The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) by Tony Parsons Page B

the waiting room.
    ‘Miss . . . Whitehead?’
    ‘Whitestone,’ she said, standing up. ‘Where’s the other doctor? Dr Patel?’
    ‘Dr Patel’s shift ended. I’m Dr Khan. I’ve just come out of surgery with your son, Jason.’
    ‘His name is Justin.’
    ‘Exactly.’ He looked at her, his face a mask, and my stomach fell away. ‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said, consulting his notes. ‘We managed to remove the fragments of glass from your son’s left iris and its supporting tissue but unfortunately the optic nerve has been detached from the back of the eye . . .’
    He looked at her, nervously licked his lips, waiting for her to fill in the terrible blank.
    But she said nothing.
    ‘What does that mean, Doctor?’ I said.
    ‘The eye is a sphere with a transparent bulge at the front – the cornea – and a stalk – the optic nerve – at the back. The glass was in the cornea but the optic nerve – which carries visual impulses to the brain – has been severed . . .’
    ‘What does it mean ?’
    ‘Vision is not possible without the optic nerve.’
    ‘So he’s . . .’ she said, swallowing hard. Swallowing it all down. The rage. The grief. The fear. The disbelief. Emotions that I could not begin to imagine because it was not my child in that operating room. She could not say the word. It seemed as if she would never say it, as if she would live and die without ever saying the word. And then finally she said it.
    ‘Blind?’ she said. ‘He’s blind?’
    The doctor was saying something about the benefits of counselling but Pat Whitestone wasn’t listening. She was gone, calling her son’s name, out of the waiting room and into the corridor.
    ‘Just! Just! Just!’
    ‘You can’t—’ a nurse said at their station.
    ‘He’s resting after the operation,’ said another nurse outside her son’s room. ‘You mustn’t—’
    But she must and she did.
    I followed her.
    The room was in darkness and so was her boy, still unconscious from the general anaesthetic. There were white bandages over his eyes that covered half his face.
    ‘My beautiful son,’ Pat Whitestone said, sinking to her knees beside the bed, and then the tears came, hopeless tears that seemed as if they would never stop.
    ‘I’m here now,’ she said.
    I stood by her side but I did not touch her and I did not speak.
    And I wished there was a father and grandparents and siblings in this room to help her carry a weight that she should never have to carry alone. But there was only me.
    ‘Those bastards,’ she said. ‘Those fucking bastards.’
    She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth and her mouth tightened with a rage and a violence that I had never seen in her before. And as I watched her she gasped, as if she suddenly couldn’t breathe, and lifted her face, her eyes still screwed tight, as if she could actually see the bastards who had done this to her son, as if she could see their faces, as if she could see them getting what they deserved.
    As if – and the thought came unbidden – she could see them screaming for mercy as they swung from the end of a rope.

12
     
    When I got to 27 Savile Row in the morning I was hoping to see Pat’s familiar figure running the show up in MIR-1, but she was clearly still at the hospital with her son.
    TDC Billy Greene was putting a photograph of Hector Welles on the whitewall that he must have downloaded from Welles’ company’s website – one of those official portraits that big corporations take of their staff, Welles smiling with shrewd, bright-eyed confidence, as though your money would be safe with him.
    It sat next to the police mugshot of Mahmud Irani.
    Colin Cho and a couple of his people from the Police Central e-crime Unit were hunkered down around a laptop. Dr Joe was eating a frozen yogurt as he contemplated the giant map of London that covered one wall. And the voice analyst – Tara Jones – was at a workstation, replaying the one line of dialogue