‘Quite a long journey, then, isn’t it, from that hotbed of revolution to this restaurant in Baghdad?’
‘As you say,’ Graham answered, ‘I’ve grown up a lot.’
‘I hope so, Mr Packard. We are playing for high stakes here, after all. I’d like to think you were a man I could trust: a man, for instance, who can keep a cool head in a difficult situation.’
‘I think I can do that,’ said Graham. ‘I think I’ve shown that already.’
Mark grabbed one of the waitresses by the edge of her miniskirt and pulled her towards him.
‘Apples,’ he said. ‘We need some apples.’
‘Yes, sir. You want them baked, or perhaps glazed in some way?’
‘Just bring five apples.’
‘And turn up that music!’ Louis shouted after her. ‘Make it loud, make it really loud!’
When she returned, Mark got all the waitresses to stand up against the wall.
‘Oh, it’s the game!’ said Louis, clapping his hands delightedly. ‘I love this game.’
Mark rested an apple on top of each of the waitresses’ heads, then reached inside his jacket and took out a revolver.
‘Who’s going to be first?’ he said.
Although drunk, the others turned out to be excellent shots – with the exception of Louis, whose bullet went some three feet wide of the mark and shattered one of the light fittings. The women screamed and whimpered, but they did not move, not even after their own apples had been targeted.
Finally it was Graham’s turn. He had never even known the feel of a gun in his hand before; but he knew that Mark Winshaw was putting him to some sort of monstrous test, and that if he were to back down, if his nerve were to fail, then his cover would be blown and before long, in a matter of weeks if not days, his own life would be taken. He raised the gun and pointed it at Lucila. Tears were streaming down her face and in her terrified eyes he could also read incomprehension: an imploring echo of the laughter and intimacy they had shared in the upstairs room. His hand was shaking. He must have stood like that for some time because he heard Mark say, ‘In your own time, Mr Packard,’ and then he heard the others clapping their hands and starting to sing the William Tell Overture, buzzing it through their lips as if they were playing on a kazoo. And then just as Lucila let out her first compulsive sob, he did it: the thing for which he would always hate himself, whenever he woke up in the middle of the night, chilled and sweating with the recollection of it; whenever he had to leave the room in the middle of a conversation, or pull over abruptly to the hard shoulder of the motorway, the gorge rising in his throat at the sudden clarity of the memory. He pulled the trigger.
Graham blacked out almost immediately, so he didn’t see his bullet split the stalk of the apple and lodge in the wall behind Lucila, or see her sink to her knees and vomit over the polished floorboards. He was dimly conscious of loud music and voices, of people slapping him on the back and making him drink more coffee, but he didn’t fully come back to his senses until he found himself sitting on the toilet, his head in his hands and his trousers around his ankles, the air thick with the stench of his diarrhoea, the tiny windowless room silent but for his robotic intonation of one word, toneless and mechanical.
Joan. Joan. Joan.
∗
Graham had earned Mark Winshaw’s respect. It came in the form of twenty months’ silence, followed by an invitation to a New Year’s party at his house in Mayfair.
∗
December 31st 1990
Eleven o’clock was about the earliest Graham thought he could politely make his excuses and leave. He told Mark that he was driving home to Birmingham that night, to be back with his wife and their eight-month-old daughter.
‘But I haven’t introduced you to Helke yet,’ Mark protested. ‘You really must say a few words to her before you go. Is your car parked near here?’
It was. Mark took the keys and gave them to one of his drivers, who was told to bring the car round to the front door immediately. In the meantime, Graham was obliged to swap a few pleasantries with the new Mrs Winshaw, whom he was surprised to find dauntingly attractive. He had wanted to dislike her – knowing that she was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and notorious Nazi sympathizer – but her pale beauty and oddly coquettish manner made this difficult, even during such a brief meeting.
A few minutes later, as he slumped into the driver’s seat, Graham breathed a sigh of relief. He was damp with sweat. Then he was knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head.
He was driven to a lock-up garage in Clapham. The driver pulled him out of the car while the engine was still running, and laid him on the ground near to the exhaust pipe. He kicked him four or five times in the face, and once in the stomach. He stripped him of his trousers, took the camcorder, and jumped up and down on Graham’s legs. Then he left the garage and locked the doors behind him.
That kick in the stomach had been a mistake, for it had the effect of shocking Graham into semi-consciousness. But he was unable to move for several minutes, during which time even as his body got stronger, his brain was fast running out of oxygen. Eventually, with tremendous effort, he dragged himself back to the driver’s seat. He put the engine into gear, and reversed back into the garage doors. It wasn’t enough to smash them open, so he tried again. It still wasn’t enough: and that was as much as he could manage.
But the noise had caught the attention of a group of drunken passers-by, who succeeded in forcing the doors open and getting the car out into the street. One of them ran off to find a phone box.
Graham was on the pavement, surrounded by strangers.
He was in an ambulance. Lights were flashing and there was a mask on his face.
He was in a hospital. It was very cold.
Big Ben was chiming midnight.
January 1991
I took the beakers of orange juice and carried them back to the cubicle. Fiona drank hers slowly and gratefully: then she drank half of mine. She said that I looked a bit distracted and asked me what had happened.
‘This guy’s just been brought in. He’s unconscious, and he’s in a pretty bad way. It just gave me a bit of a shock.’
Fiona said: ‘I’m sorry. This is a terrible way to start the New Year.’
I said: ‘Don’t be silly.’
She was getting weaker, I could see. After her drink she lay back on the trolley and didn’t try to speak again until the nurse reappeared.
‘Progress report,’ she said brightly. ‘The sister’s trying to find you a bed, and as soon as we’ve got one, you can go on to the ward and Dr Bishop will give you your antibiotics. Dr Gillam, our registrar, is very busy at the moment, so she’ll have to come and see you in the morning.’
This didn’t sound very much like progress to me.
‘But they’ve been looking for a bed for more than half an hour, now. What’s the problem?’
‘Things are very tight,’ she said. ‘There were some surgical wards closed just before Christmas and that has a knock-on effect. It means that a lot of the surgical patients are now on the medical wards. We keep a chart of all the beds available but it has to be updated all the time. We did think we’d found one for you just now, and we sent the sister along to check but she found there was already someone in it. Anyway, it really shouldn’t be much longer.’
‘Fine,’ I said, with a touch of grimness.
‘There is one problem, though.’
‘Oh?’
There was a pause. I could tell it was something she felt bad about.
‘Well, the thing is, we need this cubicle. I’m afraid we’re going to have to move you.’
‘Move us? But I thought you didn’t have anywhere to move usto.’
It turned out that they did. They wheeled Fiona’s trolley out into the corridor, pulled up a chair for me to sit beside her, and left us there. It took another ninety minutes to find the bed. We didn’t get to see any more doctors in that time: both the houseman and the elusive Dr Gillam were fully occupied, so I gathered, dealing with the new arrival – the man I’d half-recognized – who it seemed they had somehow managed to revive. It was almost two o’clock when the nurses came to take Fiona away, and by then she looked helpless and frightened. I clasped her hand tightly and kissed her on the lips. They were very cold. Then I watched as they wheeled her off down the corridor.