The Touch of Innocents Read Online Free

memory, while in his current role as Health Secretary he’s established a reputation as a radical reformer …’
    More squawking in his earpiece.
    ‘… whatever he’s doing tomorrow, in many people’s view this is a man who could eventually go all the way and one day be working on the other side of that Downing Street door.’
    On cue a duty policeman saluted, the door swung open and without a backward glance the politician disappeared inside as Grubb’s voice echoed across the satellite link, at last intelligible if deeply inelegant.
    The young broadcaster drew a deep breath, no mistake this time, the words mouthed with almost excessive precision.
    ‘We are likely to be hearing a lot more about Paul Devereux.’
    The senses were stunned, literally. A blast of sheer white light had entered the eye, which had been unable to cope. The pupil struggled to exclude the glare but had found it an impossible task; the light beams felt as though they were tearing around the skull, harassing the brain like a pack of mongrels let loose in a school yard. The olfactory nerve, under assault from a powerful and nauseatingly pungent odour, jammed in revolt; the nostrils flared in disgust, but found it impossible to escape. A sharp pain shot up through the nerve tendrils of the left arm from somewhere near its extremity, travelling through the brain stem like an angry, malevolent wind, blowing away cerebral cobwebs, rattling closed doors and throwing open the windows of the mind as it passed. The sensation it created was intense and unpleasant, yet in response her body could manage nothing but a slight, almost contemptuous curling of the little finger.
    Around the bed, the reaction to pain generated smiles. ‘You were right, Sister,’ the consultant neurologist, Arnold Weatherup, sighed. ‘Once again,’ he added with feigned reluctance. ‘I thought this one had passed us by, but it would seem the main problem was a leaky spleen all along. You have a sixthsense about these things; not so long ago women like you would have been burned at the stake.’
    ‘And no’ so long ago, Mr Weatherup, doctors like you were robbing graves for anatomy specimens.’
    The consultant laughed. There was always much laughter in this ward; it helped to ease the distress of frequent failure.
    ‘The medical profession has always required its sacrifices,’ the anaesthetist joined in, staring intently at Primrose.
    ‘I don’t think we need to prod or poke around any longer, Sister McBean,’ Weatherup concluded, examining the fresh scar on the upper left abdomen through which the leaky spleen had been removed. ‘I shall leave it to you to weave your charms and spells and hope that this recovery might continue.’ He smiled. ‘By the way, Burke and Hare, the grave robbers – Scots, weren’t they?’
    ‘No, doctor. Only the corpses they sold. Nothing but the best for the medical profession.’
    None of this banter registered within the damaged brain, which was still dazzled and largely blinded by the unaccustomed light. The tar pit, although drying out, still delayed and frustrated the reawakening army of neurological messengers. They leapt from stepping stone to stepping stone, trying to find a way through. Most still failed and some, like those bearing short-term memories, would perish entirely, but others were more persistent, reinvigorated by the blood’s fresh supplies of oxygen, trying first one route, then another, until slowly they came nearer their goal. The stepping stones were growing larger, more messengers were getting through, yet many still arrived out of sequence, jumbling their messages and confusing the brain.
    Of the several hours before the accident and allthe many days since there would be no coherent memory, nothing but a dark void. Only through dreams, which have their own unscrambling process for memories, would she be able to revisit any fragment of the torment she had endured, and one fragment she would touch only in her