She stepped away from the water at last but didn’t immediately try to leave the stall, partially extending her arms and looking down at herself. The tremor was still mere but not as bad. Her ribs and stomach ached from the vomiting. Consciously she closed her eyes again, tightly. There was no head-bursting image.
One of the women was waiting directly outside, offering an enveloping white towelling robe. It had a hood attached but the second nurse handed her a separate towel for her hair.
The attentive man said: ‘Kenyon, Bill Kenyon. I’m the embassy physician. Can you hear me?’
Claudine nodded: there was still a vague echoing sensation but his words were quite audible. She said: ‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re a doctor. You know you’re not,’ the man said. ‘We’ve got a small emergency infirmary here but I think you should go to hospital.’
Kenyon had blond, almost white, hair and rimless glasses. Claudine saw mat the nurse who’d put her arm round her had blood on the side of her uniform. She said: ‘I am a doctor – a psychologist – and I know about posttraumatic stress. I’m not going to your infirmary or to an outside hospital.’
‘You can’t shrug off what’s just happened to you,’ the physician protested.
‘I’m not trying to shrug it off: the very opposite. I’m fully acknowledging it – think I know, even, why it happened – and I believe I can go on.’
‘You’re making a mistake,’ he insisted.
‘If I am then I’ll recognize that, too. I’ll be all right.’
Kenyon shook his head, unconvinced. ‘I could let you have some chlordiazepoxide.’
It could be a useful precaution to have a tranquillizer available, Claudine conceded. ‘That would be very kind.’
By the time Kenyon returned from his dispensary the nurses – the blonde was named Anne, the brunette Betty – had located an embassy-issue track suit in Claudine’s size, still in its wrapping, and training pants for underwear. Claudine said she wanted everything she’d been wearing incinerated. Both nurses tried to persuade her to rest at least for a few hours in the embassy sick bay. She ignored them. As well as the tranquillizer Kenyon gave her his card, with his home as well as his direct embassy number. ‘Call me. I mean it. I’m here. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I want to go back upstairs.’ Claudine was pleased she could remember in which direction the lift had brought her. She still felt suspended between reality and disbelief. The disorienting echo was intermittent in her ears.
‘You’re wrong, you know,’ said Kenyon.
‘No, I do know,’ insisted Claudine. But did she really know how strong she was?
‘I’ll arrange a car to take you back to your hotel,’ offered Betty.
‘I want to find everyone else,’ Claudine said positively. ‘I didn’t take much notice of the route on my way down here. That’s all the help I need.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said Kenyon cynically.
‘I might not be. And if I’m not, I’ve got your numbers.’ She conjured the contact card between her fingers.
Claudine’s arrival in the ambassador’s suite was met with astonishment.
‘I didn’t… I thought…’ groped McBride, standing awkwardly but bringing everyone else to their feet with him.
‘I just want to be here,’ said Claudine awkwardly. ‘I’m all right.’ She saw Peter Blake was the only person in the room without a jacket and remembered his pulling her into him, swamped in Norris’s gore and her own vomit. Then she saw him crossing towards her.
‘You sure this is a good idea?’ he said, too quietly for anyone else to hear.
‘No,’ Claudine admitted. The shaking had gone, but despite the comforting thickness of the track suit she felt suddenly cold.
‘Why then?’
‘Because I want to.’
Claudine was pressing her eyes tightly together again (no blood-red explosion!) when Sanglier arrived close behind Blake. Until that moment she hadn’t been aware of his being in the room.
‘You don’t need to be here,’ insisted the Frenchman.
‘I want to be,’ she repeated. Now she was there, she wasn’t sure that was true.
From behind his protective desk McBride, still standing, said: ‘Dr Carter, I want to say…’ but Claudine, faint-voiced, stopped him.
‘There’s no need to say anything. It’s over.’
Claudine had never known the sensation before: never wanted to know it again. It was as if she were suspended above them all, in an out-of-body experience in which she could hear and see them but they were unaware of her presence. Her uncertain ears even made their words echo, ghost-like, and she had to hold very tightly on to her ebbing and flowing concentration: several times, when it ebbed, her vision actually blurred, merging people together with distant voices.
Claudine clung, like a drowning person to a fragile handhold, to her decision to be there. It was right that she should be. Not to contribute: she wasn’t able to contribute to anything at that precise moment. But she could listen, difficult though that might physically be.
Claudine sat apart from the closely arranged group round the ambassador, welcoming the distance although becoming aware that, mostly unconsciously, the discussion was directed towards her, not for approval but from courtesy. McBride did most of the talking.
For Claudine irony piled upon irony when the ambassador insisted that American sovereignty in US embassies overseas made John Norris’s suicide a matter entirely removed from Belgian jurisdiction or public awareness. Without mentioning Claudine or even looking in her direction McBride said there had been sufficient witnesses to the incident for an internal inquest, to be held that evening, prior to the body’s being returned to America. It had been the climax of a series of extremely unfortunate incidents – here at last he looked at Claudine – for which he apologized but in no way did he expect it to affect the principal reason – the only reason – for their all being there. No replacement negotiator, either FBI or CIA, was being sent from Washington. Paul Harding was to assume overall command of the combined agencies’ commitment, with the assurance at presidential level that it was seconded to Europol.
McBride was about to launch into a formal speech of congratulation to Claudine when he was interrupted by the sound of the telephone. He stared at Harrison, who said: ‘I held all calls! Except…’
McBride snatched up the phone, not immediately speaking. Holding the receiver away from him, as if it were hot against his ear, he said to Claudine: ‘It’s a woman. She says Mary got a B for the geography paper that was in her backpack.’
‘Check that!’ Claudine told Blake, as she moved towards the telephone.
‘I want McBride.’
English but accented. French possibly. Claudine said: ‘I’m speaking on his behalf.’
‘The wife?’
‘No.’ The only lies she could risk were those she couldn’t be caught out on. Damn her hearing! The voice kept rising and falling.
‘Ah, the clever little mind-reader!’
‘We want to negotiate.’ This was probably the most difficult part, establishing the rapport from which to manipulate the woman without her being aware it was happening.
‘Of course you do.’
‘Tell me about Mary.’
‘Demanding!’
Blake and Harding hurried back into the room together. The note Blake slipped in front of her said: ‘School confirm B grade.’ Harding made a rolling-over motion with his hands, encouraging her to extend the conversation as much as possible.
The woman’s reaction was exactly what Claudine wanted. ‘We have to know she’s all right.’ The sound abruptly dipped and Claudine said urgently: ‘Hello! Hello!’ She saw Rampling re-enter the room, shaking his head to Blake and Harding.