Dani arriving at the service entrance, filling in paperwork on her first day, yes she’s been checked she’s got the—hold on it’s right here it’s…
Big duffel bag full of clothes to change into and cleaning products because she likes to bring some of her own she often thinks the stuff you have here is, well…
The security guard searches her bag on the first two days, then gets bored and gives up and smiles her through, known now, how you doing luv how you
Dani cleaning.
Desks.
Computer screens.
Taking the trash out.
Scrubbing the toilets.
Scouring the sinks.
Emptying the grounds from the coffee machine. Who’d have thought something that made a drink that bad had anything organic in it?
She leaves the trash bags by the lift, to take downstairs with her in a big bundle of white.
Collects them as the last act of her work.
Goes into the lift
downstairs
emerges
vanishes off screen
reappears a few seconds later on a different camera
vanishes
reappears
puts the trash in big green bins round the back of the building and is
the same
the same
the same
three—four—days
Theo’s nose drifts back towards the screen. Even the face of Dani cannot keep him awake, dead Dani dead, he didn’t actually see her die he didn’t see her face with the bullet in it until the photo came but he knew and still has a place to doubt the truth
dead Dani dead.
On the fifth day she gets into the elevator with three bags of white trash
leaves the camera
emerges
vanishes
emerges
goes to the bins with
two bags of trash.
Theo sits up, head foggy, mind adrift, looks again.
Two bags of trash.
She puts them in the bins and vanishes.
Stays out of camera shot for nearly five minutes.
Re-emerges, swiping her security badge out at the service door and
does not look at the security camera and
leaves.
Theo scours the cameras.
He can’t see can’t find any sign of
the third bag.
Looks again.
Arrives, cleans, collects the trash, gets into the lift, gets out of the lift, turns the corner with her three bags of
re-emerges into the camera shot carrying only two.
Theo went downstairs, following half-seen geography captured on CCTV, stepped into the dead zone in the lower corridors, pipes overhead, foil wrapped around the heating units, walls that had once been painted green, then yellow, and were now a chipped collage of both.
Walked through the place where the cameras didn’t see.
Found the room on his second sweep.
Inside: a shredder, a photocopier, a stool and a sign showing the price of postage and packaging for oversized letters nine years ago. Very little of the equipment had been used for a long time. A single fluorescent tube shone overhead, flanked either side by two broken friends. A big green bin behind the shredder contained the soft tattered strings of graphs and documents long ago destroyed, letters and numbers forming strange dunes as he ran his fingers through them. He dug down into the paper, not for any particular reason other than the pleasure of sensation, and found the newspapers.
He pulled them out.
Trashy tabloids, free at the local Underground station, 40 per cent advertising, 50 per cent celebrity pop-talk, 8 per cent sport and 2 per cent rumours of death and environmental catastrophe in less important places than here.
affair scandal actor pop icon party drunk exposed footballer pregnancy sex naked downturn argument divorce
He pulled out a wedge and checked the date. The last was from a few days ago, and once he dug deeper, he found nearly thirty copies.
He drifted back to the security booth, replayed Dani’s movements on that date.
Arrive
upstairs
clean
vacuum
take the trash down
three bags in the elevator two when she
He froze the image just as she vanished out of frame, thought about what he was seeing. Her entrance and her exit both took her past the room with the shredder. He zoomed in on her arriving, exiting, looked at the duffel bag slung over her shoulder.
Bulky both ways in, but on the way out the shape had changed.
Sat back to think.
Began to laugh, and had to stop himself abruptly when a guard popped his head inside the booth to make sure he was all right.
In the evening.
He looked up “Danesmoor” from an internet café in Bermondsey.
Ancestral home. Nice garden. Areas open to the public four days a week, guided tours on the first and third Sundays of the month. Family seat of the Marquess of Mantell, title currently held by Philip Arnslade son of Helen Arnslade wife of…
He stopped.
Got himself another coffee, even though the first was still buzzing through his mind.
Sat back again. Looked up Helen Arnslade. A picture of a woman, mid-sixties, posed formally besides a bust of her dead husband, pearls at her neck, hands clasped, proud of her home, dedicated to her duty. The captain read: “Lady Helen Continues to Set the Standard for the Shooting Season.”
The photo was from several years ago. On the next page was an image of her son, proudly sporting a double-barrelled shotgun and a felt cap. He couldn’t find anything more recent. No interviews, appearances, social media; just silence and a formal picture of a woman with sealed lips who knew how to throw a party for men who liked their meat bloody.
There’s this woman, her name is Helen, she’s seen the pits, she’s got the…
Dani hadn’t said anything more about the woman called Helen. It was a common enough name. In its way.He looked at the picture of her son, forced himself to stare.
The face was familiar to everyone, in the distracted way of someone everyone knew without knowing how. The minister of fiscal efficiency had long been tipped for the top job; tipped so long that people were beginning to speculate he had other plans altogether. Something in the Company, perhaps. He’d worked for the Company before politics. The Company liked to share its expertise with government; things were so much easier when you spoke the same language.
Light brown hair on a face of long curves drooping down towards a winning, stapled smile; a swell of forehead above the eyes, a sudden drop into sallowness, another burst of bone below at high cheekbones, a long droop into the cheeks and a final, triumphant protuberance of expression at his lips, as they danced, delighted, around phrases like:
“The ongoing strong economic growth in the services sector is a direct consequence of cutting taxes to those ordinary decent working middle-class people who give so much to the nation.”
Theo had seen that face when it was younger. It had been the face of a man who couldn’t understand why a woman whose education had been paid for by his father didn’t appreciate the full nature of her commitments.
Philip Arnslade pulls the trigger by the river, and a boy dies, and as he dies, the boy who will be Theo thinks he falls too, watches the sky wheel overhead, feels the bullet in his lung, drinks blood and cannot breathe, the grass is wet and the earth punches into his back as he hits the ground and he cannot move can’t believe that he cannot move as Philip Arnslade of Danesmoor Hall walks over and
Philip Arnslade is a king, born to rule, and nothing stands in his way.
As the night settled
Theo returned to Sidcup.
Three women guarded the estate, as always. One had a child on her lap, another lost in thought, or prayer.
“Who are you?” demanded one, and immediately another: