by Janet Wakley
“Can we have the fire lit?” Clive tentatively enquired.
“No. Can’t risk the smoke,” Mat retorted flatly and stepped aside as Hood and one of the drivers gingerly carried the stretcher into the room. Instinctively, Mel stepped forwards smartly and pulled back the covers in order that Charlie could be laid gently onto the sheet. Reflected by the stark uncompromising glare directly above his head, his skin appeared an almost translucent shade of sickly yellow. Mel quickly checked the wound dressing before covering him over. The plastic drain bottle now contained three hundred millilitres. Clive joined in, tying the bag of intravenous fluids onto the headboard to gain a little gravitational fall to the vein in Charlie’s hand. Broken and despondent, Silas stood a few feet inside the door. Gone was the fight, the arrogance, the composure. He had said nothing since leaving the veterinary premises and now watched with disinterested eyes as his colleagues busied themselves with the patient that was costing them all so dear.
As the stretcher bearers retired, Silas was also ushered out of the room behind them to be escorted by Mat down to the cellar. He left the room without a word of objection. As the large wooden door closed with a thud behind them, the unmistakeable rattle of a key turning in the lock signified once more their isolation. Clive and Mel looked at each other. They had at least been left alone with their fragile patient. Mel ran to the door, stooping to examine the keyhole to determine whether the key had been left in the lock. The opening was pitch black, but the cold draught on her face convinced her that the key had been removed. Damn! Resigned, she turned back towards Clive who was counting the pulse in Charlie’s wrist. Quietly she said, “He’s not doing very well, is he?”
“No.” Stepping back from the bedside, he continued in a voice not much more than a whisper, “That journey did him no good at all. I think he’s still bleeding. His abdomen is quite hard and swollen and although there’s not a great deal of blood in the drain, I think there must still be a bleed somewhere.” As if to confirm his assessment, “his blood pressure is not improving and his urine output is still poor.”
Mel stared at the small pool of dark yellow fluid at the base of the catheter bag. “We can’t go through all that again. Whatever put them into panic-mode and made them rush us all back here like that was probably more than he could cope with.”
With a shake of his head Clive looked solemnly towards the now sleeping Charlie, exhausted by the movement and motion of his journey.
“Do you think they will really kill us if he doesn’t make it?” Mel felt the tightening in her stomach and although she couldn’t help ask the question, did not want to hear her own fears confirmed.
“Whether he survives or not, either way, our usefulness will be over. We’ll just be an encumbrance; an expendable nuisance. Our lives mean nothing to them,” he moaned bitterly.
Mel shuddered. Then in a moment of spontaneity and reckless confidence, she pulled out of her clothing the blade handle, foil blade packs and forceps hidden within her shoes. Clive looked nervously towards the door, indicating with a brush of his hand that the items should be hidden away again quickly.
“When did you get hold of those?” he breathed. “I don’t know how we can best use them, but I guess they’re better than nothing, especially the scalpel. Just keep them hidden for now.” He paused. “Does Silas know you have them?” his question was deliberate and his look penetrating.
“No.” Mel suddenly felt uneasy. Was it possible that Silas’s suspicions had been right all along? Had she just exposed the only weapons likely to aid an escape to the wrong person? She searched his face for some clue or reassurance, but he looked away towards Charlie and began again re-taking his blood pressure.
With the items concealed, Mel also applied herself to the care of Charlie. The effects of the morphine, now that all painful movement had ceased, overwhelmed the weak man, who drifted into unconsciousness, his respirations becoming deep and rasping. Each noisy breath was occasionally interspersed with several seconds of still silence. The accumulation of the opiate, administered throughout the journey, now depressed the stimulus for oxygenation so that his breathing became irregular. Mel gently lifted his eye lid, the exposed pupil tiny and unresponsive to the light.
Ash stirred in the grate as the gusting wind outside whined in the chimney. Mel shuddered and folded her arms, the cold chill air tasting dry and dusty in her mouth. “We’ve got to have some heat in here,” she complained. “Surely, a little fire wouldn’t hurt?”
Clive ignored her, his gaze firmly fixed upon the pallid face of Charlie. Suddenly, he grabbed the yellow sacks, rummaging for the green re-breath bag and mask. Finding it amongst the collection of goods, he began connecting the tubing to the oxygen cylinder and as Charlie’s breathing quietly ceased, he began once again, the manual ventilation of his unconscious patient.
Charlie’s respiratory arrest lasted almost eight minutes. The suspense seemed interminable, filled only with a tense silence. Clasping the rigid mask over Charlie’s mouth and nose with his left hand, Clive’s right hand slowly and methodically squeezed and released the reservoir bag, pushing oxygen into the patient’s lungs. They waited anxiously for the climatic effect of the morphine to pass. Every minute or two, just as Mel had done earlier following the operation, he paused from his rhythmic compressions to study the reservoir bag, until at last the tell-tale flutter of the soft green plastic once again revealed the early signs of respiratory effort. Clive eventually removed the rigid mask, replacing the lighter face mask, leaving Charlie to breathe spontaneously with increasing efficiency. The critical moment over, for the time-being at least, Clive remained sitting beside the patient, pummelling one hand into the other.
Mel, her arms wrapped around her, aimlessly wandered round the room to keep warm. The triple set of lancet windows, each with a pointed arch, no longer held glass within its frames. A fierce cold draught penetrated the room through invisible cracks in the solid boarding on the outside of the window. The window was high up, the width of the narrow gauge frames too narrow to allow the passage of hers, let alone Clive’s bulky frame, even if they were to be able to remove the outer boarding. Dejectedly she returned to the bedside. “It’s so cold in here. I don’t think we’ve a thermometer in one of those bags, but I should think Charlie must be hypothermic as well by now. I know I am. What’s the time?”
“Quarter past one. It’s been quite a day, hasn’t it? Still, we’ve survived so far...”
“How can you say that?” blurted Mel heatedly, as she embarked upon a further series of massages of Charlie’s legs, as much to keep herself warm as to stimulate his circulation. “The longer we’re trapped in this hell-hole playing nurse-maid to a sick villain, the less likely we are to ever get out. You don’t really think they’re going to come back and say, thank you very much, you can go home now, do you?” Mel was close to tears. Sad brown eyes stared back at her. Purple bruising on his cheek, now tinged with yellow at its periphery, prematurely aged his rounded features. They both knew time was running out.
Meat pies with chips and a flask of tea were delivered to the room by Danny, who anxiously enquired after his father’s progress.
“It’s too early to say yet,” replied Clive quietly. “It’ll take him a while to recover from an operation like that. He really shouldn’t have been moved back here so soon, but it’s too late now.” He watched the young man as he peered uneasily down at the sleeping man. “We’re doing everything we can, but it will take a while,” Clive added trying to exude a reasonable air of confidence.
“Where’s Mr. Maxwell?” Mel asked as Danny retreated towards the door to join Hood.
“He’s downstairs. Boss wants you kept apart. Says he causes too much trouble.”
“He is alright, isn’t he?” Mel demanded.
“Yeah, course.”
After their visitor had left the room, Clive smiled at Mel. “Charlie’
s slow recovery will at least buy us some time,” he reasoned. They won’t get rid of us until he no longer needs us. If necessary, we can use some of the drugs we’ve got to delay things a little.”
Hungrily they shared out the wrapped paper packages and tucked into the food, enjoying its warmth if not its culinary sophistication. Time dragged. Charlie, having twice regained consciousness for a brief while, each time surrendered to sleep without resistance. He was weak. How much he knew or understood about what was happening to him was difficult to estimate. Asked by Mel, when consciousness returned, with a shake of his head he disclaimed any pain or discomfort. His abdomen, however, remained firm and distended and the wound drain insidiously increased its volume of blood.
Clive rested back in the bedside chair, his crossed feet resting upon the side of the bed as he watched the steady rise and fall of Charlie’s chest. Mel curled up on the foot end of the bed, too cold and fearful to sleep, but resigned to inactivity until the door would be opened. Silas, she hoped, would eventually be returned to the room to temporarily relieve the duo of their responsibilities. Clive dozed, occasionally snatching his head upright as it rolled off the backrest in fitful sleep.
To fend off cramp and cold, Mel reached for the sphygmomanometer and took Charlie’s blood pressure. Despite the continuing provision of intravenous fluids, his blood pressure remained dangerously low. She wondered what his oxygen saturation level might be, but without appropriate monitoring equipment, she could only examine the colour and venous return of his fingernail beds. The return was sluggish. The pressure gauge on the oxygen cylinder showed it to be almost empty. As she claimed the new cylinder which had been discarded on the floor earlier by Danny, Clive watched as she exchanged the replacement.
The big house was quiet. Clive stretched, rose from his chair and wandered casually over towards the solid wooden door. Stooping down, he pressed his ear to the keyhole and listened. If there was anyone standing guard outside the room, he was keeping very still. Wide rusty hinges secured by metal bolts made the door an impenetrable blockade. Their incarceration in this ground-floor room was as robust as had been the cellar. Clive banged with his fist on the door, waited and tried again. Eventually his call for attention was answered by Hood, who reluctantly acceded to his request for a visit to the bathroom. They took turns to be escorted from the room, the boss’s insistence that two guards remained with them at all times, seemingly dismissed as unnecessary while they were locked in their impenetrable prison.
“I hope Silas is alright,” ventured Mel when they were left alone once more with their patient.
“He can take care of himself,” replied Clive sourly.
“No, actually, I don’t think he can. He comes across arrogant and self-righteous, but I don’t think he’s coping with this any better than we are. It’s just that he shows it in a different way. It must be awful being shut down in that cellar on his own.”
“You’re getting soft, my girl. You should be thinking about saving your own skin rather than his. His sort always comes off best. He’ll get out of here and be hailed as a hero. You see if I’m not right.”
“That’s if they haven’t shot him.”
Clive ignored her remark and returned his attention towards the yellow sacks, discarded beside the doorway.
“Let’s see what we’ve still got in here that might be of some use. The drug boxes and syringes were thrown into one of them. We’ll lay them out on that chair by the bed, under the light.”
“What’s going on? What are you doing to me?” The startled pair spun their heads round towards Charlie, the unexpected interruption causing Mel to drop the rolled bandage packets onto the floor. Charlie, his head turned towards them, struggled to focus; disorientated in the cold and gloomy surroundings. His voice was deep and rasping, his mouth and lips dry and inflexible.
“Hello, Charlie.” Mel was the first to recover and approach the bedside. “You’re back with us, then. How do you feel?”
“Where’s Maddie? Get Maddie,” he demanded, his cold blue eyes fixed now upon Mel’s face.
“You’re perfectly okay here with us,” she tried to deflect his order.
“Get Maddie!” he insisted.
“Who’s Maddie and why do you want her here? Let’s try and make you a bit more comfortable before you have any visitors.”
In the corner of her eye Mel was aware of Clive drawing up a syringe from a glass ampoule. Charlie’s resurgence from anaesthesia in such a dramatic way was likely to hasten the conclusion for the three hostages and valuable time for planning had suddenly almost expired.
“She’s my wife.” The quiet croak of his voice was almost pitiful and for a moment Mel thought she had misheard.
“Maddie is your wife? No wonder they’ve gone to so much trouble to fix you up.” Mel was incredulous.
“Where’s her ‘ex’? Did he do a good job on me? He’d better have done.” He sighed, resting his head back on the pillow and closing his eyes. “Can’t say I feel very good right now, though. Can’t you give me something?”
Mel stared at Clive open mouthed. His expression of complete shock confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that her interpretation of his questions had not been mistaken. He had implied that Silas had been Maddie’s first husband!
Mel sat heavily on the side of the bed. She felt sick; her mind raced in circles as she tried to comprehend the truth of Charlie’s statement. Silas, who had pushed the patience of the gang members to the limit with his obnoxious attitude had, until they were about to leave the veterinary surgery, been allowed to exhibit his temper unchallenged. It had been Maddie who, in the end, had instigated the physical assault by Hood on him. Could that have been a put-up job to satisfy his medical colleagues or had his usefulness as a surgeon now expired? Could this be why he had said so little about his private life?
Clive, quietly recovering his own shock, continued to connect the small syringe to the cannula in the back of Charlie’s hand. A few moments after the insertion of the clear liquid into the vein, Charlie once more was overcome by the slow rhythmic breathing of deep sleep. The drug would buy them some more time.
“We’ve just got to get out of here. What have we got that we can use?”
Mel and Clive returned their attentions to the yellow sacks. With a new determination, they retrieved and examined the mix of items which had been thrown together in the rush to depart the surgery. For several minutes they were absorbed in their search for anything which might aid an escape. Neither observed the patient as his breathing quietly became obstructed, the effects of the sedative drug insidiously depressing his respiratory competence. Silently and unceremoniously, Charlie died.
23
The pair gazed in horror at the lifeless corpse in front of them. Instinctively Clive’s fingertips frantically pressed in vain for signs of a carotid pulse, but he was already cold to the touch. Lifting his eyelids, dark dilated pupils stared back, fixed and unresponsive. Grabbing the re-breathe system, he clamped the face mask over Charlie’s mouth and nose and began rapidly pumping the reservoir bag. Throwing the covers back to expose his upper body, Mel knelt on the side of the bed and commenced chest compressions with a crazed ferocity far beyond the requirements of normal resuscitation procedure. For a few minutes they worked earnestly. Clive, anxious to instil life-saving drugs into the patient, intermittently broke away between sequences of ventilation to collect, draw up and administer adrenaline from their stock. Their efforts were ineffective.
“Stop. It’s no good. He’s gone.” Clive said at last, laying a hand on Mel’s arm to cease the compressions.
Charlie’s face, fixed now in a grotesque and disfigured grimace, stared back at them with unseeing eyes. For a full minute neither spoke as the enormity of their new situation sank in.
“Shit!” Clive hissed. “They’ll kill us. They’ll kill us. We’ve got to get out o
f here now. Can we smash the window?” The pitch of his voice rose in the grip of panic.
“Calm down Clive and think!” Mel’s own pulse rate had already shot into orbit, her heart beating so hard and fast she felt it would burst in her chest. “We’ve got to keep calm and work this out. And, we’ve got to keep quiet.”
“Where’s your scalpel? We can attack them with that.”
“We’d never get out like that. We’ve got to find another way out of here. The window is no good. It’s too high to reach and the concrete arches are too small to get through, even if we could get rid of the boarding on the outside. I think we’re just going to have to try and get out of the door.”
Clive was already examining the lock and hinges again, his short rapid breaths exhibiting the fear which now racked his body. Mel took out the blade handle and pulled from her shoe a foil wrapper containing a short scalpel blade. Her hands were shaking as she gingerly tried to clip the razor-sharp blade onto the stud of the handle to secure it ready for use. Hampered by the dressing to the palm of her hand, twice it slipped, almost cutting her fingers, before eventually it was fastened into place.
“We’ll never get this door open,” moaned Clive. These bolts are rusted on and the lock takes one of those big mortise keys.
Joining Clive at the doorway, she bent down to the lock to listen for tell-tale sounds outside the room. It was completely silent. Her eye to the keyhole, she hesitated and then placed her cheek against it. The earlier cold draught seemed now less forceful. Using the scalpel she gently probed the inside of the lock. The blade almost immediately struck a hard object.
“I think the key is still in the lock,” she whispered. “Hood must have left it after we came back from the bathroom.”
“Before you get too excited, it might have escaped your notice that it’s on the wrong side of the door. We need to find a way to get these hinges off, and we’re never going to do that without proper tools.”