The Mushroom Man (20 page)

Both barrels of the shotgun roared simultaneously.

The blast passed between my body and my arm, taking bits of my jacket with it, and I felt the heat of the muzzle-flash on the side of my face. Glass shattered and Annabelle jerked backwards against the panel of the door behind her, before flopping to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, like a discarded marionette, after the curtain has fallen.

I tried to get to her, but the people in the segment behind were screaming and yelling and trying to get back into the building. I heard a voice, my own, shouting ‘No! No!’ somewhere outside my head. When the people behind were safely in the foyer I attempted to pull the door open but Annabelle’s body was jamming it. Eventually I made a gap and squeezed through to her. I grasped her under the shoulders and reversed out onto the town hall steps, her long legs unfolding as I retreated and broken glass crunching under my feet. I sat there on the top step, with Annabelle cradled in my arms, trying to stem the blood, until the ambulance came and they took her from me.

They lifted her onto a stretcher with infinite gentleness and wrapped her in a bright blue blanket. The stretcher fitted on to a trolley which was exactly the same height as the back of the ambulance. It slid straight in and the wheels folded
up. The paramedic closed the door and swung the handle to fasten it. I watched the ambulance slip away into the night, lights flashing, as sirens and other blue lights converged on the town hall.

Inside the station everyone was running around like ants on a pan lid. An exasperated sergeant kept asking me for a description of the gunman, and couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen anything. I sat hunched on a hard chair in an interview room, feeling like a figure of ridicule, while officers ran in and out, shouted instructions and cursed. Bill Goodwin appeared and rescued me from further harassment by taking me to his office. He found a West Yorkshire Police sweater and I swapped it for my jacket and shirt.

‘I should have gone with her,’ I said.

‘No, you’d only have been in the way. You did the right thing.’

I picked up the phone to ring the hospital, but he put his hand over it. ‘Give them a few more minutes, Charlie, then I’ll ring. They won’t know anything yet.’ He asked a constable to make us two teas, but I didn’t touch mine.

Gilbert arrived, closely followed by Sam Evans. ‘Are you all right, Charlie?’ Sam asked.

‘I’m OK, but I wish I’d gone with the ambulance. Will they know how she is yet?’

‘Have you tried ringing?’

‘No,’ Bill replied. ‘I thought we’d give them a bit longer.’

‘They might tell me,’ said Sam, picking up the phone.

He asked for the sister in Casualty and introduced himself. He listened and nodded and looked grave. We heard him ask: ‘Could you let me know as soon as there’s any further news?’

I sat up; that meant she was still alive.

‘They’re taking her to surgery, they’ll let us know.’

‘I’m getting over there,’ I told them, jumping to my feet.

‘I’ll take you,’ Gilbert said. ‘You’re in no fit state to drive.’

Sam came with us. A police car was parked outside the hospital entrance, its lights switched off. Gilbert and I recognised it as an ARV.

Sam led us expertly down various dimly illuminated corridors until we were in the casualty department. It was rush hour. The place was filled with Friday-night boozers, suffering stab wounds, broken arms and sundry minor-injuries. Somebody in a cubicle made gurgling noises as a pipe was passed into his stomach to drain its alcoholic contents. A youth with a Mohican haircut and gold rings in his nose and eyebrows was complaining that his girlfriend was having a bad trip.

The sister had no further information for us. I
supplied her with Annabelle’s name and address for the admission forms, but wasn’t much help with next of kin. When she asked me my relationship to her I just said: ‘Friend.’

A policeman from the ARV, wearing a bulletproof vest over his shirt, was sitting on a chair in the middle of the corridor that led to the operating theatres. He nursed a Heckler and Koch automatic in the crook of his arm. Another cop stood surveying the scene in the waiting room, arms folded, legs apart; as implacable as the Colossus of Rhodes. Gilbert approached him cautiously and showed his ID. They talked and nodded, and Gilbert pointed to me, obviously telling him who I was.

When he rejoined us I said: ‘Look, I’m staying here for as long as it takes, but you two might as well go home. I’m grateful to you both for coming.’

It made sense, so they left. The sister suggested I use the staff canteen, but I declined. She let me wait in her office, and a male nurse brought me a coffee.

Every thirty or forty minutes I stretched my legs in the waiting room. New faces replaced the ones who were either patched up and sent home or admitted into a ward. The place grew slightly more quiet as the night passed. The occasional boisterous drunk fell silent when he saw the police presence. Several clients appeared to be regulars. A
down-and
-out who said he had blue spiders crawling all
over him was dealt with patiently and then propelled out through the door. Everybody called him George. I wandered down a corridor, between the cubicles, and found myself in the resuscitation room, where the ambulances bring the serious cases. Annabelle would have passed through here. The victim of a hit-and-run was being attended to. Through a gap in the curtains I saw the doctor pull the blanket over the man’s head, then wipe the sleep and the sweat from his own eyes.

I went to the bathroom. The walls were covered in graffiti and most of the taps had been left running. When I washed my hands flakes of dried blood from under my fingernails went down the plughole. Back in the sister’s office I watched the sky growing grey over the chimneypots and hi-rise flats. A porter on the next shift arrived, and left his newspaper on the desk. I glanced at the folded bundle – today was the first day of the new football season.

‘Mr Priest?’

I turned towards the voice. It was the sister.

‘Mrs Wilberforce has been taken to the ICU. You can see her for a few moments.’

I jumped to my feet. ‘How is she?’ I demanded.

The sister held up her hand to curb my haste. ‘I have to warn you,’ she said, ‘that she is very ill, and is likely to remain on the critical list for some time.’

‘But she’ll live?’

‘This way. I’ll take you.’

She led me back through the resus. room to the intensive care wards. We entered one and she introduced me to Annabelle’s nurse, but I never heard her name. There were six beds in the room, with Annabelle in the end one.

She was laid out flat, with just a thin sheet over her. A blue device was sticking out of her throat, with a corrugated tube leading to a ventilator machine that was doing her breathing. A thick orange tube came from under the sheet and ended in a bottle on the floor. There was a drip leading into her arm and a battery of instrumentation alongside her bed that wouldn’t have looked unreasonable on the flight deck of Concorde.

I couldn’t take it all in. What had I allowed to happen to the beautiful, vivacious woman I was with a few hours ago? Last night she’d been giggling like a schoolgirl for the first time in years, and I had congratulated myself for bringing about the change in her. Now she was being kept alive by electrical impulses and motors and pumps; and I was to blame for that, too. Two years ago I had been shot by another madman. I wished it was me again this time.

‘What’s happening to her?’ I whispered.

The nurse tried to tell me, but I didn’t catch much of it. She used words like intubated and pneumothorax. Annabelle had a punctured lung and damage to various other organs. She’d lost
most of her blood. The nurse said she was responsible solely for caring for Annabelle.

‘Please look after her,’ I whispered. ‘She means a lot to me.’

‘We will,’ the nurse promised, assuming it was her I was addressing.

‘Can I come back later and sit with her for a while?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Thank you.’

I gazed into the gas fire until my eyes burnt. When I couldn’t keep them open any longer I swung my feet onto the settee and fell asleep. Sam Evans woke me, tapping quietly on the window. He was carrying the bottle of milk from my doorstep.

‘You look a mess,’ he declared. ‘Have a shower and put some clean clothes on, while I make coffee.’

My resistance had vanished, so I asked him to ring the hospital for me and did as I was told. In the bathroom I stripped naked and bundled everything together, for throwing in the dustbin. I was under the shower when he poked his head around the door. ‘She’s still critical but there’s no deterioration in her condition. I would say that’s good news.’

‘Good. Thank you, Sam.’

The clock inside me didn’t know what time of day it was, so I had a big bowl of cornflakes for lunch. Surprisingly, Sam approved of my diet. Shortly after he went, Nigel and Sparky arrived, in different cars.
Nigel was returning mine, but he left it out on the road. Sparky dropped his into the drive.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said as I let them in.

‘In that case you’d better sit down,’ I told him. Nigel asked if he could make coffee.

Sparky went on: ‘The press are asking questions about Annabelle. They’ve found out who she is and have decided she’s the latest victim of this Mushroom Man. It’s only a matter of time before some kind soul earns his forty pieces of silver by telling them about your involvement, so we’re swapping cars. It might throw them off the scent until the story dies. I think you ought to bugger off somewhere – you can’t do anything here – but I don’t suppose you will.’

Nigel agreed with him, but I shook my head. ‘I’m staying,’ I said.

When they left I walked outside with them and we stood talking in the garden for several minutes. Sparky knows about gardening. He told me what to do with the perennials, but I didn’t listen. Listening has always been one of my problems. The housemartins were gathering on the phone wires, and a blackbird was gorging itself on the berries on next door’s mountain ash. The man over the road was dismantling his barbecue.

I nodded in his direction and said: ‘That marks the official end of summer.’

‘It’s still only August,’ Sparky protested. ‘What
happened to all this global warming. It’s more like November.’

‘Ah,’ said Nigel. ‘That’s the strange effect of global warming. We’ll actually get cooler. The weather in Britain is governed by the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean. As the icecaps melt, due to the warming, the meltwater cools the seas, so we’ll have cooler weather.’

Sparky gave him the scowl he usually reserves for burglars who swear blind that they were drunk and were convinced that the penthouse they were stripping really was their own squat. ‘Are you ‘aving us on?’ he said.

I was shivering when I went back inside. Nigel had given me an envelope containing stuff from the blood-stained jacket I’d left in the City nick. It was my wallet and some loose change. And the ticket stubs and programme for the concert. I opened the programme and read from the translation of the ancient verse:

My mind flashed to the new moon I’d seen the previous Tuesday as I drove away from Annabelle’s, but this time I had no defence against the bad memories it invoked.

I sat all that night in the corner of the intensive care unit. A different armed policeman was on duty outside the door. Two patients had moved out, another was brought in. I watched the ventilator rising and falling, and the green blips moving across the ECG screen. The nurses had an office area in the middle of the room. They were constantly checking their charges, moving quietly and efficiently. They read dials, made notes, felt brows and changed drips. I could understand why intensive care nursing was so satisfying.

When I wasn’t in anybody’s way I held Annabelle’s hand and tried to talk to her. I whispered in her ear that she had to get better. She just lay there, as if in the deepest sleep, breathing with the rhythm of the machinery. Her face was pale, with dark smudges under her eyes, but she still looked hauntingly beautiful, like some aristocratic lady who’d fallen under a spell.

I heard voices outside the door and looked up. Through the porthole window I could see Nigel remonstrating with the armed policeman and showing him his ID card. I went out to them.

‘What’s happening?’ I said.

‘Sorry, Mr Priest,’ said the uniformed PC, ‘I didn’t know who he was.’

‘That’s OK. Nigel?’

‘Morning, boss. How is she?’

‘No change. It’s a bit early for you, isn’t it?’

‘It certainly is. I didn’t know it was light at this hour. Unfortunately the press have found out about you. It’s all over the Sunday papers. They’ve been camped outside Dave’s all night, but now they’re here, at the hospital. We’ve come to get you out, when you’re ready.’

‘Thanks, just give me a minute.’ I had a word with the nurse and a last look at Annabelle. I squeezed her hand and told her I’d be back later.

Nigel radioed Dave, telling him to bring the car to the entrance. The other uniformed policeman walked out with us. The press were gathered in the foyer, like jackals at a kill, waiting for any scraps that they could make a meal out of. Nigel and the PC positioned themselves on either side of me and we headed purposefully towards the door.

Cameras flashed. A whizz-kid newshound with eyes in his backside and a huge video camera hiding his face cleared a path for us without once looking where he was going. Several microphones were poked towards me, their owners firing questions simultaneously:

‘Was this another Mushroom Man shooting?’

‘Are you and Annabelle lovers?’

Nigel tried to parry the questions. ‘You’ve been given a statement,’ he told them. ‘We’ve nothing to add.’

‘Is it true you didn’t see anything, Inspector?’

‘Are you expecting him to strike again?’

A tired hack at the back of the group shouted: ‘Apart from that, what did you think of the concert?’

I clenched my fists and swung towards him, but the big PC’s fingers clamped around my arm and propelled me through the door.

They trotted after us towards the car, their sound men running behind like poodles on leads. Sparky hadn’t unlocked the passenger door so I couldn’t get in. My car doesn’t run to centralised locking.