Death and Other Lovers Page 17

  Except that, Shimoni thought briefly, with Todd in here and his girl turning out to be the person who tried to kill him, he did not actually have any friends.

  Soon after that they let her in to see him. He had a white hospital smock over Todd’s pyjama trousers, and a face to match. He looked utterly washed out. When his eyes closed, the lids were almost transparent. They had him propped up on pillows and he made no effort to raise himself from them. He was sober enough now but looked if anything sicker. It might have been the drink, or something the hospital had given him. It might even have been the fact that someone had knocked him down with a deadly accurate blow to his aching jaw just when he had dragged himself back to the land of the living.

  “Mickey, I’m sorry,” she began.

  But Flynn was not interested in her apologies and interrupted, his voice both weak and urgent, mumbling through his swollen jaw. “Is Gil OK? They keep telling me different things. They say he’s all right, then they say he’s still unconscious. Have you seen him? Is he OK?”

  Shimoni laid her hand on top of his, the undamaged one, on the side of the bed. “He’s going to be all right, Mickey. They’ll keep him in a few days, but he’s going to be OK. He’s just about waking up now. I expect you’ll be able to see him before long.”

  About then Donnelly arrived in response to her message and Shimoni finally heard a coherent version of the night’s events. Partly it was that Flynn was getting his head together, but largely it was due to Donnelly’s skills as interviewer. He had an instinct for when to prompt and when to wait patiently for the tale to find its own way forward. Shimoni was surprised and rather touched by his gentleness.

  When he got up to leave, Shimoni walked him down to his car. “When they discharge him,” she said, “I’m going to take him back to my place. You have the address. He shouldn’t be on his own, and it’ll be a while before Gil’s up and around again. Also, if Fahad comes back, we might as well make him harder to find.”

  Donnelly considered for a moment, then nodded. “You have a dog, don’t you, Miss Shimoni?”

  Shimoni smiled. “Yes. But I think I can protect them both.”

  She bought herself a fresh coffee, then went back to Flynn.

  Flynn was gone, his bed empty. Panic surged in her in the moment before common sense intervened. She knew where he was. She found the room and opened the door quietly.

  Todd’s head was bandaged and he appeared to be asleep, or nearly so, drowsing like an old man before a fire. She thought he may have seen her come in, though that faint flicker of a smile might have been only a dozing twitch. He looked comfortable, even complacent, under the sheet and not at all like a man at death’s door.

  Flynn was at the window, looking out over London though Shimoni doubted if he was seeing it, talking to Todd in a low fast urgent monotone. For a moment Shimoni thought he had overestimated the extent of Todd’s awareness. Then she realised that Flynn did not know either of them was listening.

  “You don’t do this to me, Gil,” he was saying. The New York accent whined in his voice like the keen of a buzz-saw. “No way; not you. I’ve already been left by all the people I’m prepared to be left by.

  “You got any idea what it’s like surviving a plane-crash two hundred and twenty people died in? When it’s because of you the plane was blown up anyway? I got to tell you, having a charmed life ain’t the greatest feeling in the world. It has you saying too many goodbyes, and too many damned apologies. All those people dead. How the hell do I apologise for that?

  “Gil, whatever I’ve said to you in the past, forget it. I need you. I need your help. I need you to get me through this. I don’t know how to handle it. I’m telling you, I can’t hack this on my own.” A little snort that might have been half laughter, half a sob. “Hell, if you’re really lucky you might get to dry me out again. You remember what fun that was!

  “So listen to me, old man, wherever it is you’ve gone to. The pipe and the slippers and the eternal fender and the harp lessons got to wait. You aren’t finished here yet. I’ve kind of lost track whether I owe you or you owe me at the moment, but either way I’m not about to let you quit on me. You die and I got nothing. You die like this, because of me, and I honest to God don’t know how I’m going to live with that. I’m lonely and I’m scared right now. A man’s got to die some time but please, Gil, for the love of God, wait your turn. Don’t leave me alone in this.”

  Leah Shimoni slipped out of the room as quietly as she had slipped in. That had not been meant for her ears.

  It had not actually been meant for Todd’s either. But he opened one eye just the same and said, patiently and a shade plaintively, “Mickey, I’m not going anywhere yet.”

  Chapter Two

  The Forensic Science Laboratory put Donnelly onto a chemist working in that same field of antibiotic research. He took the name he was given round to the address he was given and waited while Dr. Ash was paged. When a lad of about twenty-two in cord jeans and a Fair Isle sweater just odd enough that his mother must have knitted it wandered in, Donnelly assumed he too was looking for the chemist.

  But he stood in front of Donnelly with a slightly shy smile and his hands in his pockets and said, “Superintendent Donnelly? I’m Laurie Ash.” Donnelly saw then that he was older than he had thought, perhaps by as much as ten years, but still not at all what Donnelly had been expecting. He realised with a twinge of grim humour that he had been expecting another Hehn; possibly without the accent, but essentially another impress from that archetypal mould. As if all policemen looked like George Dixon; as if all photographers looked like Mickey Flynn and none like Cecil Beaton.

  “What I need to know, Dr. Ash,” he said, “is just how cutthroat a business is pharmaceutical research?”

  Ash gave a pensive frown like a swottish schoolboy. “On a scale of one to ten? About minus three.”

  Oh well, Donnelly thought resignedly, another theory bites the dust.

  “No, that’s not altogether true,” Ash went on mildly. “What I’m working on at the moment, nobody’d walk up two flights of stairs to steal. Not because it isn’t important, but because any commercial implications are long term and it’s commercial considerations which are to blame when drug companies stop behaving like the benefactors of mankind and start behaving like dogs round a bitch in heat.”

  “I’d have thought pharmaceuticals was a business like any other: you identify a need, design a product to meet it, market it and hope to make a profit. No?”

  “Certainly, in principle. In practice there are certain idiosyncrasies, the main one of which is the size of the R&D budget as a proportion of gross income, and the amount of R&D that will never recoup itself in product sales. It’s the nature of the thing. If you sell—say—furniture, you know before you start how to make a bed, or an armchair. You might experiment with different woods, different fabrics, but you know from day one that you’ll have a product of some sort at the end.

  “Pharmaceuticals isn’t like that. Either you start at the consumer end—Mrs. Jones wants something to stop her piles being such a pain in the arse, so you hunt through your lexicon of compounds for something that might ease Mrs. Jones’s discomfort without, for example, blowing her left leg off. Or you start at the chemistry end and try to find a useful role in life for a reaction that looks jolly impressive on the bench but might be a long way from adding to the sum of human happiness.

  “Either way you waste a lot of time, effort and money. You test a lot of things that don’t help Mrs. Jones’s piles, or do blow her leg off. And you chase up a lot of blind alleys before you accept that, since turning iodine white or making sulphur smell like tortillas is not in itself a useful accomplishment, this particular reaction is never going to make money.”

  Donnelly was not sure where this was leading him but he was content to follow it for a while yet. “So how do you develop new products?”

  “Occasionally,” Ash said succinctly. “Most lines on sale are variations on
a fairly limited range of themes. Cough-drops in different flavours. Torpedo-shaped analgesics instead of round ones. Creams instead of lotions, gargles instead of sprays. What you’re selling is the same remedy as everyone else in a different package. You won’t get rich doing it, there’s too much competition, but you won’t go broke either.”

  “Then how do you get rich?”

  Ash looked down at his well-worn cords. “You’re asking me?” Donnelly grinned obligingly. “You get lucky. You work hard, you do your R&D, and then once in a while you get lucky. You cross a couple of selling-platers and breed Red Rum. You find yourself staring down a microscope at something that’s behaving how you want it to behave instead of how it wants to behave. You test it on some lab rats and it doesn’t blow any legs off. You get as far as clinical trials, and Mrs. Jones says it makes piles a pleasure. You put it on the market, and people eating off mantelpieces buy it faster than you can turn it out. Your shares go through the roof.

  “And then some whey-faced accountant on the third floor who didn’t get asked to the celebration party gets out his pocket calculator and works out that the projected five-year profits on Bum-Eez are just enough to cover the cost of all the R&D that came to nothing. So you tidy away the streamers and the champagne corks and get back to work.”

  “So how,” Donnelly said again, “do you get rich?”

  Ash shrugged. “I suppose the most reliable way is theft.”

  “What do you steal?”

  “Ideas. Research. Just finding out what doesn’t work can save you time and money. If you can actually find out what does work you can be on the market in direct competition with the market leaders without having their costs to offset. Industrial espionage is big business throughout big business, but there can’t be many industries where the rewards are so great. Is this being any help, Superintendent?”

  “I’m sure it is,” said Donnelly.

  Ash called his bluff. “How?”

  “No idea,” admitted the policeman. “But it’s R&D I haven’t had to pay for so it must be worth something.”

  Before he left he looked round Ash’s laboratory. His first impression was that it was nothing like Dr. Hehn’s. Then he realised it was just the same only older. All Ash’s equipment was a generation senior to Hehn’s, and gathered together piecemeal so that the cabinets did not match. Ash appeared to have cornered the market in other people’s rejects. He worked on what might once have been a kitchen table. Even the blackboard was second-hand: it had the letters of the alphabet printed in block capitals down one side and in joined-up writing along the bottom. A girl was scribbling a formula: when it worked out wrong she swore, erased it with her sleeve and began again.

  Donnelly said, “What is it you’re working on here?”

  “Liver fluke.”

  “Lots of luck,” said Donnelly, leaving hurriedly.

  Shimoni took Flynn home to the cottage outside Windsor. The dog remembered him, stuck its nose out from under the couch and risked a brief wag of the tail.

  During the drive they had hardly spoken, which would not have mattered if they had been comfortable in their silence. But Flynn needed to talk and Shimoni wanted to, and neither of them could find a way of breaking out of the cage that events and their own natures had built around them.

  The strain was greater because silence was not a natural element to either of them. Shimoni in her sturdy self-reliance seemed reticent, but she had never before had difficulty saying what she wanted. Flynn by instinct was downright voluble: words ran out of him as fast as, and sometimes faster than, his ideas came to mind. He would talk to anyone about anything, and argue too given half a chance, and argue as passionately for whims that amused him as for beliefs he had held all his adult life.

  What stood in the way of communication between them was guilt. Both of them were ashamed.

  Though Todd was recovering visibly, Flynn was tortured by the hurt he had brought on him. He felt as if, whatever way he turned, someone else paid the price of his mistakes. A plane-load of strangers dead; a man he cared about in hospital with a fractured skull; the woman he loved turned into some kind of an ocean-striding Nemesis with death on a leash.

  In a way he did not understand, he felt as much responsible for Laura Wade’s transmutation as for Todd’s broken head and the two hundred and twenty broken bodies. He was not thinking very clearly. He felt more like the culprit than another victim. He wished someone would punish him for whatever it was he had done and stop taking it out on his friends. Then he remembered the whisky and supposed he was going to get his wish.

  Shimoni was ashamed of her behaviour towards Flynn, going back to but not confined to the night of the plane-crash. She understood her feelings well enough. She had felt jealous of and threatened by this special relationship between Gil Todd and Mickey Flynn, suddenly revived after three years. She had not trusted Todd to take her interests into consideration. Now she felt rather ashamed of that too. She had behaved like a child who thought someone was going to snatch her doll away.

  Most of all she regretted that stinging blow she had dealt Flynn’s battered face, that had sent him reeling in agony. She knew that, if he remembered it at all, he would not hold it against her. But she did. She knew, as he could not, that the scene which greeted her when Flynn wobbled to open Todd’s front door neither explained nor justified her action. She never thought Flynn had attacked Todd. She had been waiting for her chance to hurt Flynn, and this was it. She could have told Todd that and felt the better for it. But she could not explain it to Flynn, and it stood in the way of anything she could have said.

  She went to make up the spare room, which was about three inches longer than Flynn if he lay with the crown of his head against one wall. He asked if he could help, she suggested he feed the dog. He found the bowl, and the bag of meal and the cans of meat, but could not find the can-opener. Rather than ask he hunted, and in hunting discovered where she kept her drinks.

  If she had spent another thirty seconds wrestling a cover onto the spare bed duvet she would not have returned to the kitchen in time to see him gazing thoughtfully at the green and dark and bright bottles ranged within, for he had closed the cupboard and straightened up before he knew she was there. He said, by way of explanation, “Can-opener?”

  She passed it to him and Flynn fed the dog. He said carefully, “In view of what happened to the last guy who gave me a bed for the night, you sure you want me here? It might not be the cleverest move you could make.”

  Shimoni shrugged. “I grew up with people like Fahad around me. Not just Arabs, there are Jewish Fahads as well. You learn not to let them dictate your life. It’s like having snakes in the garden: you take sensible precautions and then you forget about them. You can always be unlucky, but it’s better than living your life with one eye over your shoulder. I’m not prepared to be held hostage by a man who may be thousands of miles away by now with no intention of coming back. Whatever happens next, we’ll deal with it. You have a charmed life, remember?”

  She found his eyes on her face, his expression ambivalent. “You were there, weren’t you? While I was”—his shoulders, and his expression, gave a tiny shrug—”talking to Gil. While he was waking up. I heard the door close. I thought it was a nurse, but it was you.”

  She saw no point in denying it. “Yes.”

  His chin came up. “Is that why—?”

  “No.” Her tone was uncompromising. “Mickey, I’m not sure what the relationship between you and me is going to be, but it’ll be founded on something a damn sight more substantial than pity. I don’t know if we can really be friends. I’m willing to wait and see. In the meantime, you’re Gil Todd’s friend and that’s enough. I’m on your side, Mickey. I realise it may not always have seemed like it, but you can rely on me.

  “And now,” she added, turning away, “the sun being over the yard-arm or under the gunter or whatever it is, I think we should split a—”

  She stopped as if shot. She glanced at
him over her shoulder, horrified. The magnitude of the faux pas stripped her self-confidence away like a skin. Desperation made her inventive. Watching him out of the corner of her eye she murmured, “A tea-bag?”

  Flynn began to laugh. He had an inordinately silly laugh, and when it got started it could go on until everyone around him had either joined in or gone looking for a psychiatrist who made house-calls. It started as a low chuckle deep in his throat, served time as a definite giggle, threw in a couple of walrus impressions along the way and finally petered out, when the need to breathe became paramount, in a diminishing volley of snorts like a winded horse.

  They ended up on the carpet, back to back, tears streaming down their faces while the dog Flute ran round them excitedly trying to work out if they were dangerous.

  Flynn wiped his eyes on his sleeve and sighed. “Listen, we got two ways to handle this. We can play Let’s Pretend: you pretend not to be watching me while I pretend not to be watching the cupboard where you keep your hooch. Or we can behave like two mature, sensible adults and pass the time in some intelligent and meaningful way until we see whether this thing’s going to have me crawling up the walls.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Flynn considered. “We could get a Bugs Bunny video.”

  They played Scrabble. Todd had taught her, with the idea of extending her English vocabulary. She now had an excellent vocabulary of words with q and z in them. She used them all in a serious attempt to beat Flynn by as wide a margin as possible.

  But halfway through the first game she realised that Flynn was playing not to win but to amuse himself. “Gin” and “sling” could have been a coincidence; she was definitely suspicious of “punch,” thought she could be over-reacting to “tonic” and was left in no doubt whatever when he added a y to “whisk” which also transformed the word “tips” above it. He was sending her up. When he saw that she knew, he gave her his grin that was sweet and crazy in approximately equal proportions, and for the first time she began to understand the affection Todd bore him which had survived three years in which he had not so much as received a postcard from the wanderer.