Despite the unmistakably feminine voice, this was the dead man. My two attackers were one and the same.
Shock took the strength out of my arms. He gave one last heaving push and I fell towards the tracks below.
The freight train shot past at the same second, more or less. I caromed off the roof of the first carriage, bounced through the air like a matador who’d picked on the wrong bull, and went arse over tip into the neck-high gorse and brambles beside the track. The impact knocked the breath out of me, and the last vestiges of consciousness.
I came back to the world again slowly, and piecemeal. From where I was lying, the walkway above cut across my field of vision like a bend sinister. There was no sign of anyone up there, which was kind of a relief.
Taking it very slowly, I made a tentative pass at the whole complicated business of sitting up and then standing. It hurt a lot, but in some ways it had the abstract fascination of a crossword puzzle: finding joints that still pivoted and muscles capable of doing some actual work, and putting them together so that I moved in the directions I wanted to go.
Moving forward was even more of a challenge, because my head was full of fizzing static and my eyes were still refusing to focus or even to combine their efforts and look in the same direction. A concussion? That would be bad.
Inching my way along the rail, I made it to a fence and — after a few false starts — scrambled-slid-slipped over it into a narrow alley that led out onto the street. I had some vague idea in my head about knocking on the first door and asking them to call an ambulance, but a woman with a yappy little dog screamed when she saw me and in no time I’d drawn a small crowd. Someone helped me to sit down again, at the side of the kerb, and I hovered at the ragged edge of consciousness while another someone called for an ambulance. ‘Love Walk. Love Walk in Peckham. Yeah, I think he’s been mugged. His face is covered in blood and he’s–’
What? Luckier than he had any right to expect? Probably, because when I surfaced again for real underneath a sardonically winking strip light in the corridor of some cavernous casualty unit (back at the Royal London, by a grim irony) floating on the wave of amiable invulnerability that comes with tramodol, it was to the good news that most of my internal organs seemed to be intact and functioning: two cracked ribs were a minor nuisance, or would have been if one of them hadn’t punctured the lining of my left lung. The broken finger on my right hand was scarcely worth mentioning, and my nose hadn’t broken after all, although it had swollen up spectacularly and the orbits of my eyes were deep purple.
The young Australian doctor decided to keep me overnight for a brain scan and a bit more prodding about in my chest cavity to see if the lung itself had been damaged in any way. But he was cheerfully optimistic about the whole concussion thing because I could count to five without clues and I knew who the prime minister was.
So all things considered, I’d come out ahead of the game. My attacker had come from the Salisbury: he was nothing to do with Rafi, so our cover was still safe. I hadn’t been killed or even crippled. And I knew something about that dead man that might come in handy somewhere down the line.
All the same, I decided, enough was enough. It was time to take a leaf out of Juliet’s book, and start going for some throats.
12
‘They feeding you okay?’ Nicky asked, taking a tentative sniff of the plastic pitcher of orange cordial — I’m using the word ‘orange’ to refer to the colour, not to the taste — that stood on my bedside table. Evidently it was less enticing than wine breath. He put it down and shoved it away firmly to arm’s length.
‘You any good at syllogisms?’ I countered.
‘Socrates is my bitch.’
‘Then work it out. Everyone in a hospital eats hospital food. Everyone in a hospital is sick. Conclusion?’
‘Right. I heard it was even worse than the shit they give you in prison.’
‘Makes sense. In prison, most people are strong enough to fight back.’
It was around lunchtime of the next day, and a lot of my aches and pains were maturing rather than fading. I had a huge dressing on my cheek that made me look a little bit like Claude Rains as the Invisible Man, and I was doped up to my eyeballs on drugs that had lightened my discomfort by shutting down large and important parts of my brain.
Things being how they were and the day being overcast, Nicky had volunteered to come around in person and fill me in on the progress he’d made with my data. He normally prefers to avoid away games and make me come to him, but I think he was curious to see how badly I was damaged. Of course a hospital is a safe, antiseptic environment, cooled by air-conditioning and wiped clean regularly with powerful disinfectants: that hits Nicky where he used to live. And on top of all that he was enjoying the attention, aware that the orderly who’d come through briefly with the medicine trolley had run off to tell all the junior doctors that they had a zombie in the place, and that a small horde of them were now watching him from the nurses’ station while pretending to sign prescriptions. They were all aching to dissect him and to debrief him about life after death at the same time. The ones with the strongest curiosity and the weakest morals would probably end up on Jenna-Jane’s staff at the Queen Mary MOU.
By contrast, my fellow patients were mostly ignoring him: but then, we were all of us fire-damaged, chipped at the edges or generally shopworn. This was a recovery ward, but the term was being applied fairly loosely. There was a guy with hair so lank and plastered to his head that he looked like he’d been given the first part of a tarring and feathering, who twitched and chewed his knuckles a lot and seemed to be in some kind of withdrawal; another, much older man who drifted in and out of sleep with a look of faint surprise perpetually dissolving back into torpor; a kid probably still in his teens, his pyjamas drenched with sweat, who wore cordless headphones and rocked gently to his own inner beat. And there was me. Mostly we respected each other’s space — or in some cases were maybe unaware of each other’s existence.
That suited me fine. I was looking at this brief stay in the way that old lags look on short stretches of imprisonment: you do your time, interacting with your environment as little as you can, and then you walk. I’ve already told you why I hate hospitals: the teeming multitudes of ghosts are as distracting as mosquitoes, as spirit-sapping as a constant hangover. That aside, though, this was a new-ish ward with reasonable decor. Reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Picasso’s Man With the Blue Guitar and one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans looked down on us from the walls, and the fluorescent strips were the kind that are meant to simulate outdoor light. Despite my bitching, it could have been a lot worse.
‘Okay, you’re kind of spoiled for choice,’ Nicky said, dropping a thick wodge of computer printouts on the table in front of me. Actually, ‘thick’ doesn’t cover it: it looked like a Central London phone book. Propped up in bed in tee-shirt and pyjama trousers with every muscle in my body aching, feeling like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry, I could only stare.
‘This is—?’
Nicky gave the massive accumulation of data an affectionate pat. ‘Incidents on the Salisbury estate involving a police report or a newsfeed write-up. I went back two years — and I widened the net to include an area of a few blocks on all sides of the Salisbury itself. I didn’t know how tight your brief was.’
‘So tight I’m having trouble breathing,’ I said, fingering the bandage across my chest. ‘Jesus, Nicky, how many incidents are we talking about?’
‘I didn’t tally up. And bear in mind, there’s a lot of redundancy in there — some things popped up in a lot of different places, and I didn’t bother to filter out because, hey, you don’t pay me enough for the deluxe service. Also, I set the bar real low. If someone’s bike got stolen, it’s in there. Or say little Timmy went missing for an hour or two and turned out to be round at his gran’s . . . So long as someone called the cops and the call was logged, I threw it all in the pot. I didn’t discriminate.’