No Escape

by Hilary Norman

  Realization hit him.

  ‘The baby?’ he said, and fought off panic.

  She didn’t answer, just rocked with the pain.

  Novak looked back at Allbeury, standing, waiting. ‘Can you phone for an ambulance? I’ve left my mobile somewhere.’

  ‘In a moment,’ Allbeury said.

  ‘Now,’ Novak said. ‘Go into one of the restaurants.’

  ‘One moment.’ Allbeury came around the bench seat and sat on Clare’s other side. ‘Where’s Lizzie?’ he asked her.

  ‘Robin, she needs to get to hospital,’ Novak said, holding her more tightly.

  Clare smiled again.

  ‘Where is she, Clare?’ Allbeury asked.

  ‘Leave her alone, you son-of-a-bitch,’ Novak said, ‘and get us some help.’

  Clare tilted her face towards Allbeury.

  ‘Lizzie’s at the office,’ she said.

  ‘Which office?’ Allbeury asked.

  ‘Our office,’ she said.

  Allbeury stood up, his mobile in his right hand, keying 999.

  ‘I’ll tell them on the way to the car,’ he said and began to move away.

  Novak looked back towards Shad Tower, glittering in the dark, dwarfing the warehouse conversions, then glanced towards Tower Bridge, saw brake lights, motionless, cars still bumper to bumper.

  ‘Faster walking,’ he called out.

  Allbeury lifted a hand in assent, turned into Curlew Street and was gone.

  Chapter One Hundred Nine

  Jim Keenan had only reached St Thomas’s ten minutes earlier – had been fortuitously close, inside Waterloo Station, when Shipley had called him – and she’d just got out of X-ray and what she was telling him was a wild-sounding jumble, but he was doing his best to make sense of it.

  ‘You’re going to have to slow down,’ he told her. ‘So far, I have someone knocking you down a flight of stairs—’

  ‘Please pay attention,’ Shipley said impatiently. ‘His name is Christopher Wade, but that’s not important now.’

  ‘Assaulting a police officer’s important enough,’ Keenan said.

  ‘But not now.’

  ‘So you’re still saying what? That Allbeury is connected to the killings, but not directly?’

  ‘I’m saying that he was trying to tell me something he didn’t want Novak to hear, and I’m assuming it was because he thought Novak, and maybe his wife, were involved.’

  ‘So this is still mostly hunch, is it?’ Keenan asked.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Shipley said, ‘except now, apparently, it isn’t just my hunch, it’s Allbeury’s too. And if you’d seen his face, you’d know that something bad was going on – something new, okay?’

  They’d put her in a cubicle, had given her something for her pain, and her eyelids were beginning to droop.

  ‘By “bad”,’ Keenan pressed before she fell asleep, ‘you think someone’s in danger?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Shipley nodded. ‘And if it was me, if I wasn’t lying here with this bloody leg, I’d be on my way to the Novaks’ flat, and then I’d be going back to the agency, and if those places came up empty, I’d be tracking down Allbeury again.’

  Keenan took out his notebook. ‘Addresses?’

  Shipley’s eyes were closing. ‘Then again,’ she said, with a smile on her lips, ‘it’s your call now, and this stuff is starting to give me quite a nice buzz, and—’

  Keenan laid a hand on her arm.

  ‘Give me the addresses, Helen.’

  Chapter One Hundred Ten

  ‘We should get you inside,’ Novak told Clare, ‘into the warm.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘It’s too cold out here.’ He began to rise, to try to draw her to her feet.

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘I want to stay here.’

  ‘Okay.’ He gave in, cuddled her close. ‘The ambulance will be here soon,’ he told her gently, ‘and you’ll be fine, both of you, you and our baby, and there’s no need to be scared, okay, sweetheart?’

  ‘The baby won’t be all right,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it will. You mustn’t worry.’

  ‘The baby’s dying,’ Clare said. ‘Or maybe it’s already dead. And I’m not worrying, Mike, because it’s what I want.’

  He thought – was sure – he had misheard. But then she laughed.

  Delirium, he told himself, hung on to that thread.

  The laugh was harsh, though. Brittle.

  ‘That’s right.’ She glanced at his face, went on leaning against him. ‘I do mean it, Mike. I meant it last time, too, when I killed our baby.’

  ‘You didn’t kill him,’ Novak said. ‘I’ve told you and told you, sweetheart, it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ The fingers of Clare’s left hand hooked around the edge of his shirt, between two buttons, grasped at the fabric as a child might, clinging on. ‘Our son didn’t just die, Mike, didn’t have problems breathing – not the kind you thought, anyway—’

  ‘Clare, darling, stop it.’ He twisted around, still holding her, but trying to see up the narrow side street, looking for blue flashing lights, though he’d heard no sirens.

  ‘I kept hoping and hoping,’ Clare went on, ‘that it would die before. I prayed and prayed for a miscarriage—’

  All the dark chill of the river seemed to flow into him. He turned around, very slowly, faced her again.

  ‘—but it didn’t happen, so I had to take care of it myself.’

  He pulled away, but her fingers still gripped his shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in a voice that held no sorrow at all. ‘I’m really sorry, Mike, but it’s time you knew, don’t you think?’

  He thought, wanted to believe, that he’d gone mad or that this was a nightmare, or that maybe what he’d thought just moments ago was true, that she was delirious.

  But he could see from her eyes – cold eyes that had nothing to do with the Clare he had known and loved for years – that she was not.

  Allbeury had run along Shad Thames, past the Chef School and the sculpture gallery and Pizza Express, on past the Anchor Brewhouse, taking the steps up to the bridge three at a time, hardly slowing on Tower Bridge itself, and even on the far side there was hardly any point looking for a taxi, the traffic was so appalling. And God, East Smithfield was longer than he’d realized, though then again, he never walked from Shad Tower to the agency, and he glanced back across the river to Butler’s Wharf, wondered if the ambulance was already there, wondered what had happened to Clare.

  He reached Dock Street, turned left, breathless now from running.

  Almost there.

  ‘Lizzie Piper said she wanted to help me save our baby,’ Clare told Novak, ‘which was very nice of her, considering what I’d just done to her.’

  Another, more violent, pain had just struck her, and she was laughing and crying now, and rocking, hugging herself.

  ‘For God’s sake, Clare,’ Novak said, ‘let me get you inside.’

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘It wasn’t the way I planned it,’ she went on. ‘Not like the others.’

  That last word seemed to hang in the cold night air for a moment, hovering somewhere just outside the frontiers of Novak’s comprehension.

  ‘Others,’ he said, icy again, helpless.

  ‘It’s gone wrong,’ Clare went on, still rocking, ‘because there wasn’t enough time to plan this one. But it’s not too bad in spite of that, all working out quite neatly, and Robin’ll find her, and he’ll try to save her, but the lift’s not likely to hold his weight as well as hers.’

  ‘Lift,’ Novak echoed.

  ‘Our lift,’ she said.

  ‘Our lift doesn’t work,’ he said, stupidly. ‘It’s been condemned for years.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ Clare said. ‘Dangerous thing, hanging by a thread.’

  Chapter One Hundred Eleven

  Lizzie heard something – a door, opening, closing – downstairs. She jolted with hope, felt the big old lif
t shiver correspondingly, and froze again.

  Footsteps, coming up.

  Whose?

  ‘Lizzie?’

  Robin’s voice.

  Thank God.

  ‘Robin, I’m trapped,’ she called out to him. ‘In the lift shaft.’

  ‘Jesus,’ his voice said.

  Lizzie smiled in the dark for the first time, forgot her pain and fear.

  ‘You need to be very careful,’ she called. ‘The gate’s open on the top floor, and I’m about two floors down, on the lift’s roof.’

  ‘God almighty,’ she heard him say.

  And then, suddenly, his head and shoulders appeared in the open gateway above, staring down at her.

  ‘Be careful,’ she told him again.

  ‘Shame no one said that to you,’ Allbeury said.

  Lizzie’s smile was tremulous. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘Clare Novak told me.’

  ‘She pushed me,’ Lizzie said, her voice quivering. ‘She said she’d killed before, Robin.’ She bit her lip to stop herself crying. ‘She said she knew about Christopher, what kind of husband he is.’ The words were spilling out in a rush. ‘And when I asked her how she knew, she said I should ask you.’

  Allbeury was silent for a moment.

  ‘Why did she say that, Robin?’ she asked. ‘Did you tell her?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He paused. ‘Lizzie, are you hurt?’

  ‘Not too badly, considering.’ She took a breath. ‘Better now you’re here.’

  ‘Thank God for that, at least,’ he said, then surveyed the scene. ‘Don’t suppose you’re up to rope climbing?’

  ‘It’s cable, not rope,’ she said. ‘And it all looks a bit dodgy, I don’t trust it.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said.

  ‘Robin, why did Clare Novak say that about you?’ Lizzie found she couldn’t let it go, felt she needed to know, now, right away, if this man was to be trusted or not. ‘How could she know about Christopher?’

  ‘She could have found a little information – a very little,’ Allbeury said, ‘on my computer. She’s been breaking into my files, Lizzie, and I think she’s probably been doing the same to other people.’

  Vaguely, in the back of her mind, Lizzie recalled something odd that Christopher had said to her after the pimp had beaten him up, about someone snooping in the files at the Beauchamp clinic.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, felt suddenly as if she were drowning, and then, looking up, she saw that Allbeury had vanished.

  ‘Robin, don’t go!’ she called out, panicking.

  ‘Not going anywhere,’ his voice said. ‘I’m going to come down to get you.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she told him urgently. ‘The lift’s very shaky – I’m not sure it can hold you too.’

  ‘Of course it can,’ Allbeury’s voice dismissed. ‘It might be a bit decrepit, but it was designed to hold freight as well as people, and it only feels shaky because you’re sitting on its damned roof.’

  ‘So what do you do now?’ Clare’s voice was growing fainter. ‘Your wife sitting here beside you, bleeding, your baby dying by inches.’

  ‘Stop it, Clare.’

  ‘Your friend Robin about to risk his life to save a woman who’s too pathetic to deserve to live.’

  Novak stared at her again, disbelievingly, then got to his feet, his legs like jelly. ‘Where’s that fucking ambulance?’

  ‘But maybe they’ll both be okay.’ Clare began rocking again. ‘Maybe the lift won’t crash, or even if it does, we’re hardly talking skyscraper heights, are we? So they’ll probably be fine – unless that steel rope splits and the live wire zaps them.’

  ‘The power’s turned off,’ Novak said.

  ‘Maybe,’ his wife said. ‘Unless I turned it on at the box before I left.’

  Chapter One Hundred Twelve

  Keenan had just reached Lamb’s Conduit Street, was looking for the Novaks’ address, and he’d decided to hedge his bets, follow up on Shipley’s hunch, but by himself, not fancying making himself a laughing stock just yet.

  There was the building.

  He found the flat number and buzzed.

  No reply.

  He buzzed one of the other numbers, then another.

  ‘Who is it?’ a man’s voice asked.

  ‘Police,’ he said. ‘Let me in, please. Just to the building, not your flat.’

  There was a second’s pause, and then the door clicked open.

  The Novaks’ flat was on the first floor.

  Keenan rang the bell and knocked.

  No grounds for kicking the door in.

  He bent and peered through the letter box and listened.

  Nothing.

  Chapter One Hundred Thirteen

  ‘The only safe thing to do,’ Lizzie said, ‘is call the fire brigade.’

  ‘I was going to do that anyway,’ Allbeury told her.

  ‘And once you’ve talked to them,’ she added, ‘it might be an idea to get a doctor, because I think I’ve probably broken my left arm.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ His head and shoulders appeared again, backlit, in the gateway. ‘Christ, Lizzie, you said you were okay.’

  ‘I was just so happy to see you,’ she said, feeling foolish, ‘I forgot.’

  ‘Your left arm?’ he checked. ‘So I can tell them when I phone.’

  ‘And some of my fingers,’ she said. ‘Clare trapped them in the gate.’

  ‘Christ,’ Allbeury said again, and went to dial 999.

  Clare had finally ceased talking, and there was no more laughter now, nothing at all, and suddenly she slipped sideways on the bench.

  ‘Clare.’ Novak moved back beside her, felt for her wrist, her pulse. ‘Clare.’

  He looked at the restaurants behind them, at the brightly lit All Bar One and the sweeping Pont de la Tour frontage, thought again about getting Clare inside.

  Better not to move her.

  Reaching a decision, cursing the ambulance people – cursing Allbeury again – he drew his leather jacket away from her shoulders, lifted her feet so that she was lying on the bench seat, partly sheltered by the large planted box attached to it, and laid the jacket over her.

  ‘I’m going to get help,’ he said, loudly, clearly. ‘We can’t wait any longer.’

  She gave a small moan.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he told her.

  He ran, oblivious of the tears on his face, into the closest place, the bar, into brightness and music and normality, scanned the long bar for a phone, saw none.

  ‘I need help,’ he said loudly to anyone in earshot.

  Eyes veered to him, a waitress carrying bottles, drinkers and diners on brown leather sofas and at long narrow tables, all startled.

  ‘I need a phone.’

  ‘Sir.’ A waiter hurried towards him. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I need you to call an ambulance.’ Novak had an urge to grab the young man, to propel him to a phone. ‘My wife’s outside – she’s losing our baby . . .’

  Over the music and chattering voices, he heard it at last.

  The siren.

  Chapter One Hundred Fourteen

  ‘Shouldn’t be much longer now.’

  Allbeury was sitting by the open lift gate trying to keep Lizzie’s spirits up, but she was getting colder, and he’d dropped his jacket down to her a few minutes before, and even that slight added weight had made the lift shift a little, scaring her more. He was growing increasingly anxious for her, knew that in addition to her own predicament she was wretched about not calling home, and he’d told her he’d spoken to Gilly earlier and that the children had been okay then (not that he actually knew that for sure), had offered to call again on her behalf under some pretext, but Lizzie had said that both Jack and Edward were more than likely, in the circumstances, to see through any tale and imagine something dreadful.

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ she said now.

  ‘What don’t you understand?’
>
  ‘Why someone like Clare – you called her a nice woman, I think, when we had dinner that night . . .’

  ‘I remember,’ Allbeury said wryly.

  ‘What could happen to a woman like that to make her do such things?’

  ‘Try not to think about Clare now,’ he said.

  ‘How can I not? She’s the reason I’m in this mess.’ She winced, could feel her left arm swelling and her fingers growing more numb, and that was another reason for talking about Clare Novak, because it stopped her thinking about the pain.

  ‘Is it very bad?’ Allbeury asked.

  ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘Talk to me, Robin.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About Clare and her—’

  A new sound from above – like something tearing – silenced her.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked after a moment, her voice hushed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Allbeury said uneasily.

  The lift shuddered, and Lizzie let out an involuntary cry. ‘I didn’t move, Robin. I didn’t even move.’

  He was already on his feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked edgily.

  ‘Going to find something,’ he said. ‘Something to lower down to you, like a lifebelt, to hold you.’

  ‘In case the whole thing goes,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘It’s not going to go,’ he said. ‘So long as you stay still.’

  ‘No argument there.’ He disappeared. ‘Keep talking to me, please,’ she called.

  ‘Will do,’ Allbeury called back.

  Nothing in the office appeared to have changed since he and Novak had left after Shipley’s fall, and abruptly he remembered promising to follow her to St Thomas’s, but that would have to wait a while longer now.

  ‘Robin, what are you doing?’ Lizzie’s voice asked from a distance.

  ‘Looking around,’ he told her.

  He looked at the computer monitor he’d wrecked, shook his head, then saw the cables at the rear. Strong, but not long enough, though maybe if he tied them to the length of cable behind the printer, and to the phone wires and all the other flexes in the office . . .

  ‘Hang on, Lizzie,’ he called. ‘I’ve got something, but it’s going to take a few minutes to put together. You just hang on.’