Vicious Circle

Belatedly I remembered that I’d been tied to a chair. It seemed that I still was, but that the chair was now lying on its side on the ground. That explained the weird position I was in and the fact that I couldn’t move.

Son of a bitch! Didn’t the Vatican ever sign the Geneva Convention? They’d just wheeled or dragged the chair, with me in it, over to some cupboard and pushed it inside so hard or so clumsily that it had fallen over. That was no way to treat a prisoner.

As the pain gradually subsided, I worked at the ropes. They felt pretty loose: the original intention had just been to stop me moving while Gwillam interrogated me, not to keep me a prisoner forever. Consequently Sallis and Zucker hadn’t bothered to check whether the knots fell within reach of my fingers.

All the same, it took me a long time—I guessed more than an hour—to get my hands free. By that time, my fingers were so sore and abraded from the stiff sisal fibers that I had to rest up for a while before I started on my legs. Getting them free was much faster, but it took a good ten minutes of massaging life back into them before I could stand.

Okay, so I was free. But where the hell was I? I set out from the chair in tiny, inching steps, my arms out straight ahead of me, until I found a wall. Then I worked my way along it to the corner. This was no cupboard, obviously: it was a fair-size room, although the roughcast feel of the walls still suggested a storage area of some kind rather than a public space.

I was intending to circumnavigate the room, but a little way along the second wall I found a door—and then its very welcome neighbor, a light switch. I turned it on with a silent prayer, and three strip lights flickered into life over my head, leaving me blinking in a harsh, white radiance.

I’d guessed right: this was a storeroom, high-ceilinged, with deep shelves running the entire length of the far wall. They were all empty, though, except for a few circular drums about a foot and a half in diameter, which were presumably old movie reels. When the standing exhibition went walkabout, they must have taken pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. Either that or Gwillam had ordered the room cleared to make sure I didn’t find anything that might help me escape.

But nobody’s perfect. As my gaze came full circle and I looked across at the far side of the door 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 stenciled on its face. A first aid kit.

My ticket out of here.

Twenty

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 mortice deadlock with no lockmaker’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 favorite 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 was still 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. 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.