Dead Men's s Boots

4

I stared at Jan Hunter for a moment, letting the idea grow on me.

‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘Provisionally, I mean. Okay with provisos. You’d better tell me the whole story. Then I’ll tell you if there’s anything I can do for you.’

By way of answer, Jan rummaged in her handbag and came up with a photo, which she handed to me. It showed a man – the same age as Jan or maybe a couple of years older – with a suede-head haircut and slightly over-large ears, looking to camera with a goofy grin while holding up two dead fish on a hook. The background was a river bank; the props, a canvas chair and a keepnet. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt, a wedding ring, and that was all I could tell you about him from memory. It wasn’t a face that left a deep impression.

‘Doug,’ I said.

‘Look at that face,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice. ‘Can you imagine him hurting anyone? Let alone killing—’

‘He did for those two fish,’ I said, trying to inject a little reality back into the proceedings. She gave me a wounded look and I shrugged an apology. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what happened?’

She looked down at the photo, drawing in a long, ragged breath. It was mind over matter: I saw her shovelling the emotions back inside and locking them down. When she looked at me again, she was almost clinically calm.

‘Just the facts, ma’am?’ she said, presumably being Dan Ackroyd rather than Jack Webb.

‘To start with.’

So she told them to me. And they were as nasty a set as I’d ever come across.

The twenty-sixth of January. Sometime after four p.m. A man named Alastair Barnard, age forty-nine, checked into a hotel room in King’s Cross, along with another, younger man – this other man described as having close-cropped mid-brown hair and brown eyes, and wearing a black donkey jacket with a green paint stain on the left sleeve. The hotel in question was the Paragon: it rents by the hour, because the clientele it caters to are the prostitutes who work the back streets off Goods Way and Battle Bridge Road.

The desk clerk, one Christopher Merrill, gave them a key – room seventeen, which offers a fine view of the freight yard. He assumed that the younger man was a rent boy bringing his work in off the streets: but he didn’t ask any questions or make any small talk, because you don’t mess with your core business.

Normally the clerk would have expected to see the two men emerge again half an hour later and walk away in different directions. In this case that didn’t happen, but the clerk didn’t see anything unusual in that because he’d forgotten all about them. It was a Friday afternoon and there were a lot of comings and goings: nothing compared to the traffic that would be coming through later in the evening, but plenty to keep him busy.

But when nine o’clock rolled around and the pressure on the rooms started building up, he noticed that that key was still out. Five hours? Even with a double dose of Viagra and a pint of amyl nitrate, nobody can keep it up that long. And now they owed him money, because they’d only paid for an hour. With the sour suspicion that the men had fucked and run, he summoned the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta, who was the only other guy on the Paragon’s daytime staff. Together they took the master key up to the first floor and unlocked the door.

‘Barnard was on the floor,’ Jan said, frowning slightly as though she was quoting from memory. ‘He’d fallen off the bed, and he’d brought the sheets and the coverlet with him. He was all tangled up in them so you could only see him from the waist up. His head had been smashed into pulp.’

The desk clerk started screaming, which brought people running from the other rooms. Most of them took one look at the devastation and fled. None had come forward since. It was the cleaner who called the police, explaining in heavily accented English that there’d been an accident of some kind and a man was dead.

The cops dismissed the accident hypothesis as soon as they walked in the door. Barnard had been hit more than two dozen times with something hard and heavy, wielded with frenzied energy. Other things – crueller and sicker things – had been done to him too, presumably before that. He’d died on his stomach, crawling across the floor away from the bed, trying to make it to the door.

As far as the damage to his skull went, there were two different kinds of wound. Some of them had been made with something blunt and round-ended: some were narrower and had penetrated right through the bone instead of impacting on it. Pre-empting the forensics team who arrived later, one of the uniformed constables – the only one with the stomach to get close enough to see – immediately and confidently predicted that when the implement used on Mister Barnard was found, it would turn out to have been a claw hammer.

‘Was he right?’ I asked.

Jan halted in her recitation, which had assumed a deadpan, running-on-automatic quality. ‘They haven’t found it yet,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘If the weapon was a hammer,’ I said, picking my words carefully, ‘I guess you’re talking about a certain degree of premeditation. It couldn’t have been a . . . crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. The killer brought the weapon in with him.’

I was aware that I’d used the male pronoun, not the female. But unless I’d miscounted somewhere, there wasn’t a woman in the case yet. In fact, if memory served-

‘You mentioned sexual assault,’ I said. ‘Sexual assault and murder.’

Jan nodded. ‘This man – Barnard – he’d had what they call “receptive anal sex”. And it had been rough.’

‘Rough enough to have been non-consensual?’

‘Rough enough to raise a doubt. There was . . . damage.’

It was time for the make-or-break question. ‘Where does Doug fit into all this?’

Jan dropped her gaze to the table, where the photo of her husband was still lying. ‘He hadn’t even gone a hundred yards,’ she said, almost matter-of-factly. ‘He had blood all over him, so people were staring at him, getting out of his way. Someone called the police, and they just routed the call to one of the cars that had been sent out to the Paragon. When the squad car got to Cheney Road they didn’t even have to ask – people saw them coming along the road, pointed the way, and they found Doug sitting on the edge of the pavement, a block up from the station. Just sitting there, staring at his hands like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. They brought him in right there. Then they got a DNA match and they charged him.’

‘A DNA match?’ I echoed. ‘Then—’

She didn’t flinch: under the circumstances that was mightily impressive. ‘Yes. It was my husband’s semen they found inside Alastair Barnard.’

I turned the expression ‘open-and-shut case’ over in my mind, checking to make sure that it had no sordid double meanings that would make it inadvisable to use. Before I could say it, though, Jan was carrying on at a rush.

‘There’s no denying that part of it,’ she said. ‘Doug had sex with this man. I suppose he went there, to that hotel, specifically to do that. But I don’t believe he killed anyone, Mister Castor. I don’t believe he’s even capable of doing that.

‘We’ve been married three years now, and he’s – despite the way he looks, despite the way he was brought up – he’s the gentlest man I ever met. Really. He’s six foot three, he works as a brickie and he used to box, but really, he is. If he gets angry, he turns it on himself. He never even shouts. Doug could no more kill someone than you or I could.’

I let that straight line sail right on by. It’s true that I never pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger; or tenderised anyone with a claw hammer either, for that matter. But I’d done things that had led to people dying, and I’d done them with my eyes open. It was enough to give me a twinge of unease as I listened to Jan Hunter protesting her husband’s innocence on the basis that he was always nice to her.

‘Did you know that he was bi?’ I asked.

Jan shook her head violently. ‘No. No, I didn’t. But in the last few months I knew I wasn’t satisfying him. We were scarcely ever together. He didn’t want to touch me, although he was still . . . he still seemed to love me. There was just something he couldn’t tell me. I’d wake up in the night sometimes and I’d hear him crying in the dark. Sometimes I’d doze off and wake up again, and it would be hours later. But I’d still hear the same sounds. He was just crying and crying, all through the night. Something was eating away at him. Something he couldn’t share.

‘I’d started to think he had to be seeing someone else. It was the only explanation that made any sense. He was working on a big site over in East London – they’re building one of those new super-casinos – and he was coming home later and later. Overtime, he said, but there’s never that much overtime to go round in the winter. You can’t mix cement in the dark.

‘And then, before the murder, he didn’t even come home for a week. I hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t called, or . . .’ Jan’s voice trailed off. She stared at me, her expression bleak. ‘I was waiting for bad news. Just not this kind.’

Face to face with her grief and her pain, I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t think I could help her. That I couldn’t think of anything that would get her husband off a rap as solid as this. She saw my expression and forestalled me.

‘I’ve got evidence,’ she said quickly. ‘You have to hear this, Mister Castor. Don’t say no until you’ve heard me out.’

‘What evidence?’ I asked, with huge reluctance.

Jan picked up her gin and tonic and downed it in one go before answering. She grimaced as the pungent liquor went down.

‘All right,’ she said, her tone hardening into something belligerent and stubborn. The students at the pool table looked around: it must have sounded as though we were having a marital tiff. ‘Something happened to me. About two weeks after Doug was arrested. I was sitting at home. To be honest, I was more or less drunk, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon. I was –’ she made a sudden, sharp gesture ‘– falling apart. I really was, just . . . bits and pieces. I couldn’t keep a thought in my head. There was so much that had to be done. Not just talking to the lawyers. Bills. Letters. Doug had done all that, and now he wasn’t there. I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t even trying to. I was just sitting there feeling sorry for myself.’

That sounded reasonable enough to me, but Jan’s face twisted in self-disgust. ‘Sitting there and waiting for something to happen. As though, you know, a light was going to shine down out of the sky and a voice was going to tell me what to do. Pathetic.

‘And then the phone rang.

‘It was an American voice. He told me his name, and I didn’t hear it. I just thought he was a friend of Doug’s or someone from the site. His foreman or something. But then he said he wanted to talk to me, about Doug’s case.

‘“Your husband didn’t do it”, he said. “He’s innocent. You may even be able to prove it.”’

‘Well, I was sitting up straight now, but I still thought he might be, you know, some sort of crank. Like that nutcase who made the Ripper phone calls. One of these people who gets off on being close to a juicy murder, even if it’s at second- or third-hand. I asked him who he was, and he told me his name again. It was Paul Sumner. Paul Sumner Junior.’

I’d vaguely heard the name, but I didn’t place it until Jan went on.

‘He writes books. True crime. He wrote that history of the Mob that they made into a TV series. And a biography of John Wayne Gacy. Stuff like that. I’d never read any of it, but I sort of knew who he was. And he said he’d read about Paul’s case on the Net. He’s got all these news feeds on his desktop that link to weird crime stories from all around the world. Because that’s how he makes his living. And he read about Paul’s case, and it just made his radar go off. He said he was waiting for something like this to happen, so he knew what it was as soon as he heard. Do you remember Myriam Seaforth Kale? She was a lady gangster, back in the 1960s. Sort of like Bonnie Parker was in the 1930s.’

I gave an eyebrow shrug. Of course I’d heard of her: she was one of those bad girls like Belle Starr or Beulah Baird who go into folklore because of their connection with violent men, or because they do some of the things that violent men do routinely. I was nearly certain she’d turned up in a crappy movie that Roger Corman or someone had directed. Daughters of Blood? Children of Blood? The Blood Family Robinson? ‘Chicago Mob scene,’ I said. ‘She was Jackie Cerone’s girlfriend, or something, and then he used her on a job.’

Jan was nodding vigorously. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s absolutely right. She came from somewhere a long way down in the South. Brokenshire, Alabama. But she was already a killer before she ever got to Chicago. The first man she killed was a man who stopped and picked her up on the road, after she left home. The story is that he tried to rape her and she killed him with a wheel wrench.

‘Then later on, when she worked for the mobs, she only killed men. That was one of her rules. And she seemed to like humiliating them as well as killing them. She had a sort of ritual.’

Some of the story was coming back to me now, in all its lurid colours. Myriam Kale: the homespun farm girl who hitch-hiked up the interstate to Illinois and got lost in the big city, only to surface again as one of the few women ever to become a Mafia contract killer; the real-life femme fatale who inspired a hundred sanitised movie imitations, murdering nine men before the FBI cornered her in Chicago’s Salisbury Hotel and brought her in alive so that they could try her, condemn her and give her the electric chair. Or maybe it was lethal injection, I’m hazy on the details.

I had the barest beginning of an inkling of where this was going now.

‘Kale died in the 1960s,’ I said. ‘More than forty years ago. On the other side of the world.’ It wasn’t an absolute objection, I knew: just a place marker – something we’d have to come back to.

But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

‘I told you that Barnard had been tortured before he died,’ Jan said, using the unmentionable word this time rather than talking around it.

‘Go on.’

‘When the pathology report came back, it turned out that one of his injuries was later than all the rest. Postmortem. It was a cigarette burn. On his face, just underneath his eye. That was her trade mark, Mister Castor. She did that to all the men she murdered. The first man, the one who picked her up, she burned with the cigarette lighter out of his car. All the rest she burned with a cigarette. It was the last thing she did, always after they were already dead. Like . . . signing off on the kill.’

I tried not to meet Jan’s over-intense stare. ‘Anything like that,’ I said, guardedly, ‘any detail that becomes associated with a particular murderer’s style – copycat killers are going to pick up on it and use it as a matter of course.’

Jan nodded again: she’d seen that objection coming and it didn’t faze her. ‘This is the third time Kale has killed since her death,’ she said. ‘And all three times have been here, in England, not in the States. Paul Sumner has been tracking her – that’s why he knew what this was as soon as he read about Doug’s case. The first time was in 1980, up in Edinburgh. The second was in 1993, in Newcastle. And now this. All three of them, middle-aged men picked up on the street and taken back somewhere for sex. All three of them, tortured, murdered, then burned. Do copycat killers rest up for more than a decade between outings, Mister Castor?’

‘I’ve never known any,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe they’re cyclical, like locusts.’

‘And there’s something else,’ Jan said, with the look of someone who was turning over their hole card to reveal a big fat ace. ‘The cleaner at the Paragon Hotel – Joseph Onugeta – said in his statement that he walked past room seventeen sometime around five o’clock. That was about an hour after Doug and Barnard went in there. And he heard voices – people arguing. Two men and a woman, he said. Definitely three voices, because one of the men had a really cut-glass BBC voice – that would have been Barnard – and the other had a thick accent that he couldn’t understand properly.’

‘Doug was –?’ I interjected.

‘He was from Birmingham, and he never lost it. I couldn’t understand him myself when we started going out together. It used to really embarrass me. And then the third voice, the woman’s voice, she had an accent too. He said “like on the TV, or in a cinema.” I think that means an American accent. It was Myriam Kale, Mister Castor. It was Myriam Seaforth Kale, and whatever else he may have done, my husband isn’t going to prison for a murder that was done by some bloody ghost.’

I assumed that when Jan said ‘whatever else’, she was talking about the cottaging and the sodomy. So she’d somehow rolled with the blow of finding out that her husband was trawling the streets of London for anonymous sex with other men. I was torn between being impressed by her faithfulness and wondering what inconceivably spectacular shit-storm Doug would have to put her through before she decided that their ship was on the rocks.

I didn’t say any of that. I just asked her whether she’d mentioned her theory to the police. She snorted contemptuously. ‘Oh yes. Of course I did. The detective in charge – Coldwood – didn’t even listen to me. He’d made up his mind already, and it didn’t matter what I said, he wasn’t going to—’

‘Coldwood?’ I interrupted, making sure I hadn’t misheard.

‘Yes. Coldwood. He’s a sergeant.’ She read it in my face. ‘Do you know him or something?’

‘I worked with him a few times. I used to do consulting work for the Met when business was thin.’

That seemed to knock Jan back a little. ‘The police use exorcists?’

I nodded. ‘Sometimes we can get a fix on how or where someone died. Sometimes we can confirm that someone who’s missing isn’t dead at all. It’s standard practice now, although we can’t give evidence in court. Most judges hate us like poison, just on general principle. Most cops too, come to that. But I always got on okay with Gary Coldwood.’

That was a slight exaggeration. Our relationship had actually become fairly strained when I was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who in fact I only got to meet after she was already dead. My association with the Met was a dead letter now, and I hadn’t seen Coldwood in four months or more: but we’d parted on good terms, more or less, and he’d stuck his neck out for me at least once when it would have been easier to leave me swinging in the wind. And, as cops went, I’d found he had a more open mind than most.

All of this was pushing me towards a decision. If Coldwood was involved I could at least talk it over with him, get the bigger picture if there was one.

‘If I agree to take this on,’ I told Jan, ‘I’ll be asking for a grand in all, and at least three hundred up front. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No,’ she said, reaching for her handbag again. ‘I was expecting that you’d want some kind of down payment. I only brought two hundred and fifty, but—’

‘Two hundred and fifty is fine,’ I said. ‘And it’s refundable if I change my mind.’

She froze, hand inside the bag in the process of drawing out her purse. ‘If you-?’

‘If I look into it and it turns out there’s nothing I can do. I’ll give you the money back.’

Jan looked at me hard. ‘And what about if you talk to your old friends in Scotland Yard and decide not to rock the boat?’ she demanded.

‘Victoria Street,’ I said.

She was false-footed. ‘What?’

‘The Met moved to Victoria Street. Around about the same time that Myriam Kale was shooting G-men at the Salisbury. People just use the old name out of nostalgia.’ I lifted my glass for one last swig of beer but changed my mind when I felt how close it now was to room temperature. ‘I said I knew Coldwood. That doesn’t mean we’re picking out curtains.’

She gave a grudging nod, no doubt remembering Cheryl Telemaque’s personal recommendation. Probably better if she didn’t know how Cheryl and I had behaved back when our paths had crossed. It hadn’t been exactly my high point as far as professional ethics were concerned.

We exchanged contact details and Jan counted out the money into my hand, most of it in ten-pound notes. As I tucked it away in yet another pocket of my always-accommodating greatcoat, she gave me a searching look.

‘You were going to say no,’ she said. ‘I could see it in your face. Why did you change your mind?’

I had to think about that one. ‘Two reasons,’ I said at last. ‘Coldwood’s one. On a job like this, it helps if I can at least get some of the facts straight, and I know he’ll level with me as far as he can. And then . . .’ I paused, wondering how best to phrase this.

‘And then?’

‘Well, then there’s the hammer. I’m presuming from what you said that Doug didn’t have it on him when he was arrested?’ She shook her head, eyes a little wide. ‘No. And I’m willing to bet that the boys in blue have been over every square inch of Battle Bridge Road – in fact, the whole of King’s Cross – with a fine-toothed comb. If it was there, they’d have found it.’

I stood up to leave.

‘So it wasn’t with Doug, and it wasn’t out on the street. Which means that somebody else took it, presumably out of the hotel room.’

‘You believe me,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice.

I gave a slight grimace. I really didn’t want to lead her on when I knew so little about what I was getting into. ‘I’m prepared to believe – for the sake of argument – that there was someone else in that room.’ I finished the pint anyway, to fortify me against the night chill. ‘And if the “someone else” turns out to have been the ghost of an American serial killer, then we’re in business.’

Walking home I got a repeat of the prickling premonitions: the sense of being watched that had dogged me all the way back from Stoke Newington. But this time I was out in the open, on a busy street. I looked around. Plenty of people walking by, plenty of traffic passing on the road. The feeling was oddly directionless, and there was no way to narrow it down. Reluctantly, I gave it up. I’d have to pick a better time and a better place.

The Breathers’ van was still parked in the same place: two men sitting in it now, again not much more at this distance than blobby silhouettes. No prickle or itch or tingling spider-sense: whatever I was feeling, whatever was watching me, it had nothing to do with these tosspots. I shot them a wave as I walked past, which they stoically ignored. I was almost sorry they didn’t get out and try for a rumble: I would have welcomed the release of tension.

Back at the flat I dumped my coat over the back of a chair, poured myself a whisky and then left it to stand while I picked out some bluesy chords on my whistle.

The couple next door were no longer coupling, which was good news. But though I’d missed the climax I hadn’t missed the epilogue, which as usual was taking the form of a stand-up fight. Sex and violence, always in the same order: they seemed to have a stripped-down, back-to-basics sort of lifestyle.

I gave up on the music practice after ten minutes or so because the bellowed profanities and the crash of breakables breaking were throwing me off tempo. I put one of Ropey’s death-metal CDs on instead, not because I like Internal Bleeding – with or without the capital letters – but out of sheer self-defence.

But the noises of destruction put me in mind of John Gittings’s ghost, and my mood wobbled again. Then thinking about John brought the pocket watch to mind. I went across to my coat and fished it out to check that it was okay. It was a beautiful thing all right: you could see even through the black oxidation stains that the filigree work on the silver – a motif of fleur-de-lis – was very fine. By a natural extension, I decided to wind it and see if it still worked. That meant taking it out of the outer case, since with a Savonnette watch you can’t always get enough of a purchase on the winding stem with the watch nestled inside its two separate shells.

As I took the watch out of the case, a small piece of paper fell to the floor. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. It was the kind of very light, thin blue paper that people used to use for airmail letters before there were such things as emails. It had handwriting on it in a flowing, cursive script, and it had been folded over on itself several times.

I opened it out: three folds, four, five. When I had it fully open, I found that it was a complete page from a letter – from the middle of a letter, because there was no superscription and it started in mid-sentence. I read it with growing and slightly uneasy fascination.

could get along a bit faster, but its not a good idea to take risks. If they know youve got an idea about whats really happening, theyll take you out one way or another.

Youll just get the one pass, and its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take backup: take lots of back-up, and warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target. It ends with you dead or them dead, thats the only way.

Dont make the mistake of reconasance: the wall isnt a wall, if you take my point. Not really. They can get out further than that, so they could attack you even when youre a long way out and you think theres nobody anywere near you.

If you go in through the building, you better expect therell be heavy security. That may seem like the least of your problems but dont underestimate it. Remember you can still threaten them. Physically, I mean. If you pull your foot back to kick, a man is going to cover his balls. I know that sounds crude, but if you look at it in those terms you’ll

And that was it – or almost. In the margin, opposite the phrase ‘Take back-up’, someone had scribbled two more words in red biro.

Felix Castor.

I was still staring blankly at those two words when the phone rang. Actually, it was more like I became aware that it was ringing: a sound that had been going on for some time underneath Internal Bleeding’s relentless bass beat and the equally unremitting noises of my neighbours dismantling their flat. Not my mobile: Ropey’s phone. I picked up by reflex, even though I couldn’t remember ever giving the number to anyone.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Mister Castor?’ A man’s voice, slightly breathless and thin: not a voice I recognised.

‘Yes.’

‘Inter-Urban Couriers. Can you come down and sign for a package?’

‘A package?’ I echoed, slightly false-footed. ‘Who from?’

A short pause. ‘Well, the address is E14, but there’s no name.’

The only guy I knew out that way was Nicky Heath, a data rat who sometimes ran searches for me: but he wasn’t working on anything for me right then, and he wouldn’t be likely to use a regular courier service. Being both paranoid and dead, he has his own specialised ways of working.

‘Mister Castor?’

‘Yeah, okay. I’ll be right down.’

I got up and went to the front door of the flat, unlocked it and stepped into the corridor. A few steps brought me to the lifts: I pressed the buttons until I found the one that was currently working – the council tenant’s equivalent of the ‘find the lady’ game. It was on the fifth floor, only three floors below me, but instead of going up it went down. Someone else must have pressed the button at the same time.

As I waited for it to make its stately way back up the stack, I listened – since there wasn’t any other choice – to the shouting and swearing echoing from further up the corridor. It amazed me that the other residents on this floor weren’t poking their heads out to add their own shouts of protest to the overall row: judging by their prurient interest in my comings and goings, it couldn’t be out of an exaggerated regard for other people’s privacy.

Something snapped in me at long last, and I walked back up the corridor to give my psychopathic neighbours’ door a dyspeptic kick. ‘Turn it in, for Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. ‘If you want to kill each other, use poison or something.’

A door opened at my back, and I turned to find the woman in number eighty-three glaring at me.

‘Noise was getting to me,’ I said, by way of explanation. She just went on glaring. ‘Sorry,’ I added. She slammed her door shut in my face. While I was still staring at the NO CIRCULARS sign, I heard a ping from back the way I’d come, followed by a muffled thump: the lift warning bell, and the sound of the doors opening.

I jogged down the corridor, determined to catch it before it changed its mind. I stepped inside, found it empty, and pressed G. Then just as the doors started to close I saw through the narrowing gap the front door of Ropey’s flat standing open. In the five minutes that I was downstairs, the neighbours could have the TV, the stereo and the three-piece suite. Irritably, I hit DOOR OPEN with my free hand and the doors froze, jerked, froze, with about a foot of clearance still to spare.

But before they could make up their mind whether to close again or slide all the way open, the entire lift lurched, the floor tilting violently. Taken by surprise, I staggered and almost lost my footing. From above me came a sound of rending metal.

I had half a second to react. As the lift shuddered and lurched again, grinding against the wall of the shaft with a sickening squeal, I fought the yawing motion, barely keeping my feet under me, and flung myself through the half-open doors back out into the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me: I snapped my head round to look behind me – and saw the lift drop like several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft. Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was torn off completely and my ankle was wrenched so agonisingly that I thought for a moment that my foot had gone too. I didn’t scream, exactly, but my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch: I think we’re probably just talking semantics.

This time, all the doors along the corridor opened and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what all the noise was about. Well, all except two. My neighbours stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.

And as I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: well, fuck, that was close. But it was followed by another thought in a different register.

All right, you bastards, you called it.

Let’s dance.