Lost

6

There are police patrolling the corridors, interviewing staff and taking photographs. I can hear Campbell berating some poor doctor about hampering a police investigation. He makes it sound like a hanging offense.

The morphine is wearing off and I'm shaking. Why would someone want to kill me? Maybe I witnessed a murder on the river. Maybe I shot someone. I don't remember.

Campbell opens the door and I get a sense of déjà vu—not about the place but the conversation that's coming. He takes a seat and gives me one of his ultra-mild smiles. Before he can speak I ask about Maggie.

“She's in a room downstairs. Someone gave her a broken nose and two black eyes. Was it you?”

“No.”

He nods. “Yeah, that's what she said. You want to tell me what happened?”

I go through the whole story—telling him about “Fireman Sam” and the wheelchair sprint down the corridor. He seems happy enough with the details.

“What did the cameras pick up?”

“Sod all. He blacked out the lenses with spray paint. We got one image from the nursing station but no face behind the mask. You didn't recognize him?”

“No.”

He looks disgusted.

“I'm convinced this has something to do with Mickey Carlyle,” I tell him. “Someone sent a ransom demand. I think that's why I was on the river—”

“Mickey Carlyle is dead.”

“But what if we got it wrong?”

“Bullshit! We got it right.”

“There must have been proof of life.”

Campbell knows about this. He's known all along.

“IT'S A HOAX!” he rasps. “Nobody believed any of it except you and Mrs. Carlyle. A grieving mother I can understand—but you!” His fingers curl and uncurl. “You were the officer in charge of a successful murder prosecution yet you chose to believe a hoax that cast doubt on the outcome. First you ordered a DNA test and then you went off half-cocked like some maverick Hollywood vigilante and got yourself shot.”

Campbell is close now. I can see the dandruff in his eyebrows. “Howard Wavell murdered Mickey Carlyle. And if that sick, perverted, murdering son of a bitch walks free because of you, there won't be a police officer in the Met who will ever work with you again. You're finished.”

A deep continuous vibration has built up inside me, like the sound of a ship's engine deep within a hull.

“We have to investigate. People died on that boat.”

“Yeah! For all I know, you shot them!”

My resolve is disintegrating. I don't know enough details to argue with him. Whatever happened on the river was my fault. I stirred up something poisonous and nobody wants to help me.

Campbell is still talking. “I don't know what you did, Vincent, but you made some serious enemies. Stay away from Rachel Carlyle. Stay away from this. If you jeopardize Wavell's conviction—if I hear so much as a mouse fart from you—your career is finished. That's a cast-iron fucking guarantee.”

He's gone then, storming down the corridor. How long was I unconscious, eight days or eight years? Long enough for the world to change.

The Professor arrives, his cheeks red from the cold. He hovers in the doorway as though waiting for an invitation. Behind him I see Ali sitting on a chair. She is now officially my shadow.

There are metal detectors being installed in the lobby and my medical personnel are being screened. Maggie isn't among them. I am responsible.

Although I've been over it a dozen times with detectives, I don't mind talking to Joe about the attack because he asks different questions. He wants to know what I heard and smelled. Was the guy breathing heavily? Did he sound scared?

I take him on a guided tour, showing him where the fight took place. Ali stays two paces away from me, scanning the corridors and rooms.

Leaning on my crutches, I watch Joe do his mad professor routine, pacing out distances, crouching on the floor and studying angles.

“Tell me about the gas leak.”

“One of the delivery drivers noticed the smell first but they couldn't find the source. Someone opened up a valve on one of the feeder pipes from the gas tanks near the loading docks.”

Joe kicks at the ground as though trying to make it even. I can almost see his mind moving forward and backward as he tries to reconstruct what happened.

Out loud now, he says, “He knew his way around the hospital but he didn't know which room you were in. Once he evacuated the floors there was nobody to ask.”

Joe turns and strides down the corridor. I struggle to keep up without overbalancing. He stops beneath a CCTV camera and reaches toward it as if holding a spray can. “He must have been about six two.”

“Yeah.”

He continues to the nursing station, eyes darting over the long narrow counter and kitchenette. There are clipboards hanging on a wall. Each one corresponds to a patient.

“Where did you find Maggie?”

“On the floor.”

Joe drops to his knees and then lies down, with his head toward the sink.

“No, she was lying this way, with her head almost under the desk.”

Jumping to his feet, he stands facing the clipboards and half closes his eyes. “He was looking at the clipboards to find your room number.”

“How do you know?”

Joe crouches and I follow his outstretched finger. There are two black smudges on the baseboard made by the heels of the fireman's boots. “Maggie came up the corridor. She was coming back to get you. He heard her coming and he stepped back to hide . . .”

I can picture Maggie bustling up the corridor, admonishing herself for being late.

“As she passed the doorway, she turned her head. He struck her with his elbow across the bridge of her nose.” Joe tumbles to the floor and lies where she fell. “Then he went to your room but you had already gone.”

All this sounds reasonable.

“There is something I don't understand. He could have killed me right away, here in the corridor, but he collected a wheelchair and tried to push me down the lift shaft.”

Still lying on the floor, Joe points past my shoulder at the CCTV camera. “It's the only one he didn't black out.”

“It didn't matter, he wore a mask.”

“Psychologically it made a big difference. Even with his face hidden, he didn't want to star in a home movie. The footage was evidence against him.”

“So he took me out of view.”

“Yes.”

Joe is thinking out loud now, unaware of his twitches and trembles. I follow him down the corridor to the stairs. He pauses, puzzled by something.

“The gas leak was part of both plans,” he announces.

“Both plans?”

“One for outside and one for inside . . .”

I don't understand. Joe motions for me to follow him and waits for me to climb two flights of stairs. We reach a heavy fire door and emerge onto a barren rectangle of bitumen, the rooftop of the hospital. A gust of wind slaps me in the face and Joe grabs my shirtfront to steady me. A big-bellied gray sky hangs overhead.

Circular ducts and metal air-conditioning plants punctuate the bitumen. A low brick wall with white capping stones marks the outside edge of the building. A wire security fence is attached, curling inward before being topped with barbed wire.

Joe slowly walks the perimeter, occasionally glancing at surrounding buildings as though adjusting his internal compass. When he reaches the northeast corner of the building, he leans close to the fence. “You see that park down there—the one with the fountain?” I follow his gaze. “That's the evacuation meeting point. Everyone was supposed to meet there when they emptied the hospital. You were supposed to be with them. There is no way they could have known you were going to be left inside.”

We are both on the same page now. “Perhaps he was supposed to hide in my room and kill me when I came back.”

“Or they were going to kill you outside.”

Joe drops onto his haunches, studying the thin layer of soot on the capping stones. It's the same black film that settles on everything in London until the next shower. Three penny-size circles smudge the surface. Joe swings his eyes to the ground where two larger smudges appear beneath the wall.

Someone knelt here and rested a tripod on the wall—a lone sniper with a finger on the trigger and his eyelashes brushing the lens, studying the park below. The hair on my forearms is standing on end.

Fifteen minutes later the rooftop has been sealed off and a SOCO team is at work, searching for clues. Campbell is smarting about being shown up by a clinical psychologist.

Joe takes me downstairs to the canteen—one of those sterile food halls with tiles on the floor and stainless steel counters. Cedric, the guy in charge, is a Jamaican with impossibly tight curls and a laugh that sounds like someone cracking nuts with a brick.

He brings us coffee and pulls a half bottle of Scotch from the pocket of his apron. He pours me a slug. Joe doesn't seem to notice. He's too busy trying to fill in the missing pieces.

“Snipers have very little emotional investment in their victims. It's like playing a computer game.”

“So he could be young?”

“And isolated.”

True to form, the Professor is more interested in why than who; he wants an explanation while I want a face for my empty picture frame, someone to catch and punish.

“Aleksei Kuznet visited me last night. I think I know why I was in the river. I was following a ransom.”

Joe doesn't bat an eyelid.

“He wouldn't tell me the details, but there must have been proof of life. I must have believed Mickey was still alive.”

“Or wished it.”

I know what he's saying. He doesn't think I'm being rational.

“OK, let's ask ourselves some questions,” he says. “If Mickey is alive, where has she been for the past three years?”

“I don't know.”

“And why would anyone wait three years to post a ransom demand?”

“Maybe they didn't kidnap her for ransom, not at first.”

“OK. If not for ransom, why?”

I'm struggling now. I don't know. “Maybe they wanted to punish Aleksei.”

It doesn't sound convincing.

“It sounds like a hoax to me. Someone close to the family or to the original investigation knew enough to convince desperate people that Mickey might still be alive.”

“And the shootings?”

“They had a falling out or someone got greedy.”

It sounds so much more rational than my theory.

Joe takes out his notebook and starts drawing lines on the page as if playing hangman.

“You grew up in Lancashire, didn't you?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“I'm just asking a question. Your stepfather was an RAF pilot in the war.”

“How do you know that?”

“I remember you telling me.”

“Bullshit!”

A ball of anger forms in my throat. “You're just itching to get inside my head, aren't you? The Human Condition—isn't that what you call it? You got to watch out for that bastard.”

“Why do you keep dreaming about missing children?”

“Fuck you!”

“Maybe you feel guilty.”

I don't answer.

“Maybe you blocked it out.”

“I don't block things out.”

“Did you ever meet your real father?”

“You're going to have trouble asking questions with your jaw wired shut.”

“A lot of people don't know their fathers. You must wonder what he's like; whether you look like him or sound like him.”

“You're wrong. I don't care.”

“If you don't care, why won't you talk about it? You were probably a war baby—born just afterward. A lot of fathers didn't come home. Others were stationed overseas. Children get lost . . .”

I hate that word “lost.” My father didn't go missing. He isn't lying in some small part of France that will forever be England. I don't even know his name.

Joe is still waiting. He's sitting there, twirling his pen, waiting for Godot. I don't want to be psychoanalyzed or have my past explored. I don't want to talk about my childhood.

I was fourteen years old the first time my mother sat down and told me about where I came from. She was drunk, of course, curled up on the end of my bed, wanting me to massage her feet. She told me the story of Germile Purrum, a Gypsy girl, with a “Z” tattooed on her left arm and a black triangle sewn into her rags.

“We looked like bowling balls with sticky-out ears and frightened eyes,” she said, nursing a drink between her breasts.

The prettiest and the strongest Gypsy girls were sent to the homes of the officers in the SS. The next group were used in camp brothels, gang-raped to break them in and often sterilized because the Roma were considered unclean.

My mother was fifteen when she arrived at Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in the Reich. She was put to work in the camp brothel, working twelve hours a day.

She didn't go into details but I know she remembered every one of them.

“I think I'm pregnant,” she slurred.

“That's not possible, Daj.”

“I haven't had my monthly days.”

“Have you been to see the doctor?”

She looked at me crossly. “Esther tried to make me bleed.”

“Who is Esther?”

“A Jewish angel . . . but you clung to my insides. You didn't want to leave. You wanted so much to live.”

Daj was talking about me. I knew this part of the story.

She was three months pregnant when the war ended. She spent another two months looking for her family, but they were all gone—her twin brothers, her mother, her father, aunts, uncles, cousins . . .

At a displaced persons camp near Frankfurt, a young British immigration officer called Vincent Smith told her she should emigrate. The United States and England were taking refugees if they had identity papers and skills. Germile had neither.

Because nobody would take a Gypsy she lied on the application form and said she was Jewish. So many had perished it was easy to get identity papers in someone else's name. Germile Purrum became Sofia Eisner, aged nineteen instead of sixteen, a seamstress from Frankfurt—a new person for a new life.

I was born in a rain-swept English town in a county hospital that still had blackout curtains on the windows. She didn't let me die. She didn't say, “Who needs another white-haired German bastard with cold blue eyes?” And even when I rejected her milk, puking it down her open blouse (another sign, perhaps, that I was more of him than her), she forgave me.

I don't know what she saw when she looked in my eyes: the enemy, perhaps, or the soldiers who raped her. I looked as though I owned the world, she said. As though everything in creation would be recast or rearranged to suit me.

I don't know who I am now. I am either a miracle of survival or an abomination. I'm part German, part Gypsy, part English, one-third evil, one-third victim and the other third angry. My mother used to say I was a gentleman. No other language has such a word to describe a man. It's a paradox. You can't claim to be such a thing but you hope others see you that way.

I look up at Joe and blink away the past. I've been talking all this time.

His voice is softer than mine. “You're not responsible for your father's sins.”

Yeah, right! I'm angry now. Why did he start me out on this? I don't want any of his airy-fairy, touchy-feely, Pollyanna-pass-the-tissues psychological crap.

We sit in silence. I'm through with talking. My nightmares march in jackboots and are best left alone.

Joe stands suddenly and begins to pack his briefcase. I don't want him to go now.

“Aren't we going to talk about the ransom?”

“You're tired. I'll come and see you tomorrow.”

“But I remembered some of the details.”

“That's good.”

“Isn't there something you can tell me; something I should be doing?”

He looks at me quizzically. “You want some advice?”

“Yes.”

“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”

Then he's gone.