Waking Broken (24 page)

Harper frowned. ‘Are you talking about stress or mental illness?’

Kate shrugged awkwardly. She looked back up at Harper and he was surprised to see tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t know, Danny, I don’t know. The line between them isn’t that clear anyway.’ She sighed. ‘Look, mental illness is one of those terms that covers all kinds of things and there’s all kinds of different levels of seriousness. It can affect anyone too. Having a mental illness doesn’t mean you’re a lunatic. It can mean anything from depression to full-blown psychosis. But…’ Her hands gripped his knees hard. ‘You have changed, Danny, and that’s not normal.’

Harper reached out and took her hands gently. He looked at Kate with growing warmth. Even taking into account the fact they had been lovers in another life, he found himself drawn to her and it was obvious she still cared about him. Part of him knew he should never have knocked on her door, should have continued to distance himself and let their lives move on in isolation but he could not act like a cold stranger now. She was also probably correct: he should go and see a doctor.

Apart from the moments when his vision blurred and the unsettling dreams that continued to haunt him, he kept discovering odd holes in his memory. Not about the past but about the hours and days that had just gone by. Some were gaps of a few minutes, others hours long: times when he had no idea what he had done or where he had been. Harper’s fear was that while his mind might have been bounced into this alternative reality, it was not entirely settled here. Whether it was being pushed or leaving of its own accord he had no idea — and he suspected its place was not yet fixed. However, he doubted if it was anything any normal medic could analyse.

‘Look, Kate,’ he began. ‘You’re right, I have changed. There’s a few things have happened in my life recently, and I don’t just mean getting knocked down by a car, I’m talking about things that have made me…’

He fell silent and they both turned to stare towards her front door in astonishment. A thunderous knocking came from the landing outside.

Friday, 1.42pm:

Kate looked round in alarm. ‘What on earth’s that all about?’ She cocked her head to one side, frowning. ‘It sounds like your door they’re banging on. Sounds almost like they’re trying to beat it in not knock on it.’

She stood up and moved towards the entrance to her flat. Harper felt a prickle of alarm. ‘Hold on a minute. I’m not expecting anyone.’

Kate frowned. ‘But you don’t know what it is. It might be something urgent.’ She shrugged. ‘Let me check who it is. If there’s any kind of trouble you can always call the police.’

Harper nodded, not really convinced.

The knocking stopped as suddenly as it started but in the silence that followed they heard no sound of feet leaving. Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘We should at least see who it is.’

She turned again towards her hallway. Harper watched nervously and began to pull his jacket towards him, reaching for the phone inside. But before his fingers got there, the mobile began to ring. Harper jerked in surprise. He hesitated a moment then pulled the phone out of the pocket. He looked at the display uncertainly. The caller’s number was not one he recognised.

Harper flipped the phone open. ‘Hello?’

‘Mr Harper.’

‘Yes.’

‘You home?’

‘At home?’ Harper frowned: recognising the voice and worried by the question. He held up a hand. ‘Hold on. Kate!’

She was at her door, one hand on the lock. She glanced at him over one shoulder as she began to turn the handle.

Moving by instinct, Harper pushed himself off the bed, scooped up his jacket and slipped into Kate’s tiny kitchen, pulling the door shut behind him. Her flat was smaller than his: just one main room that doubled as living room and bedroom, a bathroom cubicle and miniscule galley kitchen. But like his flat, a door led out from the kitchen onto the fire escape. Harper unlocked the door and pulled it open.

He put the mobile back to his ear as he did so. ‘Hello? Mr Cole?’

‘Yeah. Where are you?’

‘I was in a neighbour’s flat. I’m out on the fire escape. Someone was trying to beat my door down.’

‘Yeah. That’ll be the police.’

‘Oh fuck.’ Harper could hear voices from the hallway leading into Kate’s flat now. He quickly pulled the door shut behind him and began descending the metal steps down into the garden. ‘What are they doing?’ he asked in a loud whisper.

Cole gave a short laugh. ‘Comin’ to arrest you, Mr Harper. They seem to think you’ve been makin’ anonymous calls. They probably reckon you know more than you’re tellin’. I expect takin’ you in will make them feel like they’re doin’ somethin’.’

‘Right.’ Harper nodded. ‘Thanks for the warning.’

‘My pleasure. Don’t get caught and… keep me posted.’

With that, Cole hung up and Harper reached the bottom of the external staircase. He stepped down into a small courtyard full of bins and damp moss. An archway led into a walled garden choked with unpruned shrubs. To the side, a gate opened into a side street.

As Harper got to the gate, a door opened above and heavy boots thudded onto the fire escape.

‘Oi!’ There was an angry bellow. ‘Stop there.’

Harper was still out of breath when he reached Brendan’s flat. The fire escape had given him a good head start. After a short sprint to the end of the road, he managed to lose himself in the flow of pedestrians around the railway station. Once surrounded by people, he took care not to move too fast, keeping his head down and walking calmly, trying to screen himself behind knots of people wherever possible. The hardest thing was to resist turning round to check for any pursuit.

But no one came after him and his shoulder stayed free of any heavy hands descending upon it. That first short run and the pace he set himself afterwards had made his muscles protest and his bruises were now aching like mad but at least he was still a free man.

Brendan was still at work but Harper had borrowed a spare key at the beginning of the week. He also knew his friend should be back within a couple of hours. He limped into the main room with weary relief and collapsed onto the sofa: he was back at square one in many ways and even more in need of a decent plan than before.

Harper sighed, briefly considering the bottle of whisky he had spotted on a kitchen shelf the other day before deciding on tea instead. As he levered himself up, Harper saw a packet of rolling tobacco and some papers stuck between the arm of the sofa and one of the cushions. He smiled wryly. He had been wheezing for air when he came into the flat but somehow the idea of taking up smoking again seemed tempting: his body still craved the nicotine, the slow burn of smoke slipping into his lungs.

He closed his eyes, resisting temptation and set his sights on the kettle in the other room.

Five minutes later, he stood leaning against the sink, a mug of tea clutched in both hands. Outside, some of the cloud had parted and glimpses of blue were appearing in the sky. A glint of sunlight slipped across the roofs, briefly gilding the damp tiles of a church roof a couple of streets away. From one corner of the window he could see down Courtney Hill, towards the river and the city centre.

As he sipped the tea, he considered the last few days. His mind skated across the series of events like that of a shell-shocked soldier too stunned to fully take it all in.

It was Friday afternoon. Less than five days since everything changed. On Monday morning, life was normal. On Monday morning he had no doubts or fears: merely the safe expectations of another conventional day in a world that made perfect sense.

Then came the accident. Sliding across ice on his bike. The impact with the car: although he barely recalled the precise moment. Waking in hospital: dazed and confused but confident of everything else. But then it all started to go wrong. Little things at first, like finding himself wearing the wrong clothes.

And from there it had descended with some speed into a frightening sequence of disorientation and confusion where his whole life was turned upside down: his fiancée blanking him in the street; the flat where they lived being boarded up. Even his job no longer his, although that was less important. Spotting a serial killer sitting in the same restaurant. And now he had the police after him, wanting answers for things he could not start to explain.

His tea slopped from side to side, threatening to spill out of the mug as his hands shook. Harper closed his eyes. It was all so raw, so strange: so frighteningly monstrous that it terrified him.

Friday, 3.24pm:

Louise cradled the boy’s head in her lap. He was shivering: a combination of pain and fear, she judged. She kept stroking his dark hair, the anger inside her burning stronger and stronger.

The boy’s appearance had startled her from her misery, given her new reason to think. Before he fell through the hole, she was slumped like a beaten sack in a corner of the cell. She had barely moved after her abortive escape attempt other than to crawl to the walls and push her body as far into the angle between them as possible. She was not even sure she had been thinking. In short, after being punched to the ground and seeing the ladder removed, she had given up. Curled up alone in the cold and dark, surrounded by the stench of her own urine and faeces, she teetered on the edge of total despair.

Then the boy arrived and the shock wrenched her out of her mental collapse. Seeing his injuries ignited the process of turning resignation into resentment and self-pity into righteous anger. What had happened to her was bad enough but having this poor kid trapped in the same nightmare transformed the equation.

It was hard to say which of them got the bigger fright when Ahmad fell through the hole and landed in her prison.

Louise had heard the boy coming, alerted from her mental stupor when he opened the door to the stairwell and let some light through. Believing it was her captor returning, she raised her eyes to the pale square in the ceiling with trepidation: unsure whether to try to defend herself or stay still and hope nothing happened. Ahmad’s steps were hesitant as he came down the stairs and she mistook the boy’s light tread for the furtive manoeuvres of the one who placed her in this underground cell.

Then, with no further warning, a loud gasp came. At the same moment, Louise saw a dark shape appear in the opening above her head and plummet to the concrete floor, hitting with a thud and a whimper. She listened to the gasps of pain; her first thought that another prisoner had been thrown down to join her. The idea gave her an irrational jolt of hope: not of escape but of not being alone in her tomb.

But, when she approached and realised it was a child, her stomach twisted with nausea. That brief hope of a companion vanished, replaced with sick dismay at a child landing in the same trap.

Now, the boy curled against her like an injured animal. A hand pawed at her leg and Louise took it in hers. As far as she could tell, the break in his leg was a nasty one. The bone had not quite broken through the skin but the boy’s right calf lay at an impossible angle when she first saw it. He had also hit one arm against the rim of the opening in the ceiling. Although Louise did not think he had broken that limb, it was scraped and badly bruised. She wished there were something she could do to help him but the cell was bare of anything useful and, even with a full first aid kit to hand, Louise would not really have known what to do.

She squeezed the boy’s hand again. Now, part of her wished fervently for her captor to return: she would give anything for another chance at him.

Ahmad tried to stop his tears but they kept coming. The hot tears stung on the inside of his eyelids before pushing their way through his eyelashes: the cow’s lashes he hated, those lustrous long lashes which earned him nothing but mockery at school. Those and everything else. Like being labelled a Paki, even though he was from Egypt. For being small, which he could not help. For being a teacher’s pet, even though he did not want to be. Teachers kept asking him questions because they knew he was one of the few likely to be able to give the correct response. Sometimes he pretended not to know so he could appear as stupid as the others and save himself some indignity later in the day. But most of the time, even when he realised it was inviting trouble, he found it impossible to resist. He was proud of what he had learnt and still could not understand why these English boys delighted in their own ignorance.

His face was against the woman’s leg. Part of him wanted to move it away. When she first laid his head on her lap, he was horrified and, despite the pain, tried to resist the contact. But he was in too much pain and too frightened to really struggle and got over the worst of his embarrassment by not thinking about the fact he was touching a strange woman’s skin: let alone quite where on her body that skin was.

Now, however, his tears were starting to leak out. They were trickling down out of the corner of one eye and off the end of his nose. And they were dripping onto her bare flesh: exposing his cowardice and reminding him where his head was lying.

He hated the fact he cried so easily. But he always had. Other boys never let him forget the fact, provoking him so they could laugh at his tears. He was aware he was a disappointment to his father, who would have loved a big, brave, strong son, instead of the small, weedy nerd with which he had been landed. That was the trouble with being a real know-it-all: it was possible to even see the flaws in yourself. He tried to be brave, not to let people realise when he hurt himself or when something happened to him but he was not very good at that kind of deception.

Like now: his leg really hurt. So did his arm and his side but not as badly. It was his leg that was agony. And he was trying to pretend the pain was not there but it was not working, which was why he could not help the tears. Alone, he would have sobbed until it went away and then got up and tried to limp along as if nothing had happened. This time though, it felt worse and he was not even sure where he was or what had happened. All he knew was that he was in more pain than he could ever remember feeling before, lying with his face against a strange woman’s bare leg and his tears pouring onto her skin.

As Ahmad snuffled, Louise tugged at the loose sleeve of her top and wiped his eyes as she tried to hold back her own tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled.

She squeezed his hand tight. ‘Hey,’ she said softly. ‘There’s no need to apologise. I’d be crying if… it was me that had hurt my leg.’

He gave a short nod.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ahmad.’ His voice was very soft and muffled by her thigh. ‘Ahmad Baroudi.’

‘Ah… mad?’

He nodded again. ‘I’m very sorry.’

‘For what? For falling down a hole?’

He gave a little shrug.

Louise ruffled his hair. ‘I thought that was what little boys did.’

He sniffed. ‘Yes. But I’m not a little boy any more.’

‘No? How old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

Louise’s eyes widened. She had taken him for about eight or nine. ‘How did you get here?’

‘I came in because of the rain.’

Louise nodded slowly. She still had no idea where she was. It dawned on her that if the boy had found his way in by accident then he should know where they were. She was unsure what difference it made but knowing there might be other people close by gave her hopes another lift. ‘So… Ahmad, where are we?’

He sniffed and twisted his head to look at her, frowning. ‘Don’t you know?’

Louise shook her head, tasting the blood on her lip as she sucked it nervously.

‘How did you get here then?’

Louise smiled weakly. ‘That doesn’t matter. Where are we? How did you get in?’

‘It wasn’t locked,’ he said palely. ‘I didn’t break anything to get in. I just wanted to get out of the rain. Then I used the toilets to dry off. I didn’t want to go outside again so I explored a little bit. I didn’t mean to fall down here.’

His voice trailed off and Louise brushed his hair back from his face. His skin seemed hot and, although she could hardly make him out in the thin light, she sensed that the shock of his injury was starting to take its toll. She spoke softly but firmly. ‘Where are we, Ahmad?’

He gave a brief whimper and twitched as a spasm of pain hit.

‘Where are we?’

‘I… I don’t know what it’s called. The old Army place by the river.’

Louise frowned. ‘You mean the Caledonia Barracks? The site that’s all shut up.’

He gave a slight nod. ‘I think so.’

‘Where in the barracks?’

‘It’s… I don’t know,’ he said feebly. ‘Some building.’

‘What kind of building?’

He was silent for a moment, shaking slightly.

‘What kind of building?’ she repeated, trying to reign in her impatience but desperate for any information that might improve their prospects.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘There are so many. But it has a garage and a really big space for storing things.’

‘A shed, a warehouse?’

‘Maybe.’

His voice was pitiful and she winced as she bit her lip again and tasted fresh blood. ‘Where did you get in then? Along the dual carriageway?’

‘The river.’

Louise’s hopes sank. She had hoped he would name somewhere in the middle of the city. Somewhere where there was a hope of being found. Somewhere people might hear them if she made enough noise.

But the barracks?

The Caledonia Barracks was a huge site and, apart from the guardhouse, all the buildings were set way back from the road: behind high fences and long stretches of open ground. And if they were down near the river they were at least half a mile from the nearest bit of public land. The whole site was mothballed and awaiting redevelopment. The only hope was if a security guard or maintenance team noticed something amiss but they were more likely to patrol the perimeter than worry about a load of sheds and buildings all due to get knocked down anyway.

She stiffened. That was probably why her captor had chosen the site. They might even work here as a security guard.

Louise looked around anxiously. The prospect of being found by chance was so remote she might as well forget it. She also had no way of knowing if her captor would ever return, what he would do if he did and how he would react to the boy’s presence. Her only hope was to escape and Ahmad’s arrival at least proved there was a route out. If he could get in then she would have to find a way out. All she needed to do was to work out how to get her five foot four inch frame from the floor to the opening eight feet above her head and then through what looked like a four-foot shaft.

It did not sound like much but she was starting to realise that the distance represented the difference between life and death. And not just for her.