Light was spilling out from the main doors, creating a no-go area as far as he was concerned but he managed to get a view of the reception desk, using a small conifer for cover. There were two people there, a receptionist and maybe a porter, Gordon thought. They were chatting and looked as if they might be doing so for some time to come. Even if the porter were to move on, he reckoned, it would still be almost impossible to get through the swing doors without attracting the attention of the receptionist. He looked along the wall to the right of the front door and saw an open window.
It was a small, single, frosted-glass window that was almost certainly a toilet, he thought. If he could get himself in through it, he could by-pass the reception area entirely and get out into the corridor to head straight for the IVF unit. The trouble was that the window was not in shadow; it was clearly visible to anyone approaching the building from the front. He would have to choose his moment well. He looked about him nervously, seeing no one but still feeling anxious. A final glance over his shoulder and he scurried across to the window and pushed it up.
To his great relief it moved without difficulty. With another quick look back over his shoulder, he started to clamber in through the narrow opening head first, stifling a series of curses, as he seemed to hit every earlier bruise and knock on his body on the frame on the way in. He supported himself with his arms on the toilet cistern as he pulled his legs through and struggled in the narrow space to gain an upright position. When he’d finally achieved it, he turned and looked out to the right and left outside before re-closing the window and preparing himself for the next phase. He listened for a moment, although this was not too effective as the cistern in the lavatory was faulty and water was running noisily down the overflow. He decided that he’d have to take a chance and drew in a deep breath before opening the door and stepping out into the brightness of the corridor. It was deserted.
As he moved along it, the silence was suddenly fractured by the sound of male voices, so many that Gordon couldn’t quite make up his mind at first where they were coming from. He looked around him anxiously before deciding that returning to the toilet was the only option available. He turned on his heel and hurried back to the door as the voices got suddenly louder.
He stepped quickly inside the toilet and put his back against the door. Had they seen him? He wondered anxiously. There was a chance they had... he couldn’t risk waiting to find out; he’d better get out of here. He tugged at the window again and pushed it up as far as it would, managing to get both feet out before the toilet door burst open and the loud voices arrived. He wasn’t sure what to think when he saw that they belonged to policemen. He dropped back from the window only to fall into the arms of two more policemen who’d come round the outside.
‘Got you!’ snarled one, as he brought Gordon to the ground and held him there while his colleague handcuffed his writs together. Gordon felt his cheek scrape along the ground as one of the policeman put pressure on the side of his head to make sure he remained immobile. He lay completely still as the officer spoke into his radio. ‘Intruder apprehended; he was trying to escape through a ground floor toilet window.’
For Gordon, this was the final straw. A nightmare end to a nightmare day, he concluded, as events around him started to swirl into a nebulous mist of nothingness.
Twenty one
‘I tell you; I was trying to get in to the bloody place, not running away!’ insisted Gordon for what seemed the fifth time at least. ‘What the hell am I supposed to have done anyway?’ He let his head slump back on the pillow in exasperation, as Chief Inspector Davies stood over him, red-faced and angry.
‘Christ, I’ve got to hand it to you Gordon, when it comes to insulting my intelligence you’re in a class of your own. First it was some fantasy killer planting Palmer’s kid in his own garden and now when you’re caught climbing out of a hospital window late at night in suspicious circumstances you insist you were climbing in!’
Gordon jerked his head round to stare at Davies. ‘What suspicious circumstances?’ he asked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Author, author,’ murmured Davies. ‘There must be a BAFTA award in here somewhere.’
‘Cut the crap, Davies,’ said Gordon angrily. ‘What are you talking about? What’s happened?’
Davies looked down at Gordon for fully thirty seconds before sighing and saying, ‘All right, we’ll play it your way, sunshine, Professor Carwyn Thomas was found dead in his office this evening. He was discovered by one of the night porters who’d gone up to tell him he’d left his car lights on.
Gordon felt as if he’d been struck by a train. He could only stare at Davies, speechless with shock. ‘Thomas is dead?’
‘The hospital medics say it was a heart attack but then who do we find emerging from a ground floor window?’
Gordon was still too shocked to say anything.
‘Now, when I question you about it, you behave as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be climbing out of a lavatory window in the middle of the night and your alibi is that you were actually climbing in to the place. Gordon, if nothing else, you should have the jury in stitches. Of course the prosecution might go and ruin everything by venturing to suggest that there was a perfectly good front door not twenty metres from the toilet window and that it’s open 24 hours a day but I feel confident you’ll come up with some suitable explanation.’
Gordon was too distracted to defend himself. His mind was reeling with the implications of Thomas’s death for it was the last thing in the world he expected and, coming on top of everything else, it seemed like the cruellest blow that fate could have delivered at that particular moment. Now he just couldn’t see how he could possibly link Thomas’s research to the Palmer baby’s death. Gradually he became aware of what Davies was saying.
‘Forensic haven’t done their stuff yet, but I’m going to make sure they do a thorough job, seeing as how you popped up at the scene. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do and right now, you’re not doing a very good line in “stricken by grief” if I might say so.’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Gordon wearily.
Davies pursed his lips and looked as if his exasperation level was getting perilously high. ‘Oh, wouldn’t I?’ he exclaimed. ‘Just why were you running away, Gordon? What was your contribution to the professor having a heart attack? Come to that, my officers said you looked as if you’d gone three rounds with Mike Tyson when they picked you up. And your clothes looked as if you’d crawled out of a sewer, they said. Just what the hell has been going on?’
‘I wasn’t running away,’ insisted Gordon. ‘I climbed in; I heard voices in the corridor; I climbed back out again.’
‘All right, why you were climbing in?’
‘I didn’t want to be seen.’
‘You didn’t want to be seen,’ repeated Davies sarcastically. ‘Apart from the state of your clothes, why didn’t you want to be seen — or would that question be considered an intrusion into your own personal Disneyworld?’
‘I wanted to get to Thomas without anyone stopping me or warning him I was coming.’
‘Go on.’
‘Earlier this evening... he tried to kill me.’
Davies shook his head and looked up at the ceiling as if seeking guidance from above. ‘You know, I’ve never been the greatest fan of the medical profession, Gordon but I thought it was only psychiatrists who were as loony as their patients. He tried to kill you?’