Vortex

'I thought tae kwon do was all, you know, beating people up and stuff.'

Annie gave him a cross look. 'Who do you think I am, Ben? A Teenage Mutant Ninja thingy?' Ben thought she sounded a bit more scornful than she needed to. 'I do tae kwon do because it's healthy, OK?'

Ben nodded, doing his best not to look amused. He felt quite sure that Annie had not neglected the martial arts side of her 'exercise' regime, but he didn't fancy being at the receiving end of it, so he kept quiet as he watched her put the plastic box away.

'So,' he said to break the silence, 'where are we going?'

Annie's face lit up as she practically skipped to her bookcase and brought down an ordnance survey map. She indicated that Ben should sit down with her on the floor, then spread the map open in front of them, and pointed at the area just west of the Northumbria National Park. 'Here,' she told him. 'There's a youth hostel we can stay at, and it's dead close to the area where we can find what we're looking for.'

'Right,' Ben said vaguely. 'We looking for something in particular, then?'

'Well, we're not out to spot pigeons, Ben,' Annie told him as she jumped up and selected something else from her bookcase — a magazine this time. Ben saw the blue and white logo of the RSPB on the front. She flicked through until she came across the page she wanted, then handed it to Ben. 'Hen harrier,' she said shortly. 'Very rare. We'll be lucky to find them.'

Ben looked at the pages. There were pictures of two birds — a male and a female, the text told him. The female was brown, and stared out of the picture with a certain ferocity, her beady eyes seeming to bore straight into Ben, her hooked beak sharp and threatening. The male did not appear so aggressive, but seemed no less mysterious to Ben. He was grey — like the ghost of a bird, he thought — and had a striking nobility about him.

'They're amazing,' he said quietly.

Annie nodded soberly. 'They are,' she said.

'Why are they so rare?'

'Because they're carnivorous,' she explained.

Ben looked confused. 'I don't understand. Wouldn't that make them stronger — top of the food chain and all that?'

Annie was still gazing at the magazine on Ben's lap. She reached out and touched the picture of the male hen harrier almost wistfully. 'There's not much they can do about guns, though.'

'Guns?' Ben was shocked. 'Who would want to shoot them?'

'Gamekeepers,' Annie explained. She had a sad kind of smile on her face. 'You see, the hen harrier is a natural predator of grouse. So some gamekeepers have been breaking the law by shooting harriers to keep their grouse stocks up so that people can then pay to shoot the grouse. We humans can do some pretty dumb things sometimes. It's gone on for years. Anyway, it's got really bad lately. There's only about seven hundred and fifty breeding pairs in the whole of the United Kingdom — and the English population is tiny. Only ten pairs in 2004, and my magazine says that there were only fifteen successful nests this year. That makes hen harriers really rare.'

Ben didn't know much about these things, but fifteen nests sounded like the birds were seriously in danger of being wiped out.

'The area where we're going is one of the few spots in the country where you can still see them, and now's the right time of year. If we see one, we need to make a detailed description of it and report it to the RSPB — they keep tabs on things like this because the birds are so rare. I can't promise we'll have any luck, but—'

'It's OK,' Ben interrupted. 'It'll just be nice to get away.' He glanced slightly glumly out of Annie's bedroom window at the persistent drizzle. 'Hope the weather clears up, though.'

'Yeah,' Annie replied, 'because the thing is, we'll probably die if we get wet, won't we?' She elbowed Ben playfully but — he thought — a bit sharply in the ribs. 'You're not going to wimp out on me because of a few drops of water, are you?'

Ben smiled, and he thought back momentarily to the floods in London and the torrential rains in the Congo.

'No,' he said quietly, 'I'm OK with a bit of rain. You don't have to worry about that.' And he went back to staring at the picture of the hen harrier, and wondering if they might be lucky enough to catch sight of one in real life.

Inspector Tim Matthews was a good deal younger than the clinical psychiatrist sitting opposite, but that didn't stop him looking at the guy with an expression of incredulity.

'You're trying to tell me that he just walked out?'

Dr Hopkinson raised his hands in the air and shrugged slightly. 'I know, it doesn't sound good, but there we have it,' he conceded. 'I guess we took our eye off the ball for a moment.'

The room in which they were sitting — Dr Hopkinson's study — was cluttered with files, papers and well-thumbed medical books.

'How did it happen? I thought this place was meant to be secure.'

'It is,' Dr Hopkinson replied. 'The only way in and out is using swipe cards, and they're only given to authorized personnel. Unfortunately, one of our nurses mislaid hers when she was attending to a patient, and our man was able to grab it and leave without being noticed. She's getting an official warning as we speak, but the truth is that it was just a human error.'

The policeman sighed and pulled a notebook out of his jacket. 'All right then,' he said in a resigned tone of voice. 'You'd better tell me what you know about him.'

Hopkinson looked seriously at him. 'You do understand, officer, that this is confidential. As his doctor, I have a certain duty towards my patients.'

'All we want to do is find him, Doctor Hopkinson.'

The doctor nodded, and placed his fingers together. 'His name is Joseph Sinclair. He's been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for the past twenty-five years — since the act was established, in fact. Before that, he was in a number of institutions. The records are a bit vague.' He smiled apologetically. 'I'm afraid the medical profession has not always been quite as enlightened in these matters as we are now.'

'Any family?'

'He's mentioned a brother, but not in kindly terms. Certainly there's no contact — he hasn't had a visitor for as long as I've been his doctor.'

The policeman nodded. 'What's wrong with him?' he asked.

'A classic case of paranoid schizophrenia,' Dr Hopkinson replied. 'Textbook stuff, really — voices in his head, government conspiracies, men in black out to get him. He's convinced that his mental illness derives from treatments he was given by a government agency when he was a young man. It's a very common delusion. Most of the time he keeps quiet about it, but now and then he exhibits acute psychotic episodes: when that happens, we have to keep him restrained, for his own good and that of others.'

Inspector Matthews looked sharply at him. 'Violent tendencies?'

Dr Hopkinson thought about that for a moment. 'Difficult to say,' he answered finally, 'because we never let it get that far. But with this kind of psychosis, you can never count it out. That's why he's been assessed as unsuitable for any form of community care — he needs to be in a secure institution like ours, for his own good. And now he's out there without his medicines — a few days like that and his symptoms are very likely to escalate.'

'OK. Do you have a picture of him?'

The psychiatrist opened a file in front of him and withdrew a photograph. 'This was taken about three years ago,' he said. 'He hasn't changed much since.'

Inspector Matthews looked at the picture. The man who stared back out at him had a hooked nose and grey floppy hair. But it was his eyes that stood out the most. Piercing, green, beady almost — like a hawk. There was something about them that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. 'How old is he?' the policeman asked quietly.

'Seventy-one, but fit for his age.'

'Still,' Inspector Matthews replied, 'he's an old man. We'll alert the local police forces and search the surrounding area. I can't imagine he'll have it in him to get too far.'