Requiem

by Clare Francis

  Hillyard exhaled.

  Len peered at him through his spectacles and asked hopefully: ‘What about them?’ He indicated the doors at the end of the passage.

  Locks were a serious disease with Len and it positively hurt him to leave them untried. ‘No, my old darling,’ Hillyard whispered firmly. ‘From now on it’s amateur night.’

  He went to the door of the front office. The boy was at the blinds, staring out into the night. The remaining two already had the pickaxes in their hands. At Hillyard’s nod they went down the corridor and began smashing through the double doors at the end.

  The doors gave up without much of a fight. Leaving Len to tidy up his control box, Hillyard followed the others through the remains of the doors and, overtaking, led the way into the first room, immediately to the right of the passageway. Lighting a path across the floor with his torch, he lowered the venetian blinds at all four windows and shone the torch around the room until he found a desk lamp. Switching it on, he gestured to the others to begin.

  They chose the most inviting equipment first: wooden carousels of test tubes which smashed with the satisfying crunch of crushed wine glasses; tiers of jar-lined shelves which bent and crumbled, shooting cascades of glass across the floor; complex electronic equipment with VDU units which imploded on impact.

  Leaving them to it, Hillyard explored the rest of the place. Plain unmarked doors to the left of the passageway, one locked, the next – a store room – open, the last locked again. To the right, a small room with rows of white shoes in plastic bags and overalls hanging on pegs that led into another laboratory even larger than the first. He went into this room and, closing the blinds, looked for a small lamp. Finding none, he went back to the door and flicked on one of the overhead lights.

  Returning to the first laboratory, he saw that the lads had finished with their pickaxes and were now creating a pile of chairs, papers and miscellaneous rubbish in the centre of the floor.

  When they had finished he led them back into the passageway and asked them to tackle the two locked doors on the left. The first door revealed stacks of stored equipment, the second a much larger room whose occupants were announced by the pungent smell that went before them. The room was lined with banks of cages containing an assortment of rodents. Mice and rats; white, grey, piebald, black. There seemed to be hundreds of them.

  Leading the two men into the second laboratory to start work there, he returned alone to the cages. ‘Now wouldn’t Beji love you,’ he said, dragging a gloved finger across the rungs of a cage of white mice. He tried lifting the cage, but it was fastened down in some way. Squatting, he examined the sides and base of the cage, and saw that it was clipped to the next cage. Once the clips were undone it was a simple matter to lift the cage and carry it out. He took it to the side door which he’d noticed on his first visit. The door was fastened with bolts, but also a bloody great mortise lock. Hillyard looked up the passage and saw Len still tinkering with the control box. Hillyard called to him. Len, perking up like a hunting dog, came hurrying along, pulling his skeleton keys out of his pocket.

  It took him about five seconds to get the lock open, a speed which seemed to both please and disappoint him. The rest of the job took considerably longer. Hillyard carried the cages, a pair at a time, out of the building and round to the back area, which, though dark, was the only place that was sufficiently distant from the van. There, having opened each cage, he had to spend more precious seconds getting its inhabitants to leave. The first lot of rats fell out all right, but the mice clung stubbornly to their cages. He had to shake the cage quite violently to get them out. On the second to last trip, shaking out a cage of fat grey rats, one of them fell against his leg and clutched at his trousers. Jumping clear with a cry of repulsion, he landed on something soft which squelched and crunched underfoot. Cursing, he ran back to the side door and scraped his shoe repeatedly on the doorstep. Shivering with disgust he took the last pair of cages to the door and threw them out into the darkness unopened. He turned to go back inside then stopped suddenly, and, retracing his steps to one of the unopened cages, picked it up and threw it into the back of the van.

  The others had finished in the second lab and were hovering tensely in the passageway, waiting for him to give the go-ahead for the next stage. Hillyard noticed they had already collected the jerrycans from the front lobby.

  Hillyard looked at his watch. They’d been in the building twenty minutes. It felt like a long time. The men’s restlessness was infectious, the urge to cut and run almost overpowering, but Hillyard suppressed it. He knew that this job, above all, had to be done properly.

  ‘Not so quick, not so quick,’ he flung at them, leading the way to the store rooms.

  Only when the store rooms had received the pickaxe treatment and all the filing cabinets in the front offices had been emptied onto the floor did Hillyard finally give the go-ahead for the jerrycans to be emptied over the piles of furniture and papers. ‘Not too much!’ he barked at one point. ‘We don’t want a towering bloody inferno!’

  By the time he had supervised the fuelling, he was behind schedule. He hurried into the office and, yanking the phone out of its socket, smashed it hard on the corner of the desk. Pulling off the casing, he removed the tiny transmitter that he had put there on his first visit and put it in his pocket. Passing the boy at the window, he went out into the lobby. Pulling an aerosol can from his pocket, he paused at the main doors. On the nod from the boy he stepped outside. He shook the spray can until he could hear the metal ball rattling inside its housing. He chose the long stretch of wall under the windows of the main office for his first effort. Considering the poor light, it wasn’t too bad. For his next site he chose the main doors themselves then, as a final offering, a stretch of wall on the side of the building, which, though poorly lit, was nice and large, like a blank page.

  As he finished, he remembered that the side door was still open. Finding Len, he sent him to close it again.

  When Len returned Hillyard gestured questioningly towards the control box.

  ‘All set,’ Len confirmed.

  Now it was a matter of getting things in the right order. He sent the boy to the main door, Len to the burglar alarm, and the other two down the passage to wait outside the doors of the labs. When everyone was in position he gave the nod. The first lab went up immediately with a great whoosh and flash of light; the other one he couldn’t see, but it must have gone up all right because the man in charge of lighting it came running out into the passage like a bat out of hell. As the two fire-lighters came through the smashed swing doors Len reset the burglar alarm and closed the box. Hillyard would have liked to wait and see the offices go up, but there wasn’t time.

  He ran out and round the corner and jumped into the van. The boy was already at the gates, swinging them open. Hillyard fired the engine, drove the van out onto the front apron and reversed it up to the main doors. Len was bending over the locks on the front door. The moment he straightened up and moved clear, the other two attacked the doors with their pickaxes, as if they were only just going in. The sound of the splintering wood was horrendously loud, but it was nothing compared to the alarm, which went off suddenly a few seconds later, its bells piercing the darkness. It seemed to Hillyard that the whole neighbourhood must be up and looking out of their windows.

  The flames in the front office were filling the window. The next moment there was a great whoomph! as the glass blew out. Hillyard pricked up his ears. Under the jangling of the alarm, he thought he could hear a siren in the distance.

  He slid across the seat and yelled through the window: ‘Come o-n!’

  The rear doors of the van opened and first Len, then the other two, jumped in. The boy flung himself into the passenger seat as Hillyard accelerated through the gates. The boy panted audibly all the way to the Chelmsford bypass.

  Hillyard was panting too. Reaching across, he brushed his hand against the boy’s thigh.

  Chapter 29

>   A LOG SETTLED noisily in the grate, sending licks of gold up the oak panelling and into the dusty drops of the dark chandelier. The room was warm, the rug soft under Susan’s back. Lazily, she rolled over and picked a crumpet off the dish by the hearth. The crumpet, sagging with melted butter, pliant as a sponge, was heavy with the scent of schooldays and other diet-free eras of long ago. She bit into it with a delicious sense of rediscovery. It had been a long time since she’d allowed herself anything so wicked.

  Keeping her eyes off Nick – he mustn’t feel she was crowding him – she looked casually towards the window. It was a filthy afternoon. Rain splattered against the glass, leaves streamed off the trees, and the sky was darkening rapidly. No sound penetrated the room – the double-glazing was too thick for that – and she was left with the curious but exhilarating sensation that everything that lay outside – London, people, family – was at a great remove, incapable of intruding on the afternoon.

  She finally rewarded herself with a look at Nick. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, the wallpaper book open on his knees, his shoulders hunched, his face creased with concentration, like a student pondering some impossible maths problem. As always when she looked at him she felt a tiny proprietorial thrill, an involuntary spasm of excitement, the precise nature of which it wasn’t necessary to examine. It was enough, she’d decided, to experience the surge of feeling, to ride the rush of elation which, after a week of these tea parties, seemed to be spilling over rather pleasantly into every part of her life.

  She watched him, and smiled affectionately. He had a way of chewing on the side of his lip, of splaying his fingers over his cheek, of drawing sudden hissing breaths on his cigarette that suggested a bafflement, a mild helplessness that was really very attractive. This hint of vulnerability, and his habit of letting people get closer to him only by the smallest and most tantalizing degrees, made him rather a challenge.

  She was making progress though, chipping softly away at his defences. She thought, not for the first time, of how satisfactorily things had changed. When they had been together all those years ago there had been passion – on her part at least – but also some beastly misunderstandings.

  Nick flicked over a page and pulled at his chin. Unlike Tony, he was one of those men who had improved with age. Lean body, thick hair, intriguing face.

  She had promised not to interrupt him while he studied the wallpaper samples – a rather professional-sounding assurance, she had thought – but what had been a reasonable pause had now stretched into an unwieldy silence, and silences were not something Susan felt comfortable with.

  ‘I’m keeping quiet,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ve noticed.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said, snapping the book shut and sliding it onto the floor. ‘They’re all beginning to look the same. You’ll have to choose.’

  ‘No problem,’ she said happily. ‘We could paper one wall and if you don’t like it, we can take it down and start all over again.’

  He nodded distractedly and she saw that she had lost him. This happened now and again: one moment he’d be there, listening attentively, sliding her the occasional glance in that oblique way of his, the next moment he’d slip away into a part of his mind that excluded her as completely as if he’d left the room.

  ‘You were so brave at the party!’ she said, pushing just the right balance of fondness and mockery into her voice.

  His eyes flicked towards her but she could see he was only half listening.

  ‘I still can’t get over the way those women besieged you,’ she went on lightly. ‘People with money are the worst of all, I’m afraid. Think they’ve bought you along with the ticket.’

  ‘Tell me about Schenker,’ Nick asked suddenly.

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, he’s just a mogul. You know … earnest. And dull.’

  ‘Ruthless?’

  ‘Ooh, that’s a strong word!’ she laughed. Sensing she had hit too flippant a note, she made a show of giving the question serious consideration. ‘I don’t know him that well,’ she said, ‘but ruthless – yes, I would think so. Why?’

  But he didn’t answer. Instead he asked: ‘He knows your husband quite well, I suppose?’

  Now where was this leading? Generally he never asked about Tony, not directly. ‘Oh, they’ve met …’ she said casually. ‘You know – at functions, in the House. These companies always do quite a bit of lobbying. Oh, and he’s taken us to the opera a couple of times. But then all the big companies do that – take us to things.’

  Nick absorbed this slowly, staring intently at the fire.

  The opportunity of deepening the conversation while at the same time airing the subject of Tony – something she’d been wanting to do for some time – was not to be missed. ‘I hardly see Tony nowadays,’ she murmured a little ruefully. ‘He’s in Luxembourg at the moment. Some trade talks, or whatever. But even if he’d been free to come to the party, he’d have persuaded himself he couldn’t. In fact since he became a politician – well …’ She gave a valiant little laugh and, though she didn’t plan it, her breath caught rather attractively in her throat. ‘We don’t really communicate much … His work just eats him up. And he’s so incredibly hyped up all the time, rushing around like a madman, that we don’t have time to talk – about anything. So I’ve rather given up, I’m afraid.’ She looked down at the rug and pulled delicately at the pile. ‘I’m not complaining, not exactly. Well, perhaps I am,’ she added, shooting him a fleeting smile. Looking suitably serene, she added: ‘But I think one has to try to make the best of things, don’t you? Even when they’re – difficult. Make do. Muddle through.’

  Nick lit a cigarette, propped an elbow on one knee and looked into the fire. He was gathering himself to say something in that cautious thoughtful way of his, but just as he began to speak the phone rang. Usually he ignored it, letting his housekeeper pick it up somewhere in the depths of the house, but now he got up to answer it. ‘My direct line. Sorry …’

  Direct line. She hadn’t realized he had one. She certainly didn’t have the number for it, and she rather thought she should. It was someone called David. David Weinberg, presumably.

  Nick was mumbling a perfunctory apology for having missed some meeting or another. Susan reached for another crumpet. It wouldn’t do any harm when she was burning up so much nervous energy.

  ‘What!’ Nick’s voice was sharp and raw.

  Susan abandoned the crumpet. Nick was sinking slowly onto the sofa, reaching out a hand to steady himself.

  ‘God!’ he groaned, dropping abruptly into his seat and clamping a hand to his face. ‘I might have known! I should have known!’

  He listened for a few moments longer, muttering the occasional ‘God!’ and ‘Christ!’, then, the conversation apparently over, slumped wearily back in his seat, the receiver forgotten in his hand until, looking down, he swung it slowly back into its cradle.

  Susan was on her feet. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Almost immediately, the phone rang again. This time

  Nick ignored it and after a few rings it stopped. He covered his head with his hands.

  ‘Nick – what is it?’

  He dropped his hands.

  ‘Would you do something for me, Susan?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Look and see if there’s anyone hanging around the gate.’

  ‘Of course.’ She started across the room.

  ‘Don’t let them see you.’ Nick’s voice followed her.

  A chill of excitement squirmed in her stomach; this was rather an adventure.

  She approached the window at an angle, keeping away from the glass. The cloud had lifted a little, the rain abated, but now it was almost dusk and the streetlamps were burning a dull orange.

  The house was fronted by a short garden of ornamental paving and thin strips of lawn, and screened from the road by a high wall.

  ‘I can’t see from here,’ she called. ‘Shall I try upstairs?’

&nb
sp; ‘Would you?’ His face was grim.

  She went upstairs to the guest bedroom that lay immediately above the sitting room and peered cautiously from behind the edge of the curtain. Someone passed under the streetlamp on the opposite pavement, head down, small dog in train. A car was backing into a parking place. Otherwise nothing. She was rather disappointed. A man got out of the parked car and crossed the street diagonally, heading straight for the house. The next moment she heard a bell sound deep in the house.

  She raced downstairs to hear Nick giving instructions that he was abroad and not available for comment.

  ‘Didn’t take them long!’ he remarked bitterly.

  ‘Nick, what is it?’

  He lit a cigarette, shut his lighter with an angry snap and sucked the smoke in greedily. ‘You’re trapped as well, I’m afraid – unless you want to get snapped, of course. They won’t leave, you know, not until they get fed up. Or it’s near closing time.’

  She took a few steps closer to him. ‘Who?’

  ‘The papers! The tabloids!’ He gestured towards the front of the house. ‘They won’t give up.’ His tone was belligerent, indignant.

  ‘Nick …’ She made a calming voice. ‘What’s it all about?’

  He gave a harsh chuckle. ‘You might as well know. The whole of the rest of the bloody world’ll know by the morning, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be the first.’

  She went up to him and, kneeling at his side, tugged gently at his arm. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat down beside her on the rug, resting his elbows on his knees.

  ‘There’s this research project I got involved with, a scientific project,’ he began slowly. ‘Well, the building – the laboratory they were using – it got burnt down in the night, totally destroyed.’ He snorted mirthlessly. ‘By animal rights campaigners, of all people. Angry at what the evil scientists were planning to do to the rats and mice. Protesting … Funny really …’ He dropped his head onto his knees for a moment, then flicked a sideways glance at her. ‘You see, I funded the place.’