Grant nodded his agreement and radioed for a patrol get to the institute and guard the doors. ‘I’d better let hospital security know what’s going on,’ he said, going off in search of an internal phone.
Dewar stood, looking down from a corridor window to the busy streets below. ‘Would Le Grice have made it to the outside in time? he wondered. And if he had, what then? The police already had details of his car obtained from Malloy and relayed by Grant, his description would be circulating faster than a rumour. He was trapped in the middle of the city, surely he couldn’t get far before they picked him up.
All the exits were now covered, Grant reported. There had been no sightings of Le Grice in the vicinity of any of them. ‘I think maybe we were too late,’ he said. ‘But he won’t get far.’
Dewar nodded at the confirmation of what he’d just been thinking but didn’t reply. He was thinking ahead; he knew that Le Grice couldn’t get far; Grant knew he couldn’t get far but Le Grice was a clever man. He’d probably worked that out too. So what would a clever man do in the circumstances? he asked himself. Stay put, was the answer.
‘What’s on your mind?’ asked Grant.
‘I think he’s still in the hospital,’ replied Dewar.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘He’s clever and he’s got nerve. Coming here today and doing what he did shows that. It’s my guess he’s found somewhere to lie low. He’s going to tough it out until the rest of us start believing he’s got clean away. then getting out will be a whole lot easier.’
‘I don’t fancy trying to search the whole hospital,’ said Grant. ‘This place probably has rooms the staff don’t even know about.’
Dewar nodded and agreed, ‘It’s not feasible. But if you keep men on all the exits we’ll at least pen him inside until he’s forced to do something rash.’
‘Like take a patient hostage,’ said Grant.
‘I wish you hadn’t said that,’ said Dewar. ‘He hadn’t considered the possibility.
‘Like you said, he’s got nothing left to lose. His career’s over and he’s looking at life if the girl dies. Not much less if she doesn’t.’
‘I think that situation might arise if you send in teams of uniforms to scour the place,’ said Dewar. ‘If we leave him alone he’s going to be happy biding his time. That gives us a window of a few hours while he thinks his plan is working.’
‘So what do we do with this window?’
‘We get plans of the hospital and see if we can figure out where he might be holed up. We know where he started out from. Let’s see if we can think like him.’
The clerk of works for the hospital came up with plans after ten minutes during which Grant managed to negotiate an office to work from down on the ground floor. Dewar examined them on his own until Grant returned from briefing the men on the doors to be doubly vigilant. Le Grice wasn’t going to try to run past them after all this time — twenty minutes had passed. They should be on guard for some sort of disguise.
‘Any thoughts?’ asked Grant on his return.
Dewar traced his finger along a line on the paper. ‘This is the corridor we were in. Le Grice took off along here and disappeared from sight at this corner.’
Grant leaned closer, his forefinger edging towards Dewar’s. ‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘So he had two choices. He either came down these stairs or he turned right through this door but that leads to nowhere, a circular staircase by the look of it inside a round tower. No way out at ground level.’
‘Which would you have taken?’ asked Dewar.
‘Down these stairs, without a doubt,’ said Grant. ‘He’d just started to make a run for it. His adrenaline would be pumping and he’d be making for the outside. Coming downstairs gives him several choices; three corridors to choose from and several exit points.’
‘But maybe he was smart enough to work out that he still wasn’t going to make it even at that early point in the proceedings.’
‘If he worked all that out in the few seconds it took him to reach this turn in the corridor then we are dealing with one smart cookie,’ said Grant. ‘And if he’s that smart it sure scares the shit out of me.’
‘He is and we are,’ said Dewar.
TWELVE
‘So what do you want to do?’ asked Grant.
‘I want to check out the round tower,’ said Dewar. ‘Just in case.’
Grant grimaced and said, ‘You’re certainly one for playing your hunches. I’m prepared to bet you that the door to the tower is locked. The place’s not been used for years.’
‘I wouldn’t bet against you,’ said Dewar. ‘But I’d be happier in my mind just giving it the once over.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Grant with a shrug that said, ‘waste of time’ ‘I’ll check out the rooms in this corridor one floor down. I’ll meet you on the stairs when you’re through.’
Dewar nodded his agreement.
‘And before we start let’s agree on something,’ added Grant. ‘No heroics. We call for back-up before we do anything.’
‘Agreed,’ said Dewar.
Dewar climbed back up to the corridor where he’d last seen Le Grice disappear from view, jacket flying open as he made a bid for freedom. He followed in his footsteps to the turn where, just as the plans promised, he found a choice. There was a double door to the left leading to the main staircase; there was also a door to
the right. His first thought on looking at it was that Grant had been right. There was something about the door that suggested that it had not been in use for many a long year. It had a glass panel but it had been boarded over on the inside. The handle seemed dirty and unused. He tried it and found it locked.
Conceding wryly to Grant, he turned to go downstairs when something made him stop. The resistance he’d felt in the door when he’d turned the handle had been lower down than it should have been. It had not quite been behind where the handle was. He went back and tried it again. This time he was sure. He looked up and saw the door move slightly inwards at the top. The door wasn’t locked; it was being held shut by something placed behind it on the floor. This didn’t automatically mean that someone had recently blocked it; entrance to the tower at this level could have been closed off at sometime in the past by someone coming down or up from another level inside the tower. On the other hand, it was worth checking out.
He turned the handle and held it while he put his shoulder to the door frame to apply mounting pressure. The door started to edge open as a large cardboard box was inched back out of the way. The opening was now big enough to allow Dewar to squeeze through. He closed the door behind him softly and took a look at the box that had been blocking entry; it was full of heavy rubber sheeting. The cracks on the visible folds told him that the rubber had perished a long time ago.
The air around him smelt stale and musty; there was obviously no ventilation in the tower. A thick layer of dust covered all the flat surfaces he could see and there was junk everywhere; there was a premature-baby incubator lying on the floor, one of its glass panels broken and paint peeling off its other surfaces. Dewar guessed that it had been dumped in the tower when the glass had broken and it had been deemed to have come to the end of its useful life. There were plastic chairs in various states of disrepair stacked one on top of the other in threes, planks of wood propped up against one wall, several red metal pails with the word, Fire, faded but still visible on their sides, relics of the days when pails of water were placed at intervals along corridors as the sole method of fire fighting should the need arise.
The tower room itself was half tiled, the tiles crazed and cracked so they resembled unlettered road maps. They were clearly from another age, an age that might have known gas light and the sluice of carbolic as Lister and his colleagues introduced the then new concept of antisepsis to this very hospital. An old operating table was propped on its side under the window, its pedestal nowhere to be seen. This and various other bits and pieces led Dewar to conclude that the room had once been an operating theatre for minor surgery, perhaps the draining of wounds, the lancing of septic cysts and the like but that had all been a very long time ago. It had clearly been a junk store for many years.