20

I couldn't get any signal on my cellphone. When we got to Kirkland, I stopped at the first payphone. While I was thumbing coins into the slot, I glanced across to Paddy, still sitting in the jeep. Her face was white and set, a picture of misery.

I finally got through to the ambulance depot and I had to wait a few minutes, fretting that my money would run out, before somebody came on to tell me that Barbara had been taken to the Western Infirmary. The guy gave me the number to call which I did and after a while I was put through to intensive care.

'Mrs Hartford is in surgery at the moment,' the non-committal voice told me. 'It's too early to say.'

I asked a few questions that got brief replies. You know the kind of words they use in hospitals. Critical. Poor. That sort of thing. But at least she was alive.

Back in the driver's seat, and Paddy just looked at me with wide eyes that did all the talking for her. I unclicked her seat belt and pulled her across to me and put my arms around her. I could feel her tremble against my ribs.

'She's being taken care of right now,' I told her. 'They took her to hospital and the doctors are looking after her right now, so don't worry. We'll go straight there are see how she's doing. Okay?'

I felt Paddy nod her head and then she gave a big shudder and the fear and shock that had been written all over her face since she'd seen Barbara's car, all came out of her in a torrent. She sat with her face buried in my chest, shoulders heaving, and she sobbed her heart out. I held her tight until she was over the worst of it then fished a tissue from the door-pocket and tilted her chin up. The tears were flowing freely and I wiped both eyes. She snuffled and her breath was catchy from crying.

"Want to go now?

She nodded. I buckled her in again and then we drove out, heading for Glasgow.

The Western is a big tower of concrete and glass attached to the old University Hospital. I found the underground car-park and took Paddy up to reception and followed the blue floor-lines to the elevators and up to Level 7. The floor was hushed. Nurses moved economically and quietly, padding about in soft slippers. Most were gowned and masked. Some of them had splashes of blood that I hoped Paddy wouldn't notice.

A nurse at the desk told us to wait a while and I sat Paddy down. At that moment I really felt I could have used a cigarette. The woman came back and motioned me to the desk. Barbara was still in theatre, she told me. She was in very bad shape. The doctors thought she had a fair chance, but that was all, It was too early to say.

I went across and translated that into something a bit more hopeful for Paddy and she nodded. A small smile won through. We had a choice to wait here or wander. I thought I should get her out of the hushed atmosphere because there was nothing for us to do but think about chances and odds and what the emergency surgeons were doing to Paddy's mother. Paddy came willingly enough. I took her to the art gallery at Kelvingrove, only five minutes away, and we strolled through the grounds for a while, watching normal people saunter about. In the gallery, I had a coffee and got her a coke. Neither of us were hungry. After that we wandered around the animal and fossil section and tried to take our minds off the immediate problem.

I spun it out as long as I could. Halfway through the archaeology exhibit, I saw a selection of arrowheads and spear-points. One of them was very similar to the polished stone from Kitty's box. I pointed it out to Paddy and told her I'd found one just like it, without realising, for a moment, that in my pocket. My fingers were clasped around it. I pulled it out. Paddy did a quick double-take, thinking at first I'd opened the display and stolen it.

That was not the only coincidence. The next cabinet held a selection of Celtic jewellery, and in pride of place was a gold torc, pinned to black velvet. I pointed it out and her hand flew to her neck. I looked down and there, peeping out from her collar, were the two gold spheres of the one I'd given her. The one she wore was finer and more elegantly simple than the museum piece. Absent-mindedly, she rubbed the gold necklet as if it was a charm.

We walked back to the hospital and went up to the hush zone where we found we still had a long wait. Paddy was a little brighter than she had been, but I wasn't feeling good at all. There were a few things flitting around my mind that needed urgent attention, like how to contact Barbara's father. Paddy knew he was in London, but not where he was staying or with whom. I wondered what to do about Paddy herself and decided there was nothing for it but she should come and stay at my place, at least for the duration.

It was getting well into the afternoon when Paddy turned to me. I had gone off to find a coke machine and she'd waited patiently for me top return and then said: 'It's going to be all right.'

I thought perhaps one of the team had come through he swing door and spoken to her.

But Paddy said no one had come through.

'I just know, that's all,' she said. 'She's not going to die.'

'Of course she isn't,' I said, with as much sincerity and optimism I could muster, which probably wasn't enough. Paddy didn't know all about the bone splinters and the collapsed lung, and all the other broken bits in her mother's body.

'The doctors are just fixing her up. They just take their time to get it right,' I told her.

'Yes, but she's not going to die. I just know it.'

I looked down at her and she looked up at me and there was a bright smile on her face, as if she did know it. There was a look of such certainty that it surprised me. I hoped it wasn't just shock talking.

Just then the swing doors banged open and a tall man, still wearing green gown and cap came towards us. I stood up and Paddy grabbed my hand.

'Mr Hartford?'

'No. My name's Ryan. I'm a friend of the family. This is Mrs Hartford's daughter.'

'Ah.' He paused and seemed to consider this. 'Mrs Hartford's father is out of town. I'm looking after Paddy here.'

'Right. Well, I might as well let the young lady know that her mother is as well as can be expected under the circumstances.'

He looked down at Paddy and beamed reassuringly.

'She's in intensive care right now, and in a few moments, you can go in and see her.' The doctor bent and took Paddy's other hand. 'Now, I just want you to know she's all wrapped up in bandages and there are some tubes to help her, and give her the right sort of medicine, but you've not to worry about that, okay?'

Paddy nodded and smiled up at him. He told her to go and sit down for a moment and she did as she was told. He took my arm and edged me to the side, then told me what had been going on for all those hours. Basically, the team had done what they could to repair the damage. They'd set the broken femur and bound up the smashed ribs after getting in to take the splinters out. I got a blow by blow account, like a bill from a garage mechanic. The bottom line was that Barbara was in a coma, which was not surprising, the doctor said, because of the skull fracture.

'We think we've repaired all the damage quite well. She'll have a few small scars, but her ribs will be fine and the leg-break wasn't as bad as we feared. Her heart's beating normally and we've got the lung inflated. That's as much as we can do at the moment. We've got a neuro specialist coming in to give us an opinion. We hope she may come out of it in a day or two, or it might take longer. We just can't say at the moment.'

I called Paddy over. He took us along a corridor and into the intensive care unit. Barbara was close to the door in a high cot that was surrounded by high-tech machinery and she was festooned with wires and tubes.

Lying in the cot, she was swathed in bandages and deathly still. She could have been dead, but for the very slight rise and fall of her chest. Tubes snaked into her arms and up her nose and her face was swollen and bruised. It didn't look like her at all.

Paddy stared at her mother for a long time, then a nurse came round and asked to get into some of the machinery. I took the hint and gently pulled on the little girl's hand, and she came along. Even as we were going through the doorway, her eyes never left her mother's face.

In the jeep I concentrated on the city traffic until we reached the expressway that headed west. Paddy was pretty quiet, but as we got closer to Levenford, she turned to me.

'She will be all right, Nick. I just know it.'

'I think so too. She's just been through a lot.'

'She's sleeping and I know she's hurt awful bad. But she'll get better. I can feel it.

'That's good. You go on feeling that way and she'll be just as you say.' I thought she was being a mite optimistic. I sure as hell wasn't.

'But you don't understand, Nick,' she said. 'It will be. I don't know how I know, but I know my mom's going to sleep for a long time. And then she'll wake up. But she's safe.'

Something in her tone conveyed just how certain she was that Barbara would pull through, and that somehow made me feel a bit brighter. There's nothing so good for the spirit as an optimistic kid who holds your hand and tells you everything will be fine.

I drove on a bit before I stole a glance at her. She was leaning back in her seat and fingering the two spheres on the torc, and she had a smile on her face.

Suddenly, and I can't tell you why, I just accepted what she said as the truth. I realised that Barbara was going to survive this. She was safe. And she would come back to both of us.

The storm clouds were thick and towering in the west as we crossed the bridge over the Clyde; dark and heavy, they came piling together down the estuary. When we left Glasgow, the air still had that clear high-pressure sharpness that had kept the summer going long and hot, but as we zipped across the bridge, the dividing line between summer and autumn was written in the sky.

We hit the first rain in almost two months as we passed Levenford and out along the shore that skirted Loch Lomond, taking the detour to take the back road home. Since the bridge was blown in the tanker crash, it would be some time before that road opened again.

Just at the turn-off where the dual carriageway was nipped into a single road, there was a blue-yellow flicker of lightning over the hills to the west and big heavy raindrops began to splatter the windscreen. In seconds, we were driving through a downpour that sent spray up from the road. The surface went from slick as the dust soaked up the rain, then to wet and then it became a running stream in the space of half a mile.

When we came over the Black Hill Road, the rain got steadily heavier and I switched on the main beams as visibility closed in and I slowed even further to cope. The big radials sent up spume in clouds on either side and the rain kept up a steady rhythm on the roof. Over the crest of the hill and down towards Kirkland, we could see the expanse of the firth in the distance, a slate-grey blanket that reflected back the flares of fork lightning through a curtain of rain.

By this time the road was awash and even at lower speed there were a couple of times when I felt the steering slip just a little, telling me I was aquaplaning on the bends. I came down a gear and slowed further. The wipers were toiling and on the inside, the windscreen was beginning to mist over.

On the long straight of the Kilcreggan Road back to Arden, the clouds overhead were like a barn roof and the air seemed even thicker. The lightning came down in arc-lamp sizzles and the thunder was like heavy artillery, rolling in on the rain and bouncing off the Lancraigs cliffs as we splashed past. Paddy nearly jumped out of her seat when an almost horizontal bolt of white light snaked out right in front of us and sizzled the air in a jagged line.

There was an instantaneous crack of sound that almost shook us right off the road, am immense wallop as if the atmosphere had imploded and the bolt slammed into a stunted oak in the field beside us. The tree just disintegrated in an instant flare and for seconds afterwards, purple after-images were dancing in my vision.

We past the Langcraigs and I confess I speeded up a bit because those lightning bolts were too close for comfort. The rain beat down relentlessly and already it was beginning to spill down the runnels on the cliffs that had been bone dry for the whole hot spell. It came washing across the road, carrying silt and gravel. As we passed the big cliff, I saw a brown cascade pouring over and dropping nearly fifty feet to the scree below, and I could hear the roar over the drumming of the rain.

Just as we were coming level with the instant waterfall there was another apocalyptic clap of thunder that rocked the jeep on its shockers and a crackling bolt of lightning seemed to snake right down the waterflow, sparkling with blue St Elmo's fire. It washed with the flow in a sizzling line right across the road. Even with the windows closed I could smell the burnt air and the flat scent of ozone.

I don't know what caused the lightning to streak through the water, and I've never heard of that phenomenon before, but there was nothing I could do to avoid it anyway because I was doing about fifty and it was too damn close now. We skidded into that flickering stream and there was the weirdest feeling of tension all over my skin. I could feel the hairs on my neck and the back of my hands begin to pucker and heard a high-pitched whine in my ears. For an instant, the wipers just stopped in mid sweep and the screen was immediately flooded. The engine cut out and if I hadn't stamped on the clutch then and there we would have slewed round into a ditch or a stone wall.

But suddenly we were through the lightning aurora. The engine coughed back into life again, the wipers began swiping the rain away and the lights came on. My skin stopped crawling.

From behind us came an immense crash of sound, louder than the thunder but I couldn't see what was happening in the rear view. I just supposed it was another bolt of lightning, but it sounded as if the cliff face had slipped and fallen. The road juddered under the wheels. At that moment, I couldn't have cared less.

Five minutes later, I was bundling Paddy, under the shelter of my jacket, up the garden path and I got completely soaked as I fumbled for the key. We barged inside and shut the door against that incredible downpour. Outside the thunder and lightning stalked and talked, but inside it was dry and safe.

I put the kettle on for coffee and made Paddy hot chocolate.

She talked about the lightning, now more animated than she had been all day, and I supposed the incredible display had taken her mind off her mother for a moment. But later she told me again that Barbara was going to be all right. She couldn't explain how she knew, but she was completely certain of it anyway. As long as she felt that way - and it was reassuring even to me - I was not prepared to make any dents in her optimism.

I lit up the log fire in the living room, which made the place a bit cheerier once it got going. Paddy and I graduated from happy families to draughts and then we played a game of chess on the old set of my grandfather's, now smooth and worn from years of use. Her game was simple, but she was good for her age and she had the killer instinct. It kept out minds off things; maybe not entirely, but for whole minutes at a time.

Outside, the rain beat down steadily and there was a stream from the gable gutter that was spilling over. I recalled the slates that had come off in the big storm on the night I'd come back home. I'd meant to get somebody up there to re-set them and now I was hoping the roof wouldn't leak.

Later on, I scrambled some eggs and we had them on toast as we watched the lightning arc and fork outside the window. After she had a bath, I gave her one of my old chambray shirts that came down to her calves and she came downstairs to get her hair dried, looking like a hillbilly.

Later, when she'd gone up to bed, I sat and tried to watch television, but the lightning played havoc with the reception, so I gave up and read for a while.

Without Paddy there, my attention kept slipping back to the morning.

I kept seeing that battered Volvo in the trees and the sight of Barbara, lying bandaged and tube-fed in the intensive care room.

Eventually I gave up and climbed the stairs. I looked in on Paddy and she was sound asleep. In my own bed, I listened to the hammering of the rain on the slates and took a long time lying there in the dark trying to get to sleep.