Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(68)
I felt that if I wanted to, I could probably get up and walk around and make a good impression.
‘Peter?’
I looked up to find Guleed looking down at me.
‘I’ve called Dr Walid,’ she said. ‘He’s coming down to collect you.’
‘Not UCH again,’ I said.
Guleed was unsympathetic – she pointed out that it was policy that any officer involved in a serious Falcon incident where they may have been exposed to hazardous materials or practices was required to undergo an evaluation by an appropriately trained medical professional.
I groaned and said I didn’t want to go.
‘You probably shouldn’t have written that policy, then,’ she said. ‘Should you?’
‘What about Nightingale and Carey?’ I asked, because misery loves company.
‘Carey already went in an ambulance. Nightingale is waiting around on the off-chance Chorley pops up again. Plus he’s an inspector and gets to do what he likes.’
‘And we need to get a statement from Walbrook,’ I said.
‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m the one with a notebook.’
Bits of my back, arm and leg had woken up to the fact that my hysterical moment had passed and that rational attendance to their needs might be forthcoming if only they could get my attention.
‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘And make sure you ask whether King Arthur and Merlin were real people.’
‘King Arthur?’
‘Just make sure you ask.’
Guleed shrugged.
‘If you think it’s important,’ she said, and reached down to help me up.
23
The Long Weekend
‘I want you to take the weekend off,’ said Dr Walid.
‘But it’s only Thursday afternoon,’ I said.
‘Then take a long weekend off,’ said Dr Walid.
But I cheated and went to the briefing on Friday morning.
‘I thought you had the weekend off?’ asked Guleed as I sat down beside her. ‘I wish I did.’
David Carey didn’t make an appearance – obviously he’d been given the same instructions I had. Only he’d been sensible enough to follow them. Stephanopoulos gave an after-action report on our attempted godnapping/deicide/behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.
I had a strange fancy that my head was made out of rubber and that words were bouncing off them. From what meaning I caught as they boinged past I gathered that, while we’d utterly failed to catch Martin Chorley, we’d managed to thwart – Stephanopoulos actually used the word thwart – his plans. And that was always going to be a good thing. The various analysts reported their progress chipping away at his financial empire, and Nightingale explained what to look for in a vampire infestation. Me and Guleed knew this bit off by heart, so engaged in a bit of competitive doodling while we waited for him to finish.
‘Go see your parents,’ Nightingale told me as soon as the briefing broke up. ‘They’re worried about you.’
‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.
‘Because your mother phoned me this morning and told me so,’ he said.
So home I went, where my mum promptly made me go out shopping with her down Ridley Road market so I could carry the bags back, including a massive tin of palm oil. I told her you can get palm oil just about anywhere these days, but she claims that Ridley Road is the only place you can get authentic Sierra Leonean palm oil. Shopping with my mum in Dalston is never fast, because every five metres there’s an aunty or an uncle or cousin or old friend. There will be stopping and chatting and asking after people. Plus she made me get a haircut in the barber off Kingsland High Street where they’d cut my hair from the age of five onwards and had, as far as I could tell, never changed the décor in that whole time.
It was also probably the same guy asking whether I was still police and telling me that he’d heard crime was going down and didn’t that mean I’d be out of a job, but not to worry: he could have me trained up in no time. Finally – a respectable career.
Since my mum was watching, I got it shorn short but with a nice even fade on both sides. Outside, my head felt far less rubbery and way more naked, so I treated Mum to tea and cake in a Kurdish bakery before dragging a month’s worth of food home. Since I’d carried most of it, I stayed for dinner, where my dad talked about an offer he’d got to record a vinyl exclusive and what did I think.
I thought I might want to run some checks on the characters making the offer. But what I said was that it sounded brilliant. And I asked whether it was going to make any money. My dad actually looked a bit puzzled at the concept, but judging from my mum’s expression she had that side of the business in hand.
Bev turned up while I was doing the washing up and insisted on being fed, which meant I had to do two sets of washing up while she and Mum had a conversation pitched too low for me to hear. Not that I was trying that hard to eavesdrop, honest.
Afterwards we sat on the sofa and cracked open some of the emergency Red Stripe Mum keeps stashed behind the rice barrel. Because just for once there was no live football on anywhere in the world, we watched Twenty Moments That Rocked Talent Shows, but Mum and Dad went to bed just before Susan Boyle blew Simon Cowell’s socks off. Once they were safely out of the way we lay down on the sofa, muted the TV and listened to the rain. There was a lightning flash and I used Bev’s heartbeat to time the delay before the thunder – she has a very steady heartbeat.