THE CENTRAL atrium at the Trocadero Centre is four stories high with an open basement that added another story to the fall. The space is crisscrossed at random intervals by escalators, presumably because the architects felt that disorientation and an inability to find the toilets were integral parts of the shopping experience. I was told much later that the Pale Lady had bounced off the side of one of the escalators on her way down, that she may even have been angling to try to land on it but couldn’t quite make the distance. That impact broke her back in two places but she was still alive when she hit the basement floor headfirst.

Instantaneous, said Dr. Walid.

A hundred-foot drop at thirty-two feet per second per second I make that about two and a half seconds to watch the ground coming up to meet you—that’s not what I call instantaneous.

Backup was less then a minute away. They saw her fall. They were on hand to seal off the floor and take witness statements. I gave a brief statement to Stephanopoulis before Nightingale insisted that we go to casualty. The next thing I knew, we were in the A&E unit at UCH and Dr. Walid was hovering in the background and making the F2 junior doctor who was treating me nervous. Then Dr. Walid noticed that Nightingale was a bit pale and unsteady and forced him to lie down in an adjacent treatment cubicle. The junior doctor visibly relaxed and started chatting to me as he checked my various scrapes and bruises but I don’t remember what he was talking about. Then he bustled off to arrange some X-rays and left me with a redheaded Australian nurse whom I recognized from the Punchinello case. She winked at me as she cleaned the blood off my face and glued a cut on my cheek that I wasn’t even aware I had.

“May the blessings of the river be upon you,” said the nurse as they wheeled me off to X-ray and zapped me a couple of times before wheeling me back to my cubicle to lounge around in a drafty hospital gown for an hour or so. It may have been longer because I think I dozed off. Being Saturday night there was a lot of drunken shouting and moaning and the sound of my fellow members of the constabulary telling people to “calm down” or asking them what happened. Dr. Walid popped his head in to say that he was keeping Nightingale in overnight. I asked for some water; he felt my forehead and then vanished.

Somebody with a Scouse accent a couple of cubicles down said that he just wanted to go home. The doctor told him that they had to reset his leg first. The Scouser insisted that he felt fine and the doctor explained that they had to wait for the drink to wear off so they could anesthetize him.