Someone To Save you (14 page)

‘It’s not possible. I’m sorry.’

‘You called the police,’ he said, his forehead creasing in confusion. ‘They questioned me about stealing telephone and threatening your friend.’

Louisa had decided not to go down this route, but so be it.

‘Did you take my telephone, Richard?’

He started weeping.

Louisa tried a different tact. ‘Richard, you said you’re sorry for what you’ve done. What else have you done?’

Richard looked up. ‘I did it for the best.’

Louisa was confused. ‘Did what?’

He closed his eyes. ‘I should have waited for her. I shouldn’t have crossed the road on my own. I wasn’t there when she needed me. The screams, I can hear the screams; they’re getting louder now.’

His mind was blending the past and present again. She wouldn’t get any sense out of him now. The priority was to calm him. ‘Richard you still need time to grieve. What you’ve been through, it takes time to recover, years for people to come to terms with their loss – especially when the event was so traumatic and unjust. What you’ve been through for all these years, the pain has built up and built up. It would take its toll on anyone.’

Richard nodded. ‘I did it for the best.’

This was a new statement; unlike anything he’d said to her in the past. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It was to make everything better,’ he replied cryptically.

‘Richard, you need more support to recover from everything you’ve been through, but I won’t be able to help you anymore. I’m really sorry. But Karl will be there to help you now. He can help you through all this and you will come out the other side, I promise.’

‘No.’

This wasn’t working. Louisa decided it was time to get a little firmer.

‘It’s best that we don’t see each other again,’ she said. ‘And please, Richard, don’t come to my house again. If you do, I’ll have to speak to the police again, and I really don’t want to have to do that. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

‘No, no, no,’ he said, his teeth clenched. ‘I can’t do this anymore.’

And then he produced the knife.

Sam stepped inside the apartment and headed for the kitchen. Making a cup of tea, he thought about what Paul Cullen had said. Maybe this was just a way that Alison was coping with the tragedy. Who knows what state she was in right now, alone, without any support from family. And she was so young to cope with such an event. Cullen was right. He was an obvious person to blame. After all, he had failed to free her mother from the car. Maybe that’s what she had really meant – he was to blame because he had failed to save her mother.

He moved into the lounge with the drink. The house was empty without Anna. Too quiet. She was the one who filled their home with laughter and life. Looking around, he smiled at the slightly scary but exciting thought that in nine months this place would be home to a new arrival.

Sam glanced at his watch. It would be late afternoon in Bangladesh. He wondered how Anna was getting on. He moved into the office room and booted up the laptop. A couple of minutes later he was online, logging into his email account. Maybe Anna had sent a message.

She had. It wasn’t overly long, but it was more than he could have hoped for, given the remoteness of her location and the hectic nature of her task. She had mailed first thing in the morning. The group were set to travel out to a remote rural area just north of the delta region, which had been especially hard hit by the typhoon. The population had been without clean water for days and the situation was grave. Sam smiled at the last sentence.

Lots of love from Anna and Baby Becker the first. Can’t wait to see you very soon! xxx

He replied, leaving out mention of the meeting with Cullen. He would update her when she got back. Hopefully by then Alison would have reappeared, the person would have stopped calling him, and things would be back to normal.

Sam returned to his email inbox and began deleting the half a dozen spam messages that had built up over the past two days. Most were offering him the chance to enhance the size of his penis or claiming that he’d won the lottery.

But one message was different.

Cathy B wants you to check out her profile.

Sam hovered over the title with the cursor. Could this really be a reference to his sister? It was from a sender which screamed spam:[email protected].

He knew it was risky to open such a message. Last year they’d nearly lost their entire hard drive contents thanks to a computer virus that had been delivered by email. But the title was just too tempting.

He opened the message. It repeated the title of the email, but with an accompanying link to a page on a site called Dream Date.

Again, he knew it wasn’t wise to follow the link. But he couldn’t resist. He waited impatiently as the computer connected to the destination site. And then it appeared on screen, and Sam caught his breath.

‘What the hell?’

It was a profile page for his sister Cathy. On the right hand side was her photograph. Her bright smile shone back at him. She was just fifteen years old in the photo. Her life lay ahead of her, or so they had all thought. Sam looked across at the text running beside the photo. It listed her likes as camping, walking on the beach, and late night drinking.

‘Sick bastard,’ he mouthed. ‘Who the hell...’

Her dislikes were listed as “dying young”.

Sam shook his head. He wanted to smash the screen.

There was no more information, apart from a button to click if you wanted to get in touch with her. But when he did, the site asked for registration details.

‘Who the hell would do this?’

Before he could think of what to do next, his phone rang.

It was Louisa.

‘But coming around to my house, you know that’s not right, don’t you? We agreed that there are boundaries – we have to keep a distance outside of the hospital.’

Her voice was low. ‘Louisa, are you okay?’

There was another voice, a man’s, but it was not loud enough to hear.

‘I asked you not to do it, Richard, but you keep coming. Like now, just turning up at my office when you know you shouldn’t do it.’

Sam got to his feet as the horror of the situation dawned. Richard Friedman was at her office. ‘Louisa?’

And then the phone connection went dead.

16

Sam phoned through to the hospital’s main switchboard as he threw open his car door and slid into the driver’s seat.

The hospital’s automated voice recognition system requested a name.

‘Operator.’

He started the engine, resisting the temptation to drive off with phone in hand. It would be difficult enough to concentrate on the road, without trying to deal with a phone conversation at the same time.

‘Calling Operator,’ the system replied.

The phone seemed to ring for ever as Sam continued to fight the urge to just sink his foot down on the accelerator.

‘Hello, Operator speaking.’

At last.

‘Hi, this is Sam Becker. I’m a consultant on the Cardiac Unit. I need you to get security up to the second floor, clinical psychology, right away - Louisa Owen’s office, 2G27. It’s an emergency.’ He injected all the authority he could muster into his voice. The operator needed to be in no doubt as to the seriousness of his demand.

‘Of course,’ the operator replied, her tone recognising the urgency. ‘What’s happened?’

‘A patient has forced his way into her office,’ Sam replied. ‘He’s dangerous. Louisa called me but the phone went dead.’

‘Right,’ the operator said, ‘I’ll call security straight away. I’ll also call the police.’

‘Great,’ Sam said. ‘But get security up there right now.’

Sam neared Louisa’s office, having parked the car in the drop off area right outside the front entrance to the hospital. He wasn’t comforted to see a group of security guards talking to a policewoman, right outside Louisa’s door. It looked like a crime scene.

Maybe he was too late.

The young police officer broke off her conversation as she saw his approach.

‘Can I help you?’

Sam strained to look past the officer towards the door. He couldn’t see if Louisa was in there. ‘Louisa, is she alright? I’m the one who called security; Sam Becker. I’m a close friend.’

‘She’s fine,’ she replied, stepping aside. ‘Go on in.’

Sam nodded, passing through the guards and into the office. Thank God she was okay. Louisa was sat at her desk, talking with a young male officer.

She looked up and smiled weakly. ‘Sam.’

Sam had never been so pleased to see her. She looked exhausted – pale and certainly not her usual self, but at least she was safe. ‘Thank God you’re alright.’

‘I’ll leave you to it for a moment,’ the officer said, rising to his feet and exiting.

Sam sat down. ‘Are you okay?’

Louisa nodded. ‘I am now.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They think he might still be somewhere in the hospital. He left just before security arrived.’

‘It was awful, listening to what was happening on the other end of the phone and not being able to do anything. The things going through my mind; I thought he was going to hurt you.’

‘At one point, so did I.’

‘And when the phone cut out, I thought something terrible had happened.’

‘My battery ran out,’ she admitted. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Sam said, reaching out to her. ‘You did well, using the phone like that - very clever. So what happened? Did he force his way in here?’

Louisa shook her head. ‘He took me by surprise. I had my back to the door, and by the time I realised he was in the room, asking to talk with me. I couldn’t call security, so I thought it was best to just talk to him, try to deal with it the best I could and hope he might just go away. And then I had the idea of calling you.’

‘Why did he want to see you?’

‘For help, I think. He’s really unstable. I’ve never seen him that bad before.’

‘But he didn’t touch you.’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I think he’s more likely to hurt himself. He had a knife.’

‘A knife? But he didn’t threaten you with it?’

‘No. He was just holding it.’

‘And he just left on his own accord?’

Louisa nodded. ‘He virtually ran out of the door - after he said a lot of quite worrying things.’

‘Like what?’

‘He started reliving his wife’s death, telling me that he was responsible. It was like he was standing there, watching it happening. He’s been like that before, but never so agitated. He was angry, mostly at himself, but that’s when I started to think I might be in trouble. Then he said something else. It was about Cathy.’

‘Cathy? What did he say?’

‘He starting talking about her – he knew how she’d died, when she’d died, what she looked like. He was speaking as if he’d known her. And then he was mixing up Cathy with his wife, saying he was responsible for Cathy’s death.’

Sam shook his head in anger. ‘It was him. He’s been researching Cathy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He emailed me, Louisa - sent me a link to a dating site which had a profile of Cathy on.’

‘What?’

‘Did you ask him about the phone calls?’

‘I asked but he wouldn’t answer me.’

‘They’ve got to find him and put a stop to this.’

‘I know. They’ve got all of hospital security out looking for him. People are watching the front entrance with a description. The police are looking too.’

‘I just don’t understand why he’s become so obsessed with Cathy.’

Louisa shrugged. ‘The train crash?’

‘The crash?’

‘He read about you in the news, found out about the connection between me and you, and then did some looking on the Internet. That’s probably how you’ve become caught up in all this.’

‘But why do all this? The phone calls, the threats, the website?’

‘Maybe in his head, his wife’s death and Cathy’s are all messed up together now.’

‘And he blames me?’

‘He blames himself; certainly for Margaret’s death,’ Louisa corrected. ‘Sam, you’ve got to understand that he’s just not rationale anymore. He’s living in another place. It’s hard to empathise. But at the heart of it, he’s grieving, for a loss that he can’t recover from. We can both empathise with that, can’t we?’

Sam nodded, holding Louisa’s gaze. There were tears in her eyes.

‘I still miss her, Sam.’

Sam looked away and fought his emotions. ‘We all do.’ He turned back to face Louisa. ‘He’s got to stop doing this.’

Just then the young male officer re-entered the room. ‘You’re Sam Becker?’