Peter James - Perfect People

‘I like sheep,’ Naomi said.

‘You’d need a dog, darling,’ her mother said.

‘Dogs are a pain,’ Harriet said. ‘What do you do if you want to go away?’

‘I like dogs,’ Naomi said. ‘Dogs don’t judge people.’

There was something snagging in John’s throat, tugging at it from the inside, a muscle twitching from nerves; there were muscles twitching in his guts, also. He couldn’t stay still for more than a few moments. He wanted this all to be over, yet at the same time he was truly scared. Scared for Naomi, for the babies inside her. Scared about what lay ahead.

They had given him a chair beside the operating table, and he was sitting there now, stroking Naomi’s forehead, staring at the green cloth screen that had been clipped across her chest, blocking their view of everything that was going on beyond in the operating theatre.

They were waiting for the epidural block that had been injected into Naomi’s spine to become fully effective. John glanced at the round white clock face on the theatre wall. Five minutes had passed. He smiled at Naomi.

‘How are you feeling, darling?’

She looked so vulnerable in the loose gown, with the drip line in her wrist and her plastic name tag. A tiny bubble of spittle appeared in the corner of her mouth and he dabbed it away with a tissue.

‘OK,’ she said very quietly. ‘I’ll be glad when-’ She mustered a smile back at him, then swallowed, a nervous gulp. Her eyes were wide open. Sometimes they were green, sometimes brown; right now they seemed to be both at the same time. Her smile faded and doubt flickered, like a guttering candle, in its place.

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I’ll be glad when-’

When what? he wondered. When this waiting is over? When the babies are born and we can start to find out what Dettore has really done? When we can start to discover the wisdom of what we have done?

‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

‘Waiting.’

John stood up. The theatre seemed crowded; it had filled with figures in green gowns, most of them just chatting through their masks as if they were at a cocktail party. He was trying to remember who they all were. The consultant obstetrician, the registrar obstetrician, the consultant paediatrician, anaesthetist, assistant anaesthetist, nurses, midwife. Harsh white light burned down from the overhead lamp onto Naomi’s exposed swollen belly. Banks of electrical equipment were giving off readings.

The anaesthetist, a cheery, thorough man called Andrew Davey, touched her belly with cotton wool. ‘Can you feel this, Naomi?’

She shook her head.

Next he gave her a tiny prick with a small pointed instrument. ‘Feel anything now?’

Again she shook her head.

He picked up a water spray and gave a hard squirt, first onto her belly, then either side of her navel. Naomi did not flinch.

‘OK,’ the anaesthetist said, turning to the obstetrician. ‘I’m happy.’

The consultant obstetrician at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Mr Des Holbein, was a solidly built, bespectacled man in his mid-forties. He had dark hair shorn to stubble, with a serious face that had the air of a benign bank manager. Like everyone else, he knew nothing about their background with Dettore. But he had done a great deal to bolster their morale, in particular Naomi’s, over the past seven months.

It seemed to John that for the past seven months, doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals had become part of the rhythm of their lives.

Naomi had had a rough pregnancy. John had made it his business to try to understand more about the double uterus, and the conversation he and Naomi had had over and over, to the point of exhaustion and then beyond, was why Dr Dettore had never told them about this abnormality – and why had he implanted two eggs?

And why hadn’t Dr Rosengarten in Los Angeles seen she was expecting twins on the scan? When they discussed this with Des Holbein, he told them that at that early stage, if he hadn’t known about her second uterus, and if the boy had been out of position, possibly screened by the girl, and if he had been rushed, as it sounded Rosengarten was, it could quite easily have happened.

John kept in regular contact with his friend, Kalle Almtorp. The FBI were still no nearer to solving who had killed Dettore, and the Serendipity Rose had not been sighted. It was possible, he told John, that the Disciples of the Third Millennium, if they really existed, had sunk it at the same time as they had murdered Dettore – presumably killing everyone on board. They were no closer, either, to finding the killer of Marty and Elaine Borowitz, despite the original claims that it was done by the same Disciples of the Third Millennium. Just as silently as they had surfaced and struck, the Disciples of the Third Millennium seem to have faded back into the ether.

The FBI and Interpol were baffled. His best advice, Kalle told John, was for them to keep a low profile, avoid all publicity, be ex-directory and vigilant at all times. Kalle felt that moving from the US, as they had done, was sensible.

In England they had made the decision to tell no one about their visit to the Dettore Clinic, other than Naomi’s mother and sister. Some of John’s old colleagues, and some of Naomi’s friends, had seen the press mentions when the article had been syndicated around the world, but John and Naomi had successfully played it down saying that, as usual, the press had got the wrong end of the stick and had tried to make a sensational story out of nothing.

By her eighteenth week, instead of the morning sickness having gone, as she had been told it would, it had worsened. Naomi had been vomiting all the time, unable to keep any food down, despite constant cravings for frozen peas and Marmite sandwiches. Suffering severe dehydration, with her electrolytes up the creek, short of sodium and potassium in her blood, she had been admitted to hospital four times over the next two months.

In her thirtieth week, Naomi had been diagnosed with pre-eclampsia toxaemia – pregnancy-induced hypertension – with rising blood pressure. There was protein in her urine, causing her very uncomfortable swelling of her hands and ankles, to the point where she could no longer get her shoes on.

When, at thirty-six and a half weeks, Mr Holbein advised them Naomi should have an elective lower segment caesarean section instead of going the full term, because he was worried about the function of the placenta being impaired and possibly causing death of the babies or bleeding behind the placenta, Naomi had taken little persuading; as had John.

The conversation in the operating theatre suddenly quietened and in unison the gowned medics seemed to close ranks around Naomi. John sat down and took her hand. His mouth had gone dry. He was trembling. ‘Starting now,’ he said to her.

He could hear the clatter of instruments. Saw figures leaning over the table, eyes above the masks all serious in concentration. He craned his neck around the screen and watched Mr Holbein drawing a scalpel across the base of the huge bump that took up the whole of Naomi’s abdomen. Squeamishly, he looked away.

‘What can you see?’ Naomi asked.

Then suddenly the obstetrician popped his head around the screen.

‘Would you like to see the babies delivered?’ he asked, cheerily.

John looked at Naomi, bolstered by the confident tone of Holbein’s voice. ‘How do you feel about that, darling?’

‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Would you like to?’

‘I – I would, yes,’ he said.

‘I would too.’

Moments later, the anaesthetist undid the clips and let the green sheet down.

‘You can hold up her head to give her a better view,’ Holbein said to John.