A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  I started off with good intentions. I looked around the room I was standing in. A wall panel introduced Stevenson, and outlined the early part of his career after he got to art college in London, and before he moved to the States. The walls were hung with a handful of early works, oils rather than collage, and mostly muddy brown, probably chosen to make viewers grateful that he’d given up painting. I moved quickly on to the next room, which was a long, top-lit gallery holding more than twenty pictures, and some ceramic-and-iron assemblages from the 1960s. It was also holding Aidan and Jim, who were in a heated discussion with a man wearing a suit and a pair of white gloves. He was pointing at one wall with a spirit level, so I assumed they were discussing the arrangement of the pictures, and didn’t interrupt, just waving furtively to Lucy as I passed.

  I moved slowly through the next rooms, enjoying the show with the front of my brain. Colophons aren’t my only area of nerdiness. I also classify exhibitions. It’s not something I mention in public, but privately, the Sam Clair Theory of Retrospectives sums up all shows in just three categories: 1) Wow, I had no idea s/he was so great!; or 2) Wow! I had no idea (s)he was so terrible; or, the killer, 3) Yep, I knew that s/he was great/terrible/meh. (Select one only. Do not write on both sides of the paper.) This is not the world’s most thrilling insight, but I put it out there, because the Stevenson show was falling into the second category. I’d gone in admiring Stevenson’s work, and some of the pictures I was looking at I still thought were terrific. But they were few and far between. And between the in-between were endless variations on a theme. Aidan had said the prices of Stevensons had never risen the way his pop contemporaries had. Maybe it was because, although at his best he was very good, his best didn’t come along very often.

  I’d been there more than an hour, and I hadn’t seen even half the show yet. And in all that space, I’d passed maybe six people. A few of them had the press packs open and were scribbling industriously, breaking off only to take photographs with their phones. Others were guards, although they weren’t in every room. We had been invited, vetted, and were known by name. We weren’t a threat to the art.

  I was beginning to flag. I walked into the next room, and looked around. I know it makes me a philistine, but all I could think was, ‘More?’ I was about to skip ahead to the next room when I saw Aidan again, still with Jim and Mr White Gloves. If he saw me, I’d have to be polite about the show, and I was tired and cranky. So instead I moved back to the room I’d just left, fixing my eyes on whatever was nearest the door. As soon as Aidan headed off, I’d zip quickly through the next few rooms. He did and so I did.

  Three rooms on, I paused to look back and make sure he couldn’t see me skimming past his livelihood. And there, at the end of the next room, stood Celia Stein. My heart did a peculiar leap, as though something extraordinary had occurred. I spoke to myself severely. She represents the estate, you fool. Where else would she be? I peeked back. See? I went on. She’s talking to Myra and Lucy. It’s gallery business. Now just stop this silliness.

  My body parts were not listening. By the time I’d formulated the thought, I found I’d taken three giant steps into the next room, removing myself from her sight line, and I was staring blindly at a painting. Well, I told myself snarkily, you can either stand here forever, becoming the world expert on – I peered at the label – on Untitled #38, or you can act like an adult and move. Apparently my body parts were still not on speaking terms with my brain. World expert sounds good, my feet said. They weren’t going anywhere.

  Someone else’s were. Brisk footsteps sounded in the room I’d just left. A woman in heels, not a man. And the steps were moving steadily, not stopping to look at paintings. Which meant that she wasn’t a journalist. They were more purposeful than a guard doing her rounds, and anyway, did guards wear heels? The reality, that I was standing in the middle of a national art collection, with guards wandering through regularly, with Aidan around the corner, with other Merriam–Compton staff, even Jim, coming and going, had no effect. I was in a blind panic.

  There was the outline of a door next to the painting I was looking at. It had a doorknob painted the same colour as the wall, and only a thin edge of light behind it made it noticeable, that and a ‘Staff Only’ sign. I looked around. No one was in view. I turned the knob cautiously and pulled. No bells rang, no sirens sounded. I slid through it, and closed it softly behind me.

  I was giddy with rebellion. In my mind, I am devil-may-care and do whatever I want whenever I want to. In real life, I am cautious to the point of being mistaken for street furniture. The height of rebellion for me is to toss aside an unopened utilities bill marked ‘Open Immediately’. And now here I was trespassing. I didn’t know what happened to people who were found with no authorisation in the private areas of museums, but I suspected it was frowned upon. Possibly using the police, and the courts. I shook my head. What had I been thinking? I’d slide back into the room and pretend nothing had happened.

  I could still hear the heels as they tap-tapped into the gallery I’d been in. I waited for them to move off so I could emerge without embarrassing myself. But they didn’t. And instead of me turning the knob, I felt it turn in my hand. Without thinking, I leant my full weight against the door. It gave fractionally, but I held it shut, as though it were locked. There was a pause, and then the knob was released, every bit as slowly and cautiously as it had turned a moment before. Which made me think it hadn’t been a gallery employee. The person on the other side did not want to be heard. Then nothing. Including no footsteps. I couldn’t now return the way I had come.

  I took stock. How to find my way to the public parts of the museum without drawing attention to myself was the question. I was on a staircase landing. I knew that there were no galleries on the floor above, so the stairs up probably led to offices, or other spaces where I also didn’t belong. Downstairs there were galleries, and a second entrance hall. With luck, I could find my way to that.

  I walked down without trying to be particularly quiet. I didn’t sing and dance and play the ukulele, but I decided it was better not to creep about, either. If the worst came to the worst and somebody saw me, I’d say I’d been to the press view and had got lost.

  The stairs ended in a vestibule, with three doors. One said ‘Education’, which didn’t look promising. The second was a loo. By default, Door Number Three, then. I took a breath. Despite my best intentions, I opened it like a burglar in the night. An amateur burglar, on her first expedition. No one could remotely mistake me for a lost visitor.

  It turned out not to matter. This wasn’t a public part of the gallery, because, apart from anything else, it was dark. I stepped forward and the door shut behind me, reducing the light to just a small rectangle from the landing. I waited for a moment for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. There was a faint smell of metal and damp. Nothing unpleasant, but these weren’t offices, or even rooms that were used regularly.

  I reached out to see what was beside me. A light switch, which I didn’t use. I couldn’t counterfeit that much confidence. Beside that, wood. What felt like bookcases, higher than my head. I stepped forward cautiously. Only a few feet ahead, the way was blocked by a wall. Was I in a corridor? I felt with my hands. No, not a wall. Smooth and cold, like a filing cabinet. And not much wider. Then a crack, then another smooth and cold section. And again. I ran my hand up higher, and felt a raised metal rectangle. Paper inside, like an old-fashioned label on an office door, telling you who worked there. I ran my hand down. A wheel. And I understood.

  I was in an archive. These were rolling metal stacks, shelving that, to save space, runs on a track. The shelves look like ordinary library bookshelves, but if you turn the wheel at the end of each set of shelves, the whole unit rolls along, and one by one the sections close up against each other, giving double the quantity of shelving in half the space of conventional storage. Lots of libraries have them. T&R didn’t, but Tetrarch, being bigger, stored its archive copies that way.
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  If this was an archive, then I could assume a standard layout for it, and if I walked along beside the stacks, at some point the odds were there would be another exit. I kept one hand lightly on the units. The gloom wasn’t absolute now I’d been there a few minutes, but it was gloom all the same. If there was anything on the floor – a kick stool to help researchers reach the top shelves, or files or boxes – I wasn’t going to see it.

  The shelving ended. I reached out to feel if I’d got to the end of the room, but I hadn’t. It was just a gap between two stacks, where someone must have been working earlier and hadn’t rolled the two units back together. I was about to continue when I heard – I don’t know what I heard. What I knew, however, was that someone else had entered the archive. Without even thinking about it, I slid my shoes off and stepped silently into the gap between the stacks. In hindsight I know I can’t have held my breath for the next ten minutes, but that’s what it felt like. There was nothing I could do. I had no idea where in the room the other person was, so going back to find the door I’d come in by was as impossible as going forward.

  I waited. I made, and discarded, plans. I had my phone with me, but even if I kept it shielded in my bag, the light would tell the watcher where I was. And it was a watcher, not someone willing to turn on the light and move about looking for a file. I imagined a 999 call. ‘I’m in an archive in the Tate without authorisation, and a Bad Person, whom I cannot identify, is threatening me with harm. How are they threatening me? She – or possibly he – is breathing.’

  Jake would take me seriously, and so would Helena or Aidan, but to call them I would have the same problem with light from my phone, and no guarantee I’d get anything except their voicemail. There was also no guarantee that I would even get that far. I was in a basement and there might not be a phone signal. I might give away my location and not be able to make a call.

  I berated myself: Where is Lassie when you really need her? I call myself organised, but a really organised person would have bought a collie years ago, just in case she fell into a river and needed the townspeople to rescue her as she washed towards the rapids. Get help, Lassie. Go on, girl!

  I have no idea how long I stood there thinking these entirely un-useful thoughts. My watch was old, and not luminous, while my phone was unusable because it was luminous. It paralleled my situation: crap, whatever I did. If this had been in a novel and not real life, I would have written in the margin, ‘Symbolism too heavy-handed?’

  My only hope was that a Tate employee would appear. But before that could happen, whoever was following me made up their mind. There was a flurry of steps – not walking anymore, but running – and then something heavy shrieked as it was dragged across the floor. Before I could begin to unravel the sounds, there was a huge crash, and what little light there had been was blocked out, as if by an eclipse.

  I had retreated to the far end of the shelves, away from the entrance, where I’d entered the stacks. Now I waited, but still nothing happened. I moved, cautiously, towards the opening. As I got near, my feet scuffed across something that had not been on the floor before. I bent. Books.

  I ventured another step. Nothing. Another, and I walked into what felt like a wall. I put up my hand. Wooden. A shelf. Another above it. I reached higher. Shelves as far as I could feel. And I understood. The watcher had decided I must be in the single open stack, but feared that I was lying in wait. And so they had pulled out the bookshelf on the opposite wall, tipping it over so that it fell against the entrance and trapped me.

  I listened some more. Had the watcher trapped me and gone to get someone? I hadn’t heard a door open or close, although I probably wouldn’t have over the noise of the shelves falling, and the books crashing onto the floor. But if they hadn’t, what was the point? If I couldn’t get out anymore, they couldn’t get to me, either.

  And then I heard a rumble. A rumble I knew well. Fear clutched me. It was one of the stacks starting to roll. I’d done it myself, often, one by one when I wanted to get at a book in the library. The watcher didn’t want a book, though. They wanted me. And they were rolling all the stacks, slowly but surely towards me.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I BIT BACK A scream, even though it no longer mattered if anyone heard me. There was no point in screaming now. No one would get to me in time. And if I let myself scream, I might never stop. I tried to calm myself. Because panic was going to make me slow, and it was going to make me stupid. And if I was either of those things, much less both, I was going to die.

  I would probably die anyway, but I didn’t have to die berating myself for being a panicky idiot.

  My phone. The watcher knew where I was, so that no longer mattered. I’d dropped my bag at some point, I didn’t know when or where. I was fairly sure I’d still had it when I slid into the stacks, so it had to be there somewhere. I scuffed my feet along, and then, as I reached the bag, I gave a grunt of triumph: there it was.

  I scrabbled through it, searching for the phone even as I listened to the stacks banging, one against the other as they came closer. Stay calm, I told myself. Concentrate. The stacks don’t matter. The phone does. I dug it out and clicked it on. I nearly wept when I saw no signal bars. I clicked again. Yes. The hum that said I had a line. I dialled Jake. Nothing. No connection. Again. Nothing. Did emergency calls connect better? Just do what you’re supposed to, you crappy piece of technology, I told it grimly. 999. ‘What service?’ Thank God.

  ‘Police.’ I tried to keep my voice calm, but I was a nanosecond away from wailing. ‘Emergency. Police!’

  The connection was made, even as the rolling noise came closer. There was no time. I wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear, 1960s suburban-housewife style, and knelt down and hooked my hand in flat behind the first book on the shelf nearest the floor. Using my arm like a paddle, I shovelled as many books as I could in one sweep onto the floor, and went back for more.

  ‘Police.’

  ‘Please. I’m at the Tate. I need—’ I kept shovelling, moving along the floor on my knees.

  ‘Your name and phone number, please.’

  ‘There’s no time. Someone is trying to kill me. I’m in the basement of the Tate Gallery. The Tate. Pimlico. In an archive. I don’t know what it’s called but—’

  ‘I need your name and number, please.’

  ‘There’s no time. Call Jake Field. Detective-Inspector Jacob Field, CID. He knows about this. Tell him it’s Sam Clair. He knows.’

  ‘I’ll do that. It’s going through.’ The voice was calm and soothing, although I was neither calmed nor soothed by it. I continued to hook books out. ‘Give me your number so I can call you back.’

  I was defeated. There was no time for telephone tag, and no signal for it. The books were more important. I dropped the phone and started putting the books I’d pulled out onto the floor into rows, but across the floor, perpendicular to the shelves, reaching across from one of the stacks to the other. It was a reference archive and the books were mostly thick, maybe encyclopaedias of some kind. If there were enough of them, and I packed them in tightly enough, they might block the rolling mechanism for a while. Scoop, stack, scoop, stack.

  And all the while, the rolling sound continued. The whir of the wheel, and the clank as one stack hit the next and the growing wall of metal shelving got heavier each time, moving onwards. Towards me.

  I scooted on my knees up to the other end, the blocked end, feeling around on the floor for the tracks. I started to stack more books along their line. Scoop, stack.

  If I had any brains, I told myself as my hands kept stacking, I would have hung up and redialled 999 and called in a fire. But I’d dropped the phone. It was somewhere on the floor back where I’d built the first row of books. I couldn’t waste time looking for it.

  It didn’t matter. It was too late. Rolling stacks are popular because they are easy to use. It didn’t take much time or effort to roll an entire row of stacks across a room. And I could hear that these one
s weren’t more than a couple of units away from me now. I paused, crouched over and waiting, my ear cocked, as though I needed to hear what was going to happen. As though I wasn’t going to feel it.

  Long before I thought they’d get to me, when I thought I still had a few more seconds, maybe even a minute, before, most likely I’d be—I couldn’t let myself think the word. Before I’d be hurt were the only words my mind was willing to accept. Long before that, the shelf beside me bulged out with a clang. The great mass of rolling stacks had got to me.

  I concentrated on the rows of books I’d built, even as I knew that they had as much chance of slowing down the stacks as a sand drawbridge protects a castle on the beach. I kept my hands hovering over them nonetheless. It gave me something to do, which stopped me lying on the floor and screaming in fear.

  The stacks beside me bulged again, and a few of the books in my makeshift buttresses popped up. I pushed them back, and scrambled back to the other end. The same. My God. They were holding.

  The shelf moved back. The pressure had been taken off. I stayed crouched on the floor. Waiting. I didn’t have to wait long. I heard the rolling move in the opposite direction, but I had no time to hope. Bang. The stacks were sent back as hard as the watcher could roll them. They crashed into my unit. Books poured out, a great cataract spray of them. I covered my head with my hands. At any other time, hundreds of books being flung onto my back and head would have been painful. These barely registered.

  I scuttled back to the front row and felt along the floor again. If anything, the falling books had helped, adding their weight to keep my rows in place.

  I could hear the shelves rolling back again. With fewer books on them, they’d probably move more easily the next time. I braced myself, waiting.