Liars All Read Free

said quietly, ‘Do you see much change in him?’
    â€˜A little,’ admitted Daniel. ‘Brodie—’
    She anticipated his question. ‘They said to bring him home and make him comfortable. They said I wasn’t going to have him much longer, and to make the most of it.’
    Her honesty rocked him. He tried not to let it show. ‘What did you tell them?’
    This was the human being who knew her better than any on Earth – better than her ex-husband, better than Jonathan’s father. He hadn’t been with her when the world’s experts on retinoblastoma demolished her hopes with a few carefully chosen sentences, but he might as well have been.
    â€˜I made a bit of a scene,’ she remembered. ‘It really wasn’t what I was expecting. Not the first time, not even the second. The whole world of medical science, it’s like a cavalry charge – full speed ahead, unstoppable. You read constantly of the things they can do this week that they
couldn’t do last week, of the things they’ll be able to do by the end of the month, and you think that nothing is impossible. They’ve mapped the human genome. They can produce cells in a Petri dish that can be turned into heart cells, or liver cells, or brain cells, and set about curing life-threatening diseases from the inside. They can perform surgery with beams of light instead of knives.
    â€˜And you think the answer you need has to be out there somewhere. It’s only a little cancer. The whole baby isn’t very big. How can all these experts be beaten? But they were.’ There was a kind of wonder in her voice.
    Instinctively Daniel held the sick child closer, as if he could protect the tiny body with his own. But he couldn’t. Not from this.
    â€˜I haven’t given up, you know,’ Brodie said sharply.
    â€˜Of course not.’
    â€˜I mean it. So surgery isn’t the answer. There are other things. One day chemotherapy will replace surgery entirely. Everyone says so. The precise combination of drugs that will save Jonathan’s life may be sitting on someone’s lab bench right now. I’ll find them.’
    Daniel felt his heart sink. ‘Maybe you will.’ She’d spent the last six months alternately trawling the internet and touring the world, taking the weakening child to appointments in San Francisco and Geneva and Johannesburg, only to receive one gentle rebuff after another. He’d hoped she would give up now, make the most of whatever time was left to them.
    Brodie heard the note of censure he’d tried to keep out of his voice and her pointed chin came up in a kind of
tired belligerence. ‘This is what I do, Daniel, remember? I find things. Things that other people think are gone for good. But I find them. If they’re out there at all, I can find them. I can do this. For Jonathan? Damn right I can.’
    â€˜I’m not doubting you,’ said Daniel softly. ‘But I don’t want you blaming yourself if you can’t find something that actually isn’t there yet – that might exist in another year or five years, but doesn’t exist yet.’
    â€˜It does exist,’ she insisted with the stubborn sophistry of the very desperate. ‘Somewhere. It has to.’
    He said no more. He hoped that when the jet lag subsided she’d be more open to reason.
    He’d felt the same way when she got back from Geneva, and from Johannesburg.
    In the end the defendant changed his plea. Detective Superintendent Jack Deacon supposed it was the sight of the girl in the wheelchair waiting to give her evidence that did it. Perhaps the defence team had thought she’d bottle out, or be too frail to take the stand. But Deacon had got to know her over the last nine months, knew she’d be up there telling what happened if she had to drag herself into the witness box on her hands and knees.
    Robert Carson’s counsel must have