“I understand,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll make an appointment.”

Two days?

If she felt like this, it would be difficult to even travel to Iraq, let alone do what she needed to do.

Two days.

Two days was nowhere near enough.

Chapter Eight

The pharmacy she had in mind was in an upscale neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. She often filled her prescriptions there, and she could remember enough of the layout to know that she would be able to get inside without too much bother. The windows and doors were secured by discreet metal bars, but she had no intention of gaining access that way. There was a narrow alleyway that bisected the block, with the pharmacy on one side and a boutique hair salon on the other. She passed into it, was quickly swallowed by the darkness. The row of shops were only a single storey high, and when she got to the end of the alleyway, there was a dumpster that, when she vaulted atop it, allowed her to reach up to the lip of the flat roof. Wincing from the lightning bolts of pain that lit up her nerves, she scrambled her feet up the wall and hauled herself onto the roof.

She lay there for a moment, staring up at the yellowing rind of moon as she tried to capture her breath. This weakness was so out of character for her that sometimes she wondered if she had been transplanted into the body of another, weaker, woman. There had been a time when she would have been able to make the jump to the roof without the dumpster. But that prospect now? It was a bad joke.

She rolled over onto her belly and then pushed herself to her hands and knees. There was a skylight directly in front of her. It was protected by a cage, but the padlock was cheap and flimsy. She unslung the rucksack that she was wearing over her shoulder and removed the set of short-handled bolt cutters that she had taken from the armoury. She pressed the teeth around the lock and brought them together. The arm of the padlock snapped, and it fell away.

She pulled the cage aside, used the handle of the cutters to knock a hole in the glass and reached through to open the latch. The skylight pulled back on rusty hinges, and she dropped down into the dark room below.

The cabinet where the drugs were stored was also locked, but that security, too, was not fit for its purpose. Unobserved, and with no alarms to concern her, Beatrix was able to pick the lock at her leisure. It took less than a minute.

She pulled the door open and looked at the neatly ordered boxes of drugs inside.

Morphesic SR.

MXL.

Zomorph.

Sevredol.

Oramorph.

She opened the mouth of her rucksack and started to drop the boxes inside.

By the time she had returned to the riad, the effect of the morphine had taken hold. It numbed the constant drill of the pain to a dull throb. It did not remove it completely, but instead held it in the shadows, where it remained, crouched and patient, gathering strength and preparing to return. She was in no doubt that this wasn’t anything other than a temporary reprieve.