Camille (11 page)

“Oh, there was a phone call, I thought you’d like to know.”

“When was this?”

“A while ago . . . around seven o’clock.”

And before Camille has time to ask . . .

“Her brother.”

Nathan. Camille has never met Anne’s brother, but he has heard him on her voicemail. Nervous, excitable and young. He is fifteen years younger than his sister, a researcher in some incomprehensible subject – photons, nanotechnology, some field whose very name is meaningless to Camille.

“And for a brother, he’s not exactly polite. Listening to him, I’m glad I’m an only child.”

A sudden realisation explodes inside Camille’s head: how would Nathan have known Anne was in hospital?

Suddenly wide awake, he races round to the other side of the desk. The receptionist does not even wait for him to formulate the question.

“A man’s voice, he was . . . [Ophélia rolls her eyes] well, he was ignorant and rude. ‘Forestier . . . Yeah, with an F, how else would you spell it, with two Fs? [She mimics his curt, arrogant tone.] What exactly is wrong with her? And what did the doctors say? [Her imitation is beginning to verge on caricature.] What do you mean, they don’t know?’ [Her tone now is shocked, outraged.] . . .”

Did he have an accent?

The receptionist shakes her head. Camille glances around. The conclusion will come to him, he knows that, he is simply waiting for the neural pathways to connect, it is only a matter of seconds.

“Did he sound young?”

“Not
young
-young. Forty-something, I’d guess. Personally, I thought he . . .”

Camille is no longer listening, he is running, jostling anyone in his way. He wrenches open the door to the stairs which slams behind him. Already, he is taking the stairs as fast as his dumpy legs can manage.

*

8:15 p.m.

As soon as he heard my footsteps, he went upstairs, the nurse is thinking. About twenty-two, she has her hair in a skinhead crop and a ring through her bottom lip. On the outside she is all provocation, but inside is a different matter; if anything, she is too soft, too sensitive. She heard the stairwell door bang, but during those few seconds she spent hesitating the man could have gone anywhere – up to the fourth floor, down to reception, through the neurosurgical ward – there is no way of knowing where he went after that.

What was she supposed to do? She wasn’t sure what she had seen and you don’t go setting off the alarm in a hospital when you’re not sure . . . She heads back to the nurses’ station. The whole idea is ridiculous. Who would bring a shotgun into a hospital? But if it wasn’t a gun, what was it? Some sort of prosthesis? There are visitors who bring giant bunches of gladioli – are gladioli in season now? He got the wrong room, that’s what he said.

Still, she has her doubts. She did a course on battered women at nursing college, she knows how brutal men can be, she knows they’re quite capable of attacking their wives even in a hospital. She retraces her steps and pops her head around the door of room 224. The woman in the room cries all the time; every time the nurse comes in she is in tears, running her fingers over her face, following the line of her lips. She covers her mouth when she speaks. Twice, the nurse found her in front of the bathroom mirror, though she barely has the strength to stand.

But still, she thinks as she leaves the room, worried now, what could the man have had under his raincoat? It looked like a broom handle, in the split second when his coat fell open, there was a glint of metal, of cold steel. She tries to think of something else, something that might be mistaken for a shotgun barrel. A crutch?

This is what she is thinking as the policeman bursts through the doors at the far end of the corridor, the little officer who spent all afternoon sitting with the patient – no more than five feet tall, his handsome face is grave, unsmiling. He rushes past like a lunatic, almost knocking her over, jerks open the door to room 224 and dashes inside. He looks as though he is about to throw himself on the bed.

“Anne, Anne . . .” he yells.

*

The way he’s acting makes no sense, thinks the nurse, he’s a policeman, but you’d think he was her husband. The patient seems very agitated. She shakes her head wildly, raises her hand to ward off the torrent of questions: stop yelling.

“Are you O.K.?” the policeman whispers over and over. “Are you O.K.?”

I talk to him, try to keep him calm. The patient lets her arm fall limply by her side, she looks at me. “I’m fine . . .”

“Did you see anyone?” the policeman turns back to me. “Did someone come into this room? Did you see him?”

His voice is grim, anxious.

“Did someone come into the room?”

Yes, I mean not really, I mean no . . .

“There was a man . . . he said he’d got the wrong floor, he opened the door . . .”

The policeman doesn’t even wait for me to finish. He turns back to the patient, looks at her intently, she shakes her head, she seems confused, bewildered. She doesn’t say anything, she simply shakes her head. She didn’t see anyone. She slumps back on the bed, pulls the sheets up to her chin and starts to sob quietly. All these questions are frightening her. The little cop is hopping around like a flea. I need to say something.

“Monsieur, I’ll thank you to remember that this is a hospital!”

He nods, but you can tell he’s thinking about something else.

“And besides, visiting hours are over.”

He turns back to me.

“Which way did he go?”

I pause for a split second and before I can answer he’s shouting.

“This guy you saw, the one who said he’d got the wrong room, which way did he go?”

I reach down, take the patient’s wrist and take her pulse. This is none of my business, what matters is the patient’s welfare. I’m not in the business of reassuring jealous lovers.

“He took the stairs, over by . . .”

Before I’ve even finished the sentence, he’s off like a shot, racing towards the emergency door, I hear his feet on the stairs, but it’s impossible to tell whether he is going up or down.

But the shotgun . . . Did I just imagine it?

The concrete stairwell echoes like a cathedral. Camille grabs the banister, hurtles down the first few steps. Then stops.

No. If he were the killer, he would go up.

He does a U-turn. The treads are not standard size, the steps are about half a centimetre taller than expected; ten steps and you’re tired, twenty and you’re exhausted. Especially Camille with his short legs.

Panting, he arrives on the third floor, where he hesitates, racking his brain, trying to decide what he would do. Keep going up? No – he would go back into the maze of corridors. Bursting through the doors, Camille crashes into a doctor.

“What the . . .? Look where you’re going, can’t you!”

A quick glance reveals a man of indeterminate age, his white coat freshly ironed (the pleats are still visible), his hair quite grey, he is standing frozen, hands in his pockets, flustered by Camille’s frantic appearance . . .

“Did you see a man go past just now?”

The doctor takes a deep breath, struggles to recover his dignity and is about to stalk off.

“Are you fucking deaf?” Camille roars. “Did you see a man go past or didn’t you?”

“No . . . I, um . . .”

This is answer enough for Camille, he turns on his heel, jerks the door as though trying to rip it off its hinges, tears back downstairs and into the corridor, he goes right, then left, gasping for breath, there is no-one. He retraces his steps, breaks into a run when he suddenly has a nagging hunch (doubtless fuelled by exhaustion) that tells him he is going the wrong way: the moment such doubts creep in, your pace begins to slacken, in fact it becomes impossible to run faster. As he reaches the end of the corridor where it turns at a right angle, Camille crashes into an electrical cupboard. The door is seven feet high and plastered with lightning bolts and other symbols, all of which mean “Danger of Death”. Thanks for the tip.

*

The true art of a job like this is to leave as unobtrusively as you arrived.

This is no easy feat, it requires determination, concentration, vigilance and a cool head – qualities rarely found in one man. It’s like a hold-up: when things go wrong, it’s usually at the end. You show up with non-violent intentions, encounter a little resistance and unless you can keep calm, you find yourself spraying bullets and leaving carnage in your wake, all for want of a little self-control.

This time, I had a clear run. I didn’t encounter anyone, apart from some doctor loitering inexplicably in the stairwell, and I managed to dodge him.

I get to the ground floor, I walk quickly towards the exit. In hospitals, everyone is always in a hurry, but no-one ever runs, so when you walk quickly it attracts attention, but I’m gone before anyone has time to react. Besides, what is there to react to?

On my right, the car park. The cold air feels good. Under my coat, I keep the Mossberg clamped against my leg; no point scaring the patients now – if they’re in A. & E., they’re already in a bad way. Down here, everything seems calm, but I’m guessing that things are kicking off upstairs. That pipsqueak fucking cop is probably sniffing around like a prairie dog, trying to work out what happened. The little nurse isn’t really sure what she saw. And, O.K., maybe she talks to the other nurses. A gun? Are you kidding? You sure it wasn’t a heat-seeking missile? Maybe they tease her. You know you shouldn’t be drinking on the job! You been smoking crack again, girl? But then one of them says: all the same, you should maybe say something to the ward sister . . .

But by then, I’ve had more than enough time to get back to the car, start her up and join the queue of other vehicles leaving the hospital; three minutes later, I reach the street, I turn right and stop at the traffic light.

Now, this is a spot that might offer a window of opportunity.

And if not here, then somewhere close by.

All it takes is a little determination . . .

*

Camille feels beaten, but he forces himself to run faster. He takes the lift, tries to catch his breath. If there were no-one else in it, he would pound in the walls, instead he simply takes a deep breath. Arriving back in reception, he calmly assesses the situation. The casualty department is teeming with patients and nurses, paramedics are constantly coming and going, a corridor on the right leads to an emergency exit and another on the left leads out to the car park.

There must be at least half a dozen routes by which a man could leave the hospital without being noticed.

Protocol would suggest questioning witnesses, taking statements. But who would he question? Who is there to give a statement? By the time his team arrived at the scene, two-thirds of these people would have been discharged and their places taken by others.

He could kick himself.

Calmly, he goes back up to the second floor and over to the nurses’ station. Florence, the girl with the bee-stung lips, is poring over patient files. Her colleague? She doesn’t know, she says without looking up. Camille is insistent.

“We’re overworked here on the ward,” she says.

“In that case, she can’t have gone very far . . .”

She is about to say something, but Camille is already gone. He paces up and down the corridor, popping his head around every door that opens, he is about to check the women’s toilets – in the mood he is in, nothing would stop him – when the nurse finally reappears.

She seems annoyed, she runs a hand over her skinhead crop. Mentally, Camille sketches her, her features are regular and the cropped hair makes her look fragile. She looks intimidated, but in fact she is sensible and pragmatic. Her immediate reaction confirms this. She does not break her step and Camille is forced to run to keep up with her.

“The guy got the wrong room. It happens. He apologised.”

“You heard his voice?”

“Not really . . . I heard him say sorry, that’s about it.”

Hurrying along a hospital corridor, trying to wheedle information out of this woman, information he needs if he is to save the life of the woman he loves. He grabs the nurse’s arm, forcing her to stop, to look down; she is struck by the single-mindedness she can read in his face, by the determination in his calm, measured growl as he says, “I need to you to pay attention . . .”

Camille glances at her name-tag: Cynthia. Her parents clearly watched too many soap operas.

“I need you to tell me everything, ‘
CYNTHIA
’. I need every last detail . . .”

She tells him, the man standing in the open doorway, the way he kept his head down when he turned around – embarrassed probably – the raincoat he was wearing, O.K., so he had a rather stiff way of walking . . . He headed straight for the stairs and a man who is running away would go down, not up, it’s only logical, isn’t it?

Camille sighs and nods; of course, it’s only logical.

*

9.30 p.m.

“It’ll be here any minute . . .”

The head of hospital security is not best pleased. It is late, he had to get dressed and come back to work when he could be at home watching the match. A former
gendarme
, self-important, big-bellied, no-necked, red-faced, the product of a staple diet of beef and red wine. To watch the C.C.T.V. footage, he needs a warrant. Signed by the examining magistrate. In triplicate.

“On the phone, you told me you had a warrant . . .”

“No,” Camille states categorically, “I told you I was
getting
one.”

“Well, I wasn’t aware of that.”

Pig-headed. As a rule, Camille favours negotiation, but on this occasion he has neither the time nor the inclination.

“And what exactly are you aware of?” he barks.

“I don’t know . . . that you had a sear—”

“No,” Camille cuts him off, “I’m not talking about a search warrant. Are you
aware
that a man with a sawn-off shotgun gained access to this hospital? Are you aware that he went up to the second floor intending to kill one of the patients it is your job to protect? And that if anyone got in his way, he would have happily shot them too? Are you aware that if he comes back and butchers people, you’re going to be in the dock?”