A nurse came in to check the tubes and take my blood pressure. She was starched and efficient. She smiled but didn’t speak. I waited for her to say that my wife was outside asking about me anxiously. She didn’t say it. My wife hadn’t come. Wouldn’t come. If I couldn’t hold her when I was properly alive, why should my near-death bring her running? Jenny. My wife. Still my wife in spite of three years’ separation. Regret, I think, held both of us back from the final step of divorce: we had been through passion, delight, dissention, anger and explosion. Only regret was left, and it wouldn’t be strong enough to bring her to the hospital. She’d seen me in too many hospitals before. There was no more drama, no more impact, in my form recumbent, even with tubes. She wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t telephone. Wouldn’t write. It was stupid of me to want her to.

Time passed slowly and I didn’t enjoy it, but eventually all the tubes except the one in my arm were removed and I began to heal. The police didn’t find Andrews, Jenny didn’t come, Radnor’s typists sent me a get-well card, and the hospital sent the bill.

Chico slouched in one evening, his hands in his pockets and the usual derisive grin on his face. He looked me over without haste and the grin, if anything, widened.

‘Rather you than me, mate,’ he said.

‘Go to bloody hell.’

He laughed. And well he might. I had been doing his job for him because he had a date with a girl, and Andrews’ bullet should have been his bellyache, not mine.

‘Andrews,’ he said musingly. ‘Who’d have thought it? Sodding little weasel. All the same, if you’d done what I said and stayed in the washroom, and taken his photo quiet like on the old infra-red, we’d have picked him up later nice and easy and you’d have been lolling on your arse around the office as usual instead of sweating away in here.’