The Stone Gallows (27 page)

I risked one last look. Liz hadn't moved. She lay on the concrete like a rag doll that had been tossed aside by an angry child. Somewhere in the distance, a siren rose. The makeshift rope dangled down the side of the building, twisting slowly in the breeze. I looked around frantically for something to tie on to, something strong that was too large to be dragged out of the window.

The bed frame. Metal. Thank God for Ikea.

Grunting, I pushed it as close to the window as I could, looping the end of the sheet around the frame before swing my legs over the windowsill and grasping the sheet in my hands. Even though the fire seemed to be moving faster than I was, I couldn't stop myself from pausing on the way out and sparing a final glance at the flat that had been my home for less than four months. All that could be seen through the rapidly disintegrating doorframe was a raging conflagration of flickering orange. I swung myself out of the window, feeling my arms take the strain. By leaning back I managed to make my body almost horizontal, the stone wall of the building cool on the soles of my feet. As quickly and as carefully as I could, I started to walk backwards down the side of the building, fully aware that flames could already be eating their way through the fragile cotton.

It was the longest walk of my life.

At any second, I expected to feel myself falling. By turning my neck, I could see the ground below me. Liz hadn't moved. Somebody was standing over her, holding what might have been a mobile phone in one hand. I had a nasty feeling it wasn't being used to call emergency services. I looked away, trying to focus my mind to the task in hand.

It took forever to reach the first floor window, and when I did, I nearly lost my balance as the bare soles of my feet struggled to find purchase on the smooth glass. After the choking smoke, the night air was cool and sweet in my lungs. The muscles in my arms felt taut, stretched like piano wires, ready to give way at any second.

I held the rope with both hands in front of me, the loose end hanging down between my thighs, making sure to move only one limb at a time, having to consider every stage to make sure I didn't fall.

After what felt like at least twenty minutes, I stopped looking down. The ground didn't seem to be getting any closer anyway. For every foot I moved, it seemed to retreat a yard. When I did next risk a look down, I saw that the man on the ground – he was as big as a whale, and dressed in a pure white shell-suit that made him look like a giant marshmallow – had his camera phone trained on me. Whether I lived or died, I was going to be an Internet star. Again.

Focus.

Left hand. Left leg. Right leg. Right hand. Repeat ad infinitum.

Thick black smoke was pouring from the window above me. The fire had taken hold of my bedroom. I wondered how much longer the cotton could last.

Left hand, left leg, right leg, right hand.

And. . . again.

The rope twitched once in my hands, then went slack.

I started to fall.

9.7.

So this was it. I was going to die. My life was going to be over. I tried to think happy thoughts about the good times – taking Mark to the park. . . being with Liz for the first time. . . swapping one-liners with Joe – but all I could feel was a terrible, swooping terror. I remembered Maria McAusland, and how the eyewitnesses said that she lived for a few seconds after I hit her with the car. Had she felt this way? Did she experience the same horror, the same feeling of anti-climax? Maybe her pain had been too great, too overwhelming for any rational thought at all. Maybe I would meet her in the afterlife, and she could tell me.

I doubted it; there was a terrible poetry about being killed in a fall.

It seemed to serve as a metaphor for my final destination. Babykillers don't get to go to heaven.

They go down the way instead.

9.8.

The impact was something of an anti-climax.

That's not to say that it wasn't hard. The wind was knocked out of me in a sudden rush, and for a few seconds I was unable to breathe, sucking hopelessly at the air like a fish out of water. Then my lungs kicked back in, the sudden rush of oxygen leaving me light headed and dizzy. My heart pounded in my chest, like an engine forced to rev too hard and too long, until it was only a stroke away from complete shutdown.

I was still alive. It may seem kind of obvious, but it wasn't at the time. I was genuinely shocked. Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan may be able to plummet fifty feet in slow motion and roll to their feet with little more than a sprained ankle and a photogenic gash on the cheek, but in real life things don't work that way. Falls tend to be sudden, brutal and extremely messy, especially when the landing zone happens to be actual concrete instead of a grey-painted crash-mat.

Anything over ten feet breaks bones. Anything over twenty and your days of playing pocket-pool in the public parks are over.

Anything over thirty, and the ambulance crew will scrape you up with a spatula.

I'd fallen fifteen, maybe twenty feet, and nothing was broken.

Everything hurt like hell – my hands and feet were somehow numb and tingling at the same time, and my back felt like a loan shark had used it for base-ball bat practice – but everything seemed to be working, albeit in a slightly off-kilter, disconnected way. To be honest, I relished the pain as a confirmation I was still alive. Slowly, I raised my right arm and made a fist. It was like making a telephone inquiry to a particularly incompetent call-centre: only after the message from my brain had been bounced to half a dozen wrong extensions did the fingers in my hand eventually do as they were told.

But they got there in the end.

Now that I was satisfied that I hadn't died, the next question was, why not?

The answer was simple. Something had broken my fall. A fat guy.

Not just a fat guy, but the fat guy that had decided to use his camera phone to shoot our escape. In his bid to get a better shot, he must have been standing directly below me and, when I fell, I landed directly on top of him. Lucky for me, not so lucky for him. He was out cold, breathing through his nose, making the wet snuffly noises that obese people make when they've passed out after eating six Whoppers and a litre of Chunky Monkey ice-cream. Other than checking that he was breathing, I ignored him. By using his camera phone, he had taken our moment of desperation and turned it into something amusing he could sell for profit.

To be brutally honest, I wasn't overly concerned with the fat fuck.

Especially when I had more important people to worry about.

I rolled over onto my knees, ignoring the sudden stab of pain in my legs. . . my arms. . . just about everywhere, really. The sudden chill of the concrete made me realise for the first time that I was stark-bollock naked. So was Liz, for that matter. She lay about five feet away.

I almost fell as I lurched over and grabbed her by the shoulder. ‘Liz!

Liz, can you hear me?'

Groaning, she opened her eyes and looked into mine. ‘Cam. . .' Her mouth twisted and her hand flew to her leg. ‘JESUS!'

I looked. Wished I hadn't. Forced myself to look again. ‘Um. . .that's maybe not so good.'

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. ‘How bad is it?'

I wasn't quite sure how one quantifies such things. ‘It's bad.'

‘How much of the bone is sticking out?'

‘A lot.' To me, it looked like a hell of a lot. A lot of white bone and a lot of sticky red blood, the two colours contrasting brilliantly in the dim light. The bone was jagged, like a shard of glass. ‘Maybe a couple of inches.'

‘You need to reduce it.'

‘I need to what?'

She gritted her teeth against the pain. ‘You need to push it back in.'

Yeah, right. I thought they only did stuff like that on television. ‘Are you sure that's a good idea?'

‘Cameron, if you don't do this for me I'll never sleep with you again!'

Given that attempted murder places an additional strain on blossoming relationships, I was already having doubts on that score.

Nevertheless, this was her field. If she told me the bone had to go in, then she was probably right. ‘What should I do?'

‘Just take hold on either side.'

The blood was warm on my hands as I did as I was told.

Liz coached me between squeals of pain. ‘That's it. . . just there. . .put your thumbs on either side. . . now push.'

I pushed. Liz screamed. I yelped. The bone slid back below the skin, leaving only the wound. My yell of triumph was cut short by the realisation that she had passed out.

9.9.

Things moved fairly quickly after that. The fire brigade arrived, sirens blaring, and handed out coarse woollen blankets to cover our shame. Then a couple of paramedics rolled up and seemed slightly disappointed that nobody was dead. Fat Guy regained consciousness and started yelling that somebody had stolen his mobile phone.

(Nobody had stolen it; I'd kicked the thing down a drain.) Between that and bitching about his pain, he made so much noise that the paramedics hit him with a sedative, leaving him notably calmer and glassy-eyed. By this time, a small crowd of onlookers had gathered.

They applauded as three husky firemen assisted the two medics to lift him onto a stretcher, and somebody gave the ambulance driver directions to the nearest beach, so that their precious cargo could be returned to its natural element.

As walking wounded, I was allowed to share an ambulance with Liz. She woke up screaming during the ride to the hospital. They gave her something for the pain that sent her right back to sleep. I was then given a stern telling off about resetting the leg– apparently it wasn't the accepted practice (well, duh), and I could have done all sorts of damage – before a grudging acknowledgement that I had done rather a good job.

We were separated at the hospital. I was shown into an examination room and given a thorough going-over by a doctor who looked like he was about seventy-two hours into a sixty hour shift. When I asked him about Liz, he shrugged. Satisfied that I was unlikely to die in the next few hours, he admitted me to a general hospital ward ‘for observation'. They gave me a single room, which I knew from experience was a fairly valuable hospital commodity. Although grateful, I knew what it meant. Less than ten minutes after I climbed into bed, the cops showed up. I spent the next two hours giving two detectives a report on what had happened. When we reached the point where I listed all the people that might have a grudge against me, the officer's pen ran out of ink.

9.10.

I woke up to find a nurse fastening a blood-pressure cuff to my arm. She saw my eyes open. ‘Morning.'

‘Morning.'

She pointed to her name-badge. ‘My name's Harriet. I'm your named nurse for today. How are you feeling?'

I shifted my head on the pillows, the movement highlighting a pain in the area behind my left eye. It wasn't quite a migraine, but more like the throb of a hangover. Not just an ordinary, bog-standard hangover, either, but one of these brain-smashing, bowel-quivering bastards that are completely immune to over-the-counter medicine. My eyeballs felt like somebody had inflated them with a bicycle pump and my mouth tasted like a decomposing cigar that had been marinated in the sweat of a Las Vegas poker player.

All in all, a rough start to the day.

‘I've felt better.'

‘From what I hear, you had quite an exciting night.' She moved quickly, poking a thermometer underneath my arm, making rapid-fire notes on a clipboard. ‘You'll be glad to know that your oxygen saturation levels are much better.'

‘Oh. Good.' With no idea what she was talking about, I forced myself to relax as she poked and prodded at my body. She was pretty but tiny, only slightly taller than me even though I was lying on a hospital bed.

Her ears were beet-red, as if she had spent the morning scrubbing them with carbolic soap and cold water. ‘What time is it?' I asked.

She checked the fob watch that dangled from the front of her white tunic. ‘Ten past eleven.'

For a moment I was confused, wondering if I had lost an entire day. ‘It's still Thursday, right?'

‘That's right. You were asleep when I came on duty.'

I tried to do some fast mental arithmetic to figure out how much sleep I had got in the last two nights, but the numbers eluded me. ‘I've got a headache.'

‘I can give you some Kapake, if you like.'

I had no idea what Kapake was, but I was working on the principal that if I had never heard of it, then it was probably something good. I nodded to let her know that I liked. ‘Thank you.'

Two minutes later, she was back with something fizzing in a plastic glass. ‘I got you dispersible ones because your throat is still going to feel a little raw.' She pressed the drink into my hands and bent over me, fuss-ing with the oxygen mask that I had forgotten was there. ‘And the doctor says that you don't need to use this if you don't want to. If you find yourself becoming short of breath, let me know and we can put it back on.'

She hung the mask on a little hook next to the bed and stood back.

‘There's somebody waiting to see you. He was quite insistent.'

‘Is he a police officer?'

She nodded. ‘I think so.'

Great. Another two hours of going round in circles. That would do my headache a world of good. I raised the glass in a toast, draining it in one long swallow, nearly choking on the bitter taste. ‘Thanks. Can you tell me about the girl that was admitted with me? I think she had a broken leg.'

Harriet nodded and smiled. ‘She's in ward seventeen. She's going to be fine.'

‘Can I see her?'

‘Maybe later.'

I gave her what I liked to think was a winning look. ‘Pretty please with sugar on top?'

For a few seconds, I thought that she was buying it. Unfortunately it was at that moment I spoiled things by breaking into a fit of coughing so loud it sounded like I was trying to choke up a donkey. Harriet tutted at me before moving to put the oxygen mask back on. I waved her back. ‘Don't worry, I'm fine.'