He stood up from the chair — I had progressed to the point where I had a room with normal furniture, rather than standard hospital fixtures — and went over to the window. “You’ll see a variety of physical effects before you settle down. Never mind about peeing yourself — you were doing that all the time in the first few weeks. You keep your eyes open for any kind of seizure. If you ever feel something like an epileptic fit, get to bed at once. And send for me.”
Good advice, but it made certain assumptions. It’s not easy to pop into bed when you’re running for your life, even if there’s a bed handy. Other factors loom rather larger in the list of priorities.
I felt a bit guilty when Sir Westcott left. Here was he, trying to make a whole man out of the bits and pieces that had been left over from the accident, and here was I, holding back some of the vital facts.
Rather than asking for approval to leave the hospital two days in a row, I took the coward’s way out. In this case that happened to be through the kitchens, and on down the long alley known as Kitchen Lane where food delivery trucks came to drop off supplies to the hospital. I sneaked away at five o’clock , when everything was quiet, and by six I was on the train and on my way to London .
I could have saved myself all the trouble of that deception. She never came. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty I stood outside Bertorellis in a thin, summer drizzle. I didn’t get particularly wet, the rain wasn’t hard enough for that, but I did get slowly madder and madder. Deception at the hospital was bad enough. Wasted deception was much worse. All my sneaky behavior had been pointless.
Finally I gave up. The rain was setting in harder and the evening turning colder. I went inside, sat down at a table for one, and indulged myself. The jugged hare was excellent, and the house wine made me contemplative. I was beginning to put many things together. Leo’s mood, that final afternoon. The sudden and inexplicable failure of the helicopter, listed in the accident report as “pilot error,” when I knew damned well it was nothing of the sort. Valnora Warren’s admission that Leo’s job was not what it was portrayed to be, and, worst of all, the knowledge that Leo and I had been less close than I liked to imagine. He had his secrets.
It all made sense. From the day of our first teenage reunion, Leo had acted as the one in charge. I don’t know how much was that California upbringing, and how much that tiny few minutes of seniority, but the reason didn’t matter. He would see nothing unusual in having a life I knew nothing about.
There was other evidence. A week before, I had received the final probate of Leo’s estate, for which I was the sole heir. That was no real surprise, with Tom and Ellen dead. But the amount he had left staggered me. Even allowing for the luck that he claimed for his stock market investments, could he have amassed such wealth as a simple government employee?
I sat there in the restaurant for three-quarters of an hour, musing over a couple of glasses of Courvoisier. When I paid the bill and left I found that the weather had turned even nastier. It was one of those drenching summer downpours that I remembered from childhood holidays in Scarborough, when the clouds swooped in low off the sea, the temperature dropped into the forties, and the whole town seemed to lock itself up for the night about eight o’clock.
Naturally, there wasn’t a taxi to be seen, and the pavements were deserted. Thank goodness I had come with a hat and a raincoat.
I ducked my head low and set off at a fast walk through the slick streets, heading south before cutting through to Tottenham Court Road. I was wearing rubber-soled shoes, waterproof but treacherously slippery on the wet pavement. But it made me tread lightly and carefully, and allowed me to catch the sound of heavier footsteps behind me.
I took a quick look over my shoulder. A tall man in a tan raincoat was pacing steadily after me. The area was usually well-populated and quite safe, but the bad weather had driven everyone off the streets. With my imagination inflamed from my after-dinner speculations, I walked a little faster. I’m big enough and hefty enough to scare away most people looking for an easy mugging, but like any pianist or violinist — or anyone else who relies on uninjured hands for his living — my natural instinct was to run rather than fight. I cut east at a faster walk, heading for a busier street where people should offer some insurance. Then, at the corner, I stopped.
In the narrow street that led through to Tottenham Court Road stood a second tan-coated figure. It could have been any casual local, waiting for his girlfriend, but somehow I knew better — or perhaps Leo did. My left arm was making agitated jerking motions, and my left leg acted as though it would like to run away down the street all by itself.
I swivelled, looking for some way out. The man behind me was closer, and turning the corner after him came a blue Mercedes 450SL, gliding along at walking pace.
The left-hand side of the street was lined with small shops. I moved to stand in one of the doorways — not to hide there, because that was impossible; I wanted to protect my back and sides. The man standing on the corner had started towards me now, and the tan-coated figures were converging. They halted side by side, facing the doorway.
“All right, better make it easy for yourself,” said the shorter man. In the shop window on my left was an illuminated advertisement for State Express, and the blinking light from it showed his face as a pale, asymmetrical oblong, changing from green to yellow to red. He lifted his hand and motioned to me, “Get in the car, an’ we can all go nice an’ easy.”
He carried a dark truncheon in his left hand, and there was a flash of bright metal on his companion’s closed fists.
“Come on,” he repeated, when I didn’t move. “If you want to stay in one piece. We ain’t got all night.”
There didn’t seem to be much choice. I was unarmed, and still weak from my accident. The Mercedes had halted behind them, and I shrugged and stepped forward between the two of them to get to it.
I had given up — fighting never was my forte. Leo must have had other ideas. As I came level with the shorter man, my left arm jerked sideways and thrust stiff-fingered into his midriff. As he spasmed forward, my hand flickered upwards and stabbed hard for his eyes. The fingers went fast and deep into the soft cavities, turning as they thrust. The sensation was sickening, but before I could fully respond I was pivoting hard on my left leg, spinning to the right. My closed left fist went into the tall man’s larynx, then as his hand went to his throat I had seized his thumb, twisted, and jerked. I felt the bone snap and grate. My left knee came up hard into his crotch.
One second more, and I was doing my best to run down the street. It was farcical, more like a stuttering hop than a sprint. But it was my best. My nerves were vibrating and uncontrollable, but somewhere underneath I felt a dancing anger, a black rage that drove me along much faster than I had reason to expect or hope.
At the street corner I looked back. One man was reeling in circles, his hands to his eyes, and the other was crouched over, one hand to his throat and the other to his testicles. The only sound was the purr of the Mercedes’ engine, but the car was not following me. It remained, lights off, in the road. Throughout the whole violent encounter there had been silence, nothing but the gasp for air or the snap of breaking bone.
I turned into Tottenham Court Road, then took the next left turn, and on randomly through the rainy streets of Soho . It was half an hour before my trembling subsided enough to let me venture onto the Underground, and then I sat slumped in my seat in the corner, clasping my trembling hands tightly together.
By midnight I was back at the hospital. An hour later I was shaking all over and had a fever of a hundred and three. Tess Thomson looked in on me about three o’clock — thank heaven it was her week for night shift — and had needles into me two minutes later.