Ian Rankin - Westwind

She hesitated. ‘Very well then,’ she said, and turned and walked back along the corridor.

Hepton stared into Vincent’s room. Where the hell could they be? Wait, though: a building like this would need a fire escape, wouldn’t it? He walked back along the corridor and continued past the staircase. Just around the next corner was a door marked EMERGENCY STAIRS . He smiled and pushed it open.

He was standing at the top of an enclosed stairwell, its steps winding and made of concrete. There was a window looking out onto the hospital’s rear car park. He glanced at the dozen or so cars and saw the black Sierra parked there. He smiled again. Then he heard a sound from below him. Heels scuffing on stairs.

‘Harry?’ he called. He started to descend, then stopped. There was no sound now from below. ‘Harry?’ he repeated. He listened and heard the sound again. Footsteps, not descending now but climbing. Coming towards him. He was about to approach them, but something about the sound stopped him, something distinctly ominous. The steps were slow and even, and he could hear only one pair of feet. No Paul, then. Only a woman’s heels. Silently he retreated a few steps until he was back beside the door and staring down the twelve or so steps to where the staircase turned a corner. There was a shadow on the wall below him. Then a figure appeared on the lower landing.

Harry.

And she was holding a gun.

Her face was devoid of emotion as she saw him and angled the gun up towards his head. Hepton dived towards the door and yanked it open. He threw himself through it and into the corridor, looking to left and right. He heard Harry’s feet quickening on the stairs behind him and ran back along the corridor. The receptionist was standing at the top of the main staircase.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve looked, but there’s no sign—’

‘Get back downstairs!’ yelled Hepton, startling her. Then he was past her, running towards Paul Vincent’s room. He realised that he should have pushed past her and down the stairs, well away from Harry and her gun. But there were people downstairs, lots of them. He couldn’t endanger all those lives. Very noble, Martin, he thought. But now what could he do? He stared at the door marked Stores . Beneath this sign was a smaller one indicating that a fire extinguisher was located within. Well, any weapon was better than none.

He saw as he approached that the door was ever so slightly ajar. Behind him, he could hear the receptionist. She hadn’t gone downstairs; instead, she had followed him along the corridor. Any second now, Harry would round the corner and be upon them. Hepton pulled open the cupboard door.

His eyes met a pair of legs. They were hanging a couple of feet above the ground, and on the floor lay an overturned stool. Hepton’s eyes started to move upwards, his teeth gritted in growing horror. The body’s arms hung limply; the head lolled at a tight angle. A thin metal tube, almost certainly carrying electrical wires for the building’s lighting, ran the breadth of the large cupboard’s ceiling, and this was what the green garden twine had been tied to.

The green garden twine that was cutting into Paul Vincent’s neck.

His face was purple, eyes and tongue bulging obscenely. Somewhere behind Hepton the receptionist shrieked. He leapt forward and wrapped his arms around Vincent’s legs, lifting them a little higher, then reached up with a finger to pull the twine out from where it had cut into the neck.

‘Get me scissors!’ he hissed. ‘Or a knife — anything that’ll cut this.’

The woman had a small pair of nail scissors in her pocket and handed these to him. After that initial shriek, she had quickly calmed. Hepton supposed she had seen this sort of thing before, working here. He cut the twine and eased Paul Vincent’s body down, bringing it out into the hall and laying it on the carpeted floor.

‘I didn’t know,’ the woman was saying. ‘I never realised the poor man might—’

‘He wouldn’t!’ Hepton snapped back at her. ‘He wouldn’t do this.’

He looked past the receptionist, along to the end of the corridor, and saw Harry standing there. Their eyes met, then she turned swiftly and was gone, back towards the emergency stairs.

‘Wait!’ he shouted.

The receptionist saw him staring and glanced back along the corridor too, but saw nothing. No doubt she thought him emotional and in shock.

Hepton stared at Paul Vincent, then at where Harry had been standing. He made his decision and bent over his friend, pushing Paul’s swollen tongue out of the way and sticking two fingers into the young man’s mouth, searching down towards the throat, checking if there was a clear flow for air. Then he pinched Paul’s nose and gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

‘Come on, Paul,’ he said. He pushed down with both hands on Vincent’s chest, once, twice, three times. Pause. Once, twice, three times again. He checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one — but then there was! Faint, but there.

‘Is he...?’

Hepton turned to the woman. ‘Go get a doctor,’ he hissed.

‘Yes, of course.’ She hurried away.

Hepton kept trying the mishmash of life-saving techniques, remembering bits of each of them from the training sessions he had attended more than a year ago. He pushed down hard again on Vincent’s chest with the heels of his hands. There was a palpable groan from the inert body. He crawled back to Vincent’s head, his mouth close to the deep-red ear.

‘Paul? Paul, it’s Martin. Come on, Paul. You’re going to be fine. Paul?’

The opaque eyes seemed to clear, the mouth trying to form words. But the voice box was shattered, the windpipe raw. Hepton brought his own ear close to Vincent’s mouth. There were white threads of saliva at the edges, hanging from swollen lips. The word was hoarse, barely recognisable as speech. But Hepton heard it, where others might have thought it mere babble.

‘Arrus... Arrus... Arrosss...’

And then the breath seemed to rattle within, the eyes became filmy, and Hepton could only crouch there, staring at his friend. The doctor was rushing along the corridor now, and would do what he could. It was already too late, Hepton knew. His own ministrations had served only to extend the waning life by a moment. But in that precious moment, Paul Vincent had given him something. A word.

Argos .

He left the body, rising slowly to his feet. Then he remembered Harry, and turned on his heel. He ran along the corridor, swung round the corner, pushed open the door to the stairs. He didn’t mind now, didn’t care if he ran straight into her and her gun. All he held in his mind was burning rage. But a glance through the window showed him that the black Sierra had gone. He leaned his forehead against the glass and closed his eyes.

‘Paul,’ he whispered. Then he began to cry.

They sat him on a sagging chesterfield sofa in the musty library, declared the room off-limits to the inquisitive patients and gave him sweet tea to drink. Meanwhile, Paul Vincent’s body was being laid out on the bed in his room, his possessions gathered together, his family informed. A tragic suicide: that was what it would become. But Hepton, sipping his tea, knew this was not the truth. A policeman came to see him, a detective in plain clothes. Hepton told him about Harry.

‘Yes,’ the detective said. ‘Mrs Collins on reception said Mr Vincent had had a visitor.’

‘She killed him.’

The detective raised one eyebrow. He had already been informed that Hepton was in shock.

‘She killed him,’ Hepton repeated. ‘She had a gun. I saw her.’

‘But Mr Vincent wasn’t killed with a gun,’ the detective said slowly, as though explaining something difficult to a child. ‘He hanged himself.’