Who Guards a Prince? by Reginald Hill

Author:Reginald Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

McHarg found himself sloshing whisky into his glass. Betty held out hers for a refill too.

“He just tossed me over the side,” she repeated reflectively. “Sounds simple when you say it fast, doesn’t it? Over I went, down I went. I couldn’t believe it. It was too absurd to be frightening, even. Suddenly I was flying through the air! It was almost exhilarating!

“And then I stopped flying. There was pain. Just for a moment, a flash. But so intense you could have spread it over a lifetime of visits to the dentist and still had bucketfuls to spare. And after that, nothing. Blackness. A blank. And since that moment, there have been times when I’ve recalled that pain with the kind of nostalgic longing you usually keep for the Mediterranean sun in a wet February.”

She drank some more whisky, her face deeply troubled. Then with a determined effort at brightness, she said, “There! I’ve told somebody. Well, that’s a load off my mind. It wasn’t so bad after all.”

It was a poor parody of catharsis. McHarg ignored it.

“Why the hell have you been faking amnesia all this time?” he demanded. “Why not just go straight to the police?”

She sighed deeply and shook her head.

“You’re being a great help, McHarg,” she said. “Listen, will you? For a start, when I woke up I was full of dope, cased in plaster, and I genuinely couldn’t recall a thing. I mean, really, not a damn thing. Anything I could have remembered I’d have announced to the world. But everything had gone. My earliest recollection was months earlier, long before I’d started working on the programme. The doctors diagnosed complete amnesia, and prognosed that it might be permanent. If it bothered me, they said psychotherapy might help. Otherwise, forget it—ha, ha. The police said I must have been sitting on the rail of my balcony when a metal stanchion gave way. A couple of screws had rusted and stripped their threads. The whole thing was dangerous—not just mine, but everybody’s. They found my broken glass beside me. They also found enough alcohol in my blood to suggest I might have been a bit unsteady, easily unbalanced.

“I accepted all this. To tell the truth, I wasn’t concerned about anything but my health. I’d had a miraculous escape, they told me. I should have been killed in the fall. After a while their stress on my good fortune got through and I realized things must be really bad. So then it came out. Paralysis. Probably permanent. Meals on wheels for life. If I could have got to another window, I’d have made a job of it this time.

“But I couldn’t. And I didn’t. Instead I got better, or most of me did. I recovered rapidly in some ways. Only a couple of months later I was out of hospital into my chair. Well, I won’t bore you with plucky little Betty’s struggle with adversity. I did the thing properly, went to a residential training center; my aim was self-sufficiency, my motives were mixed.

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