Peter James: Dead Man's Grip

He looked at each of them in turn, his face placid, giving nothing away.

Roy stared at the consultant, feeling sudden, irrational anger towards him. This was their child he was talking about. He was gaily reeling off percentages as if it was something you could put a spread bet on. Roy felt totally out of his depth. He had no idea about any of this. It wasn’t in any of the books he had read; nor was it in Emma’s Diary or any of the other booklets Cleo had been given by the NHS. All of those dealt with perfect pregnancies and perfect births.

‘What’s your advice?’ Grace asked. ‘What would you do if it was your child?’

‘I would advise waiting and monitoring the placenta very closely. If Cleo suffers further blood loss, we will try to keep the baby inside by transfusing against that loss. If we deliver now and your baby does survive, the poor little thing is going to have to spend several months in an incubator, which is not ideal for the baby or the mother. Cleo seems otherwise healthy and strong. The ultimate decision is yours, but my advice is that we keep you here, Cleo, for a few days, and try to support your circulation and hope that the bleeding settles.’

‘If it does, will I be able to go back to work?’

‘Yes, but not immediately and no heavy lifting. And – this is very important – you will need to take a rest at some point during the day. We’ll have to keep a careful eye on you for the rest of the pregnancy.’

‘Could this happen again?’ Grace asked.

‘To be truthful, in 50 per cent of cases, no. But that means in 50 per cent of cases, yes. I run a three strikes and you’re out rule here. If there’s a second bleed, I will insist on further reductions to your fiancée’s workload, and depending on how the percreta condition develops, I may require Cleo to be hospitalized for the rest of her term. It’s not only the baby that is at risk in this situation.’ He turned to Cleo. ‘You are too.’

‘To what extent?’ Grace asked.

‘Placenta percreta can be life-threatening to the mother,’ the consultant said. He turned back to Cleo again. ‘If there is a third bleed, there is no doubt about it. You’ll have to spend the rest of your pregnancy in hospital.’

‘What about damage to our baby?’ Grace questioned.

The consultant shook his head. ‘Not at this stage. What’s happened is that a part of the placenta is not working so well. The placenta is an organ, just like a kidney or a lung. The baby can lose some placenta without a problem. But if it loses too much it won’t grow well. And then, in extreme cases, yes, he or she can die.’

Grace squeezed Cleo’s hand again and kissed her on the forehead, terrible thoughts churning inside him. He felt sick with fear. Bloody statistics. Percentages. Fifty per cent was crap odds. Cleo was so strong, so positive. They’d get through this. DC Nick Nicholl had been through something similar last year with his wife and the baby had ended up strong and healthy.

‘It’s going to be fine, darling,’ he said, but his mouth felt dry.

Cleo nodded and managed a thin, wintry smile.

Grace glanced at his watch, then turned to the doctors. ‘Could we have a few minutes together? I have to get to a meeting.’

‘Of course.’

The doctors left the room.

Roy nuzzled his face against Cleo’s and laid his hand gently on her midriff. Fear spiralled through him and he had a terrible sense of inadequacy. He could do something about criminals, but it seemed at this moment that he couldn’t do a damned thing for the woman he loved or their unborn baby. Things were totally out of his hands.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love you so much.’

He felt her hand stroking his cheek. ‘I love you, too,’ she replied. ‘You’re soaking wet. Is it still raining?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see the car? The Alfa?’

‘I had a brief look. I’m not sure if it’s practical.’ He stopped himself short of saying with a baby .

He held her hand and kissed the engagement ring on her finger. It gave him a strange feeling every time he saw it, a feeling of utter joy, yet always tinged with foreboding. There was still one big obstacle in the way of their actually getting married: the minefield of formalities that had to be gone through before his wife, Sandy, missing for ten years now, could be declared legally dead.

He was being scrupulously careful to tick every box in the process. On the instructions of the registrar, he had recently had notices placed in the local Sussex newspapers and the national press, requesting Sandy, or anyone who might have seen her in the past ten years, to contact him. So far, no one had.

A fellow officer and friend, and his wife, were both sure they had seen Sandy in Munich, while on holiday there the previous summer, but despite alerting his German police contacts and travelling over there himself, nothing more had come of it, and he was increasingly certain that his friend and his wife were mistaken. Nevertheless, he had declared this to the registrar, who had requested that he also place notices in the appropriate German newspapers, which he had now done.

He’d had to swear an affidavit listing all the people he had made enquiries with, including the last person who had seen Sandy alive. That had been a colleague at the medical centre where she worked part-time, who had seen her leaving the office at 1 p.m. on the day she vanished. He’d had to include information about all police enquiries and which of her work colleagues and friends he had contacted. He’d also had to swear that he had searched the house after she had gone and had found nothing missing, other than her handbag and her car.

Her little Golf had been found twenty-four hours later in a bay at the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one for £7.50 at Boots and the other for £16.42 for petrol from the local branch of Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.

He was finding the process of filling in these forms therapeutic in a way. Finally he was starting to feel some kind of closure. And with luck the process would be complete in time for them to get married before their child was born.

He sighed, his heart heavy, and squeezed her hand again.

Please be OK, my darling Cleo. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you, I really couldn’t.

In his eight years’ experience with the Road Policing Unit, PC Dan Pattenden had learned that if you were the first car to arrive at a crash scene, you would find chaos. Even more so if it was raining. And to make matters worse, as he hurtled along Portland Road on blues and twos, because of budget cuts, he was single-crewed.

The information he was receiving on his screen and over the radio was chaotic, too. The first indication that the accident was serious was the number of people who had phoned to report it – eight calls logged by the Control Room so far.

A lorry versus a bicycle; a car also involved , he had been informed.

A lorry versus a bicycle was never going to be good news.

He began slowing down as he approached, and, sure enough, what he observed through the rain-spattered windscreen was a scene of total confusion. An articulated refrigerated lorry facing away from him and an ambulance just beyond it. He saw, lying in the road, a buckled bicycle. Broken reflector glass. A baseball cap. A trainer. People all over the place, most frozen with shock but others snapping away with their mobile phone cameras. A small crowd was gathered around the rear offside of the lorry. On the other side of the road a black Audi convertible, with a buckled bonnet, was up against a café wall.