He was taking the stairs with athletic ease, stepping the first three or four of each flight then leaping to the flat before the turn. He was losing me, even over the short distance to the first floor landing, where he pushed aside people in his way, some to the wall, some to the floor. I followed the startled gazes, pointing me to my quarry. Dark clothes. Tracksuit. Balaclava. He turned left at the end of the corridor and I followed.
He reached the narrow back stairs leading to the ground floor way ahead of me. As I began to take them, three at a time now, I heard the crash of a powerful physique against the fire exit. When I reached it myself, the door had swung back, juddering on its hinges. I pushed it and stepped out into the night.
There were floodlights overhead, blazing down on the side alley which ran the length of the ground floor clinics. Cars were parked there, people were getting into them.
“Which way did he go?” I yelled.
In their own, extended time, people answered. Arms floated, fingers uncurled and pointed towards a low building with a tall, grey chimney, billowing smoke.
“That way,” said a voice I'd already left behind.
Ahead of me, the dark tracksuit leaped a wooden fence and dropped down the other side of it. The fence grew taller as I approached it. I upended a dustbin, went up, up and then down onto a patch of grass beside the main boiler house. A door in the side of it opened and a silhouette in the frame, holding a mug of tea, peered out.
“Here, what's going on...” it began and withdrew, seeing the hammer.
As I ran in the only direction my quarry could have taken, I saw that the mug of tea had been exchanged for a phone and the silhouette was dialling a number. I rounded a corner and there was the tracksuit again, clearer now in the light spilling over the wall which ran along Walton Street, the main road through Jericho. The heavy door in the wall was locked. He stood back from it, kicked it with the heel of his foot, to no avail. He turned to me. He may have been considering his options as he came towards me - I was certainly considering mine - but his didn't involve physical confrontation. When far enough away from the wall, he turned and ran back at it with tremendous power, jumped and scrambled onto the top course of stone and dropped down the other side. I heard a girl scream, then footsteps running off down the pavement. I went to the door in the wall, ripped off the lock with the hammer and stepped out into the street.
The group of kids I'd surprised stood welded to the pavement in fear. I yelled at them:
“Which way did the bastard go?”
A girl in the group raised a trembling hand towards the city centre. As I turned to set off I heard the kick start of a motorbike thirty yards ahead of me, followed by a burst of acceleration, saw the streaming of a headlight as the bike came straight towards me. I stepped back, aimed the hammer, and threw it. The biker swerved, the hammer skidded across the tarmac, sparking against the opposite kerb.
I would have killed the first person who spoke to me.
The Map. I went over to a nearby Fiesta, sat back against the bonnet, took The Map from my inside pocket and unfolded it. If they'd had trouble, those kids, with me bursting through a wall with a hammer, what did they make of me throwing it at a motorbike, then consulting an imaginary map of the world? I wasn't able to ask them. They'd moved quietly away.
I'm not sure where my finger would've come down on The Map. Paris, probably, to check the disturbing e-mail I'd had yesterday morning from Fee. “I hear Ellie has a boyfriend. Enrique. Spanish. Should we thank God or worry?” Worry, every time. But right now I couldn't wrench my mind away from Laura, probably saving Julie's life for the second time in ten days. I screwed up The Map, dropped it in the gutter and hurried back to The Radcliffe.
Back at the side-ward, tribal warfare had broken out. Hospital management, in the shape of the two blokes I'd seen at reception and backed up by the ageing security guards, were blaming two coppers in plain clothes for having deserted their post. The coppers were denying it with blunt aggression. The medical crew, the young woman doctor and nurses, had fallen in behind Laura who was suggesting that the row took place somewhere else, not outside Julie's side-ward. That was good to hear. It meant that Julie was alive.
“He grabbed her by the shoulders,” Laura said to me, breaking away from the argument. “Shook her, slapped her face. God knows why. Being Julie, she's fought back. She's going down for an x-ray, just in case there's any internal bleeding, but fingers crossed.”
I turned to go into the side-ward and one of the coppers, a man in his thirties with crinkly, auburn hair and a Glasgow accent, placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Who the hell are you?”
I looked at the hand, looked at him.
“He's with me,” said Laura.
“I'll give you two minutes,” said the copper, slowly releasing his grip.
Julie was face down on the bed when I entered, the nurses were checking the stitches which had held together the gunshot wounds, mostly healed now. She was still badly bruised, though, yellow and purple, the colours of a beaten wife or child. I turned away with a mumbled apology but Julie had seen me.
“Nathan, please ... don't go.”
I went over to her and she stretched out her hand. It was cold and spindly, her face white as the sheets around her.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“I didn't catch him. Went after him, but...”
“Youngster?” she suggested.
I shook my head. “Balaclava. Couldn't tell his age. Did he say anything?”
“Yeah. 'Tell me where the money is. Where've you put it?' What's he talking about, Nathan?”
“His accent? Irish?”
“No. English, but kind of ... dressed up.”
“And he didn't try to kill you?”
“Well, no, but if these girls hadn't come in when they did...”
I stood back as the nurses pulled the bed gown around her and helped her to a sitting position. She winced a few times, reaching out with an angled arm for support. They arranged the pillows to support her, checked her oxygen cylinder and left. Julie said, almost immediately:
“You know about Jim?” I nodded. “They told me this morning.” Her head fell to one side, she closed her eyes in despair. “He's been dead to me for ... for a couple of...”
She looked at me for understanding. I took the bony hand in both of mine and tried to warm it.
“Is Tommy alright?” she asked.
“He's fine, fine,” I said. “Can you remember what happened, up there on The Ridge?”
She smiled. “You're as bad as those two coppers. Every five minutes they're in, saying “Has it come back to you yet? Do the photos ring a bell?”
“Photos?”
“Two blokes Jim was inside with.”
She withdrew her hand and gestured to the bedside cabinet. I opened the drawer, took out an A4 sheet with two sets of prison mug shots on it. Young faces, one set in a sneer of defiance, the other clearly terrified behind the blank wall of his pose.
“I've been thinking about what we might have that other people would want off us.”
“Money,” I said, meaning the two million her old man had made off with.
She looked at me. “Well, money's one thing, certainly. I mean everyone thinks everyone else is rich these days. But does that explain it, I wonder.”
“Explain what?”
“When Jim was inside, I'd go back to the cottage some nights and get this feeling. Like someone had been in there, turned it over and put everything back, extra neatly.”
“Did you tell the police?”
She smiled and winced at the effort of it. “Yeah, like Hi, I'm the mad woman who lives in the woods and thinks she's been burgled. What makes you say that, madam? A feeling, officer.”
I nodded.
“Things too precisely arranged,” she went on, more seriously. “Drawers closed flush, lids back on things perfectly, great patches of furniture with no dust on.”
“Maybe you've g
ot a ghost who does your housework when you’re not looking.”
“Ghost! That's all I bloody need.”
A porter entered, wielding a trolley. The two nurses were right behind him and one asked if I'd mind leaving. I folded the sheet of mug shots and pocketed it.
Outside in the corridor hostilities had ceased. The young doctor had been called to incoming wounded, management and the security guards had retreated to their separate bunkers. I said to the Glaswegian accent:
“Why did you leave her alone in the first place?”
He looked at me with stone grey eyes. “You've had your two minutes, pal. Fun's over. Nothing more to see.”
“You mean I don't get to see you having your balls chopped off?”
He looked away and started to chew at his bottom lip. His partner recognised the danger signs and stepped in.
“D.C. Bailey,” he said, in a local accent. “My colleague is D.C. McKinnon. What he means is that we're as upset as you are. But no one's been hurt, Mrs. Ryder's off to be checked over...”
He turned and opened the door for the trolley to pass. It swerved out into the corridor, powered by the porter, guided by the two nurses. Bailey put an arm on McKinnon's sleeve and they followed. I waited until there was distance between us, so that what I had to say became public.
“What will you be telling Charnley?” I called after them.
It was certainly a name they didn't want to hear. They stopped and turned to me.
“You know him?” asked Bailey.
I crossed my fingers and held them up. “Like that we are. What will you be telling him? That you cocked it up?”
“Nathan...” whispered Laura, the start of an urgent request to keep my temper. I eased her aside as Bailey ambled back to me.
“Well, we'll be making a report, of course...”
“Pair of bloody comics! You left her alone, unguarded, and some bastard walked right in off the street and tried to kill her. Now you're hoping the problem'll go away.”
Bailey smiled again. “Things happen. You can't always be in control.”
“To hell with justifying it,” said McKinnon. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Ex D.C.I. Hawk.”
“Oh, well, in that case I apologise,” he said, with exaggerated sarcasm. “I hereby acknowledge your superior rank and wisdom and humbly suggest that you fuck off!”
I slipped a hand into the inside pocket of my jacket only to remember that The Map wasn't there. It was in the gutter in Walton Street. I took a pace towards McKinnon, he towards me, and Bailey was there between us in a flash, sideways on, arms raised to brace against a sudden collision.
“This is not going to happen!” he said, forcefully. “This is a hospital, for Christ's sake! It is not going to happen.”
McKinnon and I looked at each other for a moment or two longer. He nodded. I took that to be capitulation. He set off in pursuit of Julie and the nurses and Bailey took Laura and me to the Friends of the Radcliffe Kiosk where he bought us stewed, expensive tea.
Seated on a ripped corridor bench, in the disturbing glare of a flickering strip light, I gave him chapter and verse on the man I'd chased. Bailey then told us the story from his side. He and MacKinnon had been sat in the corridor outside Julie's ward, playing cards, when the staff nurse called them to her office. Urgently. On the phone was a manager type saying there was a commotion in orthopaedics. Three men were attacking one of the girls there. Bailey could hear the rumpus in the background, then a girl screaming. The manager type pleading, pleading, pleading. Without a second thought the cavalry was on its way.
The orthopaedics department was right at the other side of the hospital complex which, Bailey admitted, should have rung a warning bell and, having declined a nurse's offer to guide them there, they were soon lost in the labyrinthine nightmare of the Sheldonian Annexe. Eventually they found the place they'd been called to. No one there. All closed up. Only then did the penny drop. They'd been screwed over. They phoned reception, told them to get in touch with the ward and hurried back.
Laura took up the story from there. The two nurses went down to check on Julie and there he was, the man I'd chased to Jericho, shaking Julie like a rat, slapping her in between. When the nurses entered, he ran. From then on it's guesswork. He got to the lift, only to find they'd broken down. The stairs were beginning to heave with people going down them slowly. He hid in the fire-point cupboard.
I sat thinking for a moment or two, swilling the anti-tea round in its paper chalice, contemplating its destructive power. Then I asked Bailey:
“The rumpus you heard over the phone, the girl screaming?”
He replied, sheepishly: “Any night of the week, on the telly, I guess. Tape-recording.”
I agreed. “How long between you leaving the ward and reaching orthopaedics?”
He shrugged with his face. “Ten minutes.”
“Time enough to kill someone. So why didn't he manage it?”
“I can tell you that,” said Laura. “She wasn't where he'd expected her to be. In intensive care. She was moved up to the ward this morning.”
Bailey nodded. “So he's made the phonecall and located her, by which time he's cutting it fine.”
“And that saved her life,” I said. “I hesitate to say she’s a lucky lady but she does seem to scrape through. Did she have any other visitors, d’you know?”
“No,” said Bailey. “Not even the usual, Tom and what's her name?”
“Giselle,” I said. “Are you sure they haven't been in today, only...”
I was about to say that Laura had seen Tom in Blackwells but, if it turned out to be an important detail, I'd have kicked myself for sharing it.
“Somebody popped in,” said Bailey. “Round about dinner time. Didn't want to see Julie, left a big bunch of flowers.”
“Who was that?”
“Japanese lad. Didn't leave a name.”

As Laura and I walked along the Woodstock Road the mood between us wasn't quite as it had been earlier, in Brown’s. The safety factor had gone. She'd seen me lose my rag with McKinnon. I tried to make small talk. What I came out with was so small as to be inaudible to the naked ear.
“Do you always use the Park and Ride?” I asked, feebly.
For some reason she took it as mockery.
“I do,” she said. “I'm one of those boring people who do as they've been asked.”
“Who asks you?” I struggled.
“The big sign at the roadside.”
“I'll drop you off.”
We fell silent as we approached St. Anthony's and on reaching the Landrover, Laura stood by the passenger door and asked, as if it were a precondition of travelling with me:
“What will you do about Bailey and McKinnon?”
“I shall drop them in it.”
“It was a genuine mistake.”
“And if Julie had still been in intensive care, she might be genuinely dead.”
There was a glimmer there, under that ghastly halogen lamp, a definite orange hint of a smile. Followed by another question.
“Don't you think you're a bit too old to pick fights with men half your age?”
“Certainly not. More questions or shall we go?”
“One more. Who tried to kill Julie this time, do you have any idea?”
“No, but he or she thinks they know where two million pounds is buried. And I'm really pissed off that he outran me.”
We climbed into the Landrover and I headed back to the city centre.
“Has the ring road upset you too?” she asked. “It's in the opposite direction.”
“I know.”
She pursed her lips and sat back to weather the detour I was clearly going to make. As we waited at the traffic lights beside St Giles church, I said:
“Look ... I'm sorry. I've got a mild case of A.M.D. but I'm getting on top of it...”
“What is A.M.D?” she asked, half knowing, I suspect, that it would be something to
deride.
“Anger Management Disorder,” I said. “A police shrink diagnosed it ten years ago.”
She looked away and took a deep breath.
“It can flare up at the daftest things,” I went on, in spite of her obvious scepticism. “But I have this imaginary Map. It's a little trick an old bank robber taught me...”
The lights changed to green, the bloke behind me hooted. I glanced in the mirror, reached out to switch off the engine.
“No!” she said, severely.
I turned and smiled at her. “Just kidding.”
I turned into Walton Street which, in essence, lay somewhere between the Oxford of television drama and the Oxford of reality. Jericho hadn't quite surrendered to up-town trashy stores, milling crowds and buses going nowhere. Nevertheless, an army of bollards had advanced and cut off easy retreat down handy side-roads. On its flanks had come the contradictions of the age, hordes of whispering beggars within firing range of a hundred cash dispensers.
“This is where I lost him,” I said, parking up on the kerb, opposite the door in the back wall of The Radcliffe.
“Have we come to mourn?” she asked.
“He jumped the wall and ran down there to a motorbike. By the time I was out on the street he was kick starting it and heading towards me.”
Now she was really smiling. “I'm surprised you didn't run after him.” I opened my door. “I see, you're going to run after him now.”
“Won't be a sec.”
I got out and walked along the kerb till I reached the Fiesta. I bent down to the gutter and picked up The Map. I laid it on the bonnet, smoothed out the wrinkles, folded it, and put it back in my inside pocket.
On the way to the Park and Ride I explained to Laura about The Map and she listened. Without comment.
-10-
The following day, Tuesday, I said to Hideki over breakfast:
“You went to see Julie Ryder yesterday.”
“No. Didn't go to see, I go to take flowers.”
“Went,” I said. “Verb. Past tense of go. I went, you went, etcetera.”
Haggard Hawk: A Nathan Hawk Crime Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Crtime Mysteries) Page 11