Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  The corridor was empty by the time she was round the corner. Whoever it was must have gone round the next corner heading back towards the lifts. She shrugged, dismissing the matter. She was standing outside the door of Gemma’s room now. She looked at the piece of paper tacked on to the wood: DR GEMMA WISHART. She frowned. Gemma’s contract ran for a full year. What would it cost the department to keep its signs up to date? Though there were the new research assistants coming, and Joanna had plans to put one of them in the same room as Gemma. Perhaps she planned anonymous labelling for the door – RESEARCH ASSISTANTS. She went on down the corridor.

  Next to Gemma’s room was the meeting room. Roz unlocked the door and looked in. Everything was set up. The blinds were angled to keep the morning sun off the screen, the tables were together with the right number of chairs – a small detail but it was the details that Joanna would have her eye on, that gave the sense of efficiency she wanted the group to project – and the overhead projector stood ready by Joanna’s chair at the head of the table. She pressed the switch and a square of light appeared dead centre on the screen. Luke must have stayed late last night and set the room up.

  She checked her watch again. It was nearly ten past eight. Joanna should have been in by now. They’d agreed to get together before the meeting and go over some of the main points. She was outside the computer room now, the end of Joanna’s domain. Roz always called the computer room ‘Luke’s room’, because it was where he was based – where he had been based before he’d been transferred to Joanna’s newly formed group – and where he was usually to be found. There wasn’t space for a separate technicians’ room. Joanna wasn’t happy with the proprietorial attitude Luke took towards this space. She had talked to Roz about her plans to base the new research assistants in here for some of the time, to take away his exclusivity. Luke was the only member of the team Joanna hadn’t chosen herself and she made no secret of the fact that she didn’t like him, and wouldn’t be sorry if he left. ‘I want people with first-class minds,’ she had said to Roz once. Luke, with his 2.1, apparently didn’t come into this category, no matter how good a software engineer he was. Joanna had her blind spots.

  She pushed the door open, and the fragrance of coffee drifted into the corridor. Luke was there, sitting at one of the machines, his chair pushed back, his foot up on the rungs of another, a mug in his hand. He hit a button on the keyboard as she came through the door, and the screen darkened. Then he swivelled round in his chair. ‘Roz,’ he said. His voice was neutral. She and Luke were wary with each other these days.

  ‘Hi. Thanks for getting everything set up.’ For all his insouciance, Luke was efficient.

  He didn’t respond to that, but just said, ‘You want to run through the slides?’

  ‘Are they all set up like we had them yesterday?’ He nodded and put his mug down on the desk. He was wearing jeans and trainers. That was going to go down a bomb with Joanna. She wondered if he ever thought about compromising, just a bit, to keep Joanna happy. ‘Just show me the first one, the one we changed.’

  He tapped instructions into the machine, and she looked at the slide showing the group’s income projections for the first two years. It looked impressive now that the European money that Joanna had managed to get against all the odds was highlighted. It was impressive. ‘That’s great,’ she said.

  Luke was still looking at the screen. ‘We need a group logo,’ he said.

  Roz gave him a quick look. Luke had no time for concepts like corporate identity, mission statements, quality procedures, the kind of management speak that Joanna was so keen on. His face was expressionless. She matched his air of bland imperturbability. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, perhaps you could design one.’

  Luke’s mouth twitched as she caught his eye, and then they were both laughing. ‘Thanks, Luke,’ she said again, meaning it. She knew that everything for the meeting would work without a hitch. He’d have made sure. ‘I’ll see you later.’ She checked her watch as she headed back towards Joanna’s room to see if she had arrived yet.

  Eight forty-five. Joanna should definitely be here. She began to feel worried. It wasn’t like Joanna to be late, especially not for something as important as this meeting. She felt the tension in her stomach and made herself relax. She headed back along the corridor, through the swing doors. She paused by Gemma’s door, then unlocked it and looked in. It was empty, the desk clinically neat, the in- and out-trays empty. A pattern drifted across the monitor. The screensaver. The computer had been left on. It should have been switched off. Joanna would go spare if she saw it. Anyone could get access to Gemma’s data with the machine on and unattended like that. She shut it down and looked at her watch again. It was eight-fifty. She and Joanna were supposed to get together at nine and run through the agenda, checking for last-minute hitches. Peter Cauldwell would be looking out for a chance to put the knife in. The meeting started at nine-thirty. She felt an unaccustomed panic grip her.

  Damn! She took a couple of deep breaths. She ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach, and pulled her mind back from rehearsing disasters. There was no point in worrying about something going wrong, because nothing would go wrong. Joanna would be here. If there were any problems, she would have let Roz know. Repeating this as a kind of mantra, she made herself relax.

  The air sparkled with frost. Out beyond the university, out to the west of the city, the Peak District was bathed in the light of the winter sun. Along the top of Stanage Edge, grey millstone grit against the dark peat and the dead bracken, ice glinted, making the ground treacherous. Ladybirds were suspended in the ice, red and black, a frozen glimpse of summer. The road cut across the edge, went past the dams at Ladybower and Derwent, and began the climb to the pass over the hills. The heights of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow looked almost mellow in the light, their deceptive tops inviting the casual walker to wander just that bit too far, just that bit too high.

  The traffic was slow on the road to the Snake Pass. It was an uneasy combination of business traffic coming from the west side of Sheffield and leisure travellers who wanted to meander, enjoy the scenery, park and sometimes walk. As the road climbed higher, the traffic became lighter as the landscape became more bleak, the hills more threatening. Walkers who had come to climb Bleaklow from Doctor’s Gate noticed a car pulled off the road into the culvert. An old Fiesta, red, rather battered. Maybe it belonged to an enthusiastic walker, out on the tops early.

  Hull, Friday, 8.00 a.m.

  The clouds were low and dark, with the threat of rain or snow. The traffic was heavier now, as the rush hour began to build up. The Blenheim Hotel was at the cheaper end of the market, one of a row of Edwardian terraces, converted from residential use years ago. The hotel was a Tardis, small and narrow on the outside, endless and labyrinthine inside. Every door led to another door. Every staircase led to another staircase. The corridors got no daylight, and the lighting was dim. This may have been accidental, or it may have been for reasons of economy, but it was fortuitous. The dim lighting concealed, to a certain degree, the worn, stained carpet, the places on the walls where the paint was cracked or dirty, where the paper was starting to peel. The cleaner was already at work as the last visitors were finishing breakfast in the downstairs room that doubled as a bar. The smell of beer and cigarettes greeted the breakfasters as they came down the narrow flight of stairs from the entrance hall, following the signs that said ‘dining room’. The stairs were too narrow to be a regular flight, were probably the remainder of the back stairs from the days when the hotel had been a private house, from the days when the area had been prosperous, residential and middle class.

  Some of the breakfasters had undoubtedly spent the evening before in this room, leaning against the bar or fighting their way through the crowds, and the smell of the beer triggered queasy memories.

  Rows of individual cereal packets stood on the bar, with jugs of very orange orange juice. The waitress came to the table and took the orders that arrived in the for
m of pink bacon, flabby on the plate with a slightly rancid smell, translucent eggs, sausages that oozed as the knife went in. The smell of frying temporarily overlaid the smell of beer and tobacco.

  Mary’s husband had phoned in. She’d been in an accident the night before. ‘Been drinking, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Mrs Fry had said to Anna. ‘You’ll have to manage on your own for this morning.’ Her voice was impatient. Anna always managed. She was young, and when you needed work the way she needed work, you managed. Mrs Fry knew that. So now Anna was working on her own, and already the old witch was hassling her, saying she wasn’t fast enough, the rooms weren’t going to be done in time, she’d have to speed up. She muttered Mrs Fry’s litany to herself – ‘Haven’t you got any further, Anna? Hurry it up, Anna!’ – as she worked her way along the passage. She was at the second back staircase now. There were three rooms in this part of the hotel – a different part from the one containing the bar and restaurant. This was at the back of the house and opened on to a garden, more a yard, where the bins were stored, where a few shrubs fought against the litter that was thrown down from the alley that ran behind the terrace. She picked up the cylinder cleaner and carried it down the narrow stairs, knocking it against the walls as she went. There was always the sour smell of damp down here, faint but unmistakable.

  The first room was a shambles. Anna screwed her face up. The damp was overlain by a smell of stale alcohol and cigarettes, sweat and old perfume. An empty bottle – whisky – was on the floor by the wastebasket, and a glass with a cigarette end dissolving in the bottom was on the floor by the bed. The ashtray was full. There was a used condom on the bedside table. She pulled new gloves out of the pocket of her overalls. She brought her own gloves these days. Mrs Fry always said, ‘Oh yes,’ when Anna said that she needed new gloves, but somehow the supplies were never replenished often enough. She switched on the bathroom light. Better to know the worst.

  She dumped the used sheets and towels on to the floor of the corridor. She couldn’t get the laundry cart down the narrow stairs. She would have to gather the pile up in her arms and carry it. She looked at the towels and made a grimace of distaste. The second room was better. Its damp smell was overlaid with the smell of soap and toothpaste. The bed was disordered, as though the occupant had leapt up in haste, scattering the sheets and thin quilt. There was talcum powder on the carpet, and the print of a bare foot. But the bathroom was respectable, the toilet flushed, the bath mat damp, the towels neatly folded on the rail.

  She checked her watch. She had nearly caught up. The rooms were supposed to be done by ten, or Mrs Fry would have something, a lot to say about it. She wouldn’t get rid of Anna though. Anna had managed to keep this job for five months. She didn’t complain to anyone about minimum wages. She was reliable. She’d never had a day off in the time she’d worked for the hotel. She was never late. She kept out of the way of the guests. She always finished her work and she always did it properly. People never complained about the rooms that Anna had cleaned.

  Down here in the basement, she could have a cigarette. She could have a break. The extractor fan in the windowless bathroom was roaring away. She reached into the pocket of her overalls and took out her cigarettes and lighter. Five cigarettes a day. Her ration. She lit up, leaning against the bathroom wall, blowing the smoke towards the fan. She hated the smell of smoke.

  The last room in the basement was cramped and uncomfortable. She pushed past the closed bathroom door, stumbling on something, and ran her eye over the room. The wardrobe was small, crammed against the narrow back wall next to the French windows that opened on to the yard. The window nets were damp with condensation and stuck to the glass. The dressing table was against the long wall opposite the bed. The gap was so narrow, Anna had to turn sideways to squeeze between them. The room was…She looked round. The bed appeared unused, but there were clothes thrown across it – a woman’s jacket and skirt. A shoe lay in front of the French windows. The other shoe was in the narrow entrance way. She’d trodden on it on her way in. The occupant must not have checked out yet.

  Anna stripped the bed and dumped the pile of clean linen in the middle of the mattress. Unused or not, the beds had to be changed. She picked up the shoes and put them in the bottom of the wardrobe, put the skirt and jacket on a hanger. Maybe this occupant was one of the rare visitors who stayed for more than one night. The room was cold, unlike the stuffy dampness of the other basement rooms. A line of cold seemed to run down her back, and a draught blew around her ankles. She buttoned her cardigan up round her neck.

  The vacuum cleaner was plugged in from the corridor. She switched it on, but the poor suction told her the bag would have to be changed. More time. She dumped the full bag in her cleaning tray and, with the speed of familiarity, fitted a new one and gave the small expanse of carpet a thorough clean. She ran her cloth over the skirting boards and over the surfaces of the dressing table and the small bedside table. The ashtray was unused, and the tea tray untouched. Something sticky smeared under her cloth, leaving a brown stain. She rubbed it clean. She felt dissatisfied with the room, as though she’d forgotten something important. She looked at the nets sticking to the window, and decided to wipe the condensation off. It might get rid of that…that was it! – that slight taint in the air that made the room feel unclean. For a moment, she thought she smelt burning. A sense of unease, a sickness, began to stir in her stomach.

  The window moved as she wiped it, and she realized that it was open slightly. Someone had opened the French windows and left them ajar. That was why it was so cold in here. Why would someone do that? Running away rather than pay the bill? And leave a good suit and a pair of shoes? Someone who wanted fresh air? And leave the room so insecure? She shook her head, puzzled. If there was one thing she’d learnt as a hotel cleaner, it was that you couldn’t explain the way people behaved away from home. She pulled the windows shut, slamming them to lock the bar. The smell was probably coming from the bins in the yard. It would go now that the windows were closed.

  Just the bathroom to do now. Anna had left the bathroom until last. She looked at the white painted door off the narrow entrance lobby to the room. It was shut tight. Guests usually left the bathroom door open, the steam drifting out into the room with the smell of soap and shampoo, or less pleasant smells; towels carelessly dumped on beds, on carpets, on chairs. She put her fingers on the door handle. She didn’t want to open that door. Stupid fancies! She pressed the handle down and pushed. The door stayed shut. She frowned. Locked? Now she came to listen, there was a trickling sound and the sound of water running in the pipes. She knocked. Silence. Surely, if there was someone in the bathroom, they would have come into the room and told her to leave the cleaning until the room was free. She checked her watch. She had lost all the time she had gained earlier. She was running late again. Mrs Fry would be down shortly to find out what she was doing. The thought galvanized her, and she pressed the handle down harder and pushed against the door. This door stuck sometimes, she remembered now. But there was a feeling of sick anticipation in her stomach. Something in her mind was trying to make her turn away. Don’t look! Forget!

  The door resisted for a moment then flew open. She was suddenly in the bathroom, in the hot, steamy air, and the smell was there, heavy like the smell in the meat market at home. Sour. Cloying. Unclean.

  The drip, drip of the water as she creeps through the bushes. The smell of burning is still in the air, but it is a smell of old burning. Ashes, the remains of a fire. Fires mean warmth and parties and music and voices. Voices! She stops, listens. Silence, just the dripping of the water. But coming through the smell of burning is something else, heavy, sweet, rotten.

  She can see the house, now. It’s just outside the village, on the edge of the trees. The burning must come from the village, of course, not from her house. She peers through the leaves. She listens for the sound of her mother calling to the children, or her father laughing with the men as they took a break. They’ll all be
worried. She’s been gone, what, two nights? Three nights? ‘I’m back…’ she whispers, looking through the leaves at the shell of her house, at the bundle lying half in and half out of the door, tiny on the ground, with the sole of a shoe pointing towards the bushes where she is hiding. The rain must have put the fire out. She can see the water dripping from the eaves and the remains of the roof.

  Her foot squashed in something and she looked down, recoiling instinctively, mechanically wiping her foot on the carpet. The floor was wet. Something dripped on to her neck and she jumped, turning round. Condensation was dripping from the ceiling, and the walls glistened. A steady trickling sound came from the bath as though the shower was running, just a bit, turned down very low. The shower curtain was pulled across, pink and translucent. The water ran and trickled, gurgling in the pipes, making the plughole of the basin echo.

  Someone was in the shower. That was her first thought. Someone in the shower who ran the water in a slow dribble, someone who ignored the sound of movement, the vacuum, the banging and knocking attendant on cleaning. Someone…The broken door in front of her now. Through there, mother, father, the table where they all sit to eat and talk and the little ones running around and the smell of… Sour, rotten.

  Slowly, she put out her hand and pulled the curtain back.

  She thought it would be her mother.

  The woman – it was a woman, she could still tell that – was slumped in the bath. She looked…broken, like a toy that had been dropped and crushed. Her face – Krisha…? – her face, like Krisha’s doll, they’d trodden on Krisha’s doll and the doll’s face was distorted and smashed, the eye sockets and eyes not quite aligned, the mouth cracked into a feral grin. Krisha’s doll! Water dripped from the woman’s hair as it trickled from the shower. Ribbons. It’s like… Her first thought was that there should have been more blood. Then her legs felt weak and she was cold all over. Her mouth was full of saliva and she was dizzy. She couldn’t stop herself. Her knees thumped on to the floor. She felt the wetness on the floor seeping through her stockings on to her legs. Her hands slipped on the side of the bath, trying to keep her from falling down into it. Don’t let it touch me!