Bedlam Read Online Free PDF Page B

only one person who can help me and I am content to wait.
    Eventually the man with the apparent responsibility for investigating the horror that is Bedlam stands before me and asks the question I’ve been waiting for, the key that unlocks my voice and restarts the game.
    “Is there anyone we can call who you’d like to be here with you?”
    I fix him with eyes he has so far avoided and my lips twitch with anticipation. I feel a familiar resurgence of energy fizzling deep inside. My fingertips tingle and the steady beat of my heart accelerates just enough so that my shallow veins respond with gratitude, creating a flutter which ripples delicately throughout my frame.
    “Joe McNeil ...” I whisper gently, and my voice fills the space between us with soft melodious sound.
     

Chapter Seven  
     
    “So, what do you think?”
    McNeil shrugged. He wasn’t sure what he thought anymore. His mind was filled with images of a young woman who by rights should be dead and yet was a picture of health. Well, he qualified that: not healthy exactly, but she was alive, and he was familiar with that halfway state, had been there himself for the last twelve months.
    Alive - but only just.
    Going through the motions, one foot in front of the other, inhale, exhale. He felt strangely disconnected, as if his anchor chain had snapped and left him adrift. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was seriously out of kilter. He badly needed a drink, just the one, to take the edge off. Shoving his hands deep in his pockets to hide the tremors, he slumped against the wall and studied her through the viewing window. Her eyes were closed but he knew she wasn’t sleeping ... and he wasn’t sure how he knew.
    “Did you hear what I said?” Dennis rose from the plastic chair and stretched out the kinks from his back. “What do you think?”
    “What do you mean, what do I think? I don’t think anything. She survived - end of story.”
    “Joey, come on. You saw the state she was in. We mistook her for dead. Now look at her.”
    Dennis was right. She’d made a miraculous recovery. Less than two days and, physically, all that was left to indicate she’d been through any kind of trauma were the harrowing black circles around her eyes.
    “No, Dennis, Roger mistook her for dead.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s debatable,” muttered Dennis. “She looked dead to me.”
    McNeil shrugged. They’d been over this a number of times, in the flat, on the journey down and again here in the hospital corridor. He was done with explaining how he’d simply been in the right place at the right time, and that he had no idea how the girl knew his name or indeed why she’d asked to speak to him. He knew Dennis wanted to believe him, but didn’t, and he wondered why he was being viewed with suspicion.
    Despite Dennis’ initial reluctance to involve him further in the case, he’d begged a chance to tag along and prove his account, and Dennis had agreed, rather too readily. McNeil had a sense of being manipulated but, for once, didn’t care. He didn’t know the girl, had never known her, yet was sufficiently intrigued by the strange circumstances surrounding her and was therefore willing to be used, if only to satisfy his own curiosity. If Dennis thought he would catch him out, he would be disappointed.
    “Okay, so we’re here,” he muttered, feigning disinterest. “We dodged the press, slipped under Mather’s radar. What now? What do you want me to do?”
    “Just play it by ear. Go in there and treat it as a standard interview.”
    “But it’s not, is it? A standard interview, undertaken by a detective with an outstanding shrink appointment and suspicion hanging over his head - will it even count as a witness testimony? Let’s face it, if I’m as fucked-up as you all seem to think, I shouldn’t be here at all, let alone anywhere near her.”
    “She didn’t accuse you of anything. She just asked for you. Nothing unusual in that … or is there?