(1995) By Any Name (9 page)

If only he had a torch. There were so many things he needed to do, like change his bloodstained clothes.

Gradually, his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and he began to get a “feel” for his surroundings. The ceiling was high. He couldn’t see it, but he sensed it.

He could also smell formaldehyde. Somewhere close by had to be changing rooms for the pathologist and staff, and a bathroom. He wondered how many hours were left before dawn broke.

No sounds reached him from outside. He could hear only the hum of the building itself; water pumping around heating pipes, the click of time switches operating some distance away, the whir of the lift shafts.

Cramp set into his ankle, and he moved. He limped forward, trailing his hand on the wall, pressing every door he encountered, only to find them all locked.

Then he found one that wasn’t. He opened it and the smell of bleach and lavatory cleaner wafted out to greet him. Closing the door behind him, he felt around for the light-switch, reasoning that no staff union would allow security cameras to be placed in a lavatory. The ceiling, walls and corners of the washroom were reassuringly bare. There wasn’t a window, only a ventilation fan.

He stared at his face in the mirror, pale and bloodless, his dark hair falling forward over his eyes.

He could clean himself up here, but it would be better if he could find something to clean himself up with.

Would there be a locker room nearby? Careful to turn off the light before opening the door, he moved on a few paces.

The locker room was next door. It too was devoid of cameras, probably because it served as a changing room. The locks securing the metal cabinets used for personal possessions proved childishly simple to open. Inside one he found a green operating-theatre suit. It was thinner than the tracksuit, and he shivered as he pulled it on over the boxer shorts the sister had found for him. There was a green cap and a surgical mask – a perfect disguise provided no one looked too closely. He found soap, shampoo and a safety razor, and returned to the washroom and washed. When he’d finished, he pulled the mask over his face and fixed the cap down low.

There was still Elizabeth Santer. He debated whether to leave her. But she could still be useful. All he needed was a trolley and a blanket. Bodies were shipped out all the time from mortuaries, but were they taken away by undertaker or ambulance? There had to be a door that led to a parking bay. Even during an emergency some vehicles would be allowed in and out of the grounds – hearses and ambulances evacuating patients. But how many hours away was morning? And how many more hours could he function without sleep?

CHAPTER FIVE

The faint humming of heating pipes was interrupted by deafening staccato banging. When the clamour ceased, the humming resumed at increased intensity.

The difference in sound would have probably been imperceptible to anyone who hadn’t been listening intently for a deviation from the pattern of noise in the hospital basement. But John West realised that the main pump on the boiler had speeded up its output to warm the wards for the morning shift. The night was finally drawing to an end. Leaving the light on in the washroom and the door slightly ajar, he risked checking the corridor they had spent the night in.

Once he was satisfied there were no security cameras in the area, he went to Elizabeth. She was still sleeping. He shook her awake. She stared up at him, wild-eyed, disorientated for a moment, then – as realization dawned and she recalled the events of the previous day, she began to tremble.

‘I’ve found a washroom.’ Hauling her to her feet he produced the scalpel, and cut through the bandages on her wrists. She tore the gag further away from her mouth, hesitating when she noticed the gun in his hand.

‘I won’t try anything,’ she mumbled hoarsely through chapped lips.

Gripping her arm he hauled her to the washroom, pushed her in and closed the door. He remained outside, and considered the escape plans he had formulated during the long night. Each seemed more preposterous and risk-laden than the last. But then an idea came to him; a simple, ingenious idea that just might work – if he could find everything he needed to carry it out.

Elizabeth sank even further into despair when she looked around the washroom. There were no windows, only a six inch ventilation shaft and heating pipes. She toyed with the idea of tapping a message in Morse code on the pipes, but dismissed it. Quite apart from the fact that the code she’d learned as a Brownie was rusty, West would undoubtedly pick up on it before anyone else.

Filling the sink with water she pulled off the remainder of the clammy bandages and spat the last threads of antiseptic-tasting gauze from her mouth.

She lowered her head and drank deeply from the cold tap. She only hoped it was drinking water.

‘Hurry up,’ West whispered through the closed door.

‘I’ll be out when I’ve washed,’ she snapped, irritability over-riding caution.

The door opened an inch and she caught a glimpse of the gleaming gun barrel. It closed again and she continued peeling the residue of plaster from the skin around her lips. The sweater and skirt she had taken from her wardrobe yesterday morning looked as though they’d been retrieved from the bottom of a charity clothing skip. Had she really been wearing them for only twenty-four hours? It felt like a lifetime.

Depressing the soap dispenser, she washed her hands and face and dried herself with paper towels.

She didn’t attempt to wash any more of herself. Not with John West standing outside the door. The humiliation of being forced to strip in front of him still rankled. Deliberately taking her time, she pulled the remaining pins from her hair, and disentangled it as best she could with her fingers before bunching it into a pony-tail. If West was going to tie her hands behind her back again, she didn’t want the added irritation of pins sticking into her neck. Finally she went into a cubicle and sat on the lavatory seat for ten minutes, delaying as long as possible the moment when she’d have to walk out of the door and back into the clutches of a man who was exhibiting all the classic symptoms of psychopathic behaviour.

It was all very well for experts to advise that hostages should do everything in their power to establish a rapport with their kidnappers. Those people had probably never met a John West who had no qualms about shooting a soldier who had dropped his weapons. Eventually, she could delay no longer.

Shivering as much from fear as cold, she returned to the corridor.

‘Sit on the floor.’

She did as he instructed. ‘What are you going to do with me?’ she ventured.

‘If you do exactly as I tell you, set you free –

eventually.’

‘You expect me to take the word of a murderer?’

‘Quiet.’

‘You don’t like hearing the truth.’

‘I ordered you to keep quiet,’ he repeated softly without raising his voice.

Using a sheet of gauze and some linen strips he’d found in a cupboard in the corridor, he retied her wrists and ankles and taped her mouth. Then he proceeded to bandage the whole of her head, including her eyes. She tried to struggle, but it was futile. He was stronger than her and, remembering Joseph’s adage about uncontrollable situations, she resigned herself to the inevitable.

After West had reduced Elizabeth to a blind, inanimate parcel, he pulled up the mask, switched on all the lights and returned to the locker-room.

There was a row of white rubber surgical boots behind the door. He flicked through them until he found a pair his size. A search of the lockers yielded a stethoscope and a white coat that was cleaner and larger than the one he’d taken from Elizabeth. He slipped it on over his suit and thrust the stethoscope into the pocket. It would add authenticity to his costume.

In one locker he discovered two packets of prawn-cocktail flavoured crisps and two cans of soft drink.

He pocketed them and continued to search but found nothing else edible.

Finally he heaped the entire contents of all the lockers – clothes, magazines, cigarettes and matches –

in the centre of the room. Striking a match he lit a corner of a magazine and allowed it to smoulder.

Pocketing one box of matches he left the locker-room and picked the lock on the mortuary doors. Bringing out all the bottles of flammable chemicals he could find, he placed them around the conflagration.

He pulled the paper-towel dispenser from the wall of the washroom, threw its contents, and as many toilet rolls as he could find, on to his bonfire. Flames licked towards the bottles, smoke billowed out of the locker-room into the corridor. He picked up Elizabeth, checked his mask was high over his face and unlatched the doors to the outside. The last thing he did before running up the steps was smash the glass on the fire alarm.

Bells shrilled, so high-pitched they hurt his ears as he hurried around the side of the hospital building. He needed to find the main entrance before the emergency services were mustered.

An ambulance was parked in a nearby bay alongside an array of army vehicles. He quickened his step. Jerking open the back doors he laid Elizabeth on a gurney, covering her to the chin with a sheet, so only her bandaged face was visible.

‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ A man in the green and white uniform of a paramedic ran towards him.

‘You the driver?’

‘Yes.’

‘The burns unit, right away.’

‘What burns unit?’

‘Don’t waste time. Can’t you hear the alarms? She was in the basement when the boiler blew. The burns unit is her only chance.’

West waited until the paramedic was inches away, before pulling the gun from his pocket.

‘Oh shit… ’

‘In the cab and drive,’ he ordered brusquely. ‘Get us through the cordon at the gate, and I’ll release you.

If you alert anyone, I’ll start a shooting match that will end in a massacre – and you’ll be the first victim.’

The driver glanced helplessly around the bay. His partner was inside, drinking tea in the casualty office with the charge nurse. No one was in the foyer. The casualty unit hadn’t reopened since the trust had closed it the day before. Staring at the gun he climbed into his cab. The gunman climbed in alongside him, before sliding over the seat into the back. Sirens rang out homing in on the hospital.

‘Switch on your siren and start driving.’ West poked the muzzle of the gun into the back of the driver’s seat.

‘They’ll stop me at the gate?’

‘Tell them you’re carrying a severely burned patient and there’s no time to lose. If they want to know more, I’ll deal with them.’

The driver turned the ignition key.

West crouched low in the back, ostensibly tending to his bandaged patient, while carefully keeping his gun concealed from the military and civilian police who stopped them at the gate. The wail of sirens from fire engines and police cars drowned out the conversation, but the driver must have given the right answers, because a few minutes later they were out of the hospital and on the open road.

‘Where to now?’ the driver asked nervously.

‘Switch off the siren, and take the Brighton road.’

‘If you’ve a body back there… ’

‘Just do it.’ Keeping the gun pressed into the back of the driving seat, John thought through his next move. The sky was beginning to lighten. Dawn would soon break. He needed to rest. He had a long journey ahead of him, one he would prefer to make under cover of darkness. And before then, he would need to find transport, a change of clothes, money and food.

The sky gradually turned a paler grey and the driver switched off his headlights.

‘The traffic’s light on Sunday. We’ll be in Brighton in less than an hour. Where do I go when we get there?’ The driver was acutely aware of the pressure in the small of his back.

‘The largest hospital you know, but steer clear of the casualty department. And don’t park in the main car park. Find somewhere at the back or the side of the building. A separate car park for staff or one of the clinics,’ John barked. So far so good. He was free, but he had two hostages; one too many. He would leave the paramedic in the car park with the ambulance. A hospital car park would be a good place to steal a car.

Did he know about stealing cars? He’d soon find out.

He dismissed the niggling questions worming uncomfortably in his mind. Questions centred on the skills he possessed; skills of dubious morality. He concentrated on his next move. He knew exactly where he wanted to go. The only question was how to get there. He had recognized Brecon from the photographs Elizabeth had shown him. Once there, the familiar surroundings would surely prompt his memory, and he’d recover his identity.

In Brecon he would discover who he was and what exactly had driven him to run blindly down a motorway into the path of oncoming cars. He might even find out why he was being hounded and why someone wanted him dead. And even if, as Elizabeth had suggested, he was a terrorist, then he would simply have to face the truth. It had to be better than the crushing emptiness of knowing nothing about himself.

He recalled the dead, cold eyes of the soldiers outside his room and wondered what creed or cause could be worth men’s lives. A sentence came to mind.

A sentence spoken in a maddeningly familiar voice.

“Some people deserve to be assassinated.”

Did they? And why had that come to mind if he wasn’t an assassin?

‘There’s a hospital. But the only ambulances I can see are parked outside Casualty.’

West sat up on his heels and peered over the driver’s shoulder. ‘Drive through the gates, and turn left.’ He chose the direction because the wall of the main building that overlooked that side had small windows – staircases or kitchens and bathrooms?

Whatever lay beyond them, they offered less of a view than the full sized windows at the front.

‘Pull up at the end of the row. Turn off the ignition and hand me the keys.’

When the driver bent forward to remove the keys, West placed two fingers at the side of his neck. It took a little pressure before the man slumped, unconscious, over the wheel.

Leaning forward West locked all the doors from the inside. Bracing himself, he hooked his hands under the driver’s armpit, and dragged him into the back of the ambulance laying him on the floor alongside Elizabeth. He wished the man was taller. It would be no use exchanging clothes with him; his trousers would be a foot too wide and six inches too short.