Spicer rose and moved, Patrick crouched and moved the other way in perfect counterbalance. They pivoted silently past each other. The next time he stood up, Patrick spotted a pedestrian exit. A yellow door with a big 2 on it at the far side of the level, a good hundred yards away across the concrete.
Did he dare make a run for it? The thought of committing to it was terrifying, but if he stayed, Spicer would find him eventually. And what would he do then? Patrick tested his knee and grimaced; it would have to do. He edged between two cars, watching Spicer’s head disappear one last time. He was at the Land Rover; the end of the line.
It had to be now.
Patrick lurched from between the cars and ran towards escape.
The noise of his feet was like uneven gunfire.
‘Shit!’ Spicer shouted. Patrick didn’t look back. Behind him a door slammed, an engine roared, tyres squealed. He threw a desperate look over his shoulder. The car was coming at him fast. The yellow door was miles away.
I’m not going to make it. The thought was dull and dreadful. He had made a terrible miscalculation. His legs worked, his arms pumped, his breath burned, and he dawdled before the speeding car.
The headlights threw his long shape on to the low grey wall alongside him. Beyond that – through the uppermost branches of a tree – he could see the station, illuminated, and with people standing on platforms. A woman with a pink suitcase; two girls hugging their knees on a bench.
Unaware.
Patrick turned and ran towards them anyway, as if for help. The car was almost on him. Spicer wasn’t going to stop – he was going to spread him like jam along the wall. All his arms and his legs would be in the wrong places and his eyes would look nowhere.
And he would have all the answers.
Patrick jumped.
Over the wall and into the black night beyond.
46
THE CAR HIT the wall with a sound like a bomb.
Even as he hung for an infinite beat in the frigid air, Patrick saw the woman with the pink suitcase and the two girls turn their faces towards the explosion, while shards of concrete spat against his back and legs like shrapnel.
He didn’t want the answers!
Too late.
He dropped into the branches of the tree. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to cover his head, and a million firecrackers went off as twigs snapped and popped in his ears. His unprotected arms were pierced and scraped; a branch smashed into his back and he thought of a hammer and chisel and a breakable spine. He hit another and bounced off in a different direction. The next branch he hit, he snapped his arm around. The rough bark slid down his bare skin and tore at his fingers, and he couldn’t hold his weight there for more than a moment, but when he next fell, he only dropped a short distance to the ground and landed almost on his feet.
He rolled, then stood and looked up.
Spicer looked down at him. They said nothing.
Patrick jogged lopsidedly across the road and to the phone boxes at the back of the station.
He dialled feverishly, not caring even to cover his bloodied fingers. The phone rang and rang and rang and then went to voicemail, so he hung up and dialled again, jabbing the numbers without hesitation.
07734113117. It was a simple and beautiful number, filled with a lyrical rhythm of sums and products and patterns. He had often thought of it since the day he’d first heard it and wished that it were his.
‘Hello?’ Meg answered with the sound of Spicer’s flat behind her. Music and laughter. For a moment Patrick was struck dumb by the sheer strangeness of having been there so recently, when now he was here – light years away. For him the party had ceased to exist so completely that he was stunned that, for others, it could still be going on.
‘What’s your code?’ he said.
‘What code? Who is this?’
‘It’s Patrick. I need your DR code.’
‘Patrick? Why?’
‘I have to get in.’
There was a long silence. Something tickled the side of Patrick’s face and the back of his hand came back bloody.
‘Where are you?’
‘At the station,’ he said. ‘And my money’s running out.’ It was true – the digital readout on the phone was counting down his last sixty seconds. He fumbled in his pocket and came up empty.
‘When did you go? What’s happened?’ said Meg.
‘Dr Spicer tried to kill me.’
‘What! What are you talking about? He’s here.’
‘No, he wrecked my bike and crashed his car. I have to—’
‘Hold on,’ said Meg.
‘No!’ said Patrick, but she wasn’t listening to him. She was talking to someone else nearby. Where’s Dr Spicer? And the muffled response. Patrick looked back towards the car park and felt like smashing the phone and the box. But he needed the code. He gritted his teeth and held on as the numbers fell in front of him.
20… 19… 18… 17…
‘Patrick? Angie says he’s not here.’
‘I know he’s not there! He’s here.’
More muffled noises.
‘She says he popped out for beer.’
Another lie. There was lots of beer in the icy barrel.
12… 11… 10… 9…
Patrick dug for more coins. There was nothing there.
A car emerged under the fluorescent exit of the car park. A silver Citroën with a nose crumpled like a bad boxer’s. It swung into the road and turned his way.
‘Meg!’ he cried desperately, ‘Give me the code!’
4… 3… 2…
‘Five-five-fou—’ she said, and the line went dead.
Patrick dropped the receiver and ran away from the lights of the station and under the railway bridge, where his footsteps rang like bells and pigeons cocked their beady eyes from the steel girders. He ran past the pubs and clubs of St Mary Street, where youths clustered to shout and fight, and girls warmed by drink defied the cold in skimpy tops and sparkly shoes. He ran up Queen Street, with its bright windows wrapped around the homeless in the dark doorways, and then over the road, across the grass, past the circle of standing stones and into Park Place.
The door of the Biosciences building was locked.
Of course it was.
Patrick banged it once with the side of his fist, then leaned his hot face against it to recover his breath. His knee shouted for attention. He ignored it. He had to get in. Maybe there was a back door with glass he could break. He slipped quickly around the side of the building, through a narrow passage between this building and the next, and slithered down a steep muddy slope.
There he skidded to a stop.
Light spilled from a broad doorway at the back of the block. An ambulance was parked outside.
Patrick sneaked closer, hugging the dark wall.
He heard voices coming from inside. One of them was Mick’s.
It was the entrance to the embalming room. This was where the bodies were delivered and where Mick prepared them for the students. From here he could get to the dissection room! Must be able to! But he had to be fast. He guessed Spicer had the keys to the front door.
Without thinking about it, he stepped through the entrance and into a long, dark corridor. The only light overflowed from the windows in the double doors immediately to his right. Through them he could see Mick and two people he assumed were ambulance drivers. They were lifting a white body bag from a steel table on to a light gurney.