The other passenger gazing at the baggage chute was a woman in her late thirties, with a sharp forehead and a bony but attractive face, dark hair knotted behind her. She wore a tailored black suit pitted with glass, like the sequinned tuxedo of a nightclub hostess. A piece of flying debris had drawn blood from her lower lip, but she seemed almost untouched by the explosion. She brushed the dust from her sleeve and stared sombrely at the confusion around her, a busy professional late for her next appointment.
‘David…?’ Sally reached for her sticks. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I left the sofa and knelt in front of the screen, nearly certain that I recognized the woman. But the amateur cameraman turned to survey the ceiling, where a fluorescent tube was discharging a cascade of sparks, fireworks in a madhouse. ‘I think that’s someone I know.’
‘The woman in the dark suit?’
‘It’s hard to tell. Her face reminded me of…’ I looked at my watch, and noticed our luggage in the hall. ‘We’ve missed our flight to Miami.’
‘Never mind. This woman you saw – was it Laura?’
‘I think so.’ I took Sally’s hands, noticing how steady they felt. ‘It did look like her.’
‘It can’t be.’ Sally left me and sat on the sofa, searching for her whisky. The news bulletin had returned to the concourse, where the hire-car drivers were walking away, placards lowered. ‘There’s a contact number for relatives. I’ll dial it for you.’
‘Sally, I’m not a relative.’
‘You were married for eight years.’ Sally spoke matter-of-factly, as if describing my membership of a disbanded lunching club. ‘They’ll tell you how she is.’
‘She looked all right. It might have been Laura. That expression of hers, always impatient…’
‘Call Henry Kendall at the Institute. He’ll know.’
‘Henry? Why?’
‘He’s living with Laura.’
‘True. Still, I don’t want to panic the poor man. What if I’m wrong?’
‘I don’t think you are.’ Sally spoke in her quietest voice, a sensible teenager talking to a rattled parent. ‘You need to find out. Laura meant a lot to you.’
‘That was a long time ago.’ Aware of her faintly threatening tone, I said: ‘Sally, I met you.’
‘Call him.’
I walked across the room, turning my back to the television screen. Holding the mobile, I drummed my fingers on the mantelpiece, and tried to smile at the photograph of Sally sitting in her wheelchair between her parents, taken at St Mary’s Hospital on the day of our engagement. Standing behind her in my white lab coat, I seemed remarkably confident, as if I knew for the first time in my life that I was going to be happy.
The mobile rang before I could dial the Institute’s number. Through the hubbub of background noise, the wailing of ambulance sirens and the shouts of emergency personnel, I heard Henry Kendall’s raised voice.
He was calling from Ashford Hospital, close to Heathrow. Laura had been caught by the bomb blast in Terminal 2. Among the first to be evacuated, she had collapsed in Emergency, and now lay in the intensive-care unit. Henry managed to control himself, but his voice burst into a torrent of confused anger, and he admitted that he had asked Laura to take a later flight from Zurich so that he could keep an Institute appointment and meet her at the airport.
‘The Publications Committee…Arnold asked me to chair it. For God’s sake, he was refereeing his own bloody paper! If I’d refused, Laura would still be…’
‘Henry, we’ve all done it. You can’t blame yourself…’ I tried to reassure him, thinking of the stream of blood from Laura’s mouth. For some reason, I felt closely involved in the crime, as if I had placed the bomb on the carousel.
The dialling tone sounded against my ear, a fading signal from another world. For a few minutes all the lines to reality had been severed. I looked at myself in the mirror, puzzled by the travel clothes I was wearing, the lightweight jacket and sports shirt, the tactless costume of a beach tourist who had strayed into a funeral. There was already a shadow on my cheeks, as if the shock of the Heathrow bomb had forced my beard to grow. My face looked harassed and shifty in a peculiarly English way, the wary glower of a deviant master at a minor prep school.
‘David…’ Sally stood up, the sticks forgotten. Her face seemed smaller and more pointed, mouth pursed above a childlike chin. She took the mobile from me and gripped my hands. ‘You’re all right. Bad luck for Laura.’
‘I know.’ I embraced her, thinking of the bomb. If the terrorist had chosen Terminal 3, an hour or two later, Sally and I might have been lying together in intensive care. ‘God knows why, but I feel responsible.’
‘Of course you do. She was important to you.’ She stared at me, calmly nodding to herself, almost convinced that she had caught me in a minor but telling gaffe. ‘David, you must go.’
‘Where? The Institute?’
‘Ashford Hospital. Take my car. You’ll get through faster.’
‘Why? Henry will be with her. Laura isn’t part of my life. Sally…?’
‘Not for her sake. For yours.’ Sally turned her back to me. ‘You don’t love her, I know that. But you still hate her. That’s why you have to go.’
WE REACHED ASHFORD HOSPITAL an hour later, a short journey into a very distant past. Sally drove with verve and flourish, her right hand gripping the accelerator control mounted beside the steering wheel, working the throttle like a fighter pilot, left hand releasing the brake lever next to the gate of the automatic transmission. I had designed the controls, helped by an ergonomics specialist at the Institute, who had taken Sally’s measurements with the painstaking care of a Savile Row tailor. By now she had recovered all the strength in her legs, and I suggested that we ask the Saab garage to reconvert the car. But Sally liked the adapted controls, the special skills unique to herself. When I gave in, she teased me that I secretly enjoyed the perverse thrill of having a handicapped wife.
Whatever my motives, I watched her with husbandly pride. She steered the Saab through the dense midday traffic, flashing the headlights at the overworked police on the motorway, fiercely tapping the handicapped driver’s sticker on the windscreen. Seeing the wheelchair on the rear seat, they waved us onto the hard shoulder, a high-speed alley that only a glamorous woman could make her own.
As we sped along, hazard lights flashing, I almost believed that Sally was eager to meet her one-time rival, now lying in the intensive-care unit. In a sense, a kind of justice had been done. Sally had always seen her accident as a random event, a cruel deficit in the moral order of existence that placed it firmly in her debt.
Sightseeing with her mother in the Bairro Alto district of Lisbon, a maze of steeply climbing streets, Sally had crossed the road behind a stationary tram. The fleet of ancient vehicles with their wooden panelling and cast-iron frames had been installed by British engineers almost a century earlier. But charm and industrial archaeology both came at a price. The tram’s brakes failed for a few seconds, and it rolled backwards before the safety clutch locked the wheels, knocking Sally to the ground and trapping her legs under the massive chassis.
I met Sally in the orthopaedic wing at St Mary’s, at first sight a plucky young woman