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change of mind,’ he said. ‘Sure, they’d come up with all kinds of ideas, like lacing his drink and putting him on a plane to some place, but I managed to talk them out of it — at least I thought I had.’
    She gave a wan smile of appreciation.
    He shrugged. ‘I knew how worried you were, you know, that we’d do something dumb.’
    ‘I was, desperately worried.’ She glanced at the nurse, then sniffed. ‘So where is he?’
    ‘He definitely wasn’t in the car?’
    ‘Absolutely not. I’ve rung the police — they say that — they say — they—’ She began sobbing.
    ‘What did they say?’
    In a burst of anger she blurted, ‘They won’t do anything.’
    She sobbed some more, struggling to contain herself. ‘They say they’ve checked all around at the scene of the accident and there’s no sign of him, and that he’s probably just sleeping off a mighty hangover somewhere.’
    Mark waited for her to calm down, but she carried on crying. ‘Maybe that’s true.’
    She shook her head. ‘He promised me he wasn’t going to get drunk.’ Mark gave her a look. After a moment, she nodded. ‘It was his stag night, right? That’s what you guys do on stag nights, isn’t it? You get smashed.’
    Mark stared down at grey carpet tiles. ‘Let’s go and see Zoe,’ he said.
    Ashley followed him across the ward, trailing a few yards behind him. Zoe was a slender beauty, and today she seemed even more slender to Mark, as he laid his hand on her shoulder, feeling the hard bone beneath the soft fabric of her designer tracksuit top.
    ‘Jeez, Zoe, I’m sorry.’
    She acknowledged him with a faint shrug.
    ‘How is he?’ Mark hoped the anxiety in his voice sounded genuine.
    Zoe turned her head and looked up at him, her eyes raw, her cheeks, almost translucent without make-up, tracked with tears. ‘They can’t do anything,’ she said. ‘They operated on him, now we just have to wait.’
    He was hooked up to two IVAC infusion pumps, three syringe drivers and a ventilator, which made a steady, soft, eerie hissing sound. A range of data and waveform lines changed constantly on the machine’s monitor.
    The exit tube from Josh’s mouth ended in a small bag, with a tap at the bottom, half filled with a dark fluid. There was a forest of cannulated lines, tagged yellow where they left the pumps and drivers, and tagged with white handwritten labels at the distal end. Wires ran out from the sheets and from his head, feeding digital displays and spiking graphs. What flesh Mark could see was the colour of alabaster. His friend looked like a laboratory experiment.
    But Mark was barely looking at Josh. He was looking at the displays, trying to read them, to calculate what they were saying. He was trying to remember, from when he had stood in this same room beside his dying father, which were the ECG, the blood oxygen, the blood pressure readings, and what they all meant. And he was reading the labels on the drip lines.
Mannitol. Pentastarch. Morphine. Midazolam. Noradrenaline.
And he was thinking. Josh had always had it made. Smooth good looks, rich parents. The insurance loss adjuster, always calculating, mapping out his life, forever talking about five-year plans, ten-year plans, life goals. He was the first of the gang to get married, as he wanted to have kids early, so he would still be young enough to enjoy his life after they’d grown up. Marrying the perfect wife, darling little rich girl Zoe, totally fertile, allowed him to fulfil his plan. She’d delivered him two equally perfect babies in rapid succession.
    Mark shot a glance around the ward, taking in the nurses, the doctors, marking their positions, then his eyes dropped to the drip lines into Josh’s neck and into the back of his hand, just behind the plastic tag bearing his name. Then they moved across to the ventilator. Then up to the ECG. Warning buzzers would sound if the heart rate dropped too low. Or the blood oxygen level.
    Josh surviving would be a