The sounds of the restaurant suddenly mute, the lights are dimming into darkness. I can just hear DS Finborough talking to me, reassuring me that I’m okay, but then his voice is silenced and everything is dark and I want to scream but my mouth can’t make any sound.
When I come round, I’m in the café’s clean and warm ladies’ room. DS Finborough is with me. He tells me I was out for about five minutes. Not so long then. But it’s the first time I’ve lost sound too. The staff at Carluccio’s have been solicitous and call me a taxi to get home. I ask DS Finborough if he’ll accompany me and he willingly agrees.
I’m now in a black cab with a policeman sitting next to me, but I still feel afraid. I know that he’s following me; I can feel his malevolent presence, murderous, getting closer. I want to tell DS Finborough. But like Mr. Wright, he’d tell me that he’s locked up on remand in prison, that he can’t hurt me again, that there’s nothing to fear. But I wouldn’t be able to believe him.
DS Finborough waits till I’m safely inside the flat, and then takes the taxi on to wherever he is going. As I close the door, Pudding bends her warm furry body around my legs, purring. I call out Kasia’s name. No reply. I dampen down flaring sparks of anxiety, then see a note on the table saying she’s at her antenatal group. She should be home any minute.
I go to the window to check, pulling back the curtains. Two hands pummel the glass from the other side, trying to smash it. I scream. He vanishes into the darkness.
21
Thursday
It’s a beautiful spring day, but I take the tube to the CPS offices rather than crossing the park, so that I’m always in a crowd.
When I get there, I am glad for the crush in the lift but anxious, as usual, that my pager and mobile don’t get reception and it’ll get stuck and Kasia won’t be able to get hold of me.
As soon as I’m spat out onto the third floor, I check that they’re both working. I didn’t tell her about the man at the window last night; I didn’t want to frighten her. Or to admit the other possibility—that it’s not just my body that is deteriorating but my mind too. I know that I am physically unwell but never thought I might be mentally unwell too. Is he simply a delusion, a product of a diseased mind? Maybe you need physical strength, which I no longer have, to keep a grip on sanity. Going mad is the thing I fear the most, even more than him, because it destroys who you are inside a body that somehow, grotesquely, survives you. I know you must have been afraid too. And I wish that you’d known it was PCP—not some weakness or disease in your own mind—that threatened your sanity.
Maybe I’ve been given PCP too. Has that thought crossed your mind before it has mine? Perhaps a hallucinogenic is responsible for creating the evil that stalks me. But no one could have given it to me. I’ve only been at the CPS offices, the Coyote and the flat, where no one wishes me harm.
I won’t tell Mr. Wright about the murderer at the window, not yet, nor my fear of going mad. If I don’t tell him, then he’ll treat me normally, and I will behave that way in return. He has expectations of me to be completely sane and I will rise to meet them. Besides, at least for the hours I’m with him, I know that I am safe. So I’ll wait till the end of the day and tell him then.
This morning, Mr. Wright’s office is no longer bright; there’s darkness around the edges, which I try to blink away. As I start talking to him, I hear my words slur a little and it’s an effort to remember. But Mr. Wright has said we may be able to finish my statement today, so I will just have to push myself on.
Mr. Wright doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong. Maybe I’ve become adept at hiding it, or he’s just totally focused on getting through the last part of my statement. He recaps the last part of our interview.
“Hattie Sim told you that the man who gave her the injection and delivered her baby wore a mask?”
“Yes. I asked her if it was the same person and she said it was. But she couldn’t remember any more—voice or hair color or height. She was trying to blank out the whole experience and I couldn’t blame her.”
“Did you think that the man who delivered her baby also delivered Tess’s?”
“Yes. And I was sure he was the man who murdered her. But I needed more before going to the police.”
“Heavy counterbalancing facts?” asks Mr. Wright.
“Yes. I needed to prove that he wore a mask to hide his identity. I hadn’t been able to find out who had delivered Tess’s baby—deliberately, I realized. But maybe I could find out who had given Tess and Hattie the injections.”
By the time I got to St. Anne’s Hospital from Hattie’s house in Chiswick, it was late, past midnight. But I had to find out straightaway. When I arrived, the wards were in darkness and I realized this wasn’t the most sensible time to start asking questions. But I’d already pressed the buzzer on the maternity ward door, and a nurse I didn’t recognize was opening it. She looked at me suspiciously and I remembered that the security was to prevent babies being stolen.
“Can I speak to the senior midwife? I think her name is Cressida.”
“She’s at home. Her shift finished six hours ago. She’ll be back tomorrow.”
But I couldn’t wait till then.
“Is William Saunders here?” I asked.
“You’re a patient?”
“No.” I hesitated a moment. “A friend.”
I heard the sound of a baby crying, then more joining in. A buzzer went. The young nurse grimaced and I saw how stressed she looked.
“Okay. He’s in the on-call room. Third door on the right.”
I knocked on the door, the nurse watching me, and then I went in. The room was in semidarkness, just lit by the open doorway. William woke up instantly, fully alert, presumably because he was on call and was expected to be functioning at 100 percent immediately.
“What are you doing here, Bee?”
No one but you has ever called me that and it was as if you’d lent him some of our closeness. He got out of bed and I saw that he was fully dressed in blue scrubs. His hair was tangled from where it had been on the pillow. I was conscious of the smallness of the room, the single bed.
“Do you know who gives the women on the CF trial their injection?” I asked.
“No. Do you want me to try to find out?”
That simple. “Yes.”
“Okay.” He was looking businesslike, totally focused, and I was grateful to him for taking me seriously. “Are there any other patients, apart from your sister, whom you know about?”
“Kasia Lewski and Hattie Sim. Tess met them at the CF clinic.”
“Would you write them down?”
He waited while I fumbled in my bag and wrote down their names, then gently took the piece of paper from me. “Now can I ask why you want to know?”
“Because whoever he is wore a mask. When he gave the injections, when he delivered the babies.”
There was a pause and I sensed that any urgency he’d shared with me was dissipated.
“It’s not that unusual for medical staff to wear masks, especially in obstetrics,” he said. “Childbirth is a messy business, lots of body fluids around; medical staff wear protective gear as a matter of course.”
He must have seen the disbelief on my face, or my disappointment.
“It really is pretty routine, at least in this hospital,” he continued. “We have the highest percentage of patients with HIV outside Johannesburg. We’re tested regularly to avoid infecting our patients, but the same isn’t true the other way around. So we simply don’t know when a woman comes through our doors whether or not she’s ill or a carrier.”