The Silent Ones (7 page)

A security control room was at the end of the corridor and he saw two men in security guard uniforms, one old and one much younger, sitting in the room on swivel chairs.

The older man turned as he pulled the hoover past the open door. ‘Oh, I thought you were Helen,’ the man said when he saw him out in the corridor. ‘Don’t be shy, come in.’

‘Wow,’ Darren said, looking at the banks of TV screens. ‘Quite an operation.’

The older man nodded. ‘I’m Sonny, this is Corey.’

‘Darren.’

‘Have some cake, it’s my birthday.’

‘Happy birthday,’ Darren said as Sonny cut him a slice of the cake that sat on a plate next to a computer keyboard.

‘So, Darren,’ Sonny said, smiling, ‘you been here a long time.’

‘Oh I haven’t really, just a few days—’

He saw Sonny’s face and stopped.

‘I’m only ribbing you, that can seem like a long time in here. Most people don’t last too long.’

‘I don’t know,’ said a voice from the corridor, ‘I’ve been here years.’

A woman whom Darren had seen before in the corridors downstairs came into the room with a card, which she handed to Sonny. She wore an expensive-looking white silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up and she had a short curtain of glossy black hair, which she swept off her face with a twist of her head. ‘Many happy returns.’

‘Dr McCabe, thank you kindly.’

Corey began to cut her a slice of cake, but she shook her head.

‘Darren, this is Dr Helen McCabe,’ Sonny said.

‘But you can call me Helen.’ She smiled at Darren.

‘Darren here is new,’ Corey added.

‘But Darren,’ Sonny sat back and shook his head, like something was a disappointment to him. ‘I no see hair like that even in Kingston, bwoy!’

Corey sniggered. ‘You must have something living in there, cuz.’

Darren smiled shyly and shrugged. ‘People say I hide behind it.’

‘That’s not difficult!’ said Sonny.

‘I’ve made a promise to myself that one day I’ll cut it off.’

‘Sooner would be better, cuz,’ Corey said.

‘Gosh, an English cleaner, how unusual. Darren, where do you live?’ Helen asked.

Darren swallowed a bit of cake to give himself time to think about whether he needed to lie. ‘Streatham.’

‘You live with your family?’ He nodded. ‘Any brothers or sisters?’

Darren froze. All the heads in the room had turned his way, waiting for his answer. Should he tell the truth? He decided on a version of it. ‘I had a sister, but she died. A long time ago.’

Sonny shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s rough,’ said Corey.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, how did she die?’ Helen had her head to one side, her straight shiny curtain of hair hanging down.

‘Leukaemia.’

Helen nodded, like she understood.

Sonny glanced up at the cameras as they automatically switched to different views. Looking up with him, Darren could see the dining hall and the serving counter, where a small queue of inmates stood. He stiffened: Olivia was among them. As if sensing she was being looked at, she turned and stared at the camera. Darren realised he’d taken a step backwards.

‘Well, I have to get on,’ Helen said. ‘Have a good birthday, Sonny. Nice to meet you, Darren.’ She walked out of the room and down the corridor.

Corey pointed at the screen showing the dining hall. ‘Do you think Duvall will ever tell Helen where she put those girls?’ he asked Sonny.

Darren nearly choked on his cake. ‘Helen’s Olivia’s therapist?’

‘Her psychiatrist,’ Sonny replied. ‘And she do management stuff – that’s why she here on a sunny Sunday. Very conscientious is Helen.’

‘If it was me, I’d waterboard her to get her to confess,’ Corey said, putting his shoes up on the desk and relaxing now that Helen had gone. Sonny pushed his feet off.

‘I’d better get back to work,’ Darren said, polishing off his cake. ‘Nice to meet you guys.’ His mind was a whirl as he walked back up the corridor. Helen McCabe. Here was a woman who spent countless hours trying to get inside Olivia’s head.

He walked back to her office but she wasn’t there. He walked in. She drank too much coffee; the several cups on her desk were stamped at the rim with the red lipstick she wore. He put the cups on his trolley, ready to take to the kitchen. He looked around. There were no cameras in her room or in the corridor here. The computer on her desk was password protected. He pretended to dust while looking through her in tray, one eye fixed on the door. There was nothing useful: cost-cutting memos, forms from the Department of Health. The filing cabinets lining the wall were locked and keyless, as they should be. All Olivia’s secrets – all that she had ever felt able to tell, anyway – would be in there.

He became bolder. He pulled on the drawers of her desk and they opened. He rooted around for the filing cabinet key, past a box of Tampax, a spare pair of 10-denier tights and a letter from her lawyer relating to her divorce, but didn’t find it. The desktop held a tube of expensive hand cream, a bottle of Evian, a card from someone called Liz telling her not to let the bastard get you down, exclamation mark! and a yellowing cactus in a pot.

He was cleaning her desk, wiping away the dust and crumbs from her lunches eaten in front of her computer, and wondering where to search next, when she appeared in the doorway.

‘Sorry, do you want me to leave?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘No, I just came to collect something.’

He nodded, picked up her waste bin and emptied it into his trolley bin, waiting to see if she went to open the filing cabinets, but she took a long drink of water from the Evian bottle on her desk and then tipped a little into the cactus.

‘Can I give you some advice?’ She looked taken aback and ready to be suspicious. ‘Your cactus. You’re killing it by giving it too much water. You have to let it get really, really dry.’

She stared at the yellowing spiky thing on her desk for a moment and then she laughed. ‘You’re telling me I have to make it suffer to get it to flourish.’

Darren shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

‘I won’t tell my patients that,’ she grinned.

Darren grinned too, but he was thinking about what Corey had just said. Maybe making Olivia suffer
was
the answer.

T
he heat of summer was building, walls and pavements and cars radiating the warmth of the city and a sluggish wind lazily circulating the heat around. On Monday Darren was at work again, desperate to pick up as many shifts as he could before he was unmasked or forced to leave. Every morning Darren stood outside the cleaning cupboard with the other workers on tenterhooks to see whether Kamal gave him the route that would bring him into contact with Olivia. He couldn’t risk asking for Newman ward because he knew Kamal would immediately become suspicious. Having to be so passive was a torture, and if someone else got allocated Newman ward he had to endure eight hours of mind-numbing boredom in the rest of the hospital. He stood like a condemned man waiting to see what Kamal would dole out.

The heat was making everyone tetchy and irritable.

‘Yassir, you do the offices upstairs,’ barked Kamal, ‘and Darren, you do Newman ward. And today I’m checking every inch of what you clean.’ He wiped a hand across his sweating brow.

Darren tried very hard to look disappointed.

He cleaned the corridors in double-quick time, keen to get to the rec room. A line of women filed past at one point and he feared he would miss her, but when the door was opened for him he could see Olivia standing by the window, feet apart, her baggy elasticated trousers see-through in the sun. The silhouette of her legs and bum was clearly visible. She turned and he could see the swell of her breasts before the effect was lost as a cloud passed over the sun outside.

Darren mopped across the main thoroughfare of the room towards the windows and towards her, passing Linda, parked nearby. She smiled vaguely at him as he mopped under her wheels. Olivia watched him the whole time, unmoving. He ran the mop across the dust on the floor-level runners that opened the plate glass door, should anyone have a key, to the courtyard garden beyond.

‘Walls make people talk. I’ve learned things about you.’

He looked up at her. Olivia’s eyes seemed to glow with flecks of yellow, reflected from the willow tree in the courtyard. He found he couldn’t look away.

He blushed with embarrassment, pulled a cloth from his pocket and began to wipe the window. ‘Oh yeah? Like what?’

‘That you’re an artist, Biological. With a degree and everything.’ She said it quietly, so softly that he had to take a step nearer to hear her. ‘Intelligent. So my question is, why is a bright boy like you cleaning floors in a shithole like this?’

Darren felt his stomach moving unpleasantly. If she had found out that already, then she probably knew he had a dead sister and that he was from Streatham. He began to panic. He had been unbelievably naïve and stupid, to not even consider that casual conversation in the upper offices or from Kamal could get back to her. He met her eye. He had not thought this through, this half-cocked plan to insinuate himself into the world of his sister’s killer; he had never considered that she might discover who he was all by herself – and take his power away from him in one moment.

Her face had turned blank and hard, the soft grins and melodious inflections gone. Her moods were like quicksilver, benign one moment and threatening the next. He had no idea what she knew about him, how much Carly might have told her about her life and her family, how long they had spent together.
I’m trying, Carly,
he said to himself,
I’m trying so hard to get back to you.

‘I’d keep mopping if I were you, they might notice you staring otherwise.’

Darren tried to recover his composure. ‘You think this job is too good for a graduate?’

‘Oh yes, Biological, you’re too good to be true.’

He took a step away, like she was a cobra about to attack, not liking the implications of what she was saying.

‘And then there’s your hair. I imagine it doesn’t get like that without a lot of sun, sea and salt. You’re a surfer or a swimmer aren’t you?’

The gold flecks were back in her eyes now, a come-hither smile on her face.

Darren needed desperately to take control of this conversation, but he simply didn’t know what to say, and stared at her like an imbecile instead.

She sensed his discomfort. ‘What would you bring me in here, if you could?’

‘A noose.’ It was out of his mouth before he had time to consider the consequences and felt for two long seconds that he had blown all his hard work up till now.

But Olivia laughed. Darren took advantage and ventured nearer her with the mop. ‘Actually, I don’t want you to die. Because then those girls will never be found.’

A strange look came over her face and she gazed out of the window at the brilliant summer day she was denied. Her lip curled with disdain. ‘The missing. There are so many of them.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘Cleaner! Move away from the patient please, you’re here to work, not chat.’ A male nurse by the desk was looking over, annoyed.

Darren moved quickly to the low bookshelf filled with tatty paperbacks, frustration overwhelming him.

‘Martyn, I’m just passing the time of day with a new member of the Roehampton family.’

‘Save it, Olivia, I’m not interested,’ Martyn snapped back.

She looked over at Darren and something passed between them. There were so many setbacks and obstructions to his snatched moments with her. He was gathering tiny crumbs from her when he needed to gorge on a big fat cake, but he felt he was getting somewhere, he really felt it.

A
fter Darren had seen Olivia twice in quick succession, she now frustratingly disappeared from view and he didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of her for his next three shifts on Newman ward. At the end of eight hours of back-breaking and mind-numbing corridor-wiping on a hot day he’d put the mop and cleaning tools away, changed back into his civilian clothes and was queuing to get past the last security check before the doors to the car park.

The security checkpoint was airport-style, and beeped if something metal such as a mobile phone, laptop or watch was not put in the plastic trays that went round the side. It was manned most often by Nathan, a security guard and part-time model.

Nathan had already begun to high-five Darren when he saw him at the end of his shift. This afternoon they said hello and Darren realised Chloe was in the queue ahead of him, gathering up her things from the tray.

‘How you doing, Darren, OK?’ Nathan asked him.

‘Yeah great. You?’

‘Surviving.’

‘You know you really look like that actor, Bradley Cooper.’

Nathan’s smile was very white and very charming, but Chloe turned round and rolled her eyes. ‘He gets that
all
the time.’

‘You met Darren yet? This is Darren,’ Nathan said. ‘He’s new.’

Chloe turned towards them both now. ‘Yeah, we met.’ She peered out through the doors into the car park.

Darren had to get her attention before she disappeared for the day. ‘Did you do them mashed or chipped today?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Did you do the potatoes mashed or chipped?’ he said again, feeling lame and awkward.

She smiled cautiously. ‘Both. Nothing but the best for our inmates.’

Nathan was examining the tassels on her bag, listening to their conversation.

‘Do they eat the mash?’ Darren asked.

She looked affronted. ‘Course! That’s all they’re going to get.’

‘That depends on how well you cook it.’

Nathan was running his fingers along a tassel, Darren quite sure he was listening.

‘I’d be a pretty poor caterer if I couldn’t do mashed potato.’

‘It’s hardly
Masterchef
.’

She looked at him, annoyed. ‘Cleaning the toilets here is hardly being a valet at Claridge’s.’

‘Is that where you’d like to work?’