They were being far more voluble than Authority civilian staff usually were in the presence of Pathfinders. Whatever Greenbrooke’s men had done to Wallace must have been pretty bad, to make them open up like this.

‘We just want to talk to him,’ said Chloe quickly. ‘That’s all, I swear. He’s our . . . friend.’

‘You could try,’ said the doctor. ‘But he’s under guard now. I doubt they’d let you.’

‘Let us at least try,’ I said.

The doctor shrugged to say he had no objection. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure how lucid he’ll be,’ he warned us, as we headed for the stairwell leading up to the wards on the upper floor. ‘He’s been slipping in and out of consciousness.’

There was just a single guard outside the hospital’s second-floor ward. I pulled my head back around the corner before he saw me and leaned towards Chloe. ‘Any ideas?’ I whispered.

She looked around. So did I. Between the stairwell doors and the corridor leading to the ward was a small nook containing a desk, a chair and an ageing computer. There were also a set of steel lockers beside the desk, their doors unlocked and open.

I had an idea and stepped quietly over to the lockers, looking through them until I found a couple of white coats hanging on hooks.

‘Could it get any better?’ I whispered to Chloe, pulling one of them on before handing another to her.

I gently placed the satchel on the chair behind the desk, then tiptoed over to the stairwell doors, pulling them open and letting them bang shut again. Then we walked past the desk and around the corner, and I snatched up a clipboard lying there, tucking it under one arm. I was hoping the Patriot agent left to guard Wallace wouldn’t know who we really were.

‘I need to check the patient,’ I said, indicating the ward entrance with the clipboard. ‘The saline solution needs swapping out.’

Until we appeared, the guard had been sitting slumped in his chair, staring at the floor and obviously bored out of his mind. ‘What happened to the other doctor?’ he asked, regarding us with mild suspicion. ‘Wasn’t there some other guy on duty?’

‘He got called away,’ I said. ‘One of your men got himself hurt back in town. Something to do with that fire earlier?’ I gestured impatiently at the door. ‘If you don’t mind? I’m sure you’d prefer Mr Deans didn’t die while you were supposed to be keeping an eye on him.’

The guard sat up a little. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, waving us past. ‘Go ahead.’

‘I can’t believe that worked,’ Chloe whispered as the ward doors banged shut behind us. She was about to say something else when she saw just how bad a state Wallace was in.