The Key

16

Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

There were grey smudges on the handle and the side pocket of Liv’s holdall, graphite powder traces of the forensic scrutiny it had been under.

Inside it was like a time capsule from a previous life: clothes, toiletries, pens, notebooks. She tipped everything out on to the bed, shaking her laptop free from where it had sunk to the bottom. It too bore traces of graphite powder and smelled faintly of the glue fumes they used to raise prints. She hit the power key but nothing happened. The police techs had obviously snooped through her hard drive and run the battery down in the process. She had a power cable, but it had a North American plug on the end, no good for Southern Turkish sockets. She turned the bag round and opened the side pocket. To her surprise, her passport was still inside. She took it out and stared at the scuffed blue cover with the Great Seal in the centre and the words United States of America written below. She had never considered herself to be especially nationalistic or sentimental before, but seeing it now made her want to cry. She so desperately wanted to go home.

The next two things she found did little to help her fragile emotional state. The first was a set of keys. She remembered locking the door to her apartment and dropping them into the bag as she dashed for the cab waiting to take her to the airport. The second was a paper wallet with 1-Hour Foto written on the side. Inside was a collection of glossy prints taken on a daytrip to New York. They showed a younger version of herself and a tall, blond man who looked just like her. It was the last time she had seen her brother Samuel alive. She stuffed them back inside the wallet before emotion overcame her and looked at the small piles of her old life spread across the bed, trying to shake their sentimental meanings and see them instead as a kit of parts to help her escape.

She had enough clothes but no cash, and her credit cards had been maxed out buying her plane ticket over here. Then there was the small matter of the priest and the cop keeping guard in the corridor. If she could create a diversion, she could maybe slip from the room while they were distracted. She thought about the medical staff that came by on their regular rounds. Perhaps one of them might help her, though with the ever-present priest in the room she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to subtly broach the subject, let alone communicate some kind of workable plan. The staff had probably all been vetted anyway and told to report any clandestine contact.

She slid out of bed, careful not to tip her belongings on to the floor, and padded over to the window. The sudden brightness behind the worn blind made her squint, but what lay outside was no help. There was a sheer four-storey drop to the cobbled street below and a tantalizing view of a fire escape snaking down the building opposite. There was also the ominous and unsettling sight of the Citadel, rising above the rooftops and darkening the horizon like a watchful sentinel. She returned her attention to the room, taking stock again of everything it contained, weighing up each item for its possible value in helping her get out.

Apart from the TV and the bed there was very little else: a small table with a plastic cup and a jug of water on it; a row of switches above the bed, a plastic sleeve fixed to the wall containing her medical notes. An emergency alarm cord dangled from the ceiling with a red handle on the end, large enough for a flailing hand to grab. Liv considered what would happen if she pulled it. She had heard the response to other alarms in the last few days, voices and footsteps rushing to surrounding rooms. But although the noise and confusion might create enough of a smokescreen to distract the priest for a moment, all the attention would be on her, and it would be almost impossible to speak or pass a note to anyone without being spotted. She had to think of another way.