“OK, OK,” I said, contrite. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I just want to get to the bottom of what happened.” Even then I couldn’t entirely let it go, but I smiled to soften the question down. “I thought you hated being a pillion passenger.”
“I do, but what I do remember is that the bloody Ducati wouldn’t start and I’d promised to go up to Devil’s Bridge,” Clare said, smiling back at me now, although a little faintly. “Slick arrived – to see Jacob about some parts, I think – just as I was struggling with it and he offered me a lift.” She shrugged and lay back carefully against the pillows. “Just bad timing, I suppose.”
It was more than bad timing, but even though I didn’t voice the comment she regarded me anxiously. “There are going to be all sorts of rumours flying round about this, aren’t there?”
There already are, I thought, but what I actually said was: “I expect so.”
She reached out and put her hand on my arm. “Sean’s told me you’re looking for Jacob,” she said. “When you find him, please don’t say anything to him about Slick. I-I’d rather explain things to him myself.”
It was the note of desperation in her voice that rocked me and for a moment I didn’t speak, straightening in my chair.
“Clare – what is there to tell him?” I demanded. And what is there that you’re not telling me?
She seemed to realise she’d said too much. Her lips thinned and the lower one began to tremble. As if on cue, a nurse came bustling up and swept us all with an accusing glare.
“Are you all right, Clare?” she asked. “Can I get you something for the pain?” And when Clare nodded she rounded on the rest of us, her tone ominous. “I think it might be best if you all left now,” she said. “I don’t think you appreciate that Clare’s been through major surgery and she needs to rest.”
We rose obediently. Sean bent to kiss her cheek and she gave him a quick hug. Jamie just offered a cross between a wave and salute. I reached down to squeeze Clare’s hand but she gripped it, hard, and held on.
“I just need to speak to Charlie for a moment longer,” she said pleadingly to the nurse, not letting go of my hand. “Just a moment. I promise.”
The nurse scowled a little more, but the heat went right out of it when the force of Clare’s smile hit her. Clare could do that to people.
“All right then,” she said with a grudging indulgence. And to me, more sharply: “Then you’re out, yes?”
“OK,” I agreed meekly and sat down again.
Sean met my eyes fleetingly as he began to shepherd Jamie towards the doorway. There was everything and nothing in that brief glance.
Clare waited until they were well out of earshot before she spoke again, tracking them anxiously.
“Charlie, I need you to do something for me. For us, really,” she said, keeping her voice low so I had to lean towards her to hear it properly.
“Name it,” I said, without hesitation.
Clare hesitated a moment. She let go of me and toyed with her nightie instead. She was wearing an elderly sack in faded cotton with the words ‘hospital garment’ running through it in red and blue letters so that from a distance it looked like a pattern. Stops people stealing them, I suppose. I was suddenly glad I’d brought her her own stuff.
“I need you to look after Jamie for me,” she said in a rush.
“What?” It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I sat up, my face blank. “Why?” I said.
She flushed a little. “He’s going to Ireland with a group of bikers at the end of this week,” she said. “Some trip Slick was organising, I think. I-I don’t want him to go.”
I frowned, remembering the conversation I’d had with Jamie last night. “But he’s from Ireland,” I said. “I can’t stop him going home.”
“It’s not that,” Clare said, her face miserable. “It’s the people he’s going with. They’re, well, they’re like Slick. They ride like a bunch of total idiots and they’re going to get him killed. Jamie hasn’t had his licence for that long. He’s on a bike half their size and he won’t admit he can’t really keep up.” She gave me a wan smile. “You know what these fellers are like.”
I did. Clare was ferociously quick. She’d left more than one bike wreck behind her as a testament to the foolish assumption of less experienced – and usually male – riders that any corner she could take, they could take faster.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I said. I nodded to the mechanical construction that was holding her bones together. “At the moment, he might just listen to you.”
She shook her head. “I’ve always been something of the wicked stepmother to Jamie,” she said with candour. She was folding the edge of the starched sheet over and over, her eyes fixed on her fingers. The knuckles of her right hand were bruised solid purple like she’d been in a fight. “I mean, Jacob and Isobel’s marriage was history long before I came on the scene but when I did I suppose Jamie knew they weren’t ever going to get back together again. He’s always resented me a little for that, I think.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
She stilled a moment, like she hadn’t thought it through that far, then shrugged, looking close to tears again. “I don’t know,” she said, back to restless. “I suppose I was hoping that, if you can’t stop him going with them, you could, maybe, even go with him?”
It was said hesitantly enough to turn it into a question, with a little wince at the end as though she was expecting me to shout her down.
I didn’t shout. I sat still for probably five full seconds wondering how to ask when my friend had developed this massive maternal instinct for someone else’s child. And why.
Clare took my silence for refusal. “Please, Charlie,” she said, reaching to grab my hand again. “Look, you’re a bodyguard now, aren’t you? So – I’ll hire you! Name your price.”
She said the words with a big smile but there was panic in her voice and cowering behind her eyes. Across the other side of the ward the nurse’s head snapped up like she could sniff the patient distress in the air. She started to move purposefully in our direction.
“Charlie, please!” Clare said quickly, sounding desperate now. The panic had climbed out of the background and was in full flight across her face. Her fingers gripped tight. They were unnaturally cold.
“I want you out, now!” the nurse snapped with thunderous restraint. “I will not have you upsetting my patients.”
I stood up, ignoring her, and summoned up my best reassuring smile for Clare.
“It’s OK,” I told her. “I’ll look after him.”
It wasn’t until I was heading for the ward doorway that I wondered how on earth I was going to make good on that promise.
Sean was waiting for me, leaning against the wall in the corridor. Of Jamie there was no sign.
“She OK?” Sean asked, falling into step beside me.
“Mm,” I said, still distracted. “She’s just hired me to act as Jamie’s bodyguard.”