Free The Touch of Innocents by Michael Dobbs Page B

profession on which they could congratulate themselves.
    It was only at the point when she began to focus on escape as reality rather than theory that she came to realize what a huge step it entailed. She was a woman in a strange land, penniless, with neither possessions nor friends, and a young child in her charge, lacking even a means of proving her identity. Such practicalities had seemed so unimportant – up to now. Where did she start trying to pull it all back together?
    She was stumbling through an undergrowth of tangled personal details when out of the blue he was there, waiting to catch her as she fell.
    ‘Hello. How are you getting on?’
    She gazed at him in some bewilderment. ‘I know you but …’
    A hand reached out. ‘Paul Devereux. Remember? You interviewed me, a few months ago.’
    ‘Of course …’ The soft, watery pale blue eyes, the clipped sentences. ‘I’m sorry. It’s as though you’ve stepped out of a past life. I don’t associate you with this world.’ She waved her hands around her, extending one to meet his greeting. The lights were beginning to switch on. ‘You gave me an exclusive.’
    ‘And you gave me a bloody hard time.’ His expression implied no hard feelings.
    ‘If I remember correctly,’ she replied, tenaciously but not unkindly, ‘you played the male politician and expected me to play the little lady. Foreigner, too. Easy meat, you thought.’
    He took the challenge in his stride. ‘Indeed, it hadn’t passed my attention that you were both a foreigner and an attractive woman – if one is allowed to remark on such things in these politically correct days of ours.’ He shrugged to indicate he was a hopeless case. ‘And by the time you’d finished I felt in need of a visit to one of my own casualty departments.’
    ‘Something like that,’ she nodded approvingly.
    ‘No need to worry. The scars have almost healed.’
    ‘I wasn’t worried, Mr Devereux,’ she assured him, rejecting with a smile his appeal for the sympathy vote.
    ‘No, I didn’t suppose you were. I see you are regaining your strength. Practically fighting fit, I’d say.’ He was enjoying the banter. ‘I’m delighted.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Sorry. I mean, why are you here? It’s not every day a Government Minister drops in to check my vital signs.’
    He chuckled. ‘As Secretary of State for Health, hospitals were very much part of my world, and this hospital in particular. This is Weschester, myconstituency, you see, and I make a point of dropping by every month.’
    ‘I don’t have a vote, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Voters hold sway perhaps once every four or five years, Miss Dean. Chickenfeed compared with the power wielded by you and your colleagues in the media. But this is merely a social call. Heard what a remarkable recovery you’ve staged. Wanted merely to find out how you were progressing.’
    She told him she was leaving hospital. He seemed dutifully concerned. She admitted that it was going to prove rather more complicated than she had realized. Should’ve asked K.C. for help, but hadn’t thought …
    ‘As your local Member of Parliament ad interim , perhaps I can help.’ His smile was warm, well practised. A political smile. To be ignored. Yet in those remarkable blue eyes, where feelings can rarely be hidden, she thought she could detect more than a merely professional interest. Not entirely avuncular, either.
    ‘I have nothing, absolutely nothing, but the hospital gown I am wearing.’
    Aware for the first time that she was a shade underdressed, she moved across the room to her dressing gown.
    As she put it on she couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. She hadn’t lost weight as quickly as she would have liked after the second birth, her breasts were heavier and she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the muscle tone she’d been building to lift and tuck everything back to its former shape had largely dissolved with the extended bed rest. It bothered her that