George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (21 page)

So it had been with Zack. He was good looking, amusing, interesting, and she had allowed herself to be more attracted to him than she should, considering there was always Gus. So far it had been an amusing game she had been playing, but now, suddenly, she wasn’t so sure.

There had been something chilling, she told herself, about the way he had used her tonight. It was now clear to her that neither Klein nor Llewellyn had expected to see her; that Zack had for purposes of his own set her up to act as a critic of their work, as well as supporter of his, and she was far from happy about that. Why had he done it? What was it all about? And was he trying to use her in any other way? She couldn’t imagine one at the moment, but the possibility was there; and
she pushed her hands even more deeply into her pockets and scowled as she marched on.

The flat had been hot and unwelcoming and she had gone around opening windows and tidying up in a little flurry of activity designed to keep her mind off Zack and the fact that Gus thought she was having dinner with him
à deux
; she had not been treating Gus well, she knew, these past few days, and for the first time she let herself feel really bad about that.

It had been as she was at last falling asleep that the idea had come to her and been so startling that she had actually sat up in bed and stared sightlessly at her window as she contemplated it. It was absurd, wasn’t it? And yet…

Now, as she stared down at the river on her way to the hospital, she thought about it again, turning the notion round and round in her head, sniffing at it, tasting it, trying to see if it had as much power this morning as it had in the late night watches.

And had to admit that there was still something there. The various things that had been happening at Old East had seemed quite separate from Zack and her relationship with him; now, she wasn’t so sure.

She walked on, still trying to get her ideas clear in her mind and not being able to prevent herself from letting her thinking get convoluted, twisting and turning back on itself. When she got to her office, she promised herself, she’d make notes. That always helped her sort out her confusion properly. Hadn’t it been just such an exercise that had led her to the link between Sheila and Lally Lamark? Maybe it would work again.

She let herself into the lab quietly, fumbling only a little with the new keys the locks demanded; it was still very early, not yet eight o’clock. She hadn’t been able to sleep and had preferred coming in straightaway to hanging around at home; now she was very glad. The solitude meant she would easily be able to settle down at her desk with a piece of paper and a
pencil and see what she could sort out of this tangle regarding Zack.

She took herself down to the basement and the mortuary before going to her office; she had a couple of post-mortems to do that afternoon, and she had remembered just as she left the flat that she was short of shampoo and body lotion for her shower room there; and while she was at it, she had decided to bring in a pile of fresh new underwear. She was whistling softly between her teeth as she took herself into her private changing room and set to work, enjoying, as she always did, the minutiae of her job. It made her feel so much more comfortable when things around her were well organized, just as it had when she had been a child and had found satisfaction in rearranging the coloured pencils in her special pencil box.

It wasn’t until she was on her way back upstairs and heading for her office that she felt it: a prickling sensation at the back of her neck that told her she wasn’t alone. She stood very still on the stairs, listening hard, but there was nothing to be heard apart from the hum of the big refrigerators and the distant mumble of traffic on the ring road that circled the hospital. She had heard nothing unusual, she knew, yet she was certain someone was there.

She didn’t stop to think but turned and went quickly down the stairs again. If she’d used her commonsense she’d have sent for someone from security — maybe Bittacy was still on duty? — and let them search, but she wasn’t in the mood to be sensible. Being reckless had a sort of charm, this morning.

At first all seemed well. The mortuary was quiet and empty. Taps dripped, the windows rattled in response to the distant traffic, her heels clacked on the tiled floor, but that was all, and after making a thorough search, opening every door, slowly she made her way back to the stairs.

And again it happened, just a few steps from the top; that certainty she was not alone. Now she knew it had to be somewhere ahead of her rather than behind, and moved forwards. Her shoes clicked on the stair-tread and she bent and
pulled them off, then, barefoot, moved very carefully along the corridor.

She saw it at once: the door to the Beetle cupboard was open. It couldn’t have been open when she came in, could it? She’d have noticed, surely. She stopped and tried to remember, closing her eyes to see the scene as it had been when she first arrived, and realized that she hadn’t looked along the corridor. She had come in and made straight for the stairs; if the cupboard door had been open she wouldn’t have known, because she simply hadn’t looked in that direction.

Mrs Glenney, she thought, the night cleaner. Had she left it open? Hardly. With her overblown sense of her own importance in the maintenance of security, she would never do that. And she had no cause to be in that cupboard, anyway. It contained stores of various kinds, bottles of reagents, slides, unused equipment, spare parts, stationery: the assorted materials of day-to-day life in a laboratory; and she frowned, trying to think if there was anything potentially valuable there. But then, she reminded herself, she hadn’t imagined there was anything valuable in her files and someone had broken in and rifled those …

She crept over to the cupboard and looked in. She did not know it as well as the junior staff, whose job it was to see to the maintenance of supplies to each work-station, but well enough, and now she tried again to summon up her special gift of memory by closing her eyes so that she could see in the pinkish dark behind her lids the way the cupboard usually looked. She let her memory range over the shelves, browsing among them, opening her eyes from time to time to check the reality against her memory. As far as she could tell, there was just one bottle out of place, on the top shelf; not hard to see since it had left a gap like that in a five-year-old’s teeth. She closed her eyes again to try and read the label.

Hydrochloric Acid.
That was what had been in there. Just a Winchester bottle of hydrochloric acid, of which they used a great deal for various purposes; why on earth should she be
worried about that? Someone must have taken the bottle out to refill a bench-sized bottle and just not returned it. All she had to do was go into the big lab and look for it. And for whoever else might be there …

She went to her own office first, opening the door with great stealth, to arm herself with the only thing she had in the place which might make a weapon: a rather battered but very large golf umbrella she kept in a corner in case she was called out to a body on a rainy day and had to examine it
in situ.
She’d spent enough miserable hours with rain dripping down her neck not to know the value of such an item. Now, as she picked it up and held it tightly round the middle, she was deeply, burningly grateful to her own good sense in providing it.

Then she went as softly as she could, with her heart beating like a drum, to the big laboratory.

The door was closed but not locked and she eased it open carefully, her own pulse pounding in her ears so loudly that it seemed impossible that others couldn’t hear it too for miles around, a fearful notion she pushed firmly to the back of her mind. The familiar smells came out at her, acrid and caustic at the same time: iodine and formaldehyde and methylated spirits and the faint sweetish scent of Festival, which was the disinfectant applied to floors and worktops, and somewhere deep below all that coffee, and… something else. She couldn’t place it, but knew it to be unusual in this setting. There was the sound of the refrigerators too, and the soft hissing of various other items of machinery and — she stopped and closed her eyes, listening hard. Another unfamiliarity: a thick dragging sound, swift and roughly rhythmic. She opened her eyes and, abandoning any attempt at being quiet and careful but still clutching the umbrella, shot forwards in the big room and round the front end work-bench end to look into the space beyond. No one was there. She twisted her body and pulled back to run to the next bench end and then on to the last. And there she saw him.

He was sitting on the floor, his legs outstretched and his back to the bench, with both hands flat on each side of him, his eyes closed. He was struggling to breathe, his mouth pulled apart in a great rictus, yet held wide open. The sound was
much clearer now, choked and painful. She slid to her knees beside him and leaned over to stare into his face, which was pallid and sweating, with a blueish tinge to the lips and eye sockets, though his cheeks and forehead had sprung a rich red rash. His eyes were closed.

‘Jerry!’ she cried. ‘Jerry, for God’s sake, what happened?’

Now the smell was even thicker and she thought she recognized it; indeed her own eyes were beginning to water. She pulled Jerry by one arm so that he opened his eyes and stared at her blearily; he tried to shake his head and speak, all at the same time, as his breathing became even harsher, but he couldn’t. She let go of him and ran across the lab towards the big window, one of six which lit the space. The long pole normally used to operate the high section, which was the only part that would open, was, of course, not there. It was one of the lab staff’s constant moans that wherever the pole was most wanted was always the place where it wasn’t, and she could have screamed with the frustration of it as she looked over her shoulder at Jerry again.

He had slumped a little sideways and it seemed to her that the sound of his breathing was thinner, with even less power to it, and in panic she lifted her umbrella and hurled it hard against the window. The panes shook but held; she cast around for a heavier weapon, and settled on one of the lab stools. She picked it up by one leg and virtually threw it at the window; this time it shattered in a great shower of glass and noise and the room seemed to fill with the outside air.

But Jerry still had not moved. She ran to the phone and scrabbled for the dial, muttering aloud as she did so, not knowing what the words were, but realizing later that they had been in some sort of sense a prayer; and dialled.

By the time she got an answer from the switchboard she was almost screaming with urgency and it took her valuable seconds to make the girl comprehend that she was in the lab, that there was an emergency and she needed the crash team
at once, but at last the girl understood and George was able to drop the phone and run back to Jerry.

But there was little she could do as she crouched there except hold him so that his airway was obstructed as little as possible, and listen with every part of herself for the sound of the team arriving. Around her the lab sat serene and familiar except for the shards of glass on the floor, and the smell which she had noticed before; now she lifted her head and, still holding Jerry carefully, craned her neck to look at the bench above them.

Clearly he had been refilling a reagent bottle of his own. This, she thought, must be one of the days on which he chose to come to work early. Jerry often did, she knew, particularly after an evening when he had been left to lock up and therefore had the keys. Yesterday had been such an evening, and she stared at the bottles and tried to imagine how it had been here this morning.

He would have come in with his work plans in his mind, and seen that his bottle needed refilling. It was something the junior was supposed to do, but somehow she never managed to keep up with all of them. Sheila often complained because she had to do her own.

And then George caught her breath because she realized that they were not sitting beneath Jerry’s work-station, but Sheila’s. His own area was further down the bench. Twisting her head to look, she saw that he had his microscope — the familiar old-fashioned one that he loved to use — already pulled forward, with rows of slides set in all the available space around it. So he had needed to do something with a chemical and rather than rearrange his own area had poached on Sheila’s. Why not, when she was off sick anyway? George could almost hear his voice explaining cheerfully that that was what he had done, and she looked down at him and murmured, ‘It’s all right, Jerry. Hold on, honey. They’re on their way.’ And looked back up at the bottle.

There was a small one with a funnel beside it. Had it been
used to pour something into the bottle or just opened for that purpose? She sniffed hard and the smell filled her nostrils and she blinked at the irritation, and looked again. Beside the small bottle, which was turned in such a way that she couldn’t see the label, was another bigger one, a Winchester. The Beetle cupboard bottle, she thought. The hydrochloric acid. And then she knew just what had happened and how and felt a sense of deep sick terror. ‘Not again,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh, Christ, not again!’

Beneath her hand Jerry stirred and she was at once all attention. ‘It’s OK, Jerry, they’re coming.’ Then, as she heard the clatter and the crashing down the corridor, she cried, ‘They’re here!’ She lifted her chin and shouted and went on shouting until the door burst open and they came rushing in.

The next fifteen minutes were, as far as she was concerned, bedlam. There were four of them from the Accident and Emergency crash team and within a matter of seconds they were at work. Adam Parotsky, whom she recognized as the senior houseman on A & E, set himself at Jerry’s head as two of the others eased Jerry into position flat on his back with a hard pillow beneath his shoulders and Adam reached out one hand to the senior nurse who was part of the team. At once she slid a laryngoscope into it and then, as Adam set to work, followed up with the necessary tubes and attachments.