Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

But nobody’s perfect. As my gaze came full circle and I looked across at the far side of the room from where I stood, a grim smile spread across my face. Because screwed to the wall, hiding in plain sight, was a small white box with a red cross stencilled on its face. A first-aid kit.

My ticket out of here.

The contents of a first-aid kit vary a lot from place to place but the core is always the same – bandages and sticking plasters in a million different shapes and sizes. There’s usually a bottle of disinfectant and some cotton buds; this one even had a few exotics like Savlon spray and vinegar for stings. None of that mattered a damn. I was looking for items that had either a point or an edge.

I got lucky. There was a tiny pair of scissors, a pair of splinter forceps and a half-dozen safety pins.

The door had a simple mortise deadlock with no lock-maker’s name on the plate. I dropped the forceps back into the box: probably too wide, and certainly not strong enough. I bent back one of the safety pins into a nearly straight line, then, using the scissors as a makeshift pair of pliers, I twisted the sharp end up and back into a hook. After a hairpin it’s my favourite kind of improvised lockpick, and it was easily up to a job as straightforward as this.

Five minutes were all it took to work the lock’s three levers around into the release position, the third one falling into place with a very satisfying click. Before I tried the door, I turned the light out and let my eyes adjust to the dark again. There was no light coming from under the door: if there had been, I’d have noticed it before, when the room had still been in darkness. Under the circumstances, the goal was to see before I was seen. Otherwise I’d be back to square one.

After about a minute, I eased the door open as silently as I could. Peering out, I waited until the wider darkness outside had started to resolve itself into shapes before I stepped out. I was in another part of the massive main exhibition area, as sepulchral and empty as the part where Gwillam had interrogated me. I reckoned there should be any number of ways out onto the street from here, or into other parts of the South Bank complex that were still open to the public. All I had to do was to make sure I didn’t bump into any of Gwillam’s merry little band on the way. In the case of Po, though, that meant not just avoiding being seen but also not letting him get my scent.

The level I was on seemed to be entirely deserted, so from that point of view I was doing fine. I thought about resting up for a few minutes here before I moved on but time was pressing: I didn’t know what I might have said while I was under the drug, or how much Gwillam now knew. There was also the fact that since I was still dressed only in a hospital gown I’d probably get hypothermia if I hung around too long in this frigid air.

After a minute or so of tacking backwards and forwards across the huge space I found a staircase and headed down, taking it slow in the pitch dark to avoid going arse-overtip all the way to the bottom. I was reasoning that at the very least I’d probably hit a door to the car park – which in turn had to connect with the street. Even if there was a security grille and it was locked shut, I was reasonably sure that I’d be able to jemmy it and get out.

But the door at the bottom of the stairwell was a fire door, with a padlock and chain hung over the bar in defiance of law and logic. I retraced my steps to the floor above and tried the door there. It opened when I pushed, so I stopped when the crack was about an inch wide and peered through.

Not quite dark here: there were lights on somewhere ahead – a dull, slightly bluish glow coming around the edge of what looked like a movable partition wall up ahead of me and slightly to my left. I listened: no sound at all, except for the very faint hum of some kind of machinery.

I stepped out and eased the door closed behind me. Sooner or later I had to come out of the stairwell, and the closer to the ground I was the better I’d like it. The South Bank Centre is a spectacular vertical maze even with the lights on: I could waste a quarter of an hour or more just shuffling up and down in the dark.

A few steps brought me to the edge of the partition wall. Moving as slowly and silently as I could, I leaned around it and looked in at the source of the light.

A man was sitting in a cheap plastic bucket chair at a computer terminal. His back was to me, but I recognised the bald spot: it was Sallis. He was scrolling slowly through endless screens of double-columned text, and he seemed absolutely intent. The gun, with the silencer now removed, sat beside him on the desk where the computer had been set up, in between a Republic of Coffee cup and a styrofoam burger box. The Anathemata might be tooled up for war but they were living like cops on a stake-out.

I considered my options. No one else in sight, and no other islands of light in the immense room. Sallis was deep into something that seemed to have completely cut him off from the world around him. I could sneak on past him, and maybe make it to another exit without him clocking me on the way.

On the other hand, there was the gun. And the clothes. And whatever money he might have in his pockets. Needs must when the devil drives.

I took a step back, then another; and one sideways. Working from memory, that was the best I could do. I charged the partition shoulder first, taking a flying leap at the last moment so that I hit it high and had all my weight on its upper half as it came down and I came down with it.

Sallis didn’t even yell. He did make some kind of a sound, but not one I could do justice to without specialised equipment. His head slammed forward into the desk with a solid smack as he fell, forced down by the combined weight of the partition and my body. Then the legs of the desk gave way and he just vanished from sight under the general wreckage.

I rolled over twice and came up quickly, spinning to face Sallis in case he was still conscious and going for the gun. But I needn’t have worried. He was sprawled on the ground, absolutely still, his head and upper body under the fallen partition. I snatched the gun up myself, tried to work out which end was which and eventually found the safety catch. With that matter sorted, I levered the near end of the partition wall aside with my foot. Sallis was out cold, a trickle of blood wending its way down his forehead from a shallow cut. He was still breathing, though, and the cut was the only wound I could see. He’d probably get out of this with nothing worse than a headache.

I stripped Sallis quickly and shrugged into his jeans, shirt and jacket. They fitted me pretty well, all things considered, and the slight stink of his stale sweat was a price I was willing to pay. I searched his pockets. Bingo: a small wad of notes, a card wallet, even a set of car keys on a fancy fob that bore the Mitsubishi logo. I took the gun, too, since there was no way of getting back my weapon of choice.

I was done, and I had places to be. But I hesitated because an idea had struck me. Another one came hard on its heels: way above average, and annoying because it meant going back the way I’d come. I wasn’t sure whether the gain in matériel would offset the loss of time, but either way I didn’t have the luxury of standing here agonising about it.

First things first. Rooting amidst the wreckage of the desk, I found a few sheets of paper and a black biro. I rested the paper against Sallis’s back and scribbled a brief note. It probably wouldn’t help, but it couldn’t hurt so what the hell. I folded the note and tucked it into the waistband of his underpants, like a fiver into a Chippendale’s jockstrap.

Then I retraced my steps to the storeroom and collected up about half a dozen of those old film canisters, shaking them first to make sure that they were full. They might be blank stock, useless now because the cameras that would take them had gone to rust and scrap decades ago; or alternatively they could be lost masterpieces from the silent era. I purposely didn’t read the labels in any case, because whatever they’d been before the only attraction they had for me now arose out of the fact that the blast-proof doors over at Nicky’s gaff were still fresh in my mind: film burns like petrol burns.