by Jo Bannister
Tariq nodded. ‘Just to remind us.’ His eyes dropped at how foolish that sounded.
‘Then this is probably a silly question,’ said Larry. ‘But you didn’t put one of them on its side for some reason?’
Chapter Sixteen
‘Maybe one of us knocked it over,’ Tariq offered lamely. ‘There’s not much room in the corridor for shifting furniture.’
‘Nobody’s been shifting furniture past the lift,’ said Larry. ‘We’ve moved it from the outside rooms to the inside ones. Besides, any of us knocking a chair over would have picked it up again.’
‘He’s here, isn’t he? That murderous bloody boy.’ Sheelagh was not a timorous woman. Both professionally and personally she was an aggressive, even ruthless competitor who never shirked a fight. Friends who had known her for years and come through hard times with her had not heard that icy thread of fear lacing her voice.
It was not to be wondered at. Too many things were happening too quickly, all of them bad. Being marooned six hundred feet above the city, surrounded by people they knew nothing good about while a vicious child haunted the corridors waiting a chance to do them harm, chiselled at her nerves as any number of enemies attacking in plain sight would not have done. ‘He’s come up the lift shaft into the penthouse, and even though we’re awake this time we neither saw nor heard him. How can we stop him if we can’t see him? It’s like fighting a ghost!’
‘How long is it since you put those chairs out?’ Larry asked Tariq. ‘Half an hour? Maybe he’s still here. We could look for him.’
‘Damn right we look for him!’ snapped Sheelagh. ‘One of us is dead and another badly hurt because of him. You want to leave him at large till there’s nobody left?’
‘So we look,’ agreed Larry. ‘Only try and remember it’s a kid we’re looking for, not a division of panzers.’
‘And you try and remember,’ she said fiercely, ‘it’s a killer we’re looking for.’
Tessa and Mrs Venables stayed with Miriam. While the others made a cordon in the corridor, Larry and Tariq set about flushing him out. They began at the dead end beyond the women’s quarters and worked towards the lift, searching every room and every cupboard.
It wasn’t hard except on the nerves. The searchers couldn’t know, each time they opened a door, if only dust or a homicidal boy armed with a kitchen implement would fly out. It made them jumpy, and also slow. The more cupboards they searched, the more they expected to find him in the next one. The odds rose with every door they opened.
But they reached the lift without sight of him. ‘Do we do the conference room now or later?’
‘Now,’ decided Tariq. ‘Get it out of the way.’
He wasn’t there either: not under the table, behind either of the big sofas or in the shuttered alcove that would in the fullness of time become a bar. ‘Kitchen?’
‘Kitchen.’
Sheelagh watched in shivery fascination. If there was anything innately absurd about grown men storming a kitchen like Green Berets entering a Vietnamese village it didn’t show in their faces. The cost of carelessness fresh in their minds, they proceeded in deadly earnest, each keenly aware of where the other was and how quickly he could react. They heard each other’s breathing rasp as they snatched open the doors, soft curses when one more cupboard proved bare. No one said, If anything moves, blast it, but that was how they felt.
When they were sure the boy wasn’t there the cordon moved up past the kitchen door. If he was in the penthouse he was in one of the men’s rooms; if he got past the searchers into the corridor it was important to deny him access to knives and forks and skewers.
Joe’s room was empty. Larry’s room was empty. Tariq’s room was empty and so was Richard’s. So, finally, was Will Furney’s.
They looked at each other in disbelief. Tariq said, ‘He isn’t here. He’s done it again.’ His voice was breathy with the release of pent-up tension.
‘I don’t get this,’ Larry said tersely. ‘I really don’t. Where does he go to? And why does he keep coming back?’
‘He’s travelling through the lift shaft, that’s obvious,’ said Tariq. ‘I don’t know what he wants from us. To steal – food, clothes? To scare us off? If he thinks of this place as home, maybe he just wants rid of us.’
‘Enough to brain one of us with a rolling-pin and shove another down the lift shaft?’
Tariq scowled. ‘Nobody pushed Will – that was an accident. Don’t for pity’s sake make things out to be worse than they already are.’
‘All right, it was an accident. But it wouldn’t have happened if that boy hadn’t been making free with the place. What in hell’s a kid like that doing here at all?’
From the corridor Sheelagh said, ‘Tariq?’
He raised his voice. ‘No, no sign of him here either. He’s given us the slip again.’
‘Tariq!’
Her tone brought both of them quickly to the door. The little cordon was still stretched across the corridor but now it had turned its back on them. Through a gap between Sheelagh and Joe, Tariq glimpsed a dark, stocky figure in front of the lift. Very softly, advancing a step at a time, he said, ‘Don’t anybody move. Don’t frighten him off.’
‘Frighten him?‘ echoed Sheelagh faintly.
As Tariq edged through the cordon he saw the boy clearly for the first time, and his initial reaction was more pity than anger. He understood now, as he had not before, how Mrs Venables – taken by surprise and seeing only its swift departure – could have thought it was a dog. It was certainly shaggy, but under the pelt of disintegrating woollies there was, as Larry had insisted, a boy of sixteen or seventeen years.
The cocoon of clothing – how did he take it off without it falling apart? Did he ever take it off? – gave an impression of bulk reinforced by the well-developed muscles in his hands and forearms. Of course, Tariq thought inanely; all that climbing. But the pale skin and hollow eyes told of hunger and cold and damp places out of the sun. It was like chancing on some subterranean creature and feeling the squirm of primordial distaste; and then seeing the terror in its eyes that said, however little you liked the look of it, it liked the look of you even less.
Tariq saw panic rip through the boy’s eyes and, because he was essentially a kind man, for a moment forgot about the damage the boy had done and tried to reassure him. He spread his hands and said quietly, ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you. What’s your name?’
The answer came in a voice deeper than any of them expected, barred with a fear that trembled. ‘Will.’
Resentment rose like bile in Sheelagh’s throat. She didn’t believe him. He’d taken the man’s life, and now he was stealing his name. Her lip curled in disgust. ‘Liar.’
The same instinctive revulsion kicked Larry over the edge of fury. He saw the boy standing, sullen and defiant, in front of the shaft that he’d used as a weapon, and rage burgeoned in him. ‘You bloody little ghoul!’ He flung himself through the cordon like Agassi after a wide ball.
For twenty-five years his reactions had been an intrinsic part of how Larry Ford made his living. But for wild creatures their reactions are how they stay alive, which is an even higher imperative. Fear is faster than hunger, or anger, or anything else. The boy slipped under Larry’s closing hands and fled up the corridor.
That corridor ended in a blank wall beyond the last of the women’s rooms. ‘We’ve got him now!’ yelled Larry in triumph, leading the pursuit. ‘He’ll try to come back this way. Don’t let him past!’
With Larry on his tail the boy ran until the wall stopped him. He gave a desperate little grunt, as if he’d forgotten it was there. For a second he pressed himself against it as if he could melt through, then reality intervened and he turned. Beneath the grime his face was white in the harsh glare of the naked bulbs, his eyes great with fear.
Larry braked, waiting for the boy to try and pass him. In his breast was the tight satisfaction of knowing he controlled the court. Twice the youngster had outplayed him
, but not this time. This time he could take his beating. In Larry’s mind and in his eyes was an ambivalence as to whether that was a sporting metaphor or not.
The boy saw and let it decide him. He wasn’t sure he could evade the man again but he knew he had to try: he’d as soon throw himself from the roof as on the mercy of a man with those eyes. But as he went to make his move Tariq came to join them. A moment later Richard did, then Sheelagh, then Joe. The boy stumbled back against the end wall; his shoulders dropped and he swallowed.
Suddenly Tariq felt ashamed of himself, of all of them. They’d chased a half-witted child to the end of his strength, cornered him like an animal, and now they were crowding him as if they intended to beat the crap out of him. Five of them: four strong men and a terribly angry woman.
Tariq shut his eyes an instant to organize his head. ‘Now, just hold everything while we think this through. Once we’ve got him, what are we going to do with him?’
Sheelagh threw him an incredulous glance. She was literally panting, not just with exertion. ‘What do you think?’
‘No, Sheelagh,’ the big man said quietly, manoeuvring his body between her and the boy, ‘what do you think? What I told him back there – I meant it. Nobody’s going to hurt him.’
‘We’ll tie him up,’ decided Larry. ‘There’s bound to be some rope or cord or something. He won’t give us much trouble trussed up like a chicken.’
‘Jesus, Larry,’ Tariq sighed despairingly, ‘he’s just a kid. He’s terrified already. You’re going to throw him on the floor and hog-tie him, and throw him in a room, and open the door at intervals and throw him a bit of something to eat – not much because we haven’t got enough for ourselves. If he’s a sandwich short of a picnic now, he’s going to be a gibbering idiot by the time we get out of here. You really think we have the right to do that?’
Joe was a stout man in his mid-fifties who hadn’t so much as trotted after a bus in years. His barrel chest was going like a bellows so he had trouble getting the words out. ‘It may not be right, but it’s necessary. He’s too dangerous to turn loose.’
Tariq wasn’t blind to that. But he didn’t know how to restrain a wild creature except by brute force. ‘How about this? We don’t tie him but I’ll stay in the room with him. I’ll park my bum against the door – the only way he can get out is through me.’
‘And if he brains you too?’ demanded Sheelagh.
‘Then you were right and I was wrong.’
‘It’s more than your neck, though, isn’t it?’ she snapped. ‘If that happens there’s one more casualty to look after and one less of us to fend him off next time. I say now we’ve got him we make sure.’
‘But what does that mean?’ Tariq asked again. ‘You want to tie him up, like Larry? Or do you want to open the lift doors and push him down after Will?’
She raised her hand to slap him for that. The truth was that she didn’t know what she wanted, except that she wanted to feel safe. But at the crucial moment, with Sheelagh’s hand swinging up and back and her eyes spitting fire in Tariq’s face, the boy said, ‘No! Don’t fight – help. Will.’ His voice was rusty, the words just the closest he could get hold of at short notice.
Sheelagh stared at him and her arm dropped slowly. Tariq turned, searching the parchment face for signs of intelligence. ‘Help? Help who? You?’
The boy shook his shaggy head insistently. ‘Will! In – in – the hole. Falling. On the – the— Needs—’ His residual command of language defeated, he gave a giant tremulous shrug and recalled a final imprecation. ‘Oh, buggery!’
Richard felt the blood drain from his face, taking all expression with it. He didn’t dare look at the others just yet. He spent seconds analysing the words, considering what else they might mean. But finally he risked putting what he was thinking into words of his own. ‘Is he saying what I think he’s saying?’
Chapter Seventeen
It was hard to be sure, depended on things they couldn’t know – like, how firm a grasp on reality the boy had. It was no use attempting to deal with a feral boy as if he were an intelligent adult.
On the other hand, what he was saying seemed to make sense. The hole was the lift shaft, and he knew Will had fallen. He knew his name. That didn’t prove the man was alive, but no one who’d fallen six hundred feet got up to introduce himself afterwards. He was on something, the boy said. But there couldn’t be any kind of a ledge or the lift wouldn’t run…
The lift. ‘A torch,’ Tariq said tersely, heading for the lift at a purposeful jog. ‘Quickly! Mrs Venables, can you find me—?’ She was on her way before he finished the sentence. A couple of small torches for emergency use were stowed among her kitchen equipment.
Sheelagh stared after him, wide-eyed. ‘You think he’s on top of the lift? Dear God, we didn’t even check! I knew he’d fallen – I never looked to see how far!’
‘Don’t get your hopes too high,’ cautioned Richard. ‘It must be at a lower level or he wouldn’t have fallen, he’d have walked into it. If it’s more than one or maybe two levels down, it won’t make very much difference.’
‘But he’s alive! Isn’t he?’ She turned to the boy, her cobalt eyes aflame with possibilities. ‘Isn’t he?’
Richard thought she was going to shake him. He put a hand on her wrist. ‘Tariq’s got the doors open. Let’s see what the situation is before we get too excited.’ He beckoned the boy. ‘You come too.’ Whatever they found in the shaft, he didn’t want that boy disappearing again; and he didn’t much want him at his back. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’
The reply was slow coming. Richard suspected he was having trouble remembering. Then, ‘Midge.’ Which seemed unlikely, but if it was what the boy called himself it would do. Warily he allowed Richard to usher him back up the corridor.
Tariq had levered the doors open and Joe held them with a solid shoulder. ‘Larry, your hand.’ Thus anchored Tariq leaned carefully into the dizzying space.
For a moment the sense of distance threatened to swamp him. The beam of the torch magnified the unsteadiness of his hand and bounced around the smooth oval of the shaft, fragmenting and repeating until he could make no sense of what he was seeing. He blinked and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, then he tried again.
The shaft did not end at the penthouse, but continued up perhaps another couple of levels. The domestic offices, he supposed – the water tanks, the winding gear for the lift, maybe the boilers – all the esoteric superstructure for a building the size of a town. Somewhere up there the boy must have a bolt-hole for when people were working, or in this case living, in the penthouse. In the other direction the shaft plummeted six hundred feet straight down.
Of those six hundred feet, the first forty were the only ones that counted. If the top of the gondola had stopped Will’s fall inside a couple of seconds there was a chance he was alive. The gondola all but filled the shaft. He could hardly have slipped past and kept falling. Of course, he could have broken something vital – you could do that if you were unlucky enough falling off a stepladder. But there was a chance. Tariq took a deep breath and held it, trying to steady his hand.
As the beam stopped oscillating he began to pick out, at the extreme limit of its range, something blocking the shaft. It had to be the gondola, there was nothing else it could be, but for a tantalizing minute longer he couldn’t be sure whether it was just the top of the car he was seeing, complete with its cable mechanism, or if there was something more.
‘Richard, have a look – I can’t make this out.’
Richard lay full length on the floor, his head and shoulders projecting into the shaft. He too had to wait a moment for what he was seeing to start making sense. But when it did he had no doubt. ‘He’s there all right, on top of the gondola. He isn’t moving. Will? Will!’ But there was no response.
‘How far down?’ Tessa had reached the same conclusion as Tariq, that mathematics were the best guide.
‘I don’t know. Twenty feet? Thirty?’
‘Looking down, it’s never as far as you think,’ said Richard. ‘I don’t think that would even be twenty feet. And twenty, even twenty-five feet – that’s not a killing fall. Not necessarily.’ He wriggled back from the brink and stood up. ‘We have to get him back.’
Tariq nodded. ‘Yes. How?’
Richard shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but we have to. We can’t leave him there. When the builders remember us the first thing they’ll do is send the lift on up. If Will’s still there he could get sucked in between the car and the shaft. It could literally tear him apart.’
In the second before she could get rid of it that image kicked Sheelagh hard under the heart. It was unendurable, that Will might have survived the fall only to die screaming when the lift started up.
She found herself looking at Midge, her cheeks growing hot. ‘This is your fault. What are you going to do about it?’
‘Give the kid a break,’ growled Tariq.
But Richard agreed with Sheelagh. ‘You want to help Will, Midge? Good, you can. You use this shaft all the time. It’s how you come and go. Well, how? Show us how we can get to him.’
Under the disreputable clothes Midge’s shoulders, broad with climbing, heaved once. ‘’S what Midge is trying to tell you,’ he sighed heavily. ‘’S why he came. But—’ He gestured with a thumb up the corridor where they’d chased him. Then he shook his head, impatient with the uncooperative words. The more he tried, though, the more they came back to him. ‘Will’s – OK. Pretty much. Hurt’ – he tapped his head – ‘but OK. Only, scared. Too scared to move.’
‘He’s afraid of heights,’ nodded Tariq. ‘Midge, could you take a rope down to him?’
‘Sure,’ agreed Midge immediately. ‘What rope?’
That was the problem. Even fully operational hotels are not a natural source of long lengths of strong rope. Joe scavenged through the rooms for anything that would serve and came back with several lengths of Terylene cord from the blinds. ‘Best I can do.’
