by Simon Mayo
“Hello? It’s Dr. Adeb—”
There was a buzz, and the door clicked open. He heard the intercom go dead and stepped inside. He took the elevator to the second floor, and followed the signs through a maze of corridors to 2223. He had no idea who might be behind the door, but if the embassy had requested his help, this patient must be important. He took a deep breath and rang the bell.
Within seconds the door swung open. Adebayo peered into the room; it was well lit, but he couldn’t see anyone.
“Well, come in then,” called an impatient voice from behind the door.
Tentatively Dr. Adebayo entered the apartment. Thick dark velvet curtains were pulled across two windows; ahead of him was a large brown leather sofa and an ornately carved low table. On the sofa lay a battered and burned duffle bag. The door shut behind him and, turning, Adebayo gasped.
The man standing behind the door was horribly burned. His face was charred and blistered red, the skin on the right side peeling and bubbling. At least a third of his hair had burned away, leaving brown stubble and more blistered, oozing skin. The contrast with his remaining curly white hair was shocking. His burns stretched down both arms, and he had smeared on some cream, clearly with little effect. Both hands were bandaged roughly; one held a tumbler of whiskey.
“I need help,” said Flowerdew, and started coughing.
“You do,” said the doctor, “and next door there is—”
“NO! No hospital! I thought you knew that! You can bring the doctors here—that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“I’m not sure I can—” started Adebayo.
Flowerdew came closer. “Oh, you can. I know you can—you’ve done it before. The embassy is very grateful for all the extra services you have performed over the years. And you are grateful for the cash, I’m sure. What do I need?” As he spoke, his lips started to crack and bleed.
Benedict Adebayo approached his new patient slowly. He smelled of smoke, burned hair, and whiskey, but more than anything else, the doctor sensed danger. “Have you been in a fire?”
“Oh, terrific, Sherlock. Yes, well done indeed. They’ve sent me a bright one here. Listen, chum, I’ve been in a fire and I’ve driven sixty miles to get here. I’m in great pain and coughing my lungs out. I know you have the expertise at St. Thomas’s, and I want some here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dr. Nathaniel Flowerdew. Didn’t they tell you anything?”
Adebayo sighed. He was wishing he’d paid more attention to burn assessment while he’d had the chance; he felt worryingly out of his depth. The thicker the burn, the worse the prognosis, and from what he could see of Flowerdew’s right arm, he was in trouble. “OK, well, if you go to the hospital they’ll be able to treat most of these burns. If you stay here you could be permanently disfigured. Stared-at-in-the-street disfigured. It’s your choice. I can see who is around to come here, but it won’t be as good. Really. Nowhere near as good.”
Flowerdew didn’t hesitate. “I can’t go to a hospital—I’ll never come out and I’ll lose my cargo. Get whoever you can. I’ll take my chances.”
Adebayo shook his head. “OK, I’ll get who I can. Have you taken any pain relief?”
“Oh yes, lots,” said Flowerdew, pointing at some tablets on the table and coughing again.
“Good. You need to keep warm and wrap some of those burns in plastic wrap. What’s this ointment? It needs to come off fast.”
Flowerdew moved away. “OK, I’ll deal with that. I’d rather you went and got a medical team together to fix me up. I’ll pay ten thousand for every doctor you bring, twenty for you. How long will it take?”
The doctor thought for a moment. “I could assemble a team in a few hours.”
Flowerdew reached out a hand, wincing as he did so. “For ten grand apiece, I expect the best. Not some junior doctor riffraff. I hope that’s clear.”
Adebayo nodded. “Of course. Do you have plastic wrap? I could—”
“You could get out and find me a team of medics who’ll take care of this.” Flowerdew pointed to his face and arms.
“Of course.”
Dr. Adebayo hurried away from 2223.
After warming up on a hospital breakfast, Itch and Jack were heading back to their rooms when their families—minus Gabriel, who was still asleep—arrived. The adults announced their intention to do some sightseeing as soon as the doctor had been around, before driving back to Cornwall at lunchtime, if they got the all clear.
So, when the specialist, along with her assistant, came to check on Itch and Jack, she found she had an audience. She was a large middle-aged woman in a tweed jacket and she looked around, smiling curtly.
“You need to stay with us a little while longer,” she told them both. “I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient for your folks, but smoke inhalation and burns need to be carefully supervised. I’m sure all will be OK by tomorrow or Friday at the latest. How’s the coughing?”
“Better, thanks,” said Jack.
“And you?” she asked Itch.
“Same.”
The bearded assistant, whose badge said DR. C. DREVER, peered at him, eyebrows raised. He was clearly expecting more detail.
“My hand still throbs. And I’m coughing a bit and I’m weak. But I’ll be fine.” Itch was about to raise his own eyebrows in return but then remembered he didn’t have any.
“Good. Well done,” said the specialist, and then she was gone, bustling importantly to the next room. Dr. Drever followed, scribbling notes.
Jack’s parents announced that they had to return home that day, and Jude said she had to prepare an important case on Friday. It was agreed that they would head back to Cornwall with Gabriel and leave Nicholas, Chloe, and Lucy to come home with Itch and Jack. Lucy’s mother had already told her daughter to come back “when you’ve sorted everything out.”
So with the grownups gone, Itch, Jack, Chloe, and Lucy sat in the now-open coffee bar in the hospital lobby.
“Go ahead, Itch—tell us what you’re thinking,” said Jack.
Lucy passed around the pastries she’d bought, and Itch told Chloe and Lucy about his walk with Jack past the London Eye earlier that morning and the photos he remembered from Flowerdew’s laptop.
“Well, I think Flowerdew might be in that apartment complex next door; that’s it, really,” said Itch, when he had finished explaining.
“What if he is there?” asked Chloe.
“Well, maybe he has the rocks. He might have sold them already, of course, but if they are there …”
“And if you got them back? Then what? You’ve already tried getting rid of them,” said Jack. “The deepest well couldn’t keep them hidden for long.”
“I know,” said Itch, “and I remember Flowerdew talking about the destructive power of the 126…. How it could do good things—provide clean energy, et cetera—but that its capacity for destruction would win out eventually.”
“But how can you actually get rid of radioactive rocks,” asked Jack, “when nuclear waste is buried for hundreds of thousands of years before it becomes safe?”
“Spallation,” said Lucy.
“What?” asked Itch.
“Spallation,” she repeated. “It’s the only way to make them safe. You basically bombard them with neutrons and they break apart. Into something safe.”
There was a silence around the table before Chloe laughed. “You’ve been out-geeked, Itch! Never thought I’d see it! Go, Lucy!” They all smiled.
“I’ve never heard of it,” Itch said to Lucy.
“Why would you? I only know because Dad worked at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford for a while. He took me in sometimes. It’s quite a place. He was always talking about this kind of stuff.”
“You discussed spallation?” asked Chloe. “Really?”
“Well, it wasn’t much of a discussion really. More of a lecture. But he was a passionate scientist before everything got to be too much for him.”
“Cake said he studied English,” said Itch.
“His story was that he dropped out of college, but that was only half true. English was his second degree, and he had a falling-out with the professors and had some kind of breakdown. When I was about ten, he had a job at one of the target stations at ISIS—that’s part of the Rutherford Appleton Lab; I loved it there.”
“Why was he called Cake?” asked Chloe.
“It’s another science thing, I’m afraid. He was obsessed with nuclear power, and yellowcake is a powder made of uranium, I think. He was boring everyone with it so much, they started to call him Cake. And he quite liked it, so it stuck. In time, everyone called him that. Including me.”
“So,” said Itch, “if you put the 126 into … whatever they have at ISIS …”
“Big tubes, basically,” said Lucy.
“Big tubes … and then bombard the element with particles, and it stops being 126? And stops being dangerous?”
“Think so.”
“Wow,” said Itch.
“I never like it when he says that,” said Chloe.
Outside again, Itch and Jack had led Chloe and Lucy to a vantage point behind a souvenir stall. They stood with their backs to the Thames, looking up at the apartment complex. It had previously been an oil company’s head office, and still looked like it should have a corporate logo on the front rather than THE MOORHOUSE APARTMENTS. Many of the windows were strung with Christmas lights; a few had Christmas trees that were visible from the street; the rest were bleak and empty or had drawn curtains.
“You think he’s in there?” said Lucy, stamping her feet to keep the circulation going; the day was sunny but still cold.
“The photos on Flowerdew’s laptop were taken from one of those windows. I’m sure of it.”
“And if you knew where he was, what then?”
Itch looked at Lucy. “I’d go and get that box. And then take it to your ISIS lab. Then I’d spallate them, or whatever the word is.”
“That’s about right,” said Lucy. “Well, that sounds easy, then.” She laughed.
A few people were coming and going from the apartments, always pressing a buzzer and waiting for the door to be released. Itch put down his backpack and studied the visitors, in between surveying the windows and glancing up and down the paved pathway. Jack, Lucy, and Chloe had lost interest and were browsing at a nearby souvenir stand.
“Come here! Look!” Itch was beckoning, and they scurried over to join him behind the Union Jack tea towels. “There …” He was pointing at three men approaching the apartments from the direction of the hospital. “That guy at the front with the beard. He was the doctor who came around with the hospital specialist. I’m sure of it!”
“Drever, I think it said on his badge. Yes, that’s him.” They watched as the men buzzed their way in.
“Stay here!” said Lucy, and she suddenly set off up the path to the entrance. She got there just as the door was closing and shoved a foot in the gap. Pushing it open, she saw Drever and his companions waiting for the elevator. When it arrived, she followed them in and waited for Drever to press the 2 before she selected the 3. They all stared at the teenager who had joined them, but Lucy just smiled and then kept her head down.
The elevator stopped at the second floor, and as the door opened, the men’s conversation began again. Lucy heard the man called Drever ask, “So how bad is he?” as they headed down the corridor. She jammed her foot in the elevator door as it closed so that she could hear the rest.
“Bad,” said another man. “Second- and third-degree burns to his face and arms. Hair loss.”
She heard a whistle, and then Drever’s voice again: “Where’s 2223?”
Lucy smiled and allowed the elevator doors to shut. On arrival at the third floor, she stabbed the 0 button and waited for the elevator to return to the ground floor. She flew out of the building and straight toward her relieved friends.
“What was that about?” asked Itch. “What the hell were you doing? We were just thinking of coming in to find you!”
But Lucy was still smiling. “Drever would have recognized you or Jack. It just occurred to me that I could find out what was going on. And I did.”
“You what?” exclaimed Jack. “What happened?”
“They all got out on the second floor, looking for room 2223. One of them said something about second- and third-degree burns.” Lucy looked at her new friends.
“Wow. You’re fast!” Itch was impressed.
“So what now?” she asked.
“Call the police?” suggested Chloe. “Wouldn’t that be good?”
“I could have done that last time,” said Itch. “The whole point was to get rid of the rocks. I thought I’d done that, but here we are again.”
“Lucy, you know your dad left a note for Itch …” said Jack.
Lucy’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding. What did it say?”
“I’ve got it at home,” said Itch. “He told us to get rid of the rocks and trust no one.”
“Sounds like him,” said Lucy.
“That’s why I threw them down the Woodingdean Well. What would he do now?” Itch wondered aloud.
“I think he would try to get them to his old colleagues at the labs. And blast the rocks to bits,” answered Lucy.
Itch nodded. “Then that’s what we should do.” He looked at Jack, who was staring at the river. He knew what she was thinking; he was thinking it too: This is unbelievably dangerous and stupid. They are ruthless criminals, and we are just kids. But who else would do what had to be done? If he could put the rocks out of harm’s way, for good this time, he knew he had to take the chance. But he wanted Jack to agree.
She looked pale and nervous, but she nodded. “OK. I was too ill to help much last time, so I’m in. Let’s try, anyway.”
Itch turned to Chloe, but she put her hand over his mouth. “Don’t even say it, Itch. You’re not leaving me behind again. You did that last time and I hated it. I’m in too.”
Itch was trying to say Mum and Dad will go nuts, but it came out as “Mmmngndmdg.” He pulled his head away.
“I’m coming,” Chloe said fiercely, “And I promise I’ll be useful.”
Jack touched Itch’s shoulder and he turned. “Itch. We are doing this. The four of us. Deal with it.”
He half smiled. “Right. OK, let’s see if we can find that 126 again.”
Dr. Benedict Adebayo had two very nervous colleagues with him. It had taken him some time to find doctors good enough to help fix his difficult patient. Eventually the promise of easy money worked its magic. He had found an ex-colleague, Drever, who worked at St. Thomas’s—who had, in turn, recommended Reith, a burns unit specialist from Mount Vernon Hospital.
Both doctors were now wondering if they’d made the right call. Flowerdew was on his bed, in pain, and shouting. He also looked a lot worse than he had earlier that morning, Dr. Adebayo thought. The skin on his arms and face was turning black. The doctors had rigged a saline solution IV drip bag on a stand, the tube disappearing into the patient’s left arm.
“Of course I can’t lie still, you idiot. Give me a sedative or something!”
The whiskey had made Flowerdew aggressive, and Adebayo realized that he needed to act fast.
“Pass me some morphine, Charles—quick.”
Drever passed the loaded syringe to his colleague, who was swabbing a small area of Flowerdew’s upper arm.
“This should take the edge off things,” Adebayo said, pushing the needle in and watching the painkiller disappear into his patient’s veins. “We can dress your wounds, but really you’ll need skin grafts, I’m afraid. I can arrange that, but I can’t do it in your flat. There is a discreet hospital I know—”
“OK, book me in. How long would I have to wait?” Flowerdew was already sounding calmer.
“I will need to check. Not long, I’m sure, but a few days maybe.”
Flowerdew had just closed his eyes when there was a knock o
n the door and everyone jumped. Adebayo’s colleagues cried out in alarm, and Flowerdew tried to sit up.
“Who …? No one …” He lay back again, the effort too much.
Adebayo went to the door and peered through the security fish-eye peephole.
“Who is it?” called Reith, a small bony man with slicked-back greasy hair. He had been sweating already and the knock at the door had started a virtual river down his face.
“It’s that girl from the elevator. And she’s carrying someone.” Adebayo opened the door slightly. “Yes?”
Lucy Cavendish was standing there, with Chloe in her arms. “Hi. Please can you help me! My sister just started groaning and saying her head hurt. Mum’s out and I can’t find any painkillers. I heard you talking in the elevator and realized you were doctors.” Chloe started groaning.
“There’s a hospital next door—take her there.”
“Oh, please, sir! Just an aspirin or something. Do you have kids? We only need tablets and water and we’ll go. Sorry if it’s not convenient.”
Adebayo hesitated. “Oh, well, quickly then. Sit there—I’ll get you something.” He indicated the sofa, and Lucy laid Chloe down.
A slurred voice from the bedroom called out, “Who was it?”
If Adebayo had been watching his new arrivals, he’d have seen them tense.
“Just some kids from upstairs. I’m getting them some painkillers.”
“Didn’t know we had kids upstairs. Come in here!”
Adebayo handed over some tablets and a glass of water, then hurried back to the bedroom. Flowerdew, his eyes still shut and fighting the sedative now, said, “Describe them. I’ve got a small security team on the way—they can keep unwanted visitors away.”
“Two girls, sisters. Sixteen and thirteen maybe. Ignore them—you need to rest….”
“Where are the rocks?” whispered Chloe. Lucy shrugged. She looked around the room and then, taking the glass of water with her, went into the kitchen. There was a whiskey bottle and an open package of cookies on the counter, but apart from that it appeared empty. Lucy reached inside her jacket and pulled out a small plastic jar with a screw lid. Checking the door, she opened the whiskey and sprinkled some white powder inside. She replaced the top and shook the bottle.