that car alarm hadn’t gone off, they would probably have killed him.’
Forrester exhaled. ‘Attempted murder.’
‘You’re the policeman.’ The doctor had adopted an impatient expression.
Forester nodded. ‘Can I see him?’
‘Room 37. But briefly, please.’
Forrester shook the doctor’s hand again, though he wasn’t sure why. Then he walked through the plastic doors, avoided a gurney stacked with urine gourds and knocked at the door to room 37. All he could hear was a groan inside. What should he do? Then he remembered: the man’s tongue had been cut out. Sighing, the detective pushed open the door. It was a small, simple NHS room with a TV suspended on a steel armature at one end. The TV was switched off. The room smelled of flowers and something worse. In the bed was a fairly old man staring wildly at Forrester. His head had been entirely shaved leaving a mess of cuts and scars on the nude scalp. Forrester was reminded of a map of railway lines. The man’s mouth was shut but blood was caked at the corners of his lips like dried brown sauce at the top of an old sauce bottle; bandages covered the patient’s torso.
‘David Lorimer?’
The man nodded. And stared. And stared.
It was this wild stare that gave Forrester pause. In his career he had seen plenty of frightened faces, but the sheer terror welling in this man’s eyes was something else.
David Lorimer mumbled something. Then he started coughing and small flecks of blood spat from his mouth and Forrester felt an arching guilt. ’Please.’ He held up a hand. ‘I don’t want to trouble you. I just…wanted to check something…’
The man’s eyes were full of tears, like those of a troubled child.
‘You have had a terrible ordeal, Mr Lorimer. We just…I just…want to say that we fully intend to catch these people.’
The words were pathetically inadequate. This man had been brutalized and terrorized. He’d had his tongue sliced out with shears. He’d had lines carved into his living skin. Forrester felt like an idiot. What he wanted to say was ‘we’re gonna nail these bastards’, but this room didn’t seem the right place for such absurd posturing, either. In the end he sat down on a plastic chair at the end of the bed and smiled warmly at the victim, trying to relax him.
It seemed to work. A minute or two passed and then the old man’s eyes no longer looked quite so terrified. Instead Lorimer waved a shaking hand at some papers lying on his bedside table. Forrester got up and walked to the table and picked up the documents. It was a sheaf of handwritten notes.
‘Yours?’
Lorimer nodded. Keeping his lips firmly shut.
‘Descriptions of the attackers?
He nodded again.
‘Thank you very much, Mr Lorimer.’ Forrester reached out and patted him on the shoulder, feeling self-conscious as he did so. The man really looked as if he was about to cry.
Pocketing the papers, Forrester left the room as quickly as he could. Out and down the steps and through the swing doors. When he reached the rainy late spring air of the leafy Embankment he breathed deeply, and in relief. The atmosphere of terror in the room, in the man’s staring eyes, had been all too intense.
Walking briskly down and across the River Thames, with the Houses of Parliament yellow and Gothic on his left, Forrester read the scrawled notes.
David Lorimer was a caretaker. At the Benjamin Franklin Museum. He was sixty-four. Nearing retirement. He lived alone in a flat at the top of the museum. The previous night he had woken at about 4 a.m. to the muffled crash of broken glass downstairs. His flat was in a converted attic and he’d had to descend all the way to the cellar. There he’d found five or six unknown men, apparently young, and wearing ski-masks or balaclavas. The men had broken in, quite expertly, and they were digging up the basement floor. One of them had a ‘posh voice’.
And that was pretty much all Lorimer’s notes said. During the attack a car alarm had gone off, for some reason, probably sheer and miraculous coincidence-just as the men were carving Lorimer’s neck and chest, and so the men had fled. The caretaker was lucky to be alive. If the young lad, Alan Greening, hadn’t wandered in and found him he would have bled to death.
Forrester’s mind was full of speculation. Turning right on the Strand, he headed down the quiet Georgian side street to the museum, the Benjamin Franklin House. The