Michael Robotham - Bleed For Me

Ellis grimaces. His teeth are like pieces of broken ceramic sticking from his gums.

‘What about Ray Hegarty?’

‘The girl must have killed him.’

‘No. There was someone else in the house that night waiting for Sienna. You wanted to silence her.’

‘Why would I bother? I owned her.’

I can hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. His blood is running between my fingers, over my hands. Ebbing away.

Something brushes my shoulder - a scorched photograph, blown by the breeze from the roof of the caravan. A black-and-white image of a naked girl, snap-frozen, my daughter’s best friend, with her arms bound to her ankles and her body, arched backwards. Exposed. Obscene. Unconscious.

I look at Ellis.

I look at my hands.

I walk away.

Rotors flash in the sunshine, beating the air, pushing it aside. Faces appear at the windows of the air ambulance. A door slides open and paramedics sprint across the swirling sand, their hair flattened by the downdraught.

Ronnie Cray is yelling orders and barking into her mobile. Scotland Yard is sending a team from Counter Terrorism Command and the Bomb Squad, while Louis Preston has also been summoned.

The blades of the chopper are spinning more slowly. Safari Roy and Gordon Ellis are strapped to litters and I watch them being carried to the helicopter. There’s room for one more. Cray looks nervously at the rumbling chopper. ‘You go with them. I hate those things.’

‘What about your shoulder?’

‘I’m fine. I’m needed here.’

The last of the litters is lifted into the chopper.

‘Why booby-trap the van?’ she asks.

‘Ellis had become a liability. He was attracting too much unwanted attention.’

‘So Brennan ordered this?’

‘He’s tying up loose ends.’

‘Did Ellis say anything about Ray Hegarty?’

‘He says he didn’t kill him.’

Cray doesn’t look at me, but I know what she’s thinking.

‘What about the trial? Are you going to stop it?’

‘That’s not your concern.’

‘Ruiz says it could cost you your career.’

‘It might not come to that.’

She pauses and gazes past me along the beach to where a wooden lighthouse on stilts seems to be trapped between the waves and the shore. The daylight is behind her.

‘Do you have a lot of friends, Professor?’

‘Not too many. How about you?’

‘Same. Why do you think that is?’

‘I know too much about people.’

‘And you don’t like what you see?’

‘Not a lot.’

She nods judiciously. ‘Decency is badly undersold.’ Her eyes are jittering with light and her lips move uncertainly. ‘I went to see Judge Spencer last night. I showed him a photograph of Sienna. I was sure he was going to deny it. I thought that underneath the robes and wig he’d prove to be just another lawyer who knows how to play the game - deny, deny, deny or say nothing at all.’

Cray runs a hand through her bristled hair. Dust and debris cling to her palm.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he didn’t know she was only fourteen. He uses an escort agency occasionally when his wife is away. Same old story - lust, desire and the lure of forbidden fruit.’

‘What’s he going to do?’

She shakes her head. ‘Hopefully, the right thing.’

She points towards the chopper. The engines are revving and the rotors accelerating. A helmeted co-pilot gives a thumbs-up.

‘You’d better go.’

Fine sand blasts against my trousers and my face as I run in a crouch and hoist myself on board. Seconds later my stomach lurches and the tail of the helicopter lifts. We leave the earth and swiftly rise, watching caravans shrink to the size of toy building blocks and the roads become black ribbons.

Higher still, we’re above the whitecaps and rocky shore, higher than the Mendip Hills and the patchwork fields, where everything is bathed in lustrous sunshine that makes a mockery of all that is dark about the day.

Frenchay Hospital on the northern outskirts of Bristol was built in the grounds of a former Georgian mansion, a sanatorium for children with TB back in the 1920s, when lung diseases were as Welsh as male voice choirs.

Little of the old seems to remain. The A&E is decorated in primary colours with modular furniture, cushions and even bean-bags. The Intensive Care Unit is on the ground floor, along a wide corridor that squeaks beneath the rubber-soled shoes of the nurses.

There have been too many hospitals lately and the smell seems to stick to the inside of my nostrils, reminding me of my childhood. I grew up around places like this, one of a long line of surgeons until I broke the mould and quit medicine in my third year. My father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting, has only just forgiven me.

The metal doors swing open and a small Asian woman appears. Dressed in green surgical scrubs, she has a short hair, a round face and teeth as white as brand-new. Her name is Dr Chou and she has a Birmingham accent and honey-coloured eyes.

‘The detective is out of any danger. We removed fragments from his bowel, but his other major organs seem to have escaped serious damage. We’re going to X-ray him again to make sure we haven’t missed any shrapnel.’

She consults a clipboard. ‘I can’t give you similar news about Gordon Ellis.’

She begins listing the extent of his injuries, but most of the details wash over me except for her final statement: ‘Basically we can’t stop the bleeding. X-rays also show there is a nail embedded in his spine and he has no sensation below the neck.’

She pauses, wanting to be sure that I understand what she’s saying.

‘Right now he’s on life support and receiving constant blood transfusions. We’re going to wait for his wife to get here before we turn off the machines.’

A rotund priest with a shining dome emerges from the ICU, searching for someone to comfort. He spies a T-shirted teenager in the corner who holds up a magazine as if he wishes it were a force field. Elsewhere, a waif-like couple huddle together as if conserving body heat. The boy has a ring through his eyebrow and the girl has a dozen studs in her ears.

‘I’d like to see him,’ I say.

‘Mr Ellis won’t be able to speak to you.’

‘I know.’

After scrubbing my hands, I follow Dr Chou through a heavy noiseless door. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the semi-darkness. Only the beds are brightly lit, as though under interrogation by the machines. Gordon Ellis lies on a trolley bed with metal sides. His eyes are bandaged over and his mouth and nose are hidden beneath a mask. Blood is leaking through the bandages on his chest and arms.

For a moment I think he might already be dead, but I see his chest move and the mask fog with condensation and then clear again.

Dr Chou lays a cool finger on my wrist. She has to leave. I stand away from the bed, not wanting to move any closer. Machines hum. Blood circulates. Tubes, wires and probes snake across the sheets and twist above his body leading to plastic pouches or monitors.

An intensive care nurse is perched on a padded stool amid the machines. She regards me with genial acquiescence, wondering why I’m standing in the half-darkness. She doesn’t understand what I’ve witnessed or comprehend the questions I still have.

Novak Brennan must have known about Gordon’s fondness for underage girls and his ability to groom them. He also may have known about the caravan - Ellis’s perverted chamber of secrets.

Blackmailing Ellis was the easy part. Corrupting a County Court judge was more challenging. Court appointments are published in advance of a trial, which gave Novak time to investigate Judge David Spencer and discover his penchant for prostitutes, particularly young, innocent-looking, fresh-faced girls. Sienna Hegarty fitted the bill - she was underage, a schoolgirl. Gordon could provide her.