At 9:02 A.M., the Prefects were in the lift, chittering excitedly to one another, ascending toward the uppermost level. Theoretically, there should still exist CCTV footage of their journey, but you might not be altogether surprised to learn that the tapes for that day show only electric snow, that they are filled end to end with the miserable vacuum of static.
At 9:03 A.M., Hawker and Boon arrived at the tenth floor and the carnage began.
Their first victim was Philip Statham, the safety officer. He was leant over his desk, engrossed in a book of Sudoku, when Hawker and Boon strolled up to him, sliced away the front of his fan, deftly switched it on and pressed Mr. Statham’s face into the spinning blades. Blood on the puzzles. Desktop dappled, in a hideous kind of artistry, with red.
A secretary by the name of Emily Singer saw this happen. I understand that she has never fully recovered from the experience and is unable to sleep with the lights out. On that Tuesday, however, Mrs. Singer showed some presence of mind. She screamed as loudly as she knew how, smashed the fire alarm with its little plastic hammer and dashed pell-mell for the exit. This should have meant that the population of the entire building began an automatic evacuation onto the street, but for some reason the mechanism malfunctioned, failing to make any sound at all. A satisfactory explanation for this has yet to be advanced.
Singer escaped to the exit but many of her colleagues were not so lucky. They were corralled against the photocopier by the relentless storm of Hawker and Boon, who moved amongst them with penknives flashing and teeth shining, their eyes bright with the reaper’s joy on the first day of harvest.
“What ho!” said Boon, as he forced the hand of a Timothy Clapshaw (who I vaguely remember and who I think had something to do with accounts) into a paper shredder.
“Top of the morning to you!” said Hawker, energetically staple-gunning the hands of a brusque PA called Sandra Pullman to the surface of her boss’s desk. “I don’t suppose any of you fine fellows has seen Estella?”
Anyone who could speak protested that they had never heard of the woman, let alone knew where she was.
Hawker shook his head in disappointment. “That’s a dashed shame.”
Boon heartily concurred. “If you’d only tell us, Hawker and I might think about giving all this up.”
“Too true, my old tup-weasel. We’d throw in the towel.”
Someone from HR whimpered that no one knew what they were talking about.
“She’s here somewhere,” Hawker brayed. “I can jolly well nose her.”
“Just so, old top. But at least we can have a bit of fun while we’re looking.”
At 9:08 A.M., Hawker and Boon moved down to the ninth floor just as Miss Morning, Barbara and myself were attempting to fight our way up toward them. On the stairwell, wading against the fleeing masses, I bumped into Peter Hickey-Brown.
“Christ,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Hello, Peter,” I said.
He sounded close to hyperventilating. At the time I assumed that he was simply overwhelmed by panic.
“Just leave,” I snapped. “Run for your life and don’t look back.”
Hickey-Brown gave a limp, lolling kind of nod, pushed past us and skipped girlishly down the stairs.
“They’re on the top floor,” Barbara shouted. “The sooner we can intercept them, the fewer people need to die.”
I realized that someone was missing. “Where’s Miss Morning?”
And so it was that at 9:12 A.M., on the eighth floor of the Civil Service Archive Unit, Hawker and Boon ran, almost literally, into an old acquaintance.
Miss Morning stood before them — my grandfather’s glass gun held outstretched in both hands, her gnarled little finger curled around its crystalline trigger, her arms shaking only slightly, trembling almost imperceptibly in the face of their blazered malevolence.
Of course, I can only take an educated guess at what happened next.
“Hawker,” the old lady said softly. “Boon. You haven’t aged a day.”
The ginger-haired man grinned. “Whereas you, old girl, look absolutely hideous.”
“Miss Morning…” Boon said heavily. “Didn’t you ever feel rather left out? Everyone else had a made-up name and you had to get by with the one you were born with.”
“That was my choice,” Miss Morning said, unflinching. “They offered me Havisham but I chose to keep my own.”
“Course you did.” Boon winked. “Course you did, old thing.”
Hawker mimed the stroking of a long imaginary beard. “Itchy beard!” he shouted. “Itchy beard!”
Then Boon was doing it, too, yelping out the same esoteric phrase. “Itchy beard! Itchy beard!”
Miss Morning was fed up. “Behave!” She pointed the gun toward Hawker’s head. “You know who built this. You know what it can do.” She pulled back the safety and the device made a splintering click.
Suddenly, Boon looked pitiful and afraid, more child-like than ever. “Please don’t pull the trigger, Miss Morning.”
“Oh, please don’t do it, Miss.”
“It’s really going to sting.”
“Pretty please!”
Without a second’s hesitation, without so much as a shiver of conscience or doubt, the old woman shoved the weapon hard against Hawker’s head and pulled the trigger.
The Prefect collapsed wailing to the floor, screeching in melodramatic agony. For almost a minute, Miss Morning was actually fooled. For a while there, she actually believed she might have won.
Hawker sat up with a big grin on his face and mimed a little wave. He and Boon fell about laughing.
“That should have stopped you,” Miss Morning muttered. “He promised. He promised it would cut you down.”
She was still protesting as Hawker and Boon advanced upon her, their bodies visibly quivering at their own incorrigible naughtiness.
“Nothing stops us, old girl,” Hawker said, as he hoisted the pensioner in the air by her throat. “You really ought to know that by now.”
Boon had his penknife drawn in anticipation of the coup de grace. “You silly sausage.”
At 9:15 A.M., we found them, crouched above her like starving dogs over a savaged rabbit. I’ll always be able to remember the sight of it, the degradations they put that woman through at the end. There are some things it’s impossible to ever truly forget — they imprint themselves on your retina and stay there, refusing to budge, like a ghost image on an old computer monitor.
At the sight of me, the Prefects beamed. “Henry!”
“Lamb chop!”
“What have you done?” I shouted.
Boon laughed, his hands extravagantly dripping blood onto the carpet tiles. “Just having a bit of fun, old fruit.”
“Just larking about.”
“Where’s Estella?” Barbara strode toward the Prefects, as coldly implacable as ever and apparently unaffected by the death of Miss Morning. Certainly, she stepped over her corpse as though it was of no more significance to her than a sandbag.
Hawker and Boon seemed not in the least intimidated, although I noticed something unexpected in their reaction, an expression on their faces I’d never seen there before and which I suppose I’d thought I never would. It was curiosity.
“I say,” said Hawker, as Boon let out an amused whistle. “What the Dickens are you?”
Barbara glared. “Where’s Estella?”
“No idea,” said Boon. “The old man only gave us the address. But come here anyway, you wonderful thing. We ought to have a bit of a chinwag.”
Warily, Barbara walked over to him. He whispered something in her ear, some poisonous lie or vicious half-truth, some dangerous arrangement of words.
I knelt beside the mutilated body of Miss Morning. Although she was dead, her eyes hadn’t stopped staring wildly toward the ceiling and her pupils still seemed engorged with fear. The only thing I could think of to do was to close them and, beneath my breath, murmur something halfway between an apology and a benediction.