Double Blind (22 page)

“Wait! Where are you going?” Napoleon was on the war path. We pushed our way through the crowd of people waiting at the reception desk and out through the double doors. Then we ran. After a hundred yards or so, we stopped and checked, but I couldn’t see anyone pursuing us. I was sure we weren’t the first to bolt out of an emergency room to avoid unwanted attention, but I was relieved that the doctor hadn’t given chase.

“Ok, let’s find a taxi,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

“Better be quick then. There are two security guards coming this way,” said Josh.

We ran out of the hospital grounds on to the main road, waving frantically until a black cab pulled over. When I gave the driver the address, he looked surprised. “That’s a fair trek,” he said. “It’ll be expensive.”

“That’s all right. And please go as fast as you can. It’s an emergency.”

It seemed to take forever to cross London. We drove past shuttered shops and streets crowded with young men going home after late night pub crawls. As the taxi wound through the quieter streets of Earls Court and Hammersmith, I found it hard to sit still. I kept checking my watch. It was close to eleven forty-five by the time we got on to the M4, where the driver was finally able to put his foot down. When we pulled off the motorway at junction six, my mobile rang. It was Detective Parry. “You said there’s a note? Tell me what’s going on.”

I explained about the patient files on the flash drive. “We’re supposed to hand them over in a few minutes,” I said, looking at my watch again.

“I can’t get anyone out there in that timeframe,” Parry said. “You’ll have to no-show. He’ll get back in touch.” I heard voices on his end of the line. “I have to go,” he said. “Let me know when you next hear from the kidnapper.”

“This man is a moron,” I said, staring at the blank screen on my phone. “I don’t think he gives a damn about Anita. He said we just had to no-show.”

“Well, we’re not doing that,” Josh said, squeezing my hand.

The taxi driver pulled off the main road and drove slowly into an industrial estate, a network of streets flanked by two-story warehouses with roll-up doors and loading docks. In daylight, the area was probably a hive of activity, but now the silence and darkness were oppressive.

“This is it, folks,” said the driver, pulling to the side of the road. “Are you sure you gave me the right address?”

I knew I had, but I checked the address on my phone screen again and showed it to Josh.
21 Spring Meadow Road
. It was hard to imagine a place less like a meadow in the spring.

“This is it,” said Josh. “How much do we owe you?”

“Sixty pounds, guv.” Josh pulled some notes from his wallet and handed them over.

“Could you wait for us for a while?” I asked. “We’ll need a ride out of here.”

The driver shook his grizzled head. “Sorry, miss, but I should have gone off duty at midnight. I’ll bet you can call a local cab company and they’ll be out here in a jiffy. You got a mobile, haven’t you?”

We watched the taxi drive away, its orange lights fading like the dying embers of a fire. I shivered, feeling the cold and damp already seeping through my jacket, and fear permeating my bones.

I turned to look at the building, a squat flat-roofed block of concrete with a rusting roll-up door. We approached slowly, unsure of how to make our presence known to whoever might be inside. There was an entry door next to the roll-up. Josh knocked on it. We listened for sounds, any sign that the place was occupied, but heard nothing. Josh banged on the door more loudly, but still there was no response.

“Let’s go round the back,” he suggested. The ground at the side of the building was unpaved and covered with knee-high weeds that stank of urine. I wondered briefly if it was human or animal, then tried not to think about it at all. We turned the corner to an expanse of crumbling asphalt. A skip crouched in one corner, its patches of peeling paint like animal markings in the moonlight. The back wall of the warehouse reminded me of a face, with two windows like old eyes, filmy and impenetrable, and a single metal door in the center. Josh turned the knob and, to my surprise, the door creaked open. Inside, it was completely black. I stepped into the doorway and felt around on the wall for a light switch. There was one but it didn’t turn anything on. The darkness seemed to intensify the more I looked into it.

Josh pulled a small LED torch from his pocket.

“Don’t tell me you were a Boy Scout,” I whispered.

He grinned. “Nope, but my grandma always told me to be prepared for anything. She gave me this for Christmas. A few years ago, she gave me a Swiss army knife.” He patted his coat pocket. “I always carry them with me.”

“Cool grandma,” I said. The Christmas gift washed the hallway in white light. Stepping inside, we walked along the corridor past several closed doors. I pushed the last one open but the room was empty, so we kept going until we reached a large open space. There was no shelving, no machinery. It looked as though the place had been abandoned for a long time. When I scuffed the floor with the toe of my boot, dust flew up like a swarm of insects in the beam of Josh’s torch.

“There’s a mezzanine,” I nodded in the direction of a metal staircase in the far corner. “Should we go look up there?”

Josh nodded. We tiptoed across the warehouse floor and climbed the steps, the metal ringing under the tread of my boots. Fearful of what we might find at the top, I felt my heart speed up. The stairs opened on to an open area enclosed with a half-height wall. A few scraps of newspaper littered the bare plywood floor and a pile of blankets lay in one corner.

“Nothing,” I whispered. “Let’s check those rooms on the ground floor.” It was hard to talk out loud, even though it seemed obvious that there was no one around. We went back down the stairs, crossed into the hallway and opened a door. Like the warehouse, the room was covered in dust. No one had been in there for a long time. But, in the next room, we found signs of recent occupation. A plastic table and three chairs sat in the center, and there was a blanket on the floor. In the beam of the torch, we saw footprints and drag marks in the dust. I was sure that Anita and the kidnapper had been here.

Venturing into the room, I took a good look at the table, hoping that Anita might have left a clue of some kind. Josh shook out the blanket, but all it shared with us was a dense cloud of sepia-colored dust that made my eyes itch.

“We should go back outside,” I said between sneezes.

The asphalt at the back of the building was corrugated from years of use, edged on one side by a metal link fence, festooned with papers that had caught in the mesh. Josh swung the light around. There was a small puddle on the tarmac not far from the back door. He bent down and ran his finger across the surface.
Please don’t let it be blood
, I thought.

“Looks like fluid from a car,” he said. “Water, like evaporation from the heater, perhaps.”

“So there was a vehicle here fairly recently,” I said. “Why did they leave before we got here?”

We shivered in the cold night air. It felt unreal to be in such a desolate place in the early hours of the morning but, however bad I felt, Anita must be faring worse. I stared around the lot for a minute, looking for clues. My eyes came to rest on the dented skip. It was big, more than big enough to hide a body.

“We need to look inside,” I said, the bile rising in my throat. I hung back when Josh lifted the lid and peered in.

“Anything?”

“No.” He started to let the lid fall and then stopped. “Wait, come and look. What do you think that is?”

I took a step forward to peer inside. The metal container was empty apart from a small white box, which was lodged in the far corner.

“I think we should check it out,” he said.

“I’ll do it. Just hold the light steady.”

Before he could argue, I pulled myself up on the metal rim, swung one leg over and jumped down into the container. It smelled awful. I reached for the white box and stopped. “We shouldn’t touch it without gloves on, should we? It might have fingerprints that the police could use.”

“We don’t have any choice,” Josh said. “Just lift it by a corner.”

I nodded, picking it with my thumb and forefinger, and handing it over to him. He waited until I’d clambered back out of the skip before opening the box. Inside was a single used syringe and a small square of white cotton dressing. There was no label or print on the outside of the carton, nothing to indicate what the contents of the syringe would have been.

“Too tidy for a casual druggie,” I said. “Do you think our kidnapper left it here?” My thoughts were running faster than my words. “Oh God, they’re drugging Anita.”

“We don’t know that,” said Josh. “But we should keep it to show to the police, just in case.” He slipped it into a pocket of his overcoat. “Now what?”

“Back to the main road,” I said, already leading the way back to the front of the building. When I turned the corner, I ran straight into a man with a beard. He yelled. I screamed.

The man shoved me against the wall. “What are you doing here?” he shouted at me. “This is my place. You’re trespassing, that’s what you’re doing.”

“Back off, mate.” Josh had found his Swiss army knife, which he pointed in the man’s direction. Not surprisingly, my assailant laughed.

“You need one like this, my friend.” He pulled a knife from his pocket and held it out in front of him. It was a kitchen knife with a red plastic handle. Still, the blade looked lethal enough.

I watched Josh lower his pocket knife, but he kept it in his hand. When I looked back to the bearded man, he’d moved closer, his face just inches from mine. He pushed the point of the knife against my neck. His skin was dirty and his hair was matted. He stank. For an instant, I felt relieved. This was no kidnapper, just a homeless man. But then my relief dissolved. He might be a vagrant, but he had a knife at my throat.

“What do you want? Money?” asked Josh, digging into his pocket for his wallet.

“What would I do with money? You shouldn’t have been trespassing on my property.”

“Please let her go,” Josh said, moving a few steps closer. “We’ll move on. We don’t want to disturb you.”

“Nah,” the man exclaimed, enveloping me in a cloud of foul breath. “Second time in one night you’ve been here. You’ll just come back again.”

“We haven’t been here before,” I said. “Did you see other people here earlier? A young Indian woman with black hair? A man, perhaps more than one?”

He took the knife away from my neck, breathed on it and rubbed it against his coat. “Nice and shiny,” he said, looking at the blade.

“Please? Did you see her? She’s in danger.”

He nodded. “All that frizzy air. Lot of danger.”

“Her hair is straight…” I had a strange sensation, a tingling that ran from my head to my toes. “Wait. What do you mean? Frizzy air? You mean wavy air? Around her head?”

“Yep. Means she’s going to die.”

I leaned against the wall, dropped to my haunches. The shock took all the strength from my legs. They felt like jelly.

“Have you seen the moving air before? On other people? How long have you been able to see it?” I had a hundred questions, but the bearded man moved a few steps away from me, looking at me from under drawn brows. “What’s it to you?”

“I can see it too.”

He laughed, long and loud, the sound of it grating like chalk on a board. “Good luck with that. Look what it did to me.”

“What do you mean?” asked Josh, helping me back to my feet, keeping his arm around my shoulders.

“They did it to me in the army. Put something in my head. That’s when I started seeing them. Hundreds of ’em. Drove me crazy. I mean, it was Afghanistan. We all knew some of us were going to get shot or blown up, but I knew exactly who wasn’t coming back each day. Couldn’t stand it after a while. I got myself shot, got sent back home. I thought they’d go away but I still see ’em. I need to get this thing out of my head.”

He started rubbing his scalp, pulling at his tangled hair. Josh and I looked at each other. I felt faint, but we needed to keep moving. “Who was with the woman?” I asked.

He shrugged. “A man.”

“Just one?”

“Maybe two. No, there were three. Using my place. Bastards.”

“Did you see a car? What kind it was?”

He tugged at his ears, and beat one fist against the side of his head. “Big white car,” he said.

“Can you describe the men? Did you get a plate number?”

“One of them was a lizard.” The head bashing continued.

Josh took my hand. “We’re going now,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”

We began walking fast through the weeds to the front of the warehouse. Just as we reached the road, the man shouted after us. “Green car, big. One man.”

We walked down the middle of the road, keeping some distance away from the dark structures that loomed along both sides of the street. I hadn’t noticed on the taxi ride in, but realized now that all the warehouses were abandoned, with broken windows and weed-strewn lots. There was something disturbing and post-apocalyptic about the place. And I was still shaking from the encounter with the man who could see auras.

We came to an intersection and stopped, unsure which way led back to the main road. Without speaking, we both turned to the right. After half a mile or so, we left the derelict warehouses behind and entered a newer development of three-story, glass-fronted office buildings. Many of them had signs out front indicating company names. Street lamps revealed swathes of neatly manicured lawns and pruned shrubs, a display of normality that helped me breathe a little more easily. After another turn, we were surprised to see the twinkling lights of an all-night cafe, fifty yards up the road.

A bell tinkled when we walked into the brightly-lit cafe, where several tables were occupied by men in overalls and work boots. Two men in navy blue security uniforms ate heaping plates of bacon and eggs. A Bollywood musical ran on a TV on the wall, the soundtrack barely audible. A bald man behind the counter smiled at us. “What can I get you?” he asked.