Rubbernecker (17 page)

The doctor looks back down at me and clears his throat.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Galen,’ he says softly.

My mind turns slowly around the pivot of his words. He
does
sound very sorry.
What for?
I start to worry. Maybe he heard something in my lungs. Maybe I’m not as on the mend as I thought I was. Maybe—

Then he leans over me again and I see that in his right hand he holds a pair of tweezers.

And that between their glittering points is a peanut.

My heart spasms with electric terror and in an instant I understand everything.

He’s the one! He’s the killer!

And he knows how incredibly vulnerable I am …

My panicked hand flaps like a fish on a bedspread beach as my memory detonates: I’m four years old and my throat tightens and my eyes swell shut, even while the traitorous treat still seasons the inside of my mouth. My mother screams somewhere, and my head bounces on my father’s arm as he runs from the stalled car into the
hospital
, shouting, ‘He can’t breathe! He can’t breathe!’ I’m jostled and tossed and snatched from my father’s arms by other arms in white sleeves, and the lights jiggle overhead as the doctor runs down the corridor to save my life with a scalpel and a tube in my throat, so that I can grow up to bring the stubby hands to the marital table. The stubby hands and the allergies listed on my medical notes for everyone to see …

The doctor lowers the peanut towards my lips.

‘
Guh!
’ I cry. ‘
Guh!
’

I’m more scared now than when I was a child. No one is going to help me this time.

I feel a knuckle against my chin, the nut nudging my lip – and I jab out my well-trained tongue, my only defence. It knocks the peanut from the grip of the tweezers and for a split second I’m triumphant.

And then I feel it drop instead into the back of my throat …

Dying is far easier than it looks in the movies.

There are no flashy cuts, no explosions, no speeches – just a clumsy doctor, swearing and fumbling between my teeth, digging the sharp tweezers into my palate and tongue, even as my throat swells jealously around the evidence he wants back.

The terror. The panic.

The
sorrow
for all I’m leaving behind.

I can’t die! I have people to hold, to love; to make it up to—

Too late.
Too late
. Pain cleaves me. My jaw clamps in agony and I slither back down the well. There’s no tunnel, no light, no return.

Darkness snaps shut and truth spills from my dead heart –
I love you I love you I love you—

A small hand takes mine.

‘Look at it
go
, Daddy!’

28

4017
.

The ugly code had its uses.

Patrick took a while to find the switches, then blinked as the lights shuddered awake to banish shadows from the dissecting room.

The cadavers were just sickly-sweet leftovers now. Missing limbs, gaping chests, with their skin peeled off them in dirty brown folds, and their pale brains gleaming with wetting solution beside their empty skulls.

Yet they seemed more alive to Patrick now than they had at the start. More
real
, now that he understood them better.

As he passed them, his sense of excitement grew. He knew the cause of death. He was
sure
of it. The list was wrong; Mick was wrong; Spicer was wrong; his fellow students were wrong; and whatever doctor had signed the death certificate was wrong. None of them knew what he knew – that Lexi Galen had an allergy to peanuts. And Patrick would bet the bicycle he’d inherited from his father that she had inherited that allergy from hers.

He couldn’t wait to tell them all that he’d solved the puzzle. Especially Scott.

Patrick looked down at Number 19, whose one remaining eye stared through him dully. He looked away quickly, and hunched down beside the table. Underneath it were the scores of bags they’d slowly filled with the dead man’s lungs, his liver, his small
intestines
– all pressed against the clear plastic like the cheap mince his mother bought from the wagon at Brecon market. More of Number 19 was now under the table than on it.

Patrick sorted through it all but couldn’t find the peanut.

He frowned. That made no sense; he had bagged it and tagged it himself. He was too impatient; it was small; he must have missed it. He went through the process again in slow reverse, sitting on the cold floor, loading the shelf under the table more carefully this time.

The peanut was not there.

Patrick sat very still. One of the others had got there first. Scott? Dilip? But
how
? How had they known about the allergy when he’d only found out by accident? Had he missed something obvious? And if they didn’t know about the allergy, why would they take it?

The lights went out and he was blind. He quickly squeezed his eyes tightly shut. It was a trick his father had taught him on night walks in the Beacons.

Too late he registered that the main door of the Biosciences block had been open. He’d not noticed it because he’d never seen it closed, but in the middle of the night it would have been;
should
have been – unless someone was already inside.

Idiot!

He opened his better-adjusted eyes. A black figure was framed in the charcoal doorway.

Patrick started to get up to leave but, before he could, the man entered the room.

Strangeness rippled up the back of Patrick’s neck. Turning off the lights
before
entering a room made no sense. So, instead of standing up and asking why the lights were off, Patrick stayed put on one knee and one spread hand, his stomach knotting with a fear that was all the more fearful because he didn’t understand it.

The man walked confidently between the bodies, as if he did so in the dark all the time. There was no fumbling, no banged shins
or
muttered expletives. Between the struts of the tables and the remains of the ruined bodies, the figure walked swiftly towards him, announced only by the small squeak of shoes on polished linoleum.

He was coming straight for him.

Without thinking, Patrick crawled silently on to the shelf below Table 19, along with the bags of meat and bone and offal.

Lexi’s cold father gave a little under his body, and he almost cried out with the idea of the cold flesh cushioning him.

Only the plastic between them stopped him screaming.

He bit his own lip as the shadow stopped beside him. In a moment that rushed him back to the bookies and the Labrador, Patrick watched the knees and the thighs of the man’s black trousers turn slowly, as if scanning the room, looking for something.

Patrick stopped breathing; if he could have stopped his heart pounding, he would have.

The moment seemed endless. Then the legs walked away and back towards the door.

For a second Patrick was relieved – then he realized that if the man left the block, the outer door would be locked, trapping him inside.

He rolled off the bags of cold meat and one of his trainers squealed on the floor. He froze again, then quickly pulled the shoes off his feet and slid swiftly across the floor on his socks to Table 21, and from there to Table 13.

The man was still ahead of him. He had to catch him up. Or slow him down.

Patrick wasn’t a spy. He didn’t have a grappling hook or satellite communications, or even a black turtleneck sweater. He had his trainers – that was all – so he hurled one of them into a dim corner of the room, where it landed with a slap and a clatter.

He almost laughed when the man stopped, turned, and then followed the noise to the back wall like a stupid dog, while Patrick skidded out of the door in his socks.

He couldn’t ride properly with one trainer, so he walked. Ran. Half walked, half ran, pushing his bike, and with his socks wet and stretching and tripping him up until finally he peeled them off and dropped them in the gutter. His foot was shockingly white under the streetlights.

A police car passed and Patrick pressed himself into a garden hedge, even though he’d done nothing wrong. Something told him that this was one of those occasions when people might not understand what he’d been doing. And he had no answers tonight – only questions that made his head ache to think of them.

Before, Patrick had only thought about the peanut in relation to
how
Number 19 had died, not
why
. Why was a far tougher puzzle, and now that it was gone, the peanut seemed to be a critical piece of that jigsaw. How did Number 19 ingest a peanut that could kill him? And why would somebody steal it now?

Cold rain trickled under his T-shirt and down his back, and still he stood there. For the first time that he could ever remember – and he could remember almost
everything
– Patrick knew he needed help.

Patrick didn’t have his blue gloves with him, but he stopped at the payphone outside the bookies and dialled with a wet sleeve pulled over his shivering index finger.

It took thirteen rings before the mechanical rhythm was halted by the sound of sleepy mouth-breathing and a croak that might have been
hello
.

‘If there was something that proved how someone had died,’ he said, ‘why would you want to hide that?’

There was a long silence and then his mother said shakily, ‘Who
is
this?’

Why is he asking? What’s happened?

Sarah Fort’s head asked the questions her heart didn’t want answered. She had been expecting the worst for years – ever since Patrick was a small boy – and yet time hadn’t dulled the sharp panic she felt pricking her chest and starting to turn her stomach.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked him. Anyone but Patrick would have noticed her voice shaking.

‘Say someone dies,’ he said again. ‘And then, if someone
else
– not the dead person – someone
else
—’

He was obviously getting muddled, but she didn’t help him out. She was in no hurry to hear what he wanted to say. She would wait all night – all her life – rather than help him to reach the point where everything she had done for both of them would fall apart.

But he persisted. He was always so bloody
persistent
.

‘If that someone hides something that might show
why
the other person died.’

‘Yes?’ she said faintly.

‘Well, what does that mean?’

Sarah paused. ‘I don’t understand the question.’

She knew she was being obtuse. Things would be so much simpler if she’d just said,
What are you trying to tell me, Patrick?
She didn’t ask because he would tell her – and she didn’t want to deal with whatever might happen after that. She would rather play this precarious game of denial.

‘Why are you calling tonight? It’s not Thursday.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need help.’

‘Are you all right?’ She was surprised to hear a sharp note of concern in her voice, despite everything.

‘I lost one of my trainers and I need help to understand the
actions
.’

‘What actions?’

‘Hiding the
thing
,’ he said in a tone that revealed his frustration, ‘that might show why something happened. What does that
action
mean?’

She thought carefully of the best way to answer him, and then did.

‘People hide things because they don’t want anyone to know about them.’

‘Why?’

You tell me, Patrick! Rotting animals under your pillow, and pictures of dead children and crazy lists of weird words! YOU tell ME!

Instead she said, ‘I suppose … because they feel guilty.’

‘About what?’

Sarah felt sick. ‘Doing something bad.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, Patrick! Something bad! Something very, very
bad
!’

There was a pause.

‘So what must I do about it?’

What indeed? She felt emotion start to clog her throat.

‘Do whatever you think best,’ she said hoarsely.

‘Best for who?’

Sarah could barely whisper. ‘For you.’