After they’d taken the X-ray Kathy sat alone for a while, until Partridge reappeared with a woman in a white coat, an anaesthetist. ‘We’re going to have to do some more work on that shoulder, Mrs Bragg. We’ll give you something to help you relax.’
Kathy began to object, but Partridge leaned over her and murmured, ‘Mr Bragg is not now, nor ever has been, a patient at Pewsey, Mrs Bragg. Now just breathe deeply and relax.’
She felt a prick in her hand and, after a brief moment of resistance, surrendered to the feeling of calm that enveloped her.
19
Brock walked down to his local newsagent and took the Saturday morning paper to the café next door, where he ordered a breakfast of poached eggs on toast and a pot of tea. It had been another frantic week and he was glad to have the weekend off. He scanned the front page. There were more allegations of illegal phone hacking, more Wikileaks revelations, a stabbing murder in Streatham and a fire on a boat on the Regent’s Canal—see page six for details. He turned to page six. Students at Queen Mary London University at Mile End had called emergency services to a fire on a canal boat moored opposite the campus. By the time the fire brigade arrived the fire was so intense that the boat was reduced to a burnt-out shell. Investigators were trying to determine the cause of the blaze and could not yet identify the owner or confirm whether anyone had been on board the vessel, which was described as a fifteen-metre-long narrowboat.
Brock wondered if Kathy had read the report. He hadn’t seen her since she had been released from the Pewsey Clinic—when was that? Tuesday, he saw her, four days ago. He pulled out his phone and dialled her mobile, and got an odd message about the number not being ‘operational’. Her home phone invited him to leave his details, which he did, asking her to call him. Then he rang the office and spoke to the duty officer, who did a quick search and came back with the contact details of the police investigating the narrowboat fire. They couldn’t tell him much more than was in the newspaper report. Forensics were scouring the ashes inside the boat but so far had found no human remains. It was suspected that an accelerant had been used to start the fire. So far there was no indication of who the boat had been registered to. Brock left his number and asked to be kept informed of progress.
Kathy woke to see sunlight glimmering around the edges of unfamiliar venetian blinds. No, they were familiar, she remembered now: the Pewsey Clinic. She tried to sit up and found that her left arm was bound firmly to her side and thickly wrapped in some kind of bandaged padding. When she reached with her right for the glass of water on the cabinet beside the bed she saw that there was a dressing on the burn on her forearm. She wondered what else they knew about her by now.
There was a button beside the glass and she pressed it. In a moment a nurse appeared.
‘Good morning, Mrs Bragg. How are we feeling this morning?’
Without waiting for a reply she was clipping Kathy’s fingertip to a machine and taking notes of the readings.
‘Did we sleep well?’
‘Mm, thanks. What time is it?’
‘Almost midday. Are we hungry?’
Yes, we were hungry.
‘Something light to start off? Omelette? Smoked salmon? Dr Partridge looked in earlier but decided not to disturb you. I’ll let him know you’re awake now.’
She opened the blinds and Kathy realised that she was in her old room, and remembered her sense of foreboding when she arrived.
‘Where are my things?’
‘Your clothes are being cleaned, and your wallet and keys are in the bedside drawer there, but you didn’t seem to have brought anything else. We didn’t find a phone or handbag.’
‘No, I came over in a bit of a rush.’
‘Would you like me to contact anyone for you?’
Kathy thought about that. She imagined Brock’s consternation if she told him where she was, his need for explanations and the possible stir he might create at headquarters. That was what bothered her most, that Payne and Lynch would get to hear of her misadventures with Ned Tisdell and put a stop to her investigations before she’d found out more about Anne Downey’s claims. ‘No, it’s all right. A bit of peace and quiet will do me good.’
The afternoon passed slowly. Dr Partridge came and expressed satisfaction with the operation he’d performed the previous evening, but warned her that her collarbone could tolerate no more challenges. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘you’ll be permanently disfigured.’ He contorted his shoulder to give an impression of the hunchback of Notre Dame.
She watched a little TV, then got out of bed and found she was steady enough on her feet. Through the window she watched branches swaying in the wind, but inside the clinic everything was quite still. She sat on the seat by the window and thought about Ned Tisdell and Anne Downey, and tried to imagine what they and Gudrun Kite had been up to. Not long before her accident, Freyja Kite had met Tisdell in Cambridge. They had both previously been interested in animal welfare—was that what this was really about? Anne Downey’s talk of mysterious procedures on animals and humans? She would have to check if Downey’s name was known in that connection.
They brought her an evening meal, and afterwards the nurse came with some pills—antibiotics and something to help her sleep. She palmed the sleeping pill and swallowed the rest, then went to bed.
Some time after midnight she got up and arranged a pillow and a cushion from the window seat to imitate her sleeping figure in the bed. She shrugged on a dressing-gown and took her wallet from the bedside cabinet, with the Visa card inside, and cautiously opened the door. The corridor was deserted, the lights dimmed. She followed the route she had previously taken to the door of the secure unit without meeting anyone, swiped the card at the scanner and pulled on the door. It opened silently, then closed behind her as she moved quickly away down the corridor inside.
There was a different atmosphere in here. The air was cooler and tinged with a chemical smell, as if the area was served by a separate air-conditioning system, and the surfaces were harder and more sterile, sheet-plastic flooring instead of carpet, no artworks on the walls. To Kathy’s right were the doors to the four individual bedrooms she had seen on the building plan, each with a small vision window and security scanner lock. She looked into the first room, and by the faint glow of a night-light made out an empty pillow. She moved on, peering through the second window, and then she froze, seeing Jack Bragg sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, one hand gripping an aluminium crutch. He had been staring at the floor in front of him, as if deep in thought, but now, almost as if he had registered her presence on the other side of the door, he began to raise his head and she ducked away, heart pounding. She moved quickly to the next room, then the next; they were both empty. Across the corridor she saw a door to what she remembered from the plan was a larger room, and at the same moment she heard a woman’s voice from somewhere further down the corridor, then another replying. They seemed to be coming her way, and she quickly swiped her card across the scanner in front of her and pushed open the door.
The room was in darkness, and colder than the corridor. She closed the door silently and stood by the vision panel. Two nurses walked past outside. When they had gone she took a deep breath, tasting a sharp chemical tang. Looking around she saw in the dim light from the door panel that she was in what appeared to be an operating theatre, with large lights suspended over two steel tables. There was a bench down one side of the room, and across the far end she made out the pull-handles and doors of a row of stainless-steel cabinets, each with a small panel of glowing digital symbols with the same reading, 3oC. They reminded her of something, somewhere she’d been, and then it came to her—Sundeep Mehta’s pathology suite, the cadaver room.
She went over to the cabinets and tugged on the handle of the first. It opened with a soft pneumatic whoosh to reveal a long storage container inside. It was big enough to contain an adult corpse, much larger than was needed for its present occupant, which appeared in the poor light to be
a small child curled up on its side, its body shockingly covered in dark hair. Like a monkey. Then she realised that it was a monkey, a small dead primate.
With an unsteady hand she closed the container and went to the next.
A man’s voice made her jump. It sounded so loud that she thought he must be there in the room with her, but when she spun around there was no one. He gave a laugh, and she realised that he must be standing right outside the door. She shrank back against the wall until she heard his voice move away, then went over and peered cautiously out, seeing two men, big bulky figures with shaved heads, now standing outside Jack Bragg’s room. Dressed in black leather jackets and jeans, they didn’t look like clinic staff, but it seemed they had some kind of authority, for one of them swiped a pass across the door scanner and they went into Bragg’s room.
After several minutes the door opened again and they reappeared with Bragg. One of them, a barrel-chested man with a battered boxer’s face, had a supporting hand on Bragg’s arm as he struggled to walk on his crutch, while the other, with a bodybuilder’s thick neck, followed with Bragg’s bag. They began to move back along the corridor the way they had come, towards the mortuary where Kathy was hiding, but then Bragg said something and pulled his arm out of the man’s grip and turned to go the other way, towards the connecting door to the rest of the clinic. The two men exchanged a glance then took hold of him again, steering him back, protesting, along the corridor.
Kathy waited a couple of minutes, then, when no one else appeared, she slipped out. She paused to look into Bragg’s room to check that it was empty, then continued to the security doors. She swiped the panel and pulled the door open, and stepped out, straight into the path of a nurse, who jumped in surprise and stared first at Kathy, then at the security door closing behind her.
‘Mrs Bragg! What are you doing?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. I thought a walk would help.’
‘But what were you doing in there?’
‘Oh, I just noticed that the door was partially open and I was curious. Nothing to see though.’
The nurse looked at her doubtfully. ‘We’d better get you back to your room. Come along.’
Kathy obediently walked beside her and tried to say good night at the door of her room, but the nurse insisted on coming in, frowning as she took in the cushions arranged beneath the bedclothes. She told Kathy to sit in the armchair by the window and left the room, returning in a moment with a security man and another man Kathy didn’t recognise—a doctor, going by the white coat and stethoscope. They stared at the bed, then came over to Kathy. The doctor looked hard at her.
‘How did you get into the security area, Mrs Bragg?’
Kathy registered a South African accent.
‘Is that what it is? I didn’t know. I just felt like a walk and came to a door that wasn’t quite closed and I went in. I looked around, but it was chilly in there and I came back out and bumped into the nurse.’
The doctor felt her pulse, smelled her breath, examined her eyes and fingers, checked her dressings.
‘You were given a sedative at nine thirty, yes?’
‘I was given some pills, yes.’
‘But you couldn’t sleep?’
‘No. I had some pain in my shoulder, but not enough to call a nurse. And I wanted to make a phone call.’
‘There’s a phone beside your bed.’
‘Oh, right. Well I’d like to make that call now, please.’
‘To your doctor?’
‘No, a friend.’
‘Wait,’ he said, then got to his feet with a nod to the guard, and left the room.
‘It’s urgent,’ she called after him, but he didn’t look back.
Kathy took a deep breath and went over to the window. Nothing was visible in the darkness outside. She paced back across the room, then, when she was alongside the bed, quickly picked up the phone and began keying in Brock’s home number, but immediately the guard was at her shoulder, tugging the phone out of her hand and cutting off the call.
‘Just be patient, Mrs Bragg,’ he said.
The doctor appeared at the door. ‘We’re giving you a new room. Come.’
They made their way along the corridor, and Kathy realised that they were heading towards the security area. When they reached its door she said, ‘No, I don’t want to go in there.’
‘It’s all right,’ the doctor said soothingly. ‘This is where we can give you complete care and rest.’
She wanted to tell him that she had already seen one outcome of that complete care and rest in the cold cabinet, but he had moved behind the guard, who was holding her good arm tightly. She said, ‘Please let go of me,’ and suddenly, surprisingly, he did release his grip and at the same time she felt a sharp prick in her upper arm. She looked down and saw the doctor’s hand withdraw the needle from the fabric of her gown, and immediately she began to feel dizzy. ‘No . . .’ she mumbled, and felt her knees buckle.
20
Brock spread the Sunday papers across the breakfast table while Suzanne, sitting opposite him in the thick robe she’d bought him last Christmas, sipped her coffee.
‘Who was that phone call during the night?’
‘Don’t know. It only rang a couple of times. Private number.’ He picked up a slice of toast and munched on it.
‘You don’t think it could have been Kathy?’
He looked up at her. Sometimes it was uncanny the way she read his mind. ‘I did wonder.’
‘Anything in the papers about the canal boat?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll try her number again.’
He felt Suzanne’s eyes on him as he dialled, still without success. He left another message on her home phone and got that same strange reply from her mobile number. ‘What does “not operational” mean?’
He reached to a drawer in the wall unit and fished around for an old address book in which he had the number of the resident manager of Kathy’s block. ‘Jock,’ he said, ‘David Brock here, Kathy’s boss. Good morning. I haven’t been able to contact Kathy for a few days. She’s not answering her phone. Have you seen her?’
‘Not recently, but her car’s parked outside in the forecourt.’ ‘How long’s it been there?’
‘Since yesterday morning. It wasn’t there on Friday.’
‘So she returned home Friday night?’
‘Must have.’
‘Okay, thanks. Would you let me know if you see her?’
He put down the phone and Suzanne said, ‘She probably needs a bit of time on her own, after what she’s been through.’
The following morning, Monday, Brock held his weekly workload review meeting with his team at Queen Anne’s Gate. He had received a cryptic message from Commander Lynch to make space for possible unspecified surveillance operations that might arise during the week, and he went through their case list, briefing Phil, the action manager, on priorities. When they had finished, Brock spoke to Bren Gurney, asking if he had heard from Kathy.
‘Not since she left the clinic,’ Bren said. ‘I got the impression she just wanted to drop out and recover after what happened.’
‘Did she talk about going away?’
‘Not to me.’
Later he phoned Kathy’s friend Nicole Palmer, who worked in criminal records, but she hadn’t spoken to Kathy since Thursday. At lunchtime he was sharing a plate of sandwiches with Phil, going over his figures, when he got a call on his mobile. It was Jock, from Kathy’s block of flats.
‘She’s just come in, Mr Brock,’ he said, sounding hesitant. ‘Car dropped her off. I wasn’t sure whether to ring, but you asked me to let you know.’
Brock felt a great wave of relief, somewhat surprised to realise just how anxious he’d been. ‘That’s good, Jock. I appreciate it. I’ll give her a ring.’
‘Thing is . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, she’s not her usual self.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Reckon she’s fou as a
wulk.’
‘What?’
‘One over the eight.’
‘Drunk?’
‘Aye, unsteady on her feet. And she asked me how Trudy was today.’
‘Trudy?’
‘My old cat. It’s over a year now since she died.’
Brock remembered. Jock’s cat had been killed by someone trying to intimidate Kathy, its mangled corpse stuffed into her letterbox. No matter how much she might have had to drink, there was no way that Kathy would have forgotten that.
‘I think I’d better come over, Jock.’
‘I think maybe you should.’
When he got to Finchley, Jock was waiting for him in the lobby and accompanied him up to the twelfth floor. Brock rang the doorbell of Kathy’s flat and they waited. He knocked and still there was no response.
‘Maybe she’s in the shower,’ Jock suggested doubtfully.
‘Have you got your master key?’
Jock took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and inserted one in Kathy’s door.
She was lying sprawled on the sofa, wearing an old green jacket that Brock hadn’t seen on her before. He went over to her and registered how pale and still she was, her eye sockets dark with shadows like bruises. Her clothes looked freshly laundered and the bandages and straps on her left arm were clean. He knelt beside her and put his cheek to her nostrils and was relieved to feel the coolness of a breath. He could smell no booze, but there was an unmistakable antiseptic odour about her.
‘Kathy,’ he said, and gave her a little shake.
She murmured softly but didn’t open her eyes.
‘Is she all right?’ Jock said.
‘She’s sleeping.’ Brock stared at her pinched features, thinking. Finally he got out his phone and rang Sundeep Mehta’s mobile number.
‘Sundeep?’
‘You’re lucky you got me. I’m between rooms.’
‘You’re busy?’
‘It’s Monday, old chap. Monday is always busy. The Grim Reaper works overtime at weekends. What’s the problem?’
The Raven's Eye Page 15