I hear the gunman’s footsteps closing in on me, but I know he’ll need to slow before he can raise his weapon steady in his hands and fire. As long as I hear him running I am safe, I tell myself.
Below me the ground-floor doors loom into sight and somehow I manage a shout. My voice echoes loud, reedy and terrified, down the empty stairwell ahead of me, frightening me even more. Behind me he clears the corner as I hit the ground floor hard, scramble to my feet, and burst through the double doors into the service corridor.
Then I see them both at the other end of the hallway, silhouetted in the open doorway, daylight framing them. Rhoda and Matthew. They stare wide-eyed at me, startled, unsure what exactly is happening. Then suddenly Matthew is moving, somehow making sense of the situation. He bursts toward me at a sprint. I want to warn him that the person behind me has a gun, but even as the words reach my lips I hear the doors behind me explode open, the gunman careening through after me. He must see Matthew and Rhoda—I hear him slow. And I whip my head around just in time to see him raise his weapon.
“Get down! NOW!” Matthew shouts, and I do not think, I dive onto the slippery concrete floor, crashing down hard, the impact vibrating through every bone in my body. Matthew flies past me.
A shot rings out, deafeningly sharp as it echoes through the thin corridor. I roll and see Matthew slam into the gunman. But there is no struggle. In one concise movement Matthew twists the weapon from the man’s hands, sliding it away and clear. He spins the gunman around as if they were dancing. A sharp kick to the back of the man’s knees forces him to the floor and then Matthew is on him, pressing my attacker’s screaming face into the ground.
I rise to all fours and look up the corridor to Rhoda, unsure if the shot fired connected with anyone. She’s crouched low to the floor, her mobile phone in her quivering hand, her eyes as aghast as mine must be, but she isn’t injured. Somewhere along the corridor, out of sight, there are more shouts. Without thinking, I crawl toward the abandoned gun. And that’s when I see it. A white tuft of feathers sprouting from the shoulder of Matthew’s down jacket. He’s been wounded. The bullet clipped him. I search his face for a reaction but his expression is unreadable as he watches me reach for the gun.
36
DR. EMMA LEWIS
DAY 12—FIVE’S A CROWD
Outside, with dirty bandaged hands that won’t stop shaking, I bum a cigarette off a security guard and carefully light it with his Day-Glo pink lighter.
I start to give Graceford a brief and garbled rundown of events, but she notices the tremors of shock running through my muscles and sends someone to fetch me sugary tea.
I take a greedy pull on the cigarette and let the hot surge of it fill my chest, the engulfing burn and release of it. A little death. God, I’ve missed that feeling. I know people shouldn’t smoke—I’ve seen a smoker’s lung, I know—but everything will kill us in the end, life itself kills us in the end, and like it or lump it, smoking feels good. And right now, it’s making me happy.
I’m sheltered here around the back of the building, and although the press are aware of some kind of commotion on this side of the hospital, they can’t get to us here, security gates and guards block their way. I don’t know how my attacker got through all the security. I think of what could have happened to me if Matthew hadn’t been there, if that man had got hold of me, and I shudder. His words as they took him away.She’s done more harm than me.Who paid for her training, eh? How many people have to suffer for her? Ask her that!I feel shame, thick and inescapable, pulling me under.
Rhoda walks over to join me. She eyes my cigarette, and I manage to hide the tremor in my hand as I lift it back to my lips. Not that I think she would judge me, not after what just happened.
Rhoda didn’t rush forward to help, but then she didn’t run away either, which is brave. She is a half-hero, if there is such a thing.
“I’m sorry,” she says, sipping her hot tea. I take her other hand in mine and give it a little squeeze.
“Not your fault. At all.”
I look back past her at Matthew down the corridor, his wound being assessed by Triage. I can’t see the extent of it clearly.
“Is he okay?” I ask Rhoda as she follows my gaze.
“It only nicked him. They’re popping a few stitches in. He’s lucky.” She looks back at me with a shaky smile. “But then, we knew that already, didn’t we?” I see the uncertainty behind her eyes.
She feels it too. That uneasy relief.
Thank God Matthew had been there. I wouldn’t be here if not for him. Perhaps neither of us would be. But how the hell did he do what he just did? I’ve never seen anything like the speed, the certainty, and the economy of his movements. He must have been trained, though for what, I don’t know. Shouldn’t someone with that kind of training be missed by someone? Yet here Matthew is in a general hospital deep in the Norfolk coast, in borrowed clothes, desperately clinging to borrowed memories.
Leaving Rhoda to give her statement, I grab some dressing packs from the triage nurse and head to the doctors’ locker room to clean myself up. I change the bandages on my hands in the sink under the mirror. I look gaunt in the reflection, drained of color. I examine my features objectively, hair ruffled, a speck of Matthew’s blood on my blouse.I could have died today,I try to let the reality of that sink in. I could have been killed by a stranger because of something someone else did fourteen years ago. My pale face blinks back at me in the glass. My haunted face.Places aren’t haunted, Emma, people are.I try to shake off the thoughts.
I splash my face with warm water to force some color back into it. Outside the locker room Graceford is waiting; she won’t leave my side, she says. We head up to my office, and she stands guard outside. I have a moment to myself.
I receive a call from Peter.
He tells me not to leave the hospital. Someone from the MOD is on their way. I guess thattrainingwe’ve all noticed has raised some alarms along the chain of command.
I think of the final fMRI question I asked Matthew three days ago:Have you killed?I think of how he responded. His expression this morning as I groped for the discarded gun on the hospital floor. We could be onto something now.
Hands still shaky, I google “Princess Margaret Hospital.” I need to know who that gunman was. Today’s news springs up in the search results. It’s ironic that even I need to find out about my attacker from the Internet. The police knew nothing earlier, but the media have done their thing and the facts are rolling in online. The man’s name is Simon Lichfield, a fifty-three-year-old with a history of mental illness and some spurious connection to a far-right group. I don’t know him. He didn’t know me. Nor did he know any of the July 7 victims my father stole from. He just decided I deserved some justice. Maybe he thought I was lying, hiding the money, abetting a criminal, any one of the things he’d heard on TV. So he decided to do the right thing: he made his way here to the hospital armed with a sawed-off shotgun. And he waited for me.
I close my laptop lid and shudder.What is it about me that makes people think it’s okay to kill me?
People in military uniforms arrive that afternoon. Three of them are shown into my office. Two male officers and a woman in plainclothes. The woman, in her forties, clearly outranking the men. The men take the two seats offered while she remains standing. She introduces herself as Dr. Samuels, looks at my bandaged hands and we do not shake. She briefly explains that they wish to meet Matthew and assess him. She asks if it seemed to me that he displayed any specialist training earlier. I tell her my thoughts as she leans against the tall filing cabinet watchfully. After a moment the older officer speaks.
