David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  The lock was new.

  Removing a pick and a tension wrench, I spent the next ten minutes trying to feel my way along the pins, torch between my teeth, hands getting colder, breath steaming up the glass panel on the door. I hated picking locks, the patience it required, the absolute precision, and, in truth, I wasn’t particularly good at it. But, finally – on a fourth attempt – I heard a soft dumph, and the door gently kicked away from the frame, squeaking on its hinges.

  A corridor stretched ahead of me, a door on the left leading into an office, another at the end pulled shut. Next to the one on the left was a window, creamy and smeared. There were the ghosts of old furniture visible through the smoky glass. As I stepped into the building, a fine layer of debris crunched under my boots – and then the temperature started to change. Subtly at first, barely there, the bitter cold still rolling in from behind me. But when I pulled the main door shut, the chill of winter died away and it became instantly, oppressively warm. On the wall beside me was a small, four-bar radiator. I touched a hand to it.

  It was cold.

  I continued moving. The further I got, the hotter it became. On the window into the office, condensation had formed, trails of water running down the edges of the glass.

  Now I could hear a noise too.

  A faint repetition, like a machine ticking over.

  I stood there, hesitant, some part of me instinctively sounding an alarm. But then gradually I began moving again, inching deeper into the warehouse. I tried the office door, checking the interior. It smelled of damp and cigarette smoke, the odour ingrained in the walls and furniture. But it was cooler than the corridor.

  Because the heat wasn’t coming from here.

  I turned to face the other, closed door.

  There was a slim gap at the bottom. Where it wasn’t quite flush to the frame, a soft wave of light escaped under it, washing out across the floor in front of me. The closer I got, the more heat I could feel. It pressed hard at the door from the other side, and when I touched the handle it was warm. I realized then that the noise I could hear, the mechanical repetition, was actually popping.

  The kind of sound you get when something is burning.

  I pushed at the door and it opened out into the main warehouse. Most of it was cast into darkness, its ceilings too high for light to claw at, two of its walls a swathe of black. The room was divided up by banks of stand-alone storage units, their shelves cleared out. On the left was an L-shaped wall, about five feet high, its brick crumbling. It sectioned off a space behind which I could see a dirty silver metal hood, bolted to the wall ten feet up, and a series of ventilation pipes.

  Underneath was a kiln.

  As I approached, I saw the remains of a previous life, a time when this building had housed a glassworks. A set of callipers – almost rusted through – was discarded on the ground. A set of hand shears. A blistered blowpipe. The heat was intense, even from twenty feet away, but as I got closer, the popping noise got louder and I realized the kiln was full of debris: wood, brick, cardboard, plastic, anything at all.

  Anything that needed getting rid of.

  Something fluttered in my stomach.

  Stopping at the brick wall, six feet from the door of the kiln, I looked back over my shoulder. The warehouse felt even bigger now, as if the shadows had spread. When I turned back to the fire, the same anxiety hit me again, thick and congealed in my guts.

  From this distance, I could see the remains of the Moleskines, shreds of paper – reduced to specks of ash – being drawn upwards, into the neck of the kiln. Another step closer, and I saw my laptop, sitting on its side among a knot of wood and brick, half of it already melted, splashed across the walls of the kiln like it had detonated. Had he dumped it in here after realizing I’d been tracing him? Or was it always the plan to dispose of the laptop and what was on it? My eyes moved again and I spotted a backpack – the one the man had carried all my things in – and the clothes he’d been wearing: the black trousers, the black fleece, the navy-blue balaclava. There was Franks’s iPad too, fused to the rear of the kiln, the screen cracked, its casing reduced to a molten silver pool.

  He’d got rid of everything.

  I leaned as close to the mouth of the kiln as I could go without scalding my face, trying to get a better view. Inside it was like a dumping ground: the gnarled skeletons of mobile phones; some sort of piping, coiled like a black snake; a pair of blue jeans, caked to the dome of the kiln, as if they had been painted on; countless other items long since burned, unrecognizable as they fused together in the heat. I half expected to find bones in it too, but if there had ever been bodies dumped inside, they had become memories long ago.

  Clunk.

  A deep, resonant sound echoed across the warehouse.

  I swept the flashlight out, to the spaces around me, to the way I’d come in, to the cargo doors. Nothing moved. I shifted the torch on to the shelves, wondering if something had fallen off. But then I remembered the shelves were all empty. I paused there for a moment, waiting for the sound to come again, but all I could hear now was the kiln: crackling, popping, burning.

  I felt a trail of sweat run down my back, tracing the ridge of my spine, and then the torch hit an area on the far side. An old table, awash in empty food cartons and beer cans. Discarded magazines. A paint-specked radio which had fallen on its side. A torch.

  There was a laptop too, ancient and battered. The electricity had been turned off in this place, so there was no power cord for the laptop, no plugs nearby to even charge it, no modem.

  Yet, as I flipped the lid, it sprang into life.

  It had been charged somewhere else, and brought here – and now it was leeching off the WiFi from the unit next door. There was also a thin, five-pin lead coming out of one of the USB slots, unattached to anything external – or, at least, not at the moment.

  The desktop was clean in a way that could only have been intentional. There were no folders or files, no programs beyond what existed on it when it had first been shipped. I went to the menu and selected Documents and Pictures, and there was nothing in those either. Even the Recycle Bin was empty. The laptop was registered to ‘334’, which had to be deliberate: he’d left his name off, presumably as insurance against just this sort of thing.

  His web history went back half a day. Prior to that – presumably prior to using it at lunchtime – there was no evidence he’d ever been on the Internet. He’d cleared out his cookies and cache, and there were no bookmarks.

  He repeatedly wipes it clean.

  I went through what he’d been looking at today.

  Various newspapers. Football sites. Late afternoon, he had spent two hours looking at porn, his history logging a succession of images where women were outnumbered by gangs of men. The more he watched, the darker and more aggressive the content became. But then, in the hour after that, things calmed down, and I found something else, another webpage he’d looked at. It was a tech site titled: ‘Do Mac files work on a PC?’

  I realized then what the five-pin lead was for.

  An external hard drive.

  I looked back at the kiln, at the remains of what had once been my MacBook. He’d copied everything on my Mac and on Franks’s iPad across to the hard drive. The next step was to move them across to his PC.

  Then: another noise.

  I pushed the lid of the laptop back down. It wasn’t the same sound as before – the clunk. This one was softer, less industrial.

  I listened.

  The hum of the laptop.

  The soft crackle of the kiln.

  And then a click.

  I paused, eyes moving to the kiln, the shelving, the cargo doors; to the door that led back into the corridor.

  Then I realized what it was.

  Someone’s inside the warehouse.

  30

  I moved quickly, across the floor of the warehouse, in the opposite direction to the exit. Where two shelving units had aligned in a T-shape, I dropped down and kil
led the light.

  The door opened.

  A shape emerged from the corridor, dark against it, the kiln painting one side of them in a soft orange glow. Beneath the hood of their top, I glimpsed a face: it was the man I’d chased; the one I’d tracked here. His skin looked like snow, pale and bloodless, but his eyes were the opposite, reduced to smooth discs like holes in his skull. His clothes from earlier were burning in the kiln, but this new set was basically the same: black hooded top, black trousers, black boots, a blue body warmer, zipped up.

  The side door had had a cylinder lock on it – once I’d pushed it closed, it clicked shut and there was no evidence anyone had ever been here. Except, as he stood there in the doorway, I noticed a glitch in his movement, a momentary hesitation, and he paused – fingers still wrapped around the door handle – staring across the warehouse at the kiln.

  Slowly, he looked out across the room.

  His movements were sharp, robotic, like a machine scanning its surroundings. In the lack of light, there was something more menacing about him, his rigidness, the way he seemed to sense something was off, like an animal. I felt myself tense as he looked at me, towards the area on my left, and then on to the loading doors. When he came back again, the tiniest pinpricks of light registered beneath the hood – his eyes connecting with the kiln – and then they were gone again, reduced to an oily black.

  As he finally moved and turned to face the kiln, I saw he was holding another backpack at his side, partially hidden. He took a further step, into the warehouse, and kicked the door shut behind him with his heel. Then he stopped again, as perfectly still as before, the hood covering his face. The only thing moving was the backpack, gently swinging back and forth beside him like a metronome. Now it was like he was listening.

  I’d chased him down earlier, got within feet of him, been confident of taking him if I’d ever been given the opportunity. But not now. There was something different about him: quiet, controlled, menacing. I’d surprised him earlier. He hadn’t been prepared.

  But he was prepared this time.

  About ten seconds later, he moved again, across to the kiln, looking in through the door at the fire. As he watched the flames burn, eating their way through all the evidence he’d dumped, he flipped back his hood and I got my first proper look at him, without the hood, without the balaclava.

  He was in his early forties, shaved hair, light from the fire glinting in the dome of his head. Five-ten, five-eleven, a little overweight, but not enough to slow him down. He had the build of a lapsed bodybuilder, muscle indent still evident, even as his shape had started to change. But there was a weird dichotomy to him: he looked like a nightclub bouncer, all brawn, like he should have been slow and cumbersome. Yet as I recalled him out on the walkway of the tower block – his small, aggressive movements – and now watched him again here, I realized that was exactly why he was so unnerving.

  He hid who he really was.

  Automatically, I felt myself stiffen as he left the kiln and came across to the table. It was about thirty feet to my left. He placed the backpack down on top and began to unpack it: a six-pack of beer, a sandwich, crisps, a magazine. He set the fallen radio the right way, then flicked it on. It was tuned to a station playing heavy metal, volume down low. He didn’t adjust it. Instead he continued to unpack the bag. More food: chocolate, tinned fruit, cereal, milk. But then the food stopped coming.

  A hard drive.

  Duct tape. Rope.

  He pushed the tape and the rope to one side, checked to see if there was anything else in the bag, then tossed it aside. Unzipping his body warmer, he went to the inside pockets. From one he took out his mobile phone. He checked the screen, the light briefly illuminating his face and surroundings. I silently edged back into the darkness, trying not to get caught in the glow, and then looked off across the warehouse to the only way out. I could make a break for it, perhaps get a two-second head start on him – but I’d have to avoid shelving units on the way, would waste a second opening the door, then another at the exterior. By that time, he’d be on me. Or you could try to take him. I turned back in his direction and saw he had his hand in the pocket on the other side of his body warmer.

  He brought out a gun.

  I felt myself tense again, a ripple of alarm following it. He placed it down next to the other items, its casing making a soft thud, and then started to unpack the sandwich. I looked between him and the door. If he was settling in for the night, I didn’t want to get caught here. But, equally, I didn’t want a bullet in the back either. All I had as protection, as a way to fight back, was the rubberized casing of the flashlight. My wallet. My phone.

  Nothing else.

  I’d walked into a dead end.

  I shifted slightly in the dark, trying to get further away from him. He wouldn’t be able to put the lights on because they weren’t working, but he already felt too close. I edged to my left, moving on my haunches, and came to rest next to another shelf. I adjusted quietly beside it – and the metal zip on my jacket tapped against the shelving.

  It pinged.

  He turned immediately, eyes on my position. I quickly shifted again, further back. Apart from the kiln popping and crackling, the warehouse was silent. Picking up the gun, he stepped away from the table, shed his body warmer and let it drop to the floor behind him. His head tilted slightly, trying to see beyond the shadows, and then he took a step forward, his back to the kiln, and instantly became a silhouette. I couldn’t make out his face at all now. Not where his eyes were, not even in which direction he was facing.

  I was blind.

  My heart banged against my ribcage.

  Turn around.

  And then his phone erupted into life.

  It buzzed across the table behind him in a series of robotic beeps – a mechanical heartbeat – light strobing across the walls, a pale green glow thrown along one side of his face. I saw his eyes move inside the shadows of his eye sockets, catching the light like a mirrored panel: there, gone, there, gone. He stayed in the same place, unmoved, ignoring the phone, his gun up in front of him.

  Ten seconds. Twelve. Fifteen.

  When he finally came to life again, he turned halfway – side on to where I was – and glanced at the phone, before his eyes flicked back towards me. Brow furrowed.

  He knew something was up.

  He could sense it.

  But then, as the phone stopped ringing, he shuddered out of his stillness, turned back towards the table and picked the mobile up. He looked at the screen, clicked a couple of options, then tossed it back on to the table. Picking up his sandwich, he pulled a chair out from under the table, slid in, and started using the laptop.

  After a couple of minutes, a thought occurred to me: What if my own phone goes off? As quickly as I could, I reached into my pocket, felt around for it and turned it off.

  When I looked back, my heart dropped: the man had turned slightly and through the corner of his eye he was looking off into the dark, to the position I’d been in when I’d brushed the shelving unit. A video was playing on the laptop, but he wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he started looking for something else. A second later I realized what.

  The torch.

  I moved again in the direction of the loading doors, quickly and silently, using the nearest shelving unit as a guide. Dust kicked up, getting into my throat, and I had to cover my face to subdue any noise. I heard a clatter and looked up in time to see the man placing the gun down and picking up the torch. He flicked it on, stood where he was and shone it into the space I’d first occupied. I kept moving, slower now, as he swept the cone of light from left to right, a spotlight tracking my route. Out of the dark in front of me came the loading doors, a thin glow escaping under it. I’d gone as far as I could.

  Shit.

  But then the cone of light stopped five feet to my right, the torch dropping away to his side, light skittering back across the warehouse and forming a pool next to his leg.

  He switc
hed it off.

  After a brief pause, he returned to the kiln, opened the door and stood there, face lit, eyes lucent, as if thinking. A moment later, he walked back to the table. Putting his body warmer back on, he checked his phone again, packed everything into the bag, including the gun – and then he left.

  31

  I heard the main door close, then footsteps passing outside the loading bay, crunching on compacted snow. Getting to my feet, stiff from keeping so still, I took off after him, leaving the heat of the warehouse behind me. In the corridor, it was a relief to feel a slight drop in temperature – and it felt even better hitting the sub-zero chill of the night air.

  He was already at the top of the road.

  I moved quickly along the pavement, trying to keep noise to a minimum. I didn’t want anyone out on the Old Kent Road to hear my approach, or to place me at the scene if things went south. It was only nine-forty, so the main road was still busy: traffic passed easily across trails of grit, people too, following pavements where snow had been pushed into piles, or reduced to slush. At the mouth of the road, I paused: I had a gap of about ten seconds between passers-by. Slipping out of Bayleaf Avenue and into the pedestrian flow, I spotted him about a hundred and fifty feet ahead of me. He had the hood up on his top, body warmer zipped up, hands in his pockets, heading north towards Walworth.

  I powered on my phone and picked up the pace. Ahead of me, three identical eighteen-storey tower blocks rose like fingers out of the earth, hundreds of windows illuminated against the black of the sky.