‘The eye is a sphere with a transparent bulge at the front – the cornea – and a stalk – the optic nerve – at the back. The glass was in the cornea but the optic nerve – which carries visual impulses to the brain – has been severed . . .’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Vision is not possible without the optic nerve.’

‘So he’s . . .’ she said, swallowing hard. Swallowing it all down. The rage. The grief. The fear. The disbelief. Emotions that I could not begin to imagine because it was not my child in that operating room. She could not say the word. It seemed as if she would never say it, as if she would live and die without ever saying the word. And then finally she said it.

‘Blind?’ she said. ‘He’s blind?’

The doctor was saying something about the benefits of counselling but Pat Whitestone wasn’t listening. She was gone, calling her son’s name, out of the waiting room and into the corridor.

‘Just! Just! Just!’

‘You can’t—’ a nurse said at their station.

‘He’s resting after the operation,’ said another nurse outside her son’s room. ‘You mustn’t—’

But she must and she did.

I followed her.

The room was in darkness and so was her boy, still unconscious from the general anaesthetic. There were white bandages over his eyes that covered half his face.

‘My beautiful son,’ Pat Whitestone said, sinking to her knees beside the bed, and then the tears came, hopeless tears that seemed as if they would never stop.

‘I’m here now,’ she said.

I stood by her side but I did not touch her and I did not speak.

And I wished there was a father and grandparents and siblings in this room to help her carry a weight that she should never have to carry alone. But there was only me.

‘Those bastards,’ she said. ‘Those fucking bastards.’

She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth and her mouth tightened with a rage and a violence that I had never seen in her before. And as I watched her she gasped, as if she suddenly couldn’t breathe, and lifted her face, her eyes still screwed tight, as if she could actually see the bastards who had done this to her son, as if she could see their faces, as if she could see them getting what they deserved.

As if – and the thought came unbidden – she could see them screaming for mercy as they swung from the end of a rope.

12

When I got to 27 Savile Row in the morning I was hoping to see Pat’s familiar figure running the show up in MIR-1, but she was clearly still at the hospital with her son.