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Sarah stared thoughtfully at the papers in front of her on the table for a few more moments before deciding to take another look at McKirrop. She met Sister Roche in the corridor as she was going off-duty.

“I didn’t realise you were still here,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be off-duty?”

“I won’t be long,” smiled Sarah. “Besides, I’m on call tonight.”

“Have a quiet one.”

“I wish.”

Sarah nodded to the night staff nurse who had taken up station at the console and walked through to Alpha 4. She took her pencil torch from her top pocket and opened McKirrop’s eyelids, first right and then left, to shine the light in them. “Well I’m blowed,” she murmured, putting the torch away again. She stood at the foot of the bed for a moment, watching McKirrop’s face as if looking for clues, but the tubes and electrodes had stolen any sense of personality.

The tramp, as Logan had dubbed him, had obviously been a good looking man in his youth. He might still have been had he not been living rough for some time; wind, weather and alcohol had taken their toll. He still had high cheek bones but his cheeks had hollowed below them and his eyes had sunk back into deep dark sockets. But the fact that the nursing staff had cleaned him up, and the wound in his forehead was hidden by pristine white bandaging had given him some semblance of quiet dignity.

“I wonder...” she said as an idea occurred. She went to the X-ray room and searched for McKirrop’s skull pictures. She found the one that had come up from A&E with the patient — the one she’d shown Tyndall that morning — but she had a vague recollection of seeing another envelope arriving from the X-ray department an hour or so later.

After a brief search she found the X-rays still in their delivery envelope. Now she remembered. She had seen the porter bring them in but had assumed that Logan was going to be doing McKirrop’s tests so she had put them out of her mind. It looked as if Logan hadn’t bothered to look at them.

Sarah pinned them up on the light box and adjusted her spectacles on her nose. One of the X-rays did not add anything to what she knew but the other confirmed exactly what she had begun to suspect. The slightly unusual angle of McKirrop’s forehead had decreed that the frontal lobe of his brain was further back than normal in most patients. The injury that had appeared so horrific at first glance, although still very bad in terms of associated shock and trauma, would not have caused nearly as much brain damage as they had been assuming. This was why the tests she had run had given such optimistic readings.

With a bit of luck, John McKirrop might actually survive his latest adventure and still be able to do the seven times table. In fact, there was a possibility that he might even recover consciousness before morning. This put Sarah in a quandary. Should she wait with the patient until he did come round and thereby witness the proof of her theory or should she call Tyndall right now with her diagnosis and prediction? She decided on the latter despite realising how furious Logan was going to be. If he had opened the X-rays himself he would have seen what she had discovered and he would have been counting the brownie points instead of her.

Sarah called Tyndall from the duty-room after laying out the relevant charts in front of her on Sister Roche’s desk in anticipation of any question Tyndall might ask. She also had the X-ray beside her on a chair. She felt her mouth become a little dry as she waited for Tyndall to answer.

“Dr Tyndall please,” said Sarah when a woman answered.

There was a short pause before Tyndall came on the line.

“It’s Dr Lasseter here sir,” said Sarah. “You asked to be kept informed about Mr McKirrop’s condition.”

“So I did,” said Tyndall pleasantly. “He died I suppose?”

“No sir, far from it. I think he might pull through and quite possibly without any significant brain damage.”

“We are talking about the same patient, Doctor?” asked Tyndall. “The down-and-out from the canal?”

“Yes sir.” Sarah went on to explain what she had found out from the brain function tests.

“Has Dr Logan had a chance to see your results?” asked Tyndall.

“No sir, he delegated the patient to me.”

“I see,” said Tyndall. Sarah could sense that Tyndall doubted the values she had obtained, but was too polite to say so straight out.

“I think I can explain sir,” she said. She told Tyndall how she had come to the conclusion that damage to McKirrop’s brain had been minimised by the odd angle of his skull and how she had confirmed this by reference to newer X-rays.

Tyndall seemed much happier with this. “Well done, Doctor Lasseter,” he said. “An alert mind is the physician’s most valuable tool.”

“Thank you sir,” replied Sarah, feeling better than she had done since she started at HTU. The world was suddenly a much nicer place thanks to John McKirrop and his recessed frontal lobe.

“From the values you read out it sounds as if we can expect Mr McKirrop to regain consciousness in the not-too-distant future,” said Tyndall.

“Yes sir,” said Sarah.

“Thank you for letting me know.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

The conversation with Tyndall had imbued Sarah with new reserves of energy. She resolved to stay in HTU until McKirrop came round. All things considered, it had been quite a day. Standing up to Derek Logan had made it one to remember, but seeing John McKirrop regain consciousness would be the icing on the cake. She could not keep it to herself; she went to chat to the night staff nurse.

“With that head wound?” exclaimed the nurse when Sarah predicted that McKirrop would recover.

Sarah explained how it looked worse that it actually was.

“If you say so,” shrugged the nurse.

“Bet you fifty pence?”

“You’re on. I’ll call you if he stirs... Or maybe I won’t. Fifty pence is fifty pence!”

Sarah went back to the doctors’ room and carefully wrote up her notes on John McKirrop for inclusion in his case notes file. Her hand-writing was good and she favoured a Schaeffer drawing pen filled with light blue China ink. Making sure that her notes were always clear and legible was almost a fetish with Sarah. It was born of an intense dislike of the way people made stereotypes of themselves. Many of her colleagues seemed obliged to write badly simply because they were doctors and it was expected of them. For the same reason she could confidently predict what kind of cars they would drive, what clothes they would wear, what kind of houses they would aspire to and, in certain cases, what their answer would be to any given question. Her father had once explained kindly that his profession — and now hers — had to conform to certain standards because the public expected it of them. Sarah didn’t accept that for a moment.

John Main lay awake and heard the fridge in the kitchen cut out, leaving the flat in absolute silence. He glanced at the clock at the side of his bed and saw the green digits register three in the morning, an hour he had seen a lot of in recent times. There was something about the ‘these hours’ that intensified fear and loneliness. Was it the quietness or was it the darkness? Maybe the latter. Perhaps the absence of light allowed the forces of darkness access to the fearful and vulnerable who lay unprotected by sleep. The loss of Mary and the fact that she was gone for ever was never more poignant than in these hours after midnight when the dawn was still a long way off. Loneliness could be transcribed into actual physical pain.

But even this pain took second place to the agony of not knowing what had happened to Simon’s body. It was something he could not properly understand, perhaps because it was a situation he could never have prepared himself for: no one could. The nearest analogy he could think of was a woman he had once seen on television. Her daughter had been murdered but the body never found and she now spent all her time looking for it. He had not forgotten the look in her eyes. Now he knew how she felt.