Vernon was flustered. I heard him outside calling, ‘Mervyn, Mervyn, get back here’; and when Mervyn returned it was with news that made my precarious position much worse.
‘Did you know Bakerton’s van’s here? They’ve brought fifty more cases of Pol Roger White Foil.’
Pol Roger White Foil was what I was lying on.
If they were busy with Pol Roger someone would be bound to see me. They could hardly avoid it. Delivery men wouldn’t exactly ignore a man lying on top of their boxes... they would for instance remark on it... who wouldn’t?
Vernon said disorganisedly, ‘Well if they’ve brought it... Go out and count what they unload, they left us short two cases last time... And you there with the gin, stack that lot separately, it’s not checked...’
Paul Young’s decisive voice cut through the hurrying orders. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, Vernon. Two o’clock sharp.’
Vernon’s reply was drowned as far as I was concerned by the gin handlers heating up an argument about football six paces from my toes. I could no longer hear Paul Young either. I heard too much about a questionable foul and the eyesight of the ref.
Staying on top of the champagne was hopeless, though the temptation to remain invisible was almost overwhelming. Discovery on my stomach, discovery on my feet... one or the other was inevitable.
There must be a safety of sorts, I thought, in the presence of all those delivery men.
On my feet, then.
I slithered backwards and dropped down into the narrow gap between the bulk of the Pol Roger and the smaller block of Krug beyond.
I was trembling. It wouldn’t do. I stepped from the champagne shelter numb with fright and went down to the men with the gin.
One of them broke off his denunciation of a deliberate kick at a knee cap and said/Blimey, where did you come from?’
‘Just checking,’ I said vaguely. ‘Have you finished?’
‘Near enough.’ They expertly off-loaded the last few cases. ‘That’s the lot. You want to sign our chit?’
One of them picked a yellow folded paper from his top overall pocket and held it out.
‘Er...’ I said, fishing for a pen. ‘Yes.’
I opened the yellow paper, leaned it against a case of gin, signed it illegibly in the space provided and gave it back to them.
‘Right. We’ll be off.’
They left the fork-lift truck where it was in the middle of the wide central aisle, and set off for the door. Almost without thought I grasped the truck’s handle and pushed it along in their wake, and it was in that way that I came face to face with Vernon.
There was sweat on his forehead. He looked harassed, small eyes anxious above a flourishing moustache, mouth open, breath hurried and heavy.
He gave me the smallest frown. He was accompanying an incoming load of white boxes. I let go of the truck I was pushing and walked past Vernon and the Pol Roger and was out into the passage with no sign of Paul Young, no shouts, no scalding pursuit.
I followed the brown-overalled gin men round the turn into the main passage with only a short way to go to the free open air... and there he was, Paul Young, outside the green entrance, lit by daylight, standing as if waiting, solid, shortish, unremarkable, a man without pity.
I glanced back the way I’d come. Vernon had peeled off from the champagne and was advancing after me, appearing undecided, enquiring, on the verge of suspicious.
‘You, there,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you come in.’
‘Maintenance,’ I said briskly. ‘Just checking.’
Vernon’s frown deepened. Paul Young remained at the outer door motionless and in plain sight, watching something outside.
I turned towards the only alternative, the long passage leading deep under the stands. Vernon glanced to where I’d been looking and saw Paul Young, and his mouth tightened. I gave him no more time to crystallise his suspicions of me but set off down the long passage as if every step of the way was familiar. When I looked back after about fifteen paces Vernon was still there, still staring after me. I gave him a wave. Beyond him Paul Young still filled the way out. I continued to walk onwards, trying to control a terrible urge to run. At all costs, I told myself, don’t look back again. Vernon would begin to follow.
Don’t look back.
Don’t actually run.
I went faster and deeper to I didn’t know where.
Eighteen
The passage ended in kitchens: vast cavernous halls with stainless steel growing everywhere in monstrous mixing bowls and sink-like trays.
Empty, cold, clean, greyly gleaming: a deserted science-fiction landscape which on Tuesday must have been alive with warmth and smells and food and bustle. There were a few lights on, inadequate for the area, but no sign that anyone was working. I glanced back against all my good intentions as I turned away from the passage and saw that Vernon had indeed followed; that he was almost half way along.
I waved again as I stepped out of his sight, a brief and I hoped reassuring signal.
Vernon was not apparently reassured. I heard his voice shouting loudly from the distance, ‘Hey!’
He didn’t know who I was, but he was alarmed that I could have overheard what I had. His unease sprang from guilt and his persistence in following me from a wholly accurate instinct. If he thought I was a danger to him, he was right.
Damn him, I thought. He was a better prospect than Paul Young, but not much. I might be able to talk myself free of him with something like saying I was checking electric wiring... or I might not. Better by far to vanish as inexplicably as I’d appeared. The ovens were big enough to crawl into... but they had glass doors... and gas jets inside... Where else?
Another way out... There had to be a way out for food. They wouldn’t push it along that passage out into possible rain. There would be a way into bars, into dining rooms. Exit doors, somewhere.
I sped round two corners. More stainless steel monsters.
Sinks like bathtubs for dishwashing. Floor to ceiling stacks of trays. No doors out.
Nowhere to hide.
‘Are you there?’ Vernon’s voice shouted. ‘Hey you. Where are you?’ He was much nearer. He sounded determined now, and more belligerent. ‘Come out of there. Show yourself.’
I went desperately round the furthest possible corner into a small space which looked at first like a short blank corridor leading nowhere. I began to turn to go back the way I’d come, feverishly trying to remember electricians’ terms to flourish around like interrupted resistance and circuit overload and other such nonsense when I saw that one wall of the blank corridor wasn’t blank.
One wall contained a row of four small lifts, each about a yard high, a yard wide, a yard deep. Constructed without fronts, they were of the sort especially designed for transporting food upwards from downstairs cooks. Dumb waiters the Victorians had called them. Beside each lift, selector buttons: 1, 2, 3.
I scrambled into the nearest lift, pressed button 3, not by choice but because my unsteady ringers hit it first, and wondered what on earth I would say now if Vernon at that moment appeared.
He didn’t. I heard him still round a corner or two, calling angrily, ‘Hey, you. Answer me.’: and the food lift rose smoothly, quietly, taking me far upwards like a sandwich.
When it stopped I spilled hurriedly out, finding myself in a serving area high up in the stands. There was daylight from large windows and a row of food trolleys parked end to end along a wall.
No one about. No sound from below... but Vernon might have heard the lift’s electric hum and be on his way... he knew every cranny... he belonged there. Out of a muddled thought that if the lift returned to the kitchens before he saw it had gone he might not think I’d used it, I pressed the down button and saw it disappear as fast as I’d come up.