Requiem

by Clare Francis

  Daisy’s back crawled, she felt a deep foreboding: what Campbell would probably dismiss as first-time nerves, and he would be right.

  Campbell found the next switch and the landing was flooded with light from an array of spots splaying out from a central ceiling rose. There was new carpet, bright paintwork, a prosperous look. The area contained five doors and no windows. Campbell took the left-hand doors, Daisy the right. The first door on the right was marked ‘Private’ and opened onto a continuation of the stairs. Here the stair carpet was very far from new, the paintwork visibly worn, and a musty aroma of ancient damp and old cooking fat wafted down the stairs, mixed with an odd animal odour, like wet fur.

  She moved on. Next was a toilet, the door labelled with a cheap stick-on sign. Last was an unmarked door, also open, that led into the rear extension that she had seen from the street.

  From the sound of rattling door handles, it appeared that Campbell was having less success with the two doors at the front of the house. One was a frosted glass-panelled door with ‘Reynard Associates, Investigation & Security’ in concentric arched gold lettering and on the rail underneath, a stick-on sign: ‘Please Enter’; the second had ribbed glass, and was marked ‘Private’.

  Daisy called: ‘This one’s open.’

  Abandoning his rattling, Campbell swept past her into the back extension. She followed and in the light from the hall saw what appeared to be some kind of conference room with easy chairs, a low table, a coffee-making machine and a tall metal cabinet in one corner. An odour of newness mingled with the strong smell of stale cigarettes. There was a large spill of some dark liquid on the carpet near the door.

  Campbell switched on the light, cutting off her objections with a gruff: ‘Might be keys.’

  ‘Keys?’

  ‘The office there.’ He indicated the door he had left, and started to search the filing cabinet.

  Daisy went to the window to watch for signs of approaching danger in Peregrine Road but, feeling conspicuous, pulled back.

  Campbell, tiring of his search for keys, went back across the hall to the office door.

  ‘Try not to make so much noise,’ she called as Campbell grew more ferocious with the door handle.

  He made a sound, a non-committal grunt before punching a hole in the glass with his elbow. Daisy sucked her breath as the sound reverberated into the night.

  She warned: ‘No lights, Campbell’ as he reached through and slipped the latch.

  There were blinds at the windows, venetian blinds with knotted cords and jammed pulleys which she closed before allowing Campbell to switch on his torch. Then, with Campbell angling the light, his body masking any stray beams that might find their way through the blinds, they went to work.

  The offices consisted of two rooms separated by a chipboard and frosted-glass screen. The first room contained two cluttered desks, a photocopier and a wall of filing cabinets, the second, reached through a connecting door stamped ‘C. Hillyard, Director’ or by means of the locked ribbed-glass door from the hall, had one much larger desk clean of papers, two easy chairs, an exercise bike and four gleaming filing cabinets.

  It was a mistake to start at the filing cabinets, but she didn’t realize that straight away. In its time, Reynard Associates seemed to have dealt with large numbers of clients. Each drawer contained dozens of files, and while the file tabs bore numbers which suggested some sort of system, the files themselves appeared random, and she began to realize that, approached this way, the job could not be done in a single night.

  One of the cabinets in the inner office refused to open, and leaving Campbell to pick the lock – which in Campbell’s repertoire meant to break it – she went back into the outer office and, by the light from the hall, searched the tops of the desks. The larger desk was the more obviously occupied, with in- and out-trays, two telephones, piles of papers and files, a couple of unemptied ashtrays and a stack of tape cassettes. She picked up a cassette and, holding it up to the light, read the label. There was a date – it was five days back – and the word ‘Jackie’. The rest of the cassettes – there were twenty or more – seemed to relate to Jackie as well, with the exception of two labelled ‘Charlie’. On the windowsill beside the desk there was a cassette player with headphones. Dropping one of the Jackie tapes into the slot, she sampled the buttons until, hitting the right one, the machine gave a click and began to play.

  The voice when it sprang into life was both strange and familiar. She recognized the inflections and flat south London vowels and other oddities of her own voice, even recalled the precise conversation – she’d been speaking to Jenny early one morning – yet at the same time the voice sounded disconnected and alien, grotesquely so. Partly it was the recording, which was distorted, partly it was the sheer surprise of hearing her unguarded words relayed back to her in this unlikely place.

  Slowly, calmly, she sorted through the stack of cassettes. The most recent was dated yesterday. She jammed it into her pocket, along with three others picked at random.

  Campbell reappeared and she beckoned him across to shine his torch over the desk while she searched the papers.

  A file also marked ‘Jackie’ was on top of the largest pile of documents. She might have thought this was a lucky find if she hadn’t spotted the next file, which was also entitled Jackie, and the one beneath that. Examination of the bottom file – no surprises on the title – gave her the picture. The transcriptions in the files were rough, the typing erratic and littered with errors, but they faithfully recorded every telephone conversation she’d had over the last few months, in many cases word for word.

  Then her gaze lit on a report which read: ‘Conversation with painter?? Workman?? Tells her she got some calls, also that she had a male visitor who left no name. Painter couldn’t give a description. Who’s a lucky boy, then? NFI.’

  So obvious, thought Daisy. So obvious, and I missed it. Why should they restrict their listening to phone calls? Why not bug the entire flat and record every conversation with visiting house painters, repairmen, friends, and lovers? Catch every private moment, and, if they were lucky, a few intimate ones as well to relieve the boredom and give them a few laughs. Well, they would have been disappointed on that score. No lovers in her bed for a long while, nor anywhere else in the flat for that matter. Only that long conversation with Nick by the chair. She thought abruptly: Did they get that too?

  She glanced at the report again. NFI. No further investigation? No further interest?

  ‘We should have brought a camera,’ she muttered, eyeing the photocopier and wondering how long it would take to copy a complete file.

  ‘What for?’ Campbell declared as he went through some of the papers she had cast aside. ‘Just take the stuff. It’s not as if they will na’ be knowin’ we were here, nor what we came for.’

  With Campbell life had a certain simplicity. She tucked three Jackie files into her capacious carpetbag and went through the remaining papers on the desk. They yielded little: surveillance reports on errant husbands, security reports on business premises, bills, invoices, VAT forms.

  Campbell disappeared into the inner office. Outside, a lorry thundered past and slowed with a long piercing squeal of brakes. She held still, listening, and realized that for the last few minutes at least, she had forgotten to be frightened. As if to punish her, one of the phones began to ring.

  After half a minute the ringing stopped. She returned to the desk top. Her hand settled on the invoices again and she held them up to the light one by one. Each one had the name and address of the creditor typed into the appropriate box with an invoice number above and a reference number below. In the main section came the itemization – hours of surveillance, office expenses – and the amount owing plus VAT. In some cases there were no details, just the statement ‘paid on account’ or ‘paid in advance against expenses’. Roughly half the invoices were made out to individuals, the other half to companies, and the majority were for between £100 and £500. Only two w
ere for significantly more, one, for the amount of £5,575, made out to Workham Overseas Holdings Ltd, covering ‘security for the month of October’, the other for £2,310, made out to PKL Electronics, covering ‘employee security’. Workham Overseas Holdings Ltd had an address in the Cayman Islands, and a postal address care of a bank in London.

  She made a note of the two reference numbers on the invoices and, after briefly checking the drawers of both desks and the stacks of papers on the windowsills, returned to the filing cabinets. But the gloomy light from the hall defeated her and she had to summon Campbell, torch in hand, before she could make progress through the files. The reference numbers seemed to bear some relation to logic and sequence and, working her way along the wall of cabinets, she found the drawer with the numbers most closely related to that on the PKL Electronics invoice, and then, an instant later, the PKL file itself, more or less in the right place. From what she could see PKL was everything it purported to be, an electronics company, indulging in a little surreptitious spying on its employees. There was no mention of Jackie, nothing relating to agrochemicals.

  The locating of the Workham file took a little longer. In the place where the file would most logically be found – two cabinets away in the top drawer – there was a gap, a large one, as if several very bulky files had been removed.

  Outside in the street a siren screamed and Daisy stiffened, senses reaching out beyond the room.

  ‘Try next door,’ suggested Campbell, his voice cracking with something that might have been tension.

  In the inner office, in the top drawer of the filing cabinet Campbell had forced open, they found a mound of papers, none of which referred to Jackie or Workham Overseas Holdings, while in the lower drawer there was a batch of eavesdropping equipment: recorders, batteries, and foam-lined boxes containing small black oblongs like the one she had found in her phone. As Daisy squatted to search the lower drawers there was a resounding crack! She twisted round to see Campbell at the desk, manoeuvring his way into the drawers with the jemmy.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ she cried weakly.

  A moment later she forgave him as he called her over to inspect the contents of the top right-hand drawer. The Workham file – or rather the first of three – was sitting on the top.

  Surveillance reports, digests of the Jackie transcriptions, a study of developments at Catch and Octek, even – she drew Campbell’s attention to it – a report on the fire.

  She muttered excitedly: ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Aye, well, take it an’ let’s be off then!’

  She pushed the file into her now bulging bag. ‘There’s more,’ she said, shining the torch on the files underneath.

  ‘You’ve enough,’ Campbell whispered, his voice alive with sudden anxiety.

  The second file contained detailed expense sheets covering the rental of cars and vans, the salaries of two ‘operatives’, sometimes three, along with equipment hire, phone calls and numerous incidentals.

  The third file was a bit of a mystery. Though it had the same reference number and must presumably relate to Workham Overseas Holdings, it concerned someone called Angela Kershaw who lived in Wandsworth, and contained a number of surveillance reports, some hospital bills, a few scribblings and not much else. One of the scribblings said: Paid in full. Subject has agreed not to see M again. Then underneath: Cramm – But will Driscoll stay away from her?

  ‘Campbell … look at this.’

  But Campbell wasn’t looking. ‘Hurry,’ he said in agitation. Daisy snapped the files shut and threw them back in the drawer. Then something made her draw the last one out again.

  ‘Come on!’ urged Campbell.

  But she was taking another look at the note. ‘Driscoll … You realize who that – ’

  Campbell made an abrupt hushing sound. His fear transmitted itself across the darkness, and she felt a creep of alarm. The street had gone quiet, the traffic had fallen into one of those inexplicable lulls that occur from time to time. Inside the house there was a deep stillness. It was broken by a faint sound, a muted ticking. Expanding metal. ‘The heating,’ she whispered.

  She sensed him relax. Sitting the torch on the desk she stacked all three Workham files and tried to force them into her over-stretched shoulder bag, but there wasn’t room. Even the surveillance file on its own was a squeeze, and reluctantly she put the other two back on the desk. Even then she couldn’t bring herself to leave them and, ripping the contents of the Kershaw file from its covers, tearing five specimen sheets from the expenses file, she rolled them up and pushed them into her belt. This, she immediately realized, was not ideal either and, removing them again, she thrust the bundle at Campbell who, after some complaint, jammed it into an inside compartment of his jacket.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said.

  Campbell didn’t reply. He seemed to be listening again. Abruptly he moved towards the outer office, waving at her to turn off the torch. Following, she came into the hall as he reached for the switch and killed the lights.

  In the darkness all she could hear was the soft rasp of Campbell’s breathing and the vibration of the traffic humming against the windows.

  A creak, a flow of sounds billowed into the stairwell: someone had opened the street door.

  Suddenly the lights in the lower hall sprang on and spilled round the turn in the stairs, and Daisy’s hand gave a slight involuntary spasm. Campbell touched her arm and jerked his head towards the blind spot between the toilet and the door that led to the floor above, where they would be hidden from anyone coming up from below. Having installed her there, he advanced slowly towards the head of the stairs, setting his feet down with such caution that in other circumstances he would have looked comical, like an actor in a farce.

  A floorboard creaked beneath his foot. She could almost feel him wince. He paused and tried again, but as he shifted his weight the wood creaked again.

  No sound came from below, no shout, no footfall.

  Reaching the top of the stairs Campbell put his eye to the corner and peered cautiously down the first flight, ready to spring out at anyone who came up. The silence ticked on. Numerous thoughts jostled in Daisy’s mind: the absurdity of the situation, the weight of the files dragging at her shoulder, the desire for something – anything – to happen, the urge to make some appalling noise, to shout or maybe even laugh.

  Just as it seemed the silence would go on for ever the lights went off below, plunging them into darkness again. A moment later there was a scraping of mauled wood against a frame, and an uneasy silence rippled up the stairs.

  It was perhaps two minutes before Campbell reached back and touched her arm and whispered: ‘Stay here.’ In the darkness she sensed rather than saw him move. A couple of treads creaked as he made his way down the stairs. With each sound Daisy’s foreboding returned.

  There was no way of knowing how far he had got when the loud thud rumbled up the stairwell. It was a deep and solid sound, like the thwack of a bat hitting a ball, like –

  She saw again the open door of the Beetle and the raincoat man’s arm raised above his head.

  A shuffling, a grunt, the sound of a scuffle. The dull thwack again. A crash, then silence.

  She opened her mouth to call Campbell’s name but the word died on her lips. Someone was already speaking. The murmur of a voice, not Campbell’s.

  After a moment the lower light sprang on again.

  She felt a moment of overwhelming helplessness, then the options spread themselves out before her: the conference room with its sheer drop to the yard below, the office with its windows that might or might not open, the toilet with its tiny window and no way out at all.

  From below, the voice rose, the words indistinct. The sound seemed to be coming up the stairs towards her.

  Catlike, her instinct cried out for height and, reaching for the knob beside her, she pulled open the door that led upstairs, and, stepping silently around it, closed it softly behind her. Feeling her way up the narrow stairs in t
he darkness, she stepped on every second tread, using the edges where the wood was least likely to give her away. Her back prickled with the heat of pursuit, she felt the terror of every small girl’s nightmare – the man panting at her heels, the weights pulling at her limbs – and it was with difficulty that she suppressed the urge to hurry.

  Rounding the dogleg in the stairs she heard feet pounding up to the floor below. Under cover of the noise, unable any longer to control the need to run, she made it to the top floor in three swift strides, two steps at a time. She stopped to listen, her heart hammering in her chest.

  The pounding feet were not following. Not yet anyway. She felt her way softly round the edge of a small hallway to an open door. Lights from the main street cast a fan of rectangles over the ceiling of a kitchen. In the next room, which was charged with the odours of ancient meals, tobacco and animals, the street reflections outlined chairs and the glint of glass-fronted pictures. To the back was a room in pitch darkness. Here the scent was of stale sweat and aftershave.

  She felt her way across the room to a sliver of night light showing through curtains and peered out. Below was the black bulk of the rear extension. Was it a flat roof? For all the times she had looked up at it from the car, she couldn’t remember. And what sort of a drop was it? A few feet? Six at the most.

  Slipping the bag off her shoulders, she opened the curtains a short way, hearing the clink of the rings sliding along the rail, and tried the window. It wouldn’t budge. She felt along the top of the lower sash for a catch, and finding one, slid it open. Still the frame wouldn’t shift. ‘Come on!’ She heard the desperation in her voice, felt the cold dampness on her forehead. The upper sash was a little more forthcoming and, after she had swung her weight on it, finally permitted itself to be lowered a grudging twelve inches or so. From somewhere in the house came the sound of a banging door, rapidly answered by the thudding of her heart. She thought: Dear God, I’m no good at this. Not without Campbell.

  She pulled at the window again, to see if she could open it further, but it was solid, and she realized there were security stops on the frame.