Stevie jerked awake. Her knees were drawn up to her chin and her eyelids felt as if they had been weighted with pennies. The thought forced her eyes open.
She was lying on a single bed in a small, white-painted, windowless room. The light was a searing fluorescent bright. Her head was foggy from whatever the stranger had sedated her with and her throat was Sunday-morning dry. Stevie massaged her temples with her fingertips. She looked up, saw a camera peering at her from a high corner, and resolved not to cry.
The collapsing world had made her think that Buchanan would give up his secrets as readily as Dr Ahumibe had, like a ship dropping its ballast as it neared port, but it seemed that the chemist was as obsessed with keeping his secrets as she was with uncovering the truth. Stevie looked up at the camera and said in a voice creaky from lack of fluids, ‘You win. Let me go and I promise to mind my own business.’ There was no sign that anyone had heard her.
She swung her feet on to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed until she was sure that she could stand up without falling over. Her legs felt numb and insubstantial, as if she had been on a bumpy long-haul flight that had confined passengers to their seats, but Stevie managed the three steps to the door. It lacked a handle but a small, reinforced window looked out on to a deserted, equally white corridor.
The only hiding place was beneath the bed, or in the small shower room attached to her cell. Stevie checked them both, but it was clear that her satchel had disappeared. She searched her pockets, but she had already registered the absence of the gun’s comforting weight and was unsurprised to find her mobile gone.
A second security camera observed her in the shower room. Stevie gave it the finger, then washed her face, used the toilet and drank some water from the tap.
The madness of the last few days crashed over her. If she had fled the city, as Derek had told her to, she might be holed up somewhere safe, ready to sit out the sweats. The thought brought hot tears to Stevie’s eyes, but she felt the surveillance camera shift and blinked them away. She looked into the lens and repeated her offer: ‘Let me go and I won’t bother you again.’ But the camera maintained its mute, unblinking stare. ‘Okay,’ she muttered. ‘Fuck you.’ Stevie went back into the bedroom, stripped the sheet from the bed and started to fashion it into a noose.
She had just managed to string her handiwork over the bathroom door when the man in the protective suit entered the cell. He shoved her on to the bed and swept the sheet away. Stevie had left the duvet lying on the floor and he scooped that up too. It was an awkward movement to make in the bulky suit and Stevie grabbed her chance. She kicked the stranger in the stomach, knocking him off balance, and dashed for the door. For a moment she thought she might make it, but her jailer flung out a gloved hand and caught her by the ankle, felling her smack against the floor. The fall knocked the wind from her and Stevie lay there for a long time after he had locked the door behind him.
The unwavering fluorescence of the overhead lights absorbed all concept of time, and Stevie wasn’t sure how long it was before the man returned. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the floor to avoid the camera’s stare and the dazzle of the lights, but raised her head when he entered. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to coax it into some kind of a style. The man threw a tracksuit and some underwear on to the floor and said, ‘Shower and put these on.’
His voice was muffled by his head mask, but Stevie had felt his strength and knew that he was young. She gave him a modest version of her killer smile.
‘I’m not showering beneath a camera.’
‘Do it yourself, or I’ll make you.’ The mask made him sound like an asthmatic Dalek. ‘If you’d looked in a mirror lately, you’d realise no one’s interested in your skinny arse.’ He tossed a mobile phone on to the bare mattress. ‘When that rings, answer it.’
Stevie looked directly at the man’s mask. She could see her reflection in the visor, her head cartoon-large on its curved surface. She kicked her running shoes beneath the bed, pulled off Simon’s battered trousers and T-shirt, and stripped away her underwear. She forced herself to stand there for a second, naked and defiant, goose pimples rising on her flesh, and then scooped the fresh clothes from the floor and went through to the shower. She felt the man’s eyes following her. Her body trembled with fatigue and the uncertainty of whether his interest could be worked to her advantage, or if that would only add to the danger she was in.
Forty-Two
‘I didn’t think you’d come.’ Alexander Buchanan looked like a man who had won the lottery but was worried taxes might decimate his winnings. He stood outside her room, his face framed by the door’s small window, a mobile phone to his ear. ‘I’m sorry for the clumsy welcome, but you didn’t give us many options.’
Stevie put the phone the man had left her on speaker. She faced the window and said, ‘There’s usually an alternative to chloroforming a girl and locking her up under surveillance.’ She tried to summon the woman she had been on Shop TV: the unflappable dolly, smart but unthreatening. ‘We were both friends of Simon’s. I thought that might make us friends too.’
Buchanan grinned and shook his head, as if she were incorrigible. The strain of the days since they had first met showed on his face, but his voice remained as smooth as a late-night disc jockey’s.
‘So why turn up unannounced, armed with a tyre iron and a gun?’
‘It’s chaos out there. I needed to protect myself.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘There’s enough death in the world.’ Stevie paused, to give her words more weight. ‘Dr Ahumibe has committed suicide.’
‘John left me a message before he took care of the remaining children. He told me his plans. A great pity.’
She had hoped the news would be a weakening blow, but the chemist might have been talking about arrangements for a working lunch. She said, ‘Dr Ahumibe told me about the mistake you made with the cerebral palsy treatment, and your decision to carry on.’
The chemist shook his head. The glass in the door’s small window was strengthened with chequered wire. It gave the illusion that his skin was rippling as he moved.
‘John’s weakness for confessing got Simon and me into trouble more than once when we were boys. I hope he also told you that continuing with the treatment was the quickest way to resolve the difficulty we were having with the formula.’
‘He told me you persuaded him that it was the best way forward, but that Simon didn’t agree.’
Buchanan made a face that might have been intended to convey regret.
‘Disagreeable is the last word one would apply to Simon, and yet he often did disagree. We always managed to persuade him in the end.’
‘But not this time.’ Stevie’s legs were sore, but there was nowhere to sit except for the floor or the bed, and she wanted to be able to see Buchanan’s expression. She leant against the door, putting her face next to its small window. ‘When Simon refused to go along with the cover-up, you killed him. I’m guessing Frei died for similar reasons.’
Buchanan put his face against the window, close to hers. He lowered his voice, as if they weren’t speaking from opposite sides of wood and glass, and putting their heads together was a prelude to a confidence.
‘A neat theory, but not what happened.’
This time the chemist’s smile was like a closing door. Stevie straightened her spine and looked Buchanan in the eyes. This was not a moment for soft selling or subliminal messages, this was a do-or-die deal. She put an edge of command into her words, as persuasive as a TV mesmerist.