by Peter James
The receptionist was a woman in her late forties with silver highlights in her coiffed black hair, chatting busily on the telephone in a nasal voice and filing her nails at the same time. ‘Melanie didn’t come in today, another of her migraines, so I’m stuck over lunch hour. I thought I might try the new Asda superstore this evening. I’ll just put you on hold a moment, don’t go away.’ She pressed a switch then looked inquisitively at Frannie.
‘Could you tell Sebastian Holland that Frannie Monsanto is here, please.’
‘He’s expecting you, is he?’
‘Yes.’
She pressed two buttons on her telephone, lifting the receiver to her ear. ‘Oh, would you tell Mr Sebastian that Frannie Monsanto is in reception. Yes, no, I’m still here. Melanie didn’t come in today, so I’m covering lunch hour.’ She held the receiver to her ear in silence for a moment. ‘Righty-ho. Thank you very much.’ She looked at Frannie again. ‘He’ll be out in a couple of minutes. Take a seat.’ She flicked a switch and resumed her conversation.
Frannie sat in a deep leather armchair and glanced at the magazines and papers on the table beside it. The Financial Times. Fortune. Business Week. Lloyd’s Log. The walls were hung with framed colour photographs of modern office blocks. The telephone warbled again. It was a different world in here; a long way from the one in which Seb Holland, the archaeology student, had gone down into a cellar beneath a sandwich bar for a lark.
The doors behind her opened. ‘Frannie! Hi! Sorry to keep you!’
She stood up and turned round. Seb was looking tired but cheery, the same slightly larger-than-life Seb: tall and hefty with his generous grinning face, big white teeth, black hair fashionably long and with a hint of gel, and his rich green eyes. His well-cut clothes and the executive trappings suited him. He looked good on them.
He gripped her shoulders and kissed her on each cheek, smelling heavily of aftershave as she remembered he always did. ‘God, you look great! Hope you’re still available in case Lucy dumps me at the last minute!’
She smiled. ‘You look good too. Being engaged suits you.’
‘Yah. It’s great! Right, let’s dash. I’ve booked at a little place around the corner. We’ll have to be quick if you don’t mind – bit of a crisis has come up and I’ve got to be back here by two o’clock.’
‘You’re off to New York tomorrow?’
‘A hassle. We’ve got some real problems over there at the moment. So where are you working? British Museum, did you tell me?’ He held the door for her, then stepped across and pressed the elevator button. ‘Are you doing something with archaeology? You don’t look like an archaeologist.’
‘How are we supposed to look?’ she said with mock indignation.
‘Thought you’d be in an anorak and wellies.’
‘Like I was wearing at dinner?’
He grinned. ‘So, smart dates, eh? You’re going out with Ollie Halkin?’
‘Yes.’ It sounded strange hearing Oliver’s name abbreviated.
‘Good stuff. How long?’
There was a ping behind her and they turned. A strip of green lights was flashing on an art deco display above an elevator. The same one she had come up in, she noticed.
The door slid open and Seb stepped forward quickly, holding his arm out to catch the door. ‘Hello, young fellow!’ he called out. Frannie felt a blast of cold air. ‘Have to get in these things quickly,’ he said; ‘the doors are really vicious bru –’
His voice stopped in mid sentence. She saw his eyes widen in wonder. Another blast of wind curled around her, sucked her, as if it was trying to draw her in towards him. There was blackness all around him. The wrong blackness. Not the black lacquer of the elevator walls and the bronze tint of the mirror.
No bronze-carpeted floor.
A dark, matt blackness. Air poured out. Cold air that smelled dank like a cellar. The blackness of the bare shaft. Cables ran down the back wall. Grooves were cut into it; ridges and guides.
There was no fear in his eyes; just a look of surprise; like a child opening a parcel and finding nothing inside it. His hand grabbed once at the steel door-frame; his fingers slid for a few inches down its shiny surface, without any hope of purchase.
Then he dropped from her sight in complete silence.
CHAPTER THIRTY
For a moment, for just a fleeting instant, Frannie thought it was one of his pranks. She stepped two inches forwards, moving slowly as if she were wading through water. Her hand touched the cold steel frame of the door and she stared into the darkness, breathed in its dank, oily smell.
A bunch of bright yellow wires, held together by thick black tape, ran down the far wall into a junction box with a warning bolt-of-lightning label on the outside. Ducting pipes ran down beside them; she dropped to her knees and inched forward on her hands, still protected by a layer of disbelief.
‘Seb?’ she called out in a feeble croak, her throat clamped shut like a sprung trap.
Her hands touched the metal rim and her eyes strained into the square black tunnel that dropped sheer away for forty storeys. The dust in the draught made them smart. ‘Seb?’ it was a whimper now. She looked up. The ribbed black ceiling was only ten feet above her; wires looped down from it. It was a moment before she realized it wasn’t the ceiling, but the floor of the elevator that had stopped inches above the top of the door. ‘Seb?’ the darkness sucked up her voice. She looked up at the elevator and down into the shaft again.
Then the reality hit her and tore the scream from her throat.
She backed away from the edge, scrambled to her feet and burst, stammering, through the double doors into the reception area, her eyes transmitting her terror like semaphore flags to the woman she’d seen earlier and who was still chatting merrily.
‘Get help! Oh God, get help!’ Frannie screamed. ‘He’s fallen. He’s fallen down the lift. Call an ambulance. For God’s sake call an ambulance! Keep people away from the lift. Don’t use the lift, the door’s open.’
She ran back out through the doors, stared at the open elevator shaft, then looked around wildly. There was a fire extinguisher against the wall and a flat hose on a reel. She grabbed the extinguisher and stood it in front of the open door, then hefted the hose reel down and laid that beside it, blocking the way.
The double doors opened behind her. It was the receptionist. She looked at Frannie then at the open shaft. Horror shrivelled her face as if it had been punctured. ‘Mr Sebastian? Did you say Mr Sebastian?’
‘Where are the stairs down?’ Frannie yelled at her, too afraid to risk another elevator.
‘Just inside the other doors, on the right,’ the woman’s voice had become a whisper. ‘Mr Sebastian?’
Frannie nodded.
The woman covered her mouth with her hand.
‘Call an ambulance! Please call an ambulance!’ Frannie said. She ran through the double doors and came into a large open-plan office, most of the desks abandoned for lunch. She saw immediately on her right a door marked FIRE EXIT, pushed it open and found herself on a stone staircase. She ran down, clutching the metal guide rail, turned, turned, turned again, saw the number 39 crudely painted in black on the raw concrete wall.
She raced on down, the echo of her tapping feet chasing her. 36 … 35 … 34. She was getting giddy, her hand was burning from the rail. 33 … 32 … 31 … She passed fire buckets, a discarded cigarette pack, a grubby J-cloth. The light was weak and for a couple of floors the bulbs had gone and she ran in almost total darkness. 25 … 24 … She was conscious of the sound of her own breathing, her own sobbing. 20 … 19 … The walls swirled past her. 14 … 13 … 12 … She could feel the ground getting nearer. 7 … 6 … 5 … She stumbled, lost her balance, grabbed the rail tightly and swung against the wall. One of her shoes came off and tumbled down several steps, rolling to a rest on the landing.
She hobbled down, gasping, tears streaming down her face, pulled the shoe back on and began to run again. 3 … 2 … 1 … Then she reached the bo
ttom, a poorly lit basement corridor with thickly cladded pipes along the ceiling. There was a steady roar of a machine and a hiss of air, the whine of pumps. She saw a bucket and a mop just beyond the banks of the elevator doors; a squeegee was propped against the wall beside them and a plastic drum of cleaning fluid. Further along was an open doorway and she heard a tapping sound, like a hammer on metal, and called out.
Her voice was swallowed by the roaring. She ran down the corridor, saw an open door and went in. She heard the rumble of a furnace. There were racks of stores on metal shelving: lavatory paper and towelling paper, plastic containers of soaps and detergents. The ceiling was low and gridded with pipes. It was as hot as an airing cupboard and the air was thick with flecks of lint. At the far end a light shone through an open doorway. ‘Help!’ she called out.
A shadow moved across the light. She heard the tapping again and ran across. A black man in a blue boiler suit was hammering a bracket in a vice inside a small workshop, his face glazed in concentration.
She dashed up to him. ‘Please, are you in charge of the elevators?’ She was so short of breath she could barely speak.
He looked up at her in surprise. ‘I’m the caretaker, yes, ma’am.’
‘Please come! Someone’s fallen down the lift shaft …’
His face was streaked with grease and his hair was a grizzled grey. He wiped his hands on his overalls, studying her for a moment, absorbing her expression with tired brown eyes, one of which had a burst blood vessel. ‘That can’t happen, that’s impossible.’
‘Please, I was with him on the fortieth floor. The doors opened. The elevator wasn’t there. Please come.’ She shook her head in desperation. ‘Please!’
He looked at her as if about to argue, then his expression softened. ‘They’ve only just been checked. It can’t happen,’ he said, slightly defensively.
‘It has. Oh God, it has.’
The tone of her voice seemed to get through to him.
‘On the fortieth floor?’
‘Yes. The door opened – he said he had to grab it quickly and stepped in and there was nothing there. Please,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He ran his hand along a row of shelves, hitched a long ribbed instrument and a bunch of keys off a hook, picked up a rubber torch, then walked with a limping gait out into the corridor and down to the elevators. ‘Which one?’
Frannie had to think for a moment, trying to regain her bearings. She turned around and pointed to the third one along on the right.
He gave her a chance to reconsider. ‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’
He hesitated. ‘Fortieth floor?’
‘Yes.’
‘A man, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think anyone could have fallen, ma’am.’
‘Please,’ she whispered, the salty taste of her tears in her mouth. Perspiration torrented down her chest and back. ‘Please check.’
She noticed the framed maintenance certificate that was fixed beside the elevator door.
MAINTENANCE RECORD.
DATE OF LAST SAFETY CHECK.
DATE OF ANNUAL INSPECTION.
SAFETY OFFICER. D. PAPWORTH.
The records were neatly typed. She could see the last date clearly. 27th August. Less than a month ago.
The caretaker tapped it with his forefinger; his nail was dark blue as if it had recently been hit by a hammer. ‘Been checked, you see.’
She nodded.
‘It’s impossible. The doors can’t open. Not without the elevator car there.’ He pushed a key into a box on the wall, turned it and pulled open a small metal door. There was a battery of switches and winking lights inside. One orange light was static and he stared at it for a moment, pressed a switch a couple of times and looked dubious. He then pressed two more switches and a bell sounded. He pressed another and the bell stopped ringing. ‘Have to stop the whole system,’ he said. ‘Won’t be too popular.’ He pulled a lever and there was a loud clunk. All the lights stopped winking and remained on.
He knelt down and inserted the long ribbed tool into a tiny hole in the bottom of one of the elevator’s doors and turned it sharply. He repeated the procedure in a hole at the top, and then again in the other door. Then he slowly levered his fingers into the gap and began to prise the doors open. They slid back until there was enough gap for him to get his head through.
He gave Frannie a cautioning signal with his hand for her to stay back, picked up his torch, leaned in and pointed the torch downwards.
‘Oh God …’ he stepped back, gagging. His eyes looked at Frannie without focusing, then swung away unco-ordinated. His mouth quivered. The torch fell from his fingers. He lurched towards the bucket, knelt and threw up.
Frannie picked up the lighted torch and stepped, terrified of what she would see, towards the gap in the door. She slowly lowered the white blob of torch beam down the back wall of the shaft.
Where it met the bottom she saw dust spun into a fine moss, cigarette butts, keys, a milk carton, a child’s rattle. There was a vile stench of excrement. Her chest tightened as the beam slid across a crumpled shape in pinstriped cloth. A shiny loafer shoe with a green and red band across it, and a gold buckle. Her heart jigged. Something pale white gleamed out at her. It was Seb’s face, his eyes wide open as if something was trying to push them out of their sockets, and for a brief moment she thought he was all right, thought he was fine, just in shock.
Until she realized his body was chest and stomach down, and his head had been wrenched round 180 degrees, saw a gleam of white bone sticking out of the side of his neck. And then she saw, also, the mess of red and orange pulp that was spreading through his hair and which lay like a cushion behind his ears. She whimpered. Something was sticking several inches out of his back like a bent spar impaling him; sharp and pointed, it had pierced cleanly through the centre of his jacket, between his shoulder-blades. A bone, she realized; one of his ribs.
She gulped, and her insides rattled as she staggered back, the image of his face imprinted like a developing photograph in her brain. She backed into the wall. Bells were ringing one after the other: desperate, panicky drilling sounds. She breathed in hard rasps, horror guttering through her, staring at the dark slit between the doors as if expecting Seb to climb out of it at any moment.
She turned her head. The caretaker was dialling a phone on the wall. The smell of his vomit churned her own stomach; she turned and ran, up the stairs, out into the lobby. Bells were ringing there, also, and she saw the commissionaire in his smart braided outfit walking anxiously past her towards the basement door.
She ran across the marble floor on legs that would barely hold her weight, pushed through a revolving door into the howling wind and slumped down on a teak bench, still holding the rubber torch in her hands. She switched it off, then on. Off then on again, the rubber button bending then clicking under the pressure of her finger.
She watched the spray from the fountains being bent by the relentless wind. Where a pigeon landed with a crack of its wings and eyed her expectantly, she saw only a grey blur on the ground. People were still at lunch. She could hear the distant clatter of their knives and forks, of laughter and chatter. She and Sebastian should have been in the restaurant now, talking about how to stay alive. She buried her face in her arms, plugged her ears with her fingers against the whoosh of the approaching siren and shook silently in grief. And in terror.
*
The tea was sweet and she sipped it gratefully, then placed her mug back down on the cork coaster on the mahogany boardroom table that shone like an ice-rink. A man who bore a family resemblance to Seb looked down from a portrait on the wall opposite her, a hard-looking man with Seb’s large features, but not his warmth, wearing ermine and with a shrieval chain around his neck.
She turned to the policeman, Constable Boyle, who sat opposite her, his notebook in front of him on the table. He held himself well, sat upright with broad shoulders. In his mid thirties,
his face had babyish, underdeveloped features, with half-moon eyes and thick, rubbery lips, but his manner was firm, adult, toughened with street wisdom. He exuded a faint aura of sadness as if there were things about human life that were beyond his comprehension, beyond his ability to change.
He smiled at her periodically, and each time the small act of kindness made her feel weepy again, and she sniffed, blinked away some tears and continued with her story, inching it forward, then being taken back, retracing each step a dozen times, adding fresh detail.
‘You’re sure it was ten past one, Francesca?’ His voice was flat and pedantic and she had to fight the urge to snap at him with irritation.
‘Yes.’
Then she managed, ‘I can remember looking at my watch as we went out to the lifts.’ But she was thinking, He’s dead. Nothing’s going to bring him back. What the hell does it matter what time it was?
‘I was meeting him for lunch at one, and I was late. I didn’t get here until ten past and when he came out he told me we’d have to be quick because he had to be back by two. He had some problems in the office he had to deal with.’
‘What made you late?’
She drew her breath in sharply, fighting irritation again. The clock on the wall said 2.45. Her stomach ached. She sipped more tea. Someone on the construction site would remember her she thought, knowing it was irrational. ‘I didn’t leave enough time, I suppose. And whilst I was in the area I wanted to take a look at my family’s old sandwich bar – it’s on the City Fields development – so I took a detour over there.’ She shrugged.
‘And no one else came out to the lifts with you?’
‘No one.’
Hello, young fellow!
‘Did you have lunch with – er – Mr Holland regularly?’
Hello, young fellow! Seb’s voice like an echo.
‘No. We were at university together.’
‘What was the reason for your lunch today?’
I wanted to warn him about the Ouija.
‘We – hadn’t seen each other since we were students – and we bumped into each other in a restaurant a couple of weeks ago. He told me he was engaged and said we ought to have lunch some time.’
