Her instincts were telling her that something was wrong. The footsteps had stopped further down the corridor. Who was he visiting? Not Mrs. o’shea. She had died earlier that evening and her body was in the hospice mortuary waiting to be collected by the undertakers.
And he wasn’t visiting Edward. Edward was a Quaker.
Jennifer dropped the phone and sprang to her feet.
Edward’s eyes were heavy, but he forced himself to stay awake. He wanted to hang on until one o’clock so that he could ask Jennifer if an e-mail had arrived with photos of the baby and Melanie. He wished he could tell Edith. Funny how much he missed her. That story of hers — he couldn’t quite understand how he had let himself get so carried away by it. Perhaps he had been groping for a reason for her death, unwilling to believe that she had simply disappeared, given him the slip, pulled off the vanishing act he was so shortly to pull off himself.
Just for a moment he had the feeling that she was somewhere close by. He seemed to catch a whiff of her perfume.
When the man in the clerical collar appeared in the doorway, Edward’s first thought was that he had come to the wrong room.
His second thought, as the man closed the door behind him, was that he had done a good job of updating the photo, but he couldn’t possibly have guessed about the beard.
His third was that he wouldn’t be seeing Laura after all, because among the things he had knocked off the bedside table was the emergency buzzer.
Jennifer punched the panic button to summon help.
Nurses aren’t supposed to run, and Jennifer was a big woman, but she flew down that corridor.
She reached the room in time to see the man standing by Edward’s bed.
Light glinted on a hypodermic.
Another moment and she flung her arms round him from the back. She squeezed. He struggled, but years of manhandling toddlers at home and lifting patients at work had given her arms like steel hawsers. He didn’t stand a chance.
The hypodermic went clattering to the floor.
Then Paul, the burliest of the hospice nurses and an ex-soldier, appeared in the doorway and it was all over.
“Just a black shirt and a strip of plastic cut from a bottle of washing-up liquid,” Edward marvelled for at least the tenth time.
Jennifer nodded. “That was all it took. Dressed like that, he could walk into any hospice — or any hospital ward — claim to be visiting a parishioner and no one would bat an eyelid.”
It was nearly the end of Jennifer’s shift on the following night and she hadn’t been able to resist popping in to talk it over one more time. It was as if she needed to go over and over it again to convince herself that it really had happened.
“Only sorry I won’t be here to follow the trial,” Edward said with an effort. “But it’s clear enough what happened.”
“His bad luck that Edith had the same rare cancer that he’d made a speciality and consulted him privately.”
“Johnson’s such a common name — no wonder he didn’t make the connection.”
“But she did. I wonder if she really had anything on him. She certainly made him think she had.”
“And that she’d shared it with someone in the hospice.”
Edward closed his eyes. He claimed that the excitement had given him a new lease of life. Jennifer wasn’t so sure of that. The disease was progressing fast now. He was too weak to sit up and his face was very pale against the pillow. She wondered if he would be alive when she returned in the evening. She hoped so. She’d like to be there at the end and she wanted to meet Laura.
Her eyes strayed to the colour printout of a beaming young woman with hair plastered to her sweaty forehead. She was cradling a tiny baby with a face like a crumpled rosebud.
She patted Edward’s hand and was getting up to leave when she saw that Edward had opened his eyes. He was gazing past her into the corridor.
She turned her head and saw a handsome middle-aged woman approaching.
“Laura,” Edward murmured. “You’re here...”
“Dad! I hired a car at the airport.”
“This is Jennifer.”
The two women clasped hands as they passed in the doorway. Laura gave a smile of recognition that made her look very like her father.
Jennifer closed the door behind her and went to get a Do Not Disturb sign.
No one would be needed here for a while.
Copyright © 2011 by Christine Poulson
Au Bon Coin
by Eric Wright
Born in England, Eric Wright emigrated to Canada in 1951. His distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer has earned him Canada’s most prestigious crime award, the Arthur Ellis, four times. His new novel, published in late 2010, is A Likely Story; it’s the third in his Joe Barley series. The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn, in which Barley debuted, won a Barry Award and was nominated for three other awards, including the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar.
“Hello, Daisy. Come in, come in. My, how pretty your hair is today; that lovely silver color really suits you. Come in; sit down. I’ve just made coffee. Good of you to find the time. There. Cream? No? Then let’s get started.
“First, here’s an e-mail I got from Robert two weeks ago. Lots of the usual personal stuff — he still gets very uxorious in his letters. Sorry: got. I’ll miss that. Anyway, after a couple of pages of that and some mentions of the parts of Paris that he and I had seen together — very little, really, though Givenchy was a wonderful afternoon; then the obligatory visit to the Café des Lilas — there was this:
” ‘Last night I took a colleague to one of our favourite restaurants, Au Bon Coin; you remember? Near the Place Monge Métro station. It was as good as ever, especially the herring and potato starter. Last time you and I both had sweetbreads followed by the apple tart. Afterwards we walked along the Rue Mouffetard,remember? All the time I was there I was thinking of you, and hoping we could get back to Au Bon Coin together one day soon.’
“The rest is about the weather, the conference, and his jet lag. That’s the essential passage.
“I was very frightened. You can imagine why. You’re not saying anything. I’ll get on, then. The thing is, dear, I’ve only been to Paris with Robert once, and never to a restaurant called Au Bon Coin,so understand my alarm. You remember about a year ago — no, exactly eleven months ago — I had a small stroke which temporarily affected my memory, though I remember the date of the stroke exactly. However, I was young for that sort of event, and I got over it pretty quickly. I’m not allowed to drive but I never liked driving, anyway, so it was a bit of a relief, sometimes an excuse to avoid doing things I don’t want to do. And the memory thing is manageable. Nowadays I’m careful to write down all appointments, even casual arrangements with friends, and I’m rarely at a loss anymore. So you can understand when Robert’s e-mail asked me to remember something I had no memory of, I got frightened. I thought I had regressed, even had another stroke. Then I decided to reconstruct the event for my memory. That works sometimes, in smaller things. If I can’t remember anything about a movie I saw the previous day, not even the title, I can usually work at it and recover it eventually. I have a lot of trouble with those movies that are all imagery and no plot, foreign movies especially. But my neurologist said the brain is like a computer — it’s all there somewhere, you just have to find a path to it. Sorry, I’m wandering.
“As I say, I’ve only been in Paris with Robert once, and I have no memory of a restaurant called Au Bon Coin,or walking along a street called Rue Mouffetard,some sort of market street, I gather, but I keep a journal when I’m traveling — the same book contains all my travel experiences — so after Robert’s funeral I dug it out and found the trip to Paris. With the help of this journal I could remember and reconstruct everything about that trip, including meeting the nice American girl who asked Robert if he knew the French word for ‘quiche.’ I had to stop him making fun of her. And there was no dinner at Au Bon Coin. No, sir. Dinner was accounted for every night, the name of the restaurant, even what we ate and if we liked it. And both times we stayed a long way away from that Métro station, at a hotel called Hotel des Balcons on the Left Bank. There, see. Even now, I don’t have to look it up. I remember. Paris was like that.