By the time I get back to the hospital it's almost dark. The whole place has a sour smell like the dead air in closed-up rooms. I have missed a physiotherapy session and Maggie is waiting to change my bandages.
“Somebody took some pills from the pharmacy cart yesterday,” she says, cutting the last of the bandages. “It was a bottle of morphine capsules. My friend is in trouble. They think it's her fault.”
Maggie isn't accusing me but I know there's a subtext. “We're hoping the capsules might turn up. Maybe they were misplaced.”
She withdraws, walking backward, the tray with bandages and scissors held before her.
“I hope your friend doesn't get into too much trouble,” I say.
Maggie nods, turns and is gone without a sound.
Lying back, I listen to the carts and gurneys rattling to distant rooms and someone waking from a nightmare with a scream. Four times during the evening I try to phone Rachel Carlyle. She's still not home. Ali has promised to run her name and vehicle through the Police National Computer.
There's nobody in the corridor outside my room. Maybe the weasels from the ACG have grown tired of watching me.
At 9:00 p.m. I call my mother at Villawood Lodge. She takes a long while to answer the phone.
“Were you sleeping?” I ask.
“I was watching TV.” I can hear it buzzing in the background. “Why haven't you come to see me?”
“I'm in the hospital.”
“What's wrong with you?”
“I hurt my leg, but I'm going to be fine.”
“Well if it's not serious you should come to see me.”
“The doctors say I have to be here for another week or so.”
“Do the twins know?”
“I didn't want to bother them.”
“Claire sent me a postcard from New York. She went to Martha's Vineyard last weekend. And she said Michael might be doing a yacht transfer to Newport, Rhode Island. They can catch up with each other.”
“That's nice.”
“You should call them.”
“Yes.”
I ask her a few more questions, trying to make conversation, but she isn't concentrating on anything except the TV. Suddenly, she starts sniffling. It feels like her nose is right in my ear.
“Good night, Daj.” That's what I call her.
“Wait!” She presses her mouth to the phone. “Yanko, come and see me.”
“I will. Soon.”
I wait until she hangs up. Then I hold the receiver and contemplate calling the twins—just to make sure they're OK. It's the same call I always imagine making but never do.
I imagine Claire saying, “Hi, Dad, how are you doing? Did you get that book I sent you? No, it's not a diet book; it's about lifestyle . . . cleansing your liver, purging toxins . . .” Then she invites me around for a vegetarian dinner that will purge more toxins and clear entire rooms.
I also imagine calling Michael. We'll get together for a beer, swapping jokes and talking football like a normal father and son. Only there is nothing normal about any of this. I'm imagining someone else's life. Neither of my children would waste a phone conversation, let alone an evening, on their father.
I love my children fit to bust—I just don't understand them. As babies they were fine, but then they turned into teenagers who drove too fast, played music too loud and treated me like some fascist conspirator because I worked for the Metropolitan Police. Loving children is easy. Keeping them is hard.
I fall asleep watching a vacation program on TV. The last thing I remember is seeing a woman with a permanent smile drop her sarong and dive into a pool.
Some time later the pain wakes me. There's a lethal swiftness in the air, like the vortex left behind by a passenger jet. Someone is in the room with me. Only his hands are in the light. Draped over the knuckles are polished-silver worry beads.
“How did you get in here?”
“Don't believe everything you read about hospital waiting lists.”
Aleksei Kuznet leans forward. He has dark eyes and even darker hair combed in rigid lines back from his forehead and kept there with hair gel and willpower. His other most notable feature is a pink puckered circle of scar tissue on his cheek, wrinkled and milky white. The watch on his wrist is worth more than I earn in a year.
“Forgive me, I didn't ask after your welfare. Are you well?”
“Fine.”
“That is very pleasing news. I am sure your mother will be relieved.”
He's sending me a message.
Tiny beads of perspiration gather on my fingertips. “What are you doing here?”
“I have come to collect.”
“Collect?”
“I seem to remember we had an arrangement.” His accent is classic public-school English—perfect yet cold.
I look at him blankly. His voice hardens. “My daughter—you were to collect her.”
I feel as though some snippet of the conversation has passed me by.
“What do you mean? How could I collect Mickey?”
“Dear me, wrong answer.”
“No, listen! I can't remember. I don't know what happened.”
“Did you see my daughter?”
“I don't think so. I'm not sure.”
“My ex-wife is hiding her. Don't believe anything else.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she's a cruel heartless bitch, who enjoys turning the knife. It can feel like a jousting stick.”
The statement is delivered with a ferocity that lowers the temperature.
Regaining his calm, he tugs at the cuffs of his jacket. “So I take it you didn't hand over the ransom.”
“What ransom? Who wanted the ransom?”
My hands are shaking. The uncertainty and frustration of the past few days condenses down to this moment. Aleksei knows what happened.
Tripping over the words, I plead with him to tell me. “There was a shooting on the river. I can't remember what happened. I need you to help me understand.”
Aleksei smiles. I have seen the same indolent, foreknowing expression before. The silence grows too long. He doesn't believe me. Bringing a hand to his forehead, he grips the front of his skull as though trying to crush it. He's wearing a thumb ring—gold and very thick.
“Do you always forget your failures, Inspector?”
“On the contrary, they're normally the only things I remember.”
“Somebody must take responsibility for this.”
“Yes, but first help me remember.”
He laughs wryly and points at me with his hand. His right index finger is aimed at my head and his gold thumb ring is like the hammer of a gun. Then he smoothly turns his hand and frames my face within a backward “L”.
“I want my daughter or I want my diamonds. I hope that's clear. My father told me never to trust Gypsies. Prove him wrong.”
Even after Aleksei has gone I can feel his presence. He's like a character from a Quentin Tarantino film with an aura of violence held barely in check. Although he hides behind his tailored suits and polished English accent, I know where he comes from. I knew kids just like him at school. I can even picture him in his cheap white shirt, clunking shoes and oversize shorts, taking a beating at lunchtimes because of his strange name and his peasant-poor clothes and his strange accent.
I know this because I was just like him—an outsider—the son of a Romany Gypsy, who went to school with ankrusté (small balls of dough flavored with caraway and coriander) instead of sandwiches, wearing a painted badge on my blazer because we couldn't afford to buy a stitched one.
“Beauty cannot be eaten with a spoon,” my mother would tell me. I didn't understand what she meant then. It was just another one of her queer sayings like, “One behind cannot sit on two horses.”
I survived the beatings and the ridicule, just like Aleksei. Unlike him I didn't win a scholarship to Charterhouse, where he lost his Russian accent. None of his classmates were ever invited home and the food parcels his mother sent—with their chocolate dates, gingerbread and milk candy—were kept hidden. How do I know these things? I walked in his shoes.
Aleksei's father, Dimitri Kuznet, was a Russian émigré who started with a single flower barrow in Soho and cultivated a small empire of pitches around the West End. The turf war left three people dead and five unaccounted for.
On Valentine's Day in 1987 a flower seller in Covent Garden was nailed to his barrow, doused in kerosene and set alight. We arrested Dimitri the following day. Aleksei watched from his upstairs bedroom as we led his father away. His mother wailed and screamed, waking half the neighborhood.
Three weeks before the trial Aleksei left school and took over the family business alongside Sacha, his older brother. Within five years Kuznet Brothers controlled every flower barrow in central London. Within a decade it held sway over the entire cut-flower industry in Britain with more influence over prices and availability than Mother Nature herself.
I don't believe the urban myths or bogeyman stories about Aleksei Kuznet but he still frightens me. His brutality and violence are by-products of his upbringing; an ongoing act of defiance against the genetic hand that God dealt him.
We might have both started off the same, suffering the same taunts and humiliation, but I didn't let it lodge like a ball of phlegm in my throat and cut off oxygen to my brain.
Even his brother disappointed him. Perhaps Sacha was too Russian and not English enough. More likely Aleksei disapproved of his cocaine parties and glamour-model girlfriends. A teenage waitress was found floating facedown in the swimming pool after one such party, with semen in her stomach and traces of heroin in her blood.
Sacha didn't face a jury of twelve. Only four men were needed. Dressed in balaclavas they broke into his house one night, smothered his wife, and took Sacha away. Some say Aleksei had him strung up by his wrists and lowered into an acid bath. Others say he took off his head with a wood-splitting ax. For all anyone knows Sacha's still alive, living abroad under a different name.
For Aleksei there are only two proven categories of people in the world—not the rich and the poor or the good and the evil or the talkers and the doers. There are winners and losers. Heads or tails. His universal truth.
Under normal circumstances, better circumstances, I try not to dwell on the past. I don't want to envisage what might have happened to a child like Mickey Carlyle or to the other missing children in my life.
But ever since I woke up in the hospital I can't stop myself going back there, filling in the missing hours with horrible scenarios. I see the Thames littered with corpses that bob along beneath the bridges and tumble in the wake of passing tourist boats. I see blood in the water and guns sinking into the silt.
I look at my watch. It's 5:00 a.m. That's when predators do their hunting and police come knocking. Human beings are more vulnerable at that hour. They wake and wonder, pulling the covers close around them.
Aleksei mentioned a ransom. He and Keebal both knew about the diamonds. I must have been there—on the ransom drop. I wouldn't have gone ahead without proof of life. I must have been sure.
Against the quietness comes commotion—people running and shouting. I can hear a fire alarm.
Maggie appears in the door. “There's been a gas leak. We're evacuating the hospital. I'll get a wheelchair—I don't know how many are left.”
“I can walk.”
She nods approval. “We're taking the sickest patients first. Wait for me. I'll come back.”
In the same breath she has gone. Police and fire sirens wail against the glass. The sound is soon masked by gurneys rattling down the corridors and people shouting instructions.
After twenty minutes the noise level abates and the minutes stretch out. Maybe they've forgotten me. I once got left behind on a school field trip to Morecambe Bay. Someone decided to dare me to walk the eight miles across the mudflats from Arnside to Kents Bank. People drown out there all the time, getting lost in the fog and trapped by the incoming tides.
Of course, I wasn't foolish enough to take up the dare. I spent the afternoon in a café eating scones and clotted cream, while the rest of the class studied waders and wildfowl. I convinced everyone that I'd made it. I was fourteen at the time and it almost got me expelled from Cottesloe Park but for the rest of my school days I was famous.
My aluminum crutches are beside the door. Swinging my legs out of bed, I hop sideways until my fingers close around the handles and my upper arms slip into the plastic cuffs.
Leaving the room, I look down a long straight corridor to a set of doors and through the glass panels I see another corridor reaching deeper into the building. There is a faint smell of gas.
Following the exit signs I start walking toward the stairs, glancing into empty rooms with messed-up bedclothes. I pass an abandoned cleaner's cart. Mops and brooms sprout from inside like seventies rock stars.
The stairs are in darkness. I look over the handrail, half expecting to see Maggie on her way up. Turning back I catch sight of something moving at the far end of the corridor, the way I've come. Maybe they're looking for me.
Retracing my steps, I push open closed doors with a raised crutch.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
Behind green-tinted Perspex I find a surgery with a bloodstained paper sheet crumpled on the operating table.
The nursing station is deserted. Files are open on the counter. A mug of coffee is growing cold.
I hear a low moan coming from behind a partition. Maggie is lying motionless on the floor with one leg twisted under her. Blood covers her mouth and nose, dripping onto the floor beneath her head.
A muffled voice makes me turn. “Hey, man, what you still doing here?”
A fireman in a full face mask appears in the doorway. The breathing apparatus makes him look almost alien but he's holding a spray can in his hand.
“She's hurt. Quick. Do something.”
He crouches next to Maggie, pressing his fingers against her neck. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing. I found her like this.”
I can just see his eyes behind the glass but he's looking at me warily. “You shouldn't be here.”
“They left me behind.”
Glancing above my head, he stands suddenly and pushes past me. “I'll get you a wheelchair.”
“I can walk.”
He doesn't seem to hear me. Less than a minute later he reappears through a set of swinging doors.
“What about Maggie?”
“I'll come back for her.”
“But she's hurt—”
“She'll be fine.”
Nursing the aluminum crutches across my lap, I lower myself into the chair. He sets off at a jog down the corridor, turning right and then left toward the main lifts.
His overalls are freshly laundered and his heavy rubber boots slap on the hard polished floor. For some reason I can't hear the flow of oxygen into his mask.
“I can't smell gas anymore,” I say.
He doesn't respond.
We turn into the main corridor. There are three lifts at the far end. The middle one is propped open by a yellow maintenance sign. He picks up the pace and the wheelchair rattles and jumps over the linoleum.
“I didn't think it would be safe to use the lifts.”
He doesn't answer or slow down.
“Maybe we should take the stairs,” I repeat.
He accelerates, pushing me at a sprinter's pace toward the open doors. The blackness of the shaft yawns like an open throat.
At the last possible moment I raise the aluminum crutches. They brace across the doors and I slam into them. Air is forced out of my lungs and I feel my ribs bend. Bouncing backward, I twist sideways and roll away from the chair.
The fireman is doubled over where the handle of the wheelchair has punched into his groin. I scramble up and pull his arm through the wheel of the chair. Spinning it a half turn, I jam his wrist against the frame. Another quarter turn will snap it like a pencil.
He is flailing now, trying to reach me with his other fist. I keep twisting away from him, with the chair between us.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
Cursing and struggling, his mask is nearly off. Suddenly, he changes his point of attack and sinks his fist into my damaged leg, grinding his knuckles into the bandaged flesh. The pain is unbelievable and white spots dance in front of my eyes. I spin the wheelchair sideways, trying to escape. At that same moment I hear the crack of his wrist breaking. He groans.
Both of us are on the floor. He launches a kick at my chest, sending me backward. My head slams against the wall. Up on his knees, he grips me by the back of my shirt with his good hand and tries to drag me toward the lift shaft. I kick at the floor with my one good leg and wrap my fingers around the harness on his jacket. I'm not letting go.
Exhaustion is slowing us down. He wants to kill me. I want to survive. He has strength and stamina. I have fear and bloody-mindedness.
“Listen, Tarzan, this isn't working,” I say, sucking in air between each word. “The only way I'm going down that hole is if you go with me.”
“Go to hell! You broke my fucking wrist!”
“And someone shot me in the leg. You see me crying?”
Somewhere below us an engine grinds into motion. The lifts are moving. He glances up at the numbers above the door. Scrambling to his feet, he stumbles down the corridor, carrying his busted wrist as though it's already in a sling. He is going to escape down the stairs. There is nothing I can do.
Reaching for my shirt pocket I feel for the small yellow tablet. My fingers are too large for such a delicate task. I have it now, squeezed between my thumb and forefinger . . . now it's on my tongue.
The adrenaline leaks away and my eyelids flutter like moth wings on wet glass. Someone wants me dead. Isn't that strange?
I listen to the lifts rise and the murmur of voices. Pointing down the corridor, I mumble, “Help Maggie.”