‘All Simon was worried about was covering his own back. Xander and I took the strain for months before Simon noticed. He should have got down on his knees and thanked us for bearing his share of the pressure. Instead he threatened to go to the authorities or the press.’
‘And so you killed him.’
‘I never killed anyone, until today.’ Dr Ahumibe took another sip of the water on his desk and then held a hand out towards her. ‘I need the tablets.’ Stevie ignored his outstretched palm and after a moment he said, ‘Buchanan would have brought Simon round eventually. Si was the squeaky wheel, the one that demanded the most attention, but Buchanan always persuaded him in the end.’
‘What if he couldn’t, this time?’
Dr Ahumibe took a handkerchief from his pocket. He splashed some of the water from the bottle on it and then held the handkerchief to his forehead.
‘It was the only way.’ He doubled over and retched into the wastepaper basket. ‘Simon would have recognised that, eventually.’
Stevie looked away, trying not to gag. Ahumibe said, ‘Give me the tablets.’
‘I will. I promise you.’ She paused to let him recover and then asked, ‘What happened to Geoffrey Frei?’
The doctor retched again. He looked up, his face puddle-grey, and whispered, ‘You’re torturing me.’
‘Your treatment cut sick children open and pumped them full of a useless drug. That was torture.’
Ahumibe was slumped forward in his chair now. He whispered, ‘People like you see the world in one dimension. Things are either good or bad, no muddied waters. If it were up to you, there’d be no progress.’ The doctor wiped his mouth with his damp hanky. ‘I don’t know what happened to Frei. He was mugged. Or perhaps it was a pickup gone wrong. Geoff loved his wife, but he needed other forms of release. He knew cruising was risky. He would give up for a while, but sooner or later old habits always reasserted themselves.’
‘He was investigating you.’
‘So what?’
‘You don’t think it’s a coincidence? Frei and Simon were both in a position to expose you and Buchanan and they both died under suspicious circumstances. Hope Black is dead too. I found her lying on the floor of Simon’s apartment. Her head had been smashed in.’
‘The whole world is dying. Everyone except for you.’ Dr Ahumibe leant over and retched into the wastepaper basket again. The sounds he made were dry and painful and Stevie felt her own stomach clenching in response. When the doctor looked up there was spittle on his chin. He wiped it on the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Xander was devastated by Simon’s death. He came to the hospital to break the news to me. At first he was too upset to speak. We’ve known each other most of our lives but I’d never seen him like that. I thought perhaps something had happened to William, his son. Later, after he’d broken the news, Xander told me that when he saw Simon curled up dead in his bed, it was like seeing him again as a boy, back when we shared a dorm at school. The image haunted him.’
Stevie leant forward.
‘Buchanan said he saw Simon dead in his own bed? Are you sure he wasn’t referring to when he saw him at the morgue?’
‘No, it was before Simon was brought to the morgue. Xander told me there was a picture of the three of us, taken when we were students, hanging on the wall of Simon’s bedroom. He found it deeply moving. We were as close as family.’
Stevie remembered something Derek had been fond of repeating, one in a series of self-composed homilies Joanie had christened ‘Sayings from the Policeman’s Notebook’. She said it out loud.
‘Families are the most dangerous units known to society. Most abuse, violence and murders happen inside families.’
Stevie unlocked the door and glanced into the corridor. The lights had gone out and darkness shrouded the ward, hiding the bodies still tucked tight beneath their sheets. She reached into her satchel, took out the boxes of pills and dropped them on the desk in front of John Ahumibe.
The doctor looked up at her. ‘I keep seeing the children’s faces. It was my duty. I couldn’t leave them to suffer on alone.’
Stevie turned her back on him and closed the door quietly behind her.
Thirty-Nine
The hospital was a nightmare of darkened corridors. Stevie had told Ahumibe that she could not afford to give in to fear, but terror fluttered in her chest. The building felt alive, as though the people who had died in the hospital wards had slipped into the fabric of its walls and were watching, and waiting.
Stevie wrapped her scarf around her face and counted each turn beneath her breath, trying to focus on the challenge of navigating her way to an exit. She kept her torch off and her hand on the gun. The sound of howling echoed up ahead and she corrected her route to avoid it. She saw other people ghosting through the dark, and pointed the gun straight ahead, both hands gripping the stock, so there could be no mistaking her urge for solitude.
Rats moved, swift and busy, along the walls, and Stevie knew that she would have to leave London soon, before other diseases took hold. Sudden footsteps charged along the corridor and she pinned herself flat against the wall, melting into the darkness, until the runner rushed by, a panicked breeze of pumping arms and pounding legs.
The dead were everywhere. They were slumped on waiting-room chairs, like a Tory indictment against NHS inefficiency, stretched out on beds, sprawled across desks, or lay where they had fallen, limbs tangled in positions impossible to hold in life.
Moans and harsh rattling breaths echoed from the shadows of abandoned rooms, and Stevie knew without a doubt that there was no God. If there were, he or she would have saved a better person than her, one who was ready to sacrifice themselves to the care of the dying, rather than continue a quest for the truth about an already dead man.
A man stepped out of the shadows, leading a little girl of around six or seven years old along an empty corridor. Stevie moved into the centre of the hall and aimed the gun at his head.
‘It’s all right,’ the man said. ‘She belongs to me.’
Stevie looked at the child and asked, ‘Is that true, sweetheart? Is this your daddy?’
The girl had one hand gripped in the man’s. The other was wrapped around a disreputable-looking toy monkey whose fur was matted from over-loving. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and shook her head.
‘I’m her uncle,’ the man said, his eyes on the gun.
Stevie looked at the little girl, who kept her thumb in her mouth and whispered, ‘Uncle Colin.’
‘Are you happy to go with Uncle Colin?’
The girl had the stunned stare of a road-accident victim. She nodded and the man looked relieved. He said, ‘You can come with us, if you like. There might be safety in numbers.’
Stevie thought he was probably right, but she shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ The man glanced nervously at the gun again and Stevie wondered if he was considering making a grab for it. ‘You’d best keep on going,’ she said, her finger on the trigger, the barrel still pointing at the man’s head. She watched until they vanished into the dark, like phantoms, the sound of her own breath loud in her head.
Once, a hand reached out, pale against the black, and a woman whispered, ‘Water,’ but when Stevie returned, with a plastic cup filled from a water cooler, the woman was gone. Her disappearance troubled Stevie and she upped her pace, holding on to the bannister as she ran down a darkened staircase towards the hospital exit, aware that to trip and break a leg now would mean a slow death.