He was sprawled beneath the metal stack, with the shelves lying across his lower back and buttocks. The stack had housed old folders, catalogues and anonymous directories that were spread around him. His chest was flat against the floor, his arms outflung and his head turned to one side. There was no visible blood in the dim light. He did not seem to know where he was or why, and his predicament was not clear to him yet. Maybe then he would start screaming and waste his energy. He seemed like a man who wasted his energy most of the time. A waster, a loser.
If he used his little intelligence, in time he would be able to worm himself out from beneath the stack, unless his back was broken. Either way, it was difficult to care. She wanted to ask him something. She bent over and spoke into his one visible ear.
‘Why did you want to kill me, Frank? What have I ever done to you? Tell me, and I might help you.’
When he muttered, she had to stoop further to hear, repelled by the smell of him. Sweat and fear, booze and dope, the ingrained dirt of the not-washed, the familiar smell of a Rick Boyd victim, lost to himself, all dignity stolen, like Angel.
‘He says you’re Marianne’s daughter. He says you’ll get it all. You… get it all… I get nothing.’
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Shearer. Frank Shearer. Marianne’s brother.’
She kicked him without force, shaking her head, almost laughing.
‘You’ve been conned by the best, Frank.’
She left him and went out into the corridor, leaving the door open.
Seek and you shall find. Do not misjudge the psychopath because you do not know how to judge or predict him. In the dim light of the corridor, she saw a lone gleaming spot of blood on the floor. Encouraging; almost cheering. As long as she made a single wound or broke one little finger bone, they were more like equal and he might be afraid. Hen hesitated, considering which way to go next. Getting the hell out made the most sense; getting back to the office and the phone and then out, running like mad, that made sense. She walked left to where the corridor reached another of the endless junctions. Her boots sounded loud on the concrete floor: she leaned against the wall and took them off. Then, in her socks, she quietly followed where she thought he might have gone. Rick Boyd had an uncanny instinct for weakness, an innate taste for what was precious and valuable and a powerful urge to destroy it; he might have an equally unerring sense of direction.
She paused in a pool of brighter light at the junction, listened to the silence and examined the pockets of the boiler suit yet again. There were needles and linen thread as strong as fishing wire, a thing for unpicking stitches, safety pins, a small perfume spray, but no mobile phone that was always in the bag she carried. She wondered what the spray was doing there, wanted to throw it away in disgust. There was nothing in her pockets useful for anything but the making of cats’ cradles. She could not overpower him, she could only run away from him, and she would not do that.
They had taken seven keys to seven separate units. Rick Boyd had them all. He would try them one by one but he did not know what he was looking for. He would only know that Hen had led them into the wrong place.
Hen knew exactly where the trunk was stored. Zone A, suitable for clothing, metal containers inside rooms and one of the more expensive areas. Odd to think there was storage and luxury storage, some units guaranteed more air- and watertight than others, with better light. There was no equality in stored rubbish; if you wanted it safer than houses, you paid more. By a process of elimination, using the numbers of the keys, he would find it in the end, might have found it by now, but would he recognise what he found? There was a washbasin in an alcove on her left, washbasins in many of the corridors, not always with running water. The clue to Rick Boyd’s spoor was in the pinkish water still in the basin and the drips below. She took strength from reminding herself that she had hurt him. It was cold in the centre of this enclosed world and she was conscious of hurting all over. It was the chilliness of the place, even in summer, that had stopped her playing hide and seek and it seemed to be freezing her now. She moved faster. Then paused again.
She was in a hallway of twelve metal containers, the size of shower rooms, forming their own streets in what once might have been a spacious hospital ward. The containers that were being used had locked padlocks hanging from the metal hasps of the doors: the empty ones had the locks hanging free. The padlocks varied in size. The one she took was as big as a fist, cold and heavy to the touch. She had always laughed at these padlocks. They looked impressive; they comforted the customer who held the key, but for all the weight the mechanism was primitive enough to be unlocked by a child with a penknife. It was the weight of it that counted, the feeling of security and that was why she wanted it in her hand.
Left, right, away from the centre, through another set of swing doors, another washbasin, another pool of light. Past three open doors showing stacks of furniture, rammed into the space, books in another, the contents of a child’s bedroom in the third. He had tried them all, dismissed them, until he found this and he was not sure about it. He was oblivious to inspection, no longer cared who saw him, framed by the light inside his metal cell. Instinct must have told him he was in the right place, but his instinct for what he wanted seemed to have deserted him. Perhaps he could only smell the presence of Marianne Shearer in here, realised that all he had wanted was the knowledge that was in her mind. Hen had a sudden flash image of something seen in a film, long ago, a picture of a man raiding an ancient tomb for treasure, not knowing what he should take away, until he fell prey to the curse.
He had used a knife to slash at the cambric wardrobe bags bearing the purple and orange delivery labels with the distinctive Joyce name. The beige cloth was torn, not to ribbons, only enough to have created a jagged inspection hole. That effort had wearied him; the discovery that the blade of his kitchen knife was dull against tough fabric, his left hand was not strong enough and the contents were not what he thought they were. The knife had dropped to the concrete floor. He had taken off the windcheater he had worn and used it to bind his other hand. He was sitting on the trunk, holding his wrapped hand between his crossed legs, bent over himself, his head bowed, exposing his neck. The heel of his foot beat a tattoo against the edge of the trunk, masking any noise she made. The sound she heard first was a light thump, thump, thump of indecision. Someone kicking against the cold.
Hen paused long enough to consider if there was enough time to pull the door closed and use the new padlock and key she carried to lock him in from the outside but the padlocks were fiddly; she would have to be quicker than he. She might just do it, but she could not take the risk. A piece of scarlet cloth protruded from the hole he had made in the wardrobe bag, and that angered her. She could not take the risk of leaving him locked in here with all his destructive strength, because what would he do but destroy it?
She stepped forward with the padlock held firmly in both her hands, raised them high and smashed it down on the back of his neck.
Rick Boyd slumped sideways. She could not believe it could ever be as easy as that, as easy as it had seemed to be with Frank. Better to hit him again and again, but revulsion prevailed. She did not want to be close enough, nor repeat that sick sensation of metal against flesh and bone, nor become like him and take pleasure in it. She pushed him off the trunk, aiding his own, agonisingly slow sliding to the floor. Cat got your tongue, Rick? Never silent for long, surely. He lay on his side. She pulled his damaged hand from between his legs, unwound the windcheater binding and tossed it aside. She avoided looking at the purpling lump of flesh, grasped the back of his shirt and dragged him towards the door. The shirt rode up over his perfect, washboard abdomen, the contours visible in the harsh neon light of the unit, making her feel sick. He was beginning to move, struggle, and murmur incoherently. She tied a sleeve of the windcheater round his good wrist, knotting it tightly. She pulled the rest of the noisy nylon windcheater through a metal strut on the back of the door and secured it with the padlock. When he came round, it would be the padlock he would see: he would have one badly injured hand to free himself. Enough to buy time.