by Simon Mason
‘I’m all right.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah. I’m good.’
‘Up to you. Me? I’m going out.’
An hour later she was dressed for it, a different outfit this time, leopard-print trousers and a black top with big yellow bangles. While she finished getting ready he watched her. She seemed happier than he’d seen her for a long time. Younger too, somehow. She was only thirty-eight, he worked out. That was a simple sum he’d never done before. Young enough to go out, have a few drinks, have dinner, go dancing if she wanted to.
At the door she said, ‘I got the late shift tomorrow, so don’t wait up,’ and then she was gone, and only her perfume remained.
Silence in the flat.
After half an hour or so it was broken by a call. Smudge.
‘Mate. Couldn’t believe it when my brother told me. How you doing?’
‘You mean without fencing?’
‘Yeah. Can’t imagine it.’
‘Well, Smudge. I’m getting through the pain, bit by bit.’
‘Stick with it, man. Coming out?’
‘Got stuff to do first. Give you a ding later?’
‘Anytime.’
He rang off, and sat there with the phone in his hand. After a while he got up, went into his room and lay on the bed and sighed and concentrated on the ceiling.
Standing in the doorway of the black-and-white living room at ‘Four Winds’, wearing black combat trousers, a black long-sleeved top and an electric blue bandana, Amy Roecastle informed her mother that she was going out.
‘What, now? On a Monday? It’s ten o’clock.’
‘One of Sophie’s friends is picking me up.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘The new gastro out at Poplar. Just to see what it’s like. One drink, that’s all. Quiet.’
Dr Roecastle frowned. ‘Can’t it wait till the weekend?’
‘I just told you, Sophie’s friend is picking me up.’
Dr Roecastle stood and confronted her. ‘Amy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘Where are you going? Tell me, please.’
‘I just did.’
‘You’re not going to meet that man?’
Rolling her eyes, Amy turned and walked across the hallway and out of the house. It was a soft summer’s night; the sky was the colour of blue milk, pale clouds at the horizon still luminous. Warm air in soft puffs came from the darkness beyond the garden. She walked down the driveway towards the gates until she was beyond the turn, out of sight, then, without looking back, changed direction and went quietly up the lawn through the shadows as far as the fence. Here she paused for a moment, listening, then hoisted herself up and over.
The darkness of the trees in the woods was solid. Rustlings of small creatures came out of them, and bitter smells of earth and flowers, as she went quietly down the path until she came to the bend, and, without hesitating, pushed her way into the trees, going in the pitch-dark along the narrow track, briars spooling out of the shadows and catching at her trousers, until she emerged into the clearing. There was a van parked there.
As soon as she appeared the van’s headlights came on, and the engine started up, and she walked over to it and climbed in.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
And PJ turned to her and nodded.
They drove in silence through the darkness, jolting up and down, the old van creaking and squealing, until they reached the end of the dirt track and turned onto a lane.
‘How’s your eye?’ Amy asked. She had to shout over the noise of the engine.
PJ chewed his cheek, thought about it. ‘They didn’t know what they were doing,’ he said at last. ‘That’s the best I can say.’
She looked at him. He was wearing black office-type trousers and a red short-sleeved shirt with a company logo on the breast pocket, a surgical patch over his injured eye and a red beanie tight over his big skull. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his stubble was white against his grey skin. A rat’s-tail of grey hair hung down his back.
He glanced at her sideways as he drove, his broad face angular in the shadows.
‘Anger,’ he said, ‘makes you weak. I seen it before, in the army.’ He gave her a cavernous smile, and winced. ‘I’m stronger than they thought,’ he said.
He misjudged a gear change, and the van bucked, roaring.
‘I’m sorry you got caught up in it,’ she said.
‘It’s OK. I looked for your dog by the way, the day after, but I couldn’t find it.’
‘Someone else found it.’
‘Handed it in?’
‘It was dead.’
PJ thought about that. ‘Doesn’t alter anything,’ he said after a while. ‘You just have to stay strong. I know you will.’
‘I’m nervous. Supposing …’
‘It’s OK.’
He put his hand on her leg. She gave him a look, and after a while he took it off again.
They drove downhill to the ring road and merged with the traffic, still busy at that time of night.
‘Is it safe?’ she asked suddenly, without looking at him.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Just as I told you.’
Ten minutes later they exited at the car plant, and took the first turn into the business park, and drove through it until they came to the self-storage place, Red ’n’ Black.
PJ looked at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t be long,’ he said. Climbing out of the van, he went, a little stiffly, across the car park into Reception, and Amy waited. After a few moments another man, also dressed in black trousers and red shirt, came out, got into a car and drove away. Amy waited a few minutes more, then left the van and went into the building.
Everything in the lobby was red and black. Red walls, black industrial carpet, hard red sofa with black cushions. It looked like candy and smelled like a factory. There was a rack of different-sized cardboard boxes on one wall, and a large screen on another; in one corner was a cheese plant, in another a coffee-vending machine. Set in the far wall was a door to a back office; in front of it was a long desk with monitors, and behind the desk was PJ, just settling in to his night shift.
‘Got what you need?’
She nodded.
He smiled at her. ‘Everything’s cool,’ he said. He tapped a screen. ‘I’ll be here watching.’
She went through swing doors out of the lobby into an area with rubber flooring and ribbed aluminium walls, where flat-bed trolleys were lined up at the side of wide metal lift doors. Halfway along the wall was a keypad below a red sign – Remember to Set Your Room Alarm Here – and she tapped in a number and went on, through more swing doors, to a staircase and up two flights until she reached a long narrow corridor with plastic-panelled walls and grey rubber floor gleaming under the overhead strip lighting in the low ceiling, and red doors stretching both ways as far as she could see.
The intercom whined suddenly and PJ’s voice said, ‘Other way, Amy.’
Doubling back, she walked down the corridor to the end. Every few paces there was a padlocked red door flush in the wall. At the end she turned the corner and hesitated. She could go left or straight on, down two identical corridors.
She lifted her face and spoke to the ceiling. ‘Which way?’
PJ’s voice crackled again out of hidden speakers. ‘Straight on. You remember.’
The place was a maze. On floors above and below her were other corridors, all brightly lit, all deserted at that time of night, a geometrical labyrinth, ratruns in a vast laboratory. A silent, electronically controlled environment. The only sound in the whole building was the deadened squeak of her own shoes on the rubber floor.
At the end of the corridor she went through a fire door, turned again to the left, went past another turning, through another door, turned left once more and, almost immediately, turned right.
The intercom came on again briefly – ‘You’re there.
See you later, Amy’ – and went off with a click.
Walking quietly along, she took a key out of her pocket with a tag on it labelled W Corridor 316 and after a moment stopped at one of the red doors. She unlocked the padlock and swung the door open.
It was one of the smaller units in the building, a walk-in locker, two-metres square, plain, grey and almost completely empty. There was only one thing in it, on the floor in the corner: a cardboard shoe box with the Doc Martens logo on it.
For a moment she stood there, looking at the box, breathing deeply, as if to strengthen herself. Then, just as she was about to step inside, she heard a noise and froze. It wasn’t the public address system. It was the sound of someone else’s footsteps, somewhere in the empty building.
She lifted her head and called out. ‘PJ?’
The intercom was silent.
‘PJ, is that you?’
There was no reply, only the sound of the footsteps growing louder, coming on with a steady tread. She looked up and down the corridor. One way was a dead end; the other end was fifty metres away, already too far to reach.
She hesitated. Thirty seconds passed; they felt like five minutes. All the time the footsteps came closer.
Helplessly, she retreated into the locker. The door was useless; like all the others it locked only on the outside. Slowly she backed into the corner. Now the footsteps were in the corridor.
She had no time.
The footsteps approached the door.
She fumbled in the shoe box and stood again, arms stretched out in front of her, holding in both hands – a little shakily – a heavy, brown-metal gun. She pointed it at the open locker doorway and put her finger on the trigger.
Garvie appeared.
He nodded at the gun. ‘Yeah. Good to see you too.’
28
It took a moment for her mouth to work again.
‘What the fuck?’ she managed brokenly.
‘Yeah, I know. Do you mind putting it back in the box? Or at least pointing it away from my nose?’
She stared at him for a few seconds longer, as if still not quite sure he was real. Then at the gun in her hands, where it shook slightly, big and heavy, its snout dark and ugly. All at once she dropped it to her side.
‘Thanks. That sort of thing’s bad for my nerves. And I don’t like that wild look people get in their eyes when they hold a gun.’
She stooped and mechanically put it back in the box, and rose again to face him, breathing hard. At last she recovered her power of joined-up talking. ‘OK, I’m lost. What just happened? How did you get in? How did you get up here?’ She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘How did you even know where I was?’
‘Keeping an eye on you, of course.’
‘Why?’
‘Only a matter of time before you tried to get it back.’
‘You knew about the gun? How?’
He shrugged. ‘It was one hypothesis. Once I knew you hadn’t just stormed off over the shoes—’
‘How did you know that?’
‘You dropped your ring at PJ’s.’
‘I was wearing my ring when I got home. Ask my mother.’
‘One of them, yeah. But it’s part of a matching pair. You’re wearing both of them in a photograph in your room. I guess your mother hadn’t been paying attention.’
‘All my life,’ she said bitterly.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I knew you’d met him in the woods that night.’
‘How?’
‘Van-wise, Smudge proved it to me. The boy’s a genius. I thought at first you’d just happened to run into PJ. Then I realized it was him you were trying to get to.’
‘But how did you know about the gun?’
‘I asked myself why you ran off. From your behaviour that night I reckoned it was fear. Something had shocked you. What? Could be a number of things. So I asked myself why you’d gone to meet PJ. I knew he did nights at a self-storage place. So I thought perhaps you’d got hold of something you needed to hide, something that scared you. Needn’t have been a gun. Could have been stolen property, dope. But something you really, really couldn’t keep at home. You had no time to think it through. You had to grab the nearest box to put it in before your mother saw it, and head for the woods.’
‘Why didn’t I just dump it in the woods then?’
‘Most people would have done. You’re smarter than that. Dangerous stuff that gets dumped has a habit of being found. Dangerous stuff needs to be carefully hidden. I knew you’d understand that.’
‘And how did you know I was going to come back for it?’
‘Because you can never really hide dangerous stuff. ’Cause you worry about it. ’Cause you need it back. ’Cause someone else tells you to get it back. I just had to wait till you made your move.’
‘And how did you know it was going to be tonight?’
‘I didn’t. I thought it was going to be last night. But I knew it was going to be as soon as possible after the party.’
She stared at him. ‘You absolute freak.’
He said nothing to that.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘Think a bit.’
‘About what?’
He said nothing for a few moments. ‘Sequences,’ he said at last. ‘λ and ε and N.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I guess that’s your thing.’
He shook his head. ‘I think, in fact, it’s your thing. Let’s say λ is equal to the crime.’
‘What crime?’ she asked quickly.
He glanced at the gun in its box. ‘We don’t know yet. Or at least, I don’t. And let’s say ε is a bit of deliberate confusion, like pretending to storm off.’
She said nothing.
‘And let’s say N is the moment when you first get past all that, and see what’s what. My question is: when do we get to N?’
‘I’m not telling you where I got the gun.’
‘Course not. You don’t even have to tell me who gave it you, standing in the rain with you outside your house that night. No. I want to know why it scares you so much.’
She thought about that. Nodded. ‘All right. A number of reasons. But mainly because there’s someone else after it.’
‘You sure?’
‘Oh yeah. He came after me in the woods that night. That’s why I took that brute of a dog with me. And he nearly got me. He came out of the trees and grabbed me, but Rex went for him and I got free and made it to PJ’s van. But only just.’
‘Who is he?’
She faced him. ‘I don’t know.’
He looked closely at her and she looked back, her expression one part scared, one part defiant.
‘Do you think I’m making it up?’
Garvie shook his head. ‘What I think is: we should get out of here fast as we can. Now.’
‘Seriously?’
‘I’m always serious. It’s one of my things. If I could follow you here, he could. In fact, that’s exactly what he’ll do. Get the gun.’
He took her hand and half dragged her out the locker. They went along the corridor to the end, and when they got there the lights beyond them suddenly went out and everything ahead was pitch-dark.
They stood there, shocked.
‘What’s PJ up to?’ she said.
‘Not PJ,’ Garvie said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘PJ found himself dealing with a tricky situation in the car park.’
‘What situation?’
‘Smudge.’
She stared at him again.
‘Don’t worry,’ Garvie said. ‘PJ was in the army. He can deal with innocents like Smudge. It was the only way I could get up here without him bothering me.’
‘But,’ she said, ‘if PJ’s out of the way, who’s turned off the lights?’
Garvie said nothing.
She took out her phone.
‘No signal in here,’ Garvie said. ‘I already checked.’
In a panic she turn
ed and yelled to the air. ‘PJ! Can you hear me?’ and suddenly clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Shit,’ she whispered. ‘If it’s someone else doing this we don’t want them to know we’re here.’
Garvie said, ‘They already know we’re here. They’re watching us right now.’
They turned to the left, away from the darkened corridor and went at speed the other way to the corner, and through a fire door, and down another corridor long and straight and narrow, and after a moment the lights ahead went off again.
Amy gave a cry.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Garvie said. ‘It’s only darkness.’
‘But how do we know where to go?’
‘Geometry. The building’s an L shape. Corridors are parallel, longitude in the long bit, latitude in the short. I came in this way. Easy to remember. Come on.’
They ran in darkness, Garvie directing them, turning without hesitation left or right, running together down long straight stretches, and round doglegs, until they reached a long corridor with, dimly, a fire door at the end.
‘The stairs are on the other side,’ Garvie said. They ran hard towards the door and when they had nearly reached it they heard a click.
It was locked. Amy shook it in vain and turned to Garvie. ‘He can lock doors too!’
‘Electronic,’ Garvie said. ‘Operated from downstairs.’
She pressed her face to the reinforced glass. ‘I can see the staircase. It’s just there.’
‘Good for the staircase.’
‘We have to go back, get round the other way. Quick!’
They ran back down the dark corridor and when they got to the corner they heard a click in the darkness to their right. They swerved left down a short corridor and turned another corner. There was a door a little way in front of them and they accelerated towards it, but before they could reach it there was a third click, and they stopped, panting.
‘We’re trapped,’ Amy said, breathless. ‘He’s herded us.’ She looked at Garvie.