The Sixth Soul

by Mark Roberts

  ‘Hurrying you through the system,’ said Rosen.

  ‘Look!’ snapped Sarah. ‘I’m just doing what I was told to do. I feel bad enough about this problem with my blood, so I’m just doing what I’m told to do. That’s what you do with doctors, you follow their instructions. They’re doing me a favour, fast-tracking me.’

  A junior doctor, a superannuated sixth former who looked closer to boyhood than maturity, passed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said David, ‘is Dr Reid around?’

  ‘Yeah, yes, he’s around.’

  ‘Have you come to collect my wife?’

  The junior doctor looked genuinely puzzled. ‘No, no, I haven’t. I’m a doctor, not a porter.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Sarah. ‘We’re fine as we are.’ She waited until the junior was out of earshot and spoke quietly as people brushed past them in white-coated ones and twos, while patients in all apparent stages of health milled in and out of the Haematology department. ‘You turn up on the borderline of late – and I understand the pressure you’re under – but you’ve done nothing since you got here late other than wind me up. Maybe you should just go, David.’

  His silence was deep, hiding his hurt.

  ‘Please don’t say that.’

  ‘He could already have sent someone to collect me and I’ve been missed because you didn’t get here on time. DNA: did not attend, no second chances, get in the queue with everyone else. That’s the attitude they’ll take.’ She turned her back on him and there was a lengthy pause. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. About you going.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, but it wasn’t. ‘I made you late and I’m—’

  At that moment, Rosen’s phone erupted in his pocket. He backed away a couple of paces to receive the call. ‘Carol?’

  ‘David, another woman’s gone missing. It looks like the sixth,’ said Bellwood, driving at speed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wandsworth.’

  ‘Road?’

  ‘Picardie Road, number 19.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘No. Husband went to the supermarket, comes home, she’s gone.’

  ‘Domestic abduction, same as Julia.’

  ‘Same but different. She put up a fight. There’s blood on the walls. Got to go, David.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He ended the call.

  ‘I know,’ Sarah said. ‘Go on, go.’

  ‘I—’ The stairs would be quicker than waiting for the lift.

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Call me when you’ve seen the doctor.’ He hurried to the staircase.

  ‘David!’ He turned. Then, quietly, she spoke: ‘I shouldn’t have said that I wanted you to leave.’

  He wished she hadn’t uttered those words, still feeling the visceral sting of them, but understood why. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I love you, Sarah.’

  He threw open the staircase door and was gone.

  ——

  SARAH FELT EVERYDAY life flowing around her in the corridor and watched seconds tick away on her wristwatch. More than twenty years of marriage to David rushed through her memory. She imagined a world in which they’d never met, in which their chance Saturday-night encounter in a grey nightclub had never been, and was visited by a piercing emptiness.

  He’d disbelieved her, thinking she was joking when she’d declined his offer of a date because she was away that following weekend with her TA unit. She’d enjoyed his astonishment when he’d tried to picture her in camouflage fatigues.

  What would her world be without him?

  In the glass panel of the door to the Haematology department, Sarah saw the reflection of a white-coated doctor watching her.

  ‘Mrs Rosen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Sarah turned. She hadn’t met Dr Reid before. He extended his hand. Beneath his white coat, he wore a smart black suit.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said.

  She shook his hand.

  Dr Reid held on to Sarah’s hand a little too long and said, ‘I don’t think you should worry, Mrs Rosen. Dempsey’s one of the most cautious doctors I’ve ever worked with.’

  ‘Is my baby in danger?’

  ‘We’ll sort this out and send you on your way. Would you please come with me?’

  Sarah felt relieved and was unsure whether it was down to Reid’s relaxed manner, or Rosen’s absence and the aura of tension he’d brought along with him.

  ‘I thought you were sending someone for me?’

  ‘I was, but we’re short staffed and when I realized you’d been left standing there, I thought the least I could do is collect you. I’d like to retake your bloods just to get a contrasting reading. I suspect the raised level of adrenalin was as a result of the stress of attending Mr Gilling-Smith’s clinic.’

  Sarah felt better by the moment with Dr Reid’s calm reassurance. He eyed the passenger lifts and the wide-doored service lifts with the digital display above.

  ‘Passenger lift on six,’ said Reid, ‘Neonatal Intensive Care. Service lift, ground floor.’ Reid pressed the button for the service lift and smiled at Sarah. ‘Shouldn’t really use this lift, but it’s quicker. I’ll take you to Phlebotomy myself.’

  A digital arrow showed that the service lift was on its way up. The service lift hauled to a halt and the doors opened slowly.

  Inside was a wheelchair marked Property of St Thomas’s NHS Trust and, behind this, a scissor bed covered with a bunch of crumpled green blankets.

  Reid smiled at Sarah and, with a gentlemanly gesture, indicated she should enter the lift before him. She drifted inside and he followed.

  ‘I’m going to call down to Phlebotomy and tell them to have a place ready for you at the head of the queue.’ He looked at his watch. ‘This hour of the morning, the wait to give a blood sample can be half an hour to three-quarters.’ He reached into his coat pocket with one hand and with the other kept the lift door open. ‘I left my phone in clinic.’ He spoke to himself.

  Sarah moved further back inside the lift, closer to the scissor bed.

  He looked directly at her. ‘Could I borrow your phone?’

  She fished her phone from her bag, turned it on and keyed in the pin number, then handed it over to him. He keyed in digits, smiling at her.

  ‘I’m not getting a signal. Here. Let me try . . .’ He got out of the lift and dialled again, keeping the door open with his foot. She glanced away from him and at the instructions in case of an emergency on the wall of the lift. He stepped away from the door.

  Sarah looked up to see the doors closing in front of Dr Reid’s face.

  ‘Dr Reid?’ she said.

  His face vanished. The doors shut tightly.

  Sarah pressed the button to open them again but nothing happened. A knock came on the other side of the doors, followed by Reid’s voice. ‘See you down there, Mrs Rosen.’

  She pressed the button for the ground floor and, as the lift started descending, she heard the sound of breathing. It was coming from beneath the green blanket on the scissor bed. She suddenly noticed the shape of a body that at a casual glance she had thought was just a crumpled mass of NHS blankets.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  A hand fell from beneath the blanket, dangling down the side of the scissor bed, the face and head still covered by blankets.

  ‘I’m just going to lift the blankets,’ said Sarah. Newspapers were filled with tales of pensioners marooned on hospital trolleys, forgotten for hours on end.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, though she felt fear herself. The breathing beneath the blanket deepened, coarsened, as she turned back the material.

  Jet-black hair, face down on the scissor bed, tiny little ears, a man, face down.

  ‘Try to turn over,’ she said, kindly.

  ‘Like this?’ he replied.

  Teeth and eyes, that was all, a flash of darkness out of softly lit space and the sudden appearance of a hypodermic needle racing towards her hand. She froze. The ne
edle pierced her flesh. She stared at him for a moment and then reached out with her other hand to the metal wall where every button waited to be touched. The tight confines of the lift suddenly felt like a metal coffin. The four walls appeared to push in on her as panic mounted rapidly inside her. Halfway to the buttons on the wall, her hand lost all momentum and fell away from its target.

  The emergency phone, built into the wall, receded fast.

  She tried to call out for her husband, David, as the display above her head span to the letter G for Ground. But it was too late. He set about manipulating Sarah’s liquid form into the wheelchair.

  Her head flopped back as he moulded her into the seat and the last she saw was the whites of his teeth and the whites of his eyes.

  As she sank into the void, a voice trailed after her.

  ‘I did not come from darkness. I am darkness itself.’

  ——

  WHEN HE EMERGED from the service lift, pushing a dozing patient in a wheelchair, the green-uniformed paramedic turned his back to an oncoming nurse and adjusted his patient’s blanket with, ‘Nice and cosy for you?’

  He pushed the wheelchair away from the lift and forced himself to smile, puckering his lips to whistle silently as he rolled the sixth and final carrier towards the front entrance.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, to a question she hadn’t asked. ‘I was a medical student for two years. Happy days: learned a lot, I did.’

  He kept his eyes fixed ahead as he passed the ward clerk returning from a break, the first person coming the other way. She didn’t react and neither did the nurses who cut across his path, nor the anaesthetist who overtook him as he made his way to the exit and the ambulance bay beyond.

  Sarah’s left eye wasn’t quite closed. A rim of white glistened up at him, an anaesthetised crescent.

  The ambulance, his ambulance, was parked where he’d left it, next to another ambulance.

  He opened the back doors and looked around. People were about, plenty of them coming and going. But no one appeared to be looking as he transferred the carrier into the back of his ambulance.

  54

  As Rosen ran towards Royal Street, a marked police car sailed towards him down Lambeth Palace Road. He held out his warrant card with one hand and waved the car down with his other arm.

  ‘DCI Rosen. I need to get to Picardie Road in Wandsworth.’ He climbed into the passenger seat and tersely explained, ‘Herod. Golden hour.’

  The siren blared and, within three seconds, the car was clocking 60mph, the constable weaving through traffic.

  Through a red light at a junction, the police car hit 80mph. On Victoria Bridge Road, Rosen’s phone rang. The constable steered through another red light, knocking the wing mirror off a car that wasn’t quite far enough out of the way.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Rosen.

  ‘David?’

  ‘Where are you, Carol?’

  ‘On the way to the scene of the crime. Switchboard have a problem—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  Rosen weighed up the traffic immediately around them. There was some sort of blockage just after St George’s Cathedral where, just ahead, an ambulance took advantage of the delay and cut out of Dodson Street.

  ‘What’s the problem with the switch?’ he asked.

  ‘Two problems. The mobile number that put in the Wandsworth emergency call. It’s been traced as a stolen phone. The phone was stolen this morning.’

  The traffic shifted. The constable slid back to seventy and clipped the bumper of another car.

  ‘Has anyone arrived at Wandsworth yet?’

  ‘The locals.’

  ‘Our people?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  At that moment, Rosen instinctively knew he was in the wrong place and that it was too late to turn back.

  ‘Carol, Picardie Road, Wandsworth: it’s a hoax?’

  ‘The locals can’t find a problem.’

  ‘It’s a hoax.’ In repeating the words, their significance dawned on Rosen. He wanted to scream.

  ‘It looks like.’

  ‘Carol, I’m hanging up.’

  He called Sarah’s number. It rang as buildings flew by and streets flashed past. ‘The mobile number you’ve called is currently unavailable. Please try again later.’ She’s out of coverage, he thought, or she’s switched off.

  The constable turned into Kell Street and Rosen shouted, ‘Pull up! Pull up!’ The constable slammed the car to a standstill.

  Rosen’s mouth was cloth, his tongue a dead weight. He made a call, reaching a duty sergeant he didn’t know called George Jones.

  ‘George, my name’s Detective Chief Inspector David Rosen. My wife Sarah should be on the first floor of St Thomas’s Hospital. I want officers there immediately. It relates to the Herod investigation.’

  ‘I’m acting on it now, sir. Hold the line.’

  ‘Turn the car around,’ said Rosen. ‘Back to St Thomas’s!’

  The constable made a 360-degree turn on a pin and went back to driving at high speed.

  Down Borough Road towards the roundabout with Blackfriars, Rosen clutched the phone to his ear and willed Sergeant Jones to come back on the line.

  An urgent instruction poured out of the car radio backed up by Sergeant Jones’s voice in his ear.

  ‘Sir, we’ve deployed all available officers in the area to the hospital.’

  An ambulance, its siren silent, headed in his direction. He glanced at it as it sailed away from St Thomas’s.

  ‘Call the hospital, George. Tell them to close all the doors, in and out: no one enters, no one leaves.’

  ‘I’ll do that now.’

  On either side of the road, cars hugged the pavement to allow the speeding police car through.

  Rosen was visited by a memory of Phillip Caton throwing up in the gutter of Brantwood Road on the morning his wife had been abducted. Caton, a self-employed plumber, had been drawn away by a genuine call for work, leaving his wife exposed to the terror of Herod.

  Rosen, a detective of over twenty years’ experience, realised he’d been suckered into abandoning his wife.

  St Thomas’s Hospital loomed large.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked the constable. ‘Sir, you want me to open a window or something, sir? Sir?’

  55

  On the first floor of the North Wing of St Thomas’s Hospital, Rosen ran through the area between the lifts and the main door to the Haematology department. As he did so, he wondered whether he’d ever see his wife again.

  At reception, he asked for Dr Brian Reid, who arrived within a minute.

  ‘Detective Rosen?’

  Rosen turned and saw a short, ginger-haired man in a white coat with a standard St Thomas’s NHS badge.

  ‘Dr Reid, did you telephone my wife yesterday and tell her to come in today?’

  The doctor frowned and shook his head. ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘An unofficial appointment because of a problem with her bloods?’ Blind hope drove him on. ‘You fixed it up with Tom Dempsey from Gynaecology.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Tom in weeks.’

  Rosen’s phone rang and the receptionist frowned automatically.

  He wanted more than anything else for it to be Sarah.

  ‘David?’ It was Carol Bellwood. ‘It’s definitely a hoax. Number 19 Picardie Road. I’m standing on the pavement at the gap between number 17 and number 21 where number 19 used to be. It was blown up in an accidental gas explosion and demolished years ago. We’ve knocked on every door in Picardie Road in case we got the number wrong. There aren’t even any pregnant women on the street. This is not the scene of an abduction. Where are you, David?’

  ‘I’m at the scene of an abduction right now. St Thomas’s Hospital. First floor. North Wing. Haematology.’

  ‘Do we know who the victim is?’

  The overhead fluorescents seemed to be blinding him, and the strength to merely put one foot in front of the other drained away.

&n
bsp; ‘David, do we know who the abducted woman is?’

  ‘Yes. It’s my wife, Sarah.’

  56

  Sarah Rosen was both blessed and cursed with insider knowledge. Before she had regained full consciousness, she knew she was in a dismal place. Waking up was not a gradual journey into the light of a brand-new day, but a progression into an understanding of the confines of the place that enclosed her: a man-made darkness that defied and overwhelmed her.

  For a moment, when her fingers touched the sides of the sensory deprivation chamber, she assumed she was sick – not a sudden return from health to the jaws of depression, but that she was sick and had never been well. That the profound blackness around her was merely the coming together of all that she was on the inside in the worst moments of her life.

  She said, ‘David?’ But her voice was swallowed by the darkness. She lifted her hands and touched the lid of the chamber, recalling Rosen’s description of the rags that Alison Todd’s fingers and nails had become. She had cried in their kitchen as she dried the dishes and listened, wishing her husband would shut up, and despising herself for wanting to bury her head in the sand.

  Her eyes widened and she felt something like electric shock running down her spine, a power that galvanized each nerve in her being.

  She was floating. It was dark. There was an abominable silence. Her hands rolled up her thighs and across her hips to her stomach. But there was no gaping wound in her middle; her skin, her womb, her baby were all there and intact. She kept her hands in place across her womb, but the blessed moment of relief subsided.

  It hadn’t happened yet. But it was coming. Soon. The only way she would be removed from this chamber was so that her baby could be removed from her.

  She pressed a hand to her mouth. Primal knowledge. She was safer in silence than in the scream that built up inside her. She became aware of the stuff on which she was floating, her heels pressing down against the heavy resistance of the fluid, and she was visited by a grim notion. She was floating on the blood of other women.

  Sarah seized a handful of the stuff and, as she felt it slide through her fingers, a wave of panic crashed over her. It was bigger than her intelligence, stronger than her memory, better than her imagination at shaping the future. There was no hope. The others might have hoped for the sudden arrival of the police, the broken-down door and the eleventh-hour rescue, but that was the prerogative of civilian wives. She was privy to the depth of Rosen’s knowledge, the weight of his frustrations.