Quintin Jardine - Lethal Intent

The boy's face lit up. 'Yeah!'

'How about you, Lauren?'

'Yes, please. Can Louise come?'

Her stepmother laughed. 'That's nice of you, dear, but Louise is quite happy in front of the television. Besides, I'm expecting your father home in an hour or so.'

'That's sorted, then,' said Mario. 'Kids, do your ski boots still fit you?' Both children nodded. 'And have you kept your skis in good order, like you should?'

'Of course we have,' Lauren replied, severely.

'Right, dig them all out, and your suits, then change into warmer clothes. We're off for an afternoon on the ski-slope at Hillend.'

Spencer gazed up at him as if he was a god descended from Olympus: his weekend was saved.

Dan and Elma Pringle were in a place that had been beyond their reach or their worst imagining, but which they had reached nonetheless.

They sat side by side in the small office in the Royal Infirmary. Their surroundings might have been brighter and more modern than in its predecessor, the vast Victorian village where Ross had been born and where Elma's father had died, but they noticed not at all. Wherever they were, they would simply have held hands and stared at the wall.

The door behind them opened. Neither turned; they sat and waited as the consultant took his seat behind his desk. His name was Lewis Curry, and they had seen him before, on the day of their daughter's admission, when it had been his duty to tell them that the best they could hope for was that she would live the rest of her life in total helplessness, with no idea of who they were or of what she had been or might have become.

'Hello again,' Mr Curry said quietly. 'Have you been to see Ross?'

'We looked in on her before we came along here,' Elma replied. She had taken on the role of spokesperson. 'She looked very peaceful; it doesn't seem so bad when you see her asleep like that. Who knows? We're expecting her brother back from Hong Kong tomorrow. Maybe she'll just wake up and it'll be all right.'

The consultant looked down at his hands. 'No, Mrs Pringle. She will not awaken tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. I wish I had grounds for offering you a different prognosis than at our last meeting, but I don't. The fact is that things have resolved themselves since then. Your daughter seems so peaceful for one reason: there is nothing going on inside her head, no dreams, no reaction to light or sounds around her, nothing at all. What little brain activity we were able to detect following her admission has disappeared; only the vital centres continue to function, because of the ventilator. In my opinion and in that of my colleagues, she is clinically dead.'

Elma was struck dumb; her mouth fell open. Dan's eyes flickered, then his head dropped, and his shoulders began to shake.

The consultant had seen it before, all too often. Even in the strongest, most confident and most intelligent of people, there was always an element of denial. It was worse for them in a way: when the truth eventually hit home, it hit harder. 'Would you like to see someone?' he offered. 'We have a hospital chaplain and he'll be pleased to talk with you.'

'No,' Elma whispered. 'We don't know him and he doesn't know us. Anyway, he couldn't change what you've told us. What happens next?' She asked for Dan's sake: they both knew the answer for they had discussed the question, but she felt that he needed to hear it from Mr Curry.

'At the moment,' he said, 'the machine is keeping her breathing, and her heart beating. You may continue that, or you may ask us to switch it off.'

'And if we did, what would happen?'

'If the brain is dead, the body must follow. If she can't sustain respiration on her own, her heart will stop.'

'So if we ask you to switch the machine off, we're taking a gamble that she'll be able to breathe on her own?'

'I wouldn't call it a gamble.'

'Can we have a few minutes alone?' Dan mumbled, from somewhere down in his chest.

'Of course.' The consultant rose and left the room.

The Pringles sat there, still hand in hand. Eventually Dan lifted his head and they gazed at each other. Neither spoke, but he gave a single tiny nod, then looked away.

Mr Curry returned a little later. Elma looked up and him and whispered, 'Yes.'

He led them along to the small one-bed room where Ross, their only daughter, lay; the electrodes they had seen earlier had been removed from her head, but the thick tube was still in her mouth. There was a chair on either side of the bed, as if she had been expecting them. Her father sat on her right, her mother on her left, and each took one of her hands in theirs. When they were settled, Lewis Curry reached across and withdrew the tube, then signalled to his registrar, who switched off the ventilator.

If they had looked up at the monitor at the bedside, Dan and Elma would have seen the steady peak of her heartbeat grow irregular, until it stopped and became a straight line on the screen.

However hard he tried not to, George Regan could not help thinking back to the previous Saturday afternoon. His son had pleaded with him to take him to Easter Road, but he had been tired, and in any event the prospect of Hibernian battling it out with Aberdeen did not excite him. So, in the end, he had given him his bus fare and his ticket money and had let him go on his own. He knew as he gazed idly and unseeing at the television that he would regret that piece of selfishness for the rest of his life.

Saturday was the worst day so far: it was the weekend, and the house should have been full of George junior, of his noise, his boisterousness, his vibrancy. He had never known such quiet. He closed his eyes, but that was worse: he imagined himself in the coffin with his boy, and the vision made him wrench himself from his chair.

He strode through to the kitchen: Jen was cooking, her usual response to times of crisis. It was her hobby, the thing that made her happiest. 'What are you doing?' he asked her.

'I'm making a beef casserole. It'll be more than we'll eat ourselves, but I'll put it in the freezer so that it'll be done if we have visitors. After that I thought I'd make a rhubarb crumble.'

'Fine, love, but before you do that can we get the hell out of here? This place is doing my head in.'

She looked at him, her eyes slightly heavy, the effect of her sedatives, he guessed. 'Mine too,' she admitted. 'Maybe things will be better after the funeral.' He knew that they would be worse, but he let her have her illusion. 'Where do you want to go?' she asked.

'Uptown?'

'In that snow?'

'It'll be okay. The main roads are cleared, and the traffic won't be as bad as usual.' He had a sudden, positive thought. 'I'll tell you what. Let's go to a travel agent and book a break for Christmas. I don't fancy spending it here, so let's go somewhere with a bit of sun.'

'Are you sure? He'll be with us, George, wherever we go.'

'Aye, but at least the wee bugger'll be warmer.'

She sighed. 'If that's what you want, let's do it. Give me a minute, while I change and put a face on.'

George knew that it would take more than a minute, but he smiled and nodded. As Jen went upstairs, he pulled on his rubber boots and went outside to scrape the snow off the driveway as best he could, and to start the car, so that the heater would be effective when they were ready to leave.

He had just cleared the last of the tarmac when he heard his mobile ring. He patted his waxed cloth jacket, looking for it in one of its deep pockets, until he remembered that he had left it on the kitchen table. He bustled back to the door, risking Jen's wrath by bringing snow into the house, as he grabbed the phone and pressed a key to receive. 'Yes,' he barked.