Page 4

Four

Sunday Midnight

The bookshop was about fifteen minutes’ walk from the edge-of-Harlem flat where Tom and Charlie were staying, and where Orianna had planned to spend a couple of days before heading back to the UK at the end of her book tour. The flat was the property of the arts foundation sponsoring Tom’s visit and Charlie had rolled up all the annual leave he was owed, so the two of them could spend almost a month in New York. They’d been there for a week. Orianna had been doing a whistle-stop book tour around the East Coast, mostly speaking at universities. She said she had enjoyed her trip but was ready to go back to Llanfair, her job as a librarian, her wife Ann and their twins, Amelie and Ziggy. Charlie had wondered whether Tom would want to bring the girls, his biological daughters, to New York but the topic never came up. “This is for us, away from crime, and students and everything,” Tom had said. That’s how it had been. Lots of walking round the city, looking up at the skyscrapers, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, and another to a piano bar Tom had been to on a previous trip. Charlie had felt the stress of his job lift as the plane left the tarmac at Heathrow. Tom had brought his work with him, or the drawing part of it anyway. The college principal part had stayed behind. Drawing was just something Tom did , like breathing. It simply happened. There would be a sketch pad in Tom’s messenger bag along with his phone and wallet. And now … Charlie couldn’t think about it. Not until he knew Tom was okay. He wrapped Tom’s jacket round his shoulders, glad of its familiar weight and the smell of leather and Tom.

An unmarked car arrived with a plain clothes driver, a tall, pale man in a crumpled suit. Outside the police cordon, the street was flooded with lights and choked with media vans trailing cables across the pavement. A few faces peered into the car as they passed but the window tint was too dark for them to see more than their own reflections. The driver tooted the horn and kept moving until the most intrusive members of the fourth estate drew away.

“I need to see you get inside safely,” the driver told them when he parked by the entrance to the apartment block. The pavement was wide and tree lined, lights catching the new leaves and reflecting off the windows of their block. Orianna had fallen asleep in the short car ride, so Charlie woke her gently and helped her to the front door. The driver brought her bag. Charlie caught sight of the driver’s gun as he bent over to pick the bag out of the foot well.

Lights came on in the scuffed marble-floored lift lobby, bare except for the notice advising residents about a forthcoming visit from the cockroach eradicators. Chipped marble stairs led up from the lobby, lined with wrought iron railings thick with layers of brown paint. The flat was on the top floor, so they waited for the sluggish lift to drag its doors open then make its ponderous way upward. No one spoke.

The top floor corridor was a long, thin version of the lobby downstairs. Marble floor patterned with a Greek key design and plenty of thick brown paint covering the lower half of the walls. The driver gestured for them to stay back while he examined their front door. Charlie wanted to elbow him aside and look for himself. Not that it would mean anything. He had no idea who might have a key to the block or the apartment, but he doubted that the shooter was holed up inside. He handed over the key and waited until they got the all clear. The flat was empty, quiet and still but for the hum of the huge refrigerator.

Charlie led them to the living room. One end was almost all window with views of the street trees below and more apartment blocks beyond. They must face east, Charlie thought, remembering the pale blue sky tinged with the faint pinks and yellows of dawn on his first jet-lagged morning. The walls were plain, painted cream, with a polished hardwood floor and brown aluminum window frames. He had no idea when the block had been built but the floor wasn’t flat and there were cracks in most of the walls, signs of movement though hopefully not of imminent collapse.

The driver hovered by the door, showing no signs of leaving. Charlie eased Orianna onto one of three big sofas, and unfolded a blanket for her to cuddle into.

“Do you know where the injured people were taken?” Charlie looked at the driver.

“I can try to find out,” he said. Then he stepped forward and held out his hand. “Brody Murphy. NYPD. Are you really a detective in England?”

“Wales.” Charlie was too tired to explain that Wales and England were not the same country. “Which hospital and how do we get there?”

“Um…” Murphy pulled out his phone and rang a number.

“Can I have a look round?” Orianna asked from the sofa. “And is there anything to eat?”

Charlie showed her the three generous-sized bedrooms, the bathroom and the miniature kitchen. Tom had turned one of the bedrooms into a workspace, pushing the bed out of the way and setting a table and chair close to the window. The sight of an open sketchbook with a drawing of himself made Charlie’s heart ache, and the breath catch in his throat. He covered up by going into the kitchen for the box of doughnuts Tom kept filled in case Charlie’s sugar level dropped. Or so he said.

Murphy appeared. “No word on the hospital yet. They obviously know, they’re just keeping a lid on it for the media. At least that’s my assumption. They’re going to call me back.”

“For fuck’s sake. How many hospitals are there?”

Murphy went red, the flush spreading up his neck and into the buzzcut light brown hair. He looked almost as tired as Charlie felt, and as crumpled. His lightweight blue suit might have looked okay when he had left for work, but now it was dusty from the bookshop and stained with what Charlie expected was blood.

“I … I don’t know why they aren’t saying,” he stammered. “Sometimes the hospitals want to tell the next-of-kin before the media stake out the hospital entrance…”

The words next-of-kin hit Charlie like a punch to the gut. He shared Tom’s house as well as his bed, but he had no official status in Tom’s life. Tom had parents and siblings, as well as twin daughters. None of Tom’s birth family had visited, or as far as Charlie knew, contacted Tom at all. Tom didn’t complain about them, he simply behaved as if they didn’t exist. All the information Charlie had about them had come from Ann, Orianna’s partner, and the twins’ other mother, and that was sparse enough.

They don’t like that he’s gay, and worse than that, they hate that he’s an artist. He comes from generations of doctors. It’s as if no other profession exists.

But this never-seen family would be the people empowered to be given information and make decisions. Breathing hurt Charlie’s chest.

“Have a doughnut.” Orianna thrust the box at Charlie, and when he shook his head, at Murphy, who blushed again, but took a chocolate-covered ring with sprinkles. Charlie’s stomach clenched.

“Which is the nearest big hospital with an emergency department?” he asked. Tom had been the first of the injured to leave the bookshop. It made sense for him to have been taken to the closest hospital. Murphy had a mouth full of doughnut and Charlie watched as he swallowed with obvious effort.

“First United, by the university. Probably.”

Charlie nodded sharply. If no one would tell him where Tom was he’d have to start looking.

“I’m going out,” he said. But his words were drowned by the sound of the door entry system buzzing. Murphy jumped to answer it.

“It’s the FBI,” he said.