The Invisible Code (21 page)

BREAKING FREE

HAVING PLANNED HER
escape, she waited until they had finished serving afternoon tea.

There was no point in trying to get away at night because the front door was locked and alarmed. The shift ended in ten minutes’ time, and the staff nurses would go to change out of their uniforms in five minutes. Sabira’s screaming fit had not singled her out as someone to watch more carefully. The clinic’s brochures didn’t advertise the fact, but such behaviour was hardly out of the ordinary; much worse happened in the solitary first-floor bedrooms of the east wing at night. She had heard the nurses telling stories and laughing behind the patients’ backs when they thought no one was listening.

And now they were heading off duty, down to the back of the house.

She listened for their tread and conversation on the stairs. The danger was that the first of them – Sheryl Cooper was the most gimlet-eyed of the clock-watchers – would reach the front door in under five minutes. Sabira searched about her room, trying to think what she might need, but her head was still full of clouds. She knew there
was something she was supposed to take with her, but whenever she tried to think what it was the object of her attention slipped away.

She knew she was not at all well.

Being well meant being able to exert control over your actions, but it grew more difficult to do so with each passing day. It was much worse now than it ever had been before. If she remained here, in a place that encouraged so much introspection, she would never find her way back to the normal world. It was better to get out now and worry later about the consequences.

Taking a bag would only slow her down and make her more visible. It was a warm evening and she needed to travel light. She wished she had written the plan down somewhere, just so she could remember it, but at some point she had decided not to leave evidence.

Take it one step at a time
, she told herself, fighting down panic.
The first thing you must do is get out of the building without being seen – if you fail to do that, there will be no plan
.

She had gathered the few things she needed in the top drawer of her dresser, and stuffed them in her pockets. Outside, she could hear footsteps in the corridor – not a nurse because they wore trainers, but one of the other patients.

Opening her door a crack, she peered out and saw the door on the other side of the hall close. That room belonged to Spike, an American musician with a shock of dyed black hair and a body so thin that he could surely feel his bones rubbing when he walked. He looked seventy but Sheryl had told her he was just forty-two.

Stepping into the silent corridor she ran quickly to the head of the stairs and looked down. At the moment there was a clear path to the front door, but the ground-floor hall was fed by four corridors. Any number of people could appear within seconds.

I could be going to the newspaper stand
, she told herself, remembering the stack of journals that stood beside the front door.
That’s what I’ll say if anyone stops me. If I get caught this time I mustn’t make them suspicious enough to report me. There won’t be any second chances
.

She headed downstairs as if it was the most casual thing in the world. It was just five or six metres to the front door and the brass latch that could be popped smoothly and silently. She peered into the side corridors as she passed. Someone was laughing in the dining room but there was nobody in sight.

Dinner was being prepared in the kitchen – she could smell the usual stale aroma of warm potatoes and boiled vegetables. The clinic offered a full international menu including vegetarian and gluten-free options, but everyone seemed to opt for mash and pastry and gravy. Denied drugs and alcohol, they comforted themselves with carbohydrates.

She tried to imagine what would happen beyond the door, the path, the gate. She would make her way to Hampstead High Street and the Tube station, head south on the Northern Line. It was too risky to take a taxi. Taxis had talkative drivers.

She needed to do more than just get out of the clinic. She had to break free in her mind and start thinking clearly again, but try as she might she could not find a shape to her thoughts. Something grey and cotton-woolly had soaked them up and wiped them away.

Her hand was on the lock, pressing down on the trigger that would spring it, when an image appeared before her. Less a man than a devil in black, watching and waiting for her to make an attempt at escape, knowing that she would try and fail.

She faltered, heart speeding, hand dropping, suddenly sure that if she stepped across the divide from captivity to freedom she would be playing into his hands. She saw
a thin crimson line extending and dripping, staining the floor, and realized that the wound on her wrist was bleeding through the bandage.

She pushed at the lock and heard it pop, felt the cool evening draught come in around the lintel. But there was nothing she could do to make the black figure step aside. He was smiling benignly at her, amazed by her capacity for self-delusion, blithely coming to this country and marrying into the upper echelons, and then happily assuming she could destroy reputations and wreck the status quo without any risk to herself.

You are dead to us now
, he told her.

I am dead
, she repeated, losing her resolve and lowering her hand from the lock as the door to the outside world began to swing open.

‘Where are you going?’ asked smiling Amelia Medway, the senior nurse who was just arriving to start her shift. ‘You know you’re confined to the clinic now.’

She gripped Sabira’s arm firmly and led her away to the dining hall, passing her over to the annoyed Sheryl, who was now out of uniform, thinking that her duties were over for the night.

‘Take Sabira back upstairs and keep her there until the dinner bell,’ said Nurse Medway, adding softly, behind Sabira’s back, ‘I don’t want her left alone this evening, do you understand? Not after what happened last night.’

‘I’m off duty now,’ said Sheryl, who was going on a date, and didn’t get them very often. ‘I made sure she took her medication at three. I can get someone else to take over.’

‘No, I’ll do it,’ said Medway, raising her voice to the patient. ‘You can have dinner in your room tonight, Sabira. Would you like that? We usually have a special treat on a Saturday.’

Sabira stared dumbly back, barely seeing the face before her. Nurse Medway didn’t like the lack of focus
in her patient’s eyes, and made a mental note to check her prescription dose. Paroxetine was an anti-depressant that helped treat panic disorder and social anxiety, just part of the cocktail of drugs her doctor had insisted on administering, but she wondered if it was cross-reacting to cause somnolence.

’Let’s not take the stairs,’ said Nurse Medway cheerfully. ‘We’ll use the lift for a change.’ Looking down, she noticed the freshly stained bandage. Sabira felt her hand being raised, but offered no resistance. ‘And we’ll get that nasty old dressing changed for you while we’re at it.’

22

AT HOME

NOBODY ANSWERED THE
doorbell.

As usual, it was a war of nerves to see who would last out the longest. Alma Sorrowbridge was elbow-deep in kitchen soapsuds and Arthur Bryant was on his hands and knees, trying to reach an eyeball that had rolled under the bed.

The doorbell rang a third time, staccato and impatient. ‘Can you get it?’ called Bryant. ‘I’ve lost Rothschild’s eye.’

The outcome of any battle with Bryant was preordained. With a sigh, Alma dried her hands and headed for the front door. She opened it to find a bull-necked man in a stained white wifebeater vest. He was staring angrily past her. ‘Where the bloody hell is he?’ he demanded to know.

‘Mr Bryant, it’s for you,’ said Alma, heading back to the kitchen.

Bryant stuck his head around the door and raised an eyebrow. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Brad Pitt,’ replied their next-door neighbour, ‘and I want a bloody word with you.’

‘I’m rather busy right now,’ said Bryant, still appearing
as little more than a disembodied head. ‘Do you want to come back when you’ve got dressed?’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

Bryant’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement. Why did people always ask him that? ‘Brad Pitt the actor? You don’t look anything like him, not unless he’s been in prison. Very well, I suppose you’d better come in for a moment.’

The neighbour, whose overdeveloped body clearly kept him from walking with his legs together or his arms by his sides, made his way down the narrow hall. When he looked into Bryant’s study, his mouth fell open. ‘What the bloody hell are you up to?’

On the desk in front of him was half a cat. To be precise, the bottom half of a stuffed, sandstone-coloured Abyssinian cat. The top half lay on its side, filled with straw and old newspapers. ‘Oh, that’s Rothschild, my old friend Edna Wagstaff’s spirit medium. I’m afraid he’s past his peak condition. I was trying to restitch him, but this popped out.’ He held up Rothschild’s glass eye. ‘Edna sometimes used him to summon the ghost of Dan Leno.’

The neighbour gawped at Bryant as if he had started speaking Chamicuro.
²

‘Of course, Leno was a music-hall comic, so his advice wasn’t very useful. But he did give us the details of his clog-dancing routine. You can sit down if you don’t get dirt on anything. Who are you again?’

‘The poor sod who lives next door to you.’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘Just Joe to you.’

‘Well, Just Joe, what seems to be the trouble?’

‘Do you want a list?’ Joe scrubbed a hand through his stubbled hair, then ticked off his fingers. ‘One, there was a smell like burning rubber and rotten fish coming from
in here at three o’clock yesterday morning. Two, there was a noise that sounded like someone rupturing a duck just as I was trying to get my kid to sleep last night. And I’m guessing it was you who left the pig outside my front door yesterday.’

‘Ah. Well, they tried to deliver it while we were out, you see.’ Bryant had arranged for his old butcher to drop off a pig carcass that was past its sell-by date, but the butcher had been forced to dump the meat outside Bryant’s new flat after a traffic warden threatened to have his van towed away. Pigskin was genetically close to human flesh and ideal for experimentation. Bryant attempted to push a trotter under his desk as he was talking but the pig rolled into view. It had a dozen pub darts sticking out of its flank. ‘I’m trying to prove something,’ he explained lamely.

‘I think you’ve already proved enough, mate,’ said Joe. ‘When they took the last bloke out of your flat I told the council to warn us if they were thinking of renting to another nutcase, but I must have missed the call.’

‘I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot,’ said Bryant, forcing Joe to shake hands with him. ‘The smell caught me by just as much surprise as you. I needed to reach the boiling point of an ammonia-potassium compound and accidentally burned through one of Alma’s saucepans, so I set it down on the hall table, but the varnish melted and reset, so I had to unglue it with a blowlamp. And the noise you heard was actually atonal avant-garde German music from the school of Schoenberg.’

‘It sounded like it was from the ironmongers down Chapel Street market, and if you do it again after lights out I shall come round and fetch you a punch up the bracket,’ warned Joe. ‘Are we seeing eye to eye on that? What are you doing with a dead pig, anyway?’

‘That’s something I can’t tell you while the case is still open,’ Bryant admitted. ‘I’m a police detective.’

The news alarmed Joe, who in his time had been no stranger to the world of stolen goods. ‘How long ago did you retire?’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Well, you might want to think about it before we come to blows.’

‘There’s no need for that, we’ll be fine from now, I assure you. It’s just that I’m new to all of this.’ Bryant waved his hands around the wall with vague distaste.

‘All of what?’

‘You know – tenement living. Here. Slum dwellings. The stews. The rookeries.’

Joe looked at Bryant as if trying to tune in a broadcast on a broken radio. ‘What do you mean, rookeries?’

Bryant sighed impatiently, struggling with the effort of communication. ‘Poorly constructed low-quality housing with third-rate sanitation constructed in overcrowded, impoverished areas for the poor, often occupied by criminals and prostitutes,’ he recited, ‘named after the nesting habits of the rook, a bird that constructs large, rowdy colonies consisting of multiple nests—’