I had been in hospital for about a week before things began to make any sense.

The last memories I had of that day in Pebble Deeping were a hazy mishmash of faces, noises, and motion not of my own command.

I reflected upon the irony of the similarity of my last meeting with Tyrone Edge to the first; doused in pain and bathed in flashing blue light. Sadly, on the latter occasion the ambulance was for me, and not a moment too soon.

The pretty nurse who suffered my awful chat-up lines with consummate grace was fond of telling me how near to death my course had strayed. I thought that I began to detect a note of wishful thinking in there eventually. If I had lost another pint of blood, she said, I would have met my maker long before the ambulance had got me into A&E.

Hospital was every bit as bad as it could have been. I lay swaddled from the waist down in enough bandages to fashion a passable Hammer Horror mummy, unable to move much more than to lift a cheek to fart.

The discomfort came and went. In addition to assorted fluid and plasma drips, I had a morphine line into my thumb which got a good clicking whenever the waves of agony in my thigh became too much.

Men are such pussies, the lovely nurse would say, our pain tolerance level is far below that of women.

Maybe so, I replied, but what with childbirth and all that was probably for the best.

She would smile and continue the bed bath, which constituted the closest physical contact my loins had had with a woman for a very long time.

The consultant who stitched me up drew me a quick diagram to show me what had happened. The bullet had penetrated the flesh of my thigh just below the groin, Five centimetres higher, and we would all be calling you Sally!, and nicked the femoral artery before exiting the front of my leg.

I was lucky that it hadn't lodged inside me, or the chances of infection would have been greater. Rolling about in muddy meadows and barns with an unplanned hole in your body is apparently a bad idea from an invasive bacterial perspective. I said that I would try to bear that in mind for the next time.

As it was, I had lost a lot of blood, but the surgery had been fairly simple; just a matter of clamping and stitching the consultant said. He thought that I would be up and walking properly in a couple of weeks when the muscle around the wound had healed sufficiently. I might have a limp for a while, but that would pass with the regaining of strength. Furthermore, I would have a seriously cool scar to impress girls with. Though given how close it was to my tackle, any women who actually saw it wouldn't remain impressed for long.

I tested that theory on the pretty nurse at every opportunity. "So, what do you think, Sister?" I asked one day as she changed my bandage and gauze dressing.

"I've seen better," she replied. I didn't dare ask whether she was referring to my scar or not.

If I survived the wound, the blood loss, the risk of infection, and the affections of the surgeon's sutures, the thing I decided that was most likely to do me in was the hospital food. Let me tell you that my recovery was very much in spite of the lumpen grey mush I was fed, rather than because of it.

I swear that if some old biddy running an animal shelter had tried to feed that slop to cats, she would have been lynched for cruelty to animals, and yet it was deemed perfectly acceptable to wean the sick. It took me several increasingly desperate pleas to the pretty nurse who attended me before she agreed to sneak me some food from the bakery on the hospital site.

In the grand scheme of things, sourcing sausage rolls was the least of my worries. I had a series of visitors and some were distinctly more welcome than others.

First and foremost had been two stern-faced middle-aged women from West Midlands Police Force who had questioned me at great length about how I came by a nine millimetre bullet hole in my leg during an afternoon stroll in rural Shropshire.

After feigning overwhelming tiredness, I managed to fob them off with a story about hearing several shots fired in the woods behind the farm and, assuming poachers were about, I had gone to investigate. I must, I concluded, have caught a stray bullet from these poachers who were subsequently horrified at what they had done and fled the scene.

What dumbfounded me was that there was no mention of finding the Pebble Deeping strewn with corpses, which was very much the way I remembered leaving it. Still, I didn't fancy telling the police the truth, due in no small part to the fact that I was directly responsible for at least one of those bodies.

This was a matter that I was acutely aware of whenever I closed my eyes and attempted sleep. I was immediately transported back to the riverbank, with the rain pouring on my head and Martha looking down the barrel of Sharp's gun. I had pulled the trigger then and killed a man, and I would do the same again, but that doesn't mean that I slept easily.

The police interview concluded with a stream of questions about whom else was involved in the incident and whether I wanted to press charges against the poachers. I knew they didn't believe a word I was telling them, but seemingly lacking any evidence to the contrary, they accepted my role as the bemused victim.

My next visitor had been more sympathetic but had brought with her much worse news. Joan had fussed around my bed, mopped my brow, and fluffed my pillows. Yet when she spoke to me it was to say that the Yeoman twins had instigated legal proceedings to remove me as a partner in the business. Apparently, they were citing my sustained and unexplained absence over the past few weeks. Joan said that the word was not good about my chances of holding onto my share and that the best I could hope for would be a reasonable buy-out offer. The current police interest into my activities was not helping either.

I had sworn long and hard; turning the air and my face blue with a stream of invective as foul as it was imaginative. The pretty nurse had had to warn me to shut up or I would pop my stitches.

Joan was apologetic and said that she would help me when I was back on my feet. She insisted that the Yeoman twins had a very strong case and that I certainly should accept any offer they made because the courts would most likely fuck me in the arse, then charge me for the privilege. She didn't put it in quite those terms, but that was my very clear interpretation.

I brooded for several days after Joan had visited. Even the ministrations of the pretty nurse failed to brighten my mood, until at last she asked if there was anyone I would like her to contact. I thought about it for an afternoon and then gave her Priya's number.

Two days later marked the end of my second week in hospital, and I was sleeping as best I could through another fruitless visitor hour when a cool hand touched my brow.

I opened my eyes slowly and saw slender fingers with delicate varnished nails and a dainty silver ring.

"Priya?" I murmured, drowsily.

"No," came a gentle voice. "It's Martha."

My eyes jerked open and I struggled to look up at her face. She stood by the bed wearing a plain white off-the-shoulder summer dress that clung at the hip and ended on the right side of her knees. Her hair was pulled back in the familiar ponytail and her wide green eyes looked at me with the tenderness usually reserved for an injured pet, or the performance of a young relative in a nativity play.

She looked, as ever, like a very small piece of heaven.

"Hi," I breathed, desperately searching for some of the words that I had been formulating over and over again throughout the sleepless nights I had been suffering.

"Hi," she replied, shuffling her feet slightly. Something was different about her; she looked just as beautiful as ever but ineffably less real.

It took me a few moments to realize what the difference was. She was heavily made-up; something I had never seen her do before. It made her look like an advert for perfume in a fashion magazine, somehow too perfect.

"How are you?" she asked, avoiding looking me in the eye.

"I won't be winning any marathons for a while," I joked. She smiled, the sun broke from behind clouds and birds began singing in the trees. "But honestly, I've been better. I'm not... Well, I'm not fully over what happened."

She nodded in response, a faraway look in her eyes.

"Satchmo, about that... I just wanted to come and see you. I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't done what you did." She leaned over and kissed me lightly on the forehead. "Thank you. You saved my life."

"Any time," I croaked past the lump in my throat, then realized how stupid it sounded.

There was an awkward pause between us. A million things ran through my head that I wanted to say but didn't feel were quite right.

"Have you seen Ty?" she said finally, breaking the silence. "He seems to have vanished."

The look on her face when she mentioned Edge told me all that I needed to know, and permanently banished any thought of the bulk of the things I wanted to say.

"No. Not since, well... You know," I replied.

"Oh..." she said, her disappointment palpable.

"Look, Martha. I'm glad you came," I said.

"Me too, Satchmo. I'm sorry that I took so long, but I've been so busy. You must understand, the media has been all over me," she wrung her hands apologetically.

"Media?" I said, confused.

"Yes. Haven't you seen the papers?" I shook my head. "The votives! When I went back to the farm to collect my things they were there, in my room, under my sleeping bag. The press is calling it the greatest archaeological find on UK soil. My father's work is vindicated, and I seem to be caught in the limelight," Martha smiled.

I could imagine; the sexy new face of British history. Certainly better looking than Simon Schama.

"I don't know how you did it, but by finding them you have done more than you can ever know." Her beaming smile lit up the whole gloomy ward.

"My pleasure," I returned the grin. And it was, it really was.

"I should go, I'm due at the BBC to discuss hosting a series on Druidism in ancient Britain and the votives," she said, half turning.

"I'll see you soon," she said. We both knew that was a lie.

"Bye, Martha," I replied as she headed out of the door.

There was a brief commotion out in the hall and a burst of harsh laughter that I recognized instantly. The door had hardly settled back on its hinges, when Priya swept through with the powerful grace of a panther.

"What's up, fuckwit?" she asked, tossing a bunch of grapes in a paper bag onto my lap. I winced as the fruit connected with both wound and balls.

"Hey..." I replied glumly. Priya laughed again.

"So that was her huh? Do you have some sort of sixth sense for being attracted to gorgeous and successful woman who have no interest in you?" Priya's smile betrayed no malice. As ever, she just enjoyed toying with me.

"No," I responded. "That's my seventh sense. The sixth is primarily concerned with locating free food."

Priya laughed again, and I joined her, feeling better from the normalcy of our interchange.

"She looks nice, Satch. Far too good for you, my friend. So, where is Superman?" Priya asked.

"Ty? I haven't seen him since all of this happened." I waved at my bandaged right side.

"Bollocks!" Priya huffed and threw out her hip indignantly. "I was hoping he'd be here, mopping your brow and secretly craving an exotic taste of the subcontinent."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you," I said, faux-miffed.

"Don't sweat it Satch, I'm used to it by now," she fired back.

"You know, I've always enjoyed a good curry..." I proffered.

"The nurse out there told me that you got shot in the cock. I reckon your days of Balti are behind you now." She helped herself to several of the grapes she had brought, popping them into her lip-glossed pout lasciviously.

Great, I thought, now even the staff were against me.

"Thigh, actually." I pointed to the padded bandaging and gauze.

"That's what I had assumed..." Priya mused. "Hitting such a small target would have taken quite a feat of marksmanship!" We both laughed, my wound hurt at the movement.

"Here, I brought you a load of papers with your name on that were left on my doorstep," she passed a large buff folder with familiar contents. It was old Morgan Edge's documents.

I dumped them at the side of the bed; something to read when sleep was denied to me by the mental replay of killing a man.

"How are Fang and Rommel?" I asked her. She tutted.

"The rock is no trouble; he just eats leaves. The rat on the other hand was getting on my tits with its incessant midnight rattling on that sodding wheel. In the end I stuck a wooden spoon handle up its arse and used it to clean the loo."

*

Days melted into each other.

My trickle of visitors dried up completely and I occupied my time by reading and re-reading Morgan Edge's papers. I concentrated long and hard on the newspaper he had left along with the other clues as to the location of the votives. There had to be something in it somewhere; everything else he passed on had been vital.

I began to get more and more fidgety and, as the strength returned to my limbs, I underwent some preliminary physio sessions to help me back on my feet.

It was after one such session on the twentieth day after my admission that I was resting on my bed. The pretty nurse was fussing around; adjusting the height of the backrest, plumping my pillows and refilling the plastic jug of drinking water.

The door to the ward banged closed and a large man with close-cropped blond hair, thick rimmed glasses and a white coat made his way from bed-to-bed, exchanging a few words with each occupant.

"I hope your hands are warm!" I joked with the pretty nurse as she took my blood pressure.

"Don't get over-excited or you will break my machine," she laughed back, strapping the cuff to my arm, and turning on the device which pinged and chirped happily.

The doctor made his way to the bed opposite mine in which an elderly man was recovering from a hip replacement operation. He checked the clipboard hanging from the metal frame at the end of the bed and then called the pretty nurse over.

She left my side with a heavy sigh and a theatrical roll of her eyes as if she were tired of responding to the continuous demands of the hospital bureaucracy. The doctor pointed to a few details on the patient's chart, then tugged at the corners of the bed sheet that had worked loose. The nurse nodded and the doctor said something which made the old man with the new hip chuckle.

The pretty nurse reached up and drew the overhead curtain around his bed and the blond man strode over to me.

"Satchmo," the man said, fixing me with a familiar intense gaze.

"Ty... I was worried about you. Where have you been?" I asked. Tyrone Edge, his hair cut short and dyed omelette yellow, ran the curtain around my bed on its rail.

"I've been clearing up a few loose ends," he replied nonchalantly. It was the usual tight-lipped Edge.

"Why the fuck are you dressed like that? Is pretending to be a doctor legal?" This was probably something I should have known given my now-erstwhile career.

"I'm not pretending to be a doctor. I'm just sporting a snazzy white coat. People can come to whatever conclusion they like," he replied, adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses with the trace of a faint smile on his lips.

"That doesn't explain why," I said angrily, not feeling in the mood for banter.

"You have a police guard. Three of them in fact, all undercover of course," Ty answered softly.

"What?" I said, confused.

"One downstairs in the foyer, one outside the entrance to the ward and one more, three beds that way." He pointed towards the door.

"You are shitting me," I whispered.

Frankly, I didn't believe him. The cost of maintaining that level of protection for so long would be phenomenal.

"Afraid not mate, you are hot property at the moment. I reckon it's a combination of your sudden fame and I suspect some of your dad's old friends looking after one of their own."

"Why are they here and why are you sneaking around past them?" I asked, losing my patience with being given the verbal run around.

"It seems the boys in blue are keen on interviewing a man matching my description with regard to the disappearance of one Edward 'Razor' Sharp and two of his associates. I thought it prudent to lay a little low, and that meant not visiting you for a while, and not strolling in here waving a flag and blowing a trumpet."