The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

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СКАЧАТЬ suffering, McBean thought, an overdose of experience that had etched a little downward crease at the corners of the mouth as though the woman had made a deliberate choice not to live off her fine looks but instead to compete, to join the daily struggle with the rest of the world. Beneath the battered eyes the skin had the stretched, pale mauve hue of fatigue and the red undertones which mark where tiredness turns to exhaustion and starts eating away inside. More than the strains of motherhood. Implying … what? Stubbornness? Pain? A certain lack of fulfilment? McBean sighed; it seemed they might never know.

      Primrose interrupted the sister’s thoughts. ‘Can’t the police trace the car?’

      The student nurse was seated at the head of the bed, brushing the hair as she had done every night of the last week, trying to remove fraction by fraction the large clot of blood which had matted and tangled and ruined its deep red lustre. They could have cut out the clot, of course, and destroyed the carefully created short style, but there would be so little chance for it to regrow. Even in death there should be dignity.

      Sister McBean shook her head. ‘Renault. Left-hand drive. Could have come from any one of a thousand places in Europe. And the fire destroyed everything, even her identity, poor girl. Got out wi’ nothing but the clothes she was wearing and they were precious little help. Italian silk, American denims, a rainforest wristband and sneaker shoes they reckon might have come from somewhere east of India. Upper class Oxfam.’

      ‘What about the little boy?’ Primrose persisted.

      ‘Osh-Kosh. The bairn was wearing nothing but Osh-Kosh which is as common as an English Duchess. The poor mite’s too young to talk properly, they reckon no’ even three, and they can squeeze no’ a thing from him. May be suffering from shock, although he seems to understand English. And a smattering of French.’

      ‘And the baby?’

      ‘Perhaps I should try a little Gaelic on him. I wonder if they’ve thought of that?’

      ‘The baby,’ Primrose insisted, but found her answer in McBean’s sad eyes.

      ‘You’d have thought that the father or some other relative might have enquired,’ the student nurse murmured. ‘Surely someone must be missing them?’

      ‘If I had the looks of this lass I’d expect half the men I knew would be missing me.’

      ‘So where are they, then …?’

      

      ‘What the hell you mean, “she’s gone missing”?’ Grubb hissed down the phone. The foreign editor of World Cable News looked in agitation around the noisy Washington DC newsroom, anxious about who might be eavesdropping, uncertain what was hitting him. Excuses, for sure, but close behind excuses usually came a heavy shower of shit.

      ‘She left no number? No contact?’ Grubb couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It had never happened before, one of his foreign correspondents simply deciding to go walkabout, leaving no means of contact, simply gone missing from the most important foreign beat they had, covering the whole of Europe. Izzy was one of the best but now the stupid bitch had landed him right in it. Already he could hear the shower head beginning to splutter. And it was not the time to be smelling of anything other than roses, not with the cable news network on its financial uppers and looking for more cutbacks.

      He groaned as the young producer, three thousand miles away in Paris, tried to explain. ‘Not those damned kids again? Chrissake, we gave her six weeks spawning leave and she’s only been back a few months. How much more blood does she want?’

      The young producer was reassuring; it had been a difficult time for her, she had wanted to get away, clear her head; she was under a lot of domestic pressure, personal things to sort out. For just a couple of days. Yes, he knew it had been more than a couple of days, more than a week now, but he could handle everything, it was all under control. No need to panic.

      Grubb, a short and fleshy man of uncertain middle European descent with razor burns on his dark cheeks and a chin that sagged like a feeding bag, demurred. He thought it was an excellent time to panic. When the piece he needed from London came over the following day fronted by the producer rather than their top foreign correspondent, there would be no hiding place, only retribution.

      He decided to get his retribution in first. He glanced across at the managing editor’s door, which was ajar. The feeding bag shook, his voice rose to a shout.

      ‘I don’t put up with this sort of crap. Damn it all, I pay you to give me results, not excuses, and you don’t go letting her out of your sight without she gives you some means of contact. Jesus H. Christ, there’s a major Government reshuffle in Britain and you tell me she’s off changing nappies. What am I running here, a newsroom or a nursery? If you can’t find her in the next couple of hours you’re gonna have to do the piece yourself – you better make it good, boy, right on the button, d’you hear? Heavy-duty stuff, something that’ll sandbag those bastards over on the networks while they’re still checking their zippers and fiddling their expense sheets. My show’s the best in the business, and that’s how it’s gonna stay!’

      Grubb glanced around furtively. His raised voice had attracted the attention of the entire newsroom and out of the corner of his eye he could see the managing editor standing at the door of his office, brow wrinkled and mouthing obscenities as he investigated the commotion. It was time for the full effect; he stood up, the full five and a half feet of him, to deliver his coup de grace.

      ‘And then you find her, pronto. Dig her out from under whichever stone or stud she’s hiding, and you tell her from me that she’s got her lily-white tits caught in a wringer this time.’

      He slammed the phone down, not needing to act the role of outraged editor, before looking around the newsroom to wave away their rapt attention. He could handle this one. And if he couldn’t he’d made sure that everyone, and particularly the managing editor, knew it wasn’t his fault.

      On the other side of the Atlantic the producer of WCN’s European bureau smiled to himself. He was twenty-eight and about to get his first break on screen. If he did well, really well, they might continue to let him fill in, avoid the unnecessary expense of flying over another foreign correspondent, at last recognize his true talents rather than condemning him to the mindless fetching and carrying of coffee cups and arranging satellite feeds for others. This was his big chance and he had no intention of letting it escape. Perhaps he ought to be contacting someone to report a missing person, making enquiries; on the other hand he had a job to do, a flight to book and not a hell of a lot of time. From their Paris base in a matter of hours she could have disappeared to any of a dozen countries; who was to know which? And he needed a haircut.

      Already in his mind he was writing the intro to the piece he would deliver to camera from in front of the great black door at Ten Downing Street.

      He didn’t mind if she never turned up.

      

      Nobody had noticed the problem with the spleen. The buffeting caused by the pressure of the seat belts just below the ribs had caused the smallest tear in the soft surface tissue, no more than half an inch, and it had been oozing blood ever since. Not enough blood to cause a major physiological problem, indeed, scarcely enough to register any change on the monitors, just a slow, steady drain on the oxygen supply to the nervous system which had begun to degrade even the basic autonomic responses and which everyone attributed to the gradual dysfunctioning of a swollen and chronically damaged brain. But the bleeding had weakened the tissue surrounding the tear until, as spleens sometimes do, abruptly it ruptured. Spleens are the washing machines of the СКАЧАТЬ