Free Dead Beat by Patricia Hall Page B

turned dry. ‘Just a minute,’ she said, and she walked quickly back to her office and closed the door. Just as she had suddenly suspected, her cape had gone, and when she turned round to look she realized that her fur-lined boots had gone with it and a spare cap that had been on the windowsill ready to go to the laundry the next day.
    â€˜The little beggar,’ she said under her breath and wondered how she was going to explain this to Matron.
    Half a mile away the slightly bizarre figure of a young nurse, her cape wrapped tightly around her against the biting north wind, clutching her white cap as it threatened to blow off, and wearing heavy boots seemingly too large for her, clomped up Farringdon Road towards the bomb sites alongside the Circle Line. The boy inside the disguise fought off the dizziness which threatened to overcome him, determined to make it back to his hiding place on the embankment in spite of the cuts and bruises he had sustained in the accident. He had lain in his hospital bed for two days, much more conscious than he allowed the ward staff to realize, watching closely what was going on around him. He had said little or nothing, especially to the red-faced young copper who had come in to talk to him, but he had soon noticed that the sister, whose small office was at the end of the ward, arrived in the morning in a thick navy cape and boots but appeared soon afterwards on the ward in her starched uniform and black flat-heeled shoes. Somewhere, he realized, the outdoor clothes were stowed away for the day. And somehow, if he wanted to get away, he would have to find them.
    In the end it had proved remarkably easy. When his tray of food was taken away after the midday meal, he watched as several of the nurses, including the ward sister, went through the double doors evidently for their own meal. They would not be back, he reckoned, for some time. Glancing at his neighbours, both elderly and falling into a heavy doze after eating in the overheated ward, he had slid out of bed, slipped unnoticed into the sister’s office and taken her cape down off the hook behind the door. The boots were under the desk and a spare starched cap, which neatly covered the bandage on his head, was on the windowsill. He had not been challenged on his way out of the hospital into the chilly street outside. He had, he reckoned, at least half an hour before the sister came back and noticed that her clothes had gone, and he had gone with them.
    Glancing round cautiously as he came to the broken section of fence leading down to the railway, he waited until he reckoned that most passers-by on this still largely ruined section of Farringdon Road had their backs to him before pulling back the loose boards and slipping through. He pulled off the nurse’s cap and flung it away and then stumbled and slid the rest of the way to his hiding place, where he was relieved to see Hamish slumped under a pile of blankets with a bottle in his hand. The older man looked up blearily, pushing his matted grey hair out of his eyes.
    â€˜Wha’ happened to ye?’ he asked. ‘Ye look like a lassie in that thing. An’ wha’ did ye do to your head?’ He handed his bottle to the boy. ‘Have a wee dram,’ he said. ‘Ye look terrible.’
    The Scot scrambled to his feet and fetched the boy’s blankets from their hiding place and wrapped them round the shivering teenager with surprising gentleness as he choked on the whisky.
    â€˜Will ye no’ tell me what’s going on?’ Hamish asked. ‘Ye’ve been as nervous as a kitten since that night ye came back late. And how did ye hurt your head? Hae ye been to the hospital? Is that where ye got that thing?’ He fingered the thick navy cape in astonishment and pulled it aside to reveal the hospital gown underneath.
    â€˜I got hit by a car,’ the boy mumbled, feeling the sip he had taken from Hamish’s bottle firing his throat