“Sod all. He blacked out the lenses with spray paint. We got one image from the nursing station but no face behind the mask. You didn't recognize him?”
“No.”
He looks disgusted.
“I'm convinced this has something to do with Mickey Carlyle,” I tell him. “Someone sent a ransom demand. I think that's why I was on the river—”
“Mickey Carlyle is dead.”
“But what if we got it wrong?”
“Bullshit! We got it right.”
“There must have been proof of life.”
Campbell knows about this. He's known all along.
“IT'S A HOAX!” he rasps. “Nobody believed any of it except you and Mrs. Carlyle. A grieving mother I can understand—but you!” His fingers curl and uncurl. “You were the officer in charge of a successful murder prosecution yet you chose to believe a hoax that cast doubt on the outcome. First you ordered a DNA test and then you went off half-cocked like some maverick Hollywood vigilante and got yourself shot.”
Campbell is close now. I can see the dandruff in his eyebrows. “Howard Wavell murdered Mickey Carlyle. And if that sick, perverted, murdering son of a bitch walks free because of you, there won't be a police officer in the Met who will ever work with you again. You're finished.”
A deep continuous vibration has built up inside me, like the sound of a ship's engine deep within a hull.
“We have to investigate. People died on that boat.”
“Yeah! For all I know, you shot them!”
My resolve is disintegrating. I don't know enough details to argue with him. Whatever happened on the river was my fault. I stirred up something poisonous and nobody wants to help me.
Campbell is still talking. “I don't know what you did, Vincent, but you made some serious enemies. Stay away from Rachel Carlyle. Stay away from this. If you jeopardize Wavell's conviction—if I hear so much as a mouse fart from you—your career is finished. That's a cast-iron fucking guarantee.”
He's gone then, storming down the corridor. How long was I unconscious, eight days or eight years? Long enough for the world to change.
The Professor arrives, his cheeks red from the cold. He hovers in the doorway as though waiting for an invitation. Behind him I see Ali sitting on a chair. She is now officially my shadow.
There are metal detectors being installed in the lobby and my medical personnel are being screened. Maggie isn't among them. I am responsible.
Although I've been over it a dozen times with detectives, I don't mind talking to Joe about the attack because he asks different questions. He wants to know what I heard and smelled. Was the guy breathing heavily? Did he sound scared?
I take him on a guided tour, showing him where the fight took place. Ali stays two paces away from me, scanning the corridors and rooms.
Leaning on my crutches, I watch Joe do his mad professor routine, pacing out distances, crouching on the floor and studying angles.
“Tell me about the gas leak.”
“One of the delivery drivers noticed the smell first but they couldn't find the source. Someone opened up a valve on one of the feeder pipes from the gas tanks near the loading docks.”
Joe kicks at the ground as though trying to make it even. I can almost see his mind moving forward and backward as he tries to reconstruct what happened.
Out loud now, he says, “He knew his way around the hospital but he didn't know which room you were in. Once he evacuated the floors there was nobody to ask.”
Joe turns and strides down the corridor. I struggle to keep up without overbalancing. He stops beneath a CCTV camera and reaches toward it as if holding a spray can. “He must have been about six two.”
“Yeah.”
He continues to the nursing station, eyes darting over the long narrow counter and kitchenette. There are clipboards hanging on a wall. Each one corresponds to a patient.
“Where did you find Maggie?”
“On the floor.”
Joe drops to his knees and then lies down, with his head toward the sink.
“No, she was lying this way, with her head almost under the desk.”
Jumping to his feet, he stands facing the clipboards and half closes his eyes. “He was looking at the clipboards to find your room number.”
“How do you know?”
Joe crouches and I follow his outstretched finger. There are two black smudges on the baseboard made by the heels of the fireman's boots. “Maggie came up the corridor. She was coming back to get you. He heard her coming and he stepped back to hide . . .”
I can picture Maggie bustling up the corridor, admonishing herself for being late.
“As she passed the doorway, she turned her head. He struck her with his elbow across the bridge of her nose.” Joe tumbles to the floor and lies where she fell. “Then he went to your room but you had already gone.”
All this sounds reasonable.
“There is something I don't understand. He could have killed me right away, here in the corridor, but he collected a wheelchair and tried to push me down the lift shaft.”
Still lying on the floor, Joe points past my shoulder at the CCTV camera. “It's the only one he didn't black out.”
“It didn't matter, he wore a mask.”
“Psychologically it made a big difference. Even with his face hidden, he didn't want to star in a home movie. The footage was evidence against him.”
“So he took me out of view.”
“Yes.”
Joe is thinking out loud now, unaware of his twitches and trembles. I follow him down the corridor to the stairs. He pauses, puzzled by something.
“The gas leak was part of both plans,” he announces.
“Both plans?”
“One for outside and one for inside . . .”
I don't understand. Joe motions for me to follow him and waits for me to climb two flights of stairs. We reach a heavy fire door and emerge onto a barren rectangle of bitumen, the rooftop of the hospital. A gust of wind slaps me in the face and Joe grabs my shirtfront to steady me. A big-bellied gray sky hangs overhead.
Circular ducts and metal air-conditioning plants punctuate the bitumen. A low brick wall with white capping stones marks the outside edge of the building. A wire security fence is attached, curling inward before being topped with barbed wire.
Joe slowly walks the perimeter, occasionally glancing at surrounding buildings as though adjusting his internal compass. When he reaches the northeast corner of the building, he leans close to the fence. “You see that park down there—the one with the fountain?” I follow his gaze. “That's the evacuation meeting point. Everyone was supposed to meet there when they emptied the hospital. You were supposed to be with them. There is no way they could have known you were going to be left inside.”
We are both on the same page now. “Perhaps he was supposed to hide in my room and kill me when I came back.”
“Or they were going to kill you outside.”
Joe drops onto his haunches, studying the thin layer of soot on the capping stones. It's the same black film that settles on everything in London until the next shower. Three penny-size circles smudge the surface. Joe swings his eyes to the ground where two larger smudges appear beneath the wall.
Someone knelt here and rested a tripod on the wall—a lone sniper with a finger on the trigger and his eyelashes brushing the lens, studying the park below. The hair on my forearms is standing on end.
Fifteen minutes later the rooftop has been sealed off and a SOCO team is at work, searching for clues. Campbell is smarting about being shown up by a clinical psychologist.
Joe takes me downstairs to the canteen—one of those sterile food halls with tiles on the floor and stainless steel counters. Cedric, the guy in charge, is a Jamaican with impossibly tight curls and a laugh that sounds like someone cracking nuts with a brick.