Gone in the Night

by Mary-Jane Riley

  Hospital.

  What time was it? How long had he been here?

  He licked his lips. His mouth and throat were dry. He turned to reach for the jug. His body protested. That was the trouble with lying on a soft bed in clean, cool sheets, you grew weak, couldn’t cope with pain. His arm was heavily bandaged. There was a tube snaking into his other arm. The tube led to a drip. Antibiotics, he guessed. He managed to pour water into the cup without spilling too much, and then was able to drink some through the straw.

  A nurse bustled into the room. Probably in her late thirties, early forties. Lines were beginning to appear. Dark curly hair pulled back into a pony tail. She reminded him of—

  Cora. It was the curls because Cora didn’t have dark hair, she had glorious flame-red hair. He remembered at last. His sister. That’s who he was doing all this for.

  ‘Nice to see you awake, Dan.’ The nurse put a blood pressure cuff around his good arm. ‘A cuppa will be along soon.’

  Dan?

  Yes, Dan, the name he’d given to the man at the café.

  ‘How long have I been here, nurse—’ He peered at the name badge pinned on her boobs. ‘Thelma Johnson’

  ‘The ambulance brought you in yesterday. Your friend is waiting for you outside.’

  Yesterday? He’d been out that long? And friend?

  ‘Which friend is that?’ He tried not to wince as the cuff tightened. He was still so sore all over.

  ‘I’m not sure. I can find out for you, though. He followed the ambulance.’

  ‘Thanks, Thelma.’

  ‘Nurse Johnson to you. He’s been here all night waiting for you to wake up.’

  ‘All night. Right.’ That didn’t sound good. He didn’t have those sort of friends.

  ‘The man who came with you in the ambulance had to go home. He said he would try and visit in a day or two. Mike, his name was.’

  Mike? God squad, that was it. Wanted to save his soul and ended up saving his life, not that he probably knew that. He leaned back against his pillows. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Ipswich Hospital. You were in a bit of a state. You’ve obviously been in the wars. Dehydrated, hypothermia, lots of cuts and bruises. That arm was badly infected and you had nasty burns on your hands.’ She stood, looking at him.

  ‘I can’t remember what happened to me.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, we will want more than just the name “Dan”.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘A surname. An address. How you came by your injuries. Medical history. It looks as though you might have some.’ She nodded towards his hand.

  He waggled his fingers – what was left of them. ‘You mean these?’

  ‘And the shrapnel scars on your body.’

  ‘Army.’

  ‘I thought as much. And you haven’t been looking after yourself well. You’re quite malnourished. Have you been living on the streets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nurse Johnson began writing on his chart at the end of the bed.

  Rick remembered being in the café. The man in the red jacket with the bull neck – Gary. That was his name. And there was a man in a good coat. Pete. Yes! He felt like punching the air, his memory was coming back in small pieces. The runners in their Lycra facing up to the two goons. The world starting to spin. Mike telling him he looked pale, like death. His arm throbbing. Wanting to throw up. Hearing Mike’s voice telling him to hold on, that he was going to call an ambulance. The blackness swirling up.

  ‘Shall I get your friend in now?’

  ‘Not at the moment, Nurse Johnson.’ He gave what he hoped was a weak and feeble smile. ‘I don’t feel up to it.’ If the friend wasn’t Mike, then that left Gary or Pete, and that wasn’t good news, not good news at all. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to see him at all. Can you send him away?’

  Nurse Johnson raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’

  He tried to look pathetic. ‘Please. He’s not really a friend.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll tell him you don’t want to see him, but I can’t force him to go. Anyway, we don’t expect you’ll have to stay here long. Don’t want you blocking the bed for someone more deserving, do we?’

  ‘No, Nurse Johnson.’ He tried to smile at her.

  She smiled slowly. ‘Enough of the charm, Dan. Now rest. Lunch will be along soon, and although it’s not exactly gourmet it is nourishing. So eat up. The doctor will be doing his rounds later and I expect he will want to sign you out.’ She frowned. ‘We’ll try and get you a bath before you go.’

  She bustled out of his room, leaving the door open.

  They were busy on the ward. He could hear people calling out for attention, the ping of a lift somewhere, people walking past his door purposefully. He lay quietly for a minute. Nurse Thelma Johnson would call social services soon enough. Ex-army and homeless, she would reckon he needed help. There were more deserving than him, far more. And he couldn’t afford to get caught up in red tape and do-gooders. Not in any way.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed, gasping at the pain shooting through his back, his hip, his arm. He winced as he yanked the catheter out. He steadied himself, wishing away the nausea that was rising in his throat.

  Where would his clothes be?

  In the bin.

  All he was wearing was a hospital gown. He felt around the back. Thank God it wasn’t one that left his arse exposed. Now all he had to do was to walk out of his room and find a cupboard with some spare scrubs in it – just like they did in the movies. It was going to be that easy.

  Sure it was. But he had to try.

  But first—

  He pulled open the drawer on the bedside cabinet and found his watch and gold chain in a bag. He managed to put his watch on, but the chain was more difficult. His thumbs felt like great fat sausages as he tried to fasten it around his neck. He nearly gave up, but then thought of Cora. She had given him the chain, years ago, and he had never taken it off. He wasn’t going to start now.

  Two agonizing minutes later, he had managed it.

  He sat, breathing heavily. Christ, if it took him that sort of effort to put on a fucking necklace, he stood no chance out there.

  He wanted to sleep.

  No. He could do better than this. Besides, he couldn’t stay here, he would die. Whoever it was posing as his friend – Gary or Pete – wasn’t going to give up.

  He stood and took a few tentative steps. Okay, not too wobbly. Bit shuffly. Stand up straight. Breathe through the pain. Ignore the throbbing in his arm. At least he’d had a fair dose of antibiotics.

  He reached the doorway. No one was taking any notice of him. He walked out with as much confidence as he could muster, sure that someone was going to ask him what he was doing. Shoulders back. Stand up straight.

  He was on a long corridor with rooms either side and a nurses’ station at the top. He walked in the other direction, peering into rooms as he went. At the fourth room he got lucky. A man was lying asleep, his mouth open, snoring. On the chair by the bed was a coat.

  Rick hobbled in, swiped the coat and put it on over his gown. There was a pair of slippers under the bed. He put them on as well. A little small but they would do. The man in the bed kept on snoring. Rick hoped he would forgive him when he woke up.

  He tried to walk normally back down the corridor; no limping, no striding, no breaking into a run. The idea was for him to blend in with the crowd. As he rounded the nurses’ station he saw a couple of chairs against the wall. Gary in his red jacket was sitting in one of them, flicking through a magazine.

  There was nothing else for it, Rick had to walk past.

  At that moment a gaggle of medical students came along, laughing and joking. Rick stuck himself to the far side of the group and walked on, leaving the waiting Gary behind. He didn’t dare risk a look to see if the goon had seen him, but there were no running footsteps, no shouts, no knife pricking the skin at his side.

  He kept on walking. Found the lift. Made it to the ground flo
or.

  Out in the hospital forecourt he stopped for a minute and patted the coat pockets. A wallet, surely? He took it out and found five tenners and a fiver and a credit card in the name of Clive Nixon. ‘Sorry, Clive. But I think I need the notes more than you do at the moment,’ he muttered.

  The painkillers he’d been given were beginning to wear off and his whole body throbbed. He thought he could feel a wetness on his torn arm. It was drizzling. A teenager hooked up to a drip was under a shelter smoking furiously. ‘You okay, mate?’ he asked.

  Rick nodded. ‘Bad morning.’ He sat down on a nearby bench, the cold and wet seeping through the coat.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ The teenager inhaled on his fag some more before crushing it underfoot. He began to walk back to the hospital, then stopped. ‘Hey, mate, there’s someone waving at you. That window there. Where the stairs are.’ He pointed.

  Rick looked. It was Gary, gesticulating and shouting, obscenities probably.

  ‘He looks as though he really wants to talk to you,’ said the youth.

  Rick watched as Gary began bounding down the two flights of stairs.

  He thought quickly. ‘Do me a favour, mate. That bloke is after me. I slept with his wife, you know how it is.’ He smiled ruefully and held out the £5 note, his heart hammering.

  The boy tapped ash onto the floor and took the money, pocketing it quickly. ‘I know what you mean. These things happen. I’ll trip him up or something.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Rick began to limp away as fast as his injuries and ill-fitting slippers would allow him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  DAY FIVE: MORNING

  It was all very well crashing at a mate’s place between shifts, thought Cora, but it wasn’t anything like having your own bed. She groaned as she leaned over the side of the sofa and stabbed at her phone to turn off the alarm. She didn’t want to wake Bunny and Bev, not at five o’clock in the morning when it was still as black as bloody pitch outside. The winter seemed interminable. She thought of Rick and wondered where he was spending his night.

  Yawning, she tiptoed to the bathroom for a quick wash and brushing of teeth before slipping into the clothes she’d left out the night before. Then she let herself out of the house and began to walk to the hospital on the outskirts of Ipswich.

  It was cold and drizzling and Cora wondered where Rick was, wondered how badly hurt he might be after the crash. He could have internal injuries, anything. Alex said he should have gone to hospital. Oh God. Perhaps he was hiding out somewhere? He was nothing if not resourceful. And, despite his weeks on the streets, he was pretty fit. She sent a silent prayer to God – any bloody god – that he was at least safe. Not for the first time she regretted the path she had let Rick go down.

  When he had first gone missing, she had panicked and had been only too glad of Alex’s help, whether she was a journalist or not. But now … now Alex was too involved, too tangled up with the whole thing and Cora was scared about what might happen. If Alex knew the truth, knew how much danger she could be in, what would she do? She might put Rick in even more danger. Alex had already twigged that it wasn’t only them looking for Rick. Still when all this was over, she would have her story. It just might not be the one she thought it was.

  The good thing was that Alex liked working on her own, she hadn’t bleated on about bringing in the police, though there was the problem of her having been to see Sam Slater about some bits of glass. Not that it would get anywhere, she was pretty certain of that, but they would have to be careful – she, Cora, would have to be careful.

  Alex was not stupid and would not be fobbed off much longer regarding the Riders. She would have to tell her the whole story soon to keep her onside. She needed her help. She couldn’t do this on her own.

  The Riders.

  They had been there all through her childhood. She and Rick played with them during the school holidays when the Rider boys were bored shitless because their fancy friends weren’t around. They were allowed to swim in their pool, use their swings and slides. Even play tennis on one of their courts. But the brothers would always make it clear that she and Rick needed to know their place. Their father was the farm foreman. Their mother was the cleaner and the odd-job woman. Their house was a tied cottage. It didn’t matter that Rick had more brains than the lot of them put together, that he went to the same school, that he had worked hard for his place. Their lives belonged to the Riders.

  Of course, Rick wouldn’t play by the rules and committed the cardinal sin of stealing Lewis Rider’s girlfriend from right under his nose. That did not end well. Even now Cora grimaced as she remembered the stand-off at the beach, the girlfriend telling Lewis that Rick had made her go with him. The hurt on Rick’s face. The sneer in Lewis’s voice when he told them they were dirty pikeys, that Rick was only a scholarship boy with a hand-me-down uniform. Was that where it all started? Or had the seeds been sown when they were young children and were only allowed to play with the Riders when the Riders wanted them to? Everything was on the Riders’ terms.

  There had been a time when she thought that Lewis Rider could have been a friend, a real friend. They had shared secrets over cigarettes. But maybe he had regretted that, which had made him act even more nastily towards her and Rick.

  Nastily. That was one word for it.

  She wanted to shake away the memories.

  The lights of the hospital burned brightly through the dark and the rain, and she put away all thoughts of the Riders and tried to think of the day ahead.

  Even at this early hour, the hospital was busy. Cora got to work checking the folders and drugs charts for the latest patients. A child with a bad wheeze who needed a nebuliser and a teenager waiting to have her inflamed appendix taken out. She was not allowed anything to eat. Her mother hovered nearby, anxious, and Cora did her best to reassure her.

  The morning whizzed by in a flurry of ward rounds, recording observations and talking to the doctors about the plans in place for the patients until finally Cora was able to take a lunch break down in the canteen. Then she thought she would nip outside and have a fag.

  It was still drizzling as Cora went through the hospital doors, so she pulled her cardigan tightly around herself and walked along a path and down the side of a building to an area where she couldn’t be seen by any nosey parkers. She wasn’t really supposed to smoke on hospital premises, but she and her smoking colleagues had found this sweet spot where no one would see them.

  She leaned against the wall to keep out of the drizzle as much as she could and closed her eyes. Some days she thought she could fall asleep this way. Today all she wanted to do was not to think about anything, if only for a few minutes.

  Ten minutes later she ground the cigarette under her foot, picked up the stub and then made her way back towards the hospital entrance. As always, the area in front of the hospital was busy with people milling around and ambulances pulling up next to the nearby A&E department.

  A group of people came out of the doors and among them she saw a man, half running, half limping. He was vaguely familiar. The group surged towards her, and she lost sight of the man for a moment, then spied him sitting on a bench. He was clean-shaven and his hair was short, but … She stared. Her heart jumped into her mouth. It was Rick. She had found him.

  Cora opened her mouth to shout just as two ambulances set off from A&E, their sirens blaring. She began to run, but became tangled up in the group on the path.

  ‘Excuse me, please,’ she said, trying to shoulder her way through, then she tripped, banged her knee, hit her head on a sapling. She looked up, dazed, to see a man in a red jacket race out of the hospital doors, pushing people out of the way, looking left. Right. Looking for Rick.

  Where was he?

  She clocked him at the same time as the man, who had his hand in his pocket. Not a gun, surely? Not in a crowded place with all these witnesses around?

  Oh God, it was like watching a silent film. Or having a drea
m where you know it’s going to end badly.

  The man ran towards Rick – he would catch him, Cora was sure. Then the youth with the fag tripped him up. The man got up slowly, the youth with the fag looking as though he was apologizing, preventing him from moving away. Meanwhile she could see Rick disappearing from her sight down the road.

  ‘I’m sorry, miss, are you all right?’ A woman helped her up. A sea of faces looked at her, concerned. ‘Your knee. It’s bleeding.’

  Strands of hair had come out of its ponytail. She swept them back off her face. She had to go after Rick. Stop the man in the red jacket. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

  Her legs began to work again, and she ignored the pain in her knee as she ran to the front of the hospital, looking around her everywhere. But there was no sign of Rick, and no sign of the man in the red jacket.

  She put her hands on her knees and hung her head down, breathing heavily. She had missed him. Her chance to find him, talk to him, see what was happening. She’d bloody well blown it.

  Oh, Rick.

  ‘Are you all right miss?’

  It was the smoking youth.

  Cora nodded, catching her breath. ‘Did you see which way the man went? The one who was talking to you earlier?’

  The youth grinned. ‘You mean the guy who was being chased?’

  Cora nodded. ‘Rick. He’s my brother. Did you see where he went?’

  He shook his head and Cora’s spirits plummeted. ‘I think he might have got on a bus. The other geezer was right mad. Tore his trousers. He ran after him. But he’s gone, too. Your knee’s bleeding by the way. All down your leg.’

  Cora was very glad the man in the red jacket wasn’t anywhere near. She didn’t know how much he would know about her, but she didn’t want to chance it. She smiled weakly at the youth, who was now grinding his fag butt under his shoe. ‘I know, I’ll get it seen to. And thanks for the information.’