“We were,” the guy who’d spoken outside the classroom said. “But he had to go to hospital.”
“What?” Melissa said. “Why?”
“Because of that weird red smoke,” he said. “Didn’t you smell it? The kid took a right lungful, and came over all queasy. So the other officers put him in one the ambulances, and off they went.”
Melissa shot me a worried glance.
“Which hospital are they heading for?” she said. “Did they tell you?”
“Of course,” the guy said. “St Joseph’s.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
I’d thought Melissa’s driving was aggressive on the way to Woolwich, two days ago. But that was before I saw how she cut through the traffic that afternoon between the school and the hospital. And she wasn’t just driving. She was using her phone, too.
She called Chaston, to find out if anything was happening at the Houses of Parliament.
It wasn’t.
She called Thames House, to ask them to intercept the kid’s ambulance.
They couldn’t.
She called St Joseph’s, to see if it had arrived yet.
It hadn’t.
With each new frustration her right foot grew heavier until I was tempted to pick up the phone myself and pre-emptively call an ambulance for the two of us. It was starting to seem inevitable we’d need one. The chances she was taking were becoming untenably crazy. And then, after a particularly near miss with a black cab, Melissa suddenly eased off the accelerator and revealed what was really bothering her.
“Did you hear what those other agents told me?” she said. “The ones who arrived with the fire engines?”
“No,” I said.
“I asked them how they got there so fast. I was thinking, it would take some serious hussle to get out of Thames House and still catch the emergency crews like that. And guess what they told me?”
“What?”
“They hadn’t scrambled in response to the fire at all. They were already there, staking the place out.”
“They were? Why? Have we crossed paths with another case?”
“No. Same case. Think about it. They just happened to have Geiger counters with them, and immediately test the water in the engines’ tanks?”
“So why were they there?”
“They were ordered to be. By Arthur Hardwicke. Last night. You know what that means?”
I took a moment to think.
“He took your theory about the school more seriously than you’d thought?” I said.
“No,” she said. “It means he doesn’t trust me. If he’d trusted me, he’d have told me they were being assigned, and we could have coordinated with them. Not been surprised when they showed up, guns at the ready.”
“But you’re the one who came up with the link between al-Aqsaba’a, the kid, and the school. How does that make you look untrustworthy?”
“He must have thought I suggested the school link so I’d be assigned to it. And sabotage our response to it. Which is exactly what it looks like I’ve done.”
“Not necessarily. The kid breathed in smoke. The protection detail are paid to be cautious.”
“I let the kid slip through my fingers. That’s the bottom line. If anything happens to him, they’ll say it’s my fault. They’ll say I did it on purpose. Mud sticks, David.”
“It doesn’t have to. And it won’t, if we get our hands on the poor little lad and make sure nothing else happens to him.”
There were spaces left for two ambulances at the Accident and Emergency entrance to St Joseph’s when Melissa pulled in, but she was in such a hurry to get inside that our car ended up blocking both of them. A hospital security guard saw us, and made a half-hearted attempt to intervene but he gave it up as a lost cause long before we’d entered the building and reached the reception desk.
“We’re looking for a patient,” Melissa said, flashing her ID card at the middle-aged woman behind the counter. “Name of Toby Smith. He should have been brought in by ambulance in the last five minutes.”
The receptionist took her time to reply.
“Who?” she said.
“Toby Smith,” Melissa said.
“You’re out of luck. Sorry. There’s no one with that name come in here.”
“It’s a complex situation. He might not have been using his real name. He’s around five years old. Male. Have you had any boys that age brought in?”
“I can’t tell you that kind of information.”
Melissa held out her ID once again, and didn’t move it until the woman turned to check her computer.
“Two boys were admitted this morning, yes,” she said. “One was five. The other, six.”
“Good,” Melissa said. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Where they are’s nothing to do with me. You’ll have to ask the triage nurse. She’s the one that decides who goes where.”
“OK. Where is she?”
“Round the next corner. You can’t miss her.”
The triage nurse remembered both the young boys who’d been brought in that day. Her words said the first one had fallen down stairs at home, but the expression on her face told us she didn’t believe the stepfather’s story. On another day I might have been tempted to have a chat with the guy, since she said he was still in the waiting room, but her recollection of the second kid meant that wasn’t a possibility. He was the right age. The right height. He was complaining of the right symptoms. He’d been brought in by the right kind of people. Two fit looking men in their twenties. Friends of the family, they’d told her. And we could see she didn’t believe their story, either.
She said she hadn’t been too worried by the kid’s symptoms, but had admitted him anyway so a doctor could take a closer look. She made a quick call, and told us we could find him in cubicle twelve on the main Accident and Emergency ward.
The ward was long and narrow, with a single row of beds along each side. There were twenty altogether. The spaces between them were wide, to allow for trolleys of special equipment to be wheeled in, and the floor was scuffed and scraped as a result. About a third of the beds were occupied, and beyond them we could see the two banks of cubicles. But as we approached, we could see that none of them held any patients. We checked the numbers, to be sure, and there was no doubt. Cubicle twelve was empty.
“Do you think they transferred him?” Melissa said. “Or could they have released him already?”
“I don’t think it’s either of those,” I said. “Look at the cot. The sheets haven’t been touched. They’re immaculate. I don’t think he was ever here.”
“You might be right. But the nurse seemed so sure. I’ll go and ask her to check. You stay here. Maybe the kid just needed the bathroom or something.”
Five minutes crawled past, and aside from the two nurses who were bustling between the half-dozen beds that were in use at the other end of the ward, nothing happened. Melissa didn’t return. There was no sign of the kid or his escorts. I was beginning to worry, and when another five minutes elapsed and I was still on my own, I decided the time for waiting was over.
The shift must have just changed, because a new nurse was waiting behind the triage desk when I stepped back into the corridor. She hadn’t seen Melissa, she said, but that didn’t really help. She hadn’t been there long enough. All she could do was suggest I ask at the nurses’ station on the ward.