He found a lavatory. He pushed open the swing door, and it banged against the wall and came back at him with such force it nearly knocked him down. He leaned over a handbasin and turned on the cold tap. At first the water made the pain worse, then the coolness set in. Phenol. Could have been worse. He had seen what real acid could do. One of Reggie Kray’s girls had got a bottleful of hydrochloric straight in the mug. He came across her a couple of years later. She looked like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, only worse.

The gun. He’d get the gun, and find her. Oh, yes, he’d find her.

Chapter 44

He thought the Girl was going to faint when she saw him. She got up from the bed where she had been lying on her side, nursing her bandaged wrist. Her face was grey from the pain, and there were beads of sweat on her forehead and on her upper lip. She began to say something to him but he pushed her out of the way and went to the mirror hanging by the window. He looked worse than he had in the hospital. The skin on his jaw and the side of his neck was livid, and there were patches of powdery white stuff that he hadn’t managed to wash off.

He ran water in the sink and soaked one of his shirts and pressed the wetted cloth to his face. He sat down on the side of the bed. He was breathing hard, and now and then a breath would catch in his throat and come out as a sort of whimper. The Girl was going on and on at him, crying, and tearing at her hair with the fingers of her good hand. She was like something you’d see in the pictures. He would have given her a wallop if he felt more himself. But he was saving his energy for the Latimer bitch.

The question was, where to look for her. Would she still be at the hospital? She would have to go home sometime. This wasn’t a big town. He would wait until it was dark, then he’d wrap a scarf or something around his face and go on the prowl. She might live miles outside the city, though somehow he didn’t think so. She wasn’t the rose-covered-cottage-in-the-country type.

Would she go to the cops? Not right away, with a head full of hop and a trail of needle marks up and down her arms. Maybe she wouldn’t go at all. Junkies tended to steer clear of the filth.