Weak and dazed as I was, I forced myself to move, because it didn’t look as though I’d be getting a second chance. I rolled hard, shifting my weight to throw Rafi further off his centre of gravity, and at the same time I punched him with as much force as I could on the point of the jaw. Caught off balance, he slid sideways out of Paul’s hands and we both scrambled clear.
I turned around with my arms up, ready to defend myself against a renewed attack, but whatever was happening to Rafi now had made him forget all about me. He was still lying on the ground where he’d fallen, and another ululating howl of pain and desolation was pouring without pause out of his gaping mouth. It was as if my punch hadn’t registered with him at alclass="underline" whatever was hurting him, I could see it had nothing to do with me.
Paul knelt down beside Rafi and felt his pulse. He rolled Rafi’s eyelids back and inspected his eyes, then extended the examination to gums and teeth – which was a risk I wouldn’t have taken myself. Rafi kept on howling, directly into Paul’s face: he seemed to have forgotten our existence.
Two more male nurses loomed over us, looking down at Rafi as if they were wondering where it might be safe to take a hold of him. Paul glanced up, saw them, and pointed into the cell. ‘Karen,’ he shouted over Rafi’s inhuman keening. ‘She’s still inside. Get her out of there.’ They snapped to attention like soldiers, turned around and went into the cell.
From where I was kneeling I had a good view through the doorway. I saw the two men kneel beside the fallen nurse, one of them touching a hand to her forehead. Then I saw her move, flinching away from the touch. She was hurt, maybe badly hurt, but she wasn’t dead. Caught between relief and delayed shock, I felt a sickly floating sensation rise inside me, filling me like sour gas: I doubled over and threw up copiously. It was a few moments before I could take notice of my surroundings again.
When I did, I realised that Rafi’s siren-sharp wail had died away into abrupt silence. Pen had him cradled in her arms, and Paul was kneeling beside her, his forefinger on Rafi’s bare wrist again and an abstracted frown on his face.
Doctor Webb approached us with a certain caution, eyeing the mess I’d just made on the carpet. Then his gaze traversed to Rafi whose head was in Pen’s lap as she murmured reassurances to him and smoothed his sweat-slicked hair off his forehead. Rafi seemed to be asleep now – a profound, exhausted sleep, his chest rising and falling slowly with his long, deep breaths. Still, Webb’s eyes kept flicking back to him continually as he snapped out orders to his staff to start putting the place back together.
I stood up, my legs shaky, and pulled my crushed shirt collar back into some kind of shape, wincing at the pain in my equally crushed throat. ‘What set this off?’ I asked Webb, my voice sounding hoarse and flat.
He gave a bleak snort. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. Karen and Paul went in to give him his evening meds, and he took them. One moment he was fine, the next – well, you saw. He started screaming, and when Karen tried to calm him he lashed out at her. We’re lucky she wasn’t killed.’
I nodded dumbly at that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Webb wasn’t expecting an answer, though. ‘Castor,’ he said, ‘this brings forward a discussion we were going to have to have in any case. When we took Ditko on, we did so in the belief that we could help him. We clearly can’t. He needs dedicated facilities of a kind that we can’t offer.’
I looked down at Pen. She wasn’t hearing this, fortunately. ‘There aren’t any dedicated facilities for what Rafi’s got,’ I pointed out, but that was bullshit and he knew it. There just weren’t any that I wanted to deliver him to.
‘There’s the MOU,’ Webb said.
‘Rafi’s not a lab rat.’
‘He’s not mentally ill, either. He doesn’t belong here.’
‘We’ve got a contract,’ I pointed out, playing my ace.
Webb trumped it. ‘Voidable where the welfare of staff or other inmates is at stake,’ he quoted from memory. ‘I don’t think there’s any argument about that.’
I shrugged. ‘We’ll talk.’
Webb shook his head. ‘No, we won’t. Make alternative arrangements, Castor. You have twenty-eight days.’
‘You’re all heart, Webb,’ I croaked. ‘You’ll have to toughen up or people will start taking advantage of you.’
He gave me an austere, contemptuous look. ‘Nobody can say you didn’t try,’ he said coldly.
Out in the grounds a sickle moon was up like a sword of white fire, turning everything into a mercurochrome photograph of itself. I took a turn through the rose garden, enjoying the peace and quiet. It was only relative: there were still some shouts and moans from inside the building, but after Rafi’s endless, agonising foghorn howl it sounded a lot like silence. Rafi was sleeping now, but Pen wouldn’t let anyone else touch him for the time being. I thought I’d give them half an hour, then go back inside and see if I was needed.
I leaned against the sundial and looked down a trellised avenue canopied with sweet-smelling blooms. It didn’t frame much of a view, though: just a high fence with an inward-tilting fringe of razor wire at the top, and beyond that the six lanes of the North Circular, where even at this hour a steady river of headlights flowed on by.
Alternative arrangements. That was really easy for Webb to say, especially with the gods of the small print on his side. Not so easy to do, though: not unless I wanted to take the route that Webb had suggested and give Rafi over to the tender mercies of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s in Paddington. But that was a last-ditch, desperation kind of thing, and I didn’t think we were quite there yet. Much as I respected my old sparring partner Jenna-Jane Mulbridge on an intellectual level, I knew better than anyone that she had some shortcomings where bedside manner was concerned. And that her heart and human feelings were in long-term storage underneath a crossroads somewhere.
While I was still propping up the sundial, making the place look untidy, three small figures loped out of the foliage about fifty yards away and flitted across the lawn in absolute silence. They were in a triangle formation, with the largest of the three in front, the other two flanking and following her. There were some trees on the far side of the lawn, but trees didn’t slow them down: they raced on unheeding, their slender bodies sliding through wood as though wood was air. When they got to the wall that separated the Stanger from Coldfall Wood, the girl in the lead – she was about thirteen, or rather had been that age when she died – stopped and looked across at me. She tossed back a full head of ash-blonde hair and gave me a wave. I waved back. Then she turned and walked on through the wall, where her two younger companions had already gone on before her.
These were the ghosts of three little girls whom the original Charles Stanger had murdered in the late 1940s – before being sent down for life and endowing the institution that now carries his name. They’d spent the next sixty years tied to the stones of the old cottages like dogs chained up in a yard. Most ghosts are tethered to a particular place, more often than not the place where they died: it was just a cruel irony that in this case it meant the girls had to rub shoulders with the criminally insane for the rest of eternity – or at least for as long as the Stanger stayed open. But about a year or so ago I’d given them a private concert: used my tin whistle to play a fragment of an exorcism to them in this same garden, so that although they weren’t banished from the place they were free to leave it. Since then I’d heard rumours of sightings as far afield as the Trocadero and Shadwell Stair, but they still seemed to use the Stanger as a base. I guess they were used to the place now: after half a century, it was as close to being home as anywhere they knew. I kept expecting them to move on – I mean, on to whatever else there is when this world has worn out its welcome – but obviously they still hadn’t taken that inevitable step.