“Not fair! You have a head start on me!” He heard her giggling voice trail after him.
“You’ve got longer legs!” he shouted back, already two flights down.
“Smart arse!”
Jason rang Claire’s doorbell and pushed past her as she answered it, just as his mum came skidding down the corridor in second place. Claire called after Jason, “She just can’t keep up with you, can she? I could give you a run for your money though.” She winked at Jenny. “Being a younger model and all!”
“Six months younger!” Jenny smirked, giving her friend a mock slap. “Cheeky bitch!”
“All counts, darlin’.” Claire shut the door behind them. Jason scrunched his eyes up as she rubbed his short black hair. “That new haircut makes the world of difference! You know, he’s gonna be a right looker when he gets older.” Jason could feel his face get hot.
“Are you saying my son is ugly now?” His mum laughed, nudging Jason to say that it wasn’t so. “Made him have a French crop, so he doesn’t look so much like his dad.” The discomfort returned to Jason upon hearing his dad referred to negatively, it left his innards feeling jumbled and cold.
“Well, at least you know he came from good-looking stock, Grant was a looker. I just hope my girls take after me and not my Brian,” Claire joked. Claire was the only one who didn’t avoid talking about his dad as if he was some dark secret. Claire cocked her head towards the twins’ room. “Don’t you worry; I’ve got dibs on him for one of my girls. I see wedding bells in the future. I’ve seen the way they look at him. They adore him!” She laughed and his face burned more fiercely. He didn’t think of the girls like that. He didn’t think of girl’s like that full stop. Actually he did think of girls, but girls and the idea of “going out with them” was a bit of a mystery to him. He could feel Claire watching him fondly as he headed off down the hall to the twins’ bedroom.
“Yeah, but he will have to choose between them; who will he pick?”
“Oh, my God, that’s a point. They argue about Barbie enough now. Could be Jason next!”
“Hope not, I’ve seen their toys afterwards. They aren’t playing tug of war with my kid’s arms!” Their laughter trailed out of clear earshot as he headed into the girl’s bedroom.
Emily and Amy both looked up from their play and greeted him enthusiastically. He was eleven – four years older than Emily and Amy. He bothered to get on with the girls more than other boys his age seemed to because Amy and Emily accepted him and he valued that, so he happily joined in their games, even if it meant helping dress dolls and playing “girly” games. They also had a different games console to his, which was an added attraction. Jason didn’t have many friends – none that he saw out of school; it was one of the reasons he didn’t go out – as well as being frightened that he might bump into those that picked on him. David Renshaw and Mikey Kent, two boys from school, lived in his block a few floors down from his home. They hadn’t hit him or anything, just taunted him about his dad leaving, and anything else they could think of. He chose to avoid them. It made things easier.
He sat with Amy on the floor and idly joined her in some drawing. He could hear Emily behind him on the other side of the room talking firmly to herself or her doll.
Emily’s voice was suddenly harder and louder and in his ear. “Stop it!”. He yelped as she thumped his back, more through surprise than pain.
“What was that for?”
“You started it. You kept calling my name!” She frowned moodily.
“I didn’t call you, you idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she sulked.
“He’s been helping me,” Amy defended.
Jason laughed as he frowned at Emily and shook his head dismissively. “Idiot!”
“I’m not…” she mumbled. She looked about her room at the piles of teddies and dolls. “Someone called me…”
Chapter Three
Albert Taylor marched purposefully down the stairs. He didn’t like to take the lift when he was in his undertaker’s uniform. It tended to make people think the worst; that someone had died in the building. He also disliked making pleasantries with people he knew or recognised. It wasn’t becoming of a mourner, or indeed a chief undertaker. His very job was to be discrete and create a solemn sense of mourning, something he didn’t feel he could do while talking about the weather with Mrs Jenson, the football results with Bob Chanter or listening to Rose McCarthy’s gossiping, or whatever with whomever else he could encounter in the lift. It just didn’t seem right.
Despite the fact he was on an early call and was unlikely to meet anyone, he still descended the ten floors by foot in his heavy black suit, well tailored to his broad towering build. Despite his sixty-three years and the exertion of descending six flights of stairs, he still walked with a stiff back and a regimental even step. He saved his cheer and his slouching for when he was at home with his wife Iris. Two years more and he could retire and be with her, for against his solemn dark look when working, he was a warm sensitive man with a deep love of his wife and cosy home and distant children, and maintained a jovial outlook on life. He could handle the descent and the climb, but he was glad the storm of a couple of nights ago had ended the heat wave; the stairs had been hot and airless. The crepe wrap on his black top hat trailed softly and ghost-like in his wake.
Slowly Albert’s pace lost its rhythm. At first he ignored it. He was a stubborn man. He only wanted to weaken and take his medication if it was necessary, not just at any twinge. A belt of pain cinched his chest sharply and forced the air from him. It took both his hands to steady himself on the banister. His hat came lose and fell from his head, toppling down the middle of the stairwell with the black crepe trailing and flapping gently behind as it disappeared. He fumbled for his spray. He heard his hat hit the ground with a hollow slap that sounded out in an ever-decreasing echo. He was scared, scared that this attack could be the one that the doctor had warned him about. He didn’t want to die alone. He flipped the lid of the spray. He wasn’t going to go without his Iris being there to be held. He gave two measured sprays under his tongue and waited. He thought of her warm plump body in his arms. Slowly the pain abated and his chest muscles loosened. He rested on the step for ten minutes before attempting to retrieve his hat.
He wouldn’t let his condition beat him.
Albert reached the bottom but had decided to abandon the regimented step and strolled casually down, cursing as he realised his hat had missed the landing of the lobby on the ground level and gone straight down into the basement level. He descended the last flight of steps from the lobby area to the locked basement door and crouched down steadily, scooping his hat up. He brushed the dust from it and turned for the stairs, the hat had landed flat on its top but didn’t seem to be damaged.
He was startled by the sudden clunk-click noise of a chunky lock being turned.
From the corner of his eye Albert saw the heavy metal door to the basement slowly opening. He gulped his discomfort down, but the hairs on the nape of his neck tingled and stood despite his attempted resolve. He turned to the large half-open metal door. The caretaker? he reasoned, still unsure. “Alec? Is that you?” He moved towards the door, rationalising the situation with every step. Who – what else could it be! He laughed at himself as he went to open the door further.
The door ripped from his grip and slammed against the wall. A blaze of green light burned from within the doorframe. Albert’s brief scream reached the fifth floor landing as his body was yanked into the basement and the door crashed shut behind him with a deafening echo that rolled like thunder.
Chapter Four
Craig gathered his camera and mobile phone before glancing at his reflection in the hallway mirror and lazily tended his ruffled hair, leaving it between messy and styled. Freshly shaven and with an air of CK In2U aftershave around him he answered the door to Vicki.
“Hiya, babe,” Vicki greeted him cheerily. She looked him up and down, lingering on his shirt an
d tie. “Hope you didn’t make that effort for me, sexy boy.” She winked.
Didn’t she find him attractive at all? Craig had a realistic view of his looks. He knew he wasn’t a stunner, but he knew what to wear and brushed up reasonably well. He hadn’t had that much luck with the girls to be cocky with them, but he had a good sense of humour and if he felt relaxed he could really get a good rapport going. With Vicki their whole time working together had been a rollercoaster of playfulness, and at times it was like there really could be potential, yet as soon as he thought seriously about his prospects she suddenly seemed out of reach. He straightened his tie. “You’re a bit up yourself! I’m trying to look presentable for the interview. Professional, understand?” he explained, making a show of eying her casual clothes.
He found himself rewarded with a smile that broke across her fresh smooth face. “Oooh, excuse me, ‘Mr Professional’. I just decided to go for the tight jeans and slack jumper.” She did a twirl to model her vintage jeans and faded rainbow-striped jumper. “It’s my respectful look, my sympathetic look, my persistent look.” She put a pen to her lower lip and beetled her brow as she acted out a mime of intense thought. “And my suspicious-determined-reporter look: it suits all occasions.” She stopped and beamed again, flicking a stray clump of crimped blonde from her eye.
He smiled appreciatively. She neglected to mention the sexy-arse-in-those-jeans look. “Yeah, well. Just leave the persistent and suspicious-determined-reporter look here, okay?”
She held her hands up in mock surrender. “Tact is my middle name.”
Craig closed his door. “That’s funny, I thought it was ‘shit stirrer’.”
“Ha-ha,” she returned flatly. She clutched her chest theatrically. “You have wounded this poor journalist.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise you had feelings under that hard exterior.” He laughed.
“That’s it. Mock me. Don’t know why I bother calling you…”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t have much choice. It would be well harsh using some other photographer for a job two floors away from me,” he joked as they headed to the lift.
“As if I would. You’re, my only photo boy: you’re my bitch.”
Craig was drawn into her playfulness. It was these times that bemused him. “Yeah, just don’t you forget it!”
The doors squealed shut behind them and the lift jerked into life shuddering up to the next floor. Craig watched Vicki stand close to the doors, aware of her claustrophobia. As the lift slowed to a stop Vicki bobbed on her toes impatiently and jumped into the safety of the corridor before the doors had fully parted.
She quickly found her confidence again and nodded down to his side. “Is that semen you got in your hand?” She smirked.
He looked down to the mobile phone she referred to and laughed. “Siemens,” he corrected. “Yes it is. I told you I was getting this phone.”
“And I told you I was going to wind you up about it, so we are even. A word that is an ‘i’ away from being a reproductive fluid is a dodgy product name.”
“Yeah? All this coming from the girl whose initials are VD.”
Vicki looked genuinely shocked. “Bitch!”
They reached the door to the Chambers’ flat and Craig quickly pocketed his phone.
She prodded the doorbell. “You’ll get brain cancer putting it down there.”
Craig cocked his head near to Vicki’s ear while they both stood facing the door, waiting for it to be answered. “Ha-ha. Don’t – my balls are like plums as it is. Haven’t had it for ages.” Years actually. He wasn’t into one night stands. He blushed at his own laddish posturing, he wasn’t like that but he hoped she didn’t know just how unlucky he had been.
“Ooh, big boy!” She smirked.
“Enough for a handful.” He winked playfully, riding the yearning tension within him. He arched an eyebrow tauntingly. “Want to test my theory?”
“If that’s a pass, it’s original.” She jumped back in before he could answer. “Anyway. I’m every man’s dream.” She looked to him. “Small hands.” She held them up and waved them in his frowning face. “Makes everything I hold look bigger.”
Before Craig could pursue their verbal foreplay the door was opened by a woman who appeared frail for her probable thirty-odd years. Her bobbed brown hair was untidy as if she had been asleep moments before their arrival. Her pink cardigan sagged from her frame, like flesh that had been left behind from a severe loss of weight, her white tee-shirt appeared creased and lived in, tucked into her jeans to neaten her appearance. Her eyes were young, but they stared out from lids puffy from crying and a face gaunt and exhausted, a face that was a mask that added years to her. It was hard to believe she was the same woman he had photographed at the press conference.
“Mrs Chambers.” Vicki greeted. “Hello, again. It’s Vicki Day, we have been talking on the phone. This is my photographer, Craig Digby. You called us the other day?” Vicki’s voice was pleasant but professional.
“Oh,” the woman exclaimed as if it had slipped from her memory. “Please, come in. I keep losing track of the days.” She let Craig and Vicki pass her and then gave a cursory look of suspicion into the corridor before shutting the door and joining them in the hall. She asked them to call her Claire.
Craig looked about the hallway; it opened into the kitchen on the left with the lounge ahead of them. To the right the hall travelled down further to the second bedroom and was capped with a bathroom door. The master bedroom was off the lounge. It was tidy but the curtains were still drawn on the large windows of the lounge leaving the room in a gloomy yellowish haze and giving the flat a cramped stifled atmosphere. It took him back to the oppressive days of the heat wave several weeks earlier.
Claire pulled her cardigan around her like a comfort blanket and weakly offered them a cup of tea as if it was a politeness that would be a struggle. They accepted and she shuffled off into the open kitchen like a frail old lady and started the tea-making ritual.
Craig called out to her. “I was at the press conference the other week with all the other photographers and journalists. But now I am here and it’s just us I had better tell you that I live in this building, a couple of floors down, I hope you feel comfortable about that,” he offered courteously and professionally.
“I thought I recognised the face. I guess I don’t mind; everyone knows what’s been going on anyway,” she called back meekly from round the corner in the kitchen.
When tea was made the three of them settled down into an atmosphere of pregnant expectation, Claire in an armchair and Vicki and Craig on the three-seater sofa. Vicki quickly cut off any chance of the awkward quiet becoming a stifling silence. “So, Claire. You called us the other day. It’s been…” Vicki looked at notes on her pad, checking the facts, helping her to sterilise her next question. “Two weeks since little Emily went missing?”
Claire nodded. “Yes, I wanted to make another appeal for any information. Didn’t want people to forget.”
The national press had lost interest. They were waiting for a conclusion. The Camden Gazette, through Vicki, was Claire’s only voice. Vicki had been just another reporter at the conference, didn’t get any question time as she was only with a local rag, but she would not let go of a story that had the possibility of being national again. She had managed to get Claire’s number of a source she had in the local police, and had called vowing to keep her story in the papers. “Of course, we have the facts of the story. I just need an update, a few lines, a quote or two to go with it: How do you feel now that two weeks has passed? And with the police making no progress?”
Craig watched uncomfortably as Claire sighed under the weight of Vicki’s journalistic angle that reinforced the pain and hopelessness of the situation. “It’s terrible. I mean there’s just nothing to go on.” She stared intently at Vicki as if measuring her for a moment. “It just happened! She was asleep in her bed and then she was gone.”
“Do you feel the police
haven’t done enough?” Vicki pushed.
“No, no.” She leapt in with her emphatic answer, despite her general malaise. “There’s not much to go on. She disappeared, no one has come forward with seeing anything, and she had no reason to run away.” Her voice fractured into faltering tones forcing her to clear her throat of thick emotion. “It just feels so useless.”
“Do you feel that some people close by are hiding things?”
“Someone must know something, mustn’t they? Emily has to be somewhere. Someone knows where she is, or must have seen her.”
There was a pleading desperation to her reply. “Do you think it could be someone in the building?” she rerouted after a little time.
“The police did a full search of all the flats. Everyone was very co-operative. I’ve always found everyone here to be good people.”
Claire looked to Craig for some corroboration but Vicki blocked her prompt to maintain the focus on Claire. “What are your feelings regarding the disappearance of Mr Taylor?” She glanced at her notes for his full name. “Albert Taylor.”
Claire’s eyes brimmed and she looked to the ceiling as if trying to tip the tears back into her head. She sucked air into her chest and faced Vicki again. “I don’t know. When he wasn’t working, he… he always seemed such a friendly man, always had a joke for anyone who cared to listen. He… he was great with kids.” She smiled but her resolve broke apart around her last words and their possible naïve irony, her eyes reddening as tears brimmed. She held her hand up to her mouth to hide her quivering lips. “That’s what I hate about this. You have to start looking at all your friends and your neighbours as suspects. The – the police said don’t neglect anyone from your thoughts. Any hunch or feeling has to be looked into… When – when there is as little evidence… as this.” She began to cry openly.
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