Framed (20 page)

He took a long gulp of the tea, not minding that it scalded his throat. His throbbing headache was beginning to lift, and now that the bandage had been put on his hand the cuts didn't hurt any longer, although the hand felt three or four times heavier than normal. He was staring at it again when DI Shrapnel pushed the curtain aside and came in. He had several ugly-looking cuts on his cheeks and there was a row of neat stitches on his forehead. His right hand was bandaged.

"Bloody hell," he growled, doing a swift visual check on Larry, "did you see the van driver's head? It was like a squashed tomato. Completely
squashed."

"Shut up!" Larry demanded. He had caught one glimpse of the body lying on the road and had been trying to suppress the image ever since.

"Eddie Myers must have a concrete skull," Shrapnel said. "Did you hear the bang? Christ, I thought I was a goner."

"I almost was," Larry said.

Shrapnel kept the curtain pulled back so he could watch the casualty traffic.

"The guy in the van," he said, craning his neck to see the face on a stretcher going past, "he must have been trying to spring Myers."

"Or kill him," Larry said. He finished the tea, put down the mug and stood up. "How could he have known what was going on? I mean, how could he know we were going out, or where we'd be at a particular time. . . ."

With that question hovering over them they left the cubicle and walked along toward the main entrance.

"Maybe it was an accident," Larry said.

Shrapnel glared at him. "That was no bloody accident!"

No, Larry thought, it probably wasn't. At the front door he told Shrapnel he wanted a word with one of the doctors. He said he would come straight to the station when he was through.

"Make sure you do. You'll have to fill out a full accident report. You know how long that'll take."

When Shrapnel had gone Larry took the lift to the second floor. He waited half an hour in the corridor outside

Intensive Care until a nurse came and told him he could have a couple of minutes.

The Intensive Care cubicle was very dim, with only a small lamp switched on near the bed; green light from the screen of a monitor radiated eerily into the shadows. Von Joel lay very still, propped on a rigid angled support, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling. A sheet-draped cage protected his legs; drip lines fed into canulas on the backs of his hands. Larry leaned over the bed, listening to the quiet breathing.

"You awake?"

He drew up a chair and sat down. Von Joel's lips moved.

"Close shave, huh?" he whispered. His eyes opened

and he smiled weakly.

"My new jacket's ruined," Larry said. "Covered in your

blood, mate."

Von Joel swallowed and gently cleared his throat, a dry sound like crumpling paper.

"You've got to call Professor Wallard . . ."

"Who?"

"He's my herbalist doctor. It's important. See, my system is purified, I want to know what I need to take. He'll give you a list of vitamins, some stuff for bruising, things like that. I won't take the hospital painkillers or the antibiotics." His eyes swiveled toward Larry. "Please . . ."

"Okay." Larry shrugged. "But for Christ's sake keep schtum about it."

There was a tap on the door. The nurse pushed it open and waggled a finger at Larry, telling him it was time to go. Von Joel seized Larry's hand suddenly and squeezed it. In the intensity of the moment Larry was able to say what he had come to say in the first place.

"Thanks, Eddie . . ."

The nurse closed the door behind him. She turned to the bed as Von Joel laughed softly. He appeared, suddenly, to be wide awake and highly alert.

"Can vou do something for me, Jackie?" he said.

She blinked at him coyly, stepping closer to the bed.

"How do you know my name?"

"It's on your lapel." He gave her his widest, warmest smile. "Maybe you can do me this favor—take a message to my mum. Tell her I'm here, and not to worry about me. I don't want any of my colleagues calling her, putting the fear of God into her. Can you do that little thing for me, Jackie? She's at the Hyde Park Hotel."

The nurse made a half-reluctant frown. She looked at him. His smile washed over her again.

"Have you got a pencil?" he said.

"Sure." She handed him one from her pocket. "I suppose you want paper. I'll get some from Sister's office. . . ."

By the time Larry had written up his reports of the accident, typed them in a slow, two-fingered, deliberate hammer that matched his headache, it was past two in the morning. He let himself in, shutting the front door quietly, and then crept into the living room. He didn't want to wake Susan or the kids, didn't want to have to go into all the details of the accident again, he just wanted to crash out on the sofa, but his head kept up the throb, and he had to get some aspirin. He sat at the kitchen table, gulping down the tap water as he popped one aspirin after another into his mouth. He reckoned five'd shift it, but an hour later, with a cushion under his head, his jacket over his chest, the headache persisted, felt, if anything, worse. An aspirin felt as if it had lodged itself in his chest.

The sofa was uncomfortable, too soft. His back began to ache. He sighed, tried curling up on his side, then he felt cold, really chilled.

The fake gas logs gave the room a warm glow, and as he sat staring into the bluish flames, he wondered how Von Joel was. He could still feel, or thought he could, the strange moment when Von Joel had gripped his hand. He'd seemed vulnerable, almost afraid. . . . Larry rested back on the sofa and closed his eyes. At last he was getting drowsy, and he dozed, but after a moment he woke with a start as it happened all over again. The voices shouting, the terror when he'd seen that blue Transit van hurtling toward the car. It all flashed in his head, fast brilliant pictures: he heard Von Joel calling, screaming for him to get down, felt Von Joel throwing his body across the car, the screech of tires, the cracking, crunching sound of the splintering glass and twisting metal. He recalled the awful moment when Von Joel, protecting Larry, saving Larry, took the main impact of the truck as it rammed the side of the car. He could feel Von Joel in his arms, the weight of him held against his own chest, as the blood streamed down his smashed and gashed head. If Von Joel hadn't leaned over, Larry knew it would have been his own head, his own face slashed by the glass. He would have been in the Intensive Care unit. . . .

"He saved my life." It came out, but softly, and it shook Larry that he had spoken the words aloud. "He saved my life," he repeated, and he looked to the mantel where the photographs of his sons smiled at him. It was then he wept, part delayed shock, part relief, and his sobs he kept muffled, hugging the cushion, as he had held onto Von Joel, holding it tightly, not wanting Susan to hear, not

wanting anyone to know just how scared he had been.

f

Early the next morning two frogmen, searching the bed of the Thames at a stretch beside Tower Bridge, hauled up a heavy cylindrical object encrusted with silt, gravel, and decomposing matter from the riverbed. It was taken on board a police launch for examination. When it had been soaked in clean water and gently scrubbed, it was found to be a length of heavy-gauge hessian sacking, wrapped tightly around a shotgun.

Later in the morning, in a discreet office building near Wigmore Street, Larry Jackson was shown into the consulting room of Von Joel's herbal specialist.

Professor Arnold Wallard was a lean snowy-haired man, magnificently tanned, with a broad natural smile and bright, intelligent eyes the color of flint. His age, Larry thought, would have been impossible to determine from his appearance alone. He wore a gray Italian wool suit, a pale blue broadcloth shirt, and a dark flowered silk tie.

The receptionist closed the door behind Larry and the Professor beckoned him to sit by the magnificent George III desk and unburden himself.

"And do take your time, Mr. Jackson. Haste is bad for the spirit. It plays havoc with the digestion too."

Larry explained Von Joel's condition in as much detail as he could, and answered most of the Professor's questions about the extent and degree of his injuries. The Professor listened carefully, nodding, scribbling an occasional note. When Larry had finished he tented his fingers and stared at the window.

"I believe," he said slowly, "that I can best serve my patient by making sure that his vital functions, particularly those of the liver and kidneys, are reinforced and quickened during the healing phase—they are, after all, the very functions that will be crucial to the complete recovery of his system."

He opened a drawer, took out a sheet of notepaper, and set it in front of him. Carefully he unscrewed the cap from a black fountain pen and poised the gold nib over the paper.

"I will make a list, Mr. Jackson, which I want you to take to a herbal dispensary. I will also give you some preparations of my own to take with you. They are what we call cholagogues—preparations to encourage the flow of bile from the liver—and there are teas and tinctures to stimulate kidney function. Then of course there is the important task of detoxifying the system . . ."

Over a fragrant cup of herbal tea Larry found himself learning again. Between jotted additions to the list, Professor Wallard explained the necessity of removing waste products—he called them metabolites and chemical toxins—from the system, and the importance of accelerating the cleansing process in a body which is injured and therefore vulnerable to the buildup of harmful substances.

Larry also learned something about
alternatives,
medicines designed to change the metabolism to help the tissues deal better with nutrition and elimination. And there were the aperients, cardioactives, and carminatives, all with their roles to play in restoring and maintaining health.

"The catalog is practically endless, Mr. Jackson, but so is the inventory of human ailments. . . ."

A multitude of hazards had to be considered in a case of physical injury, he said. There was, for example, the danger of low hemoglobin levels, leading to the reduction in the circulation's ability to carry oxygen, which could lead to anemia.

"Vitamin B^ is the stuff for that, Mr. Jackson. We must see he does not go without it. . . ."

And there was, of course, the matter of pain relief. Herbalists in Britain, the Professor explained, are nowadays forbidden by law from making use of the analgesic j' properties of the opium poppy. But there are other natural painkillers, all of them highly effective in the hands of j a skilled prescriber—substances like gelsemium, California poppy, aconite, which is sometimes called wolfsbane, and wild lettuce.

"And the bruising," Professor Wallard said, "will respond best to arnica—I don't know if you're familiar with it at all? It contains certain vasoactive substances—that is, they exert an effect on the caliber of the blood vessels— and although these substances are of frankly uncertain identity, they are extremely effective against bruising, sprains, and swelling. . . ."

The Professor, with infectious enthusiasm, went on for longer than the allotted thirty minutes, filling Larry's head with snippets and summaries, throwing out hints and tips as he produced neatly packaged preparations from boxes and drawers and put the names of others on the list.

By the time Larry left, he had listened to more about herbalism than he'd believed he ever could. If a tenth of it stuck, it would be acres more than he had known before today. He went off clutching a bag of herbal preparations in one hand and the list in the other, with a map drawn on the back showing him where to find the herbal pharmacy.