Unknown by Unknown

patients themselves. He glanced into a couple of the open cubicles and saw Heather Woodley suturing a gashed hand and Anna Seaman questioning an elderly man about his symptoms. A junior nurse, Lisa Fellowes, was assisting Heather.
    Jean and Alison, today's front desk staff, were on the phone. There were a couple more closed doors with the sound of voices behind them. Finally, as he neared his office, he looked along to the trolleys at the far end, which had been completely empty fifteen minutes ago when he'd gone off for a sandwich.
    He froze. The trolley end wasn't empty now. There was a woman in a ragged grey coat there, leaning over one of the trolleys, pressing something black into the face of someone in a neat-fitting, pale blue uniform. He heard a voice, thready rather than musical as it usually was, but he still recognised it as Lucy's.
    He couldn't hear what she was saying, but he could tell even from this distance that she was scared. The equipment that surrounded her seemed to gleam with menace suddenly, and that little black thing—great goodness, could it be a gun?
    He took about five seconds more to assess the situation. Was he really seeing all this? Hell, yes...
    Silently, he moved closer, prepared to duck into his office if it looked like the woman might see him. Somehow he sensed that the more dangerous trigger wasn't the one on the gun but the one in the woman's own psyche. If she felt threatened and that sent her over the edge...
    He began to sweat and to calculate at the same time.
    The one positive factor in this situation was that she had her back to him at the moment, because she'd circled around the head end of the trolley to position herself better so that she could look into Lucy's face.
    All I need to do is get the gun away, he began to think feverishly. If I can do that before she sees me coming, then I can yell blue murder and I'll have help in keeping her subdued. But I've got to get the gun away first... If Lucy sees me coming...she might see me because she's in a better position to see than Grey Coat is... she might be able to distract her and mask any sounds I make.
    He had to will his body not to shake as he moved along the corridor, had to remind himself of the old saying about more haste and less speed, but he made steady progress. It felt as if this was taking for ever, but when he caught sight of the wall clock a little further along, he realised that his sense of time passing was out of kilter. It was only a minute...less...since he'd first seen that shocking sight of Lucy and the woman and the gun.
    Hardly daring to breathe, he continued his painfully controlled creep closer, and could hear the woman muttering. No, singing. In French. She had the sort of lusty voice that would have done justice to bawdy songs in an old vaudeville show. It was surprisingly tuneful and her French accent was, to his ears, flawless. Lucy must have thought so, too.
    'Where did you learn to speak French, Comtesse Alphonsine?'
    'Mais, je suis francaise, ma chere!' She delivered an impeccably correct series of French oaths.
    'What was the name of the song you were singing just now?'
    ' Ca ira .' They used to sing it in the Revolution. This is my revolution, you see.'
    'Yes, I see. So you're singing a revolutionary song? I like the tune.'
    Had she seen him? Malcolm wondered. She was doing all the right things. Distracting Grey Coat, engaging her, not threatening her, getting her to talk about something positive and safe. He was very close to both of them now, belatedly thinking back to Heather and Brian and Anna and the others.
    How close were they to being finished with those patients? If they came out of those cubicles at the wrong moment and made a noise, and Grey Coat turned... Should he have taken the time to involve them? Should he have called hospital security, or the police, or something? Too late now.
    And which was the greater risk in the two choices he had next? Lunge now, when he wasn't quite close