“That’s why I drove in a loop,” said Ellis. “He could have seen us setting off, but—”
“Come on!” Leona cried softly. “He can’t possibly have seen us. Even if he could see all the way to Moncrieff Street, he wouldn’t be able to tell one person from another.”
There was no time for further argument. They skirted the old building, crossed a courtyard, and climbed steps to grand, green, main doors with panels and decorative brass locks. The small, square lobby inside was dominated by a lift. Along the left-hand wall, numbered letter-boxes opened gaping, oblong mouths, while on the right-hand wall, opposite the letter boxes, was a series of small grids, all numbered and named to match the letter boxes.
The name, KILMER, gold print on an enamelled green plate, stood out beside Number 12.
“Here we go!” said Jackie, his finger hovering over a red button with the word, Communicate, beside it.
But Ursa slapped his hand away.
“My job,” she said. “He’ll freak out if he gets any idea that you’re here. But he’ll let me in – if he’s there, that is.”
“Oh, please …” sighed Leona. “Please!”
But Ellis was pressing the button with one hand and gesturing for silence with the other. They waited.
Miraculously, a voice came crisply from between the narrow bars in front of him …
“Hello, there!” it said carelessly. And indeed it was Christo. Ursa clapped her hand over Jackie’s opening mouth as if unguarded words might slide out of it.
“Christo?” said Ellis in a slightly doubtful voice. “Is that you?”
“Who’s that?” asked Christo, too sharply for a man who had been merely relaxing and watching television.
“John Marlin,” said Ellis, snatching a name out of the past. Remembering the voice that had once gone with that name, he deepened his own slightly, careful not to overdo it, and assumed a faint, Scottish accent. “Just passing through and thought I’d check up on a few old friends.” (Spot on, he thought with satisfaction. That’s exactly how John used to sound.)
“Hell!” Christo’s voice had relaxed once more. “Where did you spring from?”
“I’m en route to Dunedin,” said Ellis. (Not quite so convincing that time, he thought.) Christo, however, did not seem at all suspicious.
“I rang your parents but they weren’t too sure where you were. They gave me this address, though.”
“Were they worried?” Christo asked, his voice sharpening once more.
“Worried?” said Ellis in a puzzled voice. “Why would they be worried? Are you up to something?”
“I’ve got to have some private life,” said Christo bitterly.
“Well, how about letting me in?” asked Ellis plaintively. “I’ve got a few cans and a bottle of gin.”
“I’m not short of booze,” said Christo, deriding this bribe. “This place is always pre-e-tty well-stocked.”
“Let’s party then,” Ellis cried exuberantly. Christo was silent. “Come on!” he repeated desperately. “To tell you the truth, mate, I’m on the run.”
“Why? What’s happened?” asked Christo, suddenly interested. Ellis was tempted to invent something, but – no, he told himself sternly – keep it simple.
“Just let me in,” he begged. “I can’t tell you my life story while I’m standing out here.”
There was no reply. Ellis could feel Christo’s doubt as if it were a sort of electricity arcing down through the communication system and into the air of the lobby. Jackie was staring at him with flattering astonishment. But then all four of them focused on the intercom, standing a little on either side of it as if an eye might look down through invisible wires and see who was really there.
“The thing is,” said Christo at last, “I’m not quite alone. But – OK! Come on up.”
“This is all wrong,” said Ursa as they crammed themselves into the tiny lift. “He’ll take one look at us and …”
“If he won’t give her back we’ll have to call the police,” said Leona. “At least we know where he is.”
“We don’t actually know that he’s got her,” said Jackie.
“Yeah,” Ellis said. “But it’s getting more and more likely. Don’t you think he sounded … a bit funny?”
“Right!” said Jackie with subdued sarcasm. “A real stand-up comedian. But you were great. How do you do that Scottish thing?”
The lift-door opened. They came out into a small area carpeted in dark blue and with two doors opening off it in different directions. The left-hand door displayed the number ‘12’ in shining brass. Ursa, Jackie and Leona flattened themselves on either side of the door, acting like characters in a television police drama. Ellis faced the door squarely and knocked. The handle rattled and turned. Christo must have been waiting for them. The door opened a reluctant centimetre or two, just enough to let Christo peer out at whoever might be on the other side.
With a yell, Jackie flung himself against the door and, since he had now committed them to unreasonable force, Leona, Ursa and Ellis lunged with him, pushing and shoving with all their strength. The door resisted … resisted … then yielded, swinging inwards with a surrender so complete that Jackie stumbled forward and fell, sprawling on the grey carpet of a large sitting room. As Ursa, Leona and Ellis charged in, they leaped across him as well as they could.
Christo was running for a door on the other side of the room, and before any of them had taken in the geography of this new stage – its exits and entrances, its trapdoors and stairs, or possible wires of flight or magical descent – he had dived through it and slammed it behind him. However, there was no lock on this second door.
“Quickly!” yelled Ellis.
And then, somewhere beyond the door, a child began to cry.
“Shelley!” wailed Leona, anguish and relief mingling in her voice, while Jackie and Ellis heaved, yet again, at the second door, pushing at it with their shoulders while their feet skidded on the grey carpet.
Here we go again, Ellis thought, somewhere in that curious, parallel existence in which he was not a participant but a watcher witnessing his own adventures. On his left, a window looked out across the city towards the river estuary and the sea. In front of this window stood a handsome table, and on the table lay a pair of binoculars. Ellis felt sure that if he had had time to pick them up and peer into them, he would have found it possible to make out many details in Moncrieff Street … Phipps’s portrait perhaps, or the Land-of-Smiles. The door gave a little, and then a little more, cracking against something heavy which was being pushed against it.
“Christo!” yelled Ursa. “Come on! This is crazy! Christo!”
“I’m not crazy!” Christo screamed back. Ellis could tell he was some distance from the door. “Call me crazy and you’ll be sorry.”
There was a sliding sound that Ellis recognised, without being sure exactly what it was he was hearing … a drawer closing, perhaps. The remains of his hangover swept through him, but he set his teeth and leaned his whole weight against the door as implacably as he could.
“Christo?” called Ursa. “Please!”
“Push!” grunted Ellis, and the door opened a little further. Beyond it he saw light moving across glass.
The child’s cry, which had been a tired grizzling, became a shriek, then diminished as if it were vanishing into distance.
“Where’s he taking her?” cried Leona.
“Heave!” yelled Jackie.
The door moved inwards. Jackie leaped for the widening space, stepping up, on and over the heavy mahogany chest that had been pushed to block the door. Sliding after him, first Ursa, then Leona, then Ellis, they found themselves in the sort of room described in real-estate language as the ‘master bedroom’, although its dusty-rose pink draperies and voluptuous cushions suggested it belonged to a mistress rather than a master.
Open French windows led on to a tiny balcony, and on the balcony rail, feet in black running shoes were stretched up on tiptoe. Two legs, s
heathed in black jeans, strained above the shoes, but the rest of Christo was invisible for he was in the act of pulling himself up over one of the wide, tiled lids that had half-winked at Ellis the night before. The balcony was cluttered with small things – a little table on curling, iron legs, two chairs and a folded sun umbrella. Taking all this in as he moved forward, Ellis had an image of the Kilmers sitting there, working out a trendy separation while exhaust fumes drifted up from the street below.
As Ellis made for the balcony, Jackie dived forward too. He clearly meant to catch Christo’s feet, but Leona seized him and wheeled him around, crying out ferociously as she did so, and reminding him that Christo must be holding Shelley. They could not – must not – try tugging him down. As Jackie and Leona swung around one another in a brief parody of a dance, the feet on the balcony rail flexed themselves. Christo leaped upwards. One foot dangled, flapping a little, as Christo struggled to drag his knee up on to the overhang. A desperate, scrabbling sound came from above the decorative lid, the vanished foot slid back into view and the invisible child shrieked with either fear or fury, though her cry was thin and frail compared with the rising roar of traffic accelerating below. Then the waving foot vanished, the other followed it, and Christo was gone.
“Oh, no!” wailed Leo. “No, no!”
And it was her turn to dive for the French windows.
“Don’t even look!” cried Ellis, for he, too, half- expected to see Shelley tumble past, falling like a bundle of rags, tossed away so that Christo could make good his escape.
And even now, in the small, separate world of his own head, he was aware how sweet Leona smelled, though he also caught, faint but distinct, something he had not previously recognised – the tang of antiseptic.
Meanwhile, Jackie, grabbing the iron post at the corner of the balcony, had leaped on to a chair, then on to the table and, in the same flow of movement, on to the balcony rail, grabbing the edge of the roof as he did so. Almost at once, Christo kicked him. Crying out in alarm, Jackie swayed backwards, Ursa springing to catch him and screaming as she did so. But Jackie, being Jackie, had already saved himself.
“He’s got Shelley in a backpack,” he shouted down to them. “Hey!” he cried, grasping the guttering once more and leaning backwards so he could get a better view. “Chris! Don’t be such a shit.”
Christo’s voice drifted back to them, perfectly clear but a little eerie, as if he were shouting from another dimension.
“Leave me alone! If you follow me I’ll throw the kid over. And don’t call me Chris!”
The knot between Jackie’s shoulders seemed to loosen itself. He looked down at the others on the balcony.
“Ring the cops!” he said in a low voice. It was the shape of his lips rather than the sound of the words that gave the message. “Now! Like now!”
Leona, who had also squeezed on to the balcony, turned and ran into the bedroom to look for a phone.
“Shall I go after him?” Jackie added, still speaking very softly and sounding more dubious than Ellis had ever heard him sound before.
“No!” said Ellis, entirely sure of himself. “You’re his enemy. Come down!”
Jackie jumped effortlessly from the balcony rail. “Someone ought to talk to him … distract him for a bit,” he said, looking shaken as if, for the first time, he really believed Shelley might die.
“I will,” said Ursa.
“No,” said Ellis. “I will. He isn’t frightened of me. He’s used to beating me up. Besides,” he added, “I know what to say to him.” And, instantly, things shifted in his head, and he knew, knew for certain, that he was the one who had a message for Christo.
“He’s flipped!” said Jackie. “He’s totally flipped.”
They could hear Leona dialling a number in the bedroom, and then heard her babbling rather desperately as she spoke, presumably to the police. Suddenly her voice seemed to fail. Standing in the doorway like a ghost, she stared at them, holding out the phone stretched to the limit of its cord.
“You tell them,” she said. “I can’t! I don’t even know exactly where we are.”
As Jackie grabbed the phone and went into the bedroom, and Ellis moved further out on to the balcony, a voice, wailing like the parody of a ghost-voice in a horror film, came floating down from above them.
“Ursie! Urrr-sie!”
“Yes! On the roof,” Ellis heard Jackie saying. “Ursie!” called the voice once more. “Hey Ursie! Talk to me!”
“He’s up there now,” Jackie was saying in the background. “He’s on a sort of platform. There’s scaffolding everywhere.”
“Urrr … sie!” wailed Christo. “I’m not to be trusted. Talk to me!”
Ursa looked at the balcony rail and roof above. “You’ll have to hold me!” she said to Ellis. “I’m not great with heights.”
“Oh, shit!” cried Jackie, looking through the open doors and reading her intention. The phone clattered abruptly as he dropped the receiver, a voice quacking faintly, asking questions, then probably asking them again. “You’re not to!” Jackie yelled at Ursa.
Then he was beside her, seizing her arm.
Up above them, Christo called out once more. “If you don’t come and talk to me, Ursie, I’ll jump! Life’s a bitch, anyway. I’ll jump – and take the kid with me.”
“You’re just not tall enough to get on to the roof,” Jackie was telling Ursa, shaking her as he spoke. “Listen to me! I can’t get on to that roof. I’m not tall enough. Neither are you. Christo could because he’s a tall guy. Tall and mad!”
“Jump … ing!” yelled Christo “Bye-bye-baby!”
Leona flung her arms over her head and crouched down as if the sky were crashing down on her.
“I’ll put it out of its misery!” shouted Christo, which was what he had said many years ago as he pushed Ellis, again and again, under the water.
As Jackie and Ursa hissed and struggled, Ellis scrambled on to the table, stepped on to the balcony rail, then slowly straightened. The balcony rail pressed into the balls of his feet which were set at such awkward angles that it proved difficult to move with any confidence. So he stood there like a dancer, frozen in the middle of a complicated step. Below him the street crawled with cars, probably all looking for places to park, and he began to hear voices drifting up in a smoke of sound.
Holding on to the post at the corner of the balcony, he moved carefully, altering the angle of his feet. As he did so, he happened to glance down, and the fall to the street below suddenly swam into focus. It was a long way down. Ellis understood that indeed he might fall, but forced himself to feel a sort of amused patience with his fear. Then he straightened, swung one foot around, reached up, grabbed the guttering and, at last, dared to look for Christo and Shelley.
He did not have to look far.
“Jump-ing!” Christo was calling, almost singing. And in his ritual song he sounded free from all the things that were dragging Ellis down – free from fear, free from love, free from any kind of compassion. Christo was being playful, just as he had been playful when he so nearly drowned Ellis all those years ago. And, remembering, Ellis knew just why Christo felt so confident. He was doing what he was good at … he was being a tormentor. He was fulfilled.
A sharp slope of tiles faced Ellis, climbing at an angle until it met a vertical wall. The orange pipes of scaffolding crisscrossing it, looked as if they were trying to scribble the stone out of existence. There, poised above him on a long, narrow platform, stood Christo, standing tall as he carelessly shrugged his way out of the backpack. Ellis glimpsed a small arm waving an apparent goodbye. The sound of a wail, much more insistent now that he and Shelley were almost face to face, reached his ears.
Christo propped the backpack against an orange pipe which rose vertically behind him. Ellis tried to work out if there were enough space between the platform and the wall for the backpack, together with the child it held, to tumble away down the stone face of the old library.
“Jumping
…” Christo cried almost casually, bending his knees, straightening them again, and then bending them once more.
“Hey!” Ellis yelled back, relieved to hear his own voice sounding almost as light-hearted as Christo’s own, and completely unthreatening. “It’s me!”
On the platform above him, Christo stood stock still, staring down at Ellis. He did not seem to recognise him.
“Who the fuck are you?” he cried, and then exclaimed incredulously, “Ellis?” His voice altered. “Ellis! What’s happened to you?” He sounded distracted rather than angry. But Ellis – a kitten so easy to drown – was no danger to Christo.
“They hit on me to be the transport,” said Ellis. He raised his free hand, opening it to show that there was no weapon concealed in it.
“God, look at you!” Christo said. “I didn’t know you.” He sounded quite reasonable. “What have they done to you?”
“I’m just the transport,” Ellis repeated.
“That was you driving them?” said Christo. “I thought you were some no-hoper from the Land-of-Smiles.”
Ellis bent his knees, crouching a little, then sprang upwards as hard as he could. The guttering cut into him as, floundering and clumsy, he struggled to inch himself forward, refusing to acknowledge that he was in any danger. Indeed, clumsiness was an advantage. Christo would not allow himself to be approached by anyone clever or competent.
“No closer!” cried Christo, shaking the backpack ominously. Shelley set up a tired grizzling, almost as if she already knew crying was not worth the trouble.
“Just let me …” began Ellis, making himself sound as if he were in rather more difficulty than he actually was. “Can’t I just …”
Christo visibly relaxed at the sound of Ellis’s bumbling anxiety. He watched him get one knee on to the edge of the roof, watched him push forward yet again, and then lie extended, panting as he sprawled on the tiles. Secretly, Ellis knew he could have used his impetus to scrabble further up the slope, but felt sure, in an instinctive way, that a competent spidering upwards might have alarmed Christo.
Twenty-Four Hours Page 12
