Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  My hand was getting sore. I was still gripping my mobile; it was still, I guessed, connected to the answering machine in the study on the floor below. I closed the phone then opened it again so that the back light would come on. Duration of call: 6:51, 6:52, 6:53… End Call?

  That had to cover the message I’d left last night. It must have been recorded over by now. I clicked OK to end the call. The phone vibrated almost immediately, making me panic again. I dropped the phone, grabbed at it while it was still in mid-air and succeeded only in batting it across the dark cupboard, off a wall with a loud thud and against some unidentified piece of metallic equipment with a resounding clang. Then it fell to the floor with another thump.

  Fuck! Would he have heard that? And where was the phone? Lying on the floor somewhere. If I was lucky the fucker would have been smashed by the series of impacts, but if I wasn’t then it was about to exhaust the three or four vibrations it went through in the mode I had it in and start ringing normally. I had to get to it before it did. Merrial was probably standing stopped in the hall outside, listening intently and thinking, Did I hear a couple of thuds with a clang in-between there? If he heard the piercing warble of an unfamiliar mobile phone coming from the room he’d just left, he’d be right back in here. Or more likely he’d dash down to his study, grab a gun and then come storming back.

  I levered myself forward, feeling along the unseen floor for the little phone. Why did they have to make the damn things so fucking small nowadays? Old mobiles were the size of a brick; I’d have found the thing by now instead of whimpering as my hands fanned out across the wooden floor, banging into bits of gear and failing totally to find the phone, which I couldn’t even hear now. The ringing would start any second. Not that that would matter, because thanks to my panic and subsequent whacking of the phone about the place like it was a fucking squash ball, Merrial had almost certainly realised there was somebody hiding in his gym store and probably already had his shotgun or whatever and was walking calmly upstairs, chambers full and hammers cocked.

  Green glow to one side, quietly flicking off. The phone’s screen. I found it, bashing my forehead off something metal as I did so. I closed then opened the phone again. The display looked normal; nothing wrong with the little fucker. So how come it hadn’t gone from vibration to ring? Then I saw the little envelope symbol. Of course; it had registered an incoming text message and so had vibrated once only. I needn’t have panicked; I certainly needn’t have started bouncing it off the walls like a bluebottle in a fucking jam jar.

  Still no sounds from outside. Maybe I’d got away with it. I squatted there in the darkness and accessed the message: OK 2 CALL? C.

  I looked to the door of the cupboard. There was an old-fashioned keyhole there, halfway up one edge. I swivelled over to it to put my eye to the bright slit. My forehead banged off the door handle. I sat back, blinking through the tears. A door-knob just above a keyhole; who’d have thought that? Fucking, fucking idiot. It had hurt so much I hadn’t really registered how loud the sound had been. Jesus H. For all the stealthiness I was showing here I might just as well march out singing a medley of Slipknot numbers and slide down the fucking banister rail yodelling.

  I looked carefully through the keyhole. Most of the gym was visible, including the door to the hall outside. The door was closed. Nobody in the room. I wedged myself against the wall and dialled Celia’s mobile number.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m in the cupboard in the gym,’ I whispered. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes. I just had a call from John.’

  ‘I know. I heard. Who’s this Kaj?’

  ‘John’s bodyguard. Swedish. You’ve met him, at Somerset House.’

  The big blond guy. ‘Oh, fuck.’

  ‘Have you cleared the tape on the answering machine?’

  ‘Thoroughly.’

  ‘Get out. Quick as you can.’

  ‘That was my intention.’

  ‘He said he’d have a look round, and call Kaj to get him over. Also, he might have a shower. If he does shower you should hear it; it’s a power shower and the pump is in a cupboard off the second-floor hall; it makes a fair amount of noise, on that floor at least.’

  ‘Where will this Kaj person be coming from?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m surprised he wasn’t with him. Unless they were together and he gave him the rest of the day off. Wait; Kaj has a girlfriend who lives… somewhere off Regent’s Park. He may be there. John could have dropped him on the way down from Yorkshire. He didn’t say anything about seeing your Land Rover in the mews so he’s probably parked out the front. But you must get out as soon as possible.’

  ‘I know!’ I hissed, glancing through the keyhole again. Regent’s Park to Belgravia. How long would that take by car? Potentially several hours if you made the journey during a rainy weekday rush hour while there was a tube strike, but this was a sunny Saturday lunchtime. Ten minutes? No; maybe on a Sunday. Twenty minutes? Longer? Always assuming that was where this Kaj guy was in the first place. Maybe the fucker was only five minutes’ walk away, shoulders taking up half the pavement as he searched the King’s Road for a trendy Outsize shop. ‘I’ll give it a couple of minutes more,’ I told Ceel. ‘If he’s searching the place he probably reckons he needn’t look in here because he’s already taken care of it.’

  ‘Why don’t I phone him again?’ Celia suggested. ‘I can try to find out what he’s going to do and how far away Kaj might be. I might even try to convince him he should go out until Kaj gets there, visit some friends or go to a café.’

  I thought. ‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Call me back.’

  ‘All right. Be ready to move.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ I said. Ceel rang off. I was about to close the phone when the display faded of its own accord. Oh. No. I closed the phone and opened it, but the phone had turned itself off. I tried turning it back on again and it got as far as vibrating once and beginning its start-up procedure, showing zero bars out of three of available battery power before confirming this by going dark again. Out of power. I supposed I’d been lucky to get what I had out of it after such a short charge-up time on the Temple Belle this morning.

  I sat there, breathing almost normally, with the little phone a dead lump in my hand, then I holstered it and sighed. So I was on my own now. Poor Ceel; she would worry, not being able to contact me. She’d guess the phone was out of juice, I hoped. The keyhole again. Still nothing happening in the gym. I supposed I ought to put on my other glove.

  Ah; the other glove. Now then, where would that be?

  I shook my head at the darkness. Swivelling and sliding back to where I’d been squatting earlier, in the rear corner of the store, I banged another shin on something very hard. At this rate it wouldn’t need Kaj to jump up and down on my knees to wreck my fucking legs. I felt around on the floor. I felt the glove. And some relief. One more tiny hurdle accidentally set up but then cleared. Oh, Christ, I was getting very tired. I was going to spend the rest of my life in this fucking posh house, just trying to get the hell out of it.

  Maybe I could just lie here and go to sleep and nobody would ever find me. I could squat here; stow away. Live secretly here in the house like a sort of soft hermit. Celia would discover me and bring me something to eat each evening, like a child sent to their room by a strict father brought food by a forgiving mother or younger sister.

  My knees were getting sore from all this squatting. Sore knees. Think about that. Think of that pain, hold that image; Kaj’s big face and short blond hair as he smiles at you and goes boingy-boingy on your fucking leg bones, man.

  A surprisingly large part of my brain really did seem to want to do nothing. A significant and very vocal minority of my brain cells seemed to think that just resting here in the darkness was actually quite a good idea. It had proved all right so far; I hadn’t been discovered, it was quiet and unthreatening; maybe if I stayed here everything would somehow be okay. I knew this was nonsense, obviously, but that
was the temptation. Stay put. Leaving my dark, musty-smelling sanctuary meant going out into the light, braving the landings and stairs and floors and halls and doors of a house whose owner was present and suspicious and potentially – and very possibly by now – armed. And who was anyway a crime boss. And who had just ordered his personal Dolph Lundgren-on-steroids bodyguard here to investigate what was going on. Oh yes, staying here in the darkness and hiding quietly seemed like a seductively good idea. Or maybe I could go back to Ceel’s bedroom and hide there, and our intense sexual karma would spookily protect me even from a determined and thorough search, until she got back and could smuggle me out when the coast was clear…

  No. Out. Get the fuck out. Now. Get back to the door. Look through the keyhole. Confirm nothing happening and nobody there. Take hold of the door handle. Twist handle and slowly open door. Rise. Feel knees complain, as though they’re anticipating what might happen to them later if this all goes horribly wrong. Take deep breath. Close door again. Walk quietly to door of gym. No keyhole so can’t look out to hall.

  Stop and listen. Can you hear a power shower pump operating? No. So, what to do? Go back to the cupboard and wait there? Keep an ear to the keyhole so you could hear when the pump did start up? But then what if the pump couldn’t be heard from inside the cupboard? Wait here, at the door leading to the hall? But then what if Merrial took another look inside the gym before taking his shower? He’d already been in here, but he might want to check again.

  A house this size was probably well in excess of some mathematically provable topographical limit that defined when a space became too big for one person ever to search perfectly. You could confirm that there was nobody on a certain floor, but then while you were in the depths of one of these large rooms, checking in an en suite loo or whatever, the person doing the hiding could slip out of a not-yet-searched room and creep up to one of the already-searched rooms without the searcher being able to spot them. So checking a room twice would make some sort of sense.

  Oh fuck, I didn’t fucking know. I looked behind me. Opened blinds. The window Merrial had been standing at while he’d been talking to Ceel on his mobile. I could see the house on the far side of the square, visible through the leafless trees of winter. Probably too far away for it to be a problem. I wondered if there was any way to get out of the window and down to the ground without causing a fuss. Or making it to the upper storey, to the loft and then out onto the roof and then finding a way down. If I still had a working phone I could call 999 and ask for the fire brigade because there was a major fire in the place, and hope to get away in the confusion. No; all of these just led to more complications and more opportunities for things to go appallingly wrong.

  Footsteps outside in the hall, coming closer. Oh shit. Did I have time to get back to the cupboard? Probably not, and certainly not quietly. I shrank back behind the door. If Merrial did open the door, and he was daft enough not to look behind it as soon as he’d opened it, then I might still escape.

  The footsteps went past. A door closed. Closed and locked, I thought. I waited for the sound of a shower. I looked around the gym. If there was a phone extension in here, did I dare phone Ceel in case there was something vital she now knew that I needed to? But then what if Merrial was already on the land-line? Bit of a giveaway, hearing that old other-extension click.

  I waited. But how long did I have? Where was Kaj coming from? King’s Road? Regent’s Park? Somewhere else? And how fucking long did it take Merrial to get ready for a fucking shower, for fuck’s sake? Come on, man; stop fucking about and get your fucking clothes off and jump into the fucking thing. Twist that dial and lather up.

  Maybe Ceel had been exaggerating about how loud the pump was. Maybe she had more acute hearing than I did. Maybe some eccentricity of the way sound was transmitted through the house meant that right here where I was standing in the gym was the one place you couldn’t hear the goddamn pump. I tried to listen really carefully. Was that the sound of a pump? Jesus, if my phone still had power I could phone Ceel and hold the phone up and ask her, Is that the sound of the pump, that barely audible hum way in the distance? Or is that the central heating, or the fucking drinks fridge in the study or something? Maybe Merrial was using a mains-pressure shower over his bath instead for some reason I could only guess at. Ha! Maybe he was showering as quietly as he could specifically because he didn’t want to let his supposed junkie with a knife know where he was, even if he had locked the bedroom and presumably the bathroom door.

  When the pump did start up I jumped again; it sounded like it was just through the wall from where I was standing. I thought about that phrase about somebody being as nervous as a kitten and thought what a load of crap it really was; I’d never seen a kitten as nervous as I’d been over the last couple of hours.

  Okay. Signal to go. I put my hand on the door handle. But what if Merrial had started the shower going as a ruse, and was – no, no, no, fuck it; just fucking well fucking go for fuck’s sake, you over-cautious fuck.

  I went quickly but quietly out into the hall, gently closed the door and went along to the stairwell, treading on the sides of the steps as I descended to keep down any creaking noises. I did the same on the next set of stairs. I was right at the bottom stair, facing the front door and about to make the turn to head back along the long hall to the kitchen and the rear door, when I heard the sound of a key in the front door’s lock.

  I didn’t freeze. I didn’t even start to think that, Hey, maybe I can brazen it out, dressed in my incredibly convincing overalls. There was no time to dash back upstairs or get to the kitchen. There was maybe just enough time to get to the door to the right of the main door. I lunged for it, leaping from the bottom stair, grabbing the handle and pulling the door open to fall into a cloakroom as I hauled the door closed behind me, managing to damp its closing just enough to stop it slamming an instant before I heard the front door open.

  Oh no, I was going to sneeze. I was panting, close to wheezing, worried that I was going to make so much noise that whoever it was – Kaj, probably – would hear me anyway, but now I felt the tingle in my nose that meant I was going to sneeze. I shoved my tongue up into the top of my mouth and forced the edge of a finger up into the base of my septum, under my nose. The urge to sneeze faded. I tried to work my way back into the coats and jackets – the smell of waxed material always did make me want to sneeze for some reason – and hoped that Kaj didn’t need to put a coat in here. The front door closed.

  ‘Boss?’ a deep, male voice boomed. ‘John?’

  Then silence. I crouched down, behind and underneath the thickest clump of coats. It was winter; not exactly freezing but not exactly warm either, so there was every chance Kaj would have a coat he wanted to deposit in here. Oh no, don’t. Oh no, please don’t. Please be a really hard Swedish guy who just totally scorns the very idea of coats and jackets until the temperature is a good ten below and the wind chill doubles that.

  The door opened.

  Oh God, this is it. This must be. I didn’t think I could be seen but my luck just had to run out sometime and I suspected it was long overdue for departure. All I could see, as I was buried under and behind the coats, were two very large Timberland boots and the broad shins of a pair of jeans. Could he see anything of me? There was a swishing noise, the sound of fabric on fabric, then the door closed.

  I stayed where I was. Give the big blond bastard time to do a double-take; Yoost a meenoot, whose were those shoes that I saw yust there?

  Then I heard heavy footsteps going rapidly upstairs.

  My mouth had gone all dry once more. When I tried to stand up my legs collapsed under me and I had to sit down, breathing heavily. I levered myself up. I put my ear to the door. I was a metre from escape. I’d use the front door and the hell with getting out the way I came in. Thank fuck I’d replaced the key inside the stone earlier.

  Silence. No keyhole here either. I risked cracking the door and looked out. Nobody about. The door opened and clos
ed almost silently. Upstairs, I could still just hear the sound of the shower pump. A door closed up there, sounding faint. I turned to the wide front door. Please don’t let there be a returning maid or an investigating copper standing outside. The front door was heavy but it too swung open without a sound and I went out. The fresh, cool air of a bright winter’s afternoon hit my face as I skipped down the steps to the square, breathing deeply. It tasted like freedom.

  Two left turns and I was in the mews. There was nobody at the Land Rover. I got in and reversed out. I whooped and hollered most of the way back to the Temple Belle. I parked on a double yellow by a phone box on Buckingham Palace Road to phone Ceel’s mobile. Message service. I licked my lips, trying to think what to say.

  ‘It’s all okay,’ I said.

  I blew a kiss at a parking warden already starting to take the Landy’s details.

  Then when I got back to Chelsea Creek I could hardly move once I reached the car park. It felt like the front wheels were ploughing through half-melted tarmac, and my legs almost buckled underneath me as I got out. I had to support myself with both hands as I went down the narrow gangway to the boat. I got the door closed, half fell down the steps and – for the second time in twelve hours, and, in the overalls, even more fully clothed – collapsed onto the bed like a dead weight. I was asleep before the second bounce.

  Twelve. DEAD CAT BOUNCE

  There’s this thing called the Dead Cat Bounce. It’s a stock market term, I believe. What it’s talking about is the fact that even a stock that is essentially worthless and really going nowhere but down for ever can register a slight upward movement, just for a bit, because there is generally a floor for almost everything. The comparison rests on the fact that even when a cat hits the pavement from forty storeys high and dies instantly, it’ll still bounce back up a little.