The Silent Ones (23 page)

Dr Chowdray had the blood pressure cuff on her arm and Olivia could feel her pulse beating inside her body. She opened her mouth for him to check her teeth and gums and under her tongue with a small wooden spatula. She saw Tracey watching and caught her eye. Olivia winked at her; she just couldn’t help it. Tracey started and looked away, swallowing nervy saliva.

It was an entertainment of sorts.

Olivia looked at Helen. Her psychiatrist looked right back. ‘You look tired, Helen,’ Olivia said. ‘It’s important not to have too many disturbed nights.’

She didn’t reply. Her expression didn’t change. She was no fun at all.

And then they were off, down the long dirty white corridors of Roehampton, through the safety doors, through more doors, the security buzzers interspersed with the dandy’s talk of his upcoming two weeks in Tuscany, Helen recounting a tale of pasta eaten in a vineyard. Lives lived without fear, self-indulgent and without struggle.

Another door opened and they were in a loading bay, a private ambulance waiting. Alan opened the back door and led Olivia up the steps. He handcuffed her feet to a low rail and Tracey got in beside her. The washbag sat on a shelf near the door. The driver up front revved the engine.

The dandy himself closed the back door and the van braked and swayed over speed bumps as it headed towards the gate.

D
r Faisal Waheed looked down at the rectangle of white chest skin inches below the scalpel he held in his fingers. This was the third pacemaker he had inserted on this shift, and he had one more to do before close of play today. Patients tended to blur one into the next in this job; he saw them only when they were outside the theatre, already lying down on the bed, stripped of their usual clothes, apprehensive and compliant. Bovine, he usually thought. It was easy to put them at ease; the operation was after all quite straightforward.

But obviously this patient was rather different. He had seen the name at the top of the notes, had agreed to allowing the handcuffs that attached her to the bed frame. He should have been unmoved; he had operated on a former Wimbledon tennis champion, a famous actress and a member of parliament or two in his private practice, but that was not what he felt. As he had scrubbed up he had thought of his own daughter. Of course; it would be impossible not to – her charmed life, her privilege that his hard study was paying for. He remembered her at thirteen, in the grey prep school uniform, the violin case in her hand. He had tried to imagine life without her, what that would actually mean, and found he was shaking as he had turned off the tap with his elbow. He had berated himself for his sentimentality as the implement tray had been moved carefully to the other side of the room on instruction from the prison. They were to take no chances. This wasn’t a debate at the Oxford Union. He had signed up to the Hippocratic oath; he was here to do his job and save a life, whatever that life had done to others.

Now Faisal was looking at the monitor where a 3D image of Olivia’s pumping heart was displayed. He had the scalpel in his fingers, handed to him a moment before by the nurse. Below him was the white rectangle of skin in a sea of blue sterile paper where he was to make the first incision. The two assistants, faces half obscured by their masks, were staring too.

Pacemakers were fitted under local anaesthetic, so the patient was still awake, her face now obscured behind a wall of paper. Faisal wondered if she could sense his pause.

‘Looks like an expanded and misshapen left ventricle,’ Dr Mehmet Budak offered.

Faisal wondered whether the Turk was only one generation off the soil himself, whether the superstitions of the Levant were close to his own Pakistani peasant family’s.

He felt ill. Was it too hot in here? He turned to the nurse, who dabbed his forehead as if she understood. Faisal tried to concentrate on the vessel leading into the heart chamber where he was to insert the tiny lead of the pacemaker, but all he could think was that his patient had a twisted heart.

He wanted to be out of here and back with his family more desperately than he had ever wanted anything. His father had slogged to escape from the soil of the Indian subcontinent, had worked like a dog to put his son through an English public school where he was imbued with the classics and turned into a westerner, and one look at the twisted heart of a serial killer and he was thrown back to tribal territory.

Faisal said a silent prayer; not in one language or another, this religion or that, but a personal prayer that his family be protected from witches such as this.

He took a deep breath and made the first incision.

O
rin was standing in Hyde Park, central London, holding a bottle of water in one hand and trying to attach a microphone to his head with the other. The make-up artist was dabbing at his forehead as he tried to get the microphone in the right place.

‘I’m feeling so hot today,’ he said to the woman, who was holding three brushes in one hand. ‘I’ve got a terrible case of the sweats.’

She smiled. ‘I’ve got pancake here that can obliterate anything, babes.’ She dabbed more powder on his nose.

A roadie was unbundling wires that ran across a podium like some impossible child’s conundrum. They had brought in a bigger sound system and it was taking too long to assemble, the roadies bending and lugging equipment and swarming around the stage like ants. It was threatening to rain, and Orin cursed the heavens: he could control almost everything, but not the British weather.

Molly being found, and the discovery of the injuries she had sustained, had made Orin’s rally soar up the news and political agenda and there were several TV interviews planned. He was also gratified to see that a larger than expected crowd had gathered already – and there was still half an hour until they started. It was fertile recruiting ground; the movement always needed new foot soldiers.

Darren Evans had dodged him – he had played the trump card of a sick mother and an operation. The young man was an opportunity Orin needed to incubate. He was teetering, Orin could sense it, and would probably be on board soon.

His secretary came over, holding up an iPad. ‘You need to see this, Orin.’

He pulled off the darned microphone and looked at the screen. The news was out, in black and white in all its horror. The forensic investigators had made their report public. Molly Peters’s bones had been examined and their details were different from what had been reported when she went missing in Brighton in 2002: her thigh bone was a centimetre longer, her shin bone point five of a centimetre. Her teeth also differed from her dental records. Molly Peters had grown three and a half centimetres and gained four new adult teeth in the time between going missing and being killed. There was only one explanation: she had been held captive for at least eighteen months.

In the hour between the first news reports and the start of Orin’s rally, the details burst upon the media in a fury. The suffering of the teenager, the agony of her family, of the other four families, meant that by four o’clock a phone was picked up at Roehampton High-Security Hospital and someone with a sense of personal outrage and in an attempt to right the tremendous wrongs in the world had phoned Orin Bukowski and told him, anonymously and off the record, that Olivia wasn’t even in the high-security psychiatric unit where the press were gathering again, but in hospital, her life being saved by the British taxpayer.

One thing got Orin hotter than injustice and suffering, and that was not being in the know. As he mounted the podium for his ‘Rally for the Missing’, the audience swollen by several thousand people because of the news breaking, Orin did something on a whim.

Behind him fluttered pennants carrying huge photos of the missing women and girls: the five secrets of England. He looked out at the huge crowd, at the thousands of people who had given up their precious time to show their support and their outrage. They were waiting for him to speak, for him to stir them up with his southern Baptist preacher style, his fire and brimstone rhetoric. He remained silent. The distant hum of the West End was all that could be heard.

And he started to cry. His sobs could be heard clearly through the microphone. His secretary came forward, full of concern, but he waved her away. The crowd were mesmerised and horrified. They felt his pain. He sniffed back his tears and he looked out over his followers. He raised his hands in a command. ‘To St George’s!’ he cried, and the crowd screamed back their support.

D
arren was sitting backwards on a chair, resting his chin on its hard edge, staring down at his mum as she dozed in the bed. He could smell the fug from his trainers, wafting up to his nose in the overheated hospital.

To make the time pass quicker before she was released he had kept her company, entertaining her with silly stories and progress on the front of the house; and while she slept he had roamed the building, walking the stairs, corridors and lobbies, checking out the shop and the charity stalls and the gardens and the chapel. He knew the names of the wards, marvelled at the departments with exotic names, examined the yellow X-ray symbols, the shabby chaos of the basements. He spent a lot of time chatting to volunteers and auxiliaries and he became a favourite of the nurses on his mum’s ward, who treated him like a surrogate son. She was making good progress and should be out soon, maybe tomorrow or the next day.

He heard the chanting through the window by his mum’s bed.

He leaned out, understanding in an instant who they were. The Rally for the Missing.

He went to the nurses’ station to find a crowd at the window and tension in the air.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked no one in particular.

People shook their heads, took photos on their phones.

Behind him Darren could hear a TV. He tuned in to it for a moment. Molly’s face filled the screen.

‘Can you imagine?’ said a nurse behind Darren, shaking his head.

‘Terrible,’ agreed another.

Darren turned and stared at them, then back at the screen, which was now showing the spot in Sussex where Molly had been uncovered after lying so quietly for so long. He read the ticker tape flowing past the bottom of the screen. She had been held captive for eighteen months.

They were showing Orin’s rally in Hyde Park: his tears, his big fist thumping down on a lectern, the crowd surging and shouting, the pictures of the women, including Darren’s sister, fluttering in the breeze behind him, like pennants from a medieval pageant.

There was a disturbance in the huddle of people by the television. They could see a live feed of the crowd from the Rally for the Missing swarming in through the entrance of St George’s itself, past the collecting boxes and the Friends table, passers-by gawping.

The worst serial killer of recent times was being operated on – right here in a normal hospital.

People got angry, and angry people do stupid things. A woman on the welcome desk began to block the crowd’s path, trying to shoo them out with exhortations about respect for the sick and the elderly. A security guard was overwhelmed.

Olivia was having an operation, right here in the hospital where his mum lay resting! Images flashed across his mind: the fluid that dripped from his mum’s damaged tissues into the bag by the side of her bed; Molly’s head caved in with something hard; his own scarred heart beating. As he walked over to the nurses’ station the vulnerability of those he loved and how endless suffering could be overwhelmed him. ‘Do not tell her about this,’ he ordered the nurses. ‘Do not wake my mother.’

They all nodded, their eyes already back on the TV, their backs turning away.

Darren looked behind the station at the piles of notes, papers, pens, Post-its, a hairband, an empty cup of tea and a name badge with a barcode security strip at the bottom. He picked up the badge and walked away.

Then he broke into a run.

He was stupid, that was a given, but something had fallen into place. He had wandered the hospital for hours over the past few days, and he had a hunch he knew where they were taking her.

In the empty wing on the second floor the guards outside Olivia’s room got a call. There had been a security breach: protestors were on their way and they were angry as hell.

Alan Brown had been a prison guard for fifteen years, Tracey Young had been one for twelve. They had worked at Roehampton together for five years, and they knew what to do. They swung into action immediately. Tracey called for backup while Alan entered the room and double-checked the prisoner, pulling at the handcuffs that held her to the bed frame to ensure they were secure.

‘What’s happening?’ Olivia was awake and sitting upright.

Alan didn’t bother to answer. ‘Let’s go.’

Tracey nodded.

‘What’s going on?’ Olivia was leaning forward, asking louder this time.

The two prison guards left the room and shut the door.

The corridor outside Olivia’s room had three exits. The first was a door at the far end that led to a staircase. Tracey ran over and tested it again. The door was locked, but that wouldn’t prevent someone with the correct pass opening it from the other side. But there were guards stationed at the bottom of the staircase that led to that door and the protestors were coming from the other direction. Halfway along the corridor was an elevator large enough for beds to be transported to and from theatre. The lift had been programmed remotely so that it was stopped on this floor with the doors open. The weak point was the other door, a swing door at the other end of the corridor, round a right angle. It was the public way into the ward and was manned by two more guards and the attending nurses.

The noise of the protestors was growing louder, fast, and the guards at the swing door needed extra support, but that meant Olivia’s room would be out of view to Tracey and Alan. They had prepared for her trying to escape, not for others trying to get in, and uncomfortable scenarios were beginning to yawn in front of them.