Rotten Apples Page 6

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked kindly. Willow, who had half expected to be told she should not be there, could not speak for a moment. The nurse turned away to put down her bowl and came back to put a hand on Willow’s arm, waiting patiently.

  ‘My husband,’ she said at last. ‘Tom Worth.’

  ‘Come along. He’s down here. I’ll take you. He’s very fit. He’s got a good chance.’

  Willow could not answer. She walked through the door that the nurse was holding open and stood at the foot of Tom’s bed, just looking.

  His eyes were closed and his long, black lashes lay fanned out over the huge, grey-brown arcs under his eyes. His skin was the colour of old, dried-out putty. A great wodge of bandages covered the right of his head and another lay over his naked chest. There seemed to be tubes plugged in all over him.

  ‘It’s just the ventilator, a saline drip, a discharge outlet from the chest wound, and a catheter. Don’t let them frighten you.’

  Willow hardly heard the nurse’s voice or noticed when she left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

  Quiet-footed men and women came in and out of the room at intervals during the evening. Someone brought Willow a chair and made her sit down. Later someone else talked to her, trying to persuade her to go to the canteen and eat or drink. She just shook her head and knew that they were whispering about her just outside the door. That did not seem to matter. Nothing mattered any longer except what might be happening to Tom.

  As she sat watching him, she had to bite the insides of her cheeks to stop herself yelling. All she could think was that he might die, and all she could feel was a kind of nauseating panic.

  It occurred to her later that grief was a lovely word, full of overtones of large-mindedness and dignity, quite unlike the mean, selfish terror that obsessed her as she sat by Tom’s still body. She wanted to think only of him, but she could not do it. Every idea in her mind was connected with herself, with her fears and her guilt. Every snappish word she had ever spoken to him returned to accuse her, along with all the moments of insensitivity when she had hurt him or been thick about something he needed. She thought with loathing of the months she had spent dithering as she refused to let herself believe she loved him, or he her.

  ‘What a waste!’ she said, oblivious of the nurses just outside the door. ‘Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry.’

  Stop thinking, she commanded herself, knowing that she could not alter his fate however much she tormented herself with her own failings. And it was just possible that her mood might affect him. Rationally she knew that it was unlikely that he could sense anything about her presence in the room, let alone what might be going on in her brain, but for almost the first time in her life she thought that rationality might not be all important. Her mind, perhaps searching for something to distract itself, threw up a memory of his confession of superstition only that morning.

  Willow did not wipe away the unaccustomed tears because she did not even notice that they were sliding down her cheeks and dripping on to the thick sweater. Tom’s words echoed and re-echoed in her brain: ‘I’m superstitious about that …’

  ‘Stop thinking,’ she commanded herself.

  Her vigil was interrupted soon after ten by someone more ruthless than any of the nurses or the doctor who had spoken to her earlier in an effort to persuade her to leave. She did not hear him open the door, but she felt his hand pulling at her shoulder. Shocked at the contact, she turned her head fast and saw a tall, dark, angry-looking man in a crumpled grey suit. Although they had met only three times before, she recognised him at once as Superintendent John Blackled, Tom’s immediate superior.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ she said hoarsely, before she coughed to clear her clogged throat. She became aware of her damp cheeks and wiped them with the palms of both hands, pushing outwards and downwards from the sides of her nose and then shaking her hands to get rid of the dampness. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it, but not in here.’

  ‘He hasn’t recovered consciousness yet. He can’t hear us.’

  ‘You never know with head injuries. It’s just possible that he can hear. Get weaving.’

  Willow breathed deeply and then followed the superintendent out of the dim room, looking over her shoulder at the bed. Despite her protests, Blackled took her downstairs to the visitors’canteen and bought her a bowl of salty, orange-coloured soup and a roll.

  ‘I know that the unmatchable Mrs Rusham will have left you something much better at home, but you ought to eat. You don’t have to finish the bread, but you must have the soup.’

  ‘I don’t think I can swallow,’ said Willow carefully, having picked up the spoon and put it tentatively into the soup. Blind obedience to authority had never appealed to her, but she recognised his good intentions.

  ‘Don’t be so self-indulgent.’

  Stung, Willow looked up at him, blinking.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, more gently. ‘Don’t make a great drama out of it. It’s bad enough as it is.’

  A small but real smile pulled at her lips, as she remembered Tom’s telling her that his boss was always known as ‘Black Jack’, as much for his impatient toughness as his actual name. The pinprick of amusement spread a little warmth into her as it usually did. She swallowed half a spoonful of soup.

  ‘So tell me what happened,’ she said when she had got it down.

  ‘We still don’t know.’ Blackled was relieved to see that a little colour had come back into her grey face. ‘He was on his way back from a meeting at the local nick. They’ve been having trouble with some violent kids down there and he’d gone to advise. Not really part of his job, but he’s a mate of the DCI there, who thought he might be able, to help. Tom wasn’t due to meet any of the little scrotes themselves and there was no obvious risk. The desk sergeant says he left them at ten to six. At one minute to, they got a call from someone who said he’d found a man shot and bleeding in an alley just a few streets away. They called the ambulance, told the man to wait and went out in strength to see what had happened. Then they called us. We tried to get hold of you, both at home and the office.’

  ‘I know. I was in the House of Commons with the minister. Who was the man who found him?’

  ‘Young, black, good Samaritan apparently. They checked him out, of course, but he’s got no form and his place of work still has time clocks, if you can believe it. He’d left only five minutes before he called us. No marks on his hands. No weapons. He really seems to be clean.’

  ‘He’d hardly have waited for your lot to appear if he wasn’t, would he?’ said Willow with some of the old tartness. Black Jack nodded. ‘Did he see anyone?’

  ‘He says not.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘No reason not to. He must have known that he’d be a suspect and it would have been easy to make up a story about seeing someone run off. But he didn’t. Like I say, he’s clean.’

  ‘Thank God he was there,’ said Willow, closing her eyes and feeling all the panic again, mixed with fury at whoever had fired the gun, and a less fair rage at the man opposite her.

  ‘Right,’ he agreed, apparently unaware of her anger. ‘The bleeding was pretty severe as it was. Drink your soup.’

  She took a little more and then gave up, announcing that she was going back to Tom.

  John Blackled got to his feet. ‘You can’t do anything for him, and you look like hell. You ought to go to bed. Come back in the morning. They’ve got your number. They’ll ring you if there’s any change.’

  As Willow stood up, he put his arms around her and held her head against his broad shoulder.

  ‘Don’t worry, Will. We’ll see you right. You’re family now.’

  Outraged, she pulled herself away. No one but Tom called her Will. She recognised Blackled’s good intentions, but she could not respond to them. Shaking her head, she told him again that she was going back up to the ward.

  ‘Okay, Will,’ he said, making her g
rit her teeth. ‘I understand. You go on back to him if you must. And don’t worry. We’ll get them. We always get the bloody little toerags in cases like these.’

  What good will that do, Tom? she asked silently. She knew that Blackled was talking about cases where cops are killed and that he was overstating his case. Backing away from him for a few yards, she saw that his expression of sympathy was turning puzzled and then irritated. She thought that he would have found it easier if she had leaned on his shoulder and wept and begged for help. That had never been her style. Turning away abruptly, she walked fast towards the lifts.

  Much later the nurses managed to persuade her to go home by promising to telephone if there were any changes in Tom’s condition. Willow stumbled out of the Intensive Care Unit and down to the big foyer of the hospital, quiet by then and empty but for one old woman sitting at the end of one of the rows of seats in her dressing gown, smoking. Willow nodded to her and went out to find the car, which got her home in nine and a half minutes.

  The house seemed very empty when she let herself in, and the thought that she had once wanted an hour’s solitude there at the end of every day before Tom got home seemed absurd. Mentally groping for the anger that had helped her keep uncomfortable thoughts under control in the past, she tried to hate the criminals who had fired the shots, the police officers who had not protected Tom, and the doctors who had not brought him round. But it was herself she hated most.

  Having double-locked the front door and tried to think what she usually did at that time of day, she remembered that Mrs Rusham would have left dinner for two in the kitchen. Some of it probably needed putting away or at least covering. Willow opened the door of the huge fridge and nearly wept again as she saw two of Tom’s favourite dishes, laid out under transparent perspex covers.

  There were two small, dome-shaped, cucumber mousses, looking very pale within their circles of dark-green watercress, and two plates of fish salad, with scallops, prawns and baton-shaped pieces of salmon and halibut, carefully arranged between strips of radish, tomato, and radicchio. A small jug of some kind of pale-green sauce stood beside the plates.

  Hardly aware of what she was doing, but desperate for some kind of contact with Tom, Willow reached into the cold depths of the fridge and took out one of the mousses before taking a spoon from the nearest drawer. The smoothness of the mousse made it easy to swallow, even though she was not at all hungry, and the slight astringency of the cucumber was paradoxically comforting.

  Having finished the first mousse, she picked up the other one and started to eat that, too. Half-way through the third spoonful, the possibility of Tom’s dying closed her throat and she sank down on to the floor, leaned her head on the edge of one of the fridge shelves and suddenly burst into deep, howling tears.

  The sobs seemed to be pulled up through her chest by an irresistible force as she gulped and choked. Tears poured out of her rapidly swelling eyes, making them burn, and her nose filled with disgusting fluid. Thoughts of Tom and herself, of life, pain, terror, and bitter coldness, flashed through her mind, chasing each other, never lasting long enough to be rationalised. Hardly able to breathe, nauseated and blubbering, Willow felt out of control and physically revolting.

  Her spasms did not even begin to subside for nearly five minutes. Then, fighting for mastery, she hauled herself up from the floor, shut the fridge door at last and went to wash at the sink. As she was splashing cold water over face, rubbing at her eyes with her sticky fingers, reaching for kitchen paper to blow her nose and dry her face so that she could start washing it all over again, a phrase came into her mind.

  It’s your fault.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she said loudly, but it did not help.

  Part of her mind was convinced that if she had not been so afraid of what loving Tom might do to her he would never have been shot. Another part taunted her with the idea that it must have been her relaxation that had brought disaster on them both. If she had kept herself braced, as she had always done in the old days, Tom would have been safe and she would have been all right, too.

  Furious with herself for letting such unhelpful ideas addle her brains, she picked up the sodden balls of kitchen paper, flung them into the immaculate bin and went upstairs.

  The sight of their bedroom almost overset her again. They had argued amicably for days about how to have it decorated and had settled eventually on ivy-green walls with white paintwork and furniture. The curtains were of thickly lined white cotton damask edged with a four-inch linen fringe dyed to a slightly lighter green. An old, much faded Savonnerie carpet woven in cream and pink and green was laid on the polished parquet floor, and a sunny painting of an eighteenth-century fête champêtre with a woman on a swing, hung between the windows opposite the bed.

  Willow, who had bought it before she had even met Tom, had liked it for its frivolity and never cared that it had been described in the auction catalogue as ‘After Fragonard’, that it had no provenance and might even have been a copy of something once seen by a Victorian maiden aunt. But, for once, its exuberant jollity seemed out of place and garish, and she looked away.

  There was a round table at either side of the big bed, which was covered with a simple white woven cotton throw from Gozo. On Willow’s side the table looked almost cluttered, carrying as it did the telephone, a pile of books, a glass vase of pink and white roses, a silver Thermos of Mrs Rusham’s iced lemonade, a bottle of pills and a box of handkerchieves, as well as the creamware lamp that was matched by one at Tom’s side.

  His table was quite different. There were no flowers, for he refused to have any near him while he slept in case they stole his oxygen, and apart from the lamp there were only two books. One would be whichever new novel or biography he was in the middle of reading. The other, Willow knew, would be by John Buchan.

  It had once amused her to discover how much Tom liked the simple tales he must have first read when he was about eight, but she had come to understand that they represented a kind of safety for him. Whenever he was involved in a particularly difficult or troubling case, he retreated to Buchan’s world, where villains were wholeheartedly evil and heroes triumphed, where honest women looked like boys and sang like nightingales, and where there were no horrible moral dilemmas. Good was good and bad was bad and never the twain did meet.

  Determined not to resort to the sleeping pills that had always worried Tom, Willow undressed and got into bed and tried to read his copy of Mr Standfast. She could not get absorbed in it and after half an hour gave up and turned out the light, only to lie uncomfortably awake for hours. The cool linen sheets turned into hot, ridged, uncomfortable traps beneath her exhausted body, and the extra-fine goosedown pillows seemed lumpy and stifling.

  At one moment she turned on the light to stare at the little brown bottle of Temazepam, which she kept as a kind of talisman beside her bed. The theory was that knowing the pills were there would stop her being too afraid of insomnia to let herself sleep. That night they were a talisman of another kind, in spite of Tom’s remembered disapproval of suicide.

  ‘I think it must be one of the cruellest things anyone can do to their family—and friends,’ he had once said at the end of a particularly heartbreaking case.

  Willow had been surprised, knowing that Tom’s years in the police had given him ample evidence of all sorts of more obvious cruelties. Thinking about them did not help her sleep, and nor did the glass of milk or the brandy or any of the three soothingly familiar novels she tried to read. Eventually, soon after three in the morning, she succumbed to her old terror of sleeplessness and took two pills.

  Chapter Six

  Waking later than usual the next morning, Willow reached for the telephone to ring the hospital even before she got out of bed. The nurse who answered the telephone in the ITU said that there had been no change in Tom’s condition during the second half of the night, but that that was not necessarily a bad thing.

  ‘I need to speak to the consultant,’ said
Willow.

  ‘There’s nothing more he can tell you, Mrs Worth.’

  ‘I know, but I need to speak to him.’

  ‘He won’t be here again until ten. I’ll tell him then, if you like, and ask him to ring you. Where will you be?’

  Willow dictated the number of the tax office, thanked the nurse and put down the receiver. Hearing the sound of Mrs Rusham’s activities in the kitchen, Willow went downstairs to tell her the news.

  Mrs Rusham listened calmly, nodded, and then said in a tightly controlled voice: ‘Would you like your breakfast before or after your bath?’

  Willow saw that all the other woman’s defences were up again and followed her lead by announcing calmly that she would bathe and dress before breakfast.

  As she was washing her feet a few minutes later, she thought about the words she would use to tell Tom how wrong he had been about Mrs Rusham’s feelings for him. Her warm smile faded a moment later as reality returned and she knew that he might never be able to hear anything she told him again. But she kept her terrors under control. Mrs Rusham was not the only person whose defences were back in place.

  By the time Willow left the house, having breakfasted on coffee, fruit, and a fishcake made from some of the uneaten fish from the previous night’s dinner, she was superficially in command of herself. Her green suit had makeup all over the left shoulder, where she had wiped her forehead the previous evening, and so she had left it at the end of the bed for Mrs Rusham to take to the cleaners and chosen another suit from her large wardrobe. It was made of linen in a chestnut colour that made her hair look particularly vibrant, and she wore it with a thin shirt of buff silk. A string of pearls was fastened round her neck and a pair of matching earrings glowed softly in her earlobes.

  She felt much too gaudy, but she was determined to look as normal as possible. The thought of having to answer sympathetic questions about Tom from any of Kate Moughette’s staff was horrible. With luck, Willow thought, they would not even know that she was married to him.