heard the voices, but didn’t react. He had slipped through the crowd, out of the apartment, into the night.
7. Present: Bujumbura, Burundi
Abel walked back, stripping off the gloves. He had taken off the doctor’s coat and wore only the flimsy hospital gown. Folded inside the bloody coat was the face of Dr August Lippens.
He pushed the coat and gloves into one of the large green medical waste containers. Then, glancing around furtively, he used the hem of the gown to open the doctor’s car door. He retrieved his dressing gown, fumbled in the black medical bag, and found a few useful articles, including a syringe.
Without switching on the lights, he drove out of the parking lot in first gear and parked the car in a side street, leaving the key in the ignition. He made sure he’d left no fingerprints on the car, then walked back to the hospital, climbing through the window of his ward. He fastened the catch and wiped the window, removing all possible prints. With a Kleenex from his nightstand he cleaned and polished his shoes. When he was satisfied that all signs of blood had been removed, he put the shoes with the rest of his clothes.
He lowered his plump thighs onto the bed and sat, his bare feet swinging under the hem of the dressing gown. He reached for the brown bottle containing the cough syrup. His Adam’s apple bounced as he swallowed the entire bottle.
In the bathroom he took off the dressing gown, washed his face and hands, and urinated in the empty cough syrup bottle. He drew a few milligrams of the liquid into the hypodermic syringe, tapped the needle with his finger to allow the air to escape and injected the urine subcutaneously into his left armpit. Then he flushed the needle down the toilet.
On his way back to bed he deposited the cough syrup bottle and the syringe into a garbage bin at the door of the ward, filled with used cotton wool swabs, plasters and bandages. Early the next morning, before the end of her shift, a night nurse would take it outside and empty it in the dumpster.
He plumped up his pillows, got back into bed, snuggled down, wiggled his toes to get comfortable under the blankets and closed his eyes.
Half an hour later he felt the effects of the ipecac overdose from the cough syrup. He retched, and threw up in his bed. Just after midnight he pressed the alarm button to summon the night nurse.
His armpit, where he had injected the urine, was showing signs of a rapidly spreading infection. Soon his forehead was burning. At four in the morning, with the rain rattling against the windows, his white blood cell count shot up.
Delirious, with the matron and the rest of the night staff gathered round his bed, the feverish patient had just a hint of a smile on his lips. When the quack’s body was discovered in the undergrowth around the frangipani, when the time of his death was established, no suspicion would fall on Mr Lomas. The patient would have a solid alibi: he was in his hospital bed, sick as a dog, the infection having flared up again and spread. The entire night staff of Ward B would testify to it.
The poor man had been on the mend, the trauma doctor would add. If you looked carefully, he even had some of Dr Lippens’s physiognomic features.
* * *
On the second day the fever broke, and the infection was under control.
“Where’s my doctor?” Abel asked. “I want my doctor.”
“We can’t find your doctor,” said the nurse, wiping his face with a cool cloth. The swelling and discolouration had almost gone and the scars had all but healed. Only a few faint white marks were left, behind the ears and under the chin, where the prominent implant had been inserted.
“Can I go home? Dr Lippens was going to discharge me.”
“He hasn’t been at his rooms for two days. No one knows where he is.”
“How can a doctor just disappear?” asked Abel.
“It’s a mystery,” said the nurse.
“Then I’ll discharge myself. When he pitches up, I’ll phone his surgery to make an appointment for the modifications he mentioned to my nose and chin.”
“Your discharge will be at your own risk, Mr Lomas. If something happens, a new infection, perhaps, the clinic will not be responsible.”
“I’ll sign an indemnity. Bring me the form. What about my medication?”
“Dr Lippens didn’t leave a prescription.”
“Can I have something for pain? And antibiotics, in case the infection flares up again?”
“I’ll ask the trauma doctor who treated you to write a prescription.”
“Draw the curtains around my bed.”
Abel put on his clothes and shoved the hospital gown and his few personal belongings into a plastic bag. He drove to his boarding house in his 4X4 bakkie with the bull bars and thick chrome exhaust pipe. The bakkie had a Burundian licence disc and registration plates. His friend Jules Daagari had handled the documentation.
Jules had good contacts. He had recommended the boarding house, and was helping Abel with other matters as well. Jules boasted that his forger – he called him his “fabricateur” – could duplicate any document.
In his room Abel lay down on his bed with the curtains drawn. He took his medication and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was night.
He unpacked the contents of the plastic bag, removing the facecloth from around the Russell knife, and washed the knife thoroughly in warm water and a bleaching agent with a strong ammonia smell. With his nailbrush he scrubbed the blade and hilt. He didn’t know how sophisticated the forensic investigators in Bujumbura were, but even if they employed modern techniques and used a substance like Luminol, which revealed bloodstains under ultraviolet light, the bleach would have removed every trace.
For safety’s sake, he decided to get rid of the shoes he’d been wearing, as well as the nightgown. He gazed intently at the bunch of keys from Dr Lippens’s bag and wondered whether the police had begun to investigate the surgeon’s disappearance. He doubted it. It usually took a few days. Most people who were reported missing were not really missing at all. Absconded with a lover, hiding from debtors. He wondered whether, at his age, Dr Lippens had a lover. The gossiping nurse had mentioned that he wasn’t married.
At half past eleven Abel left the grounds of the boarding house and walked into the night. It was warm and the air was moist on his skin. A fog from Lake Tanganyika had descended on the city and hovered over the streets, drooping from the trees like old rags. He did not switch on his torch. In the fog every streetlight was surrounded by a dim white halation.
It took him less than twenty minutes to reach Dr Lippens’s house, where Mr Lomas had consulted with the surgeon in the front rooms that served as his surgery.
As Abel had expected, there was no light in the windows. He walked round to the back door and tried the keys until he found the right one. When he pushed open the door,
