‘Is something wrong, Emily?’ One of the ancient women suddenly asked. ‘My hearing is not perfect, but…’
‘I can hear someone crying,’ said Henry Foxe, becoming very pale and rising to his feet. ‘Emily, it sounds like a child crying…’
‘What’s that banging?’ Frobisher rose with a look of alarm. ‘It’s coming from the stairs. Is some door being forced? Colin, I think you should—’
Colin was already running from the room as she spoke. As he reached the main corridor, he heard the scream, rising up from below his feet. He froze, feeling the cry reverberate up through his body. His heart had started hammering; he glanced along the corridor, to his right and to his left. To his right, he saw nothing; to his left, he half saw in a bedroom doorway some shape which should not be there, which could not be there, and which he knew he had to be imagining. From beyond the front door, straight ahead of him, a renewed, confused clamour broke out. He could hear a frantic, metallic, banging sound, some broken protest, the cries of a child in obvious distress, then the sound of a man’s voice—a voice he recognized at once. No, dear God, please no, said this voice, and Colin found he was across the hall, through the door, and out in the shadows of the landing.
It was of the utmost urgency and importance to be there, he knew that, even as he also knew that it was of the utmost urgency and importance to remain in Emily’s apartment, where he could look again at the two people—yes, it had been two people—who had been standing together in that doorway to his left.
He peered along the galleried landing, trying to see past its riot of pillars, trying to make sense of its shapes. Ahead of him, that red carpet poured itself down the stairs; above him, other galleries whispered and cried out alarm. He could hear doors opening and closing; he could sense a terrible, gathering collective fear: something had been let loose in this building—but Colin’s mind refused to tell him what it was. He heard Emily’s voice from the corridor behind him, then some cry from one of the old women. He fixed his eyes on the landing, and found he could see some haunting white shape, moving beyond the pillars; the shape was the size of a child; it was airborne; it had too many arms, and there was something that appalled him about its face.
‘Lindsay, stay there. Colin, what’s happening?’ Rowland said, from behind him, and that banging and crashing and anarchy burst out again. Of course he was not surprised to hear Rowland’s voice, Colin thought; of course he already knew that Rowland had not left; of course he also knew why Rowland had remained. He had seen him with his arms around Lindsay. He had been shown the unthinkable, the unimaginable and the impossible just now, in that bedroom doorway to his left.
How stupid of me, he thought. How unbelievably stupid. How could I not have seen something so obvious? A dull pain settled itself inside him; looking along the galleries now, he found the pain steadied his vision and comprehension had come. He saw a simple tableau—father, abductor, child—which made clear and immediate sense.
‘Oh, my heart—let me sit down. I can’t breathe,’ said a voice from the hall behind him. Glancing back, he saw Emily being helped to a chair, Rowland bending over her with a look of concern, and Lindsay running towards him.
It seemed to take her an immense time to approach. Years passed while he looked at her pale uplifted face. He knew she was saying something, but her words would not transmit their sense. He said something to her—he was never sure afterwards what it was, but it was probably something about the police, about calling the police. He thought maybe he told her to keep the door closed; he certainly slammed it, and he thought he said that.
As soon as it was shut it was very clear to him what he had to do next. None of this was really happening, but even so he had to help the child—so he began to run along the gallery towards the child, and the man grasping the child, and the figure slumped against the bannisters, breathing painfully, who, he realized, was Tomas Court.
As soon as he moved—and only seconds had passed, but they felt like years—the man holding the child stopped scrabbling and banging at the elevator doors and ran off. He was still clutching the child, like some pale bulky parcel, and he still had his hand clamped across the child’s mouth. Colin could see the child’s hands plucking at air, and he felt outrage and incomprehension at this. He paused only for a moment by Tomas Court. Then, seeing he could scarcely breathe, let alone pursue, set off in pursuit himself. He expected the man to run down the stairs towards the entrance hall; but, since nothing was obeying the usual rules, he did the opposite and started to run up. Colin followed, running at speed, stumbling, then running again. His heart was now pounding; the man had a head start of almost two flights, and as he ran Colin had a clear sense that this was all a dream, and at any moment he would wake up.
‘Stop, stop, stop,’ he heard himself shout in this dream, and it struck him how absurd this was. Even so, he cried ‘Stop’ several times more. He changed it to ‘Please, stop’ on the sixth landing, which was even more absurd, and ‘Don’t, please, don’t’ on the eighth. He found he was saying something garbled, and incoherent to a tiny, frightened, wizened, ancient face which popped out from behind a door on the ninth floor, but the door then slammed, and the bolts were drawn across. In his dream, Colin could then concentrate on what really mattered, which was making his legs move faster, and getting the air into his lungs, which were starting to seize up.
Reaching the top floor at last, he had a glassy sense that it was not a dream, after all, but that everything was now going to calm down; normality was about to prevail, no-one was going to get hurt, and the child—he realized the child must be Tomas Court’s son—was going to be safe.
He had a reason for thinking this, he saw, stepping onto the landing and slowing his pace. The abductor, he could now see, was not a man, but a woman. He could see why he had made that mistake: the woman was wearing trousers and her hair was hacked raggedly short. He could also see that she was holding a knife—but he found he was not alarmed by the knife. A woman must be as incapable of hurting a child as he was of hurting a woman: this creed it did not occur to him to doubt. He felt totally sure that the instant the woman saw he did not intend to hurt her, she would give him the child and surrender the knife. Fighting to steady his breathing, he began to walk towards her.
‘You’re frightening him,’ he began. ‘He’s only a little boy and he’s terrified. Please, put him down. You can’t want to hurt him. Give me the knife…’
The woman had been scratching and banging at the elevator doors. As soon as he spoke, she made a panting, grunting sound. She darted away, across the landing, which was large, and backed up against the bannisters. Colin hesitated; there was a sheer ten-storey drop behind her. He felt a vertiginous fear then; his shocked calm began to fragment; the floor began to move, and the dome tilted above his head.
‘Precious, precious,’ said the woman, and cut the child’s face.
Blood welled; Colin looked at the blood welling up in disbelief. She had cut the boy just below the eye, very close to the eye; blood welled up and dripped down over her fingers, which remained clamped over the boy’s mouth. Colin saw the child give one terrified convulsive movement, then fall limp. He could both see and smell his terror now; he could also see that the knife, a long, thin switch-blade, was pressed up against the child’s bare throat.
‘Oh, dear God, what are you doing? What are you doing? You cut him,’ He stared at the woman. ‘You—how can you do that? You can’t want to hurt a child. It’s so wicked, wicked. Please—give him to me. I’m not going to touch you, or hurt you. Let him go. Let him go at once…’
‘He stinks. Filthy little know-it-all.’ The woman spoke in a low rapid voice, eying him. ‘You take one more step and I’ll jump.’ She frowned. ‘I’ll cut his throat.’
‘You can’t do both. What are you saying? Look, please—listen to me. Why are you doing this? What’s the point? You can’t get away from here now. That elevator isn’t working. Every resident in this building will have b
een calling the police…Please, give him to me.’
He stopped. He could hear just how stupid and fatally inadequate he sounded. He could not understand why these arguments, so true and so obvious, would not be properly expressed. He tried to look at the woman; think, think, said some irritating, confusing voice in his head. He began to see that the woman was very afraid; her face had a twitchy, jittery look; she was breathing in and out very fast and beginning to shake. Colin took another step forwards. He wanted to make a rush at her, a grab at her—but the knife was just under the boy’s ear, and that ten-storey emptiness lay in wait.
‘Precious. Precious baby,’ said the woman, in a low crooning voice. She looked down at the boy; Colin risked another silent step forward. Her head jerked up and the white of her face flared at him.
‘Do you have a baby?’
‘No, not yet. Look—please. Let me help you. You need help…’
‘Call the elevator. Tell Joe to bring the elevator up…’ Colin was afraid to move away to the elevator. If he did, he would be at a greater distance. She might jump.
‘The elevator isn’t working,’ he began. ‘I told you—it won’t come. It’s broken down. Listen—’
‘I had a baby once.’ Her eyes flashed at him. ‘Didn’t I, Jonathan? Where’s my baby now? Rushed down some drain. Tossed out with the trash.’ Her mouth moved. ‘Get the elevator. Get the fucking elevator, right now, or I’ll jump.’
She made a jerking movement and the child gave a moan of fear. Colin’s heart leaped. He started to move towards her fast, because he suddenly saw with absolute clarity that if he did not act now, and act quickly, the unthinkable was going to happen right in front of his eyes, and fifteen seconds from now the boy would be dead. I’m going to kill her, Colin thought, moving, propelled on sudden violent rage, and realizing that he could kill her, if only he could get hold of her before she used the knife.
‘Get the elevator, Colin,’ said Tomas Court’s voice. ‘Get the elevator now. Do what she says.’
Colin stopped dead. Tomas Court had spoken sharply; he was standing on the far side of the landing, at the top of the last flight of stairs. Colin stared at his white face. He decided he was going mad; surely there was no way in which Court could have recovered and made it up those stairs? Yet there Court was, breathing quietly, if with obvious pain. He paused for only a second, looking at the woman and his son, then he began to walk towards them, his hand held out.
‘Jonathan, don’t move,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘Just stay still. Colin, get the elevator, please. Now, Maria—do you want me to call you Maria? I don’t think of you by that name. I think of you as Tina. I always will, and always have—if you’d said yesterday that your name was Tina, it would have made all the difference. Didn’t you realize that?’
The use of this name had a magical effect. The woman became still; she stared at Court and made an odd, gentle sound in her throat. Colin found he could breathe again. He darted across to the elevator and summoned it in the certain knowledge it would not come. Hope winged through him; he knew this was the correct thing to do, because Tomas Court had instructed him. Court knew this woman; he could reach her in a way Colin could not. Disaster was about to be averted, Colin thought. Two men against one woman was no contest, in any case. He could now see every frame of this movie playing itself out; it was a movie he’d seen a million times; it had a kindly director, who ensured that the hero disarmed the assailant, or, failing that, resolved everything quickly, without bloodshed, after a brief and well-choreographed fight.
At any moment, Tomas Court would give him a signal, Colin thought. He’d stop talking and give him a signal, and the two of them would launch some effective, concerted male attack. He moved back towards Court, who was still speaking. He found the scene in front of him would not stay still, but kept jerking about; he found Tomas Court was not only ignoring his presence and failing to give him any signal, but saying things that made very little sense.
‘Didn’t you get my messages?’ he was saying, in a quiet, puzzled way. ‘All those messages I sent? I don’t understand why you’re doing this. You must see—I can’t talk to you now, not with the boy here; he’s in the way. Look at me. Tell me you got those messages, Tina. Tell me you understood.’
The woman’s grip on the boy slackened for a second. Her mouth moved. ‘Messages?’ She stared at Court in a mesmerized way. ‘I sometimes thought—when I was alone…’
‘I can understand that.’ Court had finally come to a halt a few feet in front of her. Colin edged his way to Court’s side. He could see that Court was looking at the woman with tenderness and with regret.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he went on, in a quiet voice. ‘Trust me. I’m not going to touch you—though I want to very much. All this time…’ He gave a sigh. ‘You know not one day has gone past without my thinking of you? I’ve read your letters a thousand times. I know them by heart. There’s one you wrote—’ He hesitated. ‘And I keep it next to my heart.’ He sighed. ‘How is it you know me so well? You’re closer to me than anyone I’ve ever known. I can talk to you without any fear of being misunderstood—and you can talk to me the same way. That’s how close we are.’ He held out his hand to her. ‘Put the boy down, Tina. He’s in the way. You’re so very dear to me. Give me the knife.’
The woman began to cry. She cried in a heart-rending way, Colin thought, making ugly, gulping sounds, and twisting her face. Colin found he pitied her, and that Court’s quiet words, for all their obvious effectiveness, made him uneasy. They were familiar to him, but he could not place them; recently, he felt, he had heard, seen, or used words that were very similar himself. He shifted his weight from his right foot to his left; he had some vague, nasty sensation of evil, breathing quietly, standing close.
‘Hate you,’ said the woman, glancing down. ‘Hate you, hate you, hate you…’
‘Of course.’ Court glanced towards the knife; it had moved a little, but not, Colin thought, enough.
‘Don’t always hate you,’ she added, in a low voice. An expression of irritation passed across Tomas Court’s face. As soon as the woman saw it, she made a low, moaning, anxious sound. Hope, and fear, flickered across her face.
‘You know what I want, Tina?’ Court fixed his pale gaze on her. ‘I want you in my arms—and at this moment I want that more than anything else on this earth.’
‘Lies.’ The woman’s eyes flashed at him. ‘Lies, lies, lies, lies.’
‘No. The absolute truth.’ Court’s pale gaze did not waver, but again that expression of irritation passed across his face. ‘I’m not arguing with you, Tina. If you want to hurt me there are more imaginative ways of doing it than this. When I tell you to put him down, I mean it. Now do it.’
‘Shan’t.’ She stared at him. Court, to Colin’s alarm, gave a sudden shrug and a look of dismissal.
‘Fine,’ he said coldly. ‘Fine. You’re boring me. Jump.’
Colin stared at him in stupefaction. He heard himself make some low sound of fear and protest. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, starting to move forward, because he could see the woman’s expression altering, and he could see her starting to turn towards that ten-storey drop. She lifted the boy high in her arms, and Colin knew that she was about to throw him. The child gave one terrified cry; Court did not move, and as Colin lurched forward, the woman dropped the boy at his feet.
Colin made a grab for him; he got his arms around him and started to scoop him up. Neither Court nor the woman had moved, Colin thought, and he could sense that they were looking at each other, that their gaze, which he could feel rather than see, was interlocked. He gripped Jonathan more tightly, and the instant he touched him, the boy began to fight. He was half-crazed with fear, and the fear gave him strength. Colin was straightening up with the boy in his arms, trying to back away, to get him out of the woman’s reach, and the boy was fighting him. It was like trying to hold an armful of fish. The boy threshed and squirmed; he rained down punches and slaps on Colin’s hea
d and face. He sank his teeth into Colin’s hand, and as Colin tried to catch hold of his arms, he began to kick and scream. He caught hold of Colin’s hair, and tugged at it. ‘Jonathan, Jonathan,’ Colin said, trying to calm him, trying to get him out of the woman’s reach and away from that ten-storey drop. The boy rose up in his arms, arching and yelping. For a moment Colin could see nothing but his flailing arms, and that moment was all it took.
Darkness moved; something clattered to the floor, and somewhere to the side of him, something bunched. Over the boy’s shoulder, past his white face, Colin saw Tomas Court enfold the woman in his arms. He knew that was all right, because he had heard her drop the knife. He started to tell Jonathan this, that it was all right, that he was safe, that it was over—but Jonathan was still yelping and screaming and trying to scratch his face.
Colin ducked his head away; he heard a crunching sound, then a sharp exhalation of breath, and he began to realize that some blow had been struck. He started to turn, and heard himself make some sound, of fear, of protest. ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ Jonathan cried, and Colin froze in horrified disbelief.
He watched the woman move upwards and over the bannisters with a gymnast’s grace. She went over backwards, head first, in a beautiful dive; he saw her eyes widen and her hands grasp space. She seemed to hang there, supported by air, for an immensely long time, then she disappeared from sight. Tomas Court stepped back from the bannisters. He brushed at his jacket—one sleeve was torn; he stood listening, white-faced.
There was a silence, then a faint, thin cry, then a thud. Colin, shocked, appalled, unable to move, did not need to look over the bannisters to know what had happened; he knew she was ten floors down on a stone floor, and she was dead. He began to tremble violently; he found he had begun to weep. The little boy, sensing some change, made a whimpering sound, lay still and covered his face. Colin cradled him tightly against him and stared at Tomas Court, whom he could scarcely see for distress.
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