I was stopped in my tracks by a banshee yell and a ball of fury rushing towards me. Before I knew what was happening there was a long blade quivering under my chin.
‘You should be more careful,’ Stella said, withdrawing the knife. ‘Were you followed?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, taking a deep breath. I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone.’
She reached behind me to close the door and drag the corrugated iron sheet across.
‘You must need a drink,’ she said, leading the way to her living quarters.
‘When did you get back?’ I asked. It suddenly occurred to me that for all I knew she might have been in on the betrayal.
‘Maxi must have been put under pressure,’ she said, second-guessing me again. ‘Friends do shop each other but only when they need to in order to survive. It’s not safe to stay here much longer. Hence the welcome I gave you just then.’
I didn’t tell Stella about breaking into the house to answer the telephone, nor about what I’d seen in the first room. After all, I still didn’t know what she’d been doing upstairs at the second-hand record shop. I told her I’d made my way back slowly through the storm, picking my way carefully so as to avoid pursuit. I did, however, ask if there was a telephone in the ice rink. She said no: there were very few at all in the City and, as far as she was aware, they were good only for local calls and all lines were monitored. I could believe that.
I stayed with Stella long enough to dry my clothes out and get warm again. She offered to tidy up my hair. ‘You can see how nervous Maxi was,’ she said, running a pair of nail scissors over the worst bits. ‘Normally she’s an excellent stylist.’ But I was restless. Having heard Annie Risk’s voice, clearly in distress, I knew I had to try anything to get out of the City. I asked Stella about the men she had mentioned who had been into the Dark and stumbled back into the City. Both were beyond reach, she said, committed to institutions for the criminally insane.
‘I must be able to get to them,’ I said.
‘Impossible. You’d be killed before you got close.’
‘Which of the two is the more accessible?’ I pressed.
‘A man called Gledhill,’ she said with a sigh. ‘They keep him in King’s Hospital. That’s all I know.’
She told me the way to King’s and said, ‘You can’t go now, Carl. You need sleep and it’s still curfew.’
‘Stella,’ I said, ‘thanks for all you’ve done, but I’ve got to go.’
She protested but held the corrugated iron guard aside for me as I climbed out. The rain had stopped, leaving pavements glistening under the orange lights. I walked quickly, running with as light and swift a step as possible across roads, and peering down back entries, alert to every sound and movement. The tail end of the storm blew around the rooftops, shaking trees and curtain rags behind broken windows. I found myself humming the keyboard riff from ‘Fear’ by the Passage and I pictured Annie Risk, her body illuminated by orange street light. The riff matched my quick, stealthy march. I’d only been to Annie’s flat twice, had only known her a few weeks but as the only link between this world and hers — that frightened voice on the phone line — she was assuming almost iconic significance. I’d even begun seeing her in Stella, which had been another reason for wanting to leave the ice rink without delay.
I stopped dead in my tracks. A splash of white light on the wall diagonally opposite could only come from a car headlamp. I crouched in a doorway and waited. The car turned into the street where I was hiding. I didn’t know if it was police or the dubious Giff and his associates. Either way I preferred my own company. The car crawled closer and I curled into a ball. Peeping out I saw the driver — wearing a black boiler suit bristling with badges — switch on a spotlight and angle it manually at the doorways on the other side of the street. He swept the beam back and forth while his colleague in the passenger seat had a good look. In a moment he’d swap to my side of the street and that would be my short cut to the even closer haircut and the open-topped bus.
The car crept forward. He switched the light across.
A matter of inches.
Had the car been travelling two miles an hour more slowly the beam would have caught me. Instead it hit the brickwork six inches to my right. Consequently I was plunged into deeper shadow and they never saw me. But they could almost have heard the thump of my heart or my sigh of relief. Only when the car had turned right at the end of the street did I uncurl my long body, stretch painfully and dart to the junction. I looked right and saw the police car turning right again. I went left and ran like a bastard.
I didn’t know how I was going to get into the hospital. Maybe I was relying on there being some wall to climb, a window to lever open.
King’s Hospital was a fortress. Floodlights bathed the front entrance on the main road, so I trotted down the smaller road at the side. There was a wall all right, but it was twice my height and offered few footholds. I ran on, asking myself if this was a stupid idea. I reached the end of the wall. It turned left and seemed to extend without a break into the night. I ran along it at a crouch. There were no openings. Then I noticed a section of railing on the other side of the street and went across to take a look. It was a canal. I leap-frogged the railing and scrambled down a muddy slope to the tow-path. There was just enough width and height to make it under the road. I bent down and crawled into the tunnel. It was dark and stank of sewage but if I was lucky it might just yield a stage door entrance to the hospital.
After twenty-five yards the ceiling lifted and I was able to proceed at full height. There was a soft phosphorescent glow hovering over the water, by which I could make out where to place my feet without tripping. A large opening came into view on my side. I guessed it was a waste outlet coming from the hospital. Looking ahead, there were no more breaks in the wall as far as I could see, which admittedly wasn’t very far but I was in a hurry. So I ducked into the waste pipe. The stench was nauseating but I held my insides together by force of will and splashed through the trickle of canal-bound effluent, humming ‘Watching You Dance’. I held my breath as the pipe became steeper for a few yards and then levelled out and the ceiling disappeared. I peered over the side. This section of the pipe ran through a yard at the back of the hospital, uncovered perhaps to allow extra waste to be tipped in by hand.
I clambered up into the yard and walked over to a rickety-looking door. It opened at my touch and I stiffened. Far off I could hear a buzz of talk and the clang of instruments or cutlery in a sink. I walked away from these sounds to the first intersection of passageways and looked down a long, unpainted corridor lit by a string of bare off-white bulbs. I crept down the corridor, glancing in at every window in every door I passed. I saw rooms full of lockers and dissection tables, rows of lecture-room desks and chairs, pigeon-holes stuffed with files and notes. No sign of any staff and no noise, save the odd dripping tap.
I reached a turning signposted Haematology and Secure Unit. I turned down the new corridor and when another junction pointed left to the Secure Unit I went that way.
Maybe I’d gained access the back way and comers from other directions would face tighter security, or the Secure Unit was not quite as described. I walked straight into a long, drab ward with beds down both sides, most unoccupied, a few curtained off and billowing with shadows. Something told me to keep going through the ward and into a second, L-shaped room. The walls were whitewashed, temperature and lighting kept low. I walked silently towards the corner and hugged the wall, waiting for my breathing to steady, listening for any sound coming from around the corner.