The Pure in Heart (2 page)

He did not want it.

He turned back towards the grieving angels. But the path ahead was no longer empty. Ernesto was walking towards him, and when he saw Simon, he raised an arm.

‘Ciao – something wrong?’

‘I’ve come back for you. There was a phone call.’

‘Work?’

‘No, family. Your father. He needs you call him right back.’

Simon put sketchbook and pencils back into the canvas satchel and followed Ernesto quickly to the landing stage.

Ma, he thought, something’s happened to her. His mother had had a slight stroke a couple of months previously, the result of elevated blood pressure and too much
stress, but she had made a good recovery and it had apparently not left any after-effects. Cat had told him there was no need for him to cancel his trip. ‘She’s fine, it wasn’t major, Si. There is no reason for her to have another. Anyway, if she isn’t right, you can get back quickly enough.’ Which was what he must do, he thought, standing beside Ernesto as they sped back across the now sunlit water.

The only surprise was that it had not been Cat but his father who had telephoned. Richard Serrailler disapproved of Simon’s choice of career, of his commitment to art, of his unmarried state – of him, period.

‘Did he sound worried?’

Ernesto shrugged.

‘Did he mention my mother?’

‘No. Just you call.’

The motor boat shot up to the Fondamenta, turned neatly and stopped.

Simon put his hand on
Ernesto’s arm. ‘You’re a good friend. Thanks for coming back.’

Ernesto merely nodded.

Simon ran up the dark staircase from the empty warehouse to the flat and threw his satchel and jacket on the floor. The telephone connection had improved since the new digital lines had come in and he heard the ringing tone in Hallam House at once.

‘Serrailler.’

‘It’s Simon.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Mother all right?’

‘Yes. I rang to tell you about your sister.’

‘Cat? What’s happened?’

‘Martha. She has bronchial pneumonia. They’ve taken her to Bevham General. If you want to see her alive you should come home.’

‘Of course, I …’

But he was speaking to a dead line. Richard Serrailler wasted words on no one, least of all his policeman son.

There was an evening flight to London but it took Simon half an hour
on the telephone and in the end
the help of a contact in the Italian police to get himself a seat on it. The rest of the day was spent packing, sorting out the flat and arranging for Ernesto to take him to the airport, so it was not until he was on the crowded plane that he had leisure to think. And he had not thought, not until now. His father’s telephone call had been an order in all but name
and he had obeyed without question. His relationship with Richard Serrailler was so poor that Simon behaved towards him as towards one of his superiors in the force and with about as much emotional involvement.

His seat was over a wing so there was little chance to look down on to the lagoon when they took off, which was as well because he minded leaving Venice more than usual, leaving his refuge,
his work, and his calm, private space. Walking about the city, over canal bridges, through the squares, down the little dark passageways between the tall old houses, sitting looking and drawing, talking to Ernesto and his friends over an evening drink, Simon Serrailler was a different man from the DCI at Lafferton, his life and concerns were different, his priorities changed entirely. Time on
the journey was time in which he moved from one to the other, but tonight he was being hurtled back into his everyday life without the usual relaxed period of adjustment.

The sign to fasten seat belts went off and the drinks trolley was being manoeuvred up the aisle. He asked for a gin and tonic and a bottle of mineral water.

Simon Serrailler was one of triplets. His GP sister, Cat, was the
second, their brother Ivo, a doctor in Australia, the third. Martha was ten years younger, born when Richard and Meriel Serrailler were in their mid-forties; she was severely mentally and physically handicapped and had lived in a special care home for most of her life. Martha might or might not recognise Simon. No one could tell.

The sight of his sister had always moved him profoundly. Sometimes
she lay in bed, sometimes she was in a wheelchair, her body propped up and strapped in, her head supported. If it was fine he wheeled her into the garden and round the paths between shrubs and flower beds. Otherwise they sat in her room or in one of the lounges. There was nothing he could take her. He talked to her and held her hand and kissed her when he arrived and left.

Over the years he had
come to worry less about whether she knew him or gained anything from his company; if his visits had no significance for her, they became important to him, in something of the way these visits to Italy were important. With Martha, he was someone else. The time he spent beside her, holding her hand, thinking, talking quietly, helping her to sip a drink through a straw or eat from a spoon, absorbed
and calmed him and took him away from everything else in his life.

She was pitiful, ugly, drooling, unable to communicate, barely responsive and as a boy he had been embarrassed and upset by her. Martha had not changed. He had.

His parents mentioned her occasionally but her situation was never discussed in depth or detail and emotions were always kept out of such conversations. What did his
mother feel about her or for her? His father went to visit her but never spoke of it.

If she was unwell her condition always became acute very rapidly yet she had survived for twenty-five years. Colds led to chest infections then pneumonia. ‘
If you want to see your sister alive
…’ But it had all happened before. Was she going to die this time? Was he sorry? How could he be? How could anyone?
Did he wish her dead then? Simon’s mind veered away. But he needed to talk. When he got into Heathrow he would ring Cat.

He drank more of his gin. In the locker above his head were two sketchbooks full of new drawings from which he would select the best to work up into finished pieces for his exhibition. Perhaps he had got enough after all and the extra five days in Venice would simply have been
spent mooching about.

He finished his drink, took out the small sketch block he always carried and began to draw the elaborately plaited and beaded hair of the young African woman in the seat opposite.

The plane droned on over the Alps.

‘It’s me.’

‘Hi!’ Pleased, as always, to hear her brother’s voice, Cat Deerbon sat down ready to talk. ‘Hang on, Si, let me shift myself.’

‘You OK?’

‘Fine, just don’t know how to get comfortable.’ Cat’s baby, her third child, was due in a couple of weeks.

‘OK, I’m as settled as I can get … but listen, it costs a fortune on the mobile from Italy, let me call you back?’

‘I’m at Heathrow.’

‘What …?’

‘Dad rang. He said I’d better come home if I wanted to see my sister alive again.’

‘Oh, tactfully put.’

‘As ever.’

‘Ma and I decided we weren’t going to tell you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you needed your holiday and there’s nothing you can do, Martha won’t know you …’

‘But I will know her.’

Cat was silenced for a second. Then she said, ‘Of course you will. I’m sorry.’

‘No need. Listen,
I won’t be back till pretty late but I’ll go straight to the hospital.’

‘OK. Chris is out on a call and he may well go in to see her again if he’s up that way. Will you come over here tomorrow? I’m getting too big to be behind the wheel safely.’

‘What about Ma?’

‘I just can’t tell what she’s feeling, Si, you know how it is. She goes up there. She goes home. Sometimes she comes here but she
doesn’t talk about it.’

‘What exactly happened?’

‘The usual – cold then chest infection now pneumonia … how many times have we been there? But I don’t think her body is up to fighting it now. She’s barely responded to the treatment and Chris said they’re now wondering how aggressive that ought to be.’

‘Poor little Martha.’

Her brother’s voice, concerned and tender, echoed in her ears as Cat
put down the phone. Tears filled her eyes, as they did so easily in pregnancy … even the sight, that afternoon, of one of her daughter’s soft toys, lying scrumpled on the grass after it had been left out in the rain had made Cat soften to weeping. She heaved herself awkwardly off the sofa. She had forgotten almost everything about how it felt to be expecting a baby. Sam was eight and a half now
and Hannah seven. They had not planned this
third child. She and Chris were the only two partners in their general practice and stretched to the limits of their time and energy. But though she meant to take the odd surgery as soon as she could, realistically Cat knew that she would be out of action for the next six months and part-time at work for the year after that. Besides, now the baby was
coming and she had got used to the idea, she wanted to be at home with it and give more time to the other two, not rush back to the exhausting grind of medical practice. There would not be a fourth child. This one was precious. She was going to enjoy it.

She lay on the sofa trying to sleep but unable to stop the cycle of thought. How odd and yet how typical of their father to make the phone call
to Venice and in those terms. ‘
If you want to see your sister alive, you’d better come home
.’

Yet how often did he ever see Martha? Cat had scarcely heard the girl’s name cross his lips though he had once infuriated her by calling Martha ‘the vegetable’ in Sam and Hannah’s hearing. Was he ashamed of having a brain-damaged child? Or angry? Did he blame himself or Meriel?

And what had been the
reasoning behind his call to Simon, the other child for whom he had precious little time?

Simon, the person she loved, aside from her husband and children, above all other.

The cat Mephisto appeared from nowhere to leap softly on to the sofa beside her and settle down.

All three of them slept.

The streets were dark and almost deserted though it was barely ten o’clock. But the lights of Bevham General Hospital blazed out and as Simon Serrailler turned into the slip road an ambulance overtook him, siren wailing, speeding towards A & E.

He had always liked working at night, liked it from his first days as a uniformed constable on the beat, liked it now on the few occasions when
he had to take charge of a night-time operation. He was fired up by the sense of emergency, the way everything was intensified, every movement and word seemed significant, as well as the strange closeness engendered by the knowledge that they were people working on important and sometimes dangerous jobs, while the rest of the world slept.

He got out of his car in the half-empty car park and looked
at the great slab of hospital building, nine storeys high and with various lower blocks at angles to it.

Venice was light years away, yet for a second he had a flash picture of the cemetery at San Michele as it had been in the cool light of that Sunday morning,
of the ribbons of gravel path and the pale, still, grieving statues. There, as here at the hospital now, so much emotion was somehow
held, packed into every crevice, so that you breathed and felt and smelled it.

He walked in through the glass doors. By day, the hospital foyers were more like the concourse of an airport, with a mall of small shops and a constant passage of people. Bevham General was a teaching hospital, centre of excellence for several specialties, with a huge number of staff and patients. Now, when outpatient
areas and offices were dark, the real hospital atmosphere crept back into the quiet corridors. Lights behind ward doors, the screech of a trolley wheel, a low voice, the rattle of cubicle curtains … Simon walked slowly towards ITU, and the atmosphere, the sense of life and death together, pressed in on him, raising his pulse.

‘Chief Inspector?’

He smiled. One of the few people here who knew
him professionally happened to be the sister on duty.

The ward was settling for the night. Screens were drawn round one or two beds, lights on in a side ward. In the background, the faint bleep and hum of electronic monitors. Death seemed very close, as if it hovered in the shadows or behind a curtain, its hand on the door.

‘She’s in a side room.’ Sister Blake led him down through the ward.

A doctor, shirtsleeves rolled up, stethoscope dangling, came out of a cubicle and shot off, checking his pager as he went.

‘They get younger.’

Sister Blake glanced round. ‘Down to about sixteen I’d say.’ She stopped. ‘Your sister is in here … it’s quiet. Dr Serrailler has been with her most of the day.’

‘What’s the outlook?’

‘People in your sister’s condition are prone to develop chest infections
… well, you know that, she’s had them often enough. All the physio in the world can’t make up for the lack of essential movement.’

Martha had never walked. She had the brain of a baby and virtually no motor function. She had never talked, though she made babbling and cooing noises, never gained any control over her body. She had been in bed, in chairs and wheelchairs, her head propped up on a
frame for the whole of her life. When she was a small child, they had taken it in turns to carry her, but her weight had always been leaden and none of them had been able to manage her beyond her third year.

‘That’s the ward phone and there’s no one on the desk … understaffed as usual. I’ll be there if you want anything.’

‘Thanks, Sister.’

Simon opened the door of Room C.

It was the smell
that hit him first – the smell of sickness he had always loathed; but the sight of his sister in the high, narrow, uncomfortable looking bed cut to his heart. The monitors to which she was attached by various wires and leads flickered, the
clear bag of fluid hanging from its stand bubbled silently now and then as it was fed, drip by drip, into the vein in her arm.

But when he went closer to the
bed and looked down at her, the machinery became invisible, irrelevant. Simon saw the sister he had always seen. Martha. Brain-damaged, inert, pale, heavy, a dribble coming from the corner of her slightly open mouth. Martha. Who knew what she had ever registered about her life, the world, her surroundings, the people who cared for her, the family who loved her? No one had ever really been able
to communicate with her. Her awareness and understanding were less than those of a pet.