“So Annie was lucky the bullets didn’t go all the way through,” Banks repeated. “I see. That’s probably the good news. What about the other problems?”
“Most of Ms. Cabbot’s bleeding was internal, and the leaking fluid put pressure on her lungs, not allowing them to expand.” Again, he used his hands as he talked, moving his open palms close together, as if about to applaud, or mimic the action of bellows. “One of her lungs collapsed and, as you can imagine, she experienced serious breathing difficulties as a result. If the other lung had stopped functioning, she would have died before the ambulance arrived. Luckily, it didn’t. The paramedics acted quickly and had the knowledge and equipment to deal with the situation en route. They managed to stabilize her in Eastvale General Infirmary and then airlifted her here.”
“But she’s going to be all right?” said Banks. “You fixed it? I mean, you operated?”
Sandhar paused. “We operated. But I must stress that the patient is far from out of danger yet. It could go either way.”
“What you mean?”
“Right now there’s a struggle going on. If she’s strong enough, she’ll win it. At the moment, no one can predict the outcome.”
“She’s strong,” Banks said.
The doctor nodded. “Good. She will need to be.”
“When will you know more?”
“The next twenty-four hours are crucial. We’ll be monitoring her constantly, looking for any signs of decline or improvement. There’s nothing else we can do right now but wait. I’m sorry.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“If you’re religious you can pray.”
“And if not?”
“You can hope.”
VICTOR MALLORY was pleasantly stoned after a few drinks at lunchtime and a nice spliff when he got home. He had just put Toru Takemitsu’s I Hear the Water Dreaming on the CD player, and was about to lie down and drift off for a while when he heard the doorbell ring. If he had already lain down, he thought, he might not have bothered answering. But it could be important. Maybe Jaff had brought his car back, or maybe the nubile Marianna from the golf club had taken him up on his offer, after all. So he answered it.
Immediately he opened the door he knew he had made a mistake and desperately wished he could close it again. Stoned or straight, he wouldn’t have liked the look of the two men who stood there. They could mean nothing but trouble. Panicking, he did try to shut the door, but his reactions were too slow, and they easily pushed their way into his hallway. They would probably have broken the door down, anyway, he realized. In his business he met some nasty types from time to time, and he generally found that he could talk his way out of most situations, but this time he wasn’t sure. They didn’t look like good listeners.
The smaller one with the ginger hair resembled a speed freak, bad teeth and all, and Victor didn’t like speed or speed freaks. They were wild and unpredictable. That was why he stuck to making E and the good old psychedelics like acid, mescaline and psilocybin. Not a huge market these days, it was true, but in his eyes, they beat crystal meth and crack cocaine, and the kind of people you had to deal with in that world. People like this. It could only have to do with Jaff, who wasn’t anywhere near as fussy about what he took, or what he sold to make a living.
“Come in, gentlemen,” he said. “Make yourselves at home.”
They didn’t appear to have a sense of humor. They pushed him into the living room and sized the place up. The smaller one checked out the rest of the house to see if anyone else was there, while the big bald one sat silently eyeing the modern art on the walls: prints by Dali, Hockney, Magritte, Rothko. The smaller one returned and, satisfied that they were quite alone with their quarry, they first closed the heavy curtains and turned on the standard lamp, then they got down to business.
“First,” said the big bald man, “will you turn that fucking racket off? It makes me feel like I need a shit.”
Confused, Victor turned off the CD player. “I like it,” he said. “It’s really quite soothing if you let-”
“I’d also ask you to turn those bloody paintings around if you could,” the man went on, ignoring him. “They have about the same effect on my bowels. But we don’t have time to mess about. Ciaran.”
The ginger-haired man came forward, gestured for Victor to sit on one of the hard-backed chairs from the dining table and proceeded to use heavy gray duct tape to fasten his legs securely to it and his arms around his back. To finish off, he ran the tape around Victor’s upper body and fastened him tightly to the chair back.
Victor sat passive and silent through all this. He didn’t want them to think he was going to cause trouble. There was a chance that this was all a dream, and he could close his eyes and make it go away. He tried, but it didn’t. They hadn’t taped his mouth shut, so he assumed they wanted to ask him questions, which was a good sign. The paranoia was building, though, getting its hooks into him, but as long as he could talk, there was hope. Gift of the gab, that’s what everyone said about Victor. He could charm the birds out of the trees. This need not come to a bad end.
“Right,” said the bald one, once Victor was trussed up to the other’s satisfaction. “You may not know this, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the secret of fear isn’t the inflicting of pain. Not at all. It’s to do with the anticipation of pain. So what we’re going to do is this.” He took an object from the small grip he had put down on the sofa beside him and set it on the low glass coffee table. “Know what this is?”
“An egg timer?”
“More properly known as an hourglass or a sand clock. See how it’s shaped? That’s why they sometimes talk about women having hourglass figures. Did you know that?”
Victor did, but he wasn’t keen to appear too clever in front of these men. He had dealt with similar types before and found that at the first sign of intellectual superiority they became more resentful and, therefore, more aggressive. A public school education followed by an Oxbridge degree was definitely not an advantage in these circumstances. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. I thought it was an egg timer.”
“You turn it over, and the sand falls through the tiny hole from one glass bulb to the other. Very clever, really. Sometimes I could watch it for hours. Of course, it doesn’t take hours. It doesn’t even take anywhere near an hour, so why they call it an hourglass I don’t fucking know, except it looks like a woman’s figure, and they talk about hourglass figures, don’t they? Now, these you might find even more interesting. Ciaran.”
The other man took a large folded pouch from the same grip, set it on the table next to the hourglass and unfurled it.
“This is Ciaran’s collection of surgical instruments,” the man went on. “Not that he’s a surgeon or anything. Didn’t have the Latin, did you, Ciaran?”
“That’s a judge,” said Victor.
“What?” the bald man asked, fixing Victor with a blank stare.
“He could have been a judge, but he didn’t have the Latin.” Victor regretted the words immediately they were out. They smacked of superiority. What the hell did he think he was doing, correcting this yahoo’s quotation?