by Agatha Frost
Chapter Fourteen
Stuck in a traffic jam at a large, four-way, multi-lane junction, Claire looked out towards Royal Blackburn Hospital. The many windows in the mammoth building lit up the night, as did the cars stretching ahead of their taxi as far as the eye could see. With so many people coming and going, they’d barely moved any closer since the building had finally come into view.
“They should never have put a junction here!” Ste cried over the chorus of horns as he finally darted into the opening left after one kind woman slowed down to wave them in. “This is what happens when you build in areas where the roads can’t handle it.”
Once the smaller of the local hospitals, an ever-growing modern superstructure had gradually swallowed up Blackburn’s old Victorian building, and the surrounding area had shot up with it. Now, there were giant industrial warehouses and offices, several company headquarters, new motorway links, and even a Starbucks. Claire didn’t pity those stuck in the jam while just trying to get coffee.
“It’s right there,” Ryan said, his leg bouncing up and down as they crawled around the first of the three roundabouts between them and the hospital. Cars entered and left through every turning. “At this rate, we could walk there quicker.”
“You read my mind.” Claire pulled a twenty-pound note from her bag and waved it through the middle of the front seats. “Keep the change, Ste.”
Jumping out and slamming the doors at the same time, they then darted around the car to the narrow path running alongside the road. They started off at a walk against the blaring horns before breaking into a light jog by the time they reached the sloped road up to the hospital. When they reached the main entrance, Claire could barely breathe. Ryan clearly fared much better, but he didn’t comment while Claire leaned forward, one hand on the wall, trying to catch her breath as they lingered outside the entrance with the smokers.
“Where is he?” Ryan asked as the revolving door spat them out into the large reception area.
“Intensive care,” she said, striding ahead. “This way . . . I think.”
Claire’s instincts proved correct, and after speed-walking down a complicated system of corridors and taking two different lifts, her gut led her right to the front doors of the familiar, quiet ward. Rather than arguing with the receptionist, Claire headed down the dim corridor to Taron’s room like she belonged there. When she reached the window, her heart dropped.
“He’s gone,” she said, resting a hand on her forehead as she looked up and down the corridor.
Claire headed toward the fire exit through which she’d found Rina, but the door was closed. She scanned the hall in both directions and was relieved to spot Dr Mohindra as he quietly exited a room. He looked right through her, but she couldn’t blame him; he must see dozens of people in a day.
“I’m looking for Taron?” she asked in a panic. “He’s not in his room.”
“His condition improved dramatically, so we moved him to free up a bed,” he replied without stopping, offering a tight smile. “Ward 3-C, I think, but don’t quote me on it.”
They hurried out of intensive care and, after consulting a large map on the wall by the lifts, plotted a route to the general wards. Minutes later, they slowed to a halt outside Ward 3-C. Claire clutched the wall with both hands and lowered her head, once again trying to catch her breath around the stitch in her side. Ryan gave her back a little rub, which felt nice but did nothing to help her breathing. Afraid of wasting more time, she straightened and entered the ward.
“Split up,” Claire said, nodding in the other direction. “Check every room. We’ll meet up at the bottom.”
“I don’t know what he looks like.”
“Right.” She kept forgetting Ryan hadn’t even met Taron. “Black hair gone a bit grey. Glasses.”
There were a few private rooms, but brightly lit general wards with neat rows of beds on either side took up most of the space. Ignoring the reception desk in the middle, they each took a side. Unlike intensive care, signs of life beyond mechanical beeps and forced whispering proliferated. Music came from some rooms, the television from others, and there were far more families clustered around beds. The atmosphere was rather jovial.
Claire wasn’t feeling the joy tonight.
As glad as she was that Taron had recovered, the theory that had formed since the discovery of her missing knife nagged her. She needed to give Taron the benefit of the doubt; she needed to look him in the eye and be told she’d got it all wrong.
If only she could find him.
“I don’t think I saw him on my side,” Ryan said when they met at the bottom. “No guys with glasses, at least.”
Claire walked back up Ryan’s side just to make sure, but she didn’t see Taron in any of the beds either. A few had their curtains pulled around, but she wasn’t going to invade anyone’s privacy to check those. Instead, she headed to the reception desk, ready to try a different tactic.
“Hi, there,” she said in a sweet, quiet voice. “We’re looking for Taron. We’re his siblings.”
The man behind the desk arched a brow as he looked up at them, his eyes darting from Ryan’s ginger hair to Claire’s mousy bob; neither matched Taron’s dark mop.
“Different dads,” Claire said with a laugh. “We get that look a lot.”
The explanation soothed the nurse’s furrowed brow. With a wink, he said, “Don’t worry, my mum’s a four by four. We always look like a group of randoms when we’re together. Taron, was it?”
Claire nodded and mouthed ‘four by four?’ to Ryan while the nurse tapped away on the computer keyboard. Ryan shook his head. Given the context, Claire could only conclude that it meant four children by four different fathers.
“I’ll take you to his bed,” he said as he set off down the right side. “He’s not been in the best mood since he got here, so hopefully you can perk him up a bit. I heard some of the nurses talking about how he woke up out of a coma and proposed to his girlfriend—and she rejected the poor bugger.”
“Shame,” Claire whispered. “They made the perfect couple.”
They walked into a ward in the middle of the row, approaching a bed with the curtain drawn. The nurse popped his head around the curtain before flinging it back to reveal the empty bed.
“He might have gone for a wander,” he said after checking the empty bathroom. “Can’t have gone far. I saw him at the payphone not long ago. You’re welcome to wait for him, but visiting hours do end in twenty minutes.”
“We really do need to see him,” Claire insisted. “Is there any way to find him? It’s urgent.”
“What about the cameras?” Ryan suggested, nodding up into the corner. “I saw the feeds for all the wards on the screen behind the desk. I assume they record?”
“We’re not supposed to access the videos unless security instructs us to,” he said in a low voice with a hint of naughtiness. “Urgent, you say?”
“It’s . . . our nan,” Claire lied. “She’s fallen. Broken her hip. Taron will never forgive us if he’s the last to find out. She’s only down the corridor, and she’s asking for him.”
“Oh, the poor thing.” The nurse turned back the way they’d come, nodding discreetly for them to follow him to the desk. He resumed his place at the computer. “Now, assuming I saw him at the payphone fifteen minutes ago, I’ll go back twenty.” He clicked and typed for a moment. “Ah, there he is in bed. Right, I’ll fast forward to . . . right, he’s at the payphone.” He stared intently at the screens, clicking every so often. “He’s left the ward,” he explained. “I’m just following him . . . Why’s he going up there?”
“Up where?”
“Staircase right at the bottom of this corridor,” he said, squinting at the screen. “It’s just storage and . . .”
“And what?” Ryan prompted when the nurse’s voice trailed off.
“Access to the roof.”
Claire reached over the desk and quickly scribbled a familiar phone number on the edge of an a
nti-smoking leaflet.
“Call this number,” she said, handing it to the nurse. “Ask for Ramsbottom, explain where we are, and say Claire needs him here right now. Tell him if he hurries, he can beat the good lads of Blackburn to his second scoop of the night.”
“Scoop?” the nurse muttered, taking the leaflet with a frown. “What about your nan’s hip?”
Claire didn’t hang around to explain. She bolted to the bottom of the corridor and the staircase the nurse had referenced. Unlike the rest of the hospital, these steps led up to shadowy darkness. It was an obvious no-go area, but the illuminated fire exit sign pointed them towards the roof.
“Someone needs to be here when Ramsbottom arrives,” Claire said when they reached the top of the stairs. “Stay out here and—”
“Claire, I’m not letting you go out there with him alone.”
“He doesn’t know you.” She rested a hand on Ryan’s chest. “Maybe he just went up for some fresh air. I don’t want to risk spooking him. Please. I’m not scared.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“Probably,” she said with a half-shrug.
Though she could tell that Ryan understood, the conflict was obvious in his gaze. Claire didn’t wait around for him to argue. She pushed on the fire door and stepped out onto the roof. As a warm summer breeze licked at her hair, she immediately had a sense of how high she was. Though the building wasn’t particularly tall, it had been built on an elevation, and the roof provided sweeping views of the lit-up towns and villages across Lancashire’s rolling landscape.
After some quiet searching, Claire found Taron on the other side of a steaming duct. Wearing an open-backed gown, he leaned against the concrete barrier. Rather than looking out at the view, his gaze seemed fixed on the honking traffic below as the wind ruffled his hair. Gravel crunched under Claire’s feet as she slowly approached him, and he spun around. From the wideness of his eyes, she knew she was the last person he expected to see.
“Claire?” He sniffled as he wiped tears from eyes red and raw from weeping. “What – what are you doing here? How did you know I—”
“Followed my nose,” she said, taking a step towards him. “Not at that edge for any reason, are you?”
Lips slightly parted, Taron stared blankly at the traffic below and then back at Claire. He neither spoke nor moved away. He simply gazed out at the traffic, so Claire joined him and stared too.
“Sean called me,” he said as his top lip dragged up into a shaky snarl. “I know Rina handed herself in.”
“Did you know?”
Taron nodded, tears silently dripping down his cheeks to melt into the black scruff along his jawline.
“She told me when you were all here,” he said, sniffing hard. “I thought with Mark finally out of the way, she’d have to say yes. She told me she loved me.”
“She also told you she didn’t want to get married.” Claire exhaled. “Anyone else would have been shocked to learn their girlfriend had murdered her ex-boyfriend. Not many would suddenly propose.”
She paused, and, in a heavy voice, asked, “Did you take the knife from my kitchen on the morning of the convention?”
“You’re not as thick as you come across,” he said.
“Charming.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“I wasn’t looking for one.”
He grimaced. “That’s the problem with women these days.”
“Oh, please tell me what the problem with women is, Taron.” Claire turned and glared at him. “I’m dying to hear it.”
“You don’t know what you want,” he said, gazing out into the distance. “When there’s a good guy right in front of you, you don’t want him. What happened to romance? What happened to doing things properly?”
“I didn’t peg you as a traditionalist.”
“Traditional because I waited my whole life to fall in love?” His lip curled again. “Do you know how long I waited to feel happiness again? My mother and grandmother died within months of each other, and I was left with nothing. Meeting Rina was a new chance for me to be happy.”
“And this is how you went about it?”
“I needed Mark out of the way!” His voice suddenly rose. “He wouldn’t leave her alone. He wouldn’t get out of her head. I kept telling her to block him, to ignore him, but she couldn’t. I thought she’d finally let him go if I ostracised him, but she just kept talking to him in secret.”
“And you used Mark bullying Sean as an excuse?”
“It wasn’t an excuse,” he snapped. “He was bullying Sean, and I hated it. Sean’s like my brother. I’d wanted Mark gone for years. Seeing what he was doing to Rina was the push I needed to confront him. She hid it from me that she was joining their team for the tournament. Lied to me as well as Damon, but I found out. She thinks all those group chats are secure, but I saw it all. She was too scared of upsetting him. That was all. It was so obvious what I had to do.” He paused, before adding, “That’s the problem with you women. You’re too scared of feelings. You call yourselves rebels and then never break out of the box.”
“I can tell why you’ve been single for so long,” Claire said dryly. “So, let me get this straight. You took one of my knives to a convention on your friend’s birthday. You planned to stab your girlfriend’s ex because you wanted him out of the way so you could have her all to yourself? And the problem is with women?”
“You’re making it sound different.”
“Then tell me I’m lying.” Claire stared at him. “You were going to kill him, and what? He fought you off? Got the knife?”
“I forgot how stupidly tall that idiot was.” He touched his gown over the knife wound. “Moron didn’t even know where to stab me lethally. He got lucky.”
“Sounds like you researched it.”
“I did.” He gritted his teeth. “Every detail. I knew where to stab him so he wouldn’t live to tell the tale. I knew that if it happened somewhere public, with thousands of people around, they’d never find the proof they’d need to pin it on anyone. I even went and checked the alley before I got here, just to make sure there were no cameras.” He stamped a clenched fist on the concrete barrier. “It was perfect, and he was so easy to lure. I just told him I wanted to fight him, and the monkey-brained idiot followed me.”
“You’re talking like it all went to plan.”
“Didn’t it?” Taron glared at her. “Isn’t Mark dead?”
“And Rina?” Claire felt her anger bubble up. “You’ve ruined her life. You realise she only killed Mark because she thought he stabbed you?”
“He did!”
“In self-defence.”
“I nearly died.”
“And that’s why you faked amnesia.” Her laugh was hollow as she shook her head. “I bet you were terrified the minute you woke up, thinking he’d have told everyone what happened. Pretended you didn’t remember what happened and hoped the police wouldn’t come knocking. Of course, Mark being dead sorted that for you. You couldn’t have planned for that. Didn’t plan on bringing your own knife either?”
“I needed something that couldn’t be traced to me. Obviously buying my own would have been a mistake, so I took the first opportunity that presented itself. Hid it in my costume while you were in the shower. Your fridge told me you barely cooked, so I figured that by the time you noticed it was missing, I’d have been long gone.”
He looked up at the sky, tears welling in his eyes once again. “We were going to move to Japan. We had it all planned out. I was going to work as a translator or maybe even a teacher, and she’d intern at a game design company and work her way up. She was going to spend the money she’d made in Bitcoin on a house for us. We were going to take it easy, live life at our own pace, not be shackled to anything.”
“She agreed to do all that,” Claire said, her voice shaking, “but because she didn’t want to get married, you did all this?”
“I thought she’d get over it,” he said bitterly. �
��Her stupid obsession with her parents. We weren’t going to be like them. Neither of us want kids. It was a perfect match. I just . . . I just didn’t want to lose her. I couldn’t. We belong together. Without her, I could never be happy. I just wanted to keep her by my side.”
“And what about what Rina wanted?”
“She wanted to make me happy.”
Claire sighed; trying to make Taron understand the world didn’t revolve around him was impossible. What was the point? He’d already lost everything he’d wanted, and now he’d confessed to attempted murder; his life as a free man was over.
“Maybe she’ll be your pen pal in prison,” Claire said, pushing away from the wall.
“Prison?” he mocked. “You still have no proof, and your testimony means nothing if I say you’re lying. I’m the victim. I’m untouchable. I’ve strategised for every outcome. I meant what I said, Claire. There’s a reason I was going to play as Captain Murphy in the tournament. I never lose.”
The door burst open and DI Ramsbottom stumbled out, immediately clutching his knees. Red-faced, he held up a finger as though to say ‘one minute’ as he caught his breath. Two uniformed officers, Ryan, and the nurse from Ward 3-C followed him out.
“They can’t arrest me for anything without any proof,” Taron said, turning back to look at the traffic. “I know how this game works.”
“We have proof,” DI Ramsbottom managed between gasps for air. “I got your message, Claire, but I was already on my way here. That poor lad I wrongly arrested, Sean, dropped by the station with a little recording he’d made. Seems you confessed everything in a phone call? He came straight over the second you hung up.”
“No,” Taron muttered, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t.”
“He did.” DI Ramsbottom patted one of the officer’s shoulders and sent him toward Taron with cuffs. “I am arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention . . .”
Claire stepped back while the DI read Taron his rights, and the officers cuffed him. Clearly in shock, Taron didn’t start wriggling until they attempted to drag him away from the edge. He kicked and thrashed like an animal, not seeming to care who could see under his gown. Considering the arrogance he’d displayed in thinking he’d never get caught, the scene was almost a satisfying one – not that Claire could enjoy it. Rina’s life would have taken a very different path if she’d stayed away from Taron.
