Peter May - Cast Iron

Kirsty made a face. ‘Oh, very funny.’ Then paused. ‘I don’t like people picking up my baby without permission.’

‘I don’t think she meant any harm.’

‘No, neither do I. But still...’ Then she frowned. ‘You know, it’s weird... I’m sure I’ve met her before, or seen her somewhere.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘She didn’t seem to know you.’

‘No... She didn’t look familiar to you?’

Enzo said, ‘To be honest, I wasn’t paying her very much attention. She’s no Rafaella!’

Kirsty glowered at him. ‘Oh, Papa!’

Sunlight slanted into Bertrand’s room at an acute angle through venetian blinds, and lay in stripes across the white sheet that covered him. Stripes that followed the contour of his leg, raised under the sheet and supported from below. The softness of the pillow beneath his head felt so luxurious that he had no real desire to come fully to the surface of what felt like a very deep sleep.

For the first time in a long time, there was no pain. No sensation of any kind. He might have been floating.

But gradually he became aware of an electronic beep that sounded at regular intervals, and it dawned on him that it was keeping time with the beat of his heart. With an effort he turned his head to his left, and saw a bank of electronic apparatus spilling wires and tubes across the floor to the bed. A drip almost directly above him feeding clear liquid into a vein in his arm, sensors stuck to his chest.

His mouth was so dry he could barely separate his tongue from the roof of it, his lips cracked and sore. He tried to swallow, but it seemed there was a boulder in his throat.

He heard a door opening and lifted his head a little to see an elderly nurse bustling into the room, her crisp white uniform swishing as she walked. She leaned over and looked at him with soft, kindly brown eyes. ‘Good morning, young man,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see you are finally awake at last.’

Morning, Bertrand thought. Morning? What morning? What day? Where on earth was he?

‘How are you feeling?’

He struggled to find his voice, then finally heard it croak in the quiet of the room. ‘Not bad.’ What else to say?

The nurse smiled. ‘Maybe now you’ll be able to tell us who you are and where we can get in touch with your family.’

Bertrand was confused. Why would they not know who he was?

Then recollection returned like a sledgehammer and set the machine beside his bed beeping at an alarming rate. He sat bolt upright, and the nurse stepped back in surprise. ‘You’ve got to get me a phone,’ he said, suddenly finding strength in his voice. ‘You’ve got to get me a phone, now!’

‘The ear is a very complex construction of multiple parts. The outer and inner ears, the middle ear, the acoustic nerve, the auditory system that processes sound as it travels from the ear to the brain.’ Doctor Demoulin sat back, dispensing his expertise with the dispassionate disinterest of a man who has made the same speech many times. His consulting rooms were in an eighteenth-century provincial townhouse that sat up on the cliffs above the Boulevard du Prince de Galles, looking out across the bay beneath the town of Biarritz, once the playground of European royalty. The doctor himself sat at a large mahogany desk with his back to a double window, and, beyond yellowing vertical blinds, Enzo could see sunlight coruscating away across a crystal-blue sea.

The furniture in the doctor’s consulting rooms appeared to be of the same vintage as the house. His office smelled of time and disinfectant, and entering it felt like stepping back a century.

Doctor Demoulin might also have come from the same era. He was a big man, his great balding cranium ringed by a tangle of silver hair, like wire bursting from its sheath. The same wiry growth sprouted in abundance from his ears and nostrils. He wore a grey tweed suit and heavy brown brogues. His hands, Enzo noticed, were enormous, with more hair growing between the knuckles. He looked at the notes in front of him. Then raised his eyes towards Enzo. He gestured a hand back across the top of his head and nodded towards the Scotsman. ‘Waardenburg syndrome?’

Enzo’s own hand went instinctively to the white stripe in his hair. ‘Yes.’

Demoulin looked at Kirsty. ‘And have you inherited?’

Enzo and Kirsty exchanged embarrassed glances, and Enzo said, ‘Kirsty is not my blood daughter.’

Demoulin cocked an eyebrow, then scratched his chin and closed the folder in front of him. ‘Okay, so the fact that baby Alexis failed his newborn hearing test would not, in itself, have signalled a problem. Anything up to ten per cent of babies fail that test. Vernix in the ear canal, fluid in the middle ear... It’s the follow-up confirmatory test which is the most important. And the fact that he failed that is the cause for concern.’ He leaned over to smile at Alexis in his carrycot, and elicited a happy chortle from the baby. ‘Nothing wrong with his sight anyway.’

Enzo could feel Kirsty’s tension as, during the next hour, Doctor Demoulin donned a white coat and conducted a series of tests in a clinical room next door to his office. Miniature earphones were inserted into Alexis’ ears and electrodes placed on his head to detect brain response to the various sounds played. Then a microscopic microphone was placed in the ear next to a tiny ear bud to measure auditory echo.

A test that the doctor described as a ‘brain audiometry evaluation’ was a straightforward visual determination of changes in Alexis’ behaviour in response to what sounds were fed into his earphones.

When he had completed his tests Doctor Demoulin stood thoughtfully, his lips pursed. ‘That he has a hearing problem, there is no doubt. He is not deaf, but is what I would describe as hearing-impaired. It’s not serious, but still a cause for concern.’ He looked at them both, then focused on Kirsty. ‘There’s no history of deafness in your family?’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘Not that I know of.’

The doctor nodded and stood up. ‘Well, I’m going to have to take a little bit of blood from Alexis to send to the lab for testing. Then, perhaps, we’ll be in a better position to make both diagnosis and prognosis.’

They stepped out into the street and the rumble of traffic, and Enzo sensed his daughter’s disappointment. He said gently, ‘It never was going to be settled here and now, Kirst. These things never are. But I think you came to the right man. I had a good feeling about him.’

Kirsty turned her face up towards him, concerned. ‘Did you? I wasn’t sure.’

Enzo nodded. ‘He had a good way with Alexis, and you don’t get to be the number one specialist in your field without knowing what you’re about.’

‘It’s just...’ She shrugged. ‘He gave so little away.’

‘I’m sure he’ll have plenty to say when he knows how things stand.’ He put an arm around her shoulder and she leaned into him gratefully.

He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He had silenced the ringtone and ignored it while they were in with the consultant. Now he took it out and saw that there were several messages, all from Nicole. He hit the dial icon and waited. It barely rang once.

‘Monsieur Macleod, where on earth have you been?’

‘It doesn’t matter where I’ve been, Nicole, I’m here now. What’s the problem?’

Kirsty watched her father’s face lose all its colour in the blink of an eye. He staggered, and for a moment she thought he was going to fall down. She clutched his arm. ‘Papa? Are you okay? What’s wrong?’

‘Where?’ she heard him say, and his voice sounded oddly hoarse. ‘I’m on my way.’