It had been easy enough to get into the ICU, the fat nurse on night duty asked him if he was a close relative and he’d put on a sad face and said, “I’m his son, Ewan. I’ve just flown back from South America,” and she’d put on a matching sad face and said, “Of course, let me take you to your dad.” He’d sat with “Dad” a while, companionably, as if he really were his son. “You’re a hard man to find, Graham,” he said softly to him. He had been looking all over the place for him. There was no way for his client to get in touch with him once the job was put in motion. That was the way Ray liked it. Safe, not sorry. A phone call at the beginning, a phone call at the end.
It was funny being back in the hospital. The A and E had been noisy and chaotic, not like here. It was peaceful at Graham’s bed-side, apart from the blinks and beeps of the machines. He had thought of him as “Hatter” when he was hunting him down, but finding him like this, as helpless as a baby, the guy seemed to merit a little tenderness. He took out the syringe from the inside pocket of his jacket. Full of nothing. Air. You needed air to live, you didn’t think of it as something that would kill you. The air would travel in his vein, find his heart, stop the pumping action, stop the blood flow, stop the heart. Stop Graham dead. It took only the littlest thing. He lifted the covers from Graham’s feet and found the vein in his ankle. “This won’t hurt a bit, Graham,” he said. Ray of light, Ray of darkness. Ray of sunshine, Ray of night.
He replaced the covers. Graham’s heart would go into cardiac arrest in a few seconds and all hell would let loose, nurses running all over the place, even the fat nurse, heaving her hips heroically along the corridor.
Time to go. He patted Graham’s blanketed leg. “Night, night, Graham. Sleep tight.”
Outside, it was beginning to spit with rain again. He made the phone call to his client. There was no answer, so he left a message on her voice mail.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Hatter,” he said. “Our business is concluded.”
I owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Auld, Malcolm R. Dixon (deputy chief constable, Lothian and Borders Police), Russell Equi, Major Michael Keech, Sheriff Andrew Lothian, Dr. Doug Lyle, and Dr. Anthony Toft for telling me things they knew and I didn’t. Apologies if I have misunderstood that information or, occasionally, willfully misused or distorted it.
Thank you to David Robinson and Donald Ross at the
Scots-man
, to Reagan Arthur, Kim Witherspoon, and Peter Straus, and to Little, Brown and Transworld.
Thank you also to David Lindgren for trying, and usually failing, to explain corporate law to me and, more important, for being a lawyer who lunches.
Thanks also to Alan Stalker and Stephen Cotton for coming to the rescue in hard times.
Last but not least, thank you to the writer Ray Allan for graciously allowing me to steal a story from his life.
Kate Atkinson’s first novel,
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was then chosen as the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year. She is the author of a short story collection,
Not the End of the World
, and three other critically acclaimed novels,
Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird
, and
Case Histories
. She lives in Edinburgh.