Michael sat down. His legs were still shaking from more than the shock of the death. “There is a man called Tarquin,” he said for about the dozenth time. “He interprets for us, and will explain our situation. Once he is here, you and whoever is in charge of this asylum will answer to the British Government for a degree of negligence amounting to murder.” As if she had as much trouble with his Greek as he had with hers, she gave him a funny look before seeming to understand. She spoke again to the police officer. He answered vaguely without bothering to turn away from the body. She pulled an impatient face and said something in a laughed English to the man who was tugging needles out of the body and packing up all the equipment that had, it must be presumed, failed to keep the old man from his final and bloody attack of vomiting.
“Have you at least called for Tarquin?” he asked in his steadiest voice. The doctor looked at him and gave another bored shrug. Some small box that hung about her neck now began flashing. She held it up and read something on its display. She rapped an order to the man that Michael did understand. She wanted the body moved onto the floor so the trolley could be used for some other patient. Not giving Michael a second look, she hurried from the room.
“You could have found him a priest,” he shouted before the door closed. Paper tube already in his mouth, the police officer turned and sniggered something at him.
Chapter Sixteen
How long he’d been sitting in that chair was beyond Michael’s ability to guess. At first, he’d expected the Greek doctor to hurry back in. This time, she’d have Tarquin for company, and would be all scared emollience. But it was as if he and his dead uncle had been forgotten. Once or twice, the sound of chaos through the closed door was broken by screams of pain or of horror. The police officer had smoked his paper tube down to the end, and was half way through another.
“There was a man,” he said, trying more words of English. “And his name was Tarquin…” The officer shouted something fast and menacing, and flicked the still burning remainder of his tube at Michael. The assistant had finished pulling out all the needles and things from Simeon, and looked up from the report he’d been laboriously making. He spoke to the officer in a kind of nervous snivel. Together, they went and stood over the body. The officer grunted out a few words, and laughed at the assistant’s reply. He bent low over the body and tugged hard at something. He let out an impatient snort and got up. As the assistant hurried over to a wooden box and picked up various sharp objects, Michael realised that what he’d thought couldn’t get any worse just had.
“Not to do such!” he warned in his best English. He pointed at his uncle’s hand and at the golden ring the officer had failed to pull from a swollen finger. He shook his head and raised both hands in a gesture of pleading.
“Oh ho!” the officer said gloatingly back. He walked over to where, legs still faintly twitching, Michael had been made to sit. He reached down to his belt and unclipped one of the machines that had been used to immobilise Michael. He held it up and depressed a button on its side. There was a loud clicking, and blue sparks shot across from one metal tip to another. He laughed as Michael let out an involuntary cry of fear and tried to shrink back. The officer stood over him, glorying in his unchecked power. With every click of the machine, he grated out something in what must have been English, but that Michael couldn’t recognise. “Innit? Na’amin? Innit? Na’amin?” he seemed to end every sentence. Behind him, the assistant was holding up a set of pincers and whining the English word for gold. The officer paid no attention, but leaned forward and pushed the machine close to Michael’s face. Clicking repeatedly, it came closer and closer. “Na’amin? Na’amin?” the officer repeated between bursts of sniggering.
When you act in anger—especially when anger is joined by fear—you don’t always recall the precise sequence of events. You sometimes even forget what has happened. So it now was with Michael. In a brief flash of clarity as he stood over the fallen officer, he remembered the metal pen he’d brought away from the Prime Minister’s office, though couldn’t say what it had been doing in the pocket of his orange suit. What for sure he didn’t know was how he’d driven it like a nail through the officer’s left temple. But that was what he must have done. Eyes wide open, the officer lay before him. In his dying spasm, the man had clenched both fists into tight but ineffective balls.
Now thinking, though not clearly, Michael looked at the assistant, who stared back, as still as if he’d been a locust trapped by a scorpion. Michael stepped over his uncle’s body and smashed the palm of his right hand upward against the assistant’s nose. The man fell backward, striking his head against the wall. Whether he was alive when he hit the ground, Michael didn’t know, and didn’t care. He brought his breathing under control and looked about. There was no change in the noise that came from outside. But the door might open at any moment. Bearing in mind the circumstances, the British authorities might overlook an act of justifiable homicide. Then again—and he had just killed one of their colleagues—the police, who would represent the authorities for as long as it mattered, might well take against him.
Stripping the officer was beyond his abilities. Besides, these were clothes that would be noticed at once. The assistant was easier, and, though fat, he was about the same height as Michael. Getting unfamiliar clothes off a man who also turned out to be dead—and doing so with shaking hands—was as hard as he’d expected. But it was manageable. Faster than he’d imagined, Michael was out of his orange suit, and was playing with the fasteners of a pair of trousers that were too large for him. He hitched them up with their belt and turned his attention to the shirt and jacket. It would take more practice than he’d had to pass for normal in clothes so completely alien as these. But Michael stepped out of the room into a corridor that was, if possible, still more chaotic than when his dying uncle had been pushed up and down. No one so much as looked at him as he hurried in his white jacket past the room from where the flickering lights of a picture screen and a cloud of foul smoke advertised that the other police were still relaxing. This building, he knew, was a labyrinth of busy corridors and large hallways. But he guessed right that the Latin word, prominently displayed every few yards, for “he is going out” would get him back to the main entrance. As he walked past the big front desk in the entrance hall, he almost bumped into Tarquin, who looked panicky and shouting into his communication machine. Michael turned his head away and lost himself into a crowd of black people who, with tears and lamentations, were making their way to the revolving door that would take him into the cool night air.
Before leaving the death room, he’d got poor Simeon into a respectable position, and put a sheet over the body. If someone else would steal the ring, that was no longer a matter to be controlled. “Uncle, I promise not to fail you,” he’d said, putting a last and reverent kiss on the cold forehead.
Michael stepped out of the darkened side street and shivered in the breeze. As he’d hurried along the wide street, where pedestrians carried their own lamps, too many people had turned and looked at his white jacket and the objects that he’d tried to hang from it with an appearance of the natural. Now the jacket and its adornments were stuffed behind a pile of festering rubbish, and no one paid attention to him.