“What do you mean?”

“When he was released. Did you recommend him to any special programme?”

“What kind of programme?”

“The kind designed to keep kids out of trouble.”

“You ever send a kid over to a group called Colossus?” Nkata asked. “’Cross the river, this is. Elephant and Castle.”

Fabia Bender shook her head. “I’ve heard of it, of course. We’ve had their outreach people here for a presentation as well.”

“But…?”

“But we’ve never sent any of our children over to them.”

“You haven’t.” Barbara made this a statement.

“No. It’s quite a distance, you see, and we’ve been waiting for them to open a branch closer to this part of town.”

LYNLEY WAS ALONE with Helen and had been so for the last two hours. He’d made the request of their respective families, and they’d agreed. Only Iris protested, but she’d been here at the hospital the least amount of time, so he understood how impossible she felt it that she would be asked to part from her sister.

The specialist had come and gone. He’d read the charts and the reports. He’d studied the monitors. He’d examined what little there was to examine. In the end, he’d met everyone because Lynley had wanted it that way. As much as a person could ever be said to belong to anyone, Helen belonged to him by virtue of being his wife. But she was a daughter as well, a beloved sister, a loving daughter- and sister-in-law. The loss of her touched every one of them. He did not suffer this monstrous blow alone, nor could he ever claim to grieve it alone. So all of them had sat with the Italian doctor, the neonatal neurologist who told them what they already knew.

Twenty minutes was not a vast span of time. Twenty minutes described a period in which very little could generally be accomplished in life. Indeed, there were days when Lynley couldn’t even get from his house to Victoria Street in under twenty minutes, and other than showering and dressing or brewing and drinking a cup of tea or doing the washing up after dinner or perhaps dead-heading the roses in the garden, one-third of an hour didn’t provide the leisure necessary to do much of anything. But for the human brain, twenty minutes was an eternity. It was forever because that was the nature of the alteration it could bring upon the life depending upon its normal functioning. And that normal functioning depended upon a regular supply of oxygen. Witness the victim of the gunshot, the doctor had said. Witness your Helen.

The difficulty, of course, was in the not knowing, which arose from the not seeing. Helen could be seen-daily, hourly, moment by moment-lifeless in the hospital bed. The baby-their son, their amusingly named, for want of a permanent decision by his indecisive parents, Jasper Felix-could not. All they knew was all the specialist knew and what he knew was dependent upon what was common knowledge about the brain.

If Helen had no oxygen, the baby had no oxygen. They could hope for a miracle, but that was all.

Helen’s father had asked, “How likely is that ‘miracle’?”

The doctor shook his head. He was sympathetic. He seemed generous and good hearted. But he would not lie.

None of them looked at one another at first, once the specialist left them. All of them felt the burden, but only one of them experienced the weight of having to make a decision. Lynley was left with the knowledge that everything rested with him and upon him. They could love him-as they did and as he knew-but they could not move the cup from his hands to theirs.

Each one of them spoke to him before they left for the night, somehow knowing without being told that the moment for resolution had arrived. His mother remained longer than any of them, and she knelt before his chair and looked up into his face.

“Everything in our lives,” she said quietly, “leads up to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you-as you are right now and as you ever will be-are fully enough for this moment, Tommy. One way or the other. Whatever it brings.”

“I’ve been wondering how I’m meant to know what to do,” he said. “I look at her face and I try to see on it what she’d want me to do. Then I ask myself if even that is a lie, if I’m merely telling myself that I’m looking at her and trying to see what she’d want me to do when all the time I’m just looking at her and looking at her because I can’t face the coming moment when I won’t be able to look at her at all. Because she’ll be gone. Not only gone in spirit but gone in flesh as well. Because right now, you see, even in this, she’s giving me a reason to keep going on. I’m prolonging that.”

His mother reached up and caressed his face. She said, “Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping.”

“That’s too easy,” he said.

“On the contrary. It’s monumentally difficult.”

She left him then and he went to Helen. He sat at her bedside. He knew that no matter how he disciplined his mind to this moment, the image of his wife as she was just now would fade with time, just as the image of her as she had been days ago would also fade, had indeed already begun to fade, until ultimately, there would be nothing of her left in his visual memory. If he wanted to see her, he’d be able to do so only in photographs. When he closed his eyes, however, he’d see nothing but the dark.

It was the dark that he feared. It was everything that represented the dark, which he could not face. And Helen was at the centre of it all. As was the not-Helen that would come about the instant he acted in the only way he knew his wife would have wanted.

She’d been telling him that from the first. Or was even that belief a lie?

He did not know. He lowered his forehead to the mattress and he prayed for a sign. He knew he was looking for something that would make the road an easier one for him to walk. But signs did not exist for that purpose. They served as guides, but they did not smooth the way.

Her hand was cool when he felt for it where it lay at her side. He closed his fingers round it and he summoned hers to move as they might have done had she only been what she looked, asleep. He pictured her eyelids fluttering open and he heard her murmured “Hullo, darling,” but when he raised his head, she was as before. Breathing because medical science had evolved to that extent. Dead because it had evolved no further.

They belonged together. The will of man might have wished it otherwise. The will of nature was not so vague. Helen would have understood that even if she had not phrased it that way. Let us go, Tommy would have been how she put it. At the heart of matters, she had always been the wisest and most practical of women.

When the door opened some time later, he was ready.

“It’s time,” he said.

He felt his heart swelling, as if it would be torn from his body. The monitors deadened. The ventilator hushed. The silence of parting swept into the room.

BY THE TIME Barbara and Nkata arrived back at New Scotland Yard, the news was in. The gun bore the boy’s prints on the barrel and on the grip, and ballistics showed the bullet to have come from the same pistol. They made their own report to John Stewart, who listened stone faced. He looked as if he believed his own presence in the Harrow Road station might have made a difference, shaking the name of the other perpetrator out of the kid. Sod all he knew, Barbara thought, and she told him what they’d learned from Fabia Bender about the boy and about Colossus.