“Write them down,” Christopher said. “Write them all down. You’ll wish you had if you don’t.”
He went on for another ten minutes, listing dates and locations and specific times. His tongue peeking from between his lips, Yoda scribbled what he was saying on the inside cover of a tattered Graham Greene novel. When Christopher had finished, he fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be revived, even when Will started kicking his chair and demanding to know what these dates meant.
“Leave him,” Yoda said, reverentially. “He has spoken.”
“Spoken gibberish, more like. I shouldn’t have come here. What a waste of time.”
“Christopher said, while we were waiting for you, that the girl wasn’t dead. That she would return to you. Soon.” Yoda’s beatific smile failed to curtail Will’s sudden rage.
“Sadie? What do you know about it?” he shouted, leaping from his chair and causing Yoda to rock back on his heels and fall to the floor. “Where is she? What about Eli? Cat?”
“I don’t know,” Yoda said, trying to crawl away. “I don’t know. Christopher said…”
“Christopher said? Christopher said? He doesn’t fucking know me.”
Will didn’t know what he was going to do but he had a very strong feeling he might actually try to harm Yoda or Christopher, anything in order to get some information from them.
He was reaching down to grab hold of Yoda’s T-shirt, ignorant to the barked demands for an explanation for his presence from the starched nurse standing in the doorway, her hands squirming together. He was reaching when, out of the window, he saw the mountaineer, Flint, striding towards him across the grass, gripping by the hair the heads of Elisabeth and Sadie.
But then he saw that it wasn’t Flint after all, just a groundsman carrying buckets of pondweed. The nurse had her hand on Will’s arm now, but he couldn’t turn away, even though the shape of his shock had been softened, made manageable.
“I think you should leave, sir,” the nurse was saying, at the same time as exhorting Yoda, whom she called Mickey, to get up and tidy his magazines. “It is you who should be leaving, isn’t it?” she said to Will, her brow knitting as she volleyed a glance between the three of them.
“Probably,” Will said, shaking his head. Nice place, he thought. Even the staff get in on the madness. He took the Graham Greene novel and stuffed it in his coat pocket, wondering what he should do now. So much of his hope had been pinned on Sloe Heath that he had been unable to see beyond what might happen here. He had hoped to find an answer to Cat’s death, or even to find Cat’s killers. He had not expected this Laurel and Hardy nonsense to impede him. There must remain some kind of clue here – why else would those murderers have mentioned it?
Unless, he thought grimly, as he headed for the exit, he had misheard after all and had wasted all of this time. If that was the case, then he deserved to wander these corridors for ever, with the rest of the nutjobs.
“No, no, no,” he heard Tonto/Yoda/Mickey whining, “you’re not right. You’re not right,” and the increasingly shrill demands of the nurse to shut up and play nice.
Will ran his fingers along the dense block of pages in his pocket, wondering what the dates could mean. A slap resounded through the shiny corridor, followed by the smash of a lamp. Will heard Christopher, his voice laden with sleep, laced with terror, say: “You promised never to hurt me! You promised you’d leave me be!”
And now someone else was speaking, but it wasn’t Mickey and it wasn’t the nurse.
“Did I make a mistake?” it asked, in a voice that sounded full of wetness. “Did I err?” An airless giggle tightened Will’s skin. He stood in the middle of the corridor, looking back the thirty feet or so to the open door on the left. Thin shadows jerked across the blade of pale sunlight that had collapsed across the hallway matting. Mickey and Christopher weren’t talking any more.
Will crept back towards the doorway.
“Was it him?” the nurse was asking. “Was it the other?” Her voice was muffled, and punctuated by rhythmic, moist smacking sounds. A lump stuck in Will’s craw; he suddenly could not get the dream memory of himself fucking Sadie out of his mind.
As he reached the crack in the door, he moved only his neck, stretching to make sense of the movement within that narrow gap. He saw the nurse half-undressed. But then, how could clothes be expected to cling to her when her own flesh could not? She was gamely trying to gather loops of subcutaneous fat as they peeled apart from the muscle, like so much molten cheese. But her true focus was elsewhere. It looked as though she were kissing Christopher. Her mouth was fast against his, but surely her face should not be journeying so deeply. He heard her trying to talk again, as she burrowed further. The tall man’s body hung slackly from the powerful joist of her neck. His leather flying helmet jiggled around his throat.
Will turned and ran when he saw her teeth begin to inch their way out of the back of Christopher’s skull.
“My God,” he moaned, as he hurtled for the exit doors, waiting for the crash of her pursuit. “God.”
Outside he pounded across the car parks, past a gaggle of white-coated doctors bewildered by his haste. Climbing the rise that took him onto the cricket pitch, he risked a look around and saw the nurse’s arm like a prop from a horror film, reaching out through the brick wall.
“Fuck.”
The cricket pitch was greasy from the previous night’s downpour, and Will forced himself to traverse it before he checked again as to her whereabouts, lest he slip. He felt horribly exposed on this huge square of lawn, the naked trees surrounding him, rattling in the wind. The space made him aware of the frantic schuss of his coat and the hiss of his breath as he sprinted. The colour and shade of the grass merged and separated under the insistent wind, like the nap on a suede coat when it is brushed. He was almost at the other end of the pitch when he saw the nurse emerging from the grass: a swimmer hauling herself from the deep. She even shook her head a little, as if to rid her ears of water. He viewed, with nausea, how scraps of Christopher’s face clung to the uncertain flesh of her own, how green blades from the pitch slashed her skin as she dragged herself clear and turned to look up at him.
He wouldn’t meet her gaze; not until he had to. Not until she had him and he could look nowhere else. He swerved right and scampered for a ramp that would take him into the laundry department of the hospital. Large, lidded skips queued outside, bulging with yellow plastic bags awaiting incineration. The smell of shit and disinfectant hit him like a shovel as he shouldered the door open; he heard the ratty clitter of what could only have been claws moving fast across the road in his wake. Elbowing past great steel cages rammed with dirty linen, Will ducked into a mess room and forced himself to freeze. A kettle was boiling on a Baby Belling, funnelling steam into the face of a chimp on a calendar. That day’s Sun fought for possession of the small table with a series of coffee rings and a bowl of labelled keys. Will silenced the room by removing the kettle from the hotplate. Sweat blinded him. He blinked it away. What if she was smelling him out? As if to confirm the fear, he heard a snuffling in the corridor, as of a dog pinning down the location of a hidden bone.
When the door opened, and one of the cleaners came in, Will laughed in disbelief. Because it was her. It was her. The woman who had chased him and Elisabeth from her house all those days ago in London.
“Cup of tea, mate?” she asked, and in doing so, a slick of drool flooded from her mouth. “Bit parky, isn’t it?” Her top lip fell from her face like a slug from a branch.