It didn’t help the situation that Gregor had not been left to wait for Liz on his own. Peter Makepeace, Windsor’s headmaster, had decided to wait with him. Gregor had no idea if this was what Peter Makepeace was expected to do as headmaster, or if he’d decided it was something he had to do as long as Gregor was there. In any event it made for difficulties Gregor wasn’t prepared for. Left on his own, and given an hour or two, he could probably have managed to get the nurses to talk to him. He was good at that sort of thing. If he hadn’t been, he would never have risen as far as he had in the FBI. The nurses would not talk in front of Peter Makepeace. They would barely stay in the small waiting room with its molded blue plastic seats screwed into stainless steel bars and anchored into the walls. When there was news, they came just as far in past the swinging fire doors as they hadto. Often, they held one of those doors open for the sake of quick escape. Then they would deliver whatever line they had been given to say and dart out again, unavailable for questions.
No nurse had come in for over an hour now. There really was nothing else to say this evening. Mark had had his stomach pumped. He was sleeping. They had done tests. The results would be available in the morning. Gregor guessed that the results would be available a lot earlier than that, but that it was going to be damned near impossible to get anybody to tell them what they were.
It was a typical hospital waiting room. Gregor had been in dozens of hospitals in his life, as a patient and a visitor, and the waiting rooms were always the same. The floor was some kind of linoleum or vinyl. No matter how often it was scrubbed clean, it looked stained. There were bits and pieces of paper garbage in the corners and up against the walls: candy wrappers, Popsicle sticks, stray cigarette butts. No smoking was allowed here, but people had been smoking nonetheless. The smell of it was in the air. The windows looked out on a part of Windsor Gregor would not have believed existed if he hadn’t seen it. There was a women’s prison, and a big brick building he thought might be the local high school. Neither building looked as if it belonged in a town as rich as this one.
Peter Makepeace looked as out of place in this room as a Japanese rice paper print would have looked on the walls of a Neanderthal’s cave. He was, Gregor thought, almost unreal in his perfection of the stereotype he had been hired to represent. He was tall and lean and athletic; but more strikingly, he was elongated. Even his face was elongated. He was all angles and edges, as uncompromisingly aristocratic as a Plantagenet prince. It was there in his air of entitlement, too, which was more than just confidence. Gregor was confident that, once Liz got here, he could get the people he needed to talk to him to talk to him. Peter Makepeace gave the impression of believing that his access to information was a matter of right.
I’m being unfair this time, too, Gregor thought, and thatwas true. He was making assumptions about Peter Makepeace just as he had been making assumptions about the hospital’s nurses. God only knew Makepeace seemed to be nervous enough. He had been pacing nonstop for most of the time he’d been in the waiting room, and Gregor got the impression that he’d go on pacing until something forcibly stopped him. Gregor would have paced himself except that he was too tired to move.
Peter Makepeace stopped in midpace and looked down at him. “Did you say you were a friend of the family? That’s what you’re doing here?”
“I’m acquainted with Mark’s mother,” Gregor said.
“And he asked you down here,” Peter said. “Yes, I know about that The whole school knows about that. It’s been the subject of gossip for days. He shouldn’t have done that. There’s been enough conspiracy talk about Michael’s death as it is. Now everybody and his brother will assume that Michael Feyre was murdered.”
“I don’t see why,” Gregor said. “I’ve got no information that would indicate that Michael Feyre was murdered.”
Peter Makepeace smiled. It was a thin, bitter smile. “Excuse me if I feel that you’re very naive no matter how many years you spent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You investigate murders. If you’re here, somebody must have been murdered. The only likely candidate is Michael Feyre. He’s the one who’s dead. Of course, now there’s Mark.”
“He’s not dead.”
“No, he isn’t, but I think there’s reason to say he could have been. People will just say it was attempted murder, don’t you think?”
Gregor stretched out his legs. It was difficult because he was very tall, and Peter Makepeace was standing up close, towering over him, intimidating.