The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [145]
Elizabeth lets out a cry of pain and muffles the sound with her fist. Another contraction, this one is real. It forces her to lean back, legs splayed slightly, trying to take pressure off her cervix.
“How often are they coming?” asks Ruiz.
“I don’t know.”
“Since the last one?”
“Ten minutes maybe.”
Ruiz holds his hand to her forehead. “You’re burning up.”
“I’m fine. Claudia isn’t due for three weeks.”
“I don’t think Claudia is going to wait.”
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is less than fifteen minutes away. Ruiz parks and waits as Elizabeth fills in a form and changes into a hospital gown. A midwife is summoned, bell-shaped with blue trousers and a white blouse. Ruiz feels clumsy and out of place.
“I can wait outside,” he says, fidgeting with his car keys. “Is there someone I can call?”
“You can give me my phone back,” says Elizabeth, who is sitting on the bed, her knees together and hands flat on the mattress. Ruiz puts the SIM card in her mobile.
“How long since you’ve been in a place like this?” she asks.
“Thirty-two years. My wife was having twins. They wouldn’t let me stay. Not that I minded. I didn’t really want to see the business end of things.”
“The business end?”
“You know what I mean.”
The midwife pulls the curtains around the bed and asks Elizabeth to lie back and part her knees.
“You can stay away from my business end,” says Elizabeth, motioning him to the top of the bed.
Grimacing slightly at the intrusion, she stares at the ceiling, letting her left hand reach across the gap and take hold of Ruiz’s fingers.
“You’re six centimeters,” announces the midwife. “Call who you have to call—this baby is coming today.”
Fifteen minutes later Ruiz watches as they wheel Elizabeth along the corridor and into the lift. Her father and brother are on their way. They’re going to welcome a new addition to the Bach family—another limb to the family tree, a dynasty in progress.
Ruiz uses a payphone in the visitor’s lounge.
“Capable.”
“Mr. Ruiz. Sorry. Shit! No names. Stupid of me.”
“Relax.”
“OK. Yeah.”
“Any messages?”
“Your friend called. Is he really a professor? I’ve never met a proper professor.”
“What did he want, Capable?”
“Ah, I wrote it down, he said, ‘Holly remembers the notebook’ and he gave me an address.”
Ruiz jots it down on the back of his hand. “Another favor, Capable, I want you to find someone for me. Polina Dulsanya. She might be working as a nanny. You could try the agencies.”
“What do you need?”
“An address.”
22
LONDON
As the last rays of token sunlight strike the towers of Canary Wharf, four divers tumble backwards from the Zodiacs. Slick as seals, they disappear beneath the surface leaving barely a trace save for the brown bubbles that fill and pop.
The officer in charge is short and barrel-chested, clad in a wetsuit that makes him look as if he’s carved from ebony. He swings an air tank into a boat and uses a towel to wipe his face and neck before washing out his mouth with bottled water.
Campbell Smith is standing on a narrow strip of beach that bleeds back to a stand of willow trees.
“We found the body about eighty yards from here,” says the senior diver. “You can see the orange marker buoy. They weighted the body with chains and breezeblocks.”
Campbell glances at his shoes, which are sinking into the fetid ooze. Paul Smith brogues. Unsalvageable.
“How?”
“One bullet. Back of the head. Execution style.”
“We likely to recover a shell?”
“Entry and exit wounds. We’ll keep looking for the murder weapon but it’s blacker than black down there. Visibility nil. We’re working a circular search pattern from a single anchor chain, moving further and further out, working by touch.”
Behind him,