‘She’ll be right as rain in no time,’ he added cheerfully. ‘And I’m sure we’ll manage without her. We did before. Fiona may be ready to come back soon . . .’
He saw Her Majesty frown. The Queen liked this new girl, for some reason. Even if she couldn’t cross a road without mucking it up.
‘Thank you, Miles. Let me know if you hear anything else, will you?’
He had done what he could. Urquhart bowed and left.
Alone in her study at Balmoral, the Queen felt a pang of guilt so sharp it was as if someone had stabbed her. She went to the window and put a hand against the cool glass, waiting while it subsided.
She had sent Joan that note. She had made it clear the job might be difficult, and she knew it might even be dangerous, but she had never imagined they would go so far – whoever they were. Now, here she was, five hundred miles away and Joan could have died, and she was powerless to do anything about it. The more Urquhart assured her it was an accident, the more she felt certain that it wasn’t.
Joan’s head hurt like hell. She felt woozy, and dizzy whenever she opened her right eye enough to see out of it. A hank of hair obscured the view from her left eye. When she tried to lift her hand to push the hair away, she found it unaccountably heavy. When she looked down, the plaster cast on her left wrist caught her by surprise. She knew it was there, but kept forgetting.
‘Nurse!’ she called croakily. ‘Nurse!’
The door opened and a head popped round. A male head, with short hair. She could hardly see him through her double vision.
‘Please could you get someone to find my painkillers, doctor? I have a god-awful headache.’
‘And you’re blind!’ he said, in a Scottish burr.
There was a hint of humour in his voice. He didn’t mean she was really blind. She knew that voice.
‘Hector!’
‘You’re not in St George’s now, remember? You came home three hours ago. Your pills are on the side table, here.’ He pointed somewhere, but she couldn’t pay attention. ‘Don’t take them all at once.’
‘No . . . I . . .’
He saw how out of it she was and took pity on her.
‘Look, here you go.’
She took two pills from his proffered hand and he passed her a glass of water.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she mumbled.
‘Ha! So you don’t know where you are, you can’t see through that shiner on your eye, but you’re worried about my job at the ministry.’
‘It’s not the ministry,’ she said, closing her eyes. That much she knew.
‘Yes it is,’ he insisted.
She was quiet for a while, letting her closed eyes rest, but she didn’t hear the sound of him leaving her room. He was hovering.
‘There was a van,’ she said eventually. ‘Something . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Something not . . . something missing. I—’
‘Yes? What?’
He sounded genuinely concerned, not as if she was going mad. Joan tried to remember her last thoughts before she blacked out. The walk came back to her in shards and fragments. Crossing Lupus Street. The trees in Warwick Square ahead of her. The clouds overhead. Her hat. The road rising up to meet her . . . She jerked up, opened her eyes and winced.
‘There, there,’ that gentle Scottish burr intoned. ‘Take it easy, girl.’
But she wanted to remember – not all of it – but the bit that had confused her. There was something wrong . . . something that made her frightened . . . And then something else didn’t make sense. Too much.
‘They said I was hit by a van,’ she said, ‘in hospital.’
‘Mmm,’ Hector agreed.
But no. She remembered now, being thumped from the side, like a rough hockey tackle. When it should have been head-on.
‘I was on the street . . . and the van was . . .’ She closed her eyes at the flash of memory. ‘And someone pushed me out of the way. Didn’t they? I don’t see how I could have . . . The van was . . .’
‘Did they?’ Hector asked. ‘I don’t know about that. How very fortunate.’
‘The person who came with me, to hospital. The nurses said they didn’t leave their name.’
‘Good Samaritans like to be anonymous.’
‘I suppose . . .’ Joan mumbled groggily.
‘Go to sleep, girl,’ he encouraged, leaning over her to adjust her pillows.
It seemed a good idea, so she did.
Joan’s sleep was fitful, plagued by nightmares and disturbed by headaches. Her arm ached too, and her back and thighs. When she needed the lavatory, she had to stagger to the bathroom. She would have crawled but for her broken wrist. She lost another day to pain and confusion. But by evening, she was starting to feel less lost and brittle.
She was aware that Hector had been there for some of the time, tempting her with thin broth and cups of tea. He had even given her his arm to lean on when she decided she was well enough to sit in the living room – and again when she felt woozy and agreed that perhaps, after all, she wasn’t.
When he wasn’t popping his head round the bedroom door to check on her, she could hear him padding round the flat. His presence was reassuring, if surprising. It wasn’t the weekend, was it? Meanwhile, as the fuzziness in her brain slowly receded, she worked on putting together what had happened.
A van had come speeding towards her. By extraordinary good fortune, someone had pushed her out of the way, just in time. Somehow – she couldn’t imagine how – they had avoided being hit themselves. They had taken her to hospital and quietly disappeared. She remembered a lightning bolt of pain in her wrist as she put her hand out to protect her head from the worst of the fall.
The pain had distracted her from something. Not something that was there, but something that wasn’t . . .
She thought about the van again, though she really didn’t want to, and tried to picture the situation from above. It was a technique they had taught at Trent Park. She saw herself standing at the corner of the square and starting to cross the road, the van appearing from nowhere and heading for her, almost as if it was deliberate. No, not from nowhere. If she had paid attention, she might have seen it coming down the long side of the square, but she would never have imagined it to be travelling so fast. If the driver had been paying attention, he should have seen her too, but he obviously didn’t, because . . .
Because . . . why? Why was she so sure he didn’t?
Because she didn’t hear the brakes.
Yes! That was what was missing as the van’s metal grille blocked out the light, in the moments before she was shoved out of its path. There should have been the shocking squeal of brake pads and the hiss of tyres trying to grip the slick, wet road, but the engine noise didn’t change.
He was heading straight for her. He meant to do it. He could easily have killed her if it wasn’t for her Good Samaritan.
Joan juddered at the thought.
Oh, God. Her poor father. He’d never have got over it. And what about Her Majesty, if something had happened? Who else could she turn to? Joan had so much to tell her, not that all of it made sense at the moment. But if the driver had come for her once, he could do it again. She suddenly wondered what would happen if she didn’t get the chance.
Hector Ross had been moving quietly round the flat, trying not to disturb his tenant while she slept. He was good at being quiet and unobtrusive. He’d had a lot of practice. However, when he put his head around the door an hour later, he found her sitting on the bed, half dressed, struggling to put on a shoe one-handed, and making a bad job of it.
‘What are you doing, girl?’ he berated her. ‘You can’t leave the flat! You need to rest! Och, your brain’s gone completely doolally. Here, let me help you put your feet up.’