The Touch of Innocents
It is always the innocent who suffer to make the powerful rich.A gripping thriller from the author of the Goodfellowe Series.Paul Deverauxis one of the most powerful politicians in the country.Isadora Deanis the rising star of television news journalism.Two exceptionally talented, successful people brought in to dangerous conflict.Izzy cannot accept the death of her baby daughter Bella. Stubborn and at times irrational, her belief that her daughter is alive leads her to the sordid truth – an international black market where babies are sold for cash. Behind this horrific truth, Isadora detects the sinister hand of Devereux.She is just one woman against the world.The search for her daughter will cost her everything, but as long as she believes that Bella is alive she will never surrender and Paul Devereux must use every means in his power to make sure she is silenced for good.
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MICHAEL DOBBS
The Touch of Innocents
To the memory of my mother,Who had to fight harder than most.
CONTENTS
Her eyes were distracted, dazzled. One moment the country lane had appeared anonymous and empty in the swirling night rain, the next it was a blaze of incoherent light which screamed of danger.
The brain responded immediately, but inadequately. It could not tell that the fool on the tractor, suddenly aware he was blocking the path of an oncoming car, had panicked and switched on all the headlights; there was only that state of alarm that sends the senses cartwheeling, freezing the mind, where instinct rather than intellect takes control.
Isadora Dean would never remember what happened next, the confusion and sense of fear as the source of light came closer, the clarity of understanding that ahead lay disaster, the struggle with rubber and brakes which seemed to adopt a logic of their own as they danced and pirouetted amidst the leaf-strewn mud of an English autumn, the numbing slide away from light into darkness and the unknown, a feeling of weightlessness, of being in space, spinning off into another world, eternity.
Eternity. Death. Her death. Damn, what a waste.
She had already crossed into the underworld, it seemed. The car had left the road and was carving a tunnel of light through the tangle of wood that pressed around. Skeletal, leaf-stripped branches leapt out from the darkness to snatch at her, to drag her to disaster as a kaleidoscope of images flashed past faster than the eye could capture or brain decode.
Fear began only as her mind turned to the children. Benjamin. Little Bella. She released the breath caught in her lungs long enough to begin a strangulated cry. ‘Hold tight!’ How absurd. The boy was still soundly asleep, comprehending nothing, and how could a six-month-old baby hold tight to anything other than a mother’s breast?
She saw the bole of the gnarled oak but barely; it could have been a rock-face, a bolted door, the bottom of the deepest well. But she knew it was Immovable Object. Disaster. The End. Izzy felt nothing, not as her body began to lift from the seat and tear against the restraining belt, not when the inertia lock snatched back at the belt and threatened to carve her in two, not even when her head hit the roof of the hire Renault as it began to roll and the windscreen exploded into a thousand pieces of razor-tipped stardust.
And she would remember nothing. For as the point of her head just behind her hairline came into contact with the pressed-steel frame of the car, a shock wave like that of an earthquake passed through her brain, shaking it, stretching it, causing the cells to vibrate and become microscopically displaced. The damage was at first subtle, but decisive. As the cells twisted away from each other the chemical balance of the brain was disturbed, turning the neurological pathways from a running track into a synaptic slough, tangling and entrapping the electrical messages which perform the brain’s work.
She lost consciousness and when, in a while, she came round, she would still lack coherence and focus because many of the higher functions of the mind remained lost in what had become the ensnaring tar pit of her brain. She was unable to assist the terrified and penitent farmer who ran to drag her and her children free from the wreckage, found it impossible to respond to the concerns of the paramedics who tended her, didn’t notice the shrugs of the firemen who arrived too late to save anything from the burning metal carcass.
Yet there was still worse. Even as her body gave the impression of making some revival from the initial assault, the bruised and insulted brain was swelling.
And would continue to swell.
A small vein inside the inner brain had burst, spilling blood, creating pressure under which the nearby brain cells and their surrounding nerves would no longer operate, so reversing that original revival and pressing down her senses ever more deeply into the pit of tar.
The eyes opened but did not see, the ears heard but could not comprehend, the senses drifted away on a moonbeam until all coherent memory of the scene would be gone.
Of the crash.
Of the fire which brought terror to half the night life in that usually tranquil Dorsetshire woodland, and of the sirens and flashing lights which did for the rest.
Of her arrival at the Weschester General on a desperately busy night in A&E with its confusion and barely controllable clamour after some drunk had pulled a fire alarm.
And of the rush to get her to the intensive therapy unit as the medical staff began to realize that, instead of recovery, something with their patient was going devastatingly wrong.
Sunrise in San Francisco. A tantalizing purple and pink cast stretched across the horizon, the mist obscuring where parched hills stretched up to kiss the Californian sky, with only the lights of Oakland flickering their daily welcome from across the water to indicate where earth met heaven.
