John Harvey - Rough Treatment

Grabianski got up and moved around the body, straightening the legs, pulling the arms back down to the sides.

“Call an ambulance,” he said.

“You’re joking!”

Grabianski pointed down. “Does this look like a joke?”

“Sure. It looks like a fucking joke to me. That’s exactly what it looks like.”

“You’re not going to call an ambulance,” Grabianski said, back on his knees, “then get over here and give a hand.”

Grice watched as Grabianski took hold of the man’s head-as carefully as if it were some vase that might crack, never mind the blood that was collecting there, smudging his hand-took hold of the head and tilted it back.

“A cushion!” Grabianski sang out.

“What about it?”

“Get me a cushion.” He wasn’t sure if that was right, but took the one that Grice almost reluctantly handed him and squeezed it behind Hugo Furlong’s shoulder blades, the back of his neck.

“Now what’re you doing?” said Grice with a strange sort of fascination. Grabianski was opening the man’s mouth like he was a dentist.

“Clearing the airway.”

To Grice it sounded like something to do with pirate radio.

“Shit!” Grabianski exclaimed.

“What’s up?”

“He’s got false teeth.”

“His age, what else d’you expect? Forty-five, fifty, you expect it. I’ve got an upper set, none of them mine. Don’t you?”

There were a lot of fillings in Grabianski’s head, but every tooth was his own. Brush with salt his grandmother had told him, salt and warm water, every day. These lower dentures had been jolted loose by Hugo’s fall and were sideways across his mouth, pushing up against the palate. Finger and thumb, Grabianski eased them out and shook them a little before laying them aside.

“Jesus!” Grice complained. “That’s disgusting.”

“You’d rather he died?”

“Of course, I’d rather he died. He saw us, didn’t he? He’s not another one you can talk into calling us a couple of niggers. He’s going to pull through this, help some police artist with a photofit, there we are flashed up all over the country on Crimewatch. He’s dying, let him die.”

Grabianski wasn’t listening.

Still on his knees, he straightened the rest of his body, brought both hands level with his face, the left locked around the wrist of the right, which was shaped into a fist.

“What the hell …?” Grice began. He was wondering if what he was watching was some kind of primitive Polish prayer.

Grabianski brought his fist down into the center of Hugo’s chest with all the force he could muster, striking a couple of inches to the left of the sacrum.

“Jesus!” Grice shouted again. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Hugo’s body, the upper half of it, had lifted forward with the impact of the blow, a bolt of air expelled from the lungs. But when Grabianski checked for a pulse, there was still nothing. He shifted closer to the head, pinched the nose tight and lowered his lips over Hugo’s mouth.

“I’m going to throw up,” said Grice, as much to himself as either of them. The one on his back wasn’t hearing too well, anyway.

“Pump his chest,” said Grabianski urgently.

“What?”

“Pump his chest.”

“Hey, you’re Dr. Kildare here, not me.”

“Okay,” Grabianski swiveled on his knees, pushed himself to his feet, one hand going in that damned jam and picking up a splinter of glass for his troubles. “Get round there, give him some mouth to mouth.”

“No way!”

Grabianski had his hands locked, one over the other, arms tensed straight; he leaned forward and began to pump hard against the man’s heart. One, two, three, four … Glancing at Grice, threatening him with his eyes. Five, six, seven … Allowing himself a breather. There, eight, nine, ten and one for luck. Grice was still hovering, holding himself back. “Are you going to do this or not?”

“Give myself a mouthful of whatever he’s been chucking down all day? Forget it!”

“Give him mouth to nose, then?”

Grice looked disgusted. For a moment he thought, genuinely, that he was going to be sick. Grabianski elbowed him aside and repeated the mouth to mouth, twice, remembering to let the chest fall.

Move fast, more bumps to the heart. He could only keep this up so long, and without help what was the point? He would be losing him.

Grice was thinking the same things. “Look,” he said, “Jerry, I know what you’re trying to do. Other circumstances, you know, it’s the right thing to do. But here … we got to leave him.”

Grabianski jumped up from a couple more mouth-to-mouths and hit Grice across the face, more of a slap than a punch, not too hard but hard enough. “You don’t give a shit what happens to him, fine. Just think what kind of charge they’ll give us if they find out. Eh? Think about that and get to the phone. Call emergency, tell them they’ve got about five minutes.” He glanced round at Hugo Furlong. “Less.”

There wasn’t time to see that Grice was doing as he was told. Grabianski checked the pulse again. Shit! Already his arms were beginning to weaken, muscles aching; his own breathing was becoming ragged. He thought it possible Grice might have left the house without phoning, left them both where they were. But then he heard the receiver being replaced. The hospital, the ambulance station, both were less than a mile away.

“Come on,” Grabianski yelled at the body below him, “whoever the hell you are. Don’t die on me now.”

As he pumped his mind continued to race. From somewhere he pulled the fact that the brain could last out three minutes after the blood had stopped flowing from it. He hoped that was right, fact and not fiction. He had no thought of still being there when the ambulance crew came barging in, all hi-tech trained, armed to the teeth with electric paddles, their-what was the word for it? — defibrillator.

In less than two minutes he heard the siren.

He covered Hugo Furlong’s mouth with his own for the last time. Exhaled. Watched the chest rise and fall. “Good luck,” he called, heading not for the rear window, but the front door, sliding the catch down on the lock so there was no way it could slam shut. The siren seemed to be only in the next street and as he ran he caught sight, reflecting off the buildings, of the swirl of blue light.

Jack Skelton had scarcely slept at all and when he had he had stirred restlessly, a ragged turning from one side to the other. Even so, it was his wife who woke first, alerted by the cautious opening of the door.

“Jack,” she said, hushed, her hand pushing at his back. “Jack, wake up.”

With a small groan, Skelton rolled towards the center of the bed, levering himself into a sitting position. Kate stood in shadow just inside the doorway, looking towards them. When Skelton spoke her name she turned and left the room, the door open behind her.

Standing, Skelton refastened his pajamas and slipped on his dressing gown. “Go back to sleep.” He kissed his wife high on the cheek. It was a little after three in the morning.

Kate sat on one of the kitchen stools, dribbling honey from the blade of a knife down on to a slice of bread she had already smeared with peanut butter. Her skin was sallow spots, small and white and without heads, clustered above and below the corners of her eyes and close to her hairline. When she had arrived back from the police station the previous afternoon, she had gone straight to her room and locked the door. Aside from visits to the bathroom, she had not emerged until now. Sandwiches and tea that had been left on a tray outside had remained untouched. She had not spoken a word to her parents, not to either of them.