A minute or an hour later, an ‘am’ trickled down from somewhere and attached itself to the ‘I’. I am. I therefore think.
It was me, again, bubbling up from under the chemical sludge of anaesthesia whether I liked it or not; being harshly, achingly reborn in a dark, cold room which seemed to be hanging at an angle. But no, that was me. I was lying skewed, my cheek pressed against the floor, my legs canted up into the air. I couldn’t figure it out so I let it go.
I was still alive, anyway. And I was still thinking. Any brain damage? How would I tell? If you’ve lost enough of your brain function to make a difference, you’ve probably lost the ability to see it as a problem. Maybe the terrific throbbing inside my skull was a good sign: there had to be a lot of nerves in there still doing their jobs.
Truth serums are general anaesthetics. They’re the primary inducers that you’re given to kick your conscious mind away into the long grass so that your body can be cut and spliced and sewn without any kickback from your cerebellum. By hyperventilating, I’d tried to make sure that I got as big and fast a hit as the dose in Gwillam’s syringe could provide. I’d been hoping that I’d go straight past the rambling stage into full unconsciousness. It might even have worked: I didn’t have any memory of talking, anyway. But maybe a hole in your memory was normal with these things.
I opened my eyes, but there was nothing to see. Either I’d been struck with hysterical blindness or I was in an absolutely dark space. I tried to move, and couldn’t. I could lift my head, just, but that turned out to be a mistake because it made the throbbing worse. I opened my mouth to swear and discovered that my tongue was glued to my dry palate.
Belatedly I remembered that I’d been tied to a chair. It seemed that I still was, but that the chair was now lying on its side on the ground. That explained the weird position I was in and the fact that I couldn’t move.
Son of a bitch! Didn’t the Vatican ever sign the Geneva Convention? They’d just wheeled or dragged the chair, with me bound to it, over to some cupboard and pushed it inside so hard or so clumsily that it had fallen over. That was no way to treat a prisoner.
As the pain gradually subsided, I worked at the ropes. They felt pretty loose: the original intention had just been to stop me moving while Gwillam interrogated me, not to keep me a prisoner for ever. Consequently Sallis and Zucker hadn’t bothered to check whether the knots were within reach of my fingers.
All the same, it took me a long time – I guessed more than an hour – to get my hands free. By that time, my fingers were so sore and abraded from the stiff sisal fibres that I had to rest up for a while before I started on my legs. Getting them free was much faster, but it took a good ten minutes of massaging life back into them before I could stand.
Okay, so I was free. But where the hell was I? I set out from the chair in tiny, inching steps, my arms straight out ahead of me, until I found a wall. Then I worked my way along it to the corner. This was no cupboard, obviously: it was a fair-sized room, although the roughcast feel of the walls still suggested a storage area of some kind rather than a public space.
I was intending to circumnavigate the room, but a little way along the second wall I found a door – and then its very welcome neighbour, a light switch. I turned it on with a silent prayer, and three strip lights flickered into life over my head, leaving me blinking in a harsh white radiance.
I’d guessed right: this was a storeroom, high-ceilinged, with deep shelves running the entire length of the far wall. They were all empty, though, except for a few circular drums about a foot and a half in diameter, which were presumably old movie reels. When the standing exhibition went walkabout, they must have taken pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. Either that or Gwillam had ordered the room cleared to make sure I didn’t find anything that might help me escape.
But nobody’s perfect. As my gaze came full circle and I looked across at the far side of the room from where I stood, a grim smile spread across my face. Because screwed to the wall, hiding in plain sight, was a small white box with a red cross stencilled on its face. A first-aid kit.
My ticket out of here.
20
The contents of a first-aid kit vary a lot from place to place but the core is always the same – bandages and sticking plasters in a million different shapes and sizes. There’s usually a bottle of disinfectant and some cotton buds; this one even had a few exotics like Savlon spray and vinegar for stings. None of that mattered a damn. I was looking for items that had either a point or an edge.
I got lucky. There was a tiny pair of scissors, a pair of splinter forceps and a half-dozen safety pins.
The door had a simple mortise deadlock with no lock-maker’s name on the plate. I dropped the forceps back into the box: probably too wide, and certainly not strong enough. I bent back one of the safety pins into a nearly straight line, then, using the scissors as a makeshift pair of pliers, I twisted the sharp end up and back into a hook. After a hairpin it’s my favourite kind of improvised lockpick, and it was easily up to a job as straightforward as this.
Five minutes were all it took to work the lock’s three levers around into the release position, the third one falling into place with a very satisfying click. Before I tried the door, I turned the light out and let my eyes adjust to the dark again. There was no light coming from under the door: if there had been, I’d have noticed it before, when the room had still been in darkness. Under the circumstances, the goal was to see before I was seen. Otherwise I’d be back to square one.
After about a minute, I eased the door open as silently as I could. Peering out, I waited until the wider darkness outside had started to resolve itself into shapes before I stepped out. I was in another part of the massive main exhibition area, as sepulchral and empty as the part where Gwillam had interrogated me. I reckoned there should be any number of ways out onto the street from here, or into other parts of the South Bank complex that were still open to the public. All I had to do was to make sure I didn’t bump into any of Gwillam’s merry little band on the way. In the case of Po, though, that meant not just avoiding being seen but also not letting him get my scent.
The level I was on seemed to be entirely deserted, so from that point of view I was doing fine. I thought about resting up for a few minutes here before I moved on but time was pressing: I didn’t know what I might have said while I was under the drug, or how much Gwillam now knew. There was also the fact that since I was still dressed only in a hospital gown I’d probably get hypothermia if I hung around too long in this frigid air.
After a minute or so of tacking backwards and forwards across the huge space I found a staircase and headed down, taking it slow in the pitch dark to avoid going arse-overtip all the way to the bottom. I was reasoning that at the very least I’d probably hit a door to the car park – which in turn had to connect with the street. Even if there was a security grille and it was locked shut, I was reasonably sure that I’d be able to jemmy it and get out.
But the door at the bottom of the stairwell was a fire door, with a padlock and chain hung over the bar in defiance of law and logic. I retraced my steps to the floor above and tried the door there. It opened when I pushed, so I stopped when the crack was about an inch wide and peered through.
Not quite dark here: there were lights on somewhere ahead – a dull, slightly bluish glow coming around the edge of what looked like a movable partition wall up ahead of me and slightly to my left. I listened: no sound at all, except for the very faint hum of some kind of machinery.