‘If he worked all that out in the few seconds it took him to reach this turn in the corridor then we are dealing with one smart cookie,’ said Grant. ‘And if he’s that smart it sure scares the shit out of me.’
‘He is and we are,’ said Dewar.
TWELVE
‘So what do you want to do?’ asked Grant.
‘I want to check out the round tower,’ said Dewar. ‘Just in case.’
Grant grimaced and said, ‘You’re certainly one for playing your hunches. I’m prepared to bet you that the door to the tower is locked. The place’s not been used for years.’
‘I wouldn’t bet against you,’ said Dewar. ‘But I’d be happier in my mind just giving it the once over.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Grant with a shrug that said, ‘waste of time’ ‘I’ll check out the rooms in this corridor one floor down. I’ll meet you on the stairs when you’re through.’
Dewar nodded his agreement.
‘And before we start let’s agree on something,’ added Grant. ‘No heroics. We call for back-up before we do anything.’
‘Agreed,’ said Dewar.
Dewar climbed back up to the corridor where he’d last seen Le Grice disappear from view, jacket flying open as he made a bid for freedom. He followed in his footsteps to the turn where, just as the plans promised, he found a choice. There was a double door to the left leading to the main staircase; there was also a door to
the right. His first thought on looking at it was that Grant had been right. There was something about the door that suggested that it had not been in use for many a long year. It had a glass panel but it had been boarded over on the inside. The handle seemed dirty and unused. He tried it and found it locked.
Conceding wryly to Grant, he turned to go downstairs when something made him stop. The resistance he’d felt in the door when he’d turned the handle had been lower down than it should have been. It had not quite been behind where the handle was. He went back and tried it again. This time he was sure. He looked up and saw the door move slightly inwards at the top. The door wasn’t locked; it was being held shut by something placed behind it on the floor. This didn’t automatically mean that someone had recently blocked it; entrance to the tower at this level could have been closed off at sometime in the past by someone coming down or up from another level inside the tower. On the other hand, it was worth checking out.
He turned the handle and held it while he put his shoulder to the door frame to apply mounting pressure. The door started to edge open as a large cardboard box was inched back out of the way. The opening was now big enough to allow Dewar to squeeze through. He closed the door behind him softly and took a look at the box that had been blocking entry; it was full of heavy rubber sheeting. The cracks on the visible folds told him that the rubber had perished a long time ago.
The air around him smelt stale and musty; there was obviously no ventilation in the tower. A thick layer of dust covered all the flat surfaces he could see and there was junk everywhere; there was a premature-baby incubator lying on the floor, one of its glass panels broken and paint peeling off its other surfaces. Dewar guessed that it had been dumped in the tower when the glass had broken and it had been deemed to have come to the end of its useful life. There were plastic chairs in various states of disrepair stacked one on top of the other in threes, planks of wood propped up against one wall, several red metal pails with the word, Fire, faded but still visible on their sides, relics of the days when pails of water were placed at intervals along corridors as the sole method of fire fighting should the need arise.
The tower room itself was half tiled, the tiles crazed and cracked so they resembled unlettered road maps. They were clearly from another age, an age that might have known gas light and the sluice of carbolic as Lister and his colleagues introduced the then new concept of antisepsis to this very hospital. An old operating table was propped on its side under the window, its pedestal nowhere to be seen. This and various other bits and pieces led Dewar to conclude that the room had once been an operating theatre for minor surgery, perhaps the draining of wounds, the lancing of septic cysts and the like but that had all been a very long time ago. It had clearly been a junk store for many years.
What was more important was that there was no sign of Le Grice having been in the room, no tell-tale foot or hand prints in the dirt and dust. Dewar came out on to the landing and started to climb up to the next level, the spiral stone steps inducing vague feelings of claustrophobia as he lost the daylight of one level and entered almost complete darkness before emerging into the light of the next. There were no working lights on the stair walls or in the ceiling; the electricity to this part of the building had been cut off when occupancy ceased.
Dewar stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, just listening. There was no sound save for the distant background rumble of the traffic outside the hospital gates. Standing perfectly still and listening however, had heightened his other senses. The air still smelt musty and unpleasant but there was something else in it, a vague suggestion of cologne. He recognised it. Le Grice was somewhere up here.
Dewar’s heart rate rose until he was physically aware of it beating in his chest. He supposed he should start back down the stairs and tell Grant so that they could summon assistance but, if at all possible, he would prefer to speak to Le Grice alone about the smallpox virus and how far he’d gone with it so far. Once the police were involved with handcuffs and the attendant trauma of arrest he feared that Le Grice might just clam up and say nothing. If he could persuade him to talk before officialdom stepped in he might just have a better chance of getting at the truth. He’d have to be careful but if the worst came to the worst he was as big and as strong as the Frenchman. If he kept his wits about him and didn’t walk into any kind of trap or ambush, he should be all right.
He took a step towards the tower room on this level; the door was almost closed but not quite. He looked above it to see if anything had been mounted there to fall on unwary heads; there was nothing. There was of course, the possibility that Le Grice could be waiting just inside, his body pressed to the wall ready to jump him as he walked through. He pushed the door open gently but didn’t enter. The door hinges creaked in protest at having their slumber disturbed.
To his surprise, Dewar found Le Grice sitting there facing him. He was directly opposite the door and sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him, his back propped up against the circular wall. It was as if he’d been waiting for him to arrive. Although Le Grice could hardly have been deemed to have adopted an aggressive stance, Dewar was still wary of the man. He wasn’t dealing with an idiot.
‘Hello Pierre,’ he said quietly.
Le Grice nodded. ‘I ‘ad a feeling it might be you,’ he said, his accent seemingly more pronounced than on past occasions. ‘I misjudged you.’
‘I hoped you might tell me all about it before the police join us.’
Le Grice shrugged. ‘What’s to tell? If it hadn’t been for that stupid, interfering girl everything would ‘ave been all right. She just didn’t understand. She would have benefited too from access to more fragments, so would Peter but no, the silly bitch decided to — ow you say? Cut off her nose to spite her face.’
‘Sandra?’
‘Bloody Sandra.’
Not exactly filled with remorse, thought Dewar, steeling himself to keep his cool in the interests of learning as much as possible. ‘How much did they pay you to do it?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The Iraqis.’
‘What Iraqis?’
Dewar sighed and said, ‘What’s the point of denying it now?’ he said. ‘If you’ve any decency in you at all you’d make a clean breast of things and tell me everything. We’ve got to make a start on minimising the damage. Christ man, don’t you care at all? Don’t you realise what you’ve done?’
