand, on which a clip attached to her finger relayed her pulse and blood pressure to one of the monitors at the head of the bed.
‘Penny,’ Debbie said, her voice hushed. ‘Penny, sweetheart? Mummy and Daddy are here.’
We both scrutinized her features for some flicker of recognition, but she remained impassive.
‘She might take a while to come round,’ the doctor explained, jotting something on the clipboard which she hung on the bedstead.
‘How long?’ Debbie asked.
The young woman grimaced slightly. ‘It’s hard to say. She hasn’t woken since she was brought in, you see.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, she might take a day or two to come round.’
None of us spoke.
‘Maybe longer,’ she added.
‘Is she in a coma?’ I asked incredulously.
‘We don’t know,’ the young woman said, smiling apologetically. ‘She’s young and fit. She’s got a good chance of coming through it OK. Plus she was very lucky she got here so fast.’
‘The surgeon said,’ Debbie commented absent-mindedly.
‘Technicelly, the man who brought her probably shouldn’t have lifted her, in case she had a neck injury,’ she said. Looking around at the door as if she were telling us something she shouldn’t, she added, ‘But in this instance he did the right thing. He might have saved her life.’
The rest of the day passed as if in a dream. I constantly felt as if I were on the verge of moving out of myself, the feeling of derealization I had always associated with the panic attacks I had had a few years previous.
Debbie and I spoke little, making small talk as we waited for our daughter to waken.
Before visiting time ended, my parents arrived to visit Penny, staying only long enough to see that she was still asleep. Debbie’s parents were looking after Shane and had decided it best not to bring him to see Penny as she was at the moment.
‘Who is staying tonight?’ my father asked, as they were leaving.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, glancing at Debbie. ‘One of us will need to get Shane.’
‘You go home,’ Debbie said. ‘I’ll stay with her tonight.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘You look like you need sleep.’
‘As if I’d sleep. She needs her mother beside her.’
I left soon after my parents, to go and collect Shane. Kissing Penny as softly as I could on the forehead, I felt the roughness of the gauze dressing against my skin. It struck me as strange that, despite wanting her to waken, we were all being as careful and as quiet as possible around her.
Debbie offered me a perfunctory kiss and told me to tell Shane that she would be home in the morning, when I would return and she could go home to shower and change.
‘Though she might be awake in the morning,’ Debbie offered. ‘What do you think?’
‘She might be,’ I said.
Shane sat in the back of the car on the way home from his grandparents’ house. He held a toy dinosaur in each fist, play-fighting with them for a few moments. Finally, his imagination temporarily exhausted, he lowered them onto the seat and leant forward to speak to me.
‘Where’s Penny?’ he asked.
‘She’s with Mummy,’ I answered.
‘Is she sick?’
‘Why, little man?’
‘I heard Granny talking about it. Is she going to die?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘She’ll be home in no time.’
‘What’s wrong with her, then?’
I looked at him in the rear-view mirror, the softness of his features, his brow lightly furrowed.
‘She fell and hurt her head. The doctors have helped her feel better.’
The answer seemed to placate him and he sat back in his seat and turned his face to the window. In the passing illumination of the street lamps I could see his lips moving silently.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, suspecting he was praying for his sister.
‘I’m counting the lights,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘If the last one is twenty, Penny will be OK.’
‘Who told you that?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I just thought it is all,’ he said, as if that explained everything.
By my count, the last light before our home was the nineteenth so I cheated and counted it twice.
After I got him into bed and he had said his prayers, I went into Penny’s room. I half expected to see the familiar shape of her sleeping body, but the bed sat still made, her favourite teddy sitting on the pillow. Several items of clothing lay discarded on the floor, trousers bunched where she had stepped out of them in front of her mirror. I guessed she had been trying on different outfits for John Morrison’s party.
I picked up the clothes and began to hang them in her wardrobe. One of her tops was slightly marked with a smudge of foundation. I placed it to my face and breathed in her smell as I fought back the growing fear that she might never see this room again.
I slept little that night, waking fitfully every time I drifted off, checking my mobile in case Debbie had called from the hospital. Around two, Shane woke to go to the toilet, then stumbled into my room and clambered into the bed beside me. In the dull illumination from the bathroom, his sleeping profile reminded me of his sister. Finally, rather than counting sheep, I recited the decades of the rosary over and over until I was no longer aware of the time.
Thursday, 15 February
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I called the hospital just after dawn to be told that Penny was critical but stable, which in reality meant there had been no change in her condition. Debbie was sleeping in the chair by her bed, I was told, having only managed to fall asleep an hour earlier. I asked the nurse not to waken her, but to tell her when she woke that I would be up before 9 a.m.
Debbie’s parents arrived after seven, their drawn features showing that they too had slept little. We ate a light breakfast and they offered to stay in the house with Shane during the day. I left home at seven thirty, having a stop to make along the way.
A low mist drifted across the fields around Morrison’s house, his horses shuffling softly in the dawn light, their breath condensing around their ears.
His house stood in darkness, a sheen of dew marking the windscreen of his car. I glanced into the Range Rover as I passed it, and saw on the light upholstery of the back seat brown bloodstains where Penny’s head had rested the day previous as Morrison had driven her to the hospital.
He evidently had heard my arrival for he opened the front door before I even had a chance to knock. He stood in his doorway in grey sweat pants and a T-shirt, over which he wore a white robe, untied at the waist.
‘You’re up early,’ I said.
‘Come in,’ he replied, holding open the door, his face a mask of pity. ‘John couldn’t sleep.’
He turned and retreated into the darkness of his hallway and I followed him. He led me into the kitchen, a large bright room, all chromium-coated units and black granite surfaces. At the table a pot of coffee steamed beside a smouldering cigarette which was scarring brown
the saucer of the cup he had been drinking from.
‘Coffee?’ he offered, lifting a second cup.
‘Yes. Please.’
‘How is she doing since?’
‘She’s still sleeping,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I called the hospital but they wouldn’t tell me.’
I began to object, but he spoke again.
‘I had nothing to do with it, if that’s what you think.’
I sat at the table, took the cup from him, couldn’t trust myself to speak.
‘It was an accident. She was given the hat to wear, but it must have slipped or something. I swear I had nothing to do with it.’
He made this as a simple statement of fact, without defensiveness, and seemingly not caring if I believed him or not.
‘I don’t hurt kids,’ he concluded, then sat and, rubbing out his smouldering cigarette, lit a fresh one before tossing the pack across the table to me.
‘I’m told you saved her life,’ I managed finally. ‘If you’d acted slower she might not have had as good a chance.’
Morrison lightly waved the smoke from in front of him and picked up his coffee. I noticed a flush of blood to his face and ears. He dragged deeply on his smoke, blew the stream towards the floor. ‘Whatever’s between us, that doesn’t affect our kids. John really likes your girl. There’s nothing more to it than that.’
We both finished our coffee in silence. I stared out the window at the stables in the distance as I smoked. Finally I stood to leave. ‘I need to get back to the hospital.’
Morrison nodded, extended his hand, waited for me to respond. We shook and I opened the door and stepped out into the dawn.
‘My son would like to visit Penny, if that’s OK with you. I don’t have to come in if you don’t want me to, but he’d like to see her. He feels guilty as hell.’
I nodded, once. ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ I said. ‘And thank you for saving my daughter.’
He smiled grimly, then stepped back and closed the door behind me.
I sat with Penny for most of the morning while Debbie went home and showered. Her condition had not improved, though the doctor assured me that it had not deteriorated.
‘When she’s ready, she’ll wake up,’ he said blithely, as if that assurance would assuage the pain I felt watching her impassive face, the almost imperceptible movement of the bedclothes that revealed the shallowness of her breathing.
Jim Hendry arrived before lunch, his face flustered with embarrassment, beneath his arm a large teddy bear and a few rolled magazines. He coughed as he entered the room, patted me awkwardly on the arm in sympathy.
‘It was good of you to come,’ I said.
‘I heard it on the jungle drums, you know,’ he said.
‘I appreciate it, Jim.’
He gestured towards the teddy that he had placed on the chair in the corner of the room. ‘I wasn’t sure what age she was. Might be a little old for teddy bears.’
‘It’s very kind.’
‘I brought her a few books too,’ he said, handing me the magazines. The uppermost one was a women’s magazine that Debbie read sometimes. The front cover boasted a strapline that it contained information on ‘50 ways to satisfy your lover’.
‘That one might be a bit old for her, now I think about it,’ he said.
He glanced at the figure on the bed. ‘How’s she doing?’
‘We don’t know. They’re not saying much. Critical but stable.’
He nodded, as if this explained everything. ‘Do you know how it happened?’
‘She was horse riding, at Vincent Morrison’s home. Fell off.’
Hendry looked at me quizzically. ‘Do you need a hand taking care of him?’
I shook my head, smiled lightly. ‘Thanks, Jim,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t involved in it. In fact, he may well have saved her life.’
Hendry whistled low. ‘I’ll not ask.’
We chatted uneasily for a few moments until Debbie returned and Jim used her arrival to make his exit. I walked out with him, as much to give me a chance to have a smoke as out of courtesy.
As I stood outside, Caroline Williams arrived. She looked gaunt, her short-cropped hair serving only to accentuate the sharpness of her thinning features. She hugged me close, whispered words of consolation in my ear as she did so.
‘I tried your mobile but it was off. I called the house and Debbie’s parents told me what had happened,’ she said as she stepped away from me.
‘It was very good of you to come,’ I said. ‘Debbie will be pleased to see you.’ I wasn’t sure why I had added that, for Caroline was there more for me than for Debbie.
We walked slowly up to the room where Penny was being treated. Caroline asked about the circumstances that had led to Penny’s fall.
‘I understand how you’re feeling,’ she said, as we stepped into the elevator. She squeezed my hand reassuringly.
‘I don’t know how I’m feeling myself, to be honest,’ I said. ‘Empty, I suppose.’
She nodded as I spoke. ‘I understand,’ she repeated, looking me in the eyes.
‘I’d almost rather it had been deliberate, rather than an accident. It would have been less . . . random – less frightening, I guess – if I could explain it, could blame someone.’
Caroline continued to nod but did not speak.
‘I thought Vincent Morrison had been behind it, but apparently not. In fact he may have saved her.’
‘Who’s Vincent Morrison?’ she asked, and I realized that she hadn’t been partnered with me when I had first met Morrison.
The elevator reached Penny’s floor and we moved into the heat of the ward.
‘We’ll see Penny and I’ll explain it to you over coffee.’
Caroline was only permitted to stay for five minutes; the nurses were already annoyed at the number of people who had been in, complaining that visitors were meant to be confined to immediate family. She and Debbie chatted lightly about everything except Penny and Peter, as if each understood the other’s pain without need for explication.
I told Debbie I’d walk Caroline downstairs to get something to eat. We sat in the cafe on the ground floor, near the hospital entrance. After I had bought a pot of coffee for us both, I sat down and explained my background with Vincent Morrison and the people-smuggling ring he was involved in.
‘He reappeared a few weeks ago,’ I said. ‘He’s a community leader; he threw his weight behind this Rising crew when they started protesting about drug dealers.’
‘I’ve heard about them,’ Caroline said grimly. ‘It’s about time someone did something, Ben.’
‘Maybe,’ I agreed. ‘But The Rising isn’t the group to be doing it. They’re not trying to drive dealers out of the local communities, they’re trying to pressurize the dealers into selling their produce. Their leader is a character called Charlie Cunningham who was a cellmate of Morrison’s. Apparently, Cunningham and his crew don’t have the money to start a drugs business. Morrison does though. He was bankrupt after that last business yet he’s living in a huge house with stables in Portnee, up the side road past the Tavern.’
‘Can you prove any of this?’ Caroline asked.
I prevaricated. ‘Maybe.’
‘Depending on?’
Putting my cup down on the table, I laid my hand lightly on Caroline’s. ‘We’ve arrested someone we think was responsible for Peter’s drugs,’ I said.
A mixture of emotions blazed in Caroline’s eyes.
‘Which of them was it? That shit Murphy?’
I had not told Caroline how things had progressed since last we had spoken.
‘Murphy claimed that Peter got the drugs himself. He gave us an address for a dealer in Rossanure estate.’
‘He’s lying. Peter was never near Rossanure. Besides, he wasn’t doing drugs. I’d have known,’ Caroline said vehemently. ‘I know what to look for, Ben. I know my own son.’
She paused, reflecting on her final statement, swallowed the sentiment
down.
‘Murphy gave us a name that tied to another case I was working. A dealer from up here named Kielty.’
‘What did you want him for?’
‘We thought he was dead. You remember Lorcan Hutton?’
Caroline paused a second and grimaced.
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘He and Kielty agreed to sell a stash for Cunningham, then tried stiffing him. We found Lorcan tortured and shot in the old Abbey graveyard. Kielty was setting himself up down in Sligo, selling off Cunningham’s stash. Except there must have been something in it. One of Kielty’s clients in the North took the stuff and went berserk. Kielty claims he killed him in self-defence, then used the corpse to stage his own death. He moved to Sligo full time, using the name of his dead client.’
Caroline listened as I spoke, her eyes following my mouth to ensure she was following what I was saying.
‘Berserk?’
I nodded slowly.
‘So what’s going to happen to Kielty?’
‘I’m not sure. He implicated one of the Drugs Unit, a guy by the name of Rory Nicell. Patterson was to lift Nicell. Then everything kicked off with Penny, so I don’t know what’s happened since.’
‘But Kielty was the one who sold him the stuff?’
‘Ultimately, yes. But it stretches back to Cunningham. Or further.’ She raised her chin slightly, urging me to continue. ‘Cunningham doesn’t have the money to push drugs—’
‘Morrison,’ she said.
‘Morrison,’ I agreed. ‘But that’s not proven. Morrison claims he’s clean. When I heard about Penny I thought he’d done it to take me off the case, but apparently he had nothing to do with it.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I think I do. Penny is in school with his son. I think the two of them had a thing for each other.’
‘Jesus,’ Caroline said.
‘I know. I tried to stop her from seeing him.’
‘You can’t force your kids to do anything,’ Caroline said quietly.
Unable to think of an appropriate response, I laid my hand again on hers. I glanced up at the entrance way to the hospital.
The Rising The Rising (Inspector Devlin #4) Page 19
