by Chris Ryan
Her father, James Macpherson, was an air commodore in the RAF. Ben had seen him a number of times in his military uniform, and his jacket was practically plastered in colourful decorations for bravery. He'd been all over the world with his job, and still spent more time away from home than he did with his family. Annie adored him – idolized him, even – and as a result she was obsessed with all things military. She could tell you the spec of any plane you cared to show her, she knew more about guns than anybody Ben had ever met, and she was, for her age, an expert at tae kwon do. It was an extremely bad idea to try and patronize Annie by asking her a girlie question about her make-up – you were likely to end up groaning on the floor in agony after receiving a well-placed kick in the knee.
Ben opened up the email. Like Annie, it was curt and to the point:
GOING BIRD-WATCHING FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS. FANCY COMING ALONG?
ANNIE
That was another thing about Annie. Her hobbies were her hobbies – it didn't matter to her one bit that some girls her age would have scorned the idea of going bird-watching. She'd been an avid birder for as long as Ben could remember, and had been trying to get him to join her for ages. There had always been some reason why he couldn't, but now he thought that a few days in Annie's company was just what he needed. Moreover, it would get him out of the house and fill his time more productively than moping around here.
And besides, it was just a bird-watching trip. They weren't heading into any major natural catastrophes; they weren't heading into any dangerous, war-torn corners of the world. It was a bird-watching trip, plain and simple. Just him, Annie and a couple of pairs of binoculars.
You couldn't get much safer than that, could you?
The old man didn't really know where he was. He knew it was an institution, of course, but it could have been anywhere in the country. Perhaps it was a week ago that they'd moved him here, perhaps a month or even a year. Time had long since ceased to mean much to him.
He sat in the common room, keeping himself to himself. How he loathed this place: the way all the furniture was firmly screwed to the floor, the antiseptic smell. His face was firmly locked into a position that expressed all that loathing, his lip curled and the steeliness around his green eyes interrupted only by the occasional twitch of his left cheek – a nervous tic that had been with him since he was a young man. But he couldn't stay in his room all day. 'Enough to drive you mad,' he would joke in his high-pitched voice to the nurses, who always seemed uncomfortable with his sense of humour.
The television was blaring in the corner, and five or six other inmates were staring at it intently. Everyone else called them patients, of course, but he preferred to think of them as inmates, because that's what they were. They all wore the same clothes as him – plain trousers, T-shirts and slip-on shoes. No belts, no shoelaces, nothing that could be used to harm themselves or others. None of them were taking in a single word that was being said on the television – the old man could tell that much from the look on their faces.
Days just merged into one for him now. He would be woken at seven o'clock with his daily cocktail of medicines – anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anti-this, anti-that – then left to his own devices. Most days he would read in the morning – scientific journals from the hospital library. His reading was slow these days, and not just because of his eyesight, but he liked to keep abreast of things. Somehow it made him feel as if his life was not being wasted. He had long since grown used to the unpleasant hospital food that was served at lunch time, and he would eat what he was given enthusiastically, knowing that he had to keep his strength up. In the afternoon he would sleep – the drugs made him tired; sometimes he would have meetings with the doctors, little more than kids to his old eyes, and answer the same questions that he had been answering for so many years.
All this was assuming he was not in the middle of what they politely referred to as an 'episode'. When he was having an episode, everything was different. Everyone was different.
One of the inmates started shouting – a hoarse, hollow bark that would have been alarming had such sounds not been commonplace around here. Almost immediately a female nurse hurried into the common room to check on him. She had a friendly face – open and clear – and she put her clipboard and security card down on the table beside her as she wrapped an arm around the distressed inmate and spoke to him with calm, soothing words. Her patient started murmuring. The old man couldn't hear what he was saying, but soon the nurse seemed satisfied that she had settled him. She picked up her clipboard and left the room.
It took a few moments for the old man to realize what he was seeing. The nurse's security badge had fallen to the floor, and she had left without picking it up.
His limbs suddenly froze with adrenaline. His green eyes flickered around: had anyone been looking at him, they might have thought he appeared shifty. But nobody was looking at him – they were all distracted by the blare of the television.
He had to move quickly, that much he knew. He had escaped once before, many years ago and out of a place very different from this. Things had been different then. Less enlightened. When they finally caught him, he had been brutally restrained and dealt with severely. It had blunted his taste for freedom considerably. But lately he had been dreaming of trying again. He was old. He had been assessed as unlikely ever to be suitable for care in the community and so, if he wanted to live a little of his life on the outside now, he would have to take risks. But risks don't seem that risky when you have nothing to lose.
This was what he had been waiting for. An opportunity.
He stood up and sidled over to the inmate the nurse had been looking after. As he did so, he started to prepare himself to make small talk, but there was no need: the inmate did not seem to notice him as he bent down and slowly picked up the string with the nurse's card on it. Hiding it up his sleeve, he shuffled out of the common room.
It was busy in the corridor. He would have preferred to wait for a quieter time of day, but he knew that the nurse would soon realize she had forgotten her badge; when she realized it was missing, the whole hospital would be shut down. He was a familiar enough face, though, to be walking around, so nobody paid him any attention as he made his way towards the exit.
Suddenly he heard a voice. 'Everything all right, Joseph?' it said in a pronounced Cornish accent.
Joseph stopped still, then turned, very slowly, to see the smiling face of one of the young doctors who insisted on asking him foolish questions about 'how he was feeling'. He stared at the doctor for a moment, feeling his face twitching involuntarily. 'Everything's all right, Doctor,' he said finally. 'Everything's all right. Yes.' His head continued to nod as he spoke, and his fingers moved up to flick his floppy hair out of his eyes.
'Good,' the doctor replied, his face concerned. He stepped back a pace or two, his eyes narrowing slightly, before turning and walking off. Joseph stood still, watching him until he turned round a corner out of sight. Then he continued on his way.
There was a receptionist at the exit – a young man whom he did not recognize – but no security guard, he was relieved to see. Joseph stood a little distance away, watching him carefully. He was too old to run, and that would only have drawn attention to him anyway, but he knew he only needed the receptionist to be distracted for a few moments to give him his chance. He felt his bony hands shaking with anticipation.
The moment came soon enough.
The phone rang, and the young man's face lit up. Clearly it was a personal call – a girlfriend, maybe. The phone firmly pressed to his ear, he sat back in his swivel chair and spun round. Joseph didn't waste a second. He strode to the door and swiped the nurse's security card. The door slid open. He took a deep breath and, without looking back, stepped out into the main body of the hospital.
It was even more crowded here, and he went entirely unnoticed. By the time the alarm was raised in the psychiatric wing and the doors were locked down, he was out of the hospital, walking c
almly and slowly down the road, an unknowable look in his eyes.
Chapter Two
Later that afternoon, Ben was jumping off a bus at the end of Annie's street. The rain had let up a bit, but there was still a grey drizzle and he was glad of the hood on his raincoat as he hurried down the road and knocked on the door of her parents' large, imposing house. A dog started to bark, and soon the door was opened by Annie's mum, a harassed-looking woman in the middle of a telephone conversation. 'She's upstairs,' she mouthed to Ben, pointing to the stairs. 'In her room.'
Ben smiled, stroked the ears of the Alsatian that was enthusiastically sniffing his legs, then went up to find Annie.
'Hi, An—' he started to say, but stopped when he saw her.
Annie was eccentric, to say the least, but he wasn't quite prepared for this. She was in the middle of her room, standing on one leg on top of a plastic storage box with a pair of woollen tights wrapped round her head as a blindfold. Both arms were raised in the air as she stood perfectly still, like a statue.
'Come in!' she said brightly.
'Er, right.' Ben edged round her and sat on the edge of her bed, not quite knowing if it would be rude to chat. 'It's me – Ben,' he offered finally.
'How's things?' Annie asked, still barely moving.
'Fine.'
He sat there in silence for a moment, looking awkwardly round the room. It wasn't a typical girl's room: there was a dressing table with various pots and potions that were a mystery to Ben, but on the wall there were pictures cut out from military magazines. Ben recognized a Typhoon F1 on one wall, and a jump jet on another. There was also a huge poster of British birds, as well as a photograph of her dad in full RAF regalia. Ben looked at the pictures for a while before turning his attention back to Annie.
'You going to be like that for a long time?' he asked eventually. 'Because I can always come back.'
Annie lowered one of her hands and removed the tights from around her eyes. Then she looked down at herself and managed to seem a bit surprised at the position she was in. 'Sorry,' she said whimsically, before jumping down off the box and kissing Ben lightly on the cheek. 'Just practising. You sort of get into it.'
'I thought tae kwon do was all, you know, beating people up and stuff.'
Annie gave him a cross look. 'Who do you think I am, Ben? A Teenage Mutant Ninja thingy?' Ben thought she sounded a bit more scornful than she needed to. 'I do tae kwon do because it's healthy, OK?'
Ben nodded, doing his best not to look amused. He felt quite sure that Annie had not neglected the martial arts side of her 'exercise' regime, but he didn't fancy being at the receiving end of it, so he kept quiet as he watched her put the plastic box away.
'So,' he said to break the silence, 'where are we going?'
Annie's face lit up as she practically skipped to her bookcase and brought down an ordnance survey map. She indicated that Ben should sit down with her on the floor, then spread the map open in front of them, and pointed at the area just west of the Northumbria National Park. 'Here,' she told him. 'There's a youth hostel we can stay at, and it's dead close to the area where we can find what we're looking for.'
'Right,' Ben said vaguely. 'We looking for something in particular, then?'
'Well, we're not out to spot pigeons, Ben,' Annie told him as she jumped up and selected something else from her bookcase – a magazine this time. Ben saw the blue and white logo of the RSPB on the front. She flicked through until she came across the page she wanted, then handed it to Ben. 'Hen harrier,' she said shortly. 'Very rare. We'll be lucky to find them.'
Ben looked at the pages. There were pictures of two birds – a male and a female, the text told him. The female was brown, and stared out of the picture with a certain ferocity, her beady eyes seeming to bore straight into Ben, her hooked beak sharp and threatening. The male did not appear so aggressive, but seemed no less mysterious to Ben. He was grey – like the ghost of a bird, he thought – and had a striking nobility about him.
'They're amazing,' he said quietly.
Annie nodded soberly. 'They are,' she said.
'Why are they so rare?'
'Because they're carnivorous,' she explained.
Ben looked confused. 'I don't understand. Wouldn't that make them stronger – top of the food chain and all that?'
Annie was still gazing at the magazine on Ben's lap. She reached out and touched the picture of the male hen harrier almost wistfully. 'There's not much they can do about guns, though.'
'Guns?' Ben was shocked. 'Who would want to shoot them?'
'Gamekeepers,' Annie explained. She had a sad kind of smile on her face. 'You see, the hen harrier is a natural predator of grouse. So some gamekeepers have been breaking the law by shooting harriers to keep their grouse stocks up so that people can then pay to shoot the grouse. We humans can do some pretty dumb things sometimes. It's gone on for years. Anyway, it's got really bad lately. There's only about seven hundred and fifty breeding pairs in the whole of the United Kingdom – and the English population is tiny. Only ten pairs in 2004, and my magazine says that there were only fifteen successful nests this year. That makes hen harriers really rare.'
Ben didn't know much about these things, but fifteen nests sounded like the birds were seriously in danger of being wiped out.
'The area where we're going is one of the few spots in the country where you can still see them, and now's the right time of year. If we see one, we need to make a detailed description of it and report it to the RSPB – they keep tabs on things like this because the birds are so rare. I can't promise we'll have any luck, but—'
'It's OK,' Ben interrupted. 'It'll just be nice to get away.' He glanced slightly glumly out of Annie's bedroom window at the persistent drizzle. 'Hope the weather clears up, though.'
'Yeah,' Annie replied, 'because the thing is, we'll probably die if we get wet, won't we?' She elbowed Ben playfully but – he thought – a bit sharply in the ribs. 'You're not going to wimp out on me because of a few drops of water, are you?'
Ben smiled, and he thought back momentarily to the floods in London and the torrential rains in the Congo.
'No,' he said quietly, 'I'm OK with a bit of rain. You don't have to worry about that.' And he went back to staring at the picture of the hen harrier, and wondering if they might be lucky enough to catch sight of one in real life.
Inspector Tim Matthews was a good deal younger than the clinical psychiatrist sitting opposite, but that didn't stop him looking at the guy with an expression of incredulity.
'You're trying to tell me that he just walked out?'
Dr Hopkinson raised his hands in the air and shrugged slightly. 'I know, it doesn't sound good, but there we have it,' he conceded. 'I guess we took our eye off the ball for a moment.'
The room in which they were sitting – Dr Hopkinson's study – was cluttered with files, papers and well-thumbed medical books.
'How did it happen? I thought this place was meant to be secure.'
'It is,' Dr Hopkinson replied. 'The only way in and out is using swipe cards, and they're only given to authorized personnel. Unfortunately, one of our nurses mislaid hers when she was attending to a patient, and our man was able to grab it and leave without being noticed. She's getting an official warning as we speak, but the truth is that it was just a human error.'
The policeman sighed and pulled a notebook out of his jacket. 'All right then,' he said in a resigned tone of voice. 'You'd better tell me what you know about him.'
Hopkinson looked seriously at him. 'You do understand, officer, that this is confidential. As his doctor, I have a certain duty towards my patients.'
'All we want to do is find him, Doctor Hopkinson.'
The doctor nodded, and placed his fingers together. 'His name is Joseph Sinclair. He's been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for the past twenty-five years – since the act was established, in fact. Before that, he was in a number of institutions. The records are a bit vague.' He smiled apologetically. '
I'm afraid the medical profession has not always been quite as enlightened in these matters as we are now.'
'Any family?'
'He's mentioned a brother, but not in kindly terms. Certainly there's no contact – he hasn't had a visitor for as long as I've been his doctor.'
The policeman nodded. 'What's wrong with him?' he asked.
'A classic case of paranoid schizophrenia,' Dr Hopkinson replied. 'Textbook stuff, really – voices in his head, government conspiracies, men in black out to get him. He's convinced that his mental illness derives from treatments he was given by a government agency when he was a young man. It's a very common delusion. Most of the time he keeps quiet about it, but now and then he exhibits acute psychotic episodes: when that happens, we have to keep him restrained, for his own good and that of others.'
Inspector Matthews looked sharply at him. 'Violent tendencies?'
Dr Hopkinson thought about that for a moment. 'Difficult to say,' he answered finally, 'because we never let it get that far. But with this kind of psychosis, you can never count it out. That's why he's been assessed as unsuitable for any form of community care – he needs to be in a secure institution like ours, for his own good. And now he's out there without his medicines – a few days like that and his symptoms are very likely to escalate.'
'OK. Do you have a picture of him?'
The psychiatrist opened a file in front of him and withdrew a photograph. 'This was taken about three years ago,' he said. 'He hasn't changed much since.'
Inspector Matthews looked at the picture. The man who stared back out at him had a hooked nose and grey floppy hair. But it was his eyes that stood out the most. Piercing, green, beady almost – like a hawk. There was something about them that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. 'How old is he?' the policeman asked quietly.
'Seventy-one, but fit for his age.'
'Still,' Inspector Matthews replied, 'he's an old man. We'll alert the local police forces and search the surrounding area. I can't imagine he'll have it in him to get too far.'