The Manhattan Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  Grainger rose to her feet and exited the room.

  They sat in a silence broken only by distant groans from the pipes and the hum of the fluorescent lighting. Dick Owen turned to Vaughann, leaned close to him and whispered.

  She closed her eyes. Would she have to accept Sean’s guilt?

  Grainger came back into the room.

  ‘Your husband has been seen, Mrs Ryan.’

  Isabel rose to her feet. Her legs felt jellylike, as if she’d been in a hospital bed for six months. For a moment everything went black. She swayed and sat down again.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Grainger

  ‘Where is he?’ she said. She shook her head to clear it.

  ‘He was seen on a security camera in this building,’ said Grainger.

  ‘What?’ exploded Vaughann.

  The hairs on the back of Isabel’s neck stood up like porcupine quills.

  ‘They don’t know how he got in, but he was spotted in your underground car park, Mr Vaughann,’ said Grainger, calmly. It sounded as if she was blaming him. An alarm bell rang out in the hallway. The noise filled the room with a klaxon-like sound. More bells joined in, including one directly above them on the roof. The noise ran through her, making her bones vibrate.

  Then, they all stopped as quickly as they’d started.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Vaughann. He stood up.

  Dick Owen did too. ‘I should check on my people,’ he said. He stabbed a finger at the ceiling. His face was pale.

  ‘We need to talk a bit more, Mrs Ryan,’ said Detective Grainger.

  Her head was throbbing. Why hadn’t he given himself up to the police?

  She looked at her watch; her Gucci with the interchangeable rims. Sean had bought it for her in Macy’s for her birthday last year.

  How far away that time seemed now.

  ‘You’re going to have to be real careful from this point, Mrs Ryan,’ said Grainger, softly. She pointed a finger at her.

  ‘You don’t think my husband’s dangerous, do you?’

  ‘He could be. You have to be open to it.’ Grainger crossed her legs. Her scuffed black shoes looked as if they hadn’t been polished in a long time.

  Isabel shrugged.

  Grainger put her face closer to hers.

  ‘BXH’s security manager here in New York is missing. Nobody has any idea where he is. We’re searching for him. And we’ve had some other incidents I’m concerned about. I don’t want any more victims.’

  ‘But if he did murder someone, why has he come back? That would be crazy,’ said Isabel. She was trying not to sound too anxious. She wasn’t succeeding.

  ‘Your husband could have come back for the purpose of revenge, Mrs Ryan. We can’t discount that. Revenge is behind a lot of the craziness I see. Your husband may blame BXH or some individual here for what’s happened to him. He might have a weapon now too. We have to plan for every scenario.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’ She massaged her forehead.

  ‘I had to tell this poor woman last week that her husband had killed himself. I also had to tell her he’d killed a co-worker in their broking firm. God only knows why.’ Her expression wavered for a moment. A look of weariness appeared.

  ‘Revenge is a powerful thing.’

  ‘What if Sean’s innocent?’ said Isabel.

  ‘Listen, your husband would have come to us if he was innocent.’

  ‘This is so not Sean.’ Her hands were gripping each other.

  Grainger was looking pensive, as if she was working out how to tell her bad news.

  ‘Mrs Ryan, your husband is considered dangerous at this point. He’s a wanted man; a suspect in a murder case.’

  ‘Sean’s as straight as they come. He’s the most honest man I’ve ever met, Detective. You have to believe me. Please.’

  ‘This is not about you,’ said Grainger. She sounded sympathetic. ‘You gotta trust me. It is real hard to believe it when someone you know well goes off the rails.’

  ‘I hate this stupid bank.’ Isabel looked around. ‘You know someone invited me here by text this evening. What the hell was that about?’

  Grainger shrugged. Her pained expression made it clear she thought Isabel was still trying to hold back reality.

  ‘Are you married, Detective?’

  Grainger nodded. ‘That’s how I know how difficult this is for you,’ she said. Then she leaned towards Isabel. ‘You staying near here, Mrs Ryan?’

  Isabel told her which hotel she was in.

  ‘You should go there right now.’

  ‘Okay.’ She wanted out of the room. ‘Did you see a bathroom near here?’

  Grainger grunted, motioned her to follow, then pointed to the elevators.

  ‘See that guard?’ She waved to him. He was standing beside the elevator doors. He was a short guy with blonde hair. He waved back, nonchalantly.

  ‘I’m gonna ask him to escort you out of the building.’ She put a hand on Isabel’s arm ‘Please, stay in your hotel until we call you, understood?’

  Isabel nodded.

  ‘When are you due to fly back to London?’

  ‘Ten tomorrow night.’

  ‘If you get any more text messages or any calls from your husband, call me as soon as you get them. Don’t go off and meet him. That’s real important, Mrs Ryan.’ She slipped a card out of the back of her notebook and handed it to Isabel.

  ‘You got all that?’

  Isabel nodded.

  The toilet had white tiles on every wall. She washed her face, letting the water drip into the square old-fashioned porcelain basin. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her skin was chalky, her hair sticking out at odd angles. The dark patches under her eyes were spreading.

  Was she right to believe in Sean or was she being stupid?

  She remembered a long walk they took in Hyde Park the previous summer, how they’d talked about everything. How she was sure she knew him better than anyone else on the planet.

  Had it all been a lie?

  She bent over the basin, a wave of emotion engulfing her. Stop! You’re going to make yourself crazy.

  She straightened. She looked like a ghost. She needed to sleep. She knew that rationally, but she also felt as if she’d passed the lowest ebb of her tiredness. A notice beside the mirror caught her eye. It looked as if it had been put up in the seventies.

  It was about the fire exit.

  The FIRE EXIT, at the end of the corridor on each floor, should be used only in the case of emergency. For those in the basement levels, please remember that you must walk upwards to exit the building.

  And she knew in that second that she wasn’t going to go back to her hotel. She wasn’t going to stop looking for Sean just because someone had told her to. What could they do to her anyway? Charge her with trying to find her husband?

  She pushed her hair behind her ears. It looked better that way. Sean always said that. She took off her jacket, tied it around her waist. She didn’t feel cold, though that was probably because of the giant hot water pipes running along one wall.

  Then someone knocked on the door of the toilet. There was a muffled shout.

  ‘You in there?’

  She stood still. She didn’t answer. Seconds ticked by, dripping slow like the water from one of the taps.

  Whoever it was didn’t knock again.

  She waited, looking at herself in the mirror. Her black silk shirt was surprisingly un-creased. If you didn’t look too closely she could be mistaken for someone in the bank’s IT Department. One of the less formal staffers.

  Maybe, if she timed it right, as the guard was looking the other way, and if she was quiet, she could slip down to the fire exit and go up through the building.

  The door to the corridor opened without a sound. Her breath was coming fast. Maybe that guard was walking back to the elevators. She had to look.

  She put her head beyond the door.

  There was no one in the corridor or at the elevators. She spun around. Ther
e were two doors between her and the red-brick wall at the end of the corridor. She walked fast. The first door was locked. She put her hand on the second door. It had a fire exit sign on it. It opened soundlessly.

  Through the door there was a concrete stairwell. The stairs were dusty, abandoned-looking, framed by dull green iron hand rails that spiralled into the air. She looked up. The air was musty, yellowy. It was far colder than in the corridor too. She put on her jacket and started moving up the stairs, fast.

  A distant muffled bang echoed from somewhere up above. At each level there was a door. The first two doors were locked. She got the impression that there was nothing behind these doors but concrete. Her hands were shaking with the cold now. Adrenaline had kept it from her mind for the first few flights of stairs, but now she couldn’t avoid it.

  It wasn’t until the third floor up, about halfway to street level, she guessed, that she found a door that would open.

  It creaked loudly. Her heart thumped hard as she pushed it.

  67

  Li headed for the elevator.

  As the glass doors of the reception area closed behind him he heard the exhalation of breath from the American. The man probably expected to make the biggest killing of his life in the next few days. He probably also thought he was about to get one over on a stupid Chinese billionaire, even though two of Li’s men had been in the man’s offices for the past few days

  Li smiled and pressed the blue back-lit basement button. Greed, that self-inflicted slavery, was the best motivator. It kept people tied to the wheel when most rational players had long ago departed. He rubbed a hand through his hair. There were other things to worry about now.

  What was it the Americans called them, flies in the ointments? What a strange expression.

  He thought about what his driver had just told him, and about the call he’d received from inside BXH. Li knew well the benefits of having people on the inside. He would have been dust a long time ago if he didn’t. One call could be enough, he knew, to make the difference between him being caught red-handed or smiling in innocence, like the time the ICAC raided his office in Hong Kong.

  This time he would not take any chances. The final words he’d said to the driver had made that clear.

  ‘I want it all over with tonight. Tell that to Lord Bidoner.’

  68

  When she opened the door, the light from the fluorescent tube above Isabel’s head spread out like a wave along the corridor in front of her. It had wooden and frosted glass partitions on each side. They extended into the darkness. She reached around the wall by the door and found a light switch.

  When she turned it on a row of ancient frosted-glass circular light fittings lit up all along a panelled corridor to an elevator far in the distance. She walked towards the elevator. Was she crazy, trespassing like this? Halfway along the corridor there was a door in the partition on either side. She opened one. The entire space inside the room was taken up with brown metal filing cabinets. Each had a number, and each row of filing cabinets had a long yellow metal sign hanging above it, with more numbers on it.

  It was like looking at the forgotten archives of a long-lost empire. She got a spooky tingling feeling all over. She went across the corridor. The other room was the same. But there was an area at the end of this room separated by frosty glass from the filing cabinets.

  Presumably this was where anyone wanting to access files would come, back in the old days, when they were still being used. How long ago was that?

  A mahogany table at the top of the room had the word ‘Supervisor’ painted elaborately on it in yellow curly writing on a chunky piece of wood, as if someone might turn up at any moment to take up the post.

  She said the word – Sean – but her voice simply echoed. He wasn’t down here. She was just being stupid. She made her way back to the fire-exit stairs.

  She was almost at the next floor walking up when she heard a noise from down below. She stopped.

  There was someone coming.

  Whoever it was, was still near the bottom, but was definitely coming up fast. The pressure inside her chest increased. She ran lightly up the next flight of stairs. She didn’t want to be found, hauled away, thrown out of the building.

  Thankfully, the door on the next floor opened. The pool of light from the stairs lit up a concrete open area stretching away in front of her. It looked as if everything had been stripped out of this space. She found a bare light switch and turned the lights on.

  There was a line of large sarcophagus-like food freezers along one wall at the far end, near a single elevator door. There must have been ten freezers. This was probably where they kept the food for the CEO’s executive dining suite or whatever dining facilities they had up above.

  She ran across the concrete floor, her shoes slapping loudly. She almost stumbled at one point as her toe hit a ridge in the concrete, but she recovered. The noise of her feet echoed horribly around her. Would someone hear the commotion?

  It was like being a runaway with dogs at her heels. Her breath was coming in gasps. She was swearing to herself.

  The only light now, with the door to the stairs closed behind her, was from the string of yellow bulbs running down the centre of the room, where the corridor should have been.

  The brick-lined walls on either side were half in shadow. It appeared as if she was running across a concrete-floored plain, the type of thing you might see in a computer game.

  She focused on the freezers. They were all a foot or two away from the wall on the right, as if whoever had put them there had wanted a gap behind them for some reason.

  The nearest freezer was bigger than the others. It was one of those oversized ones you see in restaurant-based reality-TV programs. You could have kept a small European car in it. The others were half its size. From what she could see, as she ran up to them, they all had big locks on them, silvery steel locks the size of your fist. There wouldn’t be any hiding in any of these freezers, even if she wanted to. She ran on, heading for the elevator.

  The door was dented, but it had to work, didn’t it? How else would anyone get down here to access these freezers? And then she saw a dark stain, which spread out onto the concrete from under the last freezer. It must be leaking, she thought.

  As she came nearer, she saw the stain was dark red. It almost looked like blood. It was shiny too, as if it had a skin on it. And it seemed to be expanding.

  She expected to smell something bad, but aside from a tinny smell, there was no other odour at all.

  A giant cockroach scurried out of her path. It must have been three inches long. She slowed. The elevator was a few feet away.

  She hit the call button. The light came on behind it. There was a distant rattling. Every muscle in her body relaxed. She would get away.

  Then she saw them: two shoes visible behind the last freezer, sticking out. And she recognised the shoes. And she knew immediately that the stain ebbing out from under the freezer didn’t mean that it was broken.

  She walked towards it.

  And she was floating.

  Her mind was saying – No, please, no.

  And then there was a noise. A door banging.

  ‘Hey, stop right there.’

  A man had come through the door from the stairwell at the far end of the basement. He was bald and wearing a buttoned navy-blue coat. It was the guy from Greg’s apartment block. The guy who’d come after them.

  A shiver of recognition passed down her body.

  ‘Stop.’

  Time slowed. She stared at him.

  The man was running towards her, moving purposefully, head down. But still she had to look at what was behind the freezer.

  There was a hammering in her brain, as if there was a crazed carpenter banging at her skull from the inside. She had to move to avoid the expanding pool of blood at the front of the freezer.

  Iciness gripped at her chest. And then heat rushed through her body.

  Detective Grainger was lying
behind the freezer, oddly snug in the gap, her hands tight at her side. She was peaceful-looking, except for the gaping wound at her neck. It was seeping blood from a glistening slash.

  And crawling over the detective’s face were cockroaches.

  Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed hard.

  Could this be an accident?

  Stop being stupid.

  The elevator pinged loudly.

  She took one last look. The gold wedding ring on Detective Grainger’s hand sparkled.

  She walked fast towards the open elevator. The warm flush that had passed over her was gone. All her muscles were trembling now. She was a drum that had been struck hard. Too hard.

  She glanced over her shoulder. The man was near. His shouting echoed, almost unintelligibly. He had something in his hand. Something black.

  It was either a taser, or a gun.

  She stepped into the elevator. She had enough time.

  Just.

  She pressed the button.

  Nothing happened. She didn’t panic. Calm had taken over. Some calculating auto-pilot that knew just what to do. And all she had to do was stand there.

  ‘STOP. Get out of that elevator.’

  She could hear his feet slapping on the concrete. He was almost on her.

  As the bald guy reached towards her his face contorted, all bulging blue veins and white eyes, as the doors closed with an uncaring glide.

  Bang!

  There was an explosion as he hit the metal. The doors buckled a little. They opened half an inch. A shadow loomed. She stepped back, her breath catching in her throat.

  Then she was going up. And the banging was coming from below. And then it stopped. He’d probably got the doors open.

  But she was gone.

  She shivered violently. A torrent of anxiety was passing through her.

  She bent down, could smell a lemony polish. She looked around. The inside of the elevator was a gleaming panelled-wood refuge. She leaned against the wall, crouching. It felt as if she’d just missed being hit by a truck.

  She looked at the button she’d pressed. It was a middle button. Another one of the buttons had the words ‘Post Room’ beside it. Another, at the top, had the letter P beside it. Was that the penthouse?