‘Yes. Her and a few others. Some university people. I’d hoped you could have come with us.’
‘Where to?’
He mentioned the name of a new restaurant in Chelsea that she’d read about and had thought of taking him when they next had something to celebrate.
‘That’s nice. Is it as good as they say?’
‘Not bad. Very busy. It’d be better if you were here.’
‘Well, enjoy yourself. See you later.’
She put down the phone a little too briskly, reflecting that she couldn’t have afforded to eat there anyway, not after what she’d done to her credit card recently.
The others were calling it quits for the night, yawning, pulling their coats on, offering lifts, but Kathy didn’t feel like going home and said she’d stay a bit longer. She was still there in front of the computer an hour later, working slowly through the missing persons index, when one of the centre security staff rapped on the mall door.
Kathy got up and opened it, letting the guard check her identification.
‘You’re the last one in the place,’ he said. ‘I’m locking up for the night. You staying long?’
‘Maybe another half-hour? Is that okay?’
He nodded. ‘Do you reckon you can find your way out with just the emergency lights? I could leave some of the main lights on, but then you’d have to switch them off.’
‘No, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘I have a torch, anyway. What about the carpark? Isn’t there a dog patrol out there?’
‘He won’t be here till midnight, but I wouldn’t wait till then. The dogs are very nasty. Silent, they are, until the last second, just before they bring you down.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Cos they nearly got me one night.’
Kathy said good night and returned to her screen, continuing with her trawl of random correlations: missing girls of the same age as Kerri, same hair style, same occupation; perpetrators with surnames beginning with the letter V, of the same age as Verdi, same physical characteristics; references to ice-cream, to out-of-town shopping malls, to Snow White.
She checked her watch and was surprised to see it read 11.20 p.m. She switched off her screen, packed up her things and made for the door. As she turned off the lights in unit 184 and stepped out into the mall, she immediately understood the slight edge of concern in the security guard’s voice about her finding her way out. It wasn’t that she could get lost-she knew the layout of the place too well for that now. It was the overwhelming sense of being suddenly alone in a vast, empty darkness, a sense that triggered a momentary feeling of panic, a safety response hard-wired into the brain long ago: Get back to the cave! Get back to the fire! Find friends!
She stood absolutely motionless until the feeling passed, and as her eyes adjusted, the dark gradually became less impenetrable. Spots of moonlight, emerald green, speckled the pitchiness, further and further into the depths. It wasn’t moonlight, of course, only the glow of emergency lights and exit signs, but their effect was magical all the same, creating pools and haloes of penumbra, so that the blankness slowly transmuted into a deep and mysterious forest landscape. And it was unnervingly beautiful, the tawdry daytime fantasy transformed and become real in the darkness.
Now the feeling of being quite alone in this strange place was intriguing, seductive. Kathy found that she couldn’t just turn down the nearby side-exit corridor that would take her out into the carpark without exploring the moonlit forest a little further. And as she progressed along the mall the effect of being alone in a magical fairy wood was strengthened by glimpses of tiny lights from within the darkened stores on either side. She supposed that they were the winking lights of alarms and security cameras, the LCD displays of electronic digits, but the darkness made distance and perspective illusory, so that as they emerged from behind dark obstacles and vanished again into the shadows, it appeared to Kathy that she was seeing the lights of a distant village, or the gleam of rubies and emeralds in a shadowy cave, or the eyes of watchful creatures.
She reached the main square overlooking the rain-forested food court, and stopped there, absorbing the extraordinary sense of depth through the tree canopy, imagining herself hovering over a distant jungle canyon. For a moment the illusion was so powerful that she could almost see the shifting shadows of nocturnal beasts beneath the trees, hear the rustle of predators through foliage.
She suddenly stood rigid, ears straining. She could hear the rustle of movement.
She heard it again.
It seemed to come from behind her. She turned slowly, heart thumping, and saw the bamboo thicket not far away behind her right shoulder, the one that contained the crouching gorilla. There was no movement among the bamboo leaves now, no sound, the gorilla invisible in the shadows. She knew that the darkness that allowed her imagination to create a magic forest in the mall was equally capable of magnifying her terrors. But there had been a sound.
Then she jumped as something small and blurred burst out of the thicket. For a moment it seemed to hang in the air in front of her, fluttering madly, before rising up into the vault above and swooping away in the darkness. Of course, it was the small bird that had strayed into the mall and been unable, or unwilling, to leave. It had survived two or three days now, she thought. Probably there was plenty to eat and drink in here.
Kathy was aware of an odd effect. Her sight seemed less acute than before, her whole consciousness now focused on her hearing. And as she turned back towards the balcony overlooking the lower court she realised she could now hear another sound.
It was muffled, distant, difficult to decipher. She concentrated and thought she could make out some kind of music, but strange and ethereal, the rhythm broken into disjointed snatches. It seemed to be coming from the floor of the valley below. She found the top of the escalator and began walking down the motionless steps, straining to make out the sound.
Frustratingly, it was less clear down below than up above, and she circled the food court for several minutes, bumping into tables and chairs in the darkness, unable to trace its source. Then her wandering route took her towards the snake charmer and the entrance to the Bazaar, and the tinkling sounds became a little more distinct.
It was very dark down there, the faint light sources dying in the black depths of the Bazaar. The sound was certainly becoming clearer, beeping and pinging notes which came in a rush for a few seconds, then paused briefly before flying off in some new direction. It was like the pipes of some manic Pan playing in the midnight forest of a nightmare. And then she turned the corner and saw the flickering electronic flashes bouncing around the mouth of the games arcade, and she realised what it was. One of the machines had been left on.
She moved softly towards the steel security grille that had been drawn across the front of the games arcade when it had closed down for the night. The flashing lights were much brighter now, but all the same it took her a moment to make out the shadow that swayed backwards and forwards across them, and realise that someone was in there, playing the machine. He had his back to her, absorbed in the game, a slight figure against the bulk of the machine, silhouetted against the source of the flashing lights.
She put her face to the grille and was able to make out the baseball cap reversed on his head, long curls beneath, baggy trousers, the mobile phone clipped to his belt. His whole body was weaving and jigging as if he were dancing with his electric partner, whose staccato bleeping was becoming more and more excited.
By the flickering lights of the machine, she could barely make out the rest of the arcade space. He seemed to be quite alone, only this one game active. She wondered how on earth he had got there. Had he hidden somewhere in the place when Winston Starkey had closed up for the night? Or did Starkey allow him to stay there, a homeless kid addicted to the machines-in exchange for what?