She had put a whole lot of colored barrettes in her short hair. Osborne noticed for the first time that she’d dyed it red.
“Feeling any better?”
“I don’t know.”
Amelia examined his scalp. “Still no idea who did that to you?”
“No.”
“They were wearing hoods,” she went on. “It was you they were after, you personally.”
Osborne took a cigarette from his pack. “I must have stuck my nose where I shouldn’t,” he replied as he lit it.
“To judge by your face, that seems to be a bit of a specialty of yours.”
He shrugged resignedly. Thinking hurt too much.
Amelia had mixed feelings as she looked at his feverish face. “Those guys nearly killed you,” she insisted. “You’re surely going to report it.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” he retorted.
Amelia shook her head, as if all the men in the world were as bad as each other. “I don’t know what you have in mind,” she said, “but I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes. Anyway, you can stay here as long as you like.”
Osborne didn’t react.
She grabbed her bag. “All right, I’m going to work. I’m a bit behind with those tests of yours.”
He looked at her like an amnesiac looking at someone else’s photograph.
“The tests on those hairs you brought me the other day,” she said. “I was on my way to drop them at your hotel last night when I saw those men roughing you up in the alley.” She took out an envelope and the plastic sachet with the three tangled hairs. “They’re Ann Brook’s, aren’t they?”
A self-congratulatory gleam appeared in his clouded eyes.
Amelia kept her cool—so she was right. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”
“It would only get you into trouble.”
“What about you?”
“I’m already in trouble.”
“Stop playing hide-and seek-with me, all right? I’m also in a lot of trouble, thanks to you. Now I’m quite happy to risk my job for your sake, but you’re going to have to be open with me. How did you get hold of those hairs?”
Osborne took refuge behind a cloud of blue smoke. “By chance.”
“And Joanne Griffith, was that chance too?”
“I’ll explain everything when I’ve put the pieces together.”
“I won’t hold my breath, then.”
“Please, just be nice to me,” he said, holding out his hand toward the envelope, a wan smile on his face.
Yielding, Amelia threw him the test results, as if throwing a dog a bone. “You’re a bloody pain,” she said.
He didn’t dispute that.
“At least give me a ring to let me know you’re feeling better,” she said, grabbing her bag again.
He nodded, and stubbed out his cigarette.
“And whatever you do,” she concluded, “don’t thank me, you’ll only reopen your wounds.”
She was funny.
Osborne waited for her to slam the front door before he looked at the test results. The hairs revealed traces of alcohol (gin), soda (Schweppes), LSD (acid), grass (datura), but also a substance similar to South American yopo, still unidentified (probably what Ann had called “thunder’), as well as GHB, a medical disinhibitant.
Gamma-hydroxybutyrate. Strange: they’d taken everything except that.
The pain had returned, as piercing as ever. Osborne took another morphine tablet and lay down on the couch, his head in formaldehyde. The dead were getting mixed up with the living. Knocked out by the drugs, he fell asleep properly.
10.
Six in the evening. Tom Culhane hadn’t eaten all day, which was the kind of thing likely to put him in a bad mood. Having been stuck in an interminable meeting with Captain Timu and his team, he had only just arrived at the hospital, a good half an hour late. His wife was hanging on the arm of Dr. Boorman, the medic who had been treating her since their arrival in Auckland, a specialist whom they had already paid more than twelve thousand dollars, without any insurance. A fortune they didn’t have.
Culhane ran down the corridor of the hospital. He only had to look at Rosemary’s desolate eyes as she came out of the consulting room to realize the test results were bad—in vitro fertilization would be their last chance.
Rosemary looked daggers at him, said good-bye to the doctor and plunged into the maze of the hospital. Culhane stammered a few words to Dr. Boorman, but just then someone called the great specialist on his cell phone, and he immediately turned his back to take the call—Mrs. Smith’s cervix was dilating . . .
