by Knight, Ali
He took a deep breath in, the air still acrid. He couldn’t bend his body round the right angle of the tube, so wriggled round until he was lying face up and tried that way, slithering along on the oily residue. The pipe felt inches wider now, which to Darren seemed as large as a cave. He began to climb, pressing his palms and his knees against the sides of the pipe for traction, and felt the air change. He looked up and above him was a small circle of night sky.
A police team were in the car park strapping themselves into flak jackets and checking equipment, their leader on the phone to a maintenance manager.
‘The furnace is a pyrolysis incinerator that is environmentally efficient—’
‘Where does the flue go?’ the sergeant demanded.
‘Up through the walls of the hospital. About halfway up the flue splits into two. One returns the gases back to the incinerator and the other goes up to the roof.’
‘Is it large enough for a human?’
‘I doubt it. We never checked. No one’s stupid enough to climb into an incinerator.’ There was a pause. ‘I thought.’
The sergeant sighed. ‘The fool’s more likely to get stuck in it. Where does it come out?’
‘On the roof to the far left of the helicopter pad.’
‘How many storeys in this building?’
‘Three, but only in some parts. It varies.’
The policeman looked up at the jumble of levels, the new wings and departments added in different decades, floors jutting out further the closer to the ground one got, like an ugly tiered cake. ‘You need a ladder. It’s twenty feet off the ground,’ the maintenance manager said.
‘Go,’ the sergeant commanded his team.
Darren pressed on, exhausted and panicked, the goal ahead of him tantalisingly close. The fresh air was so joyful he cried anew. He reached the top of the flue and pushed at the wire grate that covered the entrance. It wouldn’t budge.
Three policemen used a variety of ladders near the helicopter pad to move across the roof of the building. It was slow work, negotiating maintenance ladders in the dark. They went in formation, keeping low in the shadows.
Darren pushed and punched again and again at the wire grate across the exit to the flue but it held fast. Even more worrying than being caught was his fear that he was going to fall, that his arms, strengthened though they were by his fitness regime, all his chin-ups, would eventually fail. He started shouting, banging on the top and sides of the flue, his hands bleeding, his nails ripping.
The moon came out from behind a cloud and gave him a little more light. The wire was attached to the metal flue by a rubber ring. He began clawing and pushing at the rubber and, instead of trying to push the wire, grabbed it and tried to pull it towards him while pushing outwards on the rubber. It moved. He yanked hard and managed to dislodge one side of the wire from the rubber. He got his hand on the edge of the flue and could rest his burning thighs for a blissful moment. Using brute force he pushed the wire cover with his head and climbed out, scraping his head, neck and shoulders as he passed.
He rested, his chest hanging over the side of the flue, miles of south London stretching away all around him. Then he realised he was twenty feet off the ground.
Now, instead of the relentless push outwards with arms and legs to climb the flue, he needed to grip tightly. He climbed out and down by hugging the sides of the flue tightly with his thighs and his arms. The contrary movement was a blessed release for his aching limbs. He fell the last ten feet and lay on the ground for a moment, stunned. Then he got up and ran to the right, away from the helicopter pad he could see in the distance.
The police fanned out across the roof, careful not to miss anyone who might be hiding in the shadows, and surrounded the flue. Two of the men kept on going across the roof; the other climbed the ladder.
Darren ran across the roof and down a ladder to a lower level, came to the edge of the roof and looked over. Squares of light from the windows on the floor below him lit up the roof felt. He used a drainpipe to climb down. The windows were in a corridor and two were open to the warm air. He pulled at one of them and slid through, closing it behind him.
He walked fast along the corridor and ducked into a toilet.
His face in the mirror was a shock. He was covered in black smears and his hands and head were bleeding and bruised. He ran the hot water and cleaned himself as best he could with paper towels and soap, ditching his shirt to reveal the T-shirt underneath and wash his arms. He stuck his face under the cold tap and let the water run colder and colder over him. Then he followed the signs for the exit.
The policeman climbed the ladder carefully, keen to avoid a mishap. He looked carefully over the rim of the flue, tensed for a surprise. He saw the bent grate, sharp edges pointing starwards, and a collection of long blond hairs caught on the wires and drifting in the wind.
56
A senior police officer was interviewing Olivia, standing at the end of her bed in the basement. ‘What did this person look like? I want as accurate a description as possible.’
Pronouns told a person a lot, Olivia decided. The policeman had used the word ‘person’ twice in two sentences, which meant to Olivia that they didn’t know who they were searching for. Darren had got away. She was genuinely surprised. But then many things about Darren Evans were turning out to be surprising.
She had been careless. But he had got inside her Teflon shell and when she had screamed she had been prepared to give him up. After all, power was an illusion that was easy to puncture – she needed to keep it inflated.
She studied the policeman at the end of the bed. She had already been subjected to a body cavity search; she was damned if she was going to make their jobs easier.
‘I was groggy, half asleep, the pills, the pain …’ She was laying it on thick. I woke and wondered if I was still dreaming. It was a woman.’
Olivia saw the detective lean in, more animated now. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘The hair. I saw long hair.’
57
They would come for him. It was only a matter of time. Olivia had given him up. The worst thing was that it felt like betrayal, as if they had had an acknowledged connection that she had then cast aside, a code of behaviour and she had let the side down. Darren was delusional expecting such a thing from a despicable creature such as that.
He had committed a serious crime. He needed to man up, take responsibility and tell his dad what he had done before the police pulled up in the car with the flashing lights and he gave his parents a whole fresh level of pain. And his mum wasn’t even out of her hospital bed.
But he was so tired, emotionally and physically, from his desperate battle to get out of the flue, that he was pulled back home. Like an animal returning to its burrow, it was the only place he could think of to go. He dragged his bike into the hallway and left it there, managed to get up the stairs and collapsed on his bed.
His sleep was as deep as the grave.
He was woken in the morning by the sun drilling into his eyeballs through the open curtains. Every cell in his body ached, every taste bud contaminated with something tangy and unpleasant, every inch of skin papery and sore.
He staggered downstairs in search of tea, and found his dad already there. He had that look on his face, Darren realised, that he had seen before: disappointment.
‘So you left her without even saying goodbye for the night? She was waiting for you to come back from wherever you’d gone to.’ He wiped a hand across his brow. ‘After she found out who was there in the hospital …’ He trailed off, not wanting to have to explain further. ‘She was upset.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t feel well.’
‘You came in so late. Where were you?’
‘I walked home.’
‘Walked? I had to move the bike out into the garden. You couldn’t even be bothered to do that.’
‘Shit.’ Darren ran his hands over his hair. It felt greasy. ‘It’s Orin’s fault.’
&
nbsp; ‘You leaving her alone isn’t his fault. Take some responsibility.’ He gave a huff of frustration. ‘She needs you to be reliable right now, Darren. Now of all times.’ He reached into the fridge for a beer, not even pretending to hide what he was doing.
Guilt stole over Darren like a shroud. ‘I’ll go to see her again today.’
His dad looked away. ‘That’s not necessary. She’s discharging herself and is coming home.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘No, but she wants to be away from all that. I can’t persuade her otherwise.’
Darren felt responsible for this too. His worry increased in tandem with his guilt.
‘You left this place in a right state. She needs to come back to somewhere clean. What are all these white bits all over the carpet? And the front of the house, what’s happening with that? It looks worse now than it did before.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He opened the fridge, took a look at the sorry contents within. Mum’s absence had made the proportion of bottles to food change dramatically. He picked up a takeaway food carton and opened it. He was starving, hadn’t eaten last night. ‘This spicy?’
‘Thai red curry.’ He pulled a fork from a drawer as his dad slurped from his beer. Darren picked up a cold forkful and chewed the curry.
His dad winced. ‘You don’t want to heat that up?’
Darren shook his head. He needed Tabasco, though. He opened a cupboard and scanned its contents. He put a knee on the kitchen counter and hoiked himself up, pushing aside containers of dried herbs on the top shelf. He found the Tabasco and turned back to Dad, who was leaning back on the counter, staring up at him, his arms folded in a ‘what the hell’ gesture.
Darren froze.
‘Jesus, do I really look that bad?’ Dad asked defensively.
Darren put the Tabasco down. With his knees on the counter he was much taller than his dad, and he saw his tired and drawn face in a new light. And a thought came to him that changed everything.
He got slowly off the counter. ‘No. I just looked at you from a different perspective.’
‘You need to finish painting the house. You promised her.’ Darren wasn’t listening. His mind was a whirl of possibilities. ‘Are you even listening?’
Darren focused on what Dad was saying. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I can’t take much more,’ his dad said. ‘All I can do is go to the hospital and sit there and hope she’s going to be OK. You know what I thought yesterday, Darren? You know what I spent most of the day at the hospital thinking? That I was lucky.’ He took a long sip of beer.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That I have a wife who is seriously ill with cancer, and I was lucky. Because I wouldn’t have to spend my time thinking about what might have happened to my murdered daughter.’ Dad looked at the ceiling as if waiting to find an answer there in the cracks. ‘Maybe she was right. Maybe I’m guilty.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of giving up too soon. Maybe if I had tried harder we could have found her—’
‘Dad, stop that right now.’
‘But it’s true isn’t it?’ He turned to Darren now, anger and pain and regret at work on his face, deepening the lines, obviously gnawing at him like an animal. ‘Carly was being held somewhere, wasn’t she, maybe for a long time, and we didn’t get to her.’
‘You are not to blame, not in any way.’
His dad’s face was breaking, collapsing under the burden of the revelations of the last few days. ‘But I am, Darren. I am to blame.’
Darren hadn’t seen his dad cry for years, and he was aware that he was the one who had brought this to pass. He had started on a voyage of discovery to make it better but instead he had made it worse, so much worse than he could have imagined. He should have let it all alone. The truth wasn’t going to set them free; it was a prison from which there was no escape. He tried to put his arms round his dad, but the older man pushed him away and stood.
‘It’s been ten years. And time hasn’t altered anything. I still think she’s going to open that door and walk in, smile that smile, throw her bag down.’ He shook his head.
‘I thought you had resigned yourself to her being gone,’ Darren said.
His dad threw his hands in the air in a hopeless gesture. ‘I have, but hope is irrational and never-ending.’
‘I’m sorry, Dad, more than you can know.’ Darren had to sit down. Something struck him forcefully. His parents must never know what he had done, of that he was absolutely certain. They had suffered too much already and he had made their traumas worse.
Dad began to laugh, snot and tears mingling in a sorry mess. By lunchtime, Darren knew, he would have drowned his sorrows. ‘Well, maybe there are some miracles in the world. You leave the ladder leaning up against the front of a house in south London, it hasn’t been stolen and we haven’t been burgled.’
58
Great Yarmouth
Olly ran to the corner of the street and pelted down towards the Spar, his school rucksack bouncing on his shoulders. He was trying out his new trainers, which Nan had finally bought him after a lot of nagging. He felt he could run for miles on these cushions of air. He also had persuaded Nan that he needed the same, newer version of the Nikes that Beggs had, so everything was good. He glimpsed the harbour in the abandoned lot between the end of the terraces and the Spar.
He sprinted past the shop and past the high wall. Where the wall ended and the little steps that led to the boats began, he nearly bumped into a woman walking away from the harbour. She had to step aside at the last minute to avoid being clattered into by him.
‘Soz!’ Olly shouted, wheeling away.
She carried on walking past the Spar, her face turned away, her blonde hair hanging low on her back.
It was the woman who liked staring at boats.
Olly slowed to a stop and looked down at the boats in the water. The day was still, the North Sea a mirror. Nan would be frying herself on the lounger in the yard when he got back from school. Olly watched the sun bounce off the water; the harbour was never busy, least of all on a weekday well after sunrise. At this hour it was all but deserted. His eyes tracked to the red boat, its tarpaulin a tight seal over the cabin and deck.
Olly looked back at the woman, but she had disappeared. She wasn’t interested in all the boats, Olly knew; she was interested only in the red one. The line of crafts sat in the still water, but the red boat was bobbing up and down as if someone had just jumped off the deck.
Olly ran further along the road and looked into the car park for the owner’s hatchback. Sure enough, it was parked there. He began to wonder where Gert Becker was as his boat was shut up, but then his eye caught sight of a stone and he kicked it with his new Nikes and was pleased to see it hit the wall and ricochet away. He headed off on the long road to school kicking every stone and discarded drink can he could see, the red boat and Gert Becker forgotten.
59
Darren finished the cold curry and went for a shower. He stood under the steaming water for a long time, scrubbing away the memory of that pitch black, never-ending tube. As he got clean he felt stronger – and angrier. There was somewhere he needed to go.
He went straight to Orin’s office, barged past the secretary and her flapping arms and opened his door. Orin was up and around the desk immediately. His bulky form could move with speed and grace when required. ‘It’s OK, Margaret, I’ll take this from here. Take a seat, Darren. I’ve been expecting you.’
‘What kind of stunt were you pulling at the hospital? My mum was in there recovering from an operation—’
‘Doesn’t that make you mad? It would me. That she’s there, only metres away, being cared for by the state, and you don’t even know?’
‘That doesn’t matter—’
‘If I got her to feel even a sliver of fear, good. I’m not going to apologise. If I made those guards think, why am I protecting an enemy of the state? – good.’
‘I care about m
y mum. Nothing else.’
Orin gave him a long look. Darren could see him taking a careful look at his hair. ‘You sure about that, young gun?’
He began to feel uncomfortable under the big American’s unwavering gaze, but knew he had to fight back. ‘Who’s your contact at Roehampton? Someone tipped you off that Olivia was there. You have no remorse, do you? No thought of how others might feel. Think of Molly’s family!’
‘I prayed for Molly’s family, your family. You and I are in the same boat.’ Orin had sat back down now, the forefinger of his right hand tapping quietly on the top of the desk. ‘Your mum’s been in hospital for at least two days. It’s a strange thing when someone is confined to bed, there’s lots of time to kill. A young, energetic man like you, you can’t sit still, I’d bet.’ Tap, tap, tap went his finger, beating out its threat.
‘I—’
‘Don’t interrupt me. Someone got close to Duvall, far closer than they should have done, even when they moved her to the basement. They think it’s a woman, but they’re not sure, because this person escaped out of the hospital incinerator, if you can imagine such a thing.’
Darren swallowed. ‘A woman?’
‘Because they found long blond hairs at the top of the flue, fluttering in the breeze.’ There was a pause. Orin’s blue eyes never left Darren’s face. ‘Cut your hair and come and join my campaign.’ Tap, tap, tap went the finger.
Orin knew. He had him right where he wanted him.
‘Why haven’t they arrested you for barging into St George’s?’
‘Because I have very, very good lawyers, and I have moral right and public opinion on my side. The question is, what was this person even doing in Duvall’s room? She was unharmed.’ Orin looked at Darren again. ‘But that is a side issue. This isn’t the reason why you came to see me.’
Orin was right. He needed to concentrate on the reason he had come. ‘Something struck me about the papers you sent me.’