“What’s happened? Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s my nephew, Jack. His appendix burst yesterday and he—he’s got—”

To Strike’s mortification, his voice cracked. As he fought to conquer himself, he wondered how long it had been since he had cried. Perhaps not since the tears of pain and rage he had shed in the hospital in Germany to which he had been airlifted away from the patch of bloody ground where the IED had ripped off his leg.

“Fuck,” he muttered at last, the only syllable he seemed able to manage.

“Cormoran, what’s happened?”

“He’s—they’ve got him in intensive care,” said Strike, his face crumpled up in the effort to hold himself together, to speak normally. “His mum—Lucy and Greg are stuck in Rome, so they asked me—”

“Who’s with you? Is Lorelei there?”

“Christ, no.”

Lorelei saying “I love you” seemed weeks in the past, though it was only two nights ago.

“What are the doctors saying?”

“They think he’ll be OK, but, you know, he’s—he’s in intensive care. Shit,” croaked Strike, wiping his eyes, “sorry. It’s been a rough night.”

“Which hospital is it?”

He told her. Rather abruptly, she said goodbye and rang off. Strike was left to finish his cigarette, intermittently wiping his face and nose on the sleeve of his shirt.

The quiet ward was bright with sun when he returned. He propped his crutches against the wall, sat down again at Jack’s bedside with the day-old newspaper he had just pilfered from the waiting room and read an article about how Arsenal might soon be losing Robin van Persie to Manchester United.

An hour later, the surgeon and the anesthetist in charge of the ward arrived at the foot of Jack’s bed to inspect him, while Strike listened uneasily to their muttered conversation.

“… haven’t managed to get his oxygen levels below fifty percent… persistent pyrexia… urine outputs have tailed off in the last four hours…”

“… another chest X-ray, check there’s nothing going on in the lungs…”

Frustrated, Strike waited for somebody to throw him digestible information. At last the surgeon turned to speak to him.

“We’ll be keeping him sedated just now. He’s not ready to come off the oxygen and we need to get his fluid balance right.”

“What does that mean? Is he worse?”

“No, it often goes like this. He had a very nasty infection. We had to wash out the peritoneum pretty thoroughly. I’d just like to X-ray the chest as a precaution, make sure we haven’t punctured anything resuscitating him. I’ll pop in to see him again later.”

They walked away to a heavily bandaged teenager covered in even more tubes and lines than Jack, leaving Strike anxious and destabilized in their wake. Through the hours of the night Strike had come to see the machines as essentially friendly, assisting his nephew to recovery. Now they seemed implacable judges holding up numbers indicating that Jack was failing.

“Fuck,” Strike muttered again, shifting the chair nearer to the bed. “Jack… your mum and dad…” He could feel a traitorous prickle behind the eyelids. Two nurses were walking past. “… shit…”

With an almighty effort he controlled himself and cleared his throat.

“… sorry, Jack, your mum wouldn’t like me swearing in your ear… it’s Uncle Cormoran here, by the way, if you didn’t… anyway, Mum and Dad are on their way back, OK? And I’ll be with you until they—”

He stopped mid-sentence. Robin was framed in the distant doorway of the ward. He watched her asking directions from a ward sister, and then she came walking towards him, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her eyes their usual blue-gray and her hair loose, and holding two polystyrene cups.

Seeing Strike’s unguarded expression of happiness and gratitude, Robin felt amply repaid for the bruising argument with Matthew, the two changes of bus and the taxi it had taken to get here. Then the slight prone figure beside Strike came into view.

“Oh no,” she said softly, coming to a halt at the foot of the bed.

“Robin, you didn’t have to—”

“I know I didn’t,” said Robin. She pulled a chair up beside Strike’s. “But I wouldn’t want to have to deal with this alone. Be careful, it’s hot,” she added, passing him a tea.

He took the cup from her, set it down on the bedside cabinet, then reached out and gripped her hand painfully tightly. He had released her before she could squeeze back. Then both sat staring at Jack for a few seconds, until Robin, her fingers throbbing, asked:

“What’s the latest?”

“He still needs the oxygen and he’s not peeing enough,” said Strike. “I don’t know what that means. I’d rather have a score out of ten or—I don’t fucking know. Oh, and they want to X-ray his chest in case they punctured his lungs putting that tube in.”

“When was the operation?”

“Yesterday afternoon. He collapsed doing cross-country at school. Some friend of Greg and Lucy’s who lives right by the school came with him in the ambulance and I met them here.”

Neither spoke for a while, their eyes on Jack.

Then Strike said, “I’ve been a bloody terrible uncle. I don’t know any of their birthdays. I couldn’t have told you how old he was. The dad of his mate’s who brought him in knew more than me. Jack wants to be a soldier, Luce says he talks about me and he draws me pictures and I never even bloody thank him.”

“Well,” said Robin, pretending not to see that Strike was dabbing roughly at his eyes with his sleeve, “you’re here for him right now when he needs you and you’ve got plenty of time to make it up to him.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, blinking rapidly. “You know what I’ll do if he—? I’ll take him to the Imperial War Museum. Day trip.”

“Good idea,” said Robin kindly.

“Have you ever been?”

“No,” said Robin.

“Good museum.”

Two nurses, one male, one the woman whom Strike had earlier snubbed, now approached.

“We need to X-ray him,” said the girl, addressing Robin rather than Strike. “Would you mind waiting outside the ward?”

“How long will you be?” asked Strike.

“Half an hour. Forty minutes-ish.”

So Robin fetched Strike’s crutches and they went to the canteen.

“This is really good of you, Robin,” Strike said over two more pallid teas and some ginger biscuits, “but if you’ve got things to do—”

“I’ll stay until Greg and Lucy come,” said Robin. “It’ll be awful for them, being so far away. Matt’s twenty-seven and his dad was still worried sick when Matt was so ill in the Maldives.”

“Was he?”

“Yeah, you know, when he—oh, of course. I never told you, did I?”

“Told me what?”

“He got a nasty infection on our honeymoon. Scratched himself on some coral. They were talking about airlifting him off to hospital at one point, but it was OK. Wasn’t as bad as they first thought.”