Free David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good by Andrew Grant Page B

here?” she said.
            “A couple looked quite
reasonable,” I said. “There was a prosciutto and goats’ cheese panini . That was probably the best
of the bunch.”
            “OK, then,” she said.
“You grab us each one of those. We’ll eat. Then we have an important meeting to
go to. But before that, there’s something I want to show you, downstairs. It’ll
help you make sense of everything.”

 
    Melissa told me to hit the button for the basement, and when the door
opened I saw that instead of a single corridor as there’d been at ground level,
we now had a choice of four.
            “It’s like Hades, only
with colour -coding,” she said as she emerged into the
stale air, nodding towards the broad stripes that were painted on the pale
green walls. “I mean, as in the underworld, not the god of the dead.”
            “I don’t care about the
dead,” I said. “Just as long as there are no three-headed dogs down here.”
            “Don’t worry,” she said,
starting off down the corridor to our left. “There are no dogs of any kind.
Except maybe some Guide Dogs, and you hardly need worry about them. So, are you
coming? It’s this way. We want the purple route.”
            I caught up with her and
took hold of the chair’s handles, but didn’t need to actually push. She was
happy to keep the speed up on her own, running her hands rhythmically around
the rim of the wheels. The corridor she’d chosen was long and straight. The
light grey on the floor was peeling in places, allowing the concrete to show
through, and the walls were plain except for the slightly wavy navigational
line that ran all the way down the right hand side. A mess of cables and
ventilation ducts dangled from angled brackets above our heads, along with a
row of caged-in fluorescent lights. They were evenly spaced, one every ten
feet, so there was no relief from their harsh glare.
            As I trudged forward I
noticed that one of Melissa’s wheels was developing a squeak every time it
turned. She was going to need some oil pretty soon if she didn’t want to
announce her arrival everywhere she went, and I was still wondering where she
could get some when I realised the smell of the air
was changing, too. The stagnant odour near the lift
was gradually being replaced by something with a sharper, harder edge.
            “What is that?” I said.
“It smells like chlorine.”
            “I think it is
chlorine,” Melissa said.
            “Where’s it coming
from?”
            “The swimming pool, I
expect.”
            “Which swimming pool?”
            “The hospital’s .”
            “I didn’t know it had
one. Where is it?”
            “Round the next corner.”
            “But wait,” I said,
taking a moment to make sure I had my bearings straight. “Wouldn’t that bring
us up into the street?”
            “If we went up,” she
said. “Yes, it would.”
            “You’ve lost me.”
            “The pool’s down here. Underground. Between the hospital and the nurses’ home.”
            “I didn’t even know
there was a nurses’ home.”
            “Oh, yes. That big, ugly, modern building on the opposite side of the road. The pool’s actually bang in the middle, twenty feet below street level.”
            “Are you sure?”
            “I am. And just think.
All those stressed out office workers heading home every evening. What would
they do if knew they were a few yards above a horde of student nurses in tiny
little bikinis?”
            “Do people use it much?”
I said, trying to imagine how it would feel to be in a pool of water beneath
one of the busiest commuter streets in London.
            “Actually, I have no
clue,” she said. “I’ve only seen it on the plans. And don’t get any ideas, cause
we’re not going that