It took Strike a while to drop back into an uneasy doze.
He was woken by early morning sunshine penetrating his eyelids. Squinting against the light, he heard footsteps squeaking on the floor. Next came a loud rattle as the curtain was pulled back, opening Jack’s bed to the ward again and revealing more motionless figures, lying in beds all around them. A new nurse stood beaming at him, younger, with a long dark ponytail.
“Hi!” she said brightly, taking Jack’s clipboard. “It’s not often we get anyone famous in here! I know all about you, I read everything about how you caught that serial—”
“This is my nephew, Jack,” he said coldly. The idea of discussing the Shacklewell Ripper now was repugnant to him. The nurse’s smile faltered.
“Would you mind waiting outside the curtain? We need to take bloods, change his drips and his catheter.”
Strike dragged himself back onto his crutches and made his way laboriously out of the ward again, trying not to focus on any of the other inert figures wired to their own buzzing machines.
The canteen was already half-full when he got there. Unshaven and heavy-eyed, he had slid his tray all the way to the till and paid before he realized he could not carry it and manage his crutches. A young girl clearing tables spotted his predicament and came to help.
“Cheers,” said Strike gruffly, when she had placed the tray on a table beside a window.
“No probs,” said the girl. “Leave it there after, I’ll get it.”
The small kindness made Strike feel disproportionately emotional. Ignoring the fry-up he had just bought, he took out his phone and texted Lucy again.
All fine, nurse changing his drip, will be back with him shortly. X
As he had half-expected, his phone rang as soon as he had cut into his fried egg.
“We’ve got a flight,” Lucy told him without preamble, “but it’s not until eleven.”
“No problem,” he told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Is he awake yet?”
“No, still sedated.”
“He’ll be so chuffed to see you, if he wakes up before—before—”
She burst into tears. Strike could hear her still trying to talk through her sobs.
“… just want to get home… want to see him…”
For the first time in Strike’s life, he was glad to hear Greg, who now took the phone from his wife.
“We’re bloody grateful, Corm. This is our first weekend away together in five years, can you believe it?”
“Sod’s law.”
“Yeah. He said his belly was sore, but I thought he was at it. Thought he didn’t want us to go away. I feel a right bastard now, I can tell you.”
“Don’t worry,” said Strike, and again, “I’m going nowhere.”
After a few more exchanges and a tearful farewell from Lucy, Strike was left to his full English. He ate methodically and without pleasure amid the clatter and jangle of the canteen, surrounded by other miserable and anxious people tucking into fatty, sugar-laden food.
As he was finishing the last of his bacon, a text from Robin arrived.
I’ve been trying to call with an update on Winn. Let me know when it’s convenient to talk.
The Chiswell case seemed a remote thing to Strike just now, but as he read her text he suddenly had a simultaneous craving for nicotine and to hear Robin’s voice. Abandoning his tray with thanks to the kind girl who had helped him to his table, he set off again on his crutches.
A cluster of smokers stood around the entrance to the hospital, hunch-shouldered like hyenas in the clean morning air. Strike lit up, inhaled deeply, and called Robin back.
“Hi,” he said, when she answered. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch, I’ve been at a hospital—”
“What’s happened? Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s my nephew, Jack. His appendix burst yesterday and he—he’s got—”
To Strike’s mortification, his voice cracked. As he fought to conquer himself, he wondered how long it had been since he had cried. Perhaps not since the tears of pain and rage he had shed in the hospital in Germany to which he had been airlifted away from the patch of bloody ground where the IED had ripped off his leg.
“Fuck,” he muttered at last, the only syllable he seemed able to manage.
“Cormoran, what’s happened?”
“He’s—they’ve got him in intensive care,” said Strike, his face crumpled up in the effort to hold himself together, to speak normally. “His mum—Lucy and Greg are stuck in Rome, so they asked me—”
“Who’s with you? Is Lorelei there?”
“Christ, no.”
Lorelei saying “I love you” seemed weeks in the past, though it was only two nights ago.
“What are the doctors saying?”
“They think he’ll be OK, but, you know, he’s—he’s in intensive care. Shit,” croaked Strike, wiping his eyes, “sorry. It’s been a rough night.”
“Which hospital is it?”
He told her. Rather abruptly, she said goodbye and rang off. Strike was left to finish his cigarette, intermittently wiping his face and nose on the sleeve of his shirt.
The quiet ward was bright with sun when he returned. He propped his crutches against the wall, sat down again at Jack’s bedside with the day-old newspaper he had just pilfered from the waiting room and read an article about how Arsenal might soon be losing Robin van Persie to Manchester United.
An hour later, the surgeon and the anesthetist in charge of the ward arrived at the foot of Jack’s bed to inspect him, while Strike listened uneasily to their muttered conversation.
“… haven’t managed to get his oxygen levels below fifty percent… persistent pyrexia… urine outputs have tailed off in the last four hours…”
“… another chest X-ray, check there’s nothing going on in the lungs…”
Frustrated, Strike waited for somebody to throw him digestible information. At last the surgeon turned to speak to him.
“We’ll be keeping him sedated just now. He’s not ready to come off the oxygen and we need to get his fluid balance right.”
“What does that mean? Is he worse?”
“No, it often goes like this. He had a very nasty infection. We had to wash out the peritoneum pretty thoroughly. I’d just like to X-ray the chest as a precaution, make sure we haven’t punctured anything resuscitating him. I’ll pop in to see him again later.”
They walked away to a heavily bandaged teenager covered in even more tubes and lines than Jack, leaving Strike anxious and destabilized in their wake. Through the hours of the night Strike had come to see the machines as essentially friendly, assisting his nephew to recovery. Now they seemed implacable judges holding up numbers indicating that Jack was failing.
“Fuck,” Strike muttered again, shifting the chair nearer to the bed. “Jack… your mum and dad…” He could feel a traitorous prickle behind the eyelids. Two nurses were walking past. “… shit…”
With an almighty effort he controlled himself and cleared his throat.
“… sorry, Jack, your mum wouldn’t like me swearing in your ear… it’s Uncle Cormoran here, by the way, if you didn’t… anyway, Mum and Dad are on their way back, OK? And I’ll be with you until they—”
He stopped mid-sentence. Robin was framed in the distant doorway of the ward. He watched her asking directions from a ward sister, and then she came walking towards him, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her eyes their usual blue-gray and her hair loose, and holding two polystyrene cups.
Seeing Strike’s unguarded expression of happiness and gratitude, Robin felt amply repaid for the bruising argument with Matthew, the two changes of bus and the taxi it had taken to get here. Then the slight prone figure beside Strike came into view.
“Oh no,” she said softly, coming to a halt at the foot of the bed.
“Robin, you didn’t have to—”