Fall From Grace (43 page)

But why would he do that?

Why had Franks frightened her so much?

I sat there, trying to form the answers. When I couldn’t get a clear view on it, I turned and looked from the money, back in the holdall now, out through the windscreen, and into the darkness.

All I could hear was the unbroken rhyme of the sea.

After changing into my wetsuit, I made sure I had a torch, dry clothes and a drink, zipped up the waterproof backpack and headed down to the beach. The suit had come with a pair of neoprene boots, which provided some relief from the freezing morning air.

At the beach – a gentle sweep of sand about one hundred and twenty feet long, cut into a cliff that ascended eighty feet back up to Brompton Lee – I stopped, making sure I was alone. There was no natural light here, so – checking there was definitely no one around – I used the torch to direct myself down towards the rock, the beach smoothly sloping away to the sea, crabs scuttling off into the darkness as soon as the beam passed them.

A pathway had been smoothed out of the rock by decades of people climbing on it, all the way to its end, forty feet out in the water. Effectively, it had become a natural jetty. I got up on to it, its ridge about ten feet off the sand, then began heading out. Below me, as I passed the waterline, the sea started to slosh and gurgle around me, and I felt its coolness dotting my hands and face. Five minutes later, at the end, I shone the torchlight into the water and could see it was about four and a half feet deep.

I clambered down.

The temperature of the water took my breath away. I’d expected it to be cold but it was still a shock, so I paused there for a moment, adjusting to it – and then I began.

The tide came up to the midway point of my stomach, but the sea was relatively still, the weather benign. To my left, the sky had lightened, the blackness of night giving way to a soft charcoal blur. It was the first hint of morning, an hour and a half before the sun came up, and as the colour changed, so my surroundings became more visible.

The outline of Parl Rock.

The houses of Brompton Lee above that.

And then, finally, the island that lay in the water in front of me.

Part Four

66

At six-forty, I reached the jetty on Keel Point island. My legs were burning, my skin slick with sweat. As I climbed on to it, it rocked gently beneath my weight, and I looked up at what awaited. Hidden in the twilight, most of Bethlehem’s blemishes were concealed – but not all. Beyond two security fences – one a wooden barricade erected after its closure, the other the original mesh fence topped with razorwire – I could see the vast, east-facing wall of windows Annabel had described, three rows deep and twenty panels long.

Moving off the jetty and on to the approach road, I shrugged off my wetsuit and changed into dry clothes and boots. I left the suit hidden in a tangle of bushes, slipped the backpack on and started up. This close to the hospital, the size of the building suddenly seemed more intimidating, its façade reaching up into the shadows of the morning, so big it was almost impossible to take it in. The distant splinters I’d seen in its paintwork, as I’d crossed the causeway, were now huge clefts; the holes I’d glimpsed in its windows and roof – ink blobs from the mainland – were now gaping jaws. Its front was a cathedral of corrosion and memories, channelled into a fractured spire one hundred feet high.

I headed further up the approach road.

Then stopped.

There was a noise.

Beyond the initial wooden barricade, the mesh had started to bow gently. Midway along that, the glass panels in the single, lonely guard tower – twenty feet off the ground, its ladder sawn off at the halfway point – had been used as target practice for stones and debris. The guard tower’s door was no longer secure either, flapping back and forth like a blanket as the breeze rolled in off the channel. Was that what was making the noise?

I heard it again.

Shining the torch into the scrub either side of me, I started wondering whether it might be an animal. It had definitely come from the left the second time. I bent down, arrowing the torch in through the knot of branches and leaves.

Something moved.

I got down even lower, so my face was almost flat to the road, and tried to pick it out. Then I realized: whatever it was, it wasn’t inside the scrub.

It was on the other side of it.

Getting to my feet, I headed back down the road until I was almost at the water’s edge, and moved up the other side of the scrub. For a moment, all the torch picked out were chunks of masonry, strewn among the long grass. As I continued moving, birds scattered, and then an animal shifted. I almost turned my ankle on a hidden cleft. When I slowed, readjusting my footing, something passed the very edges of the light.

I angled the torch back.

Finally, I found the source of the noise.

It was placed right up against the perimeter fence, half covered by grass and dried scrub. As the breeze passed across the island, it rocked gently, sounding a knock as it tapped against the wooden barricade. Two feet to its left, a square had been cut out of the wooden fence with a buzzsaw.

Unevenly, inexactly.

But, unless you were looking for the hole, you’d never find it.

My eyes instinctively drifted above the lip of the barricade, to the rows of windows on the eastern wall. From where I was now, I could see this side of the building more clearly than ever, its glass panels changing colour as day continued to break.

The gentle knocking sound came again.

Knock
.

Knock
.

I looked back to the source of the noise.

In the torchlight, next to the hole in the fence, was a boat.

67

The space was about two feet high by the same wide. I pushed my backpack through to the other side, then scrambled in after it, shuffling beyond the wooden fence on my belly. There was a two-foot gap to the second, mesh fence, but a hole had been cut out of that too. I shuffled through the second space and scrambled up a four-foot grass bank – torch off – to a pathway running parallel to the building. The hospital loomed over me, as if it had suddenly become bigger.

Behind me, the boat’s hull continued to knock gently against the wooden barricade. A seagull squawked in the sky above. Waves lapped at the island.

Otherwise, this place was silent.

I used the grey morning light as my guide. It was just before seven and, out to sea, daylight had begun to stain the horizon, bleeding and spreading. If I’d been watched all the way to the hole in the fence, there was no pretending I wasn’t here. All I could do now was use the darkness that still remained to mask my position temporarily.

I headed around to the front entrance.

Adjacent to the oak doors, the building peeled off into a series of windows, all of them barred from the inside. The approach road became a driveway and formed a circle at the end, which had allowed the tractor-ferry to turn and come back. Above me were the crooked, broken remains of a stained-glass window.

I moved up the steps to the door – and then stopped.

It was already ajar.

Not much, but enough, a thin black line filling the gap between the door and its frame. I placed a hand against it, edging it forward, waiting to see what kind of sound it made. When it made none, I pushed at it again, and this time it made a doughy moan, like the whimper of an injured dog. Along the edge of the door, I could see chisel marks: the wood had splintered, and the lock itself had been removed.

But there was something else.

As the door came to a stop, I became aware of a series of short, familiar clicks – the same sound I’d heard at the house. At my feet, half disguised by the dark, was a thin wire, running out from under the door. Taped to the wall behind it was a small plastic case, like a walkie-talkie, with a series of LEDs. Another makeshift alarm system.

Reynolds
.

He was here.

As I slowly started forward, more of the corridor came into view: medical green walls; endless doors fading into darkness; tiled black-and-white floors, like a domino set. My heart was beating harder, my fingers crushing the flashlight, but after a while an unpleasant smell began to distract me: musty, medicinal, burnt.

There were no windows here.

Only doors.

The nearest one opened up into what must have been an administrator’s office, a windowless space with a desk that had never been removed, and three rows of empty shelves. On the walls had been charts and planners, but they’d long since gone. I closed it, moved on a little way and opened another one: exactly the same layout, except for a series of concentric rings on the ceiling where water was leaking through from above.

I continued forward.

Beneath the soles of my boots, broken pieces of tile cracked and shattered. On the walls, pictures had been removed, leaving bright, unfaded green squares behind. There was nothing else, just paint-peeled walls, shedding like a skin, and light fixtures without lamps or bulbs.

The deeper into the corridor I got, the cooler and darker it became, and the stronger the stench of extinction: the building was decomposing, shutting down, leaking, falling away.

At a bend in the corridor, I stopped and looked back the way I’d come, shining the torch off into the gloom. I couldn’t even see the entrance any more. But then, as I turned back again, something moved in front of me – beyond the cone of the flashlight.

I waited, heart pumping.

No movement.

No sound.

Screw this
.

I switched the torch to its brightest setting, light erupting from it and arrowing off along the corridor. Forty feet down, the corridor split. The right-hand fork carried on into the bowels of the hospital, to the western and southern wings.

The left-hand fork dog-legged east.

I edged forward. The deeper I got, the more unpleasant the smell became. Wet and sour, it stuck to the inside of my nose and throat. When I tried to swallow, it seemed to come back even worse than before. As the smell deteriorated, the darkness got thicker, closing quickly, the spaces beyond the torch like the drapes of an infinite curtain. I could barely see walls four feet from me. Anything ahead of the torch was just a solid block of colour.

Eventually, when I got to the split in the corridor, I felt a murmur of disquiet, a realization that I’d been drawn too quickly into this maze. I thought of the boat out front, the alarm system, the knowledge that Reynolds was
here
, waiting, watching, and it was like the air changed around me. It started to hum with a threat I was blind to, the memories of this place awakening, as if its ghosts were brushing past my body. When I tried to listen for any sound, any giveaways, there was nothing. Literally, no sound at all.

No dripping. No echoes.

What kind of place makes no sound at all?

Suddenly, something moved.

I brought the torch up from my side and directed it along the eastern corridor. More doors, all identical. The same pale green walls. The same black-and-white tiled floor.

But at the end was a lift.

Next to that was a staircase.

A shadow flickered on the wall next to the staircase, there and then gone again. At first, I thought it was the light from my torch, shadows forming and shifting as its glow pointed along the corridor. Then I became less sure. My stomach curdled as I subtly moved the torch from left to right.

The shadows on the stairs didn’t change.

I couldn’t affect them from here.

But someone on the next floor up could.

68

I started up the stairs, keeping the torch angled down. Above me, for the first time, soft grey light spilled into the stairwell, on to the paint-blistered walls and railings. There was a thin layer of dust everywhere too, sheets of it, of plaster and shattered glass, all glinting under torchlight as if it were a covering of frost.

At the top, I paused, leaning out into the corridor. One way was nothing but a void: impenetrable, indefinite, like a coalface. In the other direction, the hallway ran for about one hundred and twenty feet, its design on repeat: ward after ward, set behind identical glass-panelled doors, most of which were pulled shut.

Most, but not all.

A few of the doors had swung open, revealing partially lit interiors. I could see the outlines of bed frames, some upright, some on their sides, some at a diagonal. In the doorway of one ward, a thin metal IV stand stood sentry, and I recalled one like it in Reynolds’s photo. Just inside the doors of another, a bedside cabinet was tipped over. But one pattern was repeated over and over: each of the rooms had some form of light coming in.

Because these wards look out over the water
.

This was the wall of windows.

I directed the torch in the opposite direction, where it was darker. There were no wards, just doors. Here, the hospital’s decline seemed to be faster and more effective, as if being in constant shadow had accelerated its decay.