Death & the City Book Two (41 page)

I confirm with another nod.

"Mostly I just write about guys I fancy, or have problems working with," I tell her.

"Same." She shrugs. "I don't get this way she has of dealing with it. Instead of just listing her issues and how they hinder her or push her to change stuff in her life, she's on some real super-hero fantasy high horse about being better than everyone else. Like those mental patients who think they're Jesus Christ or Mother Teresa. As if she's got an alternative explanation for being an invisible nobody in real life. An explanation that she actually believes in herself, even having made it up."

"Maybe if she carries on with the fictional version, she'll settle down into fantasy author mode," I suggest. "Unless she carries on trying to make the reality match up at the same time. Like she kills her next bedroom customer in a fantasy role-play, imagining that he's a Mafia boss."

"I think that's what the main concern is, but unless she clubs him with a vibrator, so far she's got no weapons signature on her." Drury nudges me as a familiar-looking lanky youth strolls in carrying a crash helmet. "There's your boy. I'm just going to follow that purple dressing gown and make sure he comes back after his tour of the car-park. See you inside at Maternity later."

I say goodbye, and head into the hospital, keeping a short distance behind Ian Dyer. I'm pleased to see he isn't carrying a pizza box, at any rate.

You could easily be mistaken, walking into the General University Hospital, thinking that it was Blue Lake Shopping Centre. It's got a Border & Butler's food outlet, a jeweller's, a Schmidt's bookshop, and a Tamashii Fashion, although God only knows what in-patients find in there. I think it's for doctors who never get to go home, and instead sleep in lockers and janitorial cupboards, so they can change their clothes into something respectable. If they ever venture out into the real world, when they get a few hours off.

You can tell it's a hospital for sane people suffering from sane people ailments. Mental patients aren't allowed shops on the premises. In fact I don't think they're allowed shops within walking distance. Because we might accidentally buy something, talk to someone, feel more like normal, and blend into the community. Very rarely has the proximity and convenience of shops made me feel like wandering around isolated hospital grounds looking for sharp things and anything combustible, or wonder out of boredom if it's possible to eat a light-bulb. Or what might happen if all the batteries disappeared out of the smoke alarms one day while I was feeling particularly pyrotechnic. It used to happen. Usually when patients wanted to smoke in their bedrooms.

For some reason, even at my most severely crippled psychologically, I always managed to hide my pyromania. To the point of restricting candle use to birthdays, and never owning a box of matches. I think my other personality disorders liked their freedom too much. Freedom to climb trees that weren't on fire, and to drive cars, which is a much more economical use of petrol. Pyromania is like the black sheep of my personality disorders. The one I wouldn't invite to weddings. I don't know what the trigger is exactly, but it's not anger, because anger usually just makes me bid against other people on iBay for stuff I don't want.

I think it's because the first time in my life I remember being allowed to stay up late, was the night my parents had a bonfire and let off fireworks. Loads of their friends turned up, and played loud music, like Santana, Joan Armatrading, The Doors, The Beatles, The Police, Bob Marley, and Hendrix. Quite a lot of them looked at me funny, as if I shouldn't be there, or I was something weird.

It could just be people looking at me funny. I don't know. I have stronger more controlling personality disorders who stop it happening all the time. External reality is finite and limited to actual events, but internal reality is infinite, and unless something accidentally cures all the other personality disorders keeping it in check, my pyromania is pretty much safe. Like my identity, a wildfire is fractal as it grows, and for all I know, any part of my personality could be originated from it. Without it, I might only be the shell of a personality, a hollow and empty figment of nothing. No original spark to start things off.

I wonder to myself at the tail end of this thought process, whether Sparky did the catering for the Newcastle job yesterday, with one of his potential gut-buster Home Economics specials.

Ian heads for the lifts while I take the stairs up to the in-patient wards. Unlike City Central police station, University Hospital is much more light-friendly, with big open-plan staircases, and tinted glass walls on each landing. With a view of the split-level car-park full of patients smoking on one side, and a building site on the other, where they're extending the Thoracic Intensive Care wing, and adding an Acquired Brain Injury specialist long-term unit. A few seagulls hobble carefully along the boarded-out scaffolding, evidently able to smell the kitchens, from the extractor fans and the canteen waste skips in the space between the stairwell and redevelopment site. Tantalizingly close, but hygienically sealed.

Ian has already emerged from the elevator as I reach the summit of the second level, and follow the floor plan directions to Dyer's ward. It's not long before I can find it by ear. There's nothing quite like the sound of grumpy men on a restricted diet, told to stay in bed by nurses who won't get into it with them, or told to get up and walk around when they don't want to. Frustrated is not a satisfying enough description. Doubly thwarted, at the very least.

As I approach the corridor with the single occupancy rooms to the left, and the windows overlooking the building site extension on the right, a large familiar figure in a grey suit emerges from one of them. Shaved head lowered, concentrating on his palm-top internet phone, striding in my direction without looking up. I turn sideways and look out of the window, feeling the draft as he passes behind me and heads straight down the stairs, as if following a walking sat-nav. Heath Gardner paying Dyer a courtesy visit. I don't like bumping into my line managers unplanned, and always try to avoid acknowledgement. I have a body count scroll up in my head of each one automatically when it happens. Gardner, seven to date. It would be more, but he's an office bitch, and rarely out routinely socializing or shopping, to be predictable enough as a good target for a paid hit-man.

He probably had the excuse of Ian arriving to cut short any small-talk, so he could get back to his beloved job.

I stroll towards the room more casually now, seeing that Gardner has left the door wide open, lean on the doorframe, and knock on the inside wall to announce my presence. Ian has just put his crash helmet down on the windowsill, and Terry has a tabloid newspaper on his trolley table, open at the titty pages.

"Is it a bad time?" I greet them.

"Hello, Trouble," Terry greets me in return. "What the Hell are you doing here? I'm going to have to ask for a revolving door, all these visitors. Come in, grab a pew. This is my son, Darren."

"Ian," Ian corrects him. "Darren's bleached his hair. Got a Mohawk. So you can tell us apart."

Terry looks a bit pasty, and his eyes have sunk a little. There's a bowl of stone cold soup on his abandoned tray on the bedside unit, and an empty cup and saucer. He shakes his head and shrugs.

"I got two sets of twins, one lot after the other lot, among all the others," he tells me. "How many kids have you got now, three, four?"

"Just the one," I remind him, trying to make myself comfortable on the fawn-coloured, slippery, padded vinyl chair, as Ian perches on the sill next to his crash helmet.

"Oh yeah. Well, this is one of mine. Useless bunch. Keep telling him to go down the gym so he can build himself up enough to work for me."

"Terry, you've got smaller and skinnier doormen than him on your books," I point out. "You should try meeting more of them in person before you give them shifts. And he's taller than me, anyway."

Ian grins at me and I smile back. Ice broken. I don't know whether he recognises me from the other evening, or if he knows who I am now, but he doesn't look like the kind of person to be bothered about it if he did. His dark hair, tousled from long-term crash-helmet wear, falls low across one eye like a crow's wing.

Terry doesn't show any signs of recalling either of us on his doorstep recently.

"I heard it was a funny turn you had, Terry," I remark. "What was it, karaoke, cabaret - bit of stand-up comedy?"

"Dancing bear?" Ian suggests.

"Dancing bare?" I repeat. "No wonder. You'll get pneumonia doing that sort of thing. Like that poor girl in the newspaper, look at her - they don't even pay her enough to bring her own clothes to pose nude in."

"If you two are conspiring to make me die laughing, my Will's not written yet, so pack it in," Terry says, in surprisingly good humour. "It was a funny turn brought on by angina. Not quite a heart attack. I've been put on aspirin and they've suggested I lose six to eight stone. And they might send a miniature robot down my arteries with a scraper. I don't like the sound of it. You never know where the bits scraped off might end up."

"Or what else the robot might start scraping around in while it's loose inside you," Ian adds. "Could end up with sperm in your brain."

"Oy, son, not with a lady in the room," Terry chides.

"Which one?" Ian demands, looking from the Page Three girl in the newspaper to me, and then back at Terry. Terry frowns, reaches out and turns the page over abruptly. Ian and I laugh. The next page is a double-page spread of eight or nine WAGs on a girly holiday in Antigua. Quite a few have been caught out by paparazzi, topless on the beach.

"Now
that's
more like it. If it wasn't for the women around here, I wouldn't be in this state," Terry grumbles, giving in and slumping back against his pillows. "Oh, Lord, here comes another one."

"Afternoon!" trills a cigarette-thickened voice, and a very tall - easily Terry's own height - sun-bed leathered peroxide blonde enters, wearing grey leopard-print leggings, a black leather coat with press-studs and one of those elasticated hems that resembles an Eighties balloon style, and kitten-heel black courts which click loudly on the washable floor with their metal hobnails. The white blonde hair is in a very retro cheerleader backcombed bob, with a stiffly-lacquered bouffant fringe, mirrored by extra long, extra black false eyelashes, and large gold hoop earrings. She is carrying several plastic bags, including one from Border & Butler's Food downstairs, and dumps them all on the bed upon Terry's feet. She smiles at Ian and I glassily, and it's obvious she has no knowledge of either of us. "Nice to see you have company already! I'm Mimi - Terry's better half."

"My girlfriend," Terry nods glumly. "Miriam, that's my son Brian…"

"Ian," says Ian, shaking hands politely.

"And one of my door staff, Lara."

"Correct," I confirm, shaking the briefly offered hand. Miriam's grasp is hard, dry and cold, and her skin feels slightly raspy, as if from long-term contact with beauty chemicals and hair products.

"Mimi," she says, her voice huskier than a
Coronation Street
veteran. "Only my old dear calls me Miriam. And Terrence here, when he wants to annoy me, bless him. Terry, I knew you wouldn't eat the food here, so I've got you a couple of bagels and a pasta salad, and an éclair, better hide the packaging afterwards, don't want the nasty doctors telling us off…"

Ian's Blueberry rings and he takes it out, smirking at me, while the newcomer clucks and fusses over Terry like the proverbial maternal poultry. His expression barely changes as he checks Caller I.D. before answering.

"Yup," he says. "Right now? Ah, okay. The traffic's a bit crap, have you called Damon or Jason? Sure. No, I'm on my way."

He picks up his crash helmet as he disconnects the call, and puts his phone away.

"Got an emergency call from work," he says. "Short notice despatch job. I'll pop in later tonight when it's quieter, Dad. Nice to meet you, girlies."

"Yeah, later, Kevin," Terry sighs, under a pile of food cartons already.

"Oh, bye, er… goodbye." Miriam barely interrupts herself, fussing over Terry, to acknowledge who's leaving. Ian passes me, and grins darkly before heading off swiftly down the corridor.

"Yeah, I should be off too," I say, looking at the time on my phone and glad to see there are no missed calls. "Hope you're back in the office soon, Terry. Someone has to make sure I get paid."

We shake hands, and I leave him to the mercy of Mimi, and her feeding frenzy therapy. I find it kind of strange that she had to be introduced to his son, so either it's not a very long-term relationship so far, or Terry really does fail to acknowledge his past in his current relationships. In terms of an insight into the microcosm of a spared target's life, away from knowledge of contracts out for them, their near misses, and their life trundling on innocently unaware, it's not particularly inspiring confidence in my job as being anything to do with a greater good. More that it's just about maintaining a law-abiding
status quo
, with no greater good or evil on either side. I feel more sympathy for Ian, the hitherto contract killer, whose father doesn't even know which son he is.