Time to get moving. The armed officer let him in, but the manager inside the unit was ferociously tall, heavily pregnant and quite determined that Caffery was not to trouble her patient.
'I'm sorry, sir, Mr. Friendship talked to you about this last night. He says he'll let you have access to the patient when he's ready, but until then I've been told not to let you inside. You can wait here with the officer.'
'Look, I was the one with Mr. Peach when he got ill. I'll only be a moment.'
'Mr. Friendship said he's sorry. Not for the time being.' She nodded to the PC sitting in an alcove just inside the door. 'You've been allowed him.'
'Fine, fine. I don't suppose if I said please…'
'No really.' She smiled. 'I'm sorry. Honestly, I'm sorry.'
'It's OK.' He scratched the back of his neck and looked around the small area where the officer was posted. 'I suppose I couldn't just sit here for a bit? In case there's any change.'
'There won't be.'
'Well, OK, but maybe if I could.'
'I can't stop you, but nothing's going to change until Mr. Friendship says it's changed.'
'OK.' He took off his jacket and sat down opposite the uniformed officer, stretching out his legs, watching the manager walk away with her small, clipped steps. From the storeroom a nurse, unpacking a box of ventilator tubes, watched him, her eyes big and unblinking. The armed officer nodded at Caffery but neither of them spoke. Eventually the nurse took the endotrachial tube and went back to her patient, and presently the unit manager reappeared, wandering over to where Caffery sat. She leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. 'Why the urgency, then?'
He half stood, thinking she'd changed her mind. 'We just want to speak to him about what happened.'
'It was terrible, wasn't it?'
'Terrible,' Caffery agreed. 'And God forbid it should happen to someone else.'
'Oh, crumbs don't say stuff like that.'
'These people don't stop at one. There's too much fun in it.'
'Stop it. You're not being serious, are you?'
'As serious as a heart-attack.'
She frowned. 'We don't use expressions like that here.'
'I'm sorry.' He straightened and came to stand next to her, looking at the name on the staff badge hanging around her neck. 'Sorry. Didn't mean to offend, Ayo.'
She smiled and half put her hand over the badge, slightly embarrassed, slightly flattered. For the first time in months she wished she hadn't got this football up her sweater. 'That's OK. It was horrible how it happened, wasn't it?'
'Yes.' He scratched the back of his neck and leaned a little closer. 'And he's very clever whoever it was who attacked that little boy was very clever. And I'm sure that if I spoke to Mr. Peach now I'd get that final…' he made a quick fist '… that final bit of the puzzle. Anyway,' he rapped his knuckles on the wall and looked around him, 'do you, uh, mind if I use the gents'?'
'Back through the door, first on the right.' She gestured down the corridor.
'Thanks.'
In the gents' Caffery closed the door and counted to five. Then he turned around and went straight back to Intensive Care, buzzing urgently on the door. Ayo opened it.
'Is that one of your patients?'
'What?'
'On the floor in the gents'. He's got a drip with him, I thought
Ayo dithered, confused, not certain what to do.
'He's just inside the door. Do you want me to call someone?'
'The consultant!' She hurried down the corridor, her nametag swinging wildly on its chain. '455 for an air call.'
'Will do.' He waited till she was through the doors, then nodded at the uniformed officer and slipped inside the unit.
The carpet came away quickly like Elastoplast coming away from skin the tacks pop-pop-pop-pop-popping. She scrabbled away the underlay, dropped down and pressed her ear to the naked floorboards. Silence. For a moment she lay there, comforted by the texture of the wood the lovely grained surface, the outdoorsy Canadian smell of forest and rain. But she had to keep going. She took a deep breath and sat up, looking at the area she had cleared.
The grip rod, the little wooden strip with tacks in it, was nailed into the boards so she leaned over, found the wiring from her bra and slotted the end under the rod, sliding it down as far as it would go. 'Hey, Smurf,' she muttered. 'Look at Wonder Woman.' She took off her shirt, double-wrapped it around her hands and pulled on the wire. The grip rod creaked, rose quickly and broke away from the floor.
'Good.'
Quickly she rolled over and looked at it. Projecting from the strip of wood, like renewable shark's teeth, a gully of sharp tacks. A tool. And if not a tool, then a weapon. She shuffled forward on her bottom, bending her knees up so that she was as close as possible to the radiator, and jammed the strip against the copper pipe, moving it back and forward a makeshift saw -back and forward, back and forward. She wasn't going to sit here and die. She was going to get water and then she was going to get out. Simple as that.
The intensive care unit was quiet, only the soft bleeping of the monitors, the occasional sucking noise of a nurse testing a mouth aspirator against her hand. There were eighteen beds ranged around the room and the nurses, in their blue theatre scrubs and soft white mules, moved calmly among them. There was no fluster, no panic. Caffery felt as if he was watching them through a plate-glass window. No one questioned him as he walked along the ward and when one of the nurses turned to him briefly, her fair eyebrows raised slightly, he thought the game was up thought she'd point, challenge him, call her colleagues but all she did was smile and continue along, rolling a portable drip stand in front of her.
Alek Peach was in a private room with two beds. Caffery checked through the window and entered, closing the door quietly behind him. The curtains were drawn around one bed and in the other lay
Peach, on his back, his eyes closed, his arms flat on the covers. Catheters snaked from his chest and arms, up and out to an array of bags suspended above the bed: some were clear and contained drugs, some were garish, multicoloured 'Nutrison' feeding bags. At least one was feeding him blood. Coloured lights flickered along the bank of monitors, the electrocardiogram, the pulse-oximeter, leaping and dancing.
Caffery closed the curtains around the bed, went to Peach's side, rested both fists on the side of the bed and bent until his mouth was next to his ear: 'It's time you were straight with me, Alek.'
Peach's eyes fluttered. His head moved and a small groan escaped him.
'I don't give a shit if you're not well enough to talk to me, I don't give a shit.'
Above the bed the heart monitor began to stammer. Somewhere, in some distant nurses' station, Caffery could hear it trigger an alarm. He moved even closer until he felt he was almost inside Peach's ear. 'If it's you and you've got someone else you're going to tell me who. I don't care if you die but I'm not going to let it happen to someone else.'
Peach's face suddenly changed. He licked his lips with a pale tongue. He blinked once or twice then snapped his eyes open, rolling them sideways. Caffery almost took a step back, there was such anger, such empty, un thought-through malice in those eyes. Then Peach's mouth began to move. His voice was whispery too low to be heard above the machines.
'What? Say it again, you little shit.'
A nurse, summoned from the coffee room by the monitor alarms, appeared, shocked-faced, at a gap in the curtains. 'Sir! Please, we have to ask you to leave In the ward outside someone was shouting about getting Security. 'Sir pleaseV But Peach's mouth was still moving, and Caffery bent nearer, straining to hear what he was saying.
'What? Say it again.'
Just as the unit manager arrived, just as Caffery knew he was going to be thrown out, Peach opened his mouth one more time and this time was loud enough to hear: 'Fuck you,' he was saying. 'Fuck you.'
The slit in the pipe was weeping, not even a trickle, more a slow, barely perceptible ballooning a single drop
