Simon led the way up a flight of narrow, sloping stairs, and then along to the back of the building, where there was a small sitting room with a chintz-covered sofa and two armchairs, a large radio set, and a magazine rack stuffed with yellowing copies of Radio Times and The People’s Friend.
“We’ll be snug enough here,” said Simon, easing himself stiffly into one of the chairs. “The Hoodies may have sensed somebody coming through the door, but they won’t think to look in a gaff like this.”
Josh went to the window. It was made up of small octagonal panes of yellowish glass, with bubbles and inclusions in them, so that when the sun shone through it on to his face he looked as if he were suffering from leprosy. Abraxas sat down at his feet and yawned.
“You’re sure you don’t have any idea why the Hoodies might have taken Nancy to the hospital?”
“Search me, guvnor.”
“You see, what worries me is that Julia was mutilated. When they found her body in the Thames it was empty, all of her internal organs taken out. And apparently it had been done by experts. Frank Mordant may have hung her, but what happened after that?”
Simon coughed, holding his right arm close to his chest.
“You sound pretty sick,” said Josh.
“It’s my stump, isn’t it? It’s infected. I kept it in a bowl of salty water but that still didn’t stop it from turning rotten.”
“Can’t you ask your doctor to prescribe you some antibiotics?” Josh asked him, but remembered almost at the same time that this was a world that was medically equivalent to the 1930s, before penicillin had been discovered.
Simon coughed again, and this time he brought up a handful of blood. “I’m bloody dying,” he said. “You don’t know what those bloody Hoodies did to me.”
Josh said nothing. He couldn’t quite understand why, but he felt uneasy. Why had the Hooded Men let Simon go so readily? After all, they had slaughtered all of John Farbelow’s people, in revenge for Master Thomas Edridge’s murder. And if they were holding Nancy prisoner, they must have guessed that he would come looking for her. So why hadn’t they been keeping a constant watch on the doors?
Unless they wanted to be absolutely sure that they had him trapped, where he didn’t have any chance of escape whatsoever. Josh remembered Ella’s tarot card with the man snaring songbirds. “You’re not setting me up, are you?”
Simon looked up at him, the whites of his eyes still stained with blood, like a broken vampire. “You can trust me, guvnor. You know that.”
Josh sat down next to him and pointed a finger directly at his nose. “If this is a trap, I swear to God that I will kill you first.”
Twenty-Six
Josh and Simon reached the rear of the Puritan Martyrs Hospital through a narrow alleyway that led from the side of a parade of shops on Bunhill Row. On the far side of an overgrown allotment stood a high corrugated-iron fence with its top cut into serrated saw-blade points. There was a gate in the middle of it, but it was locked.
“How do we get over this?” Josh demanded.
Simon checked his watch, and at the same time the bells of a nearby church struck ten o’clock. “Whippy should be here any second. He’s always dead reliable, Whippy.”
Abraxas was snuffling around the weeds, searching for interesting smells. He was still whuffling when they heard a padlock clanking, and the sound of bolts being drawn back. The gate was opened, and a short, stocky young man appeared, with black curly hair and a Roman nose and eyes as bright as a badger’s. He was wearing a long white apron and he was carrying a large bowl of vegetable peelings.
“Simon! Christ almighty! Look at the state of you!”
“I’m all right, Whippy. Don’t make a song and dance about it. I’m lucky I’m still living and breathing. This is Mr Winward.”
Whippy wiped his hand on his apron and held it out. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, in a strong Manchester accent. “Any butty of Simon Cutter’s is a butty of mine. Taking your dog for a walk, are you?”
“He’ll be OK, don’t you worry.”
“I hope so. If those Hoodie dogs get a smell of him, it’ll be mutt chops for breakfast.”
Whippy tossed the vegetable peelings on to a compost heap, and then he beckoned that they should follow him through the gate and into the grounds.
The hospital was set amongst wide, well-trimmed lawns, and was illuminated by floodlights, which gave it an appearance of unreality, as if it were constructed of nothing more substantial than cardboard. It was a large three-story Victorian building built in the shape of a cross, with four Gothic towers at each end. There were lights shining in almost every window, but there were no ambulances here, no staff walking around. Beyond the hospital walls they could hear the sound of buses and horse-drawn wagons clattering along Bunhill Row; and in the distance they could make out the mournful drone of a Zeppelin as it flew toward London Airport. But inside the hospital grounds it was oddly quiet, and windless, as if the whole world were holding its breath.
Whippy led them along a gravel path to the kitchen entrance, his feet noisily scrunching. “I’m cleaning up now, that’s all, so there’s only me.” The kitchen was large and bright, with white enamel worktops and a wide green-enamel range. There was a faint smell of steak-and-kidney pie in the air, but a very much stronger smell of pine disinfectant.
“Do you have any idea where Nancy is?” asked Josh.
“Oh, yes. I have to cook her tea in the evening and send it up. Room three-thirteen, on the third floor.”
“Is the room guarded?”
“Doesn’t have to be. It’s locked.”
“Have you seen her? She isn’t hurt or anything?”
Whippy lifted a casserole dish out of the sink, rinsed it under the faucet and wiped it with a tea-towel. “I haven’t seen her myself, but Sophie has. She’s the nurse who takes her food up for her. She says she’s amazing, for a Purgatorial. She talks, she eats. You’d have never credited it, would you, a dead person talking and eating? But I suppose that’s the way it happens, isn’t it? If God doesn’t want you, and the Devil sends you back, what else can you do?”
“What has she eaten?”
“Eggs, bacon; a nice cheese omelet; steak-and-kidney pie; gooseberry fool.”
“Has it occurred to you that somebody who eats like that can’t possibly be dead?”
Whippy clattered saucepans. “I’m a cook, mate. Not a fucking philosopher.”
“She’s alive and I have to get her out of here.”
“Come on, Whippy,” said Simon. “You said you would. You owe me that much after everything I did for you. Your kid brother would be brown bread by now, if it wasn’t for me.”
Without another word, Whippy reached into his apron pocket and produced the key to a five-lever lock. “I lent it off Sophie. Whatever happens – if you get caught – don’t you say where you got it from. Otherwise it’s both of us heads.”
Josh said, “What kind of security do they have in this place? Any Hoodies? Any patrols?”
“There’s only a skeleton staff. You shouldn’t have any worries, so long as you’re quick.”
“Right, then. Let’s get going.”
Simon sat down behind the kitchen table. “I’m sorry, guvnor. This is as far as I go.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve got you into the hospital, and given you the key, and they could scrag me for either of those. I can’t risk going any further.”