Panic Room

by Robert Goddard

  He did notice a framed photograph of Wortalleth West hanging on the wall in the alcove behind the desk, however. The house looked brand new, whiter than ever, the gardens around it raw and immature. A tall, leanly built man was standing on the verandah, close to the front door, his face in shadow. He was wearing a pale suit and open-necked shirt. His expression was indecipherable, as were any details of his features. It would have seemed more natural for him to pose at the foot of the steps, in full view. As it was, there was an air of withdrawal about him, perhaps of secrecy.

  Don went up to the garage block, which he had yet to measure. Blake was back in the workshop, chiselling and planing her three-legged stool. She looked entirely unworried again, calm and happy. She too, Don realized, was in many ways indecipherable.

  ‘I need to go over these rooms with the measurer,’ he explained.

  ‘Go ahead. They’re all open. Mine’s a bit of a mess. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take any pictures up there.’

  ‘I won’t. Do you want to come along and make sure I don’t disturb anything?’

  ‘No. It’s cool. I trust you.’

  ‘I can’t think why.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Neither can I.’

  ‘There’s a framed photograph on the wall in the library. Of the house.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is that Harkness on the verandah?’

  ‘S’pose so. It’s hard to be sure. But he dresses like that and the height and build are about right. Who else would it be?’

  Don shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Want to take me somewhere to eat tonight?’ Blake asked suddenly.

  Don felt ludicrously flattered by the proposal, even though he knew all it probably meant was that she saw him as the source of a free meal. ‘I’d be delighted. Where shall we go?’

  ‘There’s a nice pub just up the coast. It’s your sort of place.’

  How she could know what his sort of place was, Don was at a loss to imagine. Perhaps he was more transparent than he supposed. He smiled, as much at himself as at Blake. ‘Sounds great.’

  I was putting on a front when Don showed up at the workshop a second time. That steel door in the closet – and the panic room he seemed convinced was behind it – were giving me goosebumps whenever I thought about them. Could there actually be someone in there? No. Surely not. But then … what’s the story? What’s going on?

  It’s like a dream I sometimes have where I swim out to sea from a cove that’s pretty much Poldhu. I don’t go very far, but when I stop swimming and turn round … the coast’s gone. Vanished. There’s nothing but endless open water. I’m lost. And alone.

  I don’t like that feeling.

  After Don goes back to the main house to dump his stuff in the bedroom I made up for him, I go up to my room, to see if anything’s been moved, to see if he’s the prying type.

  There’s no sign he’s been looking where he shouldn’t. And without looking seriously he’ll know nothing about me. I don’t litter the place with pictures or mementoes. I hold my past inside my head. It’s not always easy. But it’s safer that way.

  A guide to trees and their different wood types; a study of the life cycle of the honey bee; an exhibition catalogue about the paintings of the Cornish abstract artist Peter Lanyon: Don won’t have learnt much from the books beside my bed. I wonder if he’ll notice the Lanyon Harkness has hanging in the lounge. Far West. Oil on canvas, 1964. It’s the only thing of his I actually covet. Maybe I can take it with me when I leave and no one will notice. We’ll see.

  So, Don hasn’t disturbed anything, just like he promised. Which—Hold on, though. He’s opened the bathroom cabinet. I never leave the hook in that position. Naughty boy, Don. What were you looking for? Prescription tranquillizers? A suicide stock of paracetamol? Whatever, you didn’t find anything, did you? I’m clean.

  Maybe I should take it as a sign he’s genuinely worried about me. I’m not sure how much to tell him. Walking away from all this might be the safest thing to do. But I resent losing the sense of safety I had here only this morning. And right now I don’t have anywhere I can walk away to.

  Also, I have a feeling about Don. When I told him I trusted him, I was as surprised as he was. It’s not true. Not yet. But it feels possible. Which isn’t a feeling I have about most people – any people, really. I don’t understand what it is. I’ve only known him a few hours. Life’s taught me to be suspicious. So why aren’t I suspicious of him?

  We’ve agreed to leave at seven. I take a shower and put on one of my girlier numbers. I figure it’ll make me look in need of protection. It should do the trick with a guy Don’s age.

  Don looks as if he’s taken a shower too. I think I might even be able to catch a drift of aftershave. He’s still wearing the suit. He probably didn’t bring anything casual with him. I’ve already seen the car, of course, but he introduces me to it almost formally. ‘This is my MG.’

  What am I supposed to say? It’s cramped, it’s old and it’s dusty. I ask provocatively, ‘What colour is it supposed to be?’

  ‘Harvest Gold,’ he replies, beaming proudly.

  ‘How old is it?’

  ‘She’s a 1973 model. Which is lucky. They’d phased out chrome bumpers by 1975.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  He catches my smile. ‘All right. You’ve had your fun.’

  ‘I’m guessing this car’s almost as old as you are.’

  ‘Yeah. Which means she’s just coming into her prime.’

  I nod. ‘’Course she is.’

  Before we leave, Don asks if I’m going to set the burglar alarm. I tell him I never use it. It’s true. I never do. I’ve never wanted to – or thought I needed to. I try to explain a little of that to him. It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t really get it. But he doesn’t push it.

  I tell him we could easily walk to the Halzephron Inn. It’s only a few miles along the coast path and it’s a fine evening, the sun still strong, the sea sparkling like a beaded mirror. He prefers to drive, even though it’s a long way round by the main road. He probably wants to show off the car. ‘She’, as he calls it.

  It certainly goes fast. I ask him if he feels guilty about damaging the planet by driving around in such an environmentally unfriendly machine. He replies he’s loyal and so is the car.

  I really don’t know whether that’s good news or bad. Maybe he’s an anachronism driving an anachronism.

  We get to the Halzephron around half seven. There are quite a lot of people there, some of them sitting outside. I don’t recognize anyone, though.

  It’s a cosy place, low-ceilinged and traditional. On stormy nights, with the sea booming a couple of fields away, it can feel like being below deck on some old galleon. But the weather’s calm and the light’s mellow. Everything seems tranquil. I tell Don I’m glad we came out. And I am. I start to relax properly for the first time since Don showed me the door to the panic room – if that’s what it is.

  I have a G&T. Don drinks beer. He declares the Doom Bar excellent. He orders fish and chips. I order soup and salad.

  He talks a lot. Well, he’s a salesman, so I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise. He asks me a few questions he maybe hopes will encourage me to talk about myself. But I’m not going to be drawn and it’s easy to make him believe I’m genuinely interested in hearing all about him instead.

  Don Challenor. Born 29 April 1967. He mentions the date as part of a story about being conceived the night England won the World Cup. I try to break it to him that I’m even less interested in football than vintage sports cars. 1967 is ancient history. Quite a lot of what Don says about himself comes from a place that feels remote to me.

  His father was a salesman too: brushes door to door, then venetian blinds, then … I stop listening as he goes on. There’s something about a gambling problem, father’s, not his. Then there’s Don the up-and-coming estate agent. ‘The Englishman’s home is his cash cow,’ he announces as he st
arts his third pint.

  I ask if he has a family. Not really, he replies. There was a marriage. Then there was a divorce. No children. Don claims relations with his ex-wife are good. He lets her name slip a couple of times. Fran. That’s the lawyer, then. Fran Revell. I knew they had history.

  There’s a brother, but he lives in Australia, with a wife and children and Don’s mother. Father’s long dead. Which leaves Don pretty much alone in the world. Divorced, childless, parentless – and unemployed, I happen to know. He doesn’t mention that, of course. He doesn’t want to admit things aren’t exactly hunky-dory in his world. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to admit that either.

  Maybe the beer and talking about himself make him soulful. That could be why he insists on following his last pint with a double Scotch, which puts him way over the drink-drive limit. When we leave, he can’t even cross the car park in a straight line.

  I tell him I’m not going back in the car with him. It’s still not quite dark. I’ll walk home. I suggest he comes with me and picks his car up in the morning. He bristles. I’m making a fuss about nothing. I point out I’m not making any kind of fuss. I’m just telling him what I’m going to do – and what I’m not going to do.

  Hitting his head on the door frame as he climbs into the car seems to clear this thought. I hear myself suggesting a compromise. We drive to the far end of the lane, the car park at Church Cove. That’s only half a mile from Poldhu. We leave ‘the old girl’, as Don is now addressing her – it, I mean – there and walk the rest of the way. In a tone suggesting it’s a vast and magnanimous concession, Don agrees.

  ‘I’m glad we decided to do this,’ Don announces, slurring his Cs and Ss, as, an hour or so later, we walk down the lane towards Poldhu Cove. The night is sweet and still and soundless. You’d think it was completely dark if you weren’t out in it. The banks of thrift and valerian have been drained of their colour, but they’re still visible. I don’t want to leave this place. I really don’t. And I hope I don’t have to. ‘I can see why you like it here,’ Don adds.

  We’re nearly home. Except it isn’t home of course. I’m not allowed one of those here – or anywhere else.

  Don knew Blake was right about not driving all the way back to Wortalleth West via the main road. He was not sure why he had drunk so much. Maybe, as he recalled later, it was because Blake had somehow persuaded him to sketch out the less than glorious passage of his life to date. Or maybe it was actually because he was nervous about sleeping at the house, a few bedrooms away from the locked panic room. He believed his own explanation, that it was faulty. But beliefs, in his experience, could be hard to hold on to in the middle of the night.

  The walk from Church Cove cleared his head a little and the serene beauty of the clifftop stretch had a soothing effect on him. By the time they reached Wortalleth West, he felt confident there really was nothing to worry about.

  He would not have stayed that way had he realized their approach up the drive prompted a signal, in the form of a briefly flashing light on a belt-worn pager, to a heavily built, bearded man dressed in black who was at that moment searching the pockets of the jackets hanging in the closet of the dressing room off the master bedroom.

  With a barely audible sigh of irritation, he switched off the flashing light and made his way, at a swift, soft-footed pace, out of the room in the direction of the stairs, a faint reflection of his moving form dwindling in the mirror on the end wall of the closet as he went.

  As Don and Blake neared the front door of the house, the black-clad man let himself out through a rear door on to the patio around the swimming pool. He steered a deft path between the poolside loungers and headed off swiftly into the garden. A shape in motion. A sliver of black joining a slab of darkness. He was gone.

  NINE

  DON SLEEPS DEEPLY, if not soundly. But Wortalleth West, in all its automated intricacy, functions as it was designed to, by night as well as by day. The panic room is an enclosed space, nested within the house, walled in steel, equipped with cameras, enabling an occupant to observe every other room while safe themselves from observation. The door cannot be opened, except from inside – if, and only if, there is someone inside who wishes to open it. Otherwise, it will remain sealed. The security it confers on what exists within it is absolute. It is the perfect hiding place, concealing the very nature of what it conceals.

  Until, or unless, the door opens.

  Don slept deeply, if not soundly. When he woke, the grey light of an early summer dawn already filled the room. His throat was dry and there was the insistent throb of a low-grade headache. It was a familiar sensation. Fran had once described him as a man who learnt just enough from his mistakes to go on repeating them.

  He got up and went to the bathroom. Then he threw on the towelling robe supplied for his use and descended to the kitchen. Solitude in such a large house carried with it an inescapable eeriness, but he was relieved there was no tangible cause for concern. He reminded himself of his own explanation for the closed door in the bedroom closet: a technical fault – nothing more. He downed a tumblerful of water and made himself some coffee. This necessitated grinding beans of unknown age and fiddling with a high-tech espresso machine.

  The sun was already shining palely through the dawn mist that had billowed up from the sea. Hoping fresh air might add to the reviving effects of the coffee, he ventured out on to the verandah.

  The sea was calm, the sky a blue-tinged grey. The house was still and silent, so silent the lap of the surf on the beach down in the cove sounded far closer, as if Don was standing within a few yards of it.

  He absorbed the cleanness of the air along with the aroma of the coffee as he stood there, marvelling at how newly minted the world seemed in such a place.

  A sound suddenly penetrated the gentle swash of the surf. The telephone in the kitchen had started to ring. At first, Don thought he had misheard, that maybe it was a telephone ringing in some neighbouring property, even though there were none within earshot. Only when the ringing continued and he realized where it was coming from did he turn and head back into the house.

  It had stopped by the time he reached the kitchen. He cursed the caller for interrupting his brief idyll on the verandah and wondered if they would leave a message.

  Then the telephone began ringing again. Don snatched it from its cradle with irritable haste.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Don Challenor?’ Don did not recognize the voice – male, American, slightly husky. But he was immediately puzzled that anyone other than Fran and her secretarial staff knew he was there.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘The name’s French. I’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘You are talking to me.’

  ‘Face to face.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll explain when we meet.’

  Don’s puzzlement was rapidly turning to anxiety. Who in hell was this man? ‘Look, Mr French, I—’

  ‘I’m up at Church Cove, where you left your car last night. You’ll want to come fetch it, I guess. I’ll wait for you. I’ll give you an hour. It’s no hardship. It’s beautiful here. OK?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Don’t stand me up, Don. That’d be a big mistake. Believe me.’

  Don did not like being told what to do or what not to do, especially not early in the morning by someone he had never met. He dressed and set off at once, in a mood of simmering anger, most of it directed at Fran for putting him in this situation.

  It was only after the stiff ascent from Poldhu Cove to the clifftop, with a headache pounding away ever more aggressively behind his eyes, that Don considered a worrying point. French had telephoned directly after Don had walked out on to the verandah, as if he knew then he would be able to speak to him, as if he was actually watching for Don to show himself.

  To his left, the sea stretched placidly to the horizon. The rising sun cast long shadows of him over the pink banks of thrift as he went. But his pace was
slowing. Just what did French want with him? What exactly had he been sucked into?

  He descended to Church Cove, where, at beach level, the tide appeared to have marooned the strange little church Blake had told him the previous evening was called St Wingwall’s or some such – his recollection was hazy on the point. Ahead, beyond a farmyard, at the end of the lane they had driven down from the Halzephron, was the car park where he had left the MG. And there she was, waiting patiently for him.

  But she was not alone. A black, four-wheel-drive giant had pulled in next to her. ‘Might’ve known,’ he breathlessly grumbled. No good could come of consorting with 4WD drivers, in his opinion. But it did not appear he had much choice in the matter.

  As he entered the car park, stepping gingerly over the cattle grid, the driver of the 4WD cast him a leery glance. The man was bearded and slab-faced, with something in his eyes that was deeply worrying. He looked at Don as a bear might look at a fish flapping on a riverbank.

  Then the passenger door of the car opened and another man climbed out. He was an altogether slighter figure, dressed in sports coat, jeans and workman’s boots, though the windcheater looked expensively soft and the boots had very obviously never been near a serious place of work. His face was narrow, his eyes small and close-set, his hair thin and straw-coloured.

  ‘Hi, Don,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I’m Amos French.’

  Don had no wish to shake the man’s hand, but found himself doing so. Being addressed by his Christian name was in no way reassuring. ‘Morning,’ he said guardedly.

  ‘And a grand one it is.’ French took a deep breath. ‘The air’s a deal sweeter here.’

  ‘Sweeter than where?’

  French smiled. He had the dazzling white teeth of most Americans, which did nothing to make him look less predatory. ‘We drove down from London yesterday. Like you.’

  A memory stirred. ‘Did I see your car at Exeter Services?’