With My Little Eye (19 page)

From atop the pile of rocks a single blue grouse looked over the scene and took flight, wondering what was going on. It was not used to being ignored.

P
ain. Sickness. Smell of disinfectant.

Open eyes but can't see. Kisses on the uncovered part of face and a faint perfume. Cold. Too tired to move. Drumbeat. A familiar voice talking, giving the latest news.

Travelling head first face up. Light and dark. Voices. Needles. Face uncovered, ring of faces, one of them remarkably like Honeypot's and one like Tash. Covered up again. Echoes. Left the road. Rocks among the heather. Head hurts but hallucinations drown the pain. Driving the Ford but too fast to control. Own little BMW much better.

Pipe, tube, hose.

Unwrapping again. Light hurts. Visitors. Yoo who? Mustn't laugh. Hurts. Clay pigeons blowing to dust, gets in your eyes. Pudding club. Shall I be Daddy? Smile when I'm shouting at you.

One second Douglas was wandering in the distant recesses of his mind, the next he was in a hospital bed, desperately cold, being leaned over. The male figure was the surgeon. He didn't know how he knew that; in fact he didn't even know how he knew that it was male. It asked him how many fingers it was holding up. He said that he was too tired to count but that he wasn't seeing double, which seemed to satisfy the figure. Astonishingly, although his memory was patchy his thinking processes were almost too clear.

‘He seems to be coming round at long last,' it said. ‘It's probably down to you. Keep talking to him. I'll look in again later. I'll send a nurse.'

The figure moved away and was replaced by Tash. She settled in the bedside chair. ‘You've done something different with your hair,' he said.

The effect was immediate. Tash emitted a low wail, tears hopped onto her cheeks and she searched in vain for a handkerchief before grabbing a corner of the sheet to mop her nose. ‘Are you all right?' she asked in a muffled voice. ‘No, that was silly. I know you're not all right but you're going to be. We've been waiting for you to come out of it.'

‘I'm cold. Awfully, terribly cold. I'm not dead, am I?'

Tash was trying to laugh and cry at the same time. ‘No, you're not dead. But you're still on a transfusion. You lost a terrible lot of blood.'

‘But are you all right? How's the baby?'

‘He's doing very well.'

‘He? How do you know that?'

‘They gave me a scan here when they were doing yours. We could see his little spout. I'm calling him Teapot for the moment.'

‘Be careful; that kind of nickname can stick.' His head did not seem able to move but by forcing his eyes as high as they would go he saw that there were several bags hanging on a stand and tubes coming down to him. ‘Do they take the blood straight out of the fridge and shoot it into you? Tell them to warm it first.' He tried not to sound peevish but without success.

‘I'll tell them but I don't suppose they'll listen. It probably gets too thick to flow or something, I'll ask them to give you more blankets. Do you remember what happened?'

‘Bits. But I've been dreaming all sorts of dreams and I don't know where they take over. I remember visiting my mother. That was real?'

‘Yes. She wrote me a sweet letter.'

Mrs Young was inclined to put off letter writing. And then the post …

‘How long have I been in here?'

‘Just over a week. Go on about how much you remember.'

‘There was a coach following us and a camper van behind it. We thought whatshisname – George Eastwick, was it? – might be in the camper. They both turned off when we did. After that I'm not sure …'

She put a slim finger to his lips. ‘Don't struggle to remember. They say you just have to relax and let it come when it comes. I'll tell you all you need to know. Yes, we thought it was probably George. I don't know why we were so sure, but we were right. You whizzed ahead and swung round and he stopped behind the bus and you fired at him. And he shot at you. Well, I wasn't having that. I went round the back of the coach and came up behind him and he was just taking another shot at you and I wasn't quite quick enough. I swatted him with the barrels of your gun. I'm afraid I bent it badly, do you mind an awful lot?'

‘Not in the least. Anyway, it's insured. Take it in to …' He ground to a halt, quite unable to remember the name of his usual gun shop.

‘No problem, I just filed a receipt from them. So that's all right.' Tash looked deep into his eyes to see whether he was strong enough to discuss his own condition. Her voice became husky with emotion. ‘His bullet could have killed you but it ran round between your skull and your scalp; Honeypot says that they do that sometimes. Anyway, I thought he'd killed you and I was just going to do something awful to his body when a police car turned up, the result of my phone call to Honeypot. I thought I might be in trouble—'

‘But you're not?'

‘No. You see, all the Japanese twitchers—'

‘The Japanese …?'

‘Birdwatchers. The coach was full of them, all with cameras, looking for the blue grouse. There were several video cameras and their what-d'you-call-ems, clips, were all over the TV news next day. They make it quite clear that he'd fired first and I think Honeypot had told the world that George was after your blood, because the papers had some of the photos with headlines referring to him as “assassin”.' She paused and looked at her watch. ‘We'd better be quick – they want me to keep talking to you but they only let me in during visiting hours, did you ever hear of anything so silly? But it lets me spend hours at your desk. After all the publicity, work keeps rolling in and most of them say that it can wait until you're better, and at least I can do the preliminaries for you. And, listen, do you know what you were talking about while they kept you anaesthetized because of your head injury?'

‘No idea,' Douglas said. ‘I seemed to dream about all sorts of weird things.'

‘Honeypot's delighted. She says you're her golden boy and you can park on a yellow line any time you like. It seems that you solved the last bit of the Stan Eastwood case for her.'

‘I did?'

‘Yes. You remember, we had it all figured out but there was no proof at all. But you kept babbling about pipes.'

‘It was the bagpipes I was dreaming about. A nightmare.'

‘I told Honeypot you'd kept mentioning the pipes and she realized that they'd never found the pipe that George had used to pipe the gas in through the wall. And they remembered that he'd been doing some work for a lady who lives next to Seymour's garage. They'd been putting in a ventilator from an internal room through a fan and coming out under the eaves and they found a piece of the flexible ventilation pipe with clear signs of having been pushed into a hole in a stone wall. She says that the forensic scientists have positively matched the dust on it with the stone and mortar of the house.'

Douglas had been waiting for a chance to ask a very important question but he knew that as long as she was sitting at his bedside the question was not urgent. However, at this point Tash fell silent, so he said, ‘Then I take it that George is in custody?'

Tash shook her red head. ‘Oh no.'

All Douglas's fears came rushing back. ‘If George is walking around loose, I don't like the idea of you sleeping at home. I want you well out of harm's way.'

Tash laughed and squeezed his hand. ‘He isn't walking around anywhere, silly. When I hit him with the barrels of your gun the gun went off with the shock of it, Honeypot says they quite often do that. It took half his head off. He's as dead as the dodo and I can't say that I'm sorry – a man who would spy on my mum and kill his own brother and come chasing after us. His son seems all right, though, and doesn't seem to be missing his dad at all. The two policemen who turned up were going to get quite stuffy about it but Honeypot turned up a few minutes later and she said that it was perfectly all right. She didn't quite say that I had her permission to knock his block off, but that's how she came over. I'm in some sort of custody but out on bail. She says it will be all right.'

‘How do you know George's son?' Douglas asked. His head was beginning to swim, but whether that was due to his injury or to Tash's tendency to leap from subject to subject he could not be sure.

‘He's been visiting. Apparently he inherits his father's flat and he likes it much better than the grotty cottage that he's living in just now. Mr Farlane, who owns most of the land around us, was advertising for a keeper, so he thinks he'll go after the job and move in to the granny flat. And he enjoys gardening, isn't that great?'

‘He must be off his trolley,' Douglas said. Sleep was crawling over him again. Tash's voice became a mere whisper in the distance. She would have regrets later. He must hurry and recover, get home and be ready to support her if she ever felt guilty.

Douglas woke up again suddenly. ‘He may be tarred with the same brush as his father and his uncle. Get an electrician to come in and rip out the wiring.'