The Reckless Engineer (31 page)

Sally bought a small drinks refrigerator for the garage. In it she stored the three boxes of Cavalier chocolates she had carefully injected with the cyanide. She took three small vials and carefully put some of the poison in each and sealed them. Then she sealed them in a freezer bag each and them stored under the driver’s seat of her Golf.

Sally did all this in a state of distress and rage, imagining herself to again be in her silicon laboratory working complex electronics. She then cleaned up, drank a beer, and fell asleep for twelve hours.

When she woke up she told herself again that this was crazy. She had just been working out her stress and despair. She took another day off to go sailing. The next day she went back to office and put in a sick note for the days she had missed. She tried her best to keep her head down, focus on her work, and forget about it. In the evenings she put in applications to other vacancies.

As soon as she arrived at work on Friday the 8
th
of October she was called into a meeting room on the ground floor and made to wait a good half hour before Jack walked in with Michelle. Jack handed her a notice in an envelope that AirWater Marine was terminating her appointment with immediate effect due to misconduct.

Sally froze with fear. Had they found out what she had been doing in her garage? That was impossible. She had done nothing outside her garage and the garage has been secured with a massive padlock.

‘What misconduct? Jack, might I speak to you alone?’

‘No, Michelle is here to take notes for HR. It’s about the letters that you have been writing to my family.’

‘What letters? Please, Jack, I need this job for my visa. Can we talk to Alan?’

‘Alan has approved this dismissal,’ Michelle interjected. ‘He sent that notice by email from AirWater this morning asking us to serve it on you.’

‘I have to take your security pass now.’ Jack picked up her key card. ‘Security is outside the door to escort you to your car. Your belongings have been packed and are waiting for you at the reception.’

Jack turned around and left the room.

She left with the security guard, feeling like a zombie. Michelle had turned Alan against her too. She had put four years into that job and now she had been refused even a reference. Jack and Michelle had ruined her life, her whole career. Engineering was everything to her. It was what she lived for.

Security waited for Sally to drive out of the Marine car park. She headed straight toward Jack’s house. She parked her car on a side street and out of sight close to the McAllen-Connor mansion and waited for Jack to come home. About 12:30 she put on a pair of leather gloves and took out one of the small vials from under her seat.

Jack drove home about one in the afternoon. Sally followed his car and waited for him to drive in through the gates. She then followed him into the grounds before he could close the gates again, pulling up behind his car, the driver’s side of her car close to Caitlin’s bushes. She opened her door and threw the vial concealed in her glove into the side bushes.

Now she would get out and plead for her job without Michelle there to manipulate Jack, she thought. If he were reasonable she would just take her job back and forget about this. If nothing worked she would wait quietly for things to calm down during which time she would clean out her garage and carefully dispose of the material she had in it. She would clean out and sell her car. Before Alan got back she would post a box of chocolates through Michelle’s letterbox in the dead of the night. With Michelle and Jack gone her career and visa would be safe. Alan would be hers again.

Things at the McAllen mansion went a little worse than Sally had expected. Jack reacted angrily and violently to seeing her invade his home, and the dogs came at her from every direction. She kicked Jack in rage and panic, but froze when the big German shepherd charged at her.

Sally remembered the police at the scene driving the dogs off her. They gently pulled her onto the stretcher from the ambulance and attached her hands and ankles to the metal poles of the stretcher with leather straps.

Then she went out like a light.

CHAPTER 41

The Week Leading Up To

When Sally regained consciousness she found herself in the hospital room where she would later be waiting for her Section 2 Appeal hearing. Her right ankle was strapped to the metal railing of the bed. Her left shoulder and upper arm were bandaged and pangs of pain were biting her shoulder with every breath.

‘How are you doing, my dear?’ The nurse seated outside her room saw her sit up on her bed and came in. Sally had had a nervous breakdown at her bosses’ house the day before, the nurse explained. Her shoulder had been wounded by her boss’ dogs biting her. She had been taken to the Accident and Emergency ward first where her wounds had been treated, and she had then been brought here because people at her work were concerned about her attacking her boss and her state of mind. The nurse treated her kindly and, after wiping her face with a warm wet towel, gave her water and a tuna sandwich.

Soon thereafter the doctor came in.

‘How are you feeling, my dear?’ He examined her injured arm.

‘I feel like shit. I just want to die.’ She told him the truth.

The doctor explained that she was in the hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act because she might harm herself or others.

‘Have you got any family here?’

Sally just shook her head.

‘That’s okay. We have treated your wounds and you are on a course of antibiotics and strong painkillers. Just say here and rest. We will look after you, sweetheart.’

She signed the papers put before her and said that she had no one she wanted to inform, that she just wanted to be left alone.

The doctor nodded kindly. ‘The nurse will be outside your door if you need anything. I’m Dr. Harding. Ask for me if you start feeling bad.’

The next time Sally woke up she called the nurse in and asked again where she was. The nurse patiently explained the same events to her again.

‘My car,’ she remembered.

‘The police have towed your car and left it in the A2 car park. If you look out from the window in the lounge you can see it. Everything is safe. Just get well, sweetie.’

When it was dark Sally felt in her pockets and found her penknife, her mobile phone with its battery dead, and on the key ring attached to the penknife the extra keys to her car and her house. The police had brought her straight to the A & E in a hurry and had omitted to search her. She hid everything by ripping the underside of her mattress slightly and stuffing them in.

When the doctor visited her that night she said she was feeling much better. He then asked the nurse to remove the strap around her ankle. She was finally able to walk out to the lounge into which the doors of three rooms in the unit opened. Sally could see she was on the third floor of a new built wing attached to an old Victorian building. From the window of the lounge she could see her car in the parking lot.

She wanted to get out of here, to go home to her bed. Jack had put her here, she thought with anger. She tried to walk out but was stopped at the elevator. It was a secure prison that she was in. The elevator was locked and the entrance, guarded. There was a 24-hour watch on the residents in the unit by “nurses” in the lounge, each doing an eight-hour shift. They were really security guards, she knew, disguised as nurses.

The next day she stood by the window of her room the whole day thinking about what had happened and longing to be back in her own bed. She was being held prisoner in a psychiatric ward and Michelle and Jack had put her here. Soon her visa would expire and would not be renewed without Marine’s backing. She would not be able to get a job, even back home, without a reference from Marine. She wanted to go home so badly, home to her own bed.

She would pull off an
Escape from Alcatraz
, she decided.

The window in her room was double glazed and one that opened up and out. Two metal rods that folded in half when closed held the metal frame of the pane from opening more than 4 or 5 inches out. She slipped her engineering penknife out and fitted one of the screwdrivers into the head and unscrewed the screw attaching the right rod to the window frame. Now she could push the right side out by putting her weight on it. She screwed it back on, but she had bent the left rod while pushing the windowpane out to see how far it would give. She could not close the window properly now.

Sally called the nurse in and asked for an extra duvet, a bed sheet, and a pillow for when she might wet her bed. She asked for another set from the next nurse; and so on until she had a dozen extra sets in her cupboard.

Wednesday was a cold day with the wind stealing in through the window that Sally had messed up. After the evening meal she took about four of the powerful painkillers she had been covertly hiding in her cheek and saving. Her shoulder was healing well and the pills should take care of the pain. It was a hospital regulation that the doors of the patients’ rooms be kept ajar at night. During the day she messed up the window a little more, and went to bed with three of the duvets over her. The night nurse came in and tried to close the window to keep the cold winds out of the lounge. Having failed, she closed the door to Sally’s room fully.

Good, that would block out any noise and lessen the risk of being seen.

According to the ward regulations the nurse on duty had to check the patients from the window to the lounge every half hour after dark-look in through the window at the patient sleeping just below it, and mark the register. It was called a “check-in.”

As soon as the 9:00 p.m. check-in was done, Sally slipped out of bed and started making her rope by knotting the ends of the six bed sheets with the rock climbers’ Fisherman’s knot to form one long “rope.” She knotted the middle of the sheets at every two feet to give herself further grip. One bed sheet cleared about four fifths of a floor. She knotted together four sheets to clear the four floors. The other two picked up the slack and gave her enough length to tie the top end to something strong. She completed the knots and had her rope ready in less than 12 minutes. She then slipped back to bed to await the next check-in.

After the 9:30 p.m. check-in, Sally got back to work. She ripped a corner of one pillow open and carefully emptied half of the stuffing to a pillowcase until the remainder formed a shape roughly the size of her head. She pushed everything under her bed, got back into bed, and awaited the next check-in.

After the 10:00 p.m. check-in Sally fitted the screwdriver head she had tested to the screw of the right rod holding the windowpane from opening out. In a couple of minutes she had it off. Then she tied one end of her “rope” to the metal bar of the bed that was cemented to the floor and flung the rest of the rope out of the window. The part of the white sheet “rope” running from the bed to the window was too conspicuous; the nurse would spot it and she would not have enough time to get away. She climbed out the window, holding onto the rope and tied the free end of her “rope” to a metal sewer pipe running down the wall about 2 feet from her window. She tugged at the rope to test that the metal brackets attaching the pipe to the wall at regular intervals—the one at her room level—stopped the “rope” from slipping down the pipe. She climbed back in, untied the end of the rope tied to the bed post, folded the “rope” into loops, and hung it out the window from the rod she had unscrewed. She then closed the window with the “rope” now dangling outside and out of sight.

After the 10:30 p.m. check-in Sally got up, wrung out the rainwater from her wet “rope” and tied both her shoes to what was to be the bottom end. She then arranged the pillows under the three duvets to look like her sleeping figure. It was the norm that the patients slept with their heads under the shadow just below the check-in window to keep the light out of their eyes. In this space Sally arranged the small pillow wrapped in her black sweater. It looked like the head of her sleeping figure.

Then she dropped the shoes out the window, holding onto the top part of the rope. She climbed out, closed the window behind her, and abseiled down the wall. At the bottom she untied her shoes off her “rope” and tied the rope to the pipe at the foot of the building. She then ran around the building to her car, got in, started it quietly, and drove slowly into the dripping darkness of the night.

Sally drove straight home for she had only wanted to get to her bed. She parked the car a block down so that the neighbours would not notice, walked to her house and let herself in into the darkness, tripping over the post. She felt around and picked up the post while her eyes adjusted to the thicker darkness inside. Without switching the lights on, she walked upstairs in the dark. She turned the heating on, took all her wet clothes off, and laid them out over the radiators. She then got into the warmth and comfort of her bed and went to sleep.

Sally woke about an hour past midnight and decided she would sleep in her bed and wait for the police to come and get her, for she knew that they would come for her. Not only had Michelle and Jack ruined her career and bullied her out of the country, but had also kicked her out of her own house and bed.

In great distress she got out of bed and back into her clothes. She had left her shoes in her car. She slipped on a pair of black tennis shoes. Putting latex gloves on and using a small penlight torch, she entered the garage through the exit from the kitchen and took out one of the three boxes of chocolates. Back in her small office on the ground floor she typed up the message from Jack on her PC: “Congratulations on our little baby boy! Love, Jack.” She printed it out on extra thick embossed paper, cut it, and made it into a nice card. She tied a red ribbon around the box and stuck the card on with a bit of tape.

2:20 a.m. Sally drove over to Michelle’s house and parked the car two blocks away. She walked through the deserted street and slipped the box of chocolates through the letterbox. The only hard part was the climb back up the hospital wall which she managed after returning to her car and putting on her rock climbing shoes she had in the boot-Boreal boots with flat rubber-soles made for grip.

Back in her room in the hospital, she slipped straight into bed and awaited the next check-in. After the 4:30 check-in, Sally pulled up and wrung out the water from her rope, untied the bed sheets, folded and put them away behind her stack of pillows in the cupboard. She reconstructed the pillow she had taken apart. Then she screwed up the window, slipped back into bed, and went to sleep.

The next morning Sally told each nurse on duty that she had used all the sheets because it had been a cold night, but she had wet her bed because she’d been frightened of the thunder and the howling winds. She had tried washing them in the patients’ bathtub, but they were not clean, she said. She wanted her dry bed sheets back, she cried, because her cupboard was bare. The unsuspecting nurses gave Sally a fresh stack of sheets to keep in her cupboard.