Panic Room

by Robert Goddard

  ‘What did they say?’ Blake asked, anxiety skittering in her gaze.

  ‘Fran sacked me. French threatened me.’ Don rubbed his eyes. This made nothing clearer, except his certainty on one point. ‘I need to get out of here. So do you. So I guess …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I guess you’d better drive me into Helston.’

  The drive featured a lot of gear-crunching, with Don switching between exasperated mutterings to Blake and abject apologies to the MG, something Blake made it clear she found annoying.

  The trauma of the journey had at least the advantage of taking Don’s mind off what awaited him at the end of it. They reached Helston as the long June evening was fading towards dusk. The narrow streets in the area where Wynsum Fry lived, a jumble of council houses and flats, were strangely quiet considering the fine weather. Her bungalow, small and roofed in what looked like corrugated asbestos, was wedged between a block of maisonettes and a church hall, accessible by a path that zigzagged between them.

  Blake found a place to pull in by a line of tumbledown garages. She said she would wait there.

  Don approached the bungalow apprehensively, his doubts about the wisdom of the visit dragging at his feet. It was a short walk, but plenty long enough for him to imagine all manner of disasters. His bluster on the subject of the occult did not quite match his beliefs. Something buried deep within him suggested there was more to witchcraft than charlatanry. And he doubted he was equipped to tell the difference.

  The question of whether Wynsum Fry was at home was at least swiftly answered. The half-glazed front door opened as Don approached and there she was, regarding him beadily from the threshold.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she said, smiling thinly. ‘Mr Challenor come a-callin’ on a summer’s evening.’ Summer’s evening or not, though, she was wearing a long cardigan over the same skirt and sweater Don had seen her in at the Blue Anchor. She seemed to carry her own winter around with her.

  ‘I think we might have got off on the wrong foot yesterday,’ Don said hesitantly.

  ‘If us did, ’twas by your choice.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry about that.’

  She nodded. ‘Reckon you might be.’

  ‘I was wondering … if we could, er, have a chat.’

  ‘’Bout what?’

  ‘Jack Harkness.’

  She looked at Don for a long, silent moment. Then she said, ‘We can talk about ’im if you wants. But I’ll give ’ee no second chance of card-reading ’less you pays me good money.’

  ‘That’s all right. I didn’t, er …’

  ‘Come to ’ave your future told?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘First wise thing I’ve ’eard come out of your mouth, Mr Challenor.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘See, some futures are better not told. Reckon yours might be one of ’em.’

  Don summoned a defiant smile. ‘That’s comforting.’

  ‘Not meant to be.’ She stared him down. ‘So, what you got to say ’bout Jack ’Arkness?’

  ‘Can I, er, come in?’

  ‘Reckon not. Seein’ as you’m an unbeliever.’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘You can sit yourself there.’

  Her nod directed Don’s attention to a steel and plastic camp-chair set up by the front step, which until then he had not noticed. ‘OK,’ he said, sitting down somewhat awkwardly.

  He turned away from Fry briefly while moving to occupy the chair. When he turned back towards her, he saw she had unfolded a matching chair and sat down herself.

  ‘Glad you wants to speak to me, Mr Challenor, when you didn’t afore,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve made a few, er, thought-provoking discoveries.’

  ‘’Ave ’ee now?’

  ‘About Jack Harkness.’

  ‘Go on, then.’ She engaged Don eye to eye. ‘Say your piece.’

  I leave the MG and walk away from her. God, Don’s got me at it now. I mean I walk away from it. I can see the chimney of the bungalow over the curved roof of the church hall. Smoke’s curling up from it. Somehow, I’m not surprised Fry’s lit a fire in June.

  I step in round the wall surrounding the church hall. From there, I can just get a view of the corner of the bungalow without showing myself. By the front door there’s a chair, facing away from me. Fry’s sitting in it, looking at Don, I guess, though I can’t see him. She made me sit outside when I called to ask if she’d do a reading for Andrew. I don’t know what you have to do to get invited in. I was sure Don wouldn’t qualify, though. In fact, I was counting on it.

  Maris never named the other dewitcher she went to after she ran into so much trouble with Calensa Fry. She told me she was dead now anyway. The woman knew Fry well, though. They’d crossed swords before.

  The other dewitcher’s advice was weird but pretty specific. She said it was sure to work and Maris believed her, though she never needed to try it.

  Don’s visit to Fry gives me a chance to do that, though. He has no idea what I’ve got in mind. I might not be able to pull it off. Whether I can or not, I have to be back at the car before he finishes with her.

  Sometimes you’ve got to take a risk. And this is one of those times. I’m quick and quiet when I need to be. I climb and scurry well. I could be a great burglar.

  Here goes.

  Don gave it his best shot. His cover story, as he set it out under Wynsum Fry’s beady gaze, was as close to the truth as he could contrive. Visiting Andrew Glasson to see if Blake could move back in with him after leaving Wortalleth West, Don had heard the sad tale of Glasson’s missing daughter. Considering what Blake had told him about Fry’s dead brother, he had started to wonder if there was anything he could do to establish what part Jack Harkness had played in those events.

  ‘Why should you care?’ Fry challenged him, which brought Don to the crux of the matter. They both knew why he might care, but Don did not propose to admit she had any power over him. Instead, he recycled Mike Coleman’s self-serving motivation for digging up dirt on Harkness.

  ‘Between you and me, Miss Fry,’ he said, ‘I’m hoping the American company that’s after Harkness will pay handsomely for information that’ll land him in even bigger trouble than charges of bribery and embezzlement.’

  ‘You’m in this for what you can get, then?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. But I’m going after the truth. Isn’t that what you want uncovered?’

  ‘I already knows the truth.’

  ‘You knowing doesn’t harm Harkness. But if the world knows …’

  ‘The King of Spades’ll lose his crown.’ Fry gave Don a long, hard look. ‘What makes you reckon you can take it off ’im?’

  ‘I have a lead to follow.’

  She frowned curiously. ‘What might that be, now?’

  ‘It concerns a schoolfriend of Jane Glasson’s. I think she might know where Jane is. If she does …’

  Fry sat forward in her chair. ‘Why you’m telling me this, Mr Challenor?’

  ‘Since you’re Jory’s sister, I suppose I hoped … you’d give me your blessing.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘If I do make any money out of it, it’d only be fair, as Jory’s closest surviving relative, for you to get a share.’

  ‘Oh, it comes down to money, do it?’ Her expression darkened. ‘You reckon I can be bought, do ’ee?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But I don’t see why you should miss out either. Money makes the world go round, whether we like it or not.’

  ‘The world you lives in right enough.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know what I had in mind. So that we … understand one another.’

  ‘I understands you, Mr Challenor, you can be sure. You’m a sheet o’ clear glass to me. But I’ll not worrit over your reasons if you can bring ’Arkness down. I’ll give my blessing to that any day o’ the week.’

  ‘Well, I’m … glad to hear it.’

  ‘Take my ’and. I’ll k
now you’m in earnest then.’

  She extended her right hand, the palm open. Don was back where he had started with her, in the rear bar of the Blue Anchor. There was no dodging a commitment of some kind. It was required of him.

  Bracing himself against the pain it was likely to cause, he half rose from the chair and stretched forward to shake her hand. The contact was light – and painless. She smiled at him and closed her left hand over his right. His wrist felt oddly warm, but nothing more than that.

  ‘A promise lightly given is a ’eavy thing to break,’ she said so quietly it seemed to Don he had merely imagined her speaking.

  Suddenly, a wave of nausea swept over him. He pulled his hand away and leant over, grasping his knees.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Challenor?’

  ‘I don’t … feel well.’

  ‘There’s a bathroom down the passage.’

  Raising his head, Don saw her pointing into the house. He nodded his thanks and stumbled past her. The passage was narrow and dark. Only one of the three doors off it stood open. Through it Don glimpsed a wash hand basin and the rim of a roll-top bath. He blundered towards it.

  As he pushed the bathroom door fully open and entered, a frosted-glass window ahead of him clunked shut, the loose stay rattling against the frame. He felt too sick to make anything of it. The loo was to his right, an old-fashioned wooden-seated WC with the cistern at ceiling height. He flung up the lid and instantly vomited, copiously, into the pan.

  A minute or so slowly passed as he recovered himself. He flushed the loo a couple of times and rinsed his mouth out with water from the basin, then douched his face and looked in the circular mirror above it. His reflection was so blurred he started back in surprise. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight. At least, there had been nothing wrong with it. The rest of the room was in clear focus. He looked in the mirror again. His reflection was pin-sharp now. He shook his head in bafflement.

  When he went back out into the passage, Wynsum Fry was waiting for him, standing in the doorway straight ahead. He could not see the expression on her face, cast in shadow as it was by the evening light behind her.

  ‘Better now, Mr Challenor?’ she asked as he walked towards her.

  ‘Yes thanks. I’m, er … sorry about that.’

  ‘No need. Purgation is good for the soul.’

  Don looked at her as he reached the front door. Her gaze was feline, observant, superior. He could find nothing to say.

  ‘Look in the mirror, did ’ee, Mr Challenor?’

  He nodded.

  ‘There’s a flaw in the glass. An aberration, they calls it. You can’t always trust it.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But, then, there’s not much you can.’

  He wanted to be away from her, but somehow he could not bring himself to squeeze between her and the camp-chair.

  ‘I’ll be ’earin’ from ’ee. Do I ’ave that right?’

  Again he nodded.

  She took a step back. ‘Then good evenin’, Mr Challenor. You go careful now.’

  Blake was waiting for him in the MG. He clambered into the passenger seat with a sigh.

  ‘How’d it go?’ she asked, looking round at him.

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘How’s the wrist?’

  He had forgotten the pain in his wrist. Flexing the joint, he realized it no longer hurt. ‘Bugger me,’ he murmured.

  ‘Miracle cure?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘We got what we came for, then.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And there’s nothing to hold us back?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head and glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the bungalow. ‘Nothing at all.’

  SEVEN

  THE LIGHTS ARE off in the room behind the mirror, but there is light nonetheless: stand-by amber on off-line computers shrouded in darkness, red on wall-mounted digital clocks recording the time in seven different time zones: London, Frankfurt, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York; grey and white on a bank of flickering video screens.

  The pictures on the screens are fed by cameras concealed around the house, in light fittings and cornices and intrusion sensors. On one, hidden within the master-bedroom closet, Don Challenor looms into view. He approaches the mirror and stands close to it for a minute or more, then retreats, reappearing on a second screen in the bedroom itself shortly afterwards. A third screen shows Blake, standing by the hob in the kitchen, stirring porridge, a fourth Don again, on the landing.

  Elsewhere there are views of rooms in which nothing moves: empty chairs and tables, vacant lengths of hallway, a gym filled with equipment, a wine cellar racked high with bottles.

  Everything is videoed, everything recorded: minutes, hours, days, weeks of the comings and goings and all the much longer absences of Wortalleth West. Everything is seen. Nothing is missed.

  Except what happens inside this room, the invisible centre of the house, the secret heart of what Jack Harkness has built. Here, unobserved and unsuspected, the provisions he has made bide their measured time and await their moment.

  Don slept dreamlessly. He woke feeling calm and refreshed. It was how his Australian sister-in-law had assured him he would feel if he ever adopted her favourite detox diet of lettuce smoothies. He had no wish to credit his clear-headedness to Wynsum Fry, but the fact remained his wrist was completely free of pain.

  By the time he had showered and shaved, Blake had come down to the house from the garage block. She shouted up an offer of porridge, which he accepted after fruitlessly requesting bacon and eggs.

  He went into the master bedroom before going downstairs. The mirror at the back of the closet threw back his reflection with disarming clarity. If there was an aberration here, it was behind the glass, not within it.

  Don pressed the frame of the mirror where he had before and it swung open, revealing the steel door behind. He rested his fingers lightly on the door’s smooth surface and was almost certain he could detect a faint vibration from within, a thrill of contained energy. He pressed his ear to the steel, but heard nothing. There was, he assured himself, nothing to hear. And yet …

  He clicked his tongue in irritation at his own lack of certainty, swung the mirror back into place, then turned and walked away.

  Three hundred miles away, in the flower garden in the south-eastern corner of Hyde Park, Fran Revell sat down on a bench and spread out the Sunday Times on her lap. She was casually dressed, in cool summer trousers and light top. She was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. Altogether, someone who knew her could easily have walked by without recognizing or even noticing her, which was in fact her intention.

  She took sips from a takeaway coffee as she pretended to read the newspaper and did not look up when a man walked into the flower garden carrying a newspaper of his own and sat down on the bench next to hers.

  He was tall and lean, dressed in tracksuit and trainers, though he did not appear to have been running. His thick grey hair and weathered features suggested he was in his fifties or sixties and he could easily have passed for an American with his orthodontically perfect bright white teeth. There was a quizzical, faintly amused tilt to his mouth and eyebrows, but a seriousness, a sense of purpose, in his gaze.

  He laid the paper beside him on the bench and stretched down to adjust the left leg of his tracksuit, which had snagged on something fitted to his ankle. Then he sat back, took a deep appreciative breath of the clear summer air and glanced across at Fran.

  ‘When you get to the business section,’ he said in a voice so accentless judging where he came from would have been difficult in the extreme, ‘don’t read the piece about me. It’s bollocks.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ said Fran, who did not return his glance.

  ‘How’s my divorce going?’

  ‘Smoothly.’

  ‘Good. I only want the best for Mona.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘You say that as if you
doubt it.’

  ‘Is there a panic room at Wortalleth West, Jack?’

  ‘You surely didn’t want to meet me just to ask that.’

  ‘I had to sack the agent I sent down there. Since I’m going to have to sort this out personally now, I’d like to know what I’m walking into.’

  ‘A highly desirable property on the Cornish coast, generously made over by me to Mona. That’s what you’re walking into.’

  ‘Is there a panic room in the house?’

  Jack Harkness pondered the question for a moment, then said, ‘No. There isn’t.’

  ‘Don insists there’s some kind of void adjacent to the master bedroom.’

  ‘He’s an architect, is he?’

  ‘No, but he’s accurate enough.’

  ‘I see. Well …’

  ‘I sent in someone from a Plymouth company, with panic-room experience. They seem to think there’s something there.’

  ‘I didn’t say there wasn’t. I just wouldn’t call it a panic room.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Why don’t we say it’s what Don suggested – a void? Maybe I allowed for a panic room, but never went ahead with installing one. That sounds plausible, doesn’t it? After all, why would I want a panic room down in Cornwall?’

  Fran set down her coffee and pushed her sunglasses up on her nose. Something in the action suggested she was not as calm as she appeared to be. ‘I wish I’d never agreed to any of this.’

  ‘To be fair, you had no choice but to agree.’

  ‘Peter’s a good man.’

  ‘Maybe. But he does have his fallibilities. And, while you’re married to him, they’re your fallibilities as well.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘Because you don’t need to know. Just do what Mona wants. Sell Wortalleth West and deposit the proceeds in whichever of her accounts she nominates.’

  ‘For a man accused of embezzlement, you seem strangely indifferent to money.’

  Harkness smiled. ‘I’m generous to a fault.’

  ‘The panic-room engineer ended up in hospital, you know.’

  ‘I thought you said that was a road accident.’