She talks and moves slowly.
Before diving into the medical bag, she holds her hands over it, asking for permission to delve inside.
Mousy nods.
Kerrigan and I head straight for the diabetic, who confirms her name is indeed Lorraine.
‘OK, Lorraine, we’ll take a reading right away. A few other measurements too.’
Kerrigan takes a blood sugar reading, which isn’t good at all. She calculates an insulin dose. I inject it.
Alcohol swab. Uncap the pen. Push. Discard into the sharps bin.
I wriggle my eyebrows at Kerrigan in a ta-daa! sort of way, but she doesn’t wriggle back.
Kerrigan listens to Biggar’s chest with a stethoscope.
Grimaces.
Tells me to get going with the thermometer and blood pressure cuff.
I do so. Don’t cock anything up. I should think, to the three watching gunmen, I look very much like a not-excessively-large nurse doing my not-excessively-challenging job.
I give Kerrigan the measurements she needs in a low mutter. Biggar’s systolic blood pressure score is well over one seventy, which is way too high. She’s running a fever too. Not much of one, but a bit.
Biggar complains of headache and we give her aspirin. Kerrigan takes the woman’s shoes off and inspects her feet, I think because circulation problems often manifest there first. Kerrigan lightly touches Biggar’s toes. Asks if she has normal sensation there.
Biggar’s answers are slow and unconvincing, but that’s as likely the result of anxiety as from any kind of nerve failure.
At one point, she vomits slightly. She doesn’t produce much and I wipe her up as best I can with paper towels.
Kerrigan doesn’t comment, but her face is grim.
As she continues to examine Biggar, I take readings from everyone else.
No other fever. A couple of the security guards have lousy blood pressure. One of them pats his tummy with his free hand and says, ‘Biscuits. That’s my downfall.’
I note names, dates of birth, temperature and blood pressure readings on a pad, then go round again with Kerrigan, noting other observations, mostly heart rates, as she gives them.
When we’re done with the hostages, we turn to the gunmen, now shinily greased around their mouths.
Mousy has yielded the gun to Dark Hair, and is stuffing his gob with hamburger.
Kerrigan says, ‘I’d like to examine each of you, if I may. This is a highly stressful situation for everyone, including you, and I’d like to check for any problems early.’
Mousy and Dark Hair treat that idea with contempt.
Ginger the same, except that, ever the humorist, he rolls his sleeve up his well-muscled arm and says, ‘You can do me. So long as you do it topless.’
I don’t know if that was aimed more at me or more at Kerrigan, but we don’t offer a topless medical check-up service, not even with guns in our faces.
Ginger hesitates a moment, but decides his witticism is too good to leave, so he gets Kerrigan to listen to his chest and has me take a blood pressure reading, as he writhes around and breathes heavily and makes horrible little grunty noises.
I’ve a nasty feeling we’re getting glimpses of Ginger’s real sex face.
Bending over his arm, as I operate the inflation bulb for the pressure cuff, I note that his hands smell of soap, but have a whitish dust under the fingernails.
When we’re done, Kerrigan straightens. Flicks her long, dark pony-tail behind her.
‘OK. Everyone’s fine, except for Lorraine here. She’s on the edge of hypertensive crisis. She needs proper medical attention right now. That means hospital.’
Dark Guy says, ‘You just gave her insulin. I watched you.’
‘Her blood sugar will soon come back to normal. Her blood pressure is on the edge of crisis. You can see it.’
Dark Guy studies Biggar, then shakes his head.
‘Sorry. We didn’t cause those problems. She’ll just have to take her chances.’ He gives a look that adds, her fault for being a fatty.
Kerrigan: ‘This woman needs immediate transfer to a hospital.’
‘OK. Once there’s a chopper on the roof with a bag full of cash.’
Kerrigan, I think, is going to continue to argue, but Biggar chooses that moment to vomit properly. A full-on, head-forward, moaning gush.
I do my nurse bit to the full.
Check her airways. Start cleaning her up – an almost impossible job. Talk soothingly, bending close to her ear. She’s not really with me, though. She’s foggy and unresponsive.
Kerrigan, hand on Biggar’s pulse, says, ‘Hospital. She needs a hospital now.’
Dark Guy: ‘All righty. One in, one out.’
He means one of us.
Kerrigan flashes a look at me.
I say to Dark Guy, ‘Can we talk? In private?’
He shrugs. Kerrigan and I go to the far end of the rec room, which is hardly private, but probably good enough.
I tell her I don’t mind staying. Tell her some other things too. Things to do with a smell of soap and a whitish dust. Tell her what to communicate to whom.
She shakes her head with impatience. ‘No. I’m the doctor. If anyone stays, I do.’
That’s a crap argument if ever there was one. I say, ‘Yes, and I’m the “nurse”,’ wrapping as many inverted commas round that word as one low whisper can manage. ‘Aside from Biggar, this is a room full of healthy people. My skills are more relevant here.’ Since Kerrigan is still hesitating, I look pointedly down at her left hand, where a wedding band twinkles on her ring finger. ‘Also, I’m not married and I have no kids.’
Kerrigan thinks a second and says, ‘OK, fine.’
Turns back to the grinning gunmen and says, ‘My colleague, Fiona, has agreed to stay. I need your word that she won’t be harmed.’
Dark Guy shrugs and agrees. Just adds the itsy-bitsy rider, ‘Unless we need someone to execute.’
Ginger cuts Biggar out of her packing-tape casket. He and Kerrigan help her up. Biggar’s eyes still have the madness and vacancy of shock but, I assume, she’ll be OK the further she’s able to get from this place.
Kerrigan, supporting the woman’s weight, starts to lead her away.
That leaves me.
Me. A splatter of puke. A pile of paper towels.
Ginger wants to put me into Biggar’s place right away, but I gesture at the mess. At me.
‘Can I clean up first? Is there a bathroom?’
Dark Hair nods. The place stinks and none of the gunmen want to perform the clean-up.
At a nod from Dark Hair, Ginger escorts me out of the room and round a corner. I’m carrying a plastic waste bin that I’ll use to fetch water. Ginger is carrying a gun, but not pointing it, particularly.
Further on down the corridor, just in front of a sign saying Numismatics, Palaeography and Codicology, there’s a spot where some ceiling tiles have been removed. Stacked up on the floor. From the hole that’s been left, I can see the glimmer of what is presumably an air duct. A portable CD player sits a bit randomly on the floor below.
Ginger sees me looking at this set-up and pushes my shoulder towards the bathroom. So I stop staring and go obediently inside.
Codicology, I think. Codicology.
Fill my bin with water. A few squidges of that weird pink soap. Lots more paper towels.
Go back to the room.
Hands and knees clean-up. Do a reasonable job, given the tools at hand. Then Ginger leads me back to the bathroom to get rid of the water and the stinky towels.
Once done, I ask permission to use the toilet. He says fine.
I enter a cubicle, close the door and pee. The air duct thing. Is that real or a red herring? The corridor floor was carpeted, but I dab carefully at the sole of my shoe. Find a little white stone dust, gritty under my fingertips.
Dust then that didn’t come from outside. That didn’t come from upstairs.
These are either among the worst mu
seum-breaker-inners in the world, or among the best.
I think about that CD player. Why have that? Only one reason that I can think of.
Also: numismatics. Codicology.
Ginger starts moving about impatiently outside my stall, so I finish my business and exit.
Move towards the basins to wash my hands, when I glimpse movement in the mirror.
Ginger has swung his pistol up and is pointing it, in a two-handed grip, at the back of my neck. The barrel of the gun is maybe six inches away from me.
Because he’s now directly behind me, we can’t see each other’s eyes in the mirror and that appears to bother him, because he changes stance, rotating round me, so the gun’s cold glare is now fixed on a spot at the side of my neck.
I don’t move. Just watch Ginger in the mirror.
Watch him watching me.
He has pale-blue eyes, white skin, and his mouth is just a little parted. The wet interior of his lips slightly exposed.
Under these bathroom halogens, the gun has a steel-blue quality. It seems like the only durable object in the room. My neck, me, Ginger: all temporary, soft, disposable.
Through all this, I’ve kept my hands down and slightly away from my sides. Remain like that, completely still, as the gun traces lines on me. My head. Neck. Then chest. Special mention for my breasts, the line of my arm, then the barrel rises again to settle on my ear.
My mouth is completely dry.
Ginger says, ‘That doctor was quite hot, maybe an eight or nine. You’re probably only a seven, but I bet you’re one of those girls who goes batshit crazy in bed.’
I don’t enlighten him. Try not to look batshit crazy.
I say, slowly, ‘I’m going to step forward and wash my hands.’
I do that.
Before I turn on the tap, I say, ‘I’m going to turn on the tap.’ Before I squidge soap from the dispenser, I say, ‘I’m getting soap.’
My movements are slow. Like a mime artist breaking each motion down into its smallest components.
If Ginger was dividing womankind up into deciles, I don’t see how he could rate Kerrigan at anything less than ten, but I don’t argue. I suspect that with people like Ginger the lower deciles are more heavily populated than the upper ones.
As I wash and rinse my hands, Ginger moves again. Places the snout of the gun against the back of my neck. Leaves it there just long enough that I can feel its metal chill. That conversation between barrel, bullet and flesh. Then the gun moves.
Traces the line of my spine, vertebra by vertebra, through the thin cotton of my nursing scrubs. The gun catches a bit when it reaches my bra – a catch that stopped my breath, stopped time itself – but it moves on.
As the water still gushes from the tap, the gun moves down to my waist. My coccyx. Then, horribly, between my legs. He actually pushes his fist in between my thighs far enough that I have to part my legs to make room. The gun barrel slides between my thighs, pushing up.
Pushes hard enough that I find myself lifting slightly. Legs slightly spread, standing on tiptoe, wet hands resting on the basin for support.
We stand like that for a moment. Frozen in this moment.
Then he jabs upwards. Hard. Nastily. I let out an involuntary ah! of pain and shock. Mouth open. Attention not in my head, or in the mirror, but down below where the action is.
I think that cry of pain gives Ginger what he wanted. Perhaps he thinks he’s seen my sex face. And maybe he has. I wouldn’t know.
In any case he removes the gun.
I come down from tiptoe. Stand normally again.
‘A biter,’ he tells me. ‘I bet you’re a biter.’
I say, ‘I’m going to rinse my hands.’
I do so.
‘I’m turning off the tap.’
Do so.
‘I’m moving over to the drier now.’
Do so.
My gait is a little awkward, I think. The dark upward jab of that bruise is still widening. Still the centre of things. But Ginger’s not pointing the gun now. Just dandling it around the way he was before.
I stand there at the drier, slowly calming.
Codicology.
‘Codicology’, I assume, derives from the word codex, which means book. So: the study of books as physical objects, something like that.
I’m not too sure about ‘palaeography’, but I think palaeo must mean old, as in palaeolithic. And graphy might have a connection with graphic, or something to do with writing. And if the damn word is stuck on a door next to codicology, I’m going to take a wild guess that palaeography is the study of old writing.
Codicology, palaeography, numismatics.
The drier clicks off.
My hands are actually dry. For possibly the very first time in my life, I have stood by a hot air drier long enough to actually dry my hands.
I turn around, still slowly, but not with the extreme, exaggerated slowness of before. I say, ‘All done.’
Ginger says, ‘OK, Nursey,’ and motions me back outside.
He takes me back.
His games aren’t quite over. He enjoys stroking the gun barrel in wide curves over my back and I walk slowly enough that he can, more or less, keep the gun in steady contact with me. But the gun doesn’t drift down to my bum or spend more than a moment or two at the back of my neck.
Small mercies.
We get back to the rec room. As we draw close, Ginger holds the gun away from me, down by his side. Assuming that Dark Hair is the head of this particular crew, I suspect he’d be pissed off with Ginger for his fooling around.
I feel the tension of that pointing gun slowly, and only partially dissipate.
I sit where Lorraine Biggar sat. Ginger tapes me to my new neighbour, Molly.
Brown packing tape that crackles when you move.
‘Hello, Molly,’ I say. ‘Hello everyone.’
I’m helloed back. One of the security guards says, ‘You swapping places with Lorraine there. That showed real guts, love. They should give you a medal.’
I bloody hope they don’t, but sit there and nod as people say nice things.
Talk flickers and flares.
I look at the posters. Adventures in Archaeology. A boring photograph of bones and churned earth. I like bones, of course, but I prefer them fresh.
Maps and Manuscripts. That one has an image of that old, medieval writing blurring into and overlaying an old map. Two images superimposed.
Mousy stays in the room. He has his gun next to him, but mostly he’s just sitting with his feet up, flicking at a magazine. The other two go off somewhere.
Rock music starts playing, from the CD player beyond the bathroom. I try to listen for sounds beyond the music, but can’t, or don’t think I can.
I hope Kerrigan passes on my message. I hope someone acts on it.
With my free hand, I rub my eyes.
‘You all right, Molly?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about me, love.’
I don’t.
Just sit there. Rub my eyes.
And time goes by.
30
Time.
The fourth dimension.
One of my favourite dimensions. One that brings all the good stuff, even if she brings more than her share of the crappy stuff too. But there are times she’s out of her depth. Times when she shunts one second into the void, over the edge of the present and away – then, blow it, the next second to come along looks exactly the same. And the next and the next.
Thousands of seconds, all alike. Yes, they come with minor differences of colour and tone. Sometimes it’s one gunman at the table. Sometimes another. Sometimes the fattest of the three security guards snores as he snoozes. Sometimes he doesn’t, or he blinks himself awake, or looks around the room with a kind of incredulity.
But still: it’s samey.
The crate of food is passed around and we, or some of us, eat cold chips, fallen hamburger.
There’s a bit of chat, but not much.
Flickers of conversation that spurt for a minute or two, but don’t ignite. Out in the corridor, that stupid CD player plays the same CD over and over and over again.
When we move, we crackle with packing tape.
It was about three o’clock when Kerrigan and I came downstairs. It’s eight in the evening now.
Five hours.Eighteen thousand same-coloured seconds.
Maps and Manuscripts.
Codicology.
Palaeography.
And then – I stare one more time at that stupid poster and laugh at myself. My second Dummkopf moment of the case.
The thing that I was missing is missing no longer. The clue is shoved almost literally in my face.
Palimpsest. That’s another cracker of a word, even if it doesn’t get much airtime these days.
A second food crate arrives. I’m not sure how it came or who brought it. I can’t see from my position and whoever’s making those ‘John’ phone calls to the negotiators isn’t making them from any place we can hear them.
We eat some food. Drink some drink.
No one has much appetite, not even the gunmen. They seem tired, actually. Like men most of the way through a long and arduous job. Arctic trekkers two days’ short of the Pole.
The men’s hands are grained in dust now. They’re not bothering to wash off properly even. There are marks on their jeans where they’ve wiped them. Their faces too. Sweat streaked with white. One of the guys, Mousy, has a dark graze ruling a line down the inside of his thumb. He picks at the injury. Eats chips.
We’re getting close, I think. This drama is nearing its denouement.
When I get the chance, I use my free hand to slip off my earrings. One goes in a pocket. The other in my mouth, lying in the channel between gum and cheek like the world’s tiniest dagger.
One of the security guards, munching burger, says, ‘Free food, eh? It’s not all bad, then.’
Molly says, ‘Oh, I don’t usually eat anything like this. I always like to cook from fresh.’
She tells me all about her philosophy of food. I adhere to my normal policy on small-talk and agree with whatever proposition has just been put to me.
At nine o’clock, Mousy and Dark Hair come into the room.
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 20
