The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

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 blood, designed to produce white corpuscles and break down the worn-out red corpuscles; they are not intended to haemorrhage and squirt blood into the abdominal cavity. When they do, patients normally have no more than a couple of hours to live.

      

      Primrose was flustered. Less than forty minutes had passed since the grand parade of registrars, house officers, anaesthetists and physiotherapists had swept through ITU on the thrice-daily rounds, rushing around with their earnest faces and silly jokes, treating the nurses around them with as much consideration as uncomfortable pieces of furniture. Particularly student nurses. Yet now the anaesthetist, the one with the blond hair and salon tan, was on the phone, summoning her. She hadn’t even realized he knew her name. What did he want; had she fouled up?

      The other nurses exchanged knowing smiles; after all, he had the tightest and best-known glutei maximi any of them had seen in or out of surgical trousers.

      So that was it. An emergency, he explained, of a distinctly non-clinical nature. These emergencies she’d been handling since she was fifteen. Patiently she explained she couldn’t, not this week when she was working nights, trying to phrase her refusal so he wouldn’t be unduly deterred, wondering how far the tan went beyond the forearms, when the air-conditioned calm of Weschester General’s intensive therapy unit was shattered by the shrill insistence of an alarm. Alarms in ITU may sound if a patient rolls over and disturbs a sensor, or when a monitor is switched off for a bed bath or some other treatment. But patients in comas don’t roll over, and there wasn’t a nurse within twenty feet.

      She cut off the anaesthetist without explanation and rushed for the bed, but already McBean was ahead of her and checking the monitor. Blood pressure dropping, catastrophically. The breathing, once so serene, abruptly shallow and rasping. Now the alarm on the ECG monitor joined in the drama as it detected a heartbeat beginning to race. The