by Stephen Laws
The Police Sergeant and Constable sat back in relief. In the back seat of the car, Beaton still continued to stare straight up at the block, with that same glazed expression in his eyes. While they’d been waiting for the engineering operatives to arrive, he’d told them the story of what had happened, making more sense than previously; but with a tale that still sounded more drunk than sober.
“Tell you something, though,” said the man in the blue boiler suit to the Sergeant, leaning in the panda-car window.
“What’s that?”
“We don’t get paid to come out and get blown up on Christmas Eve. That’s what they pay you boys to do. Or the army.”
The Sergeant grinned back, no hint of humour in his ragged smile.
“Claim double time tonight. You’re worth it.”
The blue boiler suit grunted and turned away from the car, moving back to the two Land-Rovers and trailer of equipment they’d brought out with them. The Sergeant watched them go, muttered “Clever shits” under his breath and then turned back to Beaton in the back seat. “Alright, so you say everyone’s gone.”
“That’s right.”
“Been watching the windows, Sarge,” said the Constable. “Doesn’t seem to be anyone up there on any of the floors. At least, no one’s come to the windows.”
“Maybe they’re all shagging on the floor. Out of sight. Know What Christmas parties are like.”
“All gone,” said Beaton again, his voice far away.
“And you say you found it on the top floor, is that right?”
Beaton nodded, eyes still fixed on that distant fourteenth floor.
“Well, if we’re not going to get blown to Hell after all, let’s take a look.”
In the office block, on the ground floor, the Sergeant and the Constable ushered Beaton into the first elevator. The strip lights overhead flickered as they entered. Beaton pushed back against the wall, eyes wild.
“Steady, Dad,” said the Sergeant. “Nothing to worry about now.”
“Where to?” asked the Constable. “Top floor?”
The Sergeant nodded and Simpson stabbed at the button for the fourteenth floor. The elevator juddered and the doors slid closed. The Constable found his attention drawn to Beaton. There was sweat on his face, and his eyes were fixed glassily on the lights as the elevator began to climb. And now the Constable was beginning to feel uneasy himself as those lights ascended.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
Something about Beaton’s manner, something about the way he was sweating, something about that fearful, glassy stare, something about the way he was pressed back against the wall of the elevator . . .
Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . .
Something about the way he was licking dried lips.
. . . eleven . . . twelve . . .
Something about the way he was almost expecting the bottom to drop out of the elevator, sending all three of them hurtling downwards . . .
. . . thirteen . . .
Something.
. . . fourteen . . .
The elevator shuddered. The elevator light pinged. And Beaton moaned; a low, almost desperate and resigned sound. The Constable watched him look down and close his eyes. And the something that was so terrifying him now seemed to jump across to the Constable. For reasons he did not understand, Simpson preferred not to step out of the lift on to the fourteenth floor.
“Fourteenth floor. Jockstraps and ladies’ knickers!” The Sergeant’s harsh voice made them both jump.
The caretaker exchanged a look with the Constable. And when Simpson saw his fear reflected in those eyes, he was shamed into turning away, looking directly ahead . . . and then following the Sergeant as he stepped out into the corridor.
Disco lights flashed blue, red and green against the pastel wall before them. Bryan Ferry was singing about a Hard Rain that was Gonna Fall.
The Constable almost collided with the Sergeant when he suddenly stopped and turned back. Beaton was still standing in the elevator, back to the wall.
“Mr Beaton,” asked Lawrence, in as controlled and well-tempered a voice as he could muster. “Would you care to join us?”
Beaton swallowed hard and pushed himself away from the elevator wall and into the corridor.
“Maybe you’d care to show us where?”
“. . . straight ahead. . .” Beaton’s Words were a croak in his throat. “Through the main door.”
“Seems right so far, Sarge,” said the Constable. “Not a sign of anyone.”
The Sergeant gave him a sour look and pushed on through the glass double doors and into the office area.
The room was as deserted as before.
Spinning lights from the makeshift disco in the centre of the room’. Christmas party decorations on all the walls; red, green and blue. Posters of Santa and the Crib. Drinks on tables, small bowls of potato crisps and nuts. Cigarette ends stubbed out on floors. And Bryan Ferry singing to himself.
But no one in the room.
The Sergeant walked into the centre of the room. Water streaked the outside panes. Somewhere, thunder growled again.
“Christ,” said Beaton at last. “Let’s get out of here. l don’t like it. Can’t you feel it? Well, can’t you?”
“Feel what?” the Constable heard himself say.
“There’s something wrong here. Something bad. Can’t you feel it in the air?”
Lightning flashed in the skies again, and as if in answer to Beaton’s words, thunder rolled in the sky. The windows seemed to rattle.
“They are gone,” said the Constable at last. The Sergeant stopped in his scanning of the room to give him a hard look. Turning to Beaton again, he said: “Alright, where is it?”
The caretaker’s gaze remained fixed on the rattling windowpanes.
“Mr Beaton!” snapped the Sergeant. The caretaker looked wildly at him. “Where is it?”
“On the floor. Over there . . . beside the wall.”
The Sergeant and Constable followed the track of his pointing finger to the far wall.
“Where?”
“Behind that office screen they’ve pulled to one side.”
Impatiently, the Sergeant strode over towards the screen; a four-foot-high partition. There were others like it in the office, all pulled up to the walls to make space for the party. The screens acted, no doubt, to break the office up into units for typists and clerks. The Constable seemed less inclined to follow him, as thunder rolled again and a brief flash from outside gave them a momentary reflection of themselves in the windows.
The Sergeant reached the screen and pulled it aside.
“Jesus Christ . . .”
“What? What is it, Sarge?” The Constable hurried over to join him now.
“He was right.”
Not wanting to look, not really wanting to have that crazy radio report verified, the Constable looked down anyway at the crumpled pale-white thing that lay on the carpet. And now the feeling of not-rightness was upon him with an undeniable reality, just as the crazy, drunken old caretaker had said.
“Don’t throw up, son,” said the Sergeant matter-of-factly. “You’ll see worse than this on the job eventually.”
“Yeah . . . I’m okay. It . . . I . . . just didn’t think . . . thought it was a drunken call, that’s all.”
The Sergeant looked up to check if he was okay, and then back at what lay on the office floor.
It was a man’s hand, severed at the wrist.
The fingers were curled inwards towards the palm, making it look like some large, dead, white spider.
FIFTEEN
Cardiff looked at the streaked glass again and heard something click. He wasn’t aware that his thumb had moved on the safety catch but he wasn’t surprised at the inevitability of it.
But he was shocked when someone said: “Jack?”
Startled, he looked across to the outside door. His colleague, DI Peter Johns was standing against the doorframe with a glass of whisky in his hand, lo
oking at him. Cardiff hastily dropped the pistol below the desk line and into the drawer again, sliding it shut and turning in the swivel chair to face Johns.
“Yeah?”
Had he seen?
“Coming for a drink? We can put an intercept on the lines. You don’t have to sit here by yourself.”
“No . . . thanks, Pete. You go on. Have one for me.”
Johns nodded at the spot where he had just shut the drawer.
“That’s not the answer.”
He has seen the gun!
“What. . . ?”
“Drinking alone, I mean. You don’t have to hide a bottle in there.”
Cardiff made a gesture; part relief, part acceptance of what Johns had wrongly assumed. “I’m okay, Pete.”
“Alright, alright. If you say so. But I know what time of year it is. When we’re done, we can go down to the club and have a few bevvies before we go home. Just me and you. Okay?”
“Thanks, Pete. I appreciate What you’re saying. I’ll give it some thought. But you go back and have another. Like you say . . . it’s Christmas Eve.”
Johns stood in the doorframe a while longer, swirling the whisky in his glass. He looked down into it for a long while, as if balancing something; maybe professional judgment, maybe whether he should let loose with a rash statement brought on by the booze . .. maybe even something to do with comradeship. After a while, he looked up.
“Don’t say it,” said Cardiff.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“It doesn’t matter, Pete. I respect you. Just don’t say it.”
Johns gave a fractured smile, looked down into his glass again, and thought of his own kids. Then he looked directly back at Cardiff, brought the glass up and gave a toast to him. He swung away from the doorframe, back to the party. The door snicked shut.
Cardiff looked at the snow again . . . and then back at the top right-hand drawer.
Then the telephone rang.
And the nightmare began.
SIXTEEN
She was fifty-four years old, five feet two inches tall, married with two grown-up kids—and she felt like hell.
She had been wandering the crowded street for well over two hours now. Late Christmas shoppers had bumped, jostled and cursed their way past her as she wandered aimlessly down the pavement. Her hair was awry, her coat was wet down one side and she seemed to have lost her handbag. She stopped for a moment and stared at her reflection in a shop window. That reflection was surrounded by an aura of Christmas lights; flashing blue, green and yellow. She put her hands on the glass and stared the reflection right in the face.
She did not recognise the anguished face that stared back at her.
Someone else in the crowd collided with her, spinning her away from the shop window—and she was lost again in that dizzying, bustling crowd.
She felt sure that she must have had a handbag when she set off. If she had it now, she could have hunted through it for the evidence she needed. She would have been able to find something with her name on it; perhaps an address.
The streets were unfamiliar to her.
She’d no idea how she’d got there.
Or where she had come from.
In fact, she didn’t know who she was—or how she’d come to be wandering the streets like this.
“Excuse me . . . I wonder if . . . ? Excuse me . . . ?”
The crowd hurried on past, ignoring her entreaties, full of Christmas spirit for themselves and their own; with none to spare for what seemed to be a white-faced, bedraggled old bag lady with dishevelled hair and a dirty coat. The figures she tried to catch by the sleeve or by the lapels side-stepped, pushed by or dragged past her, cursing.
This was a terrible nightmare.
Who was she? Why would no one help?
“Please . . . ?”
A young man was standing in a café doorway, coat collar pulled up around his neck, smoking a cigarette. He was unshaven, one lick of black hair hanging in his face. His eyes seemed feverish as he took another drag on the cigarette. Their eyes connected.
“Please . . . ?”
The man dropped the cigarette, stubbed it out with one foot and walked over to her through the crowd keeping the collar tight around his neck. He began chewing the fingernails of his other hand nervously. Those feverish eyes kept looking from side to side as he said: “How much?”
The words made no sense to her. But here was someone in the crowd who had noticed her plight; someone who would be able to help.
“Please help me. I think I’m lost . . .”
“Yeah, yeah. Lost. Right. But how much?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Please help me. I don’t know how I got here or where I came from or . . .”
“Come over here.” The young man had taken her coat sleeve by the elbow and was guiding her out of the flow of the crowd towards the cafe entrance. She let herself be led. When they reached the comparative shelter of the entrance, he glanced nervously back inside over his shoulder as if fearing that someone he knew back in there would see him.
“Please . . .”
“Yeah, okay. You’re lost. I heard you. But you look cold. Wet. Wouldn’t you want to earn something to warm you up? Something to eat. Something hot to drink.”
Everything was going to be alright now. He would help her. But what did he mean about earning? None of this made any sense.
“I just . . .” and now the tears were starting to form, “just . . . want to go home.”
“Yeah, go home. But don’t come on with the waterworks, love. That won’t help. just come with me a minute.” Again, that gentle tug on the elbow of her coat, leading her away from the café entrance and down the alley at the side. Again, she let herself be led, dabbing at her eyes with the other sleeve of her coat. What was happening to her?
There were ranks of overflowing dustbins back here. In places the garbage had spilled from the bins and on to the shining black pavements. A solitary street lamp at the end of the alley gave a stark blue-black lining on the bins, the railings and the smeared back-window panes. Steam gushed from a grating in the ground at the back of the café and her sense of smell was assailed by the odours of burned fat and grease. The young man continued to lead her on.
“Where are we going?”
“Just down here.”
“Are you going to help me?”
The young man laughed. “Could say that.”
At last they stopped in the shadows. The young man pulled her into a doorway and at first, she thought that he must live here; but then he stopped, pushed her into the alcove and stood back, looking again towards the street at the top of the alley. Content that they had not been seen, he stood up close to her again and she could smell his breath: sweet and unpleasant.
“How much, then?”
“I thought you were . . .”
“Okay, okay. A tenner. How’s that, then? Wouldn’t get much more. Not at your age.”
Something was happening to her. She could feel it as he pulled the coat collar away from his neck and she could see, despite the biting winter cold, that he was naked underneath. She could see his skinny, ribbed and hairless chest; so unlike . . . unlike her husband’s . . .
. . . husband . . . Donald. . .
. . . and below that, she should be horrified to see that this would-be rescuer was sexually aroused as he stepped up to her, eyes glittering, breath excited. She should be utterly horrified and try to beat him off when he began to unbutton her own coat from the neck downwards. But she was completely overcome now by a strange drifting sensation; a strange lassitude, as if this was all somehow inevitable; as if something alien inside her recognised what was going on and was, even now, responding accordingly.
“Changing. . .” she said vaguely, as her sensibilities began to slip back again to that nowhere place from which she’d come . “I’m changing.”
“Aren’t we all?” said the young man, eyes wide in anticipation as he pulled ope
n her coat and blouse at last and then pushed up close.
The screaming began then.
She was aware that he was screaming directly into her face. And although she wasn’t holding him, she was aware that something was holding the young man tight against her. Disinterested, uninvolved, uncaring and content only to drift away again, she listened as the screaming went on and on . . .
And then she . . . and the screaming, drifted away.
SEVENTEEN
The outside door, leading back into the CID Christmas party had just snicked shut when the telephone rang. Turning back to look at the rain-streaked glass, Cardiff lifted the telephone.
“Cardiff speaking.”
“Jack?”
“Who . . . Barry?”
“Yes, look. We’ve got something bloody funny going down here at Fernley House: the office complex.”
“Who sent you up there?”
“Routine patrol. Me and young Simpson on short-straw panda duty. We got a call to investigate.”
“You know the normal routine, Barry. You’re supposed to radio straight into the Control Room. Then they get in touch with me.”
“I’m not sure how to handle this one, Jack. Not sure I want anything formally recorded before I talk to you as my CO.”
“Okay, better let me have it.”
“Seems as if an entire office block of people has gone missing. Everybody on fourteen floors has just bloody vanished. There’s only one guy left here. The caretaker. He was in the basement. Says he thought the boilers were going to blow and checked out the floors above to evacuate the place. Couldn’t find a soul up there.”
“Is this a wind-up, Barty?”
“You know me, Jack. And that’s not all.”
“What else?”
“Simpson and me checked the building ourselves. And we found a hand. A man’s hand on the top floor. Just lying on the carpet—chopped off at the wrist. No blood.”
Cardiff swung back to the desk.
“Okay, Barry. Get the normal team . . .”
“Yeah, they’ve been. The boilers are okay. No problem, no danger.”
