The lumpy parcel, crudely lashed with rope and duct tape, drifted towards me, and with a last heave bumped against my chair. As I stepped forward, about to kick it back into the water, the undertow turned it onto its side. A figure with human features lay trussed inside a small carpet, perhaps a piece of teak statuary that one of the hostages had tried to hide before leaving the Metro-Centre.
A wave washed over the figure, dispersing the glaze of oil and dirt. Eyes with intact pupils stared up at me, and I recognized the blanched face of the Pakistani barrister I had seen remonstrating with Carradine.
Behind me, the engineers switched off the current. A last wave rolled across the beach, its foam hissing among the beer cans. With a faint sigh, the undertow retrieved the body and drew it down towards the dark floor of the lake.
35
NORMALITY
DAVID CRUISE WAS DYING, among stuffed elephants and kangaroos, surrounded by cheerful wallpaper and plastic toys, in sight of the television studio that had created him.
The Metro-Centre’s first-aid post, now housing an intensive care unit, occupied a suite of rooms below the mezzanine, usually visited by small children who had scraped their knees and pensioners with nosebleeds. For the present, the toys were corralled inside a playpen, and the reception room once manned by a kindly sister was filled with beds commandeered from a nearby store. The six patients lay on luxurious mattresses, unwashed pillows leaning against quilted boudoir headboards. Almost all were elderly hostages unable to keep up with Carradine’s more dictatorial regime.
Tony Maxted was crouching on a chair beside a white-haired woman, trying to extract a broken dental plate. He waved to me and pointed to the treatment room. He seemed unsurprised to see me, though every morning he urged me to make the most of my Sangster contacts and join the few hostages still leaving the dome.
Julia Goodwin, though, seemed surprised when I walked into the treatment room. Pale and nerveless, her neck flushed by a persistent rash, she was almost asleep on her feet, trying to break the seal on a bandage pack while searching for a stray hair over her eyes. As always, I was glad to see her, and had the odd sense that as long as I was with her, emptying the pedal bins and foraging for packets of herbal tea, she would be all right. An absurd notion, which reminded me of my childhood motoring trips with my mother, when I strained forward to watch the road as she argued with herself over the traffic lights.
‘Richard? What happened?’
‘Nothing.’ I tried to prompt a smile from her. ‘Nothing’s happened for days. We could be here for ever.’
‘You were supposed to leave. What are you doing here?’
‘Julia . . . I’ll make some tea.’ I pulled a packet of Assam breakfast tea from my shirt. ‘I’ve been tracking this down for days. Leaf, please note, not tea bags . . .’
‘Wonderful. That’ll block the drain for good.’ She held my shoulders, yellowing eyes under her uncombed hair. ‘You shouldn’t be here. I’ll speak to Carradine.’
‘No. I was held up at the hotel.’ I decided not to alarm her over the dead barrister. ‘There was a security problem—someone thought he saw Duncan Christie.’
‘Not again. People are seeing him all the time. It must be some sort of portent, like flying saucers.’ She took my hands and turned my anaemic palms to the light. ‘You have to get out of here, Richard. If there’s a release tomorrow . . .’
‘I will. I will. I want to leave.’
‘Do you? Maybe. Let’s have a look at that foot.’
Julia rebandaged my foot, using a fresh strip of lint, part of a consignment supplied, reluctantly, by the police. We were sitting in the pharmacy next to the treatment room, and our chairs were close enough for me to embrace her. Her fingers fumbled at the tie, and I took over when she seemed to lose interest. Her mind was elsewhere, in one of the high galleries closer to the sun, rather than in this airless clinic with its erratic air conditioning.
‘Good . . .’ I patted the bandage with its clumsy bows. ‘That should keep me going.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She leaned briefly against my shoulder, and then watched me with a faint smile. She was waiting for me to produce a ‘gift’ from my pockets, perhaps a foil sheet of antibiotics looted from a chemist’s shop. ‘It’s been a hell of a night. I keep hearing helicopters. Tomorrow, go straight to the entrance hall—you’ll be on the list.’
‘I’ll get there. Don’t worry.’
‘I do worry. We’re short of everything. We might as well close up shop.’
‘Why? The chemists here are packed with enough drugs to fit out a hospital.’
‘Haven’t you heard? It’s all got to stay as it was. We’re not allowed to touch a thing.’
‘Even for emergencies? I don’t get it.’
‘Dear man . . .’ Julia placed her worn hands around mine, for once glad of the physical warmth. ‘Emergencies don’t exist any more. For Carradine and his people everything is normal. He and Sangster did their ward round this morning and decided all the patients were getting better. Even the old pensioner who died in the night.’
‘And David Cruise?’
‘He’s holding on . . .’ She avoided my eyes and listened to the faint sighing of the ventilator from the empty storeroom, converted into Cruise’s intensive care unit. ‘I ought to take a look—I keep forgetting about him.’
I followed her into the storeroom, where Cruise lay in his makeshift oxygen tent. As always, the sight of him stretched inertly in his maze of wires and tubes made me deeply uneasy. The lithe and athletic figure with his tactile charm had vanished, as if the monitors and gauges were steadily pumping his life from him and transferring his blood and lymph to their voracious machines.
Only his hair survived, a blond mane lying across the phlegm-soaked pillow. I stood beside Julia as she adjusted the ventilator, now and then stroking the hair like the pelt of a sleeping cat. Cruise’s head had shrunk, his cheeks and jaw folding into themselves, as if his face was a stage set being dismantled from within. A transfusion bag hung from its stand and dripped serum into a relay tube, but the television presenter seemed so empty of life that I wondered if Julia was trying to revive a corpse.
‘Richard? He won’t recognize you.’ She led me back to the treatment room. ‘Now, we’ll find something for you to do.’
‘Julia . . .’ I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to steady her. ‘How is Cruise?’
‘Not good.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I’ve got to get him to the hospital, but Carradine won’t let him leave. Sangster says he’ll be up in a couple of days.’
‘How long can he last?’
‘Not long. We’ll have to use car batteries to run the ventilator.’
‘How long? A day? Two days?’
‘Something like that.’ Her eyes darkened. ‘If he died . . .’
‘Would it matter?’
‘They believe in him. If anything happened . . .’ She laughed to herself, a desperate chuckle. ‘It’s a pity they can’t see him now, all those people who marched and stamped.’
‘Julia, hold on.’
‘You corrupted him, you know.’ She spoke matter-of-factly. ‘Still, it’s a kind of revenge.’
‘For what? Losing my job?’
‘Your job? Your father’s death, for God’s sake. This pays for it. In a way, I’m glad for you.’
‘Why?’ I took her arm, trying to hold her attention before her mind could slide away. ‘David Cruise had nothing to do with my father’s death.’
‘Cruise? No. But . . .’
‘Others did? Who? Is that why you went to the funeral?’
Her gaze, once so thoughtful and concerned, drifted away into the borders of fatigue. But her hands touched my chest, searching for refuge. The attempted murder of David Cruise had relieved her of the guilt I had sensed since our first meeting, an anger at herself that had always come between us.