Thicker Than Water

I had some vague idea in my head about knocking on the first door and asking them to call an ambulance, but a woman with a yappy little dog screamed when she saw me and in no time I’d drawn a small crowd. Someone helped me to sit down again, at the side of the kerb, and I hovered at the ragged edge of consciousness while another someone called for an ambulance. ‘Love Walk. Love Walk in Peckham. Yeah, I think he’s been mugged. His face is covered in blood and he’s—’

What? Luckier than he had any right to expect? Probably, because when I surfaced again for real underneath a sardonically winking strip light in the corridor of some cavernous casualty unit (back at the Royal London, by a grim irony) floating on the wave of amiable invulnerability that comes with tramodol, it was to the good news that most of my internal organs seemed to be intact and functioning: two cracked ribs were a minor nuisance, or would have been if one of them hadn’t punctured the lining of my left lung.

The broken finger on my right hand was scarcely worth mentioning, and my nose hadn’t broken after all, although it had swollen up spectacularly and the orbits of my eyes were deep purple.

The young Australian doctor decided to keep me overnight for a brain scan and a bit more prodding about in my chest cavity to see if the lung itself had been damaged in any way. But he was cheerfully optimistic about the whole concussion thing because I could count to five without clues and I knew who the prime minister was.

So all things considered, I’d come out ahead of the game.

My attacker had come from the Salisbury: he was nothing to do with Rafi, so our cover was still safe. I hadn’t been killed or even crippled. And I knew something about that dead man that might come in handy somewhere down the line.

All the same, I decided, enough was enough. It was time to take a leaf out of Juliet’s book, and start going for some throats.

12

‘They feeding you okay?’ Nicky asked, taking a tentative sniff of the plastic pitcher of orange cordial - I’m using the word ‘orange’ to refer to the colour, not to the taste - that stood on my bedside table.

Evidently it was less enticing than wine breath. He put it down and shoved it away firmly to arm’s length.

‘You any good at syllogisms?’ I countered.

‘Socrates is my bitch.’

‘Then work it out. Everyone in a hospital eats hospital food. Everyone in a hospital is sick. Conclusion?’

‘Right. I heard it was even worse than the shit they give you in prison.