Dust and Desire by Conrad Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

he’d had for breakfast, ‘you’re about as bad as they come.’
    ‘Am I coming or am I going?’ I said. ‘As grammarians go, you’re a cock-end.’
    ‘Gary Cullen escaped from Summerhead eight weeks ago. We’ve been trying to find him ever since. The man is dangerous.’
    ‘Nooooo shit,’ I said.
    ‘His wife has gone walkabout, too. They used to live in the flat on St John’s Way but she, her two nippers and now Gary Cullen have all disappeared.’
    ‘He got a sister?’
    He frowned. ‘Not that I know of. Why?’
    I shrugged. I was trying to put it all together in my head, but my head needed putting together first. I needed some bastard-strength painkillers and some decent kip. I needed some vodka, too. Hang on, I’ll make a list…
    ‘You doing all right, Joel?’ he said. I was taken off guard. All this sledgehammering about, and I wasn’t ready for the little stiletto slipped between my ribs and finding the coldest part of me.
    ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked, hating the hunted whine in my voice.
    ‘Just that you seem a bit pale.’
    ‘So would you if you’d just had someone use your nut for a gong.’
    ‘No,’ he said, and he moved his face closer, as if he was seeing something beneath the skin that he couldn’t quite make out in this light. ‘The other stuff, Joel. I mean Rebecca, Sarah. How do you feel?’
    I wanted to lean over and bite his nose off, spit it back in his face. But I sucked all the rage back in and just stared him down. He wasn’t a bad man, Ian Mawker, but when he tried to be one, he just became something to be pitied. Keep hold of that thought, I thought. Even if… especially if your head is filling with snapshots of Rebecca in every different shade of dead.
    ‘Working much?’ he asked, breezy as you like.
    I put up with it, joshing him about his inferior marks during training back in the late ’90s, and the time I walked in on him in his room while he was trying to persuade a girl, visible through her bedroom window opposite, to take her top off for him. He left, but not before comically warning me to think twice about ‘leaving town’. I could still hear him tapping his pencil against his teeth long after he’d taken himself and his grubby Columbo mac outside.
    I dialled Kara Geenan’s number and got a long, uninterrupted tone. I don’t know what was worse: wishing that the guy had hammered me another five times and done the job properly, or realising that I was going to have to speak to Barry Liptrott again. I swung my legs out of bed. Not too shoddy. I stood up. Pain crawled up and down my back but it was manageable.
    ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
    She must have put a silencer on those nylons. ‘Nurse Ratched,’ I said, ‘what a pleasant surprise.’
    ‘It’s Nurse Rasheed ,’ she said flatly, not getting it at all. ‘Get back under that blanket.’
    ‘You’ll have one hell of a bedbath on your hands if you don’t let me go where I need to go.’
    ‘We have special implements for that.’
    I eventually talked her out of it, but she accompanied me to the toilets and told me to hurry up. I was about to announce that I was going to discharge myself, but behind her, standing on the other side of a pair of swing-doors, I saw that Mawker had left behind a police guard. I wouldn’t be able to fart without him making a note of it.
    I looked out of the window. There was a drop of ten feet or so, but it would be into a drift of snow. I couldn’t see how thick it was, but it was better than nothing. I squeezed out through the gap and jumped into a patch that looked the most forgiving. What could be the worst that lay under that white blanket? It wasn’t as if hospital security had planted landmines.
    I disappeared up to my knees in water.
    It’s not the easiest job in the world to flag a cab when you’re dressed in pyjamas, less so when those pyjamas are sopping wet and streaked with mud. Eventually though, a taxi driver pulled up in front