Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Daylight dwindled, might soon be left behind. Steve reached into his haversack and brought out the night sight. Using a pair of rubber straps given him by Danzo, he fixed it between the telescope and the barrel on his Enfield.

  The night sight had belonged to his quarry: Danzo had picked it up on the escarpment. The angel would know it had fallen into the hands of his enemies. Unless he had another, he would not dare to venture into the dark for fear of being shot unseen. At the same time, since he was in the lead, darkness would provide his best defence. The oncoming torch-beam of a pursuer would make an ideal target.

  Reluctantly, Steve found and tested his miniature Maglite. When the daylight eventually failed, he’d be unable to follow the trail without it.

  Eighty paces on, the main corridor ended. The last direct rays of sunshine were now far behind. In the gloom ahead Steve made out the form of two lift doorways in shiny steel. Set in the wall on his left was another, wider, door, also in stainless steel. A quick flash of the beam showed this too gave access to a lift, a bigger one for trolleys and laundry baskets.

  On the right rose a flight of stairs. The dust and debris on every second tread had lately been disturbed by a pair of heavy boots.

  Steve shut off the torch and edged forward. When he was almost within touching distance of the left-hand banister rail, he risked a peep up the stairwell. Just enough light was filtering in from each floor to show that the stairs turned five or six times in their anti-clockwise ascent. He glimpsed a damp-stained ceiling, far above, and immediately pulled back.

  ‘Weren’t born fucking yesterday,’ he breathed, and produced a grim smile, picturing the angel hiding on the stairs just above a half-landing.

  At Pinstead, Steve had spent most of his days and nights in the woods with the other hunters. No one had been faster at snap-shooting teal or snipe or woodcock. No one had been more deadly in exploiting the split second of visibility that often was all a fleeing deer allowed. Given the crass opportunities he had been presented with today, he was amazed he had not already killed the bloke they were after. It was true, what he had told Carl and Gil: their prey was a dodgy bastard. His cunning, and a streak of luck, had so far kept him alive.

  Reflex action, snap speed, were nothing without foresight. From an early age Steve had been taught to observe, to read the ground, to anticipate. However lucky or cunning the quarry, it could usually be out-thought.

  His assault rifle held ready, he waited at the foot of the stairs. As he listened, his right index-finger absently caressed the warm, smooth metal of the trigger. Staring sightlessly at the dimness of the floor, he inclined his head, presently moving it from the left to the right, all his attention centred on his hearing. The silence above him possessed a quality of occupation, menace. It was not the silence of an empty space. He told himself that the angel was definitely on the stairs. But between which two floors? Probably the fourth and fifth. Climbing four flights would be enough to leave the expected follower out of breath. His pulse would be elevated, his hearing less acute, his aim less precise. By then, also, it would seem obvious that his quarry had gone all the way to the top and his caution would be correspondingly reduced. Rounding the final half-landing, he would have perhaps half a second’s grace before the shotgun went off. Boom.

  On the way to this spot, Steve had passed a crossroads in the corridors. A little way along one of the side corridors he had noticed a pair of glass doors that opened on another, subsidiary, staircase.

  He decided to go back there, moving as quickly and quietly as he could. He would take that staircase all the way to the top, then silently descend this one, catching his quarry unawares from above and behind.

  Listening a moment longer, turning his plan over and over in his mind and finding it good, he heard a muffled, very distant crash, as of something being knocked over. From the direction and elevation of the noise he deduced that Gil was responsible.

  ‘Clumsy sod,’ he thought, turning away from the stairs and heading back down the corridor.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Suter heard the crash and every muscle in his body tensed. The sound may have come from a long way off, from another part of the building entirely, but it confirmed that they had followed him in.

  Again he wondered whether he had adopted the right course of action. By sitting here between two floors, he had given himself at least a chance of getting in an effective first shot. The price of this stratagem was to trap himself in the stairwell. If, simultaneously, one pursuer came from above and another from below, he would be in terrible danger.

  But such cooperation was unlikely. Since the hospital was so large, the three of them would have split up. His best option was to try picking them off one by one. To do that, he had had to use his trail to lure the first of his victims into place. As soon as he had disposed of the first, the nature of the game would change. The next would be much harder. The third, the survivor, would be easier, might even run away, or give up without a struggle.

  Suter’s calculations formed an amorphous mass of indecision, generated by the terror that had invaded and pushed all else from his mind. Only a single shred of logic remained to stop him from embracing the siren of retreat: he knew he would eventually have to face these three men. Better, safer, to do it in a place of his choice.

  He was seated on the fifth step down, close to the railing, the Remington across his knees. Light was seeping into the stairwell from two broken windows on the floor above. In the past fifteen minutes of listening, he had taken in every detail of his surroundings.

  Each flight of stairs comprised twelve concrete steps, faced in pinkish marble with a non-slip carborundum strip near the edge of the tread. This particular flight, between the fourth and fifth floors, was more sparsely littered with human detritus than the others, though on the half-landing below lay at least two complete skeletons, one belonging to a child of about ten. Flat brass handrails, tarnished to the patina of a garden bronze, ran down either side of the stairs. The handrail on Suter’s right formed part of the metal banisters that looped all the way to the ground floor. The rail on the left was fastened to the wall with a series of brass brackets, each having a circular base fixed with four cupped screws. A marble-faced dado rose a foot or so above the staircase. The wall itself, anciently emulsioned in pale green, the minute roughness of its finish coated with dust, still bore two staggered picture-frames, grimed with neglect. The frames held the sort of images formerly displayed in the corridors and stairways of public buildings: The Bridge at Arles by Van Gogh filled the nearer. The other print, also a landscape view, Suter did not recognise.

  These observations had served only to reinforce the hallucinatory strangeness of enforced inaction, of feeling the hardness of the step eating steadily into his backside. The stairwell was itself a place of dread, of some dimly threatened but inhuman punishment. Hospitals, schools, prisons: all were designed and built to impose the will of others unseen. In his stew of fear and doubt, Suter momentarily felt a craving to belong in an institution such as this, to be suspended here for ever in this cool, indirect light, cared for, given calming drugs, monitored, all responsibility gone. His own bed and locker and armchair would constitute home. He would need no more. To them would he be returned by kindly orderlies when he had strayed too far. Such an existence would be like an everlasting childhood. He would never have to grow up or learn to interact with his fellow men.

  Fantasies of this sort had accompanied him, on and off, for the past twelve years. He had even committed some of them to his diary.

  He had fantasised, too, about being visited by Helen. She might sit anxiously at his bedside while he lay semi-conscious, recovering from some glamorous accident or disease. She might be with him in the palm-filled conservatory, reclining in wicker furniture while snow fell outside, or she might accompany the invalid on his first tentative walks in the grounds, her mere presence confirming her devotion and her regret for all that had gone before.

  ‘Keinmal d
ie Helen,’ he whispered. ‘Keinmal! ’

  He checked his watch, the back of his hand a congealing mass of bramble-tears. Seventeen minutes had passed by. Three more to go: he had determined to wait here for exactly twenty before abandoning this plan and going in search of his enemies.

  And then, from somewhere below, he heard a click, the beginnings of a slight, rolling rattle, the sort of noise a small human bone might make on a hard surface if inadvertently knocked by the toe of an ascending combat boot.

  Two floors down. Maybe three.

  It was working!

  The beating of Suter’s heart suddenly swelled to fill his thorax, his throat, his head, drowning his hearing. He edged away from the banisters, more into the middle of the step, recalculating the angle of approach. His hands were shaking as he confirmed that the safety catch was off. He raised and turned the muzzle of his shotgun.

  Having left his trail on the main staircase, Suter had climbed to the top floor before making his way back to, and part way down, this other staircase. Whichever of the three had been following him, in doubling back, would not be expecting him here.

  Only half heeding, much too quickly, the man rounded the bend in the stairs. Suter glimpsed a shaven head, the yellow and blue plaid jacket. He fired.

  The decompacting thunder of the report, expanding to fill the stairwell and amplified by the hardness of the marble and concrete, was so loud that it hurt Suter’s ears. The fist of lead shot struck the oncomer in the neck. He staggered backwards against the precursive patch of his own tissues, blood, clothing and pellets that had already been embedded in the plaster of the wall. His eyes, his brows, what remained of his face, registered pure astonishment.

  The second round hit his chest, delaying gravity’s progress in bringing him slithering, in a broad trail of blood, to the floor. Still breathing, his robust heart still dazedly managing to pump, he was left sitting upright like a rag doll, legs splayed, arms at his sides, head hanging forward.

  He made a gurgling noise and it was over.

  Suter got to his feet. He knew he should search the body. He knew he should take the haversack and the assault rifle for himself, and he knew he should do these things without delay, before the other two got here. He also knew that he should withdraw two new shells from his bandolier and replenish the magazine of his shotgun. But the shaking of his hands had become uncontrollable. It had spread into his arms, his whole body, his mind. Never before had he killed anyone with such deliberation or at such close range. The two at Shanley, the two torturing Muriel, had been bad enough, but this murder belonged to another order of magnitude.

  Ever since finding that bloated corpse in the river, ever since arriving at Shanley, he had been no more than a few steps ahead of blind funk. Each episode of exertion and horror had let it come closer to his heels, and now it had overtaken him completely. He saw now, too clearly, that he had brought all this upon himself. He should never have interfered at Shanley.

  No good ever came of meddling in other people’s business. It had been provocative enough to give Muriel the Glock, but aiming the AW and opening fire, actually opening fire and in consequence shooting two men – that had been an act of lunacy.

  He should have followed his own advice and fled. Gone home.

  It wasn’t too late. All he had to do was get out of the hospital in one piece and be careful about his tracks.

  He had already freed the blood-stained haversack from the body. Slinging it across his own shoulder, he seized the assault rifle and started up the stairs.

  7

  Nylon blinds, wrecked, tattered, green with algae, lightly clacking in the breeze, were still hanging at the tall window-frames of this ward on the western side of the top floor. All three windows had been broken and the ceiling had sprung leaks. Nearly everything organic had rotted away: each rusty bedframe supported a matrix of corroded springs upon which reposed fallen equipment or broken glass, together with whole or partial skeletons. The flooring, immune to decay, was more or less covered with rubbish, such as the remains of bedside chairs and trolleys, cupboard handles and hinges, dislodged ceiling tiles and light fixtures, a smashed TV, bedpans, scattered teeth, fragments of glass and crockery, more and yet more bones. Over the years, windblown grit, leaves, twigs, feathers and bird droppings had conjoined with and bound this mass of debris into an uneven layer across which it was impossible to walk without leaving signs of passage.

  Suter moved to the middle window and looked down. Shimmering rainwater filled most of the flat roof below, making a lake, dazzling in the afternoon sun.

  He craned his head but could see nothing he recognised. To his right jutted another wing of the hospital. It concealed the football ground, and the road, from view.

  Almost as soon as he had again reached the top of the stairs and started back the way he had come, he had realised that he must have taken a wrong turning. In trying to correct it, and without a light, he had become, in the warren of corridors, wards and offices, completely disorientated. Because of all the steel in the shell of the building, the luminous blob on his compass needle had offered no help. All he had to go on now was his map and the direction of the sunshine.

  The sun felt warm on his hands. Across the rooftops of the town the land dipped, then rose towards a distant ridge of forest, mauve with haze. The trees there formed a mass like a long bank of cloud, its upper surface here and there projecting ambitious wisps and billows of overtopping foliage against the glare of the south-western sky.

  Suter had grown up among contours such as these. The landscape should have had a comfortable, domestic feel, but, left untrodden for twelve years, it had slowly been resorbed into the wilderness. The woods were coalescing, becoming continuous again, like the forest of oak and lime that in prehistory had stretched from sea to sea. Only the environs of his house remained friendly: his river, his valley, the narrow paths he had forged or kept open. At Shanley he had scarcely been able to recognise the parish he had once known. That too was being resorbed. The strangers who lived there today, the fate that had overtaken them, were all part of the new order of things. Suter was the sole relic of the past. His feelings had been shaped by civilisation. They were nothing more than an anachronistic burden.

  But he could not shake off his reaction to the creature he had just killed. It clung to his mind like an incubus. His hands would not stop trembling. He lifted the binoculars anyway, his attention drawn by something half a mile or so away and somewhat to the left: a lightning-shattered church spire.

  Part of the structure still hung loose. Some of the broken beams were visible, charred and as yet unaffected by rot. As if dislodged by the arrival of Suter’s gaze, three starlings, perching there, jumped into the breeze and took flight.

  Although he had intended to leave the hospital as he had entered, he saw now that all he really needed was another staircase, any staircase, which led to the ground floor. With suitable caution, he could then find his way outside and get away unseen.

  Suter lowered the binoculars and drew back from the sill. He was about to turn when, at about ten yards’ remove on the level below, he felt and heard a massive thud. The floor under his feet bulged, rising in a shock wave that instantly passed on, dissipating in all directions, and was followed by the sound of a coarse voice shouting someone’s name.

  ‘Carl! Carl! It’s all right! I got him!’

  A moment later Suter answered under his breath. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, if I were you.’

  ‘Carl!’

  Could it be true? Mad and black as it seemed, there was no other explanation. The two surviving skinheads, drawn by the sound of his shotgun, had apparently converged on one another from different parts of the building. Each, in his extremity of trepidation, in his eagerness to put an end to Suter, had allowed himself to become hyperreactive, so much so that one of them, on tracking the other down, mistaking him for their common prey, and perhaps cornering him in some unlit washroom, had, through the open doorw
ay, rolled a grenade.

  Suter stole to the end of the ward, heading for the staircase. His defeatism had vanished. It might never have existed. His intellect was again forging ahead, drawing inferences, making connections.

  Once the survivor had realised he was on his own, what would he do? Leave, of course: if not altogether, then the building at least. But might he lie in wait by one of the exits, hoping to catch Suter unawares? Or might he choose to follow at a distance, waiting for an opportunity to shoot? At the very least, if Suter failed to catch him now, he would be able to return to Shanley with an exact account of events. And of the place to resume looking for Suter’s trail back to Harefield.

  ‘Carl?’ A note of profound alarm had entered the young man’s voice. He may by now have returned to the scene of his error, on the point of directing, through thick and pungent smoke, a torch beam on the grisly consequences.

  Going as quickly as he dared, Suter hurried along the corridor. He passed the counter of the nurses’ station and turned right. Yes. There, in the twilight ahead, through that familiar intersection with its dust-filmed fire extinguishers in yellow and red, lay the right way to the staircase.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Emerging at last from the same door through which he had entered the building, Suter had his first plain sight of the youth he had been hunting for the past half-hour: the one in the red jacket, with the AK47, the one who had entered the rear of the house in Baldwin’s Lane. By the time Suter came out on the doorstep, the youth was fifty yards ahead, the speed of his run belying his size. He was still carrying his Kalashnikov. There was nothing to prevent him from stopping and turning to fire. Nothing except the cowardice that had manifested itself during the protracted, largely silent, guessing game of descent. He had just kept going, committing an occasional clumsiness to vouchsafe some sound or other that had drawn Suter on. At every possible place for an ambush, Suter had expected to find him waiting. He had been, was still, running away, and in a few seconds more he would reach the corner of the generator house and be lost.