‘What?’ they asked in unison.
‘We’ve checked and double-checked, but he isn’t in the hospital. He wasn’t brought in by the ambulances.’ The officer watched them, waiting for the news to sink in. Which it did, rapidly, bringing with it waves of confusion. He continued, ‘Mohir was reported, by a number of eyewitnesses at the party, as getting into the car that crashed; and given our – and your – inability to contact him, an assumption was made that he’d been involved in the incident. Hence you being asked to come to the hospital. But after checking the IDs of the other casualties, and now that the other parents have provided positive identification of their children, it’s become clear that Mohir is not among the injured.’
‘Are you sure?’ Nihal asked. It was hard to swap one narrative for another so quickly.
‘Yes. We’re sure. That’s what we were checking. Hence the delay in speaking to you.’
The following silence was a barren one.
‘So where is he?’ Shazia’s confusion echoed Nihal’s own. Where was their son, if he wasn’t at the hospital? He’d been with the others. He’d been in the car. He’d been involved.
The officer couldn’t tell them. ‘That’s what we’re trying to ascertain.’
Again neither Nihal nor Shazia could compose a response that was adequate. Eventually Nihal said, ‘So what do we do now?’
The officer paused. ‘We’d advise that you go home – wait for him there. He will, we have to assume, come home eventually. He was seen leaving the party, and a couple of witnesses are adamant that he got into the car, but that’s the last confirmed sighting we have of him. We’re obviously continuing our enquiries. Has he ever dropped off the radar before?’
‘No.’ They put up united front. What was he implying?
‘And you don’t have any ideas about where he might be?’
‘No.’ Again in unison.
‘Okay.’ The officer didn’t add anything. They all just stood there, in middle of the room, wrestling with their own thoughts and questions.
It was the woman who broke the impasse. ‘We have your contact details. Obviously if we hear anything we’ll contact you ASAP, and you must let us know if – when – he gets in touch with you or returns home.’
Shazia reached for her bag. They had to leave. There was nothing for them here. Mo was elsewhere, lost to them, and seemingly to everyone else.
As she reached out to push open the door, the officer said, ‘We’ll obviously want to talk to him when he does turn up…’ After a beat he added, ‘as a witness.’
Chapter 11
DOM WAS discovering that time moved at a totally different speed in hospital, dictated by medical priorities, not chronology. The doctor – who the ancient nurse had said would be along shortly to speak to them – had still not put in an appearance. The wait, in the dark, trapped in their tiny cubicle on the slumbering ward, had been interminable. Once he’d phoned Martha to tell her that her brother was okay, Dom had had nothing to do but sit and stew. Initially he’d been patient and polite, grateful even, but as the minutes crawled by he grew restless, then exasperated. After three hours of waiting he was angry.
Harry had been tight-lipped, which Dom supposed was understandable, but it was also deeply frustrating. When he’d tried to get details about the accident out of him, Harry had said very little, other than that the car had crashed when he’d swerved to avoid something in the road. He volunteered nothing else and, when Dom pressed him, he said he had a headache, lay down on the bed and closed his eyes – a piss off and leave me alone gesture, if ever there was one. Left to his own devices, tired, stressed and irritated, Dom had felt like a caged animal, hemmed in by a flimsy curtain, the cast-iron hospital protocol and an awful feeling of being totally out of control.
By dawn he had had enough. As Harry slept, or pretended to sleep, Dom went to the nurses’ station and demanded, rather than requested, that they be allowed home. The senior nurse repeated that Harry had to be seen to eat, without vomiting, and had to have had a normal wee and to have opened his bowels – and be signed off by one of the doctors – before they would be permitted to leave. Dom promptly went and fetched a can of Coke and a cereal bar from the vending machine, woke Harry up and supervised him as he consumed them. Then he pointedly took the evidence of consumption to the nurses’ station. He was told, again politely, but this time even more firmly, that they still had to wait until the full observation period had been completed.
And so they waited.
By late morning Dom was at his wits’ end with his son, and with the wait. He resorted to going out into the corridor. His in-box at least provided a distraction. Life went on. Time pressures and deadlines remained. He responded to a couple of enquiries, then composed what turned out to be a long email to the solicitor handling the Birmingham deal about the issues that had emerged during his visit. Before he knew it, nearly an hour had passed. Faced with the option of going back onto the ward or staying in the corridor working, he chose the latter. It was, he reasoned, better for everyone.
Harry was relieved finally to be left alone. He’d not spent this long with his dad, in such a confined space, for years − not since their camping holidays in Wales when he and Martha were kids. That felt a lifetime ago, in the dim, and increasingly hard to remember, post-‘Mum walk-out’ days. He and his dad were not good at being together at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. They needed other people around to act as a buffer. Harry didn’t normally give his relationship with his father much thought, but marooned in the hospital, his body and soul in shock and his dad sitting at his bedside vibrating with frustration, it was hard not to. The momentary relief of seeing a familiar face and hoping that his dad would somehow make it all go away had vanished within seconds. Dom was not the indulgent, loving type. Never had been…at least not with Harry. Their relationship had always been spiky, competitive, lacking in any emotion other than flashes of anger and, much more rarely, pride. Perhaps it was because, deep down, they didn’t really like each other that much. Who knew? Who cared? Normally.
Martha! She was the one who cared. She’d cried when Harry had called to tell her that he was okay; tears of disbelief, to start with, then of relief. She’d not asked what had happened, just how he was, what hurt, whether they were looking after him, when he would be coming home, if he really was all right. Harry could hear the fear in her voice and felt terrible for being the cause of it. When he’d said that he had to go – as if he had something urgent to attend to – Martha had insisted that he pass the phone back to Dom. Harry had been able to tell, by his dad’s whispered responses, that she was checking that he wasn’t lying to her about being okay. Harry watched his dad change as he spoke to Martha. His posture, his voice – everything about him – became softer and calmer. That hurt. But he was used it to. His dad ended the call and sprang back into his normal coil of repressed energy.
And so they had settled in to wait.
With every passing minute the pressure inside the tiny cubicle had built. He could feel his dad’s impatience pulsing off him. The nurses were patient with Dom’s rudeness and were kind to him, which only made Harry feel worse. They brought him cups of tea, which he accepted, to show willing, and offered him paracetamol, which he declined. There wasn’t enough pain. Nowhere near enough pain!