The third message was from Larry. He and his boys had run the prints from the sniper’s nest through the computer, got nothing: our man wasn’t in the system. The fourth one was O’Kelly again: same message as before, this time with free bonus swearing. The fifth one had come in just twenty minutes earlier, from some doctor, upstairs. Jenny Spain was awake.

One of the reasons I love Murder is that the victims are, as a general rule, dead. The friends and relations are alive, obviously, but we can palm them off on Victim Support after an interview or two, unless they’re suspects, in which case talking to them doesn’t run your mind through a shredder quite the same way. I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me for a sicko or—worse—a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up crying outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.

What I’m getting at is that going to see Jenny Spain in hospital was my worst work-related nightmare come true. A part of me had been praying that we would get the other phone call, the one to say she had let go without ever regaining consciousness, that there had been a borderline to her pain.

Richie’s head had turned towards me, and I realized my hand was clenched around the phone. He said, “News, yeah?”

I said, “Looks like we can ask Jenny Spain for those IDs after all. She’s awake. We’re going upstairs.”

*

The doctor outside Jenny’s room was fair and skinny, trying hard to make himself older with a middle-aged parting and the beginnings of a beard. Behind him, the uniform at the door—maybe because I was tired, everyone looked about twelve—took one look at me and Richie and snapped to attention, chin tucked in.

I held up my ID. “Detective Kennedy. Is she still awake?”

The doctor gave the ID a careful going-over, which was good. “She is, yeah. I doubt you’ll get a lot of time with her, though. She’s on powerful painkillers, and injuries on this scale are exhausting in themselves. I’d say she’ll be falling asleep soon.”

“She’s out of danger, though?”

He shrugged. “No guarantees. Her prognosis is brighter than it was a couple of hours ago, and we’re cautiously optimistic about her neurological function, but there’s still a massive risk of infection. We’ll have a better idea in a few days.”

“Has she said anything?”

“You know about the facial injury, don’t you? She has a hard time talking. She told one of the nurses she was thirsty. She asked me who I was. And she said, ‘It hurts,’ two or three times, before we upped the painkillers. That’s it.”