The Crooked Letter (5 page)

Hadrian drifted through it all in a haze, wishing he could sleep and bury the grief under empty hours. He felt purposeless and lost, and very alone. Yet being alone gave him a strange sense of safety, as though social isolation could protect him from a very physical attacker. If Locyta came looking for him in the hospital, he doubted that simply turning his back on him would afford any real protection.

Lascowicz hadn’t let on whether they knew where Ellis was or not, and Bechard claimed not to know either. Hadrian listened for her voice in the hard-edged ambience of the hospital, but heard nothing. He sometimes felt Seth just on the edge of his consciousness, as he had all his life, but that had to be an illusion. Seth was dead, which made Hadrian like an amputee flexing a ghost-limb — except the limb happened to be his entire brother, not just a piece of him.

As the sun moved across the sky outside, the light faded to grey. When Bechard next appeared to check his temperature, Hadrian sat up and took the orderly’s arm.

‘How long am I going to stay here? When will someone contact me?’

‘The detective is a busy man,’ Bechard reassured him, smelling strongly of soap. ‘If he’s left you here, it’s to undertake important business. He’ll be back. You haven’t been forgotten.’

Hadrian had no reason to mistrust the orderly, but Bechard’s lingering green gaze gave him no assurance at all.

‘Is he going to look for the man who killed my brother?’

‘I don’t know what he’ll do, but I suppose it’ll be what’s necessary. Please, rest. For the moment, everything is out of your hands. Dinner’s running late tonight, but I’ll see if I can get you something to drink. You must be exhausted.’

‘How can I sleep when the man who killed my brother is walking free?’

‘If you want him to stay that way, the best thing you could do is obstruct the police. No?’

Hadrian warred with the instinct to make a fuss. But Bechard was making sense. Hadrian needed the cooperation of the police if he was to see justice done, and he would wait a little longer to ensure that it was.

From spy novels to a crime thriller. He wished he could go back to the erotic journey of self-discovery he had hoped his holiday would be.

‘You’re better off in here, if you want my opinion.’ Bechard shook his head, as though waking from a daze, and made a note on the clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. ‘It’s crazy outside.’

‘Why? What’s going on?’

‘No one knows. Nothing’s working. Power, the phones, trains, Internet — they’re all messed up. Some people think the government’s behind it, that they’re trying to keep something secret, but that doesn’t feel right to me. It’s more likely to be good old incompetence.’ The orderly shrugged. ‘I’m staying here until things calm down.’

The orderly hurried off to attend to another patient. Dispirited, Hadrian sank back onto the mattress and pulled the covers up to his chin. The news that Stockholm was in as bad a state as he was didn’t help. Sadness rose over him like a cowl. More than anything, he wanted to call home, to hear a familiar voice.
Your brother is dead.
Did their parents know yet? Did they know Hadrian was still alive?

And Ellis. Where was she? Was she safe? Did she think he was dead too?

A murmur of voices teased him as Bechard talked to someone outside the ward. Beyond that, in the distance, he heard what sounded like a crowd at a football match: the mingled throats of thousands of people all shouting at once. Shouting, or screaming.

He didn’t know if they played football in Sweden, and he supposed it didn’t matter much.

Bechard returned with a glass of warm orange juice and placed it on the table next to his bed. Hadrian’s mouth was dry and his throat still raw from the chokehold. The bitter taste of the juice reminded him of happier times, of breakfasts and fruit-picking during the holidays. Tears came again, and he was glad to be secluded with his grief.

* * * *

An unknown time later, Hadrian sat bolt upright, clutching the bed, totally disoriented. His heart shuddered in his chest. Adrenaline gave everything around him a cold, brilliant clarity. The cotton weave blanket was rough under his fingertips and the air cold against his skin. Moonlight angled in a sharply-defined rectangular block from a window on the far side of the curtain. There was no other light at all.

He forced himself to breathe. The knowledge of where he was — and what had happened to him — gradually returned. He felt like a skier swallowed up in an avalanche, unable to evade each crushing revelation as it came. If only they had gone somewhere other than Europe, he thought. If only they had listened to Ellis about the Swede. Now, because they hadn’t, he would always be on his own.

The weird thing was, he didn’t
feel
alone ...

‘You were dreaming,’ said a voice out of the darkness.

He jumped. ‘Who —?’ He choked back the question as the broad silhouette of Detective Lascowicz eclipsed the moonlight. ‘What?’

‘You were dreaming. Do you remember?’

Hadrian struggled through the shock to recall. If the detective had come to him in the middle of the night, it had to be important.

‘There was a pit, a gulf. Everything was dark and upside-down. There were — things — with giant lobster claws chasing me. I could smell smoke, and hear lions roaring ...’

He stopped in sudden embarrassment, feeling the detective’s eyes on him. Other people’s dreams were not to be taken seriously.

‘That’s all,’ he lied, although there was much more: a gold-skinned demon running under a sky full of shooting stars; a landscape as tortured and twisted as a First World War battlefield; and Seth, alone and afraid, just as he was.

‘I am not here to talk about your dreams,’ Lascowicz said, ‘although they do interest me.’ His manner was tense, tightly contained. ‘Locyta. The Swede. You said he spoke to you. Can you remember what he said?’

‘Something about our time coming. I already told you that.’

Lascowicz nodded impatiently. ‘Yes, yes. Was there more?’

‘It was in Swedish. I didn’t understand it.’

‘Did he ever use a word that sounded like “Yod”?’

Hadrian was about to repeat, angrily, that he wouldn’t remember a single word — when he realised that this one did strike him as familiar. The Swede had babbled something just before stabbing Seth in the chest. The stab itself had coincided with the sound Lascowicz was asking about.

‘Yod,’ he said, nodding. ‘Yes. He did say that. What does it mean? Is it significant?’

The detective stood. Moonlight caught his face. Eyes and teeth gleamed silver.

Hadrian froze. Something had changed in the detective since their first meeting. He was taciturn, almost hostile. And he stank of dog.

That wasn’t unreasonable, he told himself. If Lascowicz had been working all day without rest, abruptness was the best he could expect. And police everywhere employed tracker dogs. There was no reason to feel unnerved.

Yet he did. Something was different. He could feel it.

‘I don’t know,’ Lascowicz said in answer to Hadrian’s question. His voice shook. ‘I think that it might be significant, but my thoughts do not make sense. I feel — I feel as though I am waking from a long, deep sleep, as you just did. I see things. I hear voices that tell me everything I knew before was a dream. I am —’ The detective hugged himself. The sound of his breathing was loud in the darkness.
I
am on fire.’

Hadrian didn’t know what to say or do. Every muscle in his body was rigid, responding to the passion he heard in Lascowicz’s voice.

‘Wait here.’

The detective moved suddenly, launching himself through the curtains as though a bomb had gone off under him. His footsteps ran down the length of the ward. The door slammed heavily behind him.

The echoes of the slam dropped like a stone into a bottomless lake. Hadrian waited for his fellow patients to complain about the noise. And waited ...

Within a dozen breaths, the strange encounter was overtaken by another strangeness entirely — one of absence, not presence.

It was quiet in the ward. Too quiet, he realised. He could hear no snoring or breathing of the other patients in the ward. The man with the broken leg was wordless for once.

Uneasily, Hadrian pulled back the blanket and slid his bare legs off the bed. Standing in nothing but his boxer shorts, he took stock of his surroundings in the dim moonlight. There was the bedside table, there the end of the bed. The chair was well out of the way, where Lascowicz had sat. He put on the hospital robe, and shivered.

‘Hello?’ His voice wavered from the tiled walls. ‘Is anyone awake?’

No answer.

He padded softly around the bed to the gap in the curtains. The jingle of the rings securing it to the rail above sounded very loud as he peered out at the room beyond. The other five beds also had their curtains closed. The window through which the moonlight shone was at one end of the ward; at the other, the double door leading to the hallway was closed.

‘Hello?’ he called again. Still no sound. With a whisper of fabric, he slipped through the curtain and darted across the room, into the space between the berth opposite his and the one next to the window, where the man with the American accent had been sleeping. He felt for the gap in its curtains and stuck his head through.

The bed was empty. The sheets were pulled back, as though the man occupying it had got up to go to the toilet. Hadrian withdrew his head and tried the berth next door, only to find it in a similar state. Increasingly mystified, he checked all the berths. They were all unoccupied.

Apart from himself and the moonlight, the ward was empty.

His disquiet grew upon realising that the silence around him extended beyond the walls of his ward. He crept closer to the door and pressed his ear against it, irrationally afraid of it bursting open in his face. The corridor outside was as still as the grave. No rattling of trolleys and the chattering of nurses and orderlies. Even the air conditioning had let up.

When he touched the door, intending to peer outside, it didn’t budge. It was locked.

He raised a hand to hammer on it, then lowered it to think. The door wasn’t just locked; he was
locked in.
Lascowicz would only have done that because he thought Hadrian was either guilty or in danger — but why not tell Hadrian in either case? Why leave him literally in the dark?

He tried a light switch. It was dead. The generator appeared to be out again.

Something was going on. Feeling trapped and frustrated, Hadrian crossed to the window. He didn’t want to wait around to be arrested or attacked without knowing why. The glass was smoky and dirty, but a pane shifted under his hand, and he managed to open it a fraction. Cool air greeted him, but not as cold as he had expected given the frigid weather in Stockholm. No rumble of traffic came from the street.

He craned his neck to see the ground below. A stone ledge blocked his view. He was quite high up, maybe five storeys, and the buildings around him were dark. A smell of smoke came faintly on the wind, sharp and acrid, as though something other than wood was burning. The moon was almost full, he noted — putting the date within a day or two of the attack on him and his brother — and by its light he made out roofs, pipes, chimneys and fire escapes. The skyline was a jagged toothscape silhouetted against the stars. Two slender skyscrapers dominated the view, but he didn’t recognise either of them.

He tried to push the pane wider. It wouldn’t give. That was lucky, he told himself, because the thought of crawling through it and dropping to the ledge below made his bowels turn to water. Being trapped inside was no good either, though. He had to find a way out that didn’t involve further risk to life and limb.

* * * *

Before Hadrian could think of one, he heard footsteps approaching the door. His first instinct was to get back into bed so no one would know that he had been out of it. A flare of resentment put paid to that possibility. He wasn’t going to wait quietly for whatever was going to happen to him. That would get him nowhere. It could be the murderous Locyta returning to finish the job he had started.

The footsteps reached the door and stopped. Keys jingled softly. Hadrian moved quickly up the centre of the room and ducked out of sight behind the curtain closest to the door.

The doors opened with a sigh, admitting a wash of soft yellow light that seemed bright to his dark-accustomed eyes. He shrank back into the shadows as two people stepped into the room, one large and the other slight. He recognised them instantly: Detective Lascowicz had returned with the orderly Bechard. They moved with heavy steps into the room.

He held his breath and asked himself what Seth would do. Would he reveal himself, or run? His brother wasn’t one to take anything lying down, given a choice, but getting out of the room would solve only part of Hadrian’s problem: he had no clothes, no passport, no money, and not the slightest idea where he was. Who was going to help a panicked tourist in his underwear and a gown made of little more than tissue paper?

You’ll just have to look out for yourself,
he imagined Seth saying.

Lascowicz and Bechard reached the curtain surrounding his bed.

On shoeless feet, Hadrian slipped around the curtain’s edge and toward the door. He fought the urge to run. One sudden move or misstep would ruin everything. Peering around the jamb, he found the corridor beyond long and empty, lit only by moonlight from open windows. Darkness crowded each patch of light, giving the view a strange perspective. The elevator doors at the far end were dead. The police officer who had been there earlier was gone.

* * * *

Hadrian put the ward behind him just as Bechard raised his hand to open the curtain.

‘Wait,’ said the detective, his voice deep and guttural. ‘I smell —’

A window shattered with a sound like night itself breaking. Bechard yelled and Hadrian heard scuffling feet on linoleum. He didn’t stop to find out what was going on. He just ran, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the ward while Lascowicz and Bechard were distracted.