PROLOGUE

When he heard the noise Seth stopped and stared, as if trying to see through the front door of apartment sixteen, the teak veneer aglow with a golden sheen. Right after descending the stairs from the ninth floor and crossing the landing the sounds began. Same as the last three nights, on his 2 a.m. patrol of the building.

Snapping out of his torpor, he flinched and took a quick step away from the door. Looming up the opposite wall, the shadow of his lanky body stretched out its arms as if grasping at a support. The sight of it made him start. ‘Fuck.’

He’d never liked this part of Barrington House, but couldn’t say why with any certainty. Maybe it was just too dark. Perhaps the lights were not set right. The head porter said there was nothing wrong with them, but they often cast shapes down the stairs Seth was walking up. It was as if a person descending was being preceded by their shadow; the impression of spiky limbs flickering ahead of them before they appeared around a bend in the staircase, sometimes even convinced Seth he’d also heard the swish of cloth and the pumpf, pumpf, pumpf of determined feet approaching. Only no one ever appeared, and there was never anyone up there when he turned a corner.

But the noise in apartment sixteen was far more alarming than any shadow.

Because during the early hours of the morning in this exclusive niche of London there is little to compete with the silence of night. Outside Barrington House the warren of streets behind the Knightsbridge Road are inclined to remain peaceful. Occasionally, out front, a car will drive around Lowndes Square. Or inside, the nightwatchman becomes aware of the electric lights in the communal areas, humming like insects with their black faces pressed against the recalcitrance of glass. But from the hours of one until five the residents sleep. Indoors, there is nothing but ambient sound.

And number sixteen was unoccupied. The head porter once told him it had been empty for over fifty years. But for the fourth consecutive night Seth’s attention had been drawn to it. Because of the bumping behind the door, against the door. Something he’d previously dismissed as a random noise in an old building. One that had stood for a hundred years. Something loose in a draught maybe. Something like that. But tonight it was insistant. It was louder than ever before. It was . . . determined. Had been stepped up a notch. Seemed directed at him and timed to coincide with his usually oblivious passage to the next set of stairs, during the hour when your body temperature drops and when most people die. An hour when he, the nightwatchman, was paid to patrol nine storeys of stairwell and the ancient landings on each floor. And it had never before escalated into a sudden eruption of noise like this.

A clattering of furniture across a marble floor, as if a chair or small table in the reception hall of the flat had been knocked aside. Perhaps toppling over, and even breaking. Not something that should be heard at any hour in a place as respectable as Barrington House.

Nervous, he continued to watch the door, as if anticipating its opening. His stare fixed on the brass number 16, polished so brightly it looked like white gold. He dared not even blink, in case it swung away from his eyes and revealed the source of the commotion. A sight he might not be able to bear. He wondered if his legs possessed the strength to carry him down eight flights of stairs in a hurry. Perhaps with something in pursuit.

He killed the thought. A little shame warmed the aftermath of his sudden fright. He was a thirty-one-year-old man, not a child. Six feet tall, and a paid deterrent. Not that he anticipated doing anything beyond being a reassuring presence when he took the job. But this had to be investigated.

Struggling to hear over the thump of his heart in his ears, Seth leaned towards the front door and placed his left ear an inch from the letter flap to listen. Silence.

His fingers made a move for the letter box. If he knelt down and pushed the brass flap inward, enough light should fall from the landing to illumine some of the hallway on the other side of the front door.

But what if somebody looked back at him?

His hand paused, then withdrew.

No one was permitted to go inside sixteen, a rule pressed upon him by the head porter when he first began the night job six months earlier. Such a strict observance was not unusual for portered apartment buildings in Knightsbridge. Even after a reasonable lottery win an ordinary member of the public would struggle to afford a flat in Barrington House. The three-bedroom apartments never sold for less than one million pounds, and the service charge cost an additional eleven thousand per annum. Many residents filled their apartments with antiques; others guarded their privacy like war criminals and shredded their paperwork for the porters to collect in bin bags. The same instruction forbidding access existed for another five empty flats in the building. But during his patrols Seth had not once heard noises inside any of them.

Maybe someone had been given permission to stay in the apartment and one of the day porters had forgotten to record the information in the desk ledger. Unlikely, as both day porters, Piotr and Jorge, had frowned with incredulity when he first mentioned the disturbances during the morning changeover. Which left one other plausible explanation at such an hour: an intruder had broken in from the outside.

But then an intruder would need to scale the exterior of the building with a ladder. Seth had patrolled the front of the building in the last ten minutes and there had been no ladder. He could always go and wake Stephen, the head porter, and ask him to open the door. But he baulked at the thought of disturbing him at this hour; the head porter’s wife was an invalid. She occupied most of his time between duties, leaving him exhausted at the end of each day.

Lowering himself to one knee, Seth pushed open the letter flap and peered into the darkness. A shock of cold air rushed past his face and with it came a smell that was familiar: a woody-camphor scent reminiscent of his grandmother’s gigantic wardrobe that had been like a secret cabin to him as a boy, and an aroma not dissimilar to reading rooms in university libraries or museums built by the Victorians. A trace of former residents and antiquity, suggesting vacancy rather than use.

The vague light that fell past his head and shoulders brightened a small section of the reception hall inside the flat. He could make out the murky outline of a telephone table against one wall, an indistinct doorway on the right-hand side, and a few square metres of floor tiled in black and white marble. The rest of the space was in shadow or complete darkness.

He screwed his eyes up against the uncomfortable draught that swelled against the front of his face and tried to see more. And failed. But his scalp prickled on account of what he heard.

Squinting into the umbra, he could hear the suggestion of something heavy being dragged at the far end of the hallway; as if a significant weight wrapped up in sheets, or supported on a large rug, was being moved in short bursts of exertion away from the tiny slot of light he had made in the front door. As the sounds receded further into the far confines of the apartment, they lessened, then ceased.

Seth wondered if he should call out and offer the darkness a challenge, but could not summon the strength to open his mouth. Acutely, he now felt he was being watched from down there. And this sudden sense of scrutiny and vulnerability made him want to close the mail flap, stand up and step away.

He dithered. It was hard to think clearly. He was tired. Weary to the marrow, clumsy and confused, paranoid even. He was thirty-one, but working these shifts made him feel eighty-one. Clear signs of sleep deprivation common to the night worker. But he had never hallucinated in his life. There was someone inside flat sixteen.

‘Jesus.’

A door opened. Inside. Down in the dark part he couldn’t see. Must have been about halfway down the hallway. It clicked open and swung wide on its trajectory, emitting a slow creak until it banged against a wall.

He did not move or blink. Just stared and anticipated the arrival of something from out of the darkness.

But there was only expectation, and silence.

Though not a total absence of sound for long. Seth began to hear something. It was faint, but closing, as if travelling towards his face.

It grew out of the hushed unlit interior of the flat. A kind of rushing sound not dissimilar to what he’d heard inside large seashells. A suggestion of faraway winds. He had a curious sense of a great distance existing at the other end of the hallway. Down there. Where he couldn’t see a damn thing.

The breeze thickened where he crouched and peered. Carrying something with it. Inside it. A suggestion of a voice, far off, but still keen to be heard. A voice that sounded like it was moving in a circle miles away. No, there was more than one, there were voices. But the cries were so distant no words could be understood.

He moved his face further away from the door, his mind clutching for an explanation. Was a window open in there somewhere? Could a radio be muttering, or was it a television with the volume turned low? Impossible, the place was empty.

The wind swept closer and the voices grew louder. They were gaining a precedence in the movement of the air. And though they failed to define themselves, their tone was clear, filling him with a greater unease, and then with horror.

These were the cries of the terrified. Someone was screaming. A woman? No, it couldn’t be. Now it was closer it sounded like an animal, and he thought of a baboon he had once seen in a zoo, roaring with scarlet lips peeling back from black gums and long yellow teeth.

It was swept away, the scream replaced by a chorus of moans, hapless in their despair but competing with each other in the cold wind. A hysterical voice, relentless in its panic, swooped closer, dominating the other voices that suddenly retreated as if pulled back by a swift tide, until he could almost hear what the new voice was saying.

He let the letter flap slam shut and there was an immediate and profound silence.

Standing up and stepping away he tried to gather his wits. Disoriented by the hammering of his pulse, he wiped the moisture from his brow with the sleeve of his pullover and noticed the dryness of his mouth, as if he had been inhaling dust.

He desperately wanted to leave the building. To go home and lie down. To end this strange sensitivity and the rush of impressions that accompanied lack of sleep. That’s all it was, surely.

Taking the carpeted stairs two at a time, he fled down through the west wing to the ground-floor reception. He quickly walked past his desk and left the building through the front doors. Outside, he stood on the pavement and looked up, counting the white stone balconies until his eyes reached the eighth floor.

All of the windows were closed, not open, not even ajar, but shut tight and flush within the white frames, and the interior of apartment sixteen was further sealed by thick curtains; drawn day and night against London, and against the world.

But his scalp stiffened beneath his hair, because he could still hear, above him, or even inside his head, ever so faintly, the far-off wind and the clamour of unrecognizable voices, as if he had brought them down here, with him.

ONE

Apryl went straight to her inheritance from the airport. And it was easy to find, direct from Heathrow on the navy blue Piccadilly Line to the station called Knightsbridge.

Swept up the concrete stairs by the bustle and rush of people about her, she emerged with her backpack onto the sidewalk. She’d been on the subway for so long the steely light smarted against the back of her eyes. But if the map was right this was the Knightsbridge Road. She moved into the push of the crowd.

Buffeted from behind, and then knocked to the side by a sharp elbow, she immediately failed to move in step with the strange city. She felt irrelevant and very small. It made her apologetic but angry at the same time.

She shuffled across the narrow sidewalk and took shelter in a shop doorway. Knee joints stiff and her body damp beneath her leather jacket and gingham shirt, she took a few seconds and watched the shunt, race and break of the human traffic before her, with Hyde Park as a backdrop, a landscape painting dissolving into a far-off mist.

It was hard to concentrate on any particular building, determined face, or boutique window around her, because London was constantly moving before and about every static feature. Thousands of people marched up and down the street and darted across it whenever the red buses, white vans, delivery trucks, and cars slowed for a second. She wanted to look at everything at the same time, and to know it, and to understand her place in it all, but the sheer energy sweeping up and down the street started to numb the workings behind her forehead, making her squint, like her mind was already giving up and thinking about sleep instead.

Looking at the map in the guidebook, she peered at the short and simple route to Barrington House that she must have looked at a hundred times since leaving New York eight hours earlier. All she needed to do was walk down Sloane Street, then turn left into Lowndes Square. A cab couldn’t have dropped her much closer than the subway. Her great-aunt’s building was somewhere on the square. Then it was just a case of following the numbers to the correct door. A good sign and one that infused her with relief; the frustration of trying to read road signs and figure out which direction she was heading on streets like this would have been paralysing.

But she would need to rest soon. The prospect of visiting London, and of seeing whatever it was that Great-aunt Lillian had bequeathed her and her mother had disrupted her sleep for over a week and she’d not managed so much as a micro-nap on the plane. But when could a mind ever rest in this place?

The short walk from the station to Lowndes Square confirmed her suspicions that Great-aunt Lillian had not been poor. On the map, the very fact this neighbourhood was so close to Buckingham Palace, and Belgravia with all those embassies, and Harrods, the store she had heard of back home, made her realize her great-aunt had not spent the last sixty years of her life in a slum. But that knowledge was still no preparation for her first sight of Knightsbridge: the tall white buildings with their long windows and black railings; the plethora of luxury cars gleaming at the kerbs; the thin blonde English girls with clipped accents, teetering about in high heels and clutching designer handbags that made her backpack feel like a sack of shit. With her biker jacket, turnups and Converse boots, and with her black hair styled like Bettie Page, she felt the tension of discomfort bend her head forward with the shame and diffidence of the miscast.

At least there weren’t many people out in Lowndes Square to see her in this state: a couple of Arab women alighting from a silver Merc, and a tall blonde Russian girl talking angrily into a phone clamped to her ear. And after the melee of the Knightsbridge Road, the elegance of the square was soothing. The apartment buildings and hotels formed an unbroken and graceful rectangle around the long oval park in its centre, where short trees and empty flower beds could be seen through railings. The unlaboured harmony of the mansion blocks stilled the air and deflected the noise elsewhere.

‘No way.’ She and her mom now owned an apartment here? At least until they sold it for a stack of cash. A thought that immediately rankled. She wanted to live here. It kept her great-aunt here for over sixty years and Apryl could see why. The place was classic, flawless, and effortlessly exuded the sense of a long history. She imagined the polite but indifferent faces of butlers behind every front door. Aristocrats must live here. And diplomats. And billionaires. People unlike her and her mother. ‘Shit, Mama, you’re just not gonna believe this,’ she said out loud.

She’d only ever seen one photo of Great-aunt Lillian, when Lillian was a little girl. Dressed in a curious white gown matching that of her elder sister, Apryl’s grandmother, Marilyn. In the picture Lillian held her big sister’s hand. They stood next to each other with sulky smiles in the yard of their home in New Jersey. But Lillian and Marilyn were closer at that time than they ever were after. Lillian moved to London during the war to work for the US military as a secretary. Where she met an English guy, a pilot, and married him. She never came home.

Lillian and her granny Marilyn must have exchanged letters or cards because Lillian knew when Apryl had been born. She used to get birthday cards from Lillian when she was little. With beautiful English money inside. Pounds. Really colourful paper with pictures of kings and dukes and battles and god knows what else on them. And watermarks when you held them up against a light that she thought were magical. She wanted to keep them, not cash them for dollars, which looked like toy money in comparison. It always made her want to visit England. And here she was for the first time.

But Lillian went quiet on them a long time ago. They even stopped getting Christmas cards before Apryl was ten. Her mother was too busy raising her alone to find out why. And when Granny Marilyn died, her mother wrote to Lillian at the address in Barrington House, but there was no response. So they just assumed she’d died too, over in England, where she’d lived a life they knew nothing of, the weak connection with that generation of the family finally severed, for ever.

Until two months back, when a probate lawyer sent a letter to inform the last surviving relatives of their inheritance following the ‘sad passing of Lillian Archer’. She and her mother were still in a daze. A death, occurring eight weeks previously, and leading to the bequest to them of an apartment in London. Knightsbridge, London, no less. Right here where she was standing, outside Barrington House: the great white building seated solemnly at the foot of the square. Rising up, so many floors dignified in strong white stone, the classicism tempered with slender art-deco flourishes around the window frames. A place so well-proportioned and proud, she could only feel daunted before the grand entrance, with its big, brass-framed glass doors, its flower baskets and ornamental columns either side of the marble stairs. ‘No way.’

Beyond her reflection in the pristine glass of the front doors she could see a long, carpeted corridor with a big reception desk at the far end. And behind it she received an impression of two men with neat haircuts, each wearing a silver waistcoat. ‘Oh shit.’

She laughed to herself. Feeling ridiculous, as if ordinary life had suddenly transformed into cinematic fantasy, she checked the address on the papers they had received from the lawyer: a letter, with a contract and deeds that would get her the keys. To this.

No doubt about it. This was the place. Their place.

TWO

The figure was there again, watching Seth from across the street. This time it stood at the kerb between two parked cars and was not slouched inside a shop doorway, or peering from the mouth of a side street as it had done on three previous sightings.

Closer now, open to his attention, the small form was more sure of itself. Unperturbed by the slanting rain, it just stared. At him.

It.

Seth thought it was a boy but couldn’t be certain. Even though the head was no longer dipped, inside the hood of the dirty parka he could see no face. Just a child then, hanging around instead of being at school, where any youngster with parents who cared should be at this time. And directly across the road from the Green Man pub, where Seth lived in an upstairs room.

So perhaps the child was merely waiting for a father or mother inside the bar. But the figure’s attention was directed at him, as if it had been waiting for him. And it had been on the same stretch of the Essex Road for the past three afternoons he’d been off work.

It was such an unusual child: wrapped from the legs to the head in the faded khaki parka. Or was it grey? It was hard to make out the colour of the fabric against the dark background, or the wet silvery air beneath the smudgy red sign of the fried chicken takeaway. But it was one of those old snorkel coats. He’d not seen one in years. Didn’t even know they were still being made.

Dark trousers too. Not baggy jeans or tracksuit bottoms like most kids wore these days, but trousers. Schoolish trousers. Badly fitted and too long in the leg, as if handed down from an elder sibling in a poor family. And completed by black shoes with a chunky heel. He’d not seen anything like those either, not since he’d been at junior school, and that was during the early seventies.

Usually as he marched through London he did his best to ignore the people on the streets, and took extra care to avoid the eyes of any youths on this stretch of road. Many of them had been drinking, and Seth knew what a stare could lead to. There were plenty of them running wild in this area. They had acquired the privileges of adulthood too early, and played at their version of maturity for long enough to eradicate genuine youthfulness. But this one was different. Set apart by its vulnerability, its isolation. He was reminded of his own youth and he was drawn to the figure out of pity. Every memory of childhood was painful, marked by a terror of bullies he could still taste like ozone, and by a quick stab of heartbreak that lingered twenty years after his parents’ divorce.

But what surprised Seth most was the curious and sudden feeling preceding his sighting of the strange watching child. The mere presence of this figure projected such a force that he reacted with a slight shock and temporary bewilderment, as if a voice had suddenly been directed at him, or as if there had been an unexpected hand around his elbow within a crowd. Not exactly intimidating, but enough to give him a start. To wake him up. But before this sense of significance could fully form in his mind, the feeling would pass. And so would the child. It never stayed long. Just long enough to let him know he was being watched.

But not this afternoon. The hooded figure lingered at the kerb.

Screwing up his eyes and facing the figure, Seth expected his attention to force the cowled head to turn away, uncomfortable under his glare. It didn’t. Not a twitch. The figure in the coat remained at ease and just continued to stare from out of the dark oval of dirty fur-trimmed nylon. It appeared to have been in the same position for so long it could have been a permanent fixture on the street, a sculpture indifferent to the people walking by. And no one else seemed to take any notice of the child.

The situation soon began to feel intimate. Speech seemed inevitable. As Seth tried to think of something he could call across the road to the kid, the door of the pub opened behind him.

He heard a series of disquieting sounds from inside the bar. Someone yelled ‘Cunt’, a chair was scraped violently across a wooden floor, pool balls snapped against each other, there was a raucous eruption of laughter, and a muffled love song rose from the jukebox as if trying to calm the other sounds. Seth turned to face the bright orange doorway. But no one entered or left, and the noise only lasted for as long as it took the door to swing closed by itself; everything growing fainter until the hot and noisy innards of the pub were completely shut off from the street again.

When he turned back to face the road the figure had gone. Walking into the road, he looked up and down the wet street. There was no sign of the child in the coat.

The Green Man was the last surviving Victorian building on the corner of a scruffy street. Now, the character of its brickwork and buttresses was spoiled by the rubbish at street level. Survivors of the Blitz and looking as if they hadn’t been cleaned for decades, little could be seen through the pub’s murky windows from outside but a variety of posters tacked to the inside of the glass. There was an advert for Guinness he remembered from his teens. Now, the Guinness in the pint glass had faded a lime green in colour, like sucked liquorice. Other adverts for coming attractions, like Quiz Night and Sky Football: Big Screen TV, were only bright and colourful where the windows had been blotched by rain.

He’d lived there long enough to learn something of the customers and culture of the Green Man. Some of the punters were market traders, retired from the stalls but still doing business in the bar with East End accents so broad he was tempted to suspect them inauthentic. There were casualties from labour patterns as sketchy as his own, who drank their benefits from opening until closing, or played the fruit machine. A miscellany of other characters would be positioned about them in the gloom, like unrelieved sentries. This final subculture had no peers in Seth’s experience with whom to be compared; they represented new strains of dysfunction caused by personal tragedy, mental illness, and drink. How long now before he completely gave up on himself too? Some days, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already.

Weary from waking late in the morning after only a few hours’ sleep, he shrugged off the residual effect of the staring child and approached the door of the pub. His rent was due: seventy quid across the bar once a week. Stepping over some dog shit, he entered the bar.

His vision began to jitter, as if he was being bounced along on someone’s shoulders. He only ever seemed to get fleeting impressions of the place: a panorama of yellow eyes, the foamy sides of pint glasses, Lambert and Butler cigarette packets, an evil fox’s face behind glass, a tier of champagne bottles under genuine cobwebs, a nicotine ceiling, a pool table, a small dog with bristly fur before an opened bag of scratchings, one Arsenal shirt, and a once pretty woman with eyes still attractive but mostly sly. Several heads turned to take him in, then turned away.

Seth nodded to Quin, who was working the bar today. Quin’s skull looked as if it had once been cleft by an axe. The wound ran from his hairless white cranium to his pink forehead and still shined with scar tissue. Quin nodded without smiling. He leant on the bar to accept Seth’s money.

‘There’s a kid,’ Seth said.

Quin squinted and his glasses moved up his nose. ‘Huh?’

The music was loud and someone with cheeks like corned beef was shouting on the other side of the square-shaped bar.

‘There’s this kid outside. Watching the place. Have you seen him?’

‘Eh?’

‘A kid. Just stands over the road. And stares at the pub. Wondered if you’d seen him.’

Quin looked at Seth as if his words confirmed something he’d long suspected: He’s gone a bit funny in the head, this one. Up there on his own all the time. No girlfriend. No visitors. Shrugging, Quin turned to stuff Seth’s rent in the till.

Feeling ridiculous, Seth moved to make his way back to the door, but someone stood in his path. ‘All right, son.’ It was Archie. Archie from Dundee, though he hadn’t been back to the wife and five kids for over twenty years. He was the live-in cleaner and handyman responsible for the rooms above the pub. Though the irony of the position never escaped Seth, as Archie was the prime contributor to the mess and disrepair inside.

Small and old-man-bony, Archie seemed to hover more than walk. But he was still in possession of an incredible thatch of grey hair, cut into the shape of a Saxon helmet. Cragged and sprinkled with whiskers, his face appeared grandfatherly, as if capable of compassion. Archie always called Seth ‘son’, too, though it was only because he couldn’t remember his name.

‘Have ye got a fag on yer?’ Archie asked.

Seth nodded. ‘Sure.’ Seth gave him a crumpled packet of Old Holborn with a last tuft of tobacco in the bottom.

Archie grinned. ‘Ar, yer a pal, son.’ He had one tooth, an incisor, bottom right, that Seth could never stop staring at. Nor the masking tape that held the thick lenses inside the plastic frames of his glasses. ‘Run out. Dinne get paid till Tuesdee,’ Archie said, grinning at his booty.

‘Listen, Archie. Have you seen that kid who hangs around outside the bar? Wears a hooded coat.’

Now he had the tobacco, Archie lost interest in conversation. He was also drunk and had to concentrate on rolling the cigarette. Seth moved out of the bar and back into the porch. He jabbed his key into the lock and climbed the dark staircase that led to the rooms above the bar.

On the first set of stairs, the skirting boards were painted the red of fresh blood. Over the walls a white paper decorated with the impression of grapes had turned sallow and peeled away from the seam. In places, vast swathes had been torn down to the plaster beneath.

On the dark landing of the first floor, Seth guided himself by the light falling from the doorway of the communal kitchen. He could smell the damp beer towels in the washing machine. Bacon had been fried recently on the old gas stove and the fat had cooled. Its smell now mingled with the scent of ripe rubbish, which meant that Archie had not taken down the bin bags. There were mice in there, but no rats, yet.

Across from the kitchen was the bathroom. Frosted glass had been fitted into the top half of the door, but was not quite opaque enough for privacy. Seth switched the light on and peered inside to see if the shower unit above the bath had been fixed. It had not. ‘Cunt,’ he said, and then wondered when he would give up checking on the progress of the repair. Aged thirty-one, with two arts degrees to his name, and he had been reduced to washing his entire body in a sink.

He climbed the second grim flight of stairs to his room. The banisters were painted the same colour of murder as the skirting boards in the rest of the building, but the pattern and colour of the carpet had changed three times by the time he reached the second floor. He shared this storey with two other men he’d never spoken to. Up here, the lack of both natural and electric light plunged Seth into oblivion.

‘Shit!’ He banged a knee against something sharp. Flailing, Seth slapped a hand up and down a wall until it happened across a light switch in a splintered plastic surround, where a fist had once applied too much force. All of the lights were on timers. Pushing the large circular button activated the unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The passage between the three rooms, each fronted with a red door, appeared all the more gloomy and cramped because of the furniture stacked against the walls. It was a fire hazard he navigated daily. Hurrying forward to get to his room before the lights went out, he trampled amongst the broken bones of a discarded sofa bed. By the time he reached the door to his room the passage was dark again. Seth hit the closest switch for another five seconds of sight while he fumbled with his keys. Crossing the threshold of his room, the darkness returned and swallowed everything behind him.

On Seth’s first day at the Green Man, twelve months earlier, it was Archie who had shown him the room. And Archie didn’t hang around for long, as it had been his job to prepare the place for the new tenant. Of the two window frames neither had net curtains and only the window on the left side had fabric ones, the same colour as dress-patterns in the copies of Woman’s Weekly that survive decades in doctors’ waiting rooms. The sash window on the right side had become skewed at a tilt in the frame.

‘Aha,’ Seth had said, in horror and disbelief.

But Archie had merely blinked at him.

On the side of the room opposite the windows, the mattress of the double bed distinguished itself with Auschwitz stripes and gang-rape stains. Of the furniture, there were two badly assembled wardrobes and a little cabinet beside the bed. Still coated in mug rings and make-up, it added a faintly reassuring feminine touch.

Beside the bedside table was a single radiator, painted yellow and speckled with dark droplets. Dried blood. He’d never been able to get rid of the stains and once asked Archie who lived in the room before him. To which Archie had raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Lassy. Lovely girl. Had boyfriend troubles. They was at each other all night.’ Archie had then relished his role as storyteller. ‘Before her was a real strange fella. Quiet as you like. But when the police come, they caught him in here with his step-daughter. And her friend.’

The whole room smelled like old carpet that had been stored in a garage for years. But at least it was dry.

He’d never done much with the place after that, just moved his stuff in and picked some broken glass out of the carpet. The sheer dilapidation of the room made any attempt at improvement seem futile. And now his piles of discarded magazines and Sunday papers made the room look cluttered but somehow vacant at the same time. Desperation led him there; despair kept him there.

During his first night he remembered being filled with a combination of self-pity, feelings of abandonment, and a subtle terror that would have been choking had he let it grow. But he couldn’t afford anything else after moving to London with twenty unwanted paintings to his name. And with the big south-facing windows, he told himself the room would make him a good studio. Old school.

Seth closed his bedroom door and locked it. The other tenants often got drunk and fell about in the dark passageways; he could never relax until the door was secure. He dropped his bag on the bed and switched the kettle on. Then he turned it off again and opened the fridge, remembering he had a can of beer left over from the four-pack he bought the day before.

He sat on the edge of the bed and glanced at the cardboard boxes still stacked in the corner of his room. All of his art materials were back inside the boxes, gathering dust in a corner. The paintings were in plastic bags, stacked inside the wardrobe. He’d not done so much as a sketch in over six months and wondered whether he’d finally given up on all that, or if he might go back to it someday.

Not bothering with a glass, Seth drank from the can. He thought about a sandwich, but now he’d sat down he was too tired to move again. Still wearing his coat, he lay on the bed covers and sipped the cold drink. Time to get out. Tomorrow he’d make a start. Decide on his next move.

He looked at his watch: four o’clock. He’d have to leave for work at five thirty. Deciding a quick nap would make him feel better, he put the can on the floor, turned on his side, closed his burning eyes. And dreamed of a place he’d not been shut inside since the age of eleven.

The gate to the chamber was made from iron bars, thickly covered with black paint. Instead of windows there were two arches, one on either side of the gate. These were also blocked with vertical bars. There were no other entrances into the chamber.

The back wall, the two sides and the ceiling that completed the rectangular building were bare white stone. Smooth marble tiles made the floor hard and cold under Seth’s bare feet. In here, he was always stepping from one foot to the other; the soles of his feet felt as if they had turned blue and stayed blue.

No bigger than fifteen feet square, the chamber had no decorations. It was also devoid of furnishings. There was nothing to sit on. The cold made his back ache, but the floor was too chilly to sit upon with naked buttocks.

From the ceiling a light was suspended on a brass chain. The light bulb was housed inside a square glass shade, like an antique lamp on the outside of a horse-drawn carriage. It gave off a bright yellow light, all night and all day. He could not prevent himself from trying to warm his hands against the glass shade. But every time he reached up and touched the glass it was cold.

Looking through the locked gate he could see a deciduous wood: damp, thick and wild. The foliage was dark green and the sky above the tallest trees was low and grey. Three wide steps descended from the chamber into the long grass that grew in a wide arc around the face of the structure before the tree line. A cold wind blew through the iron bars.

His world had been reduced to a few colours.

He was inside this place because he had allowed himself to be led there and locked inside. That was all he knew. Beside that, he had vague memories that his family had visited long ago. His mum and dad had come together; his dad had seemed disappointed in him, his mother worried but tried not to show it. Another time, his sister and her husband had come. They had stood at the bottom of the steps and his brother-in-law had cracked jokes to make him feel better. Seth had kept a grin on his face until it began to ache. His sister had said little and seemed frightened of him, as if she didn’t recognize her brother any more.

He’d told them all he was all right, but was unable to tell anyone what he really felt about his imprisonment in the strange stone chamber; he was unable to explain it to himself. After they passed from sight, a lump had filled his throat. Confused, his memory failing, he had no idea how long he had been inside the stone chamber, or for what specific reason he had been locked inside in the first place, but he did know he would be there for ever; always frozen, always hungry, never able to sit down, just stepping from one foot to the other, fretting.

THREE

She might have just boarded a luxury passenger liner, a Titanic or a Lusitania. Inside, Barrington House was like a movie lot designed for a film set on the high seas between the wars, photographed in copper and sepia.

In a daze, she followed the tall head porter, Stephen, through reception and into the east wing. Along corridors lined with silk wallpaper, illumined golden brown by the lights inside patterned glass shades, and through the peculiar smell of tradition. Not quite churchish, but not far off: wood and metal polish, fresh flowers and the fragrance of precious, preserved things insufficiently ventilated, like an old and private museum never open to the public.

Stephen talked as he walked ahead of her. ‘We’ve forty apartments spread through the two blocks with the private garden in the middle which draws the light into the rear of the flats. It’s a bit confusing at first. But if you imagine a giant L shape, with the roads along the outside, you soon get your bearings. And there are twenty parking spaces under the building, but I’m afraid your aunt’s flat doesn’t have parking.’

‘That’s OK, I don’t have a car. And the novelty of using the subway hasn’t worn off.’

The head porter smiled. ‘It may do, ma’am. It may do.’

‘Apryl. Call me Apryl. Otherwise I sound about a hundred and ninety.’

‘And you may live to be that old. Your aunt was eighty-four when she died.’

‘Great-aunt. She was my grandmother’s sister.’

‘Still, a good age.’ He paused and looked over his shoulder. ‘Though I am truly sorry for your loss . . . Apryl.’

‘Thanks. But I never met her. It’s still sad though. She was the last of that generation in my family. We had no idea she was still alive. Or that this place was like . . . Well, like this. I mean, it’s spectacular. We’re not rich. We couldn’t even afford the service charge – it’s about how much I make a year back home. So I won’t be here long.’

At a guess, when they eventually sold the place, neither she nor her mother would need to work for a long time, if ever again. They’d be rich. Just the word seemed incongruous, even silly, when applied to them. But there was no one else with a claim on the inheritance. Lillian died childless, and Apryl’s mother, like Apryl, was an only child. End of the line. And at twenty-eight, if she didn’t get a move on herself, the Beckford family would vanish with her. The last spinster.

‘It’s all a bit of a fairy tale. My mom is just gonna die when I tell her about this place. I mean you porters and everything. I could get used to this.’

Stephen nodded, his smile polite but stiff. He seemed weary, but also preoccupied by something, though not by the tattoos peeking from under the sleeves of her shirt. Reflected in the mirror of the elevator they looked like the open pages of comic books.

‘So you never knew your aunt Lillian?’ he asked warily, as if weighing up something awkward he would have to tell her.

‘No. My mom kind of remembers her, but not well. And Lillian wasn’t that close to Granny Marilyn either. They just kind of went their own ways during the war. Which I never got, being an only child. I’d have loved a sister. We just guessed Lillian died years ago. I mean, my grandmother’s been dead for fifteen years. And my mom was too busy raising me to find out about Lillian. I was quite a handful.’ She was rambling, she knew it, but was too excited to care.

Stephen bit his bottom lip, then sighed. ‘Your aunt wasn’t well, Apryl, I’m afraid. She was a lovely woman. Very kind. And I’m not just saying that. We were all very fond of her here. But she was old and her mental health hadn’t been good for a long time. Not for the ten years I’ve worked here, and my predecessor said as much. A few years ago we arranged to have meals delivered. And a carer visited her every week. The management used to cash her cheques and pay the bills on her behalf.’

‘I never knew. Must make us sound terrible.’

‘I didn’t mean to suggest anything. It happens all the time in this part of town. People become estranged from their families. Cut off. Money can do that. But Lillian’s state of mind was getting worse. A lot worse in the last few years before she passed away. She shouldn’t have been here really. But this was her home and we all pitched in – the porters and the cleaners – to make it possible for her to stay.’

‘That was very kind.’

‘Oh, it was nothing really. Just milk and bread and fetching things she needed from the shops. We do try and be helpful. But we were always concerned she might have fallen or’ – he paused to clear his throat – ‘become lost.’

‘Didn’t she have any friends?’

‘Not that I noticed. Not a single visitor since I’ve been here. You see . . .’ He paused and rubbed at his mouth. ‘She was quite eccentric. That’s the politest way I can put it, and I mean no disrespect.’ He looked uncomfortable as he said it. Even his voice dropped. Crazy he meant.

But she wanted to know everything about the great-aunt who had left her and her mother a whole bunch of real estate in London. Once it was sold, she’d make sure those who’d made the old lady comfortable toward the end were rewarded in some way. Her mom wouldn’t object. She’d feel guilty too. Just like Apryl did right now. Though neither of them should. It was never wilful neglect on their behalf: Lillian had been a distant relative who lived on the other side of the earth.

‘Do you remember her husband? Reginald?’ asked Apryl. ‘I think he was a pilot in the war.’

Stephen looked away, his pale blue eyes flitting, glancing above and around her head as if he were inspecting the lights in the elevator, which were dim and cast a grubby shadow over the mahogany panels and brass trimmings. ‘Mmm, no. Passed away before my time here. But I would hazard a guess his death affected her greatly.’

‘Why do you say that?’

But then the elevator stopped with a wheeze followed by a clunk. The doors slid open and Stephen seemed eager to step through them.

She followed him onto the landing. It was carpeted in dark green, and the walls were decorated in the same restrained tone as the communal corridors downstairs. There was a radiator opposite the elevator, inside an ornamental covering that looked like a Victorian tomb. A broad, gilt-framed mirror glimmered above it and a staircase rose and fell on either side of the elevator shaft. On the walls of the staircase she could see prints in elegant frames. At each end of the landing was a wooden front door, numbered in brass.

‘Well, here we are. Number thirty-nine. Right at the top. Unfortunately, the heating isn’t so good up here, so I put portable radiators in Lillian’s bedroom and in the kitchen, the only two rooms I can ever remember her using. At some point I’ll need them back.’

‘Sure.’ Apryl watched the back of Stephen’s neat silver head as he rattled the fob to free the right key. Under the shiny grey waistcoat, she could see how strong his shoulders were. He exuded ex-military; the kind of authority she imagined was popular with the residents. Her great-aunt must have felt safe with Stephen around.

‘I’m afraid it’s quite a mess inside. She didn’t want a maid and wouldn’t let anyone move a thing. I doubt she threw anything away in sixty years. Anyway, here are the keys. We have another set in the safe downstairs – standard practice in case of emergency. I’ll have to dash off now. Contractors are coming to look at the satellite dishes on the roof. But call reception if there is anything you need. Piotr is on the desk until six thirty, and then Seth, the night man, will take over. I’ll be on site pretty much all day, every day. You can call the front desk from the phone in the kitchen. Just lift the handset and it’ll connect you.’

Stephen looked into her eyes. He could probably guess she didn’t want to be left alone in the apartment. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got your work cut out, Apryl. I doubt it’s been cleaned in years. And it’s the only apartment with the original bathroom still intact. If you are going to sell, it’ll need a lot of work. Maybe a complete renovation to get the right price.’ Stephen left her outside the open door and trotted down the stairs.

The drapes must have been drawn inside the apartment, for even though Stephen had reached inside the door and turned the hall light on, little was revealed beside a dowdy and cluttered hallway from a different age.

The very thought of entering made her feel vulnerable and guilty, like she was a trespasser. And the dross of age was reluctant to remain within the confines of its walls. Even outside on the landing the place smelled old. Real old. Like her grandmother’s bedroom in Jersey, which hadn’t altered one bit since the forties either. But this smell was a thousand times stronger. Like the windows had never been opened and everything inside was ancient and faded and dusty. The past contained and reluctant to leave. Like the rest of the place, if she were honest, now the excitement of her first impression had passed. Gloomy stairwells and dim hallways. It was like going back in time. Maybe the residents liked it that way. Traditional ambience or something.

She poked her head inside the door and felt a foolish urge to call out her aunt’s name. Because, curiously, the place didn’t feel empty.

The head porter wasn’t kidding: Lillian had been a shut-in. The hallway was choked with bundles of old newspapers, magazines and plastic bags, their shiny sides bulging taut. Apryl peered inside the bag nearest the coat stand. It was full of junk mail, colourful intrusions from the modern world standing no chance in here, but kept for some reason, imprisoned.

Under the soles of her boots the carpet was crispy. With the dim hall lights on, a host of dead moths visible through their glass shades, she could see how the carpet was worn down to the weave. What had once been a complicated pattern of red and green was now mostly the colour of compressed straw along the middle. Worn down by her great-aunt’s feet.

The furniture in the long hallway was definitely antique. Dark and shiny wooden legs appeared between bales of yellowing newspaper. Embroidered cushions on the chairs were partially hidden by blanched telephone directories. Elsewhere, carved wood, mother-of-pearl inlays, and frosted glass with intricate decorations peeked out from among the garbage sacks, as if humiliated by their surroundings. Apryl was no historian, but even she knew they’d stopped making cabinets, clocks and chairs like this in the forties. And if it wasn’t for the piles of trash and stained walls the apartment might have looked elegant. Or maybe not.

The wallpaper had once been a cream silk, with silver stripes running vertically through it, but was now mostly yellow and discoloured by brown clouds where moisture had dried near the dirty wainscoting and above the skirting boards. Beneath her fingertips, the walls felt fuzzy like the worn fur on a stuffed animal.

In the kitchen there was cracked yellow lino and a perimeter of ancient enamel appliances. Dark wooden cabinets were fixed to walls once painted buttercup but now blemished like ivory. The gas rings on the stove were dry and dusty, the deep sink bone dry. Only the surface of the kitchen table showed signs of use. There were lines made by a knife on the chopping board and crumbs in the bread bin. A solitary chair, with a tartan pattern on its cushion, was tucked beneath the kitchen table.

The scant evidence of her great-aunt’s domesticity suddenly made her sad, right down to her toes. But it was the sight of the silver teapot on the tray decorated with birds of the British Isles, next to the stub of a packet of lemon cookies on the table, that thickened her throat with emotion. She thought she might cry.

There was a single china cup beside the teapot, a strainer, a sugar bowl and a tea caddy. The gold rim of the cup was chipped, probably the last of a set. Maybe a wedding gift when she and Reginald were married. Apryl touched the handle, but couldn’t bring herself to raise the fragile vessel. This was Lillian’s cup; she drank tea out of it. Up here on her own in the kitchen, at this little table by the plastic bin with the swing lid, surrounded by the relics of nearly a century on this planet. Apryl sniffed a tear back. She could see why rich people sealed themselves off inside retirement villages in Florida and rode around in golf carts wearing polo shirts. What was the point of being different if you ended up like this?

She wiped at her eyes. ‘You could have come and lived with us.’

Inside the cupboards on the walls she found a motley assortment of crockery – three china dinner sets, incomplete and now combined in an incongruous medley of patterns. There were some old pots and pans in the cupboards. She doubted the pots had been used in years, except for the one with a rind of dry milk inside. And besides the three tins of soup and some packets of sweet cookies, there was nothing to eat. Inside the fridge she saw a plastic bottle of lumpy milk. Her great-aunt lived on tea, cookies and soup and made it to eighty-four.

Stephen said nothing had been touched since Lillian died. And how did she die? Was it in here?

Apryl dropped her backpack from her shoulder and leant it against the kitchen table. She couldn’t shake the sense of being an intruder in a stranger’s home. Already she was dreading the thought of spending a night here. Would there be clean sheets? Had her aunt died in bed? She suddenly wanted to call Stephen and get him up here and not let him leave until she knew everything.

With an effort of will she calmed herself. She was tired, excited, her nerves were strung out; she couldn’t possibly have anticipated any of this. She just had to remember this was a great opportunity. Something totally radical and beyond her experience.

But when she opened the living-room door, her resolve vanished again. She didn’t manage more than two steps inside. Why hadn’t Stephen told her about the flowers? All of the dead flowers. The sloping pile of brown stalks and shrivelled petals that rose from the carpet to the sill of the big window overlooking Lowndes Square. They reminded her of flowers on old graves, left to wither and collapse and to bleach of colour. Seeing so many emaciated stems and dead leaves in the thin, brownish light made a shiver pinprick up her spine and then fizzle at the base of her skull. This must have been going on for years. This pile built one bunch at a time. And all roses, by the look of the few petals on the top that remained as dark as wine. Behind them, the grey drapes with the plaited golden trim were drawn closed.

She turned the main light on to better investigate the flowers and see the pictures on the walls, but the room was still so shadowy and dim she realized she’d be better off with the drapes open. But when she leant over the flowers and tried to pull them apart she discovered they had been stitched shut. She stepped back quickly from the window and stared at the neat bindings of red thread that joined the drapes in the middle, permanently.

‘What the fuck?’

Alone and crazy, Great-aunt Lillian had sewn her drapes shut with thread, and then mounted before them floral tributes that covered half the room. She turned around to look about her. The room was empty of furniture, the floor still thick with dust, but the corners where the walls met the ceiling were free of cobwebs, so you still could see the photographs. On all of the walls, black-and-white photographs in antique frames reached from the height of her waist to the ceiling. And the pictures all featured the same couple. Every single one of them.

Handsome with a pencil moustache, like Douglas Fairbanks Junior, his hair slick either side of a parting, she saw her great-uncle Reginald for the first time in her life.

His eyes were dark and intelligent. And smiling. Just looking at him made her grin. Reginald always dressed in a suit and tie or wore silver slacks with a white shirt open at the neck. In one photo a little terrier lay at his feet as he sat in a cane chair. A pipe often featured in his strong left hand. Lillian’s husband: a man she always stood proudly beside, close, either holding his elbow or standing behind him with a hand placed upon his shoulder. Like she couldn’t let him go. Like she loved the man so much being without him would drive her crazy.

And Lillian had been a beautiful woman. Like a movie star from the forties with big brown eyes and the sharp bone structure you rarely saw these days. Always dressed elegantly in tea frocks, or cocktail dresses to the knee, or ball gowns sweeping around the white toes of her glossy shoes. But it was the way they looked at each other that affected her most. You couldn’t fake that. This sad, brown and mildewed space which Lillian roamed and dreamed in and haunted for sixty years suddenly made more sense. Two people once lived here who should never have parted. And the place was in mourning because the widow was heartbroken. Maybe mad with a grief that never eased. Did hearts still get broken like that?

Apryl knew Reginald died in the late forties. After serving in the RAF in the war and surviving dangers she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, this happy, handsome man with a beautiful young bride had died suddenly. She didn’t know the details, but her gran had told her mom that he died after the war. That’s all they had to go on. A sketchy oral history passed down from one solitary old woman to another, and so on to her. But glimpses into Lillian’s life hung all around her on the walls, and were packed into those boxes in the hallway, and into whatever else Apryl might find in the three bedrooms and dining room. And hadn’t Stephen said something about a storage cage under the building?

She’d budgeted to arrange a quick sale of the flat and a hasty disposal of Lillian’s possessions in two weeks. But she didn’t want that any more. She wanted to stay here and learn about her great-aunt and uncle. She wanted to examine and consider and collect and preserve. This wasn’t junk. It meant something to Lillian. All of it.

There had to be letters. Maybe a diary. She’d have to sift and discard in here like an archaeologist, in between dealing with real-estate agents and all of the legal stuff. Work fast and maybe see a bit of London too. But Lillian had to come first. If it meant cashing the rest of her savings and quitting her job back home, so be it. She would know every single thing there was to know about her great-aunt.

FOUR

Changed into his uniform, with a cup of tea in his hand, when Seth came up from the staffroom he was hoping Piotr had already made his way down to the basement garage where his rusted shitbox car was parked. Instead, Piotr had merely pulled his red anorak over his sweat-clouded polyester shirt and was waiting for him. Grinning, he held up the duty log. ‘Ah, Seth being seeing the ghosts again! We all laugh so much when we read the log. Maybe he drink the whisky in the night and he see things, eh?’ He rolled his eyes and raised a hand as if to simulate drinking from a glass.

‘I didn’t say I saw anything. I reported a disturbance. A noise. Someone’s been in sixteen. I heard them.’

But Piotr wasn’t listening. ‘You should polish the brass at night. I tell Stephen but he no listen. Then you being doing work and not have the time to see the ghosts.’ The door closed on the swishing anorak and beaming face.

He wouldn’t make another report, no matter what he heard. Fuck it. He’d done his job; if something was stolen, he’d warned them.

He collapsed into the chair and thought again about the dream he’d had that afternoon. It left him nostalgic but uneasy. As a kid, he used to visit that chamber in nightmares. Trying to scream, while strangely mute, as he was pushed inside the chamber against his will. It started around the time his dad left. Over and over again, he used to find that weird stone chamber in his dreams. It was an actual mausoleum he’d once seen with his nan, as they walked through an unkempt corner of the cemetery where his grandfather was buried. All the flowers were dead and the names of people were worn off the stone tablets and markers. It terrified him. He could not accept that his mum and dad would die and leave him one day, and then end up inside one of those stone enclosures or the mausoleum. And that he would die too. His nan said, with a smile, ‘Not for a long time, Seth.’ But the cold marble mausoleum with the little light inside, and the locked gate and barred windows, haunted him. He imagined being put in there. Being dead in there. Where he would stand on the wrong side of the little gate crying for his mum and dad who couldn’t see him. Would watch them walk away through the headstones. He used to see them clearly, starting the white Allegro before driving off and leaving him behind the gate, sobbing, hysterical.

He shook himself. Even now he didn’t like remembering it. As a kid, the fear of the chamber used to tighten his chest so much he couldn’t breathe.

He should call his mum. His dad. His sister. The dream made him want to. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken to any of them. He’d let everything go.

Seth sighed and glanced over the duty clipboard to force himself to think of something else. Only twenty of the forty apartments were in use. Same situation as during his four shifts the previous week.

Most of the penthouse suites were either holiday homes for the absurdly rich or corporate flats for employees working in the city. Although some of the flats were occupied by troublesome permanent tenants, he was rarely bothered during the night. Though he noted one addition in flat thirty-nine in the east wing. Someone had moved in. The old girl, Lillian, had died. In a taxi or something a couple of months back. Stephen had told him the day after, but he’d never seen the woman during his shifts. She never came out at night. The new tenant was listed as Apryl Beckford. He wondered what she looked like.

When he finished the last dregs of his tea, he walked into the ornamental garden built at the intersection of the two wings. He rolled and then smoked a thin cigarette while listening to the fountain. The memory of the dream dimmed and he began to feel something like relief to be back at work. There were few chores, only the occasional patrol to make and guest to sign in. It was less demoralizing than life at the Green Man, and more comfortable too. Once, before he started work at Barrington House, the building had even been featured in Hello! magazine, on account of some footballer who used to live there. An ideal old-school job for an artist, he’d once hoped, but he’d stopped sketching as soon as he took his place in the leather chair in reception. Now he suspected he had put himself there to forget and be forgotten; to ease himself out of mainstream life in the most comfortable way possible. And that notion no longer troubled him.

After his spent cigarette landed in the fountain he returned to the chair and began to yawn. Another restless night. Arab teenagers in performance cars circled Lowndes Square. He checked his watch. Still another ten hours before he could leave in the morning and fall into a deep sleep. Preferably a dreamless coma.

Leafing through the television listings in the Evening Standard, he was suddenly startled by the buzzing of the house phone. On the brass panel he could see a red light next to the label for apartment forty.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ he whispered to himself. It was Mr Glock, the middle-aged Swiss playboy, and the rudest man Seth had ever met. He picked up the handset to stop the deafening trill from the panel’s speaker. ‘Seth speaking.’

‘I need a taxi for Heathrow. Do it now.’ Mr Glock hung up.

No other tenant so reinforced his long-held suspicion that the rich were an unpleasant crowd. When he first began working in the building, the tenants and their absurd wealth intimidated him, as if their very presence shone lights about his stained tie, the scuffs on his shoes and the gaping holes in his curriculum vitae. It had made him ridiculously diffident in their presence. But after half a year of taking their stinking rubbish out and witnessing countless demonstrations of self-importance before his desk, compounded with their affected accents and vulgar furnishings, his awe had gradually reduced to a simmer of resentment. He’d little respect left for any of them. Especially Glock. Working here assured Seth that money favoured the worst kind of people.

He took the lift up to the fourth floor, where Glock’s bags would be waiting. On the way up he mopped his face with a paper towel. The texture of the paper hurt the hot, delicate skin of his forehead and cheeks. Remembering an Asian man who sneezed on him in the cinema, he wondered if he’d picked up a tropical illness from a foreigner. He rubbed at his neck, feeling the beginning of a tickle in his throat. Then recalled that nasty cold air he had sucked in while looking through the letter box of apartment sixteen, and winced. He thought he could still taste the dust.

Once Glock and his bags were taken care of, Seth rolled a cigarette and watched the cab pull away from the kerb and drive out of the square. He told himself it was absolutely the last time he was getting out of the chair for the duration of the shift. He felt like shit. The tickle at the back of his throat had turned into something raw. Under his blazer, his shirt clung to his back.

But his respite slumped behind the desk was short-lived. The next person to demand his attention was Mrs Shafer, the elderly wife of an invalided American stockbroker. They lived in apartment twelve.

Standing outside the building’s front doors, she began ringing the bell. The incessant buzzing tone that sounded behind his desk carried the full force of her annoyance. She appeared even more grotesque than usual, with her hair piled into a messy arrangement of scarves from which strands drooped around her doughy face. Fucking Halloween in a bandanna. He shivered with disgust. How could a woman let herself go like that? Especially one with so much money?

Seth buzzed her inside via the switch behind his desk. As she trundled into reception on her thick legs, a severe frown eroded her forehead. ‘What is the point . . .’ There was a long pause. ‘We have trouble with it!’ She pointed at the door. Seth winced. Although accustomed to her hysteria and unpredictable temper, she never failed to frighten him. She was mad. Only the head porter, with his graceful manner and soft voice, seemed able to manage her moods.

She began to take short, shuddering steps towards his desk. ‘Don’t bother yourself!’ she shrieked at him. One of her arms flapped in the air until she resembled a dinosaur, the bulky body set forward at an angle, with short, fetal arms clawing out front. Mrs Shafer expected the porters to rush to the doors and manually hold them open as if she were royalty. Then it was customary to escort her from the lift to the front door of her apartment. This was a precedent set by Piotr and his relentless hustle for tips, but Seth refused to take part in the charade. It made him think bitterly of his wasted education – four years at art school, a master’s degree to follow – only to be reduced to placating a demented, rich bully who terrorized her tiny, disabled husband before the eyes of the door staff.

Mr Shafer rarely left the apartment. On the rare occasions he was seen, he was always accompanied by his shrill wife. He looked like a puppet with dried-out wooden limbs barely suspended above the ground, as if most of the strings had been severed. His wife would tug the old man about her massive skirts and constantly berate him, while he used all of his concentration and energy to balance as he took one slow step after another. Both the Shafers stank of stale sweat.

Seth stood up in front of his chair and said, ‘Good evening,’ so quietly he barely heard himself.

She flapped her arms again in exasperation and her face turned bright red. ‘Get Stephen! Phone Stephen now!’

She only stopped shouting when the lift doors opened behind her. For a moment the sound flustered her, then she shambled inside. A final mumble from her became a shrill cry that Seth could make no sense of. He had no intention of bothering Stephen; by the time she reached her apartment, she would have forgotten the altercation.

But he was to get no peace that night. Every arsehole in the building seemed involved in a conspiracy to make him work. By nine o’clock, Mrs Pzalis had phoned down three times from flat twenty-two to complain about the television reception. As did Mrs Benedetti from flat five. He wrote it in the log, but could see that the satellite company had been up on the roof twice since his last shift. At ten thirty, Mrs Singh in nineteen complained about a smell of smoke in the west wing, and before he could go and investigate, Mrs Roth in eighteen called down to tell him the same thing. There wasn’t a peep out of the fire and smoke alarms, but he had to check it out.

If Singh and Roth could smell it inside their apartments, then the smell was up by sixteen. A part of the building he’d planned to avoid on each of the three patrols he was obliged to undertake during the shift.

‘Cunt.’ He took the lift to the ninth floor.

The moment he left the lift and stood on the landing, he could smell it too: burned meat, singed clothing and something like sulphur. But there was no smoke, the doors were cold, and the rubbish stores were empty. It was a dead scent, but a deeply unpleasant miasma like the residue that lingered in a place where there had been an accident with fire. It was strongest near the door of number nineteen. Old Mrs Roth’s place.

He looked about him and was reminded why he’d never liked the building upstairs. Any of it, if he were honest. Even during the lighter evenings of the summer, when the fading sun reinforced the electric light in the communal areas, he found it gloomy. The old brown wood, the dull brasses and the thick green carpet seemed to absorb any illumination, particularly on the stairwells. They reminded him of those parts of old houses that remained forever in shadow. But despite the absence of human traffic in the stairwells and corridors, the place had an active energy. A kind of swarming, bustling sensation in the air, as if the presence of former activity was locked in place and unable to escape.

He descended to the eighth floor in a feverish, breathless daze. He decided to proceed swiftly across the landing and not stop, regardless of what he smelled or heard bumping and scraping about inside apartment sixteen. But it was not to be.

As he took the stairs two at a time and swung onto the landing he almost collided with a figure. A figure dressed in white and hunched over. It was standing a few feet before the door of apartment sixteen.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he whimpered in a breathless voice and felt every hair stand up on his scalp.

The figure turned to stare at him. For a second he failed to identify the crumpled face and the curved bonnet of thin silvery hair. But then recognition struck. His shock passed and an immediate sense of relief washed through him. It was Mrs Roth. But in her nightgown, alone, and clearly distressed.

‘He’s come back,’ she said, on the verge of tears. Her needle-thin arms and arthritic hands trembled. Through the thin, silky material of her gown he could see the sharp bones of her shoulders and pelvis sticking out. Absurdly scrawny legs, knotted with veins, jutted from beneath the hem. Her clawed feet were bare.

‘He’s come back for me.’

She was ninety-two. He could do nothing but wonder how she had managed to walk down a flight of stairs on those legs. Mrs Roth was largely confined to her bed, being taken out for lunch just twice a week, with the help of two walking sticks and her Filipino maid, Imee.

Seth stood still and stared at her. He tried to swallow but it was too painful.

She pointed a disfigured hand at the door of flat sixteen. ‘Open the door. I want to see for myself.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Mrs Roth. Let’s get you back into bed.’

Angrily, she swatted the contortion of bone and thin skin that serviced as a hand. ‘I don’t want to be in bed!’

She wasn’t sleepwalking. And, despite her age, Mrs Roth had never seemed prone to even the vaguest confusion. In fact, she remained unfailingly rude and unpleasant at all times. Though she rarely bothered Seth at night, her maltreatment of the day staff was legendary. Even the head porter was terrified of her.

‘Please, ma’am. You shouldn’t be down here.’

He realized his mistake as he was speaking. Her face purpled with rage. She turned on him; pointed a finger, bent like a hook, at his face, so only the knuckle of the second joint was directed at his eyes. ‘How dare you!’ The normally perfect halo of transparent wisps on her head, fashioned into a bouffant, became disturbed. A few strands hung about her ears. Through what remained in place, he could see her pale scalp and the liver spots discolouring it. Her neck was thin and the flesh hung from her collarbones like loose leather. She reminded him of a bird. A beaky, fierce-eyed bird with a few feathers remaining on its plucked skin.

‘He’s back, I tell you! I heard him. I heard him laughing.’

Ordinarily, a man in his position would be prone to an embarrassed laugh or a nervous smile when confronted by a raving ninety-two-year-old woman in her nightgown, but there was something about her determined face and wild rheumy eyes that made Seth uneasy. Particularly considering what he too had heard on the other side of that door.

Seth made a bold move. He stood close to Mrs Roth, nodding in sympathy. ‘I know. I’ve heard noises in there for a while now. But what is it?’

‘What? Speak up. Don’t be ridiculous. What are you saying?’

He nodded his head towards the door. ‘In there. At night. I made reports. About the noises. The bumping. In the hallway. Furniture being knocked over. Things. Like that.’

Mrs Roth’s pointed face blanched a sickly shade of pale. The tremble in her frail, monkey limbs became a shake. He thought she might fall over, and moved forward to take her elbow. She clutched at him for support and dropped her head.

‘No,’ she whispered. And then, ‘No,’ again, but to herself. She looked up at him like a child after a fright. ‘Take me home. I want Imee. Get Imee. Where’s Imee? I want Imee.’

Tense and uncomfortable in the face of her indignity, he walked her slowly towards the lift door and then summoned it from the ground floor by punching the button in the polished brass plate. As he waited he realized his shirt was drenched with sweat again.

The groaning cables seemed to take an age to haul the heavy but elegant carriage up from the ground. And all the while, in his discomfort, Seth tried to reassure Mrs Roth with comments about Imee and bed, until she told him to, ‘Shut up, just shut up,’ and waved a hand at his face.

When he opened the outer doors and guided her inside the lift carriage, she screwed her eyes closed and seemed more decrepit and bent-over than ever, as if being forced to remember something especially painful. Something that broke her. Broke what little spirit remained in that old frail body.

Up on the ninth floor, the door to her apartment was still open, and Seth rang the bell to raise Imee, who came swiftly from her little room at the end of the long hall. Clutching her blue dressing gown across her front, as if to protect her modesty from the eyes of the porter, she snatched Mrs Roth off him, and cast him a sullen, angry look, before closing the front door on his whispered explanations. Mrs Roth had begun sniffing and crying the moment she saw Imee.

‘Bitch,’ Seth muttered at the closed door, and took the lift down to the staffroom in the basement. Where he pondered, with some discomfort, who Mrs Roth had been referring to outside the front door of apartment sixteen.

FIVE

‘Mama, she never threw anything out. Nothing. I’m not kidding. You should see the clothes in her room. There’s like a hundred dresses and suits and coats and stuff. Going back to, like, the forties. It’s all still here. Like a fashion museum or something. We inherited a goddamn museum. The Lillian collection. And some of the dresses are so beautiful.’ Apryl walked back and forth in her great-aunt’s bedroom, her cell phone pressed to her ear.

But she knew her mother could never comprehend what she’d uncovered in her great-aunt’s rooms. Not unless she saw it herself. Which she never would, due to her pathological terror of flying. And Apryl felt unable to describe her discoveries adequately, or to impress upon her mother the atmosphere of the apartment: the faded grandeur, the ever-present sense of loss, the chaotic defence an old woman had built against the world outside, the disturbed inner life still evident in unoccupied rooms with shrines and rituals and habits long maintained but now just plain mystifying.

Two of the rooms, the smaller bedrooms at the end of the cluttered hallway on the right side, were choked with debris. In each room she’d found a single bed with an ancient eiderdown coated in a fur of dust. About the beds, cardboard boxes and old suitcases filled with bric-a-brac were stacked. What she was to do with any of it remained a mystery. An inventory would take weeks, even months to complete.

At least Lillian’s bedroom remained uncluttered around the two giant wardrobes and clothes drawers. There was also a huge bed and a beautiful bureau with three locked drawers, the keys for which she couldn’t find, but she guessed Lillian’s personal papers must be stored inside. And she’d never seen so many perfume bottles arranged in a herd on top of the chest of drawers. Cosmetic companies never made glass like that any more, nor the porcelain jars for cream and makeup, most of their contents hard and cracked like the baked soil of distant planets.

‘Mama, I’d like to bring the clothes back. I think they all fit me. Isn’t that crazy? I tried on two fur coats and three hats and it was like they were made for me.’

‘Honey, where are you gonna put it? In your tiny place? I’ve no room here, you know that. And think of the cost, sweetheart. We just don’t have the money for that kind of thing and now you’re talking of giving up your job too. I’m worried.’

‘Don’t be. Mama, we’re not going to be short of green soon.’

‘We will be if you carry on like this. You have to be realistic, honey. The apartment could take a long time to sell.’

‘I can cover the shipping from my savings. But Lillian’s stuff I want to keep will have to come to you first and go in the basement.’

‘Honey, it’ll cost a fortune. You can’t bring it back here – you’ll have to sell it in England.’

‘No. I’ll be careful. I can stay here until the apartment is sold and just work my way through all this stuff. The furniture will have to go. I don’t know anything about antiques, so we’ll have to get an expert to value them. But the really personal stuff I want us to keep. Mama, it’s so beautiful. It’s just the clothes and the photos and a few other things.’

‘Oh honey, I don’t know about this. You were only going there for two weeks to empty the place and sell it, and now you’re talking like a crazy thing.’

‘Mama, Mama, this is our history. We can’t just throw it out. I mean, the photos of Lillian and Reginald, they’re just heartbreaking. They were so glamorous. Like movie stars. You just won’t believe it when you see them. That’s someone in our family up there on those walls. A woman with so much taste and class and style. She’s like my icon already. You know how much I love that look.’

But her mother sounded tired; she should never have agitated her like this. Added to the strain of her only daughter being overseas, the intrusion of anything new or foreign into her immaculate New Jersey bungalow would be the cause of severe anxiety. She should have broken all this to her mother slowly, but Apryl couldn’t contain her excitement.

The forties and fifties had long been the inspiration for her own retro stylings back home in New York, where she sold alternative and vintage clothing in St Mark’s Place. And had done for starvation wages for the last five years, which had slipped by and left her without much of a CV, or apartment, or standard of living. But this cache could raise thousands on eBay. Not that she was intending to sell it all; she intended to wear the majority of these outfits to the retro clubs downtown and in the Village when she got home. This was her inheritance; her aunt wore these clothes back in the day.

The dresses were so exquisitely made; she’d found six immaculate silk and taffeta ball gowns, two dozen suits in cashmere and wool, and twice as many figure-hugging black and cream dresses, folded into cases, that her great-aunt must have worn into the sixties with, perhaps, a single strand of pearls. And the sight of the costume jewellery had made her shriek out loud: three boxes stuffed full of colourful brooches, necklaces and earrings all tangled together.

The vintage underwear they stopped making in the early seventies, and some of her great-aunt’s girdles and corsets were made at least as far back as the forties. She’d long fantasized of such finds in used clothing stores and garage sales, and had never stopped scouring factory closures and charity stores for vintage accessories for her own wardrobe, or to sell in the store. There were enough clothes in her great-aunt’s room to start a business from scratch or fill an auction room. There were at least thirty packets of real nylons unopened in the top drawer of the dresser, with names like Mink and Cocktail Kitty. Some of the older stockings were still sealed inside tissue-paper sheets within flat cardboard boxes, the manufacturer’s details embossed regally on the lids.

Lillian could not have discarded any of her clothes. As decades and styles changed, she seemed to have preserved and stored everything until she stopped buying new clothes some time in the early sixties. She had no contemporary clothes at all. So she must have worn old classic styles right up until she died. If she had done, the family resemblance was uncanny; Apryl rarely wore anything that didn’t look as if it had been made in the fifties.

Only the shoe collection disappointed. Apart from a pair of velvet pumps with Cuban heels and two pairs of silver sandals, Lillian had worn out all of her shoes. Heels were sheared down to wood and leather uppers were split or scarred with deep creases, all unsalvageable. It was as if her great-aunt had done a lot of walking, but very little in the way of replacing her footwear.

‘Mama, look, don’t worry, it’ll be OK. Everything will be fine. I’m just real tired. I’ve been up since five thirty. All this is so exciting and sad and I don’t know what. I still can’t get my head around the fact that Great-aunt Lillian lived here. Knightsbridge is like Park Avenue. With the money she had in the bank and the sale of this flat, we’re going to be rich, Mama. You hear me? Rich.’

‘Well we don’t know that, honey. You said it needed renovating.’

‘Mama, this is prime real estate. These places get snapped up right away. Even in this condition. It’s a penthouse, Mama.’ She heard the front-door bell trill like a little hammer going crazy inside an iron bell. ‘Mama, someone at the door. I gotta fly, and anyway my cell is nearly out of juice.’

‘Your cell? What are you calling me on your cell for? It’ll cost the earth.’

‘Love you, Mama. Gotta fly. Call you soon when I know more.’ Apryl air-kissed the phone then ran from the kitchen to the front door to let the head porter in.

‘I guess I really want to know what she was like. Especially at the end. I mean, she’s left all of this. In here . . .’ To unravel, she wanted to say. Lillian had not made it possible for her to just throw things out and sell up. It was as if the dead woman was enforcing an involvement in her crazy existence. Apryl sighed as she sat in the kitchen with the head porter. ‘I promise not to keep you long – I’m just beat myself. I’m so wrecked I’m starting to hallucinate. So maybe this isn’t the best time for me to start asking questions, but . . . some of this is kind of freaking me out.’ She couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. She coughed and took a slurp of her black tea; she usually drank coffee, but Lillian was all out.

Stephen was no longer on duty and had taken his tie off, but even though it was after ten, he still wore the white cotton shirt and grey trousers of his uniform, which suggested he didn’t have much life besides his service to the building. While Apryl sat at the table in the kitchen – the only room serviceable enough to entertain a guest – he leant against the counter and held the mug of tea she’d made for him.

He nodded. ‘It must be a lot to take in. I was thinking it might have been easier for you to deal with as you never knew Lillian. But of course, having not known her is probably just as taxing in a different way. You want to know her before you let this place go.’

‘That’s about the size of it. And already I’m seeing things here that remind me of me. If that makes any sense.’

Stephen smiled, as if in prelude to a confession. ‘It does. I noted a resemblance right away. In your eyes. But it’s ironic. Often the residents are closer to us porters at the end than they are to their own families.’

‘And I guess no one ever thinks of you guys.’

‘Oh, we don’t mind. We’re paid to do a job. But when you work in people’s homes for a long time, you can’t help becoming a part of their lives. Like family.’

‘You liked Lillian, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. The day porters did too. But I don’t think the night staff ever saw her. Not once.’

‘Why was that?’

He shrugged. ‘She always made sure she was home and indoors in plenty of time before it got dark.’ He could see Apryl was confused, and tried to elaborate. ‘It’s what happens when you spend a twelve-hour shift here. We never pry, but you just can’t help noticing things. And we’re paid to be observant.’ He was preparing her for something. She could see he was a man with impeccable manners and very professional, who didn’t want to speak out of turn, or be garrulous. Maybe it was against staff policy. But she was tired now and just wanted him to be straight with her. If Lillian never had visitors or friends, the staff at Barrington House were the people to talk to. It looked like the porters were all Lillian had at the end. And the very thought of a life recollected only by them made her morose again.

She gave Stephen a tired smile. ‘Please, Stephen. You can be candid. I just need something to go on before I hit the hay. My curiosity is killing me.’

He nodded. Looked at his feet. Ran his tongue over his gums. ‘Like I said before, she was very eccentric.’

‘But in what way, specifically? I mean, did she talk to herself out loud and—’

‘Yes. Yes she did. Half the time she lived in her own world. In her head. And she never seemed particularly happy when she was there.’

Apryl felt her mouth sag.

‘But there were often moments too when she was completely lucid. She was unfailingly gracious. She had beautiful manners, your aunt. Real quality. Though we never really passed more than the time of day with her, on her way out. Once every day. At eleven, like clockwork. But . . .’

‘Go on.’

Stephen’s smile was awkward. ‘It’s not often you see a woman wearing a hat these days. With a veil. But Lillian never went out without one. Or without her gloves. And only ever dressed in black. Like she was in mourning. She was quite the local celebrity. Everyone around here knew her. And took care of her. Local residents and shopkeepers and the cabbies would all bring her back when they found her wandering about confused.’

‘What do you mean, confused?’

Stephen shrugged. ‘She’d go out as right as rain, your aunt. But then get all upset and have to be brought home. Most of the time she’d perk up when she came within sight of the building. And eventually, if I could spare them, I had one of the porters follow her whenever she left the building. Or I’d go myself. She never went far, but never seemed to take the same route twice. She’d always turn up in a different place.’

‘It sounds terrible.’

Stephen shrugged, his expression helpless. ‘But what could we do? We’re not nurses.’

‘I wonder what was going on in her head.’

‘Before she set off she’d always say, “Well, it’s cheerio, Stephen. If I don’t see you again, take care my dear.” And she took the same bag with her. A small case and her black umbrella, as if she were going on a trip. But every day, she’d be back within a couple of hours. More than anything else we worried about her getting lost. Some of the cabbies would stop when they saw her and say, “Hop in, Lil, I’ll drop you home.” And if she was ready, she’d climb in and say, “I shan’t get any farther today. Not today. But I’ll try again tomorrow.” Same thing every time, without fail. They all said so. And they’d bring her back. In a way, I always thought it refreshing to know there’s still a sense of community, at least among the local workforce. They all knew your aunt Lillian.’

‘What about the flowers? There must be a thousand in that room.’

Stephen shrugged. ‘She never told me what they were for, or why she collected them. But she came home with them, for as long as I can remember. Roses every time. She was caught twice taking them from the front gardens of Chesterfield House in Mayfair. Fortunately, I know the head porter, so there wasn’t any trouble. But it could be awkward. She’d even get them out of bins, and walk out of florists and forget to pay.’

‘And how did she die? It says heart failure on the death certificate.’

Stephen wiped at his mouth. He was having difficulty meeting her eye. He tried twice and failed.

‘Please, Stephen. Tell me.’

‘She died in the back of a cab, Apryl. She’d had quite a fright out there. On one of her walks. A cabby saw her first. Really distressed. She had made it as far as Marble Arch too. The furthest I’d ever known her go, and that’s quite a distance for a woman of her age. But that day, she was different. You see, usually, when someone found her, she’d be talking to herself and striking at the air with her umbrella or cane. Nothing odd about that. We’d all seen her do it. Very involved in an argument with someone who wasn’t there. And usually this would happen, this agitation, just before she turned and headed for home. Or, as I said before, when she was picked up and escorted back here. But the morning she died, the driver said she looked ill. Really worn out. She was leaning against the railings of the park. Very pale and almost ready to keel over. She’d used up all her strength getting so upset about something. So he stopped and helped her into the cab. But she never broke out of the trance like she usually did. She seemed . . . to be in shock. Just wasn’t aware any longer of where she was, or where she was going. The driver put his foot down and phoned the main desk to tell us to call an ambulance. But she died on the way here. It looked to me like a massive stroke. That’s what I thought. And the oddest thing . . . well, she came out of her trance just before she died. As the cab entered the square. The driver saw her in the mirror. Upset. Really upset at the end. Well, afraid, you could say. Of something. Almost as if someone was sitting beside her.’

Apryl looked into the dregs of her tea. After a long, uncomfortable silence she spoke. ‘Wouldn’t a care home have been a better place for her?’

‘Yes, probably. But she did have a carer, and when she was here Lillian was fine. Eccentric, but capable and lucid and able to look after herself. She was quite a strong woman for her age. It was only when she went out – only when she left the building – that she . . . well, had a funny turn.’

Lillian could have been suffering from anything: Alzheimer’s, dementia. If only she and her mother had known. ‘Poor Aunty Lillian,’ she said.

But Stephen didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was preoccupied with his own thoughts. ‘But the strangest thing that day,’ he suddenly said, ‘was her bag.’ The head porter frowned at his shoes in puzzlement. ‘She had a plane ticket in there. To New York. Along with a passport that had been out of date for fifty years. It seemed she really was planning on leaving us for good that last time.’

After Stephen left, Apryl ate some pasta parcels with pesto she’d bought from the little store on Motcomb Street and then ran a bath. There was no shower, or even a shower attachment to fix to the cloudy steel faucet. So she sat on the little cushioned stool beside the tub and watched the thick cascade of water splash with a hollow sound against the worn enamel. It set off a whole series of clanging and gassy whooshing sounds behind the discoloured and patchy walls of the bathroom. Waiting for the tub to fill, she went and unpacked the few clothes she’d brought with her and put her vanity case on the dresser in Lillian’s bedroom.

She found herself looking for things to do. Trying to distract her mind from dwelling both on the prospect of sleeping alone in the apartment, and on what her great-aunt spent her time doing at night. The two end bedrooms had long been out of action and were just used as storage, so it was doubtful Lillian ever went in there other than to make deposits. The living room was never used for anything beside the delivery of fresh flowers to cover the dead flowers of the window shrine. That room was sacred to her aunt. And the furniture in the dining room was covered in dust sheets. There was no television or even a working radio in the apartment either. Earlier, she’d found an old broken radio set with a Bakelite casing, wrapped in newspaper and plunged deep inside a box of pewter tankards. But apart from that and a few books in the bedroom, none of them recent titles or publications, she couldn’t even begin to guess how her great-aunt occupied herself during so many nights indoors and alone. No wonder she talked to herself; Apryl had been there for a day and she was ready to do the same thing.

After her bath, in which her eyelids closed themselves three times and abandoned her to a doze – lasting until the water cooled – she made her way to the bedroom and shut the door. The bed linen under the ancient quilted eiderdown looked clean, but she couldn’t bring herself to climb beneath the sheets. On top of a wardrobe she found some blankets and made a temporary nest with them on top of the covers.

When she turned off the side light, the profound darkness of the room shocked her a little; made her pause before lying down. But she forced herself to quell her silliness; she was just too tired for it. In fresh underwear and a Social Distortion T-shirt, she curled into a fetal position facing the door, like she always did when sleeping in a strange place.

As she settled down, she listened to the purr of the occasional car passing below the window of the room, down in Lowndes Square. She cast her slowing thoughts out there, into London, rather than let them turn and begin exploring the apartment, reaching to the strange and cluttered rooms upon which a darkness and heavy silence had fallen.

Pulling her knees further up and into her stomach, she clasped her hands together and sandwiched them between her warm thighs, like she’d always done since childhood. And was immediately aware of herself slipping into a thick slumber, one that would last for hours, all night. Down she went, and away. At last her mind was still. Though the room beyond her closed eyelids was not.

She dismissed the rustle and the subtle padding of feet on the floor, moving swiftly from the door to the foot of the bed. It was only her roommate, Tony. Tiptoeing the way he did, in a kind of hasty walk to fetch something he had left in her room earlier. Too tired to open her eyes, in a very distant and shrinking part of her consciousness she knew he would be gone soon. Gone.

What did he want now, then, standing at the foot of the bed and leaning over her? She felt the long presence extending across her feet, the indentation of a knee at the foot of the mattress.

She snapped awake in a panic, sweat cooling on her forehead. Utterly disoriented, she stared into total darkness. Sat up. Said, ‘What do you want?’ Which went unanswered and left her unable for a few seconds to understand where she was or how she came to be there.

Until her memory supplied a few vital details. There was no Tony here, no roommate. She was in London. In the new apartment. Lillian’s. Then who . . .

With one hand she smashed about the bedside table looking for the lamp. Found it. Groped around for the switch. Whimpered. Clambered onto her knees, her body feeling painfully vulnerable while exposed to the standing figure so close by in the darkness. Her fingers found the old ceramic fixture with the clunky switch and clicked it. The heavy base of the lamp rocked on the table. Then suddenly the brownish room flooded with pale light.

No one there. She was alone in the room.

Her every fibre and sinew relaxed with relief. She gulped at the air like she had just sprinted up a flight of stairs. It was the drapes wafting in a draught, or the old floorboards correcting themselves. Like they do in old buildings you are unaccustomed to.

She put her face in her hands. Shock drained from her, to be replaced with a blush of foolishness.

But the experience of such acute alienation, and the terror of intrusion, shook her sufficiently to make her try and sleep more lightly, by sitting up, with the bedside lamp on. And she left it shining all night. Something she hadn’t done since the first and only time she had watched The Exorcist.

SIX

Some time after midnight, the residents stopped bothering Seth, and the smell of sulphur and old smoke on the upper floors of the west block dispersed during his third investigation, as he hunted for its source in the rubbish stores. But the inertia that prevented him from concentrating on the Evening Standard increased once he was back behind his desk. His head was soon dropping across his chest every few minutes. Which was odd; he never usually dozed until around 2 a.m. at the earliest. Must have been the virus his body was busily cultivating into something more than just a temperature and scratch at the back of his throat.

He decided to nap for a few minutes. Then he’d wake up refreshed and able to keep his eyes open, at least for another few hours.

He fell into a deep sleep.

It lasted for what felt like a few seconds, before a swish of movement nearby and the darkening of a shadow across his closed eyelids woke him.

Seth sat up, alert.

The reception area was empty.

He shivered, and then relaxed back into his chair.

And dozed off again.

But awoke a moment later. Because this time he was certain a face was pressed against the glass of the front doors opposite his desk. But when his eyes snapped open and he lurched forward in his chair, noisily clearing his throat, all he could see in the dark glass was his own reflection peering back: a solemn, thin face with dark eyes.

Unsettled, he went downstairs and smoked two cigarettes and drank a cup of coffee. But despite his best attempts to stay awake, within moments of returning to his chair behind the reception desk his chin began to drop. And he slipped off a ledge and eased into a welcoming depth of sleep.

Until once again he heard the brush of clothing right next to his ear. And a voice. Someone said, ‘Seth.’ And then again, ‘Seth.’

Sitting bolt upright in the chair, his heart thumping, he peered about. Stood up, already mumbling an apology as if expecting to find a resident in a dressing gown leaning over the desk. But there was no one around. He’d imagined it. But how? The mouth had been right against his ear; he was sure he’d even felt the speaker’s cool breath.

The glare of the white electric lights in reception bruised the back of his eyes.

Still uneasy, he returned to his chair and turned the television on. Clawed at his face with two hands and shook himself. But it was as if he had no choice and there was no controlling his mind’s insistence on slumber. Or on the dream that came with it.

From the corner of the wood, a small figure emerged. Wearing a grey coat with the hood pulled over its face, it just watched Seth as he stood in the stone chamber with his hands clutching the cold bars of the gate that kept him locked inside. Stepping from one foot to the other, Seth swallowed and secretly wished the figure would not disappear or pass by.

Trying to smile, he found he had no control over his facial muscles; it must have looked as if he were about to cry. He stopped trying to smile, and waved. Embarrassed when the hooded figure never so much as moved, he let his hand drop to his side and wondered whether he should crouch in a corner and never bother anyone again. That’s why he was here.

The figure moved forward away from the trees. Slowly, it wandered through the long grass, avoiding big clumps of dark wet nettles, until it reached the edge of the stone steps. The urns upon them held dry brown stalks. The figure looked up at him. Inside the hood, Seth could see no face.

‘What’s ya name?’ the boy asked.

‘Seth.’

‘Why you in there?’

Seth looked at his feet. He paused to swallow, then looked up and shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

‘I know why. You got scared and crazy. Same as me. You’ll be in there for ages. And then some place much worse.’

Inside the stone prison, Seth began to feel something cold skitter about his stomach. His skin goosed and his vision flicked about. It was hard to breathe.

‘Makes you shit-scared, don’t it?’ the boy asked.

Tears burned Seth’s face and he gripped the bars of the gate so tightly that all the feeling disappeared from his hands. He kept squeezing even though he knew it would leave bruises. ‘It’s too late,’ he said, in a thin voice that broke around the edges.

‘It ain’t,’ the hooded boy said with defiance. ‘I can get you out.’

‘But we’ll get in trouble,’ Seth replied, and hated himself for saying that.

‘Who gives a shit? And anyway, no one thinks of you. Not no more. You’re forgotten.’

Seth tried to say no but knew the hooded boy was telling the truth.

‘Do yous want to come out?’ the boy asked, rummaging in a deep pocket.

Snuffling back his tears, Seth nodded.

From his coat pocket the boy withdrew a large iron key. But Seth never really looked at the key; he couldn’t take his eyes from the boy’s hand. It was purple and yellow and just the sight of it made him feel sick. The skin had melted and then gone hard again. Some of the fingers were stuck together.

Crooked fingers folded around the key’s large butterfly-shaped handle and turned it in the lock of the gate. The mechanism made a groaning sound before the barred portal swung open.

Too frightened to move his bare feet from the marble floor of the chamber, Seth remained inside for a while, shivering. The boy retreated to the bottom of the stairs and looked up at Seth. He put his hands back inside the pockets of his snorkel coat and assumed his usual posture: relaxed but expectant.

The sky over the wood turned dark. Either night was coming or the clouds brooded closer to the treetops.

The hooded boy began to look over his shoulder and watch the woods. Seth instinctively knew he had to hurry and make up his mind. Did he stay or leave? It was as if another much bigger gate had been opened in the world outside the chamber and if he wasn’t quick enough it might close again and leave him stranded. And together for too long in the same place, they could attract attention. He had a sense they might be spotted at any minute by someone in the trees.

Seth ventured out through the gate and into the grass on weak legs unused to exercise. He thought of his limbs as spindly sticks of vegetable left to go soft in the bottom of a fridge.

He stood in the grass and marvelled at how the stalks felt on the soles of feet so used to stone, at the pluck of the breeze against his naked skin, and at his excitement at the sight of a path that led into the thick, deciduous foliage of the wood.

The hooded boy moved toward the trees. Anxiously, Seth followed.

From the edge of the wood, he took a last look over his shoulder at the chamber and its little yellow light. Further up the path, the boy encouraged Seth to follow by doing nothing more than waiting and staring at him until they stood by each other on the path inside the damp wood.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked the hooded boy.

‘Away from this place.’

Seth swallowed and tasted panic.

‘If yous go back we won’t be able to get you out again. Yous’ll stay in there. It always happens. There are lots of people trapped. I see ’em all the time. They don’t know how to escape.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Only a bit of yous is still alive, Seth. The rest of yous is here, always. And when you die you’ll come back to this place again. For a long time.’ The hooded head nodded in the direction of the marble cage. ‘That’s what happens. Then yous get the darkness, when you can’t see nuffin’. Or remember much. Then it’s like you’re in the sea at night. Cold and drowning and no one comes to help yous.’

Nervously, Seth began to take short steps back and forth.

‘I’m your mate, Seth,’ the boy said, in a more decisive, grown-up way. ‘You’re lucky we came. Yous can trust us.’

‘I know. I know. Thanks. Really, thanks.’ Seth felt better and grateful, but awkward too. He wanted to ask so many questions but didn’t want to annoy his new friend who’d let him out of the chamber. ‘Who . . . what I mean is, you said we and they?’

As if he had not heard, the hooded boy continued to move along the path away from the chamber. Overhanging branches and wet bushes whipped against the nylon of his coat. Seth continued to follow until they were moving faster and had gone so far from the chamber he wondered if he’d ever find it again. Dew soaked him and nettles stung his shins.

‘Don’t be scared, Seth. It’s just strange at first. Everything will look strange to start with. But after a while it’s OK. I was only ten when I got stuck. I was stuck in a concrete pipe near a playground.’

‘Really, a pipe?’

‘Then I was done in with fireworks, by me mates.’ The hooded boy slowed down. He took his hands out of his pockets and Seth saw a flash of deformed joint and purple flesh before the long sleeves fell down to cover his fingertips. ‘Now you’re out of that place you’re gonna see things as they really are, Seth. When people like you and me are on the outside of the places we get put, we see it all. Then we do what we were supposed to do.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. And you’re going to paint what you see. They’s gonna show you how. You’s gonna be brilliant, mate. The best. They told me. And then you’ll do stuff for us too, like.’

‘Yes!’ Seth said, suddenly excited, although it was not clear to him what he was going to do.

‘It’ll be really scary at the start. But you’ll never want to go back. I never did once I was let out of that pipe.’

Seth nodded, enjoying the new sense of liberation he felt outside the chamber. Yes, there was a real difference now; a real freedom he could not properly define. It was unformed but its new presence made him shiver with pleasure. It was something he’d waited most of his life for and then forgotten about. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt enthusiastic about anything.

Soon, the wood started to thin around them. The air became colder and the sky lightened to a watery grey. ‘This is my bit,’ the hooded boy said. ‘I wanted to show yous where I got stuck. Most people go back to a place when they die, like I’s told you. And can’t get out. Till those places go all dark. And you don’t want to be in the darkness, mate. Nah-ah. I seen it. That’s the end of everyfing. But we’s going to show you how to move around all the others down there, mate. They’s fucked. Don’t mean you have to be, like.’

They emerged from the wood and onto a wide plain of waste ground. Sparse, struggling grass grew from mud that pulled at his bare feet and made him slip about. In the distance, to their left, Seth could see a cluster of sheds with plastic sheets on the roofs and polythene windows that were ripped. Between the sheds were allotments grown over with weeds. Straight ahead of them, he could see a playground.

They walked towards it. Every few feet they would pass a coil of dried dog shit and shards of glass from smashed bottles. The hooded boy started to skip and hum to himself. He seemed pleased with the way things were going.

In the playground there was a slide and four chain-link swings with plastic seats hanging from an iron frame, and a roundabout made from rusty sheet metal with wooden bars across the top. It had been solidly anchored into a concrete square. The bright paint on all of the apparatus had chipped down to brownish metal and then been varnished with the grease from many little hands. There was a giant sandpit full of broken glass and slugs. Part of a smashed plastic doll languished in a rain puddle. Its head was cracked. Seth could see a dark hole through its curly blonde hair. The wound looked real. An eye was missing too. The violence of the thing made him shudder. Beside the doll were a few pages from a porn magazine. Glancing at it, Seth saw a woman with her legs open and one finger between her big purple lips.

‘Shit hole, ain’t it,’ the boy said.

Seth nodded and followed the boy out of the playground until they came to two enormous tower blocks rising so far into the clouds the height of them made him squint. There were no lights on and they looked derelict. Graffiti covered the walls up to the height of a child and there was rubbish blowing about the pathways between the buildings.

Seth looked at the things around his feet – crisp packets, cans and tins with faded labels, a tyre, something from a car engine, a smashed television and a pair of tights that had been soaked by the rain and dried out so many times it took him a while to work out what the crispy thing with long tentacles was. The remnants of a child’s scribblings, drawn with coloured chalk – pink, yellow and blue – had stained some of the paving slabs. The rain hadn’t managed to wash it away. And it must have just rained. All the concrete was wet and there were still some puddles on the pavement. Seth assumed the place was always damp. He shivered. Wrapped his arms around his ribs. Even in summer it would be horrible. The closer they got to the buildings the stronger the smell of urine and bleach became.

As they walked between the giant tower blocks, a gust of wind whipped between the walls and made Seth cringe from the cold. When he looked up, the buildings seemed to be tilting and ready to fall down on him. He put a hand against a pebbled wall for support.

Next they came to a small, brackish stream that dissected the endless, flat, dull landscape and its struggling grass full of excrement and glass.

The mud of the banks and bed of the stream were bright orange and smelled of the spaces beneath kitchen sinks where plastic bottles are kept. Under Seth’s feet, a lethargic trickle of water moved between a rusty paint tin and a broken pram that had been made for a child to wheel its dolls around with. Purple canvas hung in rags from the white plastic frame. Further down the stream, Seth could see a large grey sewer pipe. Inside the mouth the concrete was stained orange. He looked down at the hooded boy, who nodded without speaking. What a place to die.

They crossed the stream. As far as he could see the view never changed: disused allotments, empty playgrounds, litter, and tower blocks dotted about the stagnant plain. It went on for ever.

‘There’s toilets too,’ the hooded boy said, without turning his head to look at Seth. ‘I never showed you them. And in some of the flats I found people.’

‘They trapped too?’

The boy nodded.

Seth shuddered. ‘Can’t you get them out?’

The boy shrugged. Then he said, ‘Nah. They’re done for. I found a mongol kid with a plastic bag on his head that he couldn’t get off. He couldn’t understand anything I said to him. And there was an old lady who breathed in fumes from a boiler. She was just lying on the lino in some sick. And I found a man too that I didn’t like. He was sitting in a chair by a gas fire and asked me to look at his pee pee.’

‘Can we go? I’m cold,’ Seth said.

‘Yeah. Just wanted to show you my old place.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Most people can only see these places in the dreams they forget in the morning. And when they die it’s too late. They come back and wait for the darkness.’

They walked back the way they had come, towards the wood. ‘Who got you out of here?’ was Seth’s final question as they left the waste ground.

‘A man,’ the hooded boy replied. ‘He’s an artist. Like you. And some people you know done bad things to him.’

‘Who?’

‘He’s gonna help yous. He’s your mate. Yous’ll meet him, Seth. Soon. But you’s got plenty to do for us first.’

Sitting up with a start, it took Seth a moment to realize where he was. Looking around him, he saw familiar things: the semicircular desk that he sat at with the house phone and the metal panel for the intruder and fire alarms connected to every apartment, a portable radio, the yellow walls of the spacious reception area, fake plants, an orderly pile of Tatlers and London Magazines on a cane coffee table, and the security monitors on the desk before him, glowing yellow-green. Anxious, he expected someone to shout at him, or at least be standing before his desk shaking their head because he had fallen asleep on duty.

There was no one there. Both lift shafts were quiet behind their sliding metal doors. The fire exits at the foot of each staircase were closed. The front doors were locked. No one had been into reception and seen him sleeping.

Glancing at the clock, he could see it was nearly four o’clock. He’d been asleep for over three hours. The ache in his lower back attested to time spent in the same cramped, seated position. He breathed out and straightened his tie. Rotating his head slowly, he heard a crunch inside his neck before his muscles warmed and became flexible again. Then he stretched his legs. Both knees had gone stiff from hanging over the front edge of the chair while it was reclined.

He had never slept so soundly at work before. Not to wake up for hours was new, unthinkable. And that dream again. He recalled bits of it; remembered enough of it to know he’d dreamt of that place again. The stone chamber, the mausoleum, set on the edge of the wood. But there were differences. The boy with the hood and the burnt hand hadn’t been in the first dream.

It was that kid who’d been watching the pub; his subconscious had inserted the figure. With remarkable clarity, Seth remembered what it was like to be a child again. It had all come back in the dream. And he had been crying with frustration as he slept. Against his cheeks the salt tracks cracked when he yawned. He almost wanted to sleep again to recapture the exhilaration of escape, the comfort of a new companion, the anticipation of adventure.

But he began to shiver and could barely swallow. His throat felt peeled. His face burned with fever. He wanted to lie on the floor and die. A lingering sense of duty made him scan the monitors. Glancing over the bank of screens, he could see no one in the black-and-white street outside, or in the mews that ran behind the ornamental garden, or in the basement garage.

And then he paused, and looked to his left. Sniffed. Stood up. Hastily smelled the arm of his jacket, and then both of his hands. They stank – of sulphur, maybe gunpowder, and the thick greasy smoke that belches from open cooking fires. He reeked of it, and so did his desk and the reception area, all the way down to the lift doors.

SEVEN

There were no mirrors in the bedroom, as far as Apryl could tell in the thin morning light struggling through the parted drapes, so she went to the bathroom and checked the sills of the window behind the blinds and the little cupboard that contained floor rags and a bottle of disinfectant – but still no mirrors. So she rifled about in the two end bedrooms for another five minutes. But there still wasn’t a single mirror to be found.

She returned to the master bedroom and sifted through the boxes of cosmetics for a hand mirror. Nothing. But she noted a vacant space at the back of the dresser, between two wooden uprights, in which she was sure an oval mirror must have once been fixed.

Curious, she returned to the bathroom and found four small holes in the wall above the sink. Drilled holes with brown rawlplugs still pressed inside. Holes for screws that once held a bathroom cabinet in place. A cabinet that most likely featured mirrored doors.

On the wall behind the bath, she noticed two more holes. These were wider, for longer screws that went deeper, to support a larger mirror. It too had been removed. And yet the room had not been decorated or newly painted, so the mirror and cabinet had not been removed in order to modernize or brighten the place with a lick of paint or some gleaming tiles. The watery yellow walls, blotched with clouds of dried damp, had remained unchanged for a long time.

Back out in the hallway, she took a closer look at the long walls reaching down to the bedrooms. Their surfaces warranted nothing more than a cursory inspection the day before because they made her feel uneasy. It was the stains and the worn paper peeling off in places that affected her. Had Lillian been so unwell, so incapable for so long? It was hard for Apryl to accept, considering how precise and neurotically tidy her granny Marilyn had been, and how elegant and beautifully groomed Lillian appeared in the photographs.

But the mystery of the missing mirrors insinuated itself uncomfortably through her mind when she noticed a total absence of any other decorative feature on the walls in the apartment. Not a single picture frame or ornament in the hallway. Or in the kitchen or the three bedrooms. She hadn’t noticed that the day before. And now, the closer she looked at the ageing paper in the cluttered hall and at the disorderly bedrooms, she noticed further evidence of screws and steel fittings that had once held paintings, mirrors and ornaments that her great-aunt had taken down at some point and removed from the apartment. And she was certain that when she searched the boxes and cases in the two storage bedrooms she had seen no watercolours, no seascapes, no hunting trophies, no oil paintings, or whatever it was with which Lillian and Reginald had once furnished the walls of their home.

They had been removed, not merely taken down from the walls, but eradicated from the apartment itself. Stephen said Lillian had been a hoarder, that she had thrown nothing away during his time as head porter. Which left the storage cage under the building as the only possible repository for the pictures and mirrors. Frowning, Apryl fingered the small black iron key attached to the same ring as her front-door keys.

‘And the Mrs Lillian throw the nothing away,’ said Piotr. He sweated so much. His suit looked unbearably tight and his face was pink and moist. She thought of a hot-dog sausage, with its reddish meat bursting through the membrane of skin. And he never stopped talking with a forced jollity devoid of humour or wit. Her polite smile began to hurt her face as he irritated her with so many questions, usually about money, with no pause for an answer. ‘And maybe the Mrs Lillian keeps the gold here, no? Maybe one of the boxes is full of the money, eh? Then you don’t need the lottery tickets, no?’

And down to the basement they went. To what the staff called the ‘cages’. Beneath the millionaires’ world of dark carpets and teak doors, of heavy drapes and marble floors, they entered a netherworld, coexisting below the luxury and silence of the world that it served above.

Down here the walls were of painted cement and the floor was rough and stained with oil and scuffing; wires and rubber-coated cables swung in loops from the ceiling. African cleaners moved slowly with buckets and detergent bottles, their skin coal-black but sheening purple under the lights. Steel doors warned of high-voltage dangers; a vast boiler wheezed and smouldered and sent a ripple through the concrete under the thin soles of her Converse sneakers. And then there were the cages. A labyrinth of black mesh cubicles filled with bicycles, boxes, and looming objects concealed by dust sheets. One cage for each flat. She hoped Piotr would leave her alone once the cage was open.

‘Ah, here is your one.’

More boxes, and long sheets draped over packing cases. There was just enough room to stand inside the cage with the metal door open. ‘Thank you, Piotr. I’ll be fine now.’

‘But you might need the help to take the boxes, no?’

‘I’ll be fine. Really. I’ll swing by the desk if I need a hand. But thanks.’ She had to repeat this three times as he hovered, too close, sweating and smiling and flitting his small eyes past her to the contents of the cage. When he finally waddled away, wiping the sweat from his forehead, she wondered where the thrill of discovery had gone. Just looking at all the stuff made her weary. It was like moving house, only a hundred times worse. Because although these things legally belonged to her, she didn’t feel like they were really hers, and there was so much, and she didn’t know what to do with any of it, or if any of it was valuable. A reckless part of her suggested she just junk the lot and then go out sightseeing.

Starting from the edge, she began to lift the sheets and was soon amongst piles of aged drapes and musty bed linen, old-fashioned skis and tennis racquets in cases, fishing tackle, tartan blankets, a wicker picnic hamper, two old tea sets, tarnished silver trophies and six pairs of wellington boots. Beneath and behind all of this she found the missing mirrors. Eight of them of various sizes and shapes, packed in brown paper, neatly tied with string, and carefully stowed away.

And within flat wooden cases with the hinges so old and corroded they were mostly dust, she found the paintings that once adorned Lillian and Reginald’s walls. Seascapes and line drawings of Grecian figures, lithographs and RAF squadron plaques. Then there was the largest picture. The one at the very back she reached last of all, in the early afternoon, when her stomach burned with hunger and a litre bottle of Evian rolled empty at her feet. Her discomfort was immediately forgotten the moment she unveiled the painting and was confronted by an image of Great-aunt Lillian and Great-uncle Reginald, depicted in their glamorous prime by a skilled hand. This was the first time she had seen them together in colour. For a few seconds Apryl stared without blinking.

It was a full-length portrait. Lillian’s beautiful, imperious face stared out, as if unimpressed with the sordid location now inflicted upon her eternal image. Ice-blonde hair was pulled back beneath a sparkling tiara, and her forehead was porcelain-smooth. A perfect nose, the thin arches of her clipped brows, and full red lips completed a composition of arresting beauty. White satin gloves shone to her elbows, a necklace glittered around a princess’s neck, and a long white dress hugged her wonderful lines and curves. But it was the arctic eyes that astonished Apryl. It hurt to look into them; it was impossible not to. Eyes filled with curiosity and intelligence. Passion, too. But above all else, they were vulnerable. Deeply.

She attributed an impending tragedy to the figures, knowing these qualities in Lillian would flounder into a slow madness after her beloved husband’s death. It was as if the painter had been commissioned just in time to capture the last of her extraordinary intelligence and beauty before it became something else entirely, until she would eventually suffer a confused and frightened death in the back of a hackney cab.

And Apryl struggled to believe there had ever been a more handsome and distinguished man in uniform, standing beside such a society beauty. A hint of prettiness in his eyes and long, dark lashes were offset by the masculine angles of jaw and pronounced cheekbones. The slight bump of a nose that had been broken and healed crooked was an imperfection not detracting from his beauty but adding the same character as a duelling scar. While flecks of silver speckled his temples, most of his hair was as black as fresh oil.

Their hands were together. Fingers entwined. A sudden glare of intimacy that Apryl’s eyes were pulled toward. Somehow incongruous in such a formal pose, but not inappropriate. A sign of devotion they were unable to contain even at this moment of their immortalizing.

A lump came to her throat. She whispered ‘Sorry’ to their faces. Sorry for rummaging through their private possessions. For planning on selling these things they had collected together and once cherished. She felt like an intruder, a trespasser, a vulgar little urchin with dusty hands and smeared cheeks where she had wiped at her hair falling from beneath the red headscarf.

Their home and its furnishings, most of its valuables and bric-a-brac, all from a different time and world, would have to be sold to the highest bidder. But not this painting, and the elegant dress-mirror, nor her great-aunt’s clothes that she would model before it. They were going back to the States, so the poor branch of this family could marvel at these once proud and beautiful people who shared their blood.

Outside, night had fallen early, at about four o’clock, in a dense ocean of black, and now the rain pattered against the windows of the apartment. Inside, the radiators and pipes glowed too hot to touch and banished the chill into the corners and near the windows of Lillian’s bedroom. Apryl had warmed her bones with another hot bath and a spicy Lebanese takeout, but at the prospect of dressing in Lillian’s clothes she’d been edgy with excitement, like a young girl given permission to play with her mother’s make-up. This was her time. Tired after a day in the basement rescuing another weight of memorabilia to assess and discard, she would fill her evening with the styles of the past. And in this solemn place she was a bright little ghost, come back to prepare herself for evenings and days long gone.

By the time the clock chimed ten she had tried on the dark suits, sleeveless dresses, and sparkly gowns, overlaid by fur coats and complemented with hats and their smoky veils that instantly made her eyes mysterious in a way no eye shadow could. It was uncanny how they fitted. Tight, but not uncomfortably so, over her trim hips and small athletic bust.

She covered the bed with tailored tweed, wool, cashmere, silk, satin and clattering wooden hangers. Put her hair up in the easiest forties’ victory roll she could manage with the hairpins from one of Lillian’s porcelain pots. Then creamed, brushed and powdered her pretty face and upturned nose with her own cosmetics, and found herself unable to resist a dab of Lillian’s scent from a crystal stopper on her neck and upon each pale wrist.

In Cuban-heeled shoes or glittering silver sandals, depending on the outfit – a fitted suit with box jacket, a floor-length ball gown with diaphanous shawl – she strode, pranced, pirouetted and sat with affected poise before the oval mirror she’d rescued from the cage, while the drab backdrop of an old woman’s bedroom formed a brown murk around her reflected silhouette.

Against the muscular curve of her calf muscles her aunt’s nylons gleamed in the thin light. Sheer as cobwebs but slick as glass, making her legs look more aerodynamic than the imitations she bought back home ever could. With nails red as clots of blood, cheekbones rouged and eyes dollish in the false lashes she found in a drawer that also contained long opera gloves, she twirled and danced a three-step jive. She was transformed, and her great-aunt was suddenly alive all around her, and inside her.

Transported by her finery, she took no account of the time and gave no further thought to the heaving of boxes, the calling of antique dealers, and the complications of dispensing with real estate that would come in the days ahead. She emptied her mind of all but the atmosphere and imagery of the past so suddenly filling her imagination and lightening her soul. In the painting that Stephen had hung above the cluttered dresser, her great-aunt and uncle looked down in silence.

All this excitement . . . until she was forced to stop in her tracks. To pause and do a double take like a flapper in a silent film. In the mirror she saw her face suddenly seize with shock at the movement behind her reflection.

Quick in motion, a rushing forward from the gloom. Intangible apart from its thinness and the suggestion of something reddish where one would have expected a face to be.

The brief sight of this form in the polished mirror made her turn and cringe like a cat expecting a blow.

And when she took a second look into the mirror she saw nothing in the dour light but the wardrobes on either side of a rumpled bed. And herself, petrified and alone.

Breath rushed back into her body and her balance returned. She stood up straight and felt ice crystals shiver and then melt all over her warm skin. She swallowed the tightness in her throat.

It had been nothing. The faint glow of the stained lampshades had fooled her into seeing something in the mirror where there was nothing. But still she teetered across the room and hastily departed, running down the hall to the front door, where she paused, breathing hard.

In this long-silent place of shadow and clutter, had someone been hiding all along, crouched down on thin limbs, with something red fastened tight about a face that only a nightmare would cherish?

EIGHT

Three other passengers on the bus were aware of him talking to himself. They pretended to be unmoved by his muttering presence. Embarrassed by the realization that his inner voice had become audible, Seth stopped whispering and looked out of the bus window instead, peering down to the street to keep his mind distracted from its inward meanderings.

What was happening to him? It was hard to say. Hard to remember what he was like before this. The normal business of humanity had begun to appear strange to him. Alien. He wondered if he was more enlightened now, or just losing his mind.

The entire front of his face burned and the skin was tender. In his joints, any movement created a painful grinding of the ball in the socket. Every muscle felt like it was being assaulted by a yellow acid that responded angrily to exertion. A pulsing headache forced his eyes into a squint or closed them entirely near strong light. And the further he travelled from his room the worse he felt.

Below in the street the beggars sat, their legs under dirty white blankets on the cold pavement; but at least they seemed capable of salvation, of a second chance, when he had finally been consigned to an incurable demise, a disintegration both physical and mental. That’s what it felt like. A long and tangled series of disappointments, habits, unfortunate choices and periods of introspection had brought him to this.

He couldn’t stop his thoughts now; they raged and changed direction and reappeared unexpectedly like a bush fire. And it was as if the last vestige of his former self only survived to impotently monitor the transformation.

Furious with himself, he tried to fathom why he had left the Green Man. Fever had prevented him from getting more than a few hours of fitful rest between his shifts at Barrington House. And every time he woke during the day, he’d found his sick, sweating body had turned the bed into a cold swamp, while the sunlight filtering through the thin curtains of his room seared his eyes and made him groan and then cry out with a pillow held over his face. If he kicked the blankets off for relief from the heat, he would quickly freeze and be forced to pull the damp bed linen back over his cramped body. Eventually, he’d risen at three in the afternoon to gulp water and swallow painkillers. Perhaps then, some deluded sense of duty, some sad parody of a Protestant work ethic, had obliged him to dress and leave his room for work.

But it was something more than that. He felt almost compelled to go back. As if some important business connected to his bizarre dreams and Mrs Roth was to be concluded. Or maybe his judgement was now so impaired that he couldn’t account for his actions at all. It was possible.

After alighting from the bus, he trudged from Hyde Park Corner to Lowndes Square. Sweat covered his forehead and re-soaked the back of his shirt and jumper. There was so much cloudy liquid leaking out of his pores even the lining of his overcoat was sodden by the time he pulled himself up the back stairs of the building. Each footstep hurt his head and jarred his lower back; his breathing was ragged and painful in his hot lungs, yet still he smoked himself nauseous.

‘Ahh,’ he said, and put his hands over his hot ears when Piotr appeared.

‘Today, you would not believe what happened. There will be the big trouble. The Jorge was out driving when he should have been here. I cannot be responsible for the building with him gone so long . . .’

Seth ducked into the stairwell and fled down to the staffroom, clutching his head and the fragile swollen cargo inside. Meningitis. Maybe the tissues of his mind were inflamed and pressing against the inner walls of his skull. Piotr’s voice chased him down the stairs: ‘And he get paid for this driving. When it say in our contract that we cannot maker the money outsider the building. It is not fair. Why is he allowed . . .’

He could die in that chair behind the semicircular desk tonight. Maybe the dreams were the prelude to a coma. Yes, he’d driven his mind to the point of extinction; slowly unravelled himself until he realized there was no point to his existence, so nature was kicking in to relieve the species of a burden. He giggled and then sniffed.

In the staffroom Seth stripped down to his pants and socks and washed his body with cold water from the sink. Using paper towels he then dried himself under his arms, around his neck and in the small of his back. By the time he’d dressed in his uniform – grey polyester trousers, a synthetic white shirt, a pullover, tie, and navy blue blazer – his body was slick with sweat again.

He turned the lights off and lay on the small couch beside the water cooler. Sipping a hot lemon drink full of paracetamol, he waited for his shift to begin.

Over the next few hours his illness allowed him to do nothing but exist inside it. He rocked back and forth in his chair with a hot face clasped in both hands. The bright lights of reception burned his eyes and the gurgling radiators threatened to desiccate his body. Covered in his overcoat, he passed in and out of consciousness.

But just after midnight, Seth became aware of a presence in the communal areas of the building. As if locked in with him for the night, someone seemed to be out there, flitting between floors, pointlessly running up and down the stairwells and taking short, inconclusive rides in the lifts. Like a bored, restless child might do after gaining access to a private building.

Half an hour later, he struggled from his chair to investigate the most recent noise close to his desk: a swish of clothing and the bumping of quick tiny feet. Most of what he had heard when half asleep seemed too distant to be of pressing concern, occurring far off and upstairs. But the most recent sounds raced across reception and past his desk until a creak and whump of the fire doors leading to the west block staircase brought the commotion to an end.

Pursuing the noise into the stairwell, he heard the faint sound of running feet retreat up one floor, and then stop. He went up to investigate.

The flats on both the first and second floors of the west wing were empty. One apartment was for sale, and the tenants of the others were overseas, so there should have been no one up there for any reason he could think of. It now appeared that somebody was.

Allowances had to be made for the presence: wind moving through the air risers; a maid or a nurse from the upper floors – there were two he knew of – wandering about to smoke a cigarette or to make a call from a mobile phone; or maybe it was a resident coming downstairs only to find they had forgotten a wallet and returning to their apartment.

Above him, at the foot of the next staircase, a light in the ceiling flickered. But everything else was the same as it always had been at this time of night. Or was it? There was a smell. Again. Faint, but undeniably present, and growing stronger the further he investigated. Walking around the corridor and sniffing, he noticed a trace of sulphur in the hall. It was as if someone had not long struck a match. A hint of smoke, too, in the way it clung to the clothes of one recently in the presence of a bonfire. And something else: a cooking odour. Yes, a kind of chargrilled, meaty smell like roasting animal fat. The same thing he’d smelled up by flat sixteen last night. ‘What the fuck?’

In front of each door he passed on his ascent Seth sniffed at the letter flaps to determine whether anyone was inside the apartments cooking meat. But the odours were stronger in the middle of each of the landings and virtually nonexistent near the apartment doors. It was as if someone passing through the building was leaving a scent.

The stairwell above had fallen silent, and lacking the strength to go any higher he walked back down to the ground floor and sat behind his desk. Unable to keep his eyes open because of the painful pressure behind his face, he closed them. And fell into a deep sleep.

A glance at the clock told him that it was shortly after half past one when the disturbance began again. This time it was more insistent. From behind his desk he heard the west block lift click, groan and whirr into life. Up it ascended, through the dark shaft to the higher floors.

Someone had summoned it from above. Seth glanced at the metal panel beneath the lip of the desk. A red light moved behind the digits until it showed that the lift had stopped at the eighth floor of the west wing. Flat seventeen had been empty for four months, since Mr and Mrs Howard-Broderick had moved to their apartment in New York. Flat sixteen, he knew well enough, had been empty for half a century.

From his chair he watched the illuminated panel. Observed the lift descend. Floor by floor, from the eighth down towards the ground floor. His floor. Right where he was waiting.

With a hydraulic wheeze the lift slowed, then settled with a clunk on the ground floor. The door remained shut.

Gingerly, Seth moved out from behind his desk and walked across reception. He peered through the little window in the outer door of the lift. And saw nothing but the mirrored rear wall. Anxious the inner doors might suddenly slide apart as he peered through the little glass square, he stepped back and pressed the button to open the door.

The carriage was empty. He saw nothing more than his own pale face peering back from the mirrored interior. He sniffed and winced. Once again he could smell smoke and burnt fat, pungent inside the lift, even worse than it had been in the stairwell.

He closed the outer door and shut his eyes. The brief exertion had worn him out. He was too ill to care about a bad smell and a faulty lift. The virus had returned with vigour and these scant movements felt like they had nearly killed him. He was barely able to stand, and clung to the railing as he staggered down to the staffroom to gulp chilled water from the cooler.

But relief was still some way off. After he returned to the desk and slumped into the leather chair it was as if the nocturnal disturbances were only just beginning.

At two in the morning, for the second time that night, the lift in the west wing clanged to a halt on the ground floor. But this time it wasn’t empty.

Dizzy and blinking, Seth stood up and leant on the desk with his elbows. Squinting through a migraine that travelled through his head in waves, he saw something crawl out of the lift carriage on a number of legs he couldn’t count. Only as it scuttled near to his desk did he recognize the shrunken face of the thing to be that of Mrs Shafer.

Covered in a vast silken kimono, the bulk of her body traversed the carpet with a surprising swiftness. The sack-like head rested on the tabletop of her back, dwarfing her shoulders. Clumsily pinned under a tapestry of scarves, her hair was wet. Tendrils of it glistened on her forehead and temples where a few pins had dislodged. ‘How many times do we have to ask before the job is done properly?’ Her voice was on the verge of a scream. ‘They’ve been on the roof time and time again, and still we can’t get a picture. Are these men not trained?’

She’d made this complaint before. Behind her on the carpet a slug trail of moisture leaked from her abdomen. It reeked of meat gone bad in a rubber bag.

‘My husband,’ she said to Seth, who held a hand across his mouth to withstand the stench, ‘is a very important man. He must see the financial news. He doesn’t just sit around on his fanny all night.’ A small front leg waved in the air to add emphasis. There was a tiny human hand on the end of the thin limb. ‘I want Stephen, now!’ Seth backed away from the edge of his desk.

Swinging the bag of her head around on an oily neck, she then shrieked, ‘And who might you be?’ She was addressing the hooded boy who stood and watched Seth from the main doors of the reception area.

‘I told you, didn’t I? That you were gonna see fings the way they really are,’ he said to Seth, ignoring Mrs Shafer, who raced back across the floor of reception shrieking for the head porter, until her bulbous body finally stuffed itself back inside the lift. When Seth glanced over to the front doors the hooded boy had vanished. The entire foyer was empty and silent again save for the humming of the wall lights. And the smell of burnt meat.

Seth stepped out from behind his desk. He checked the carpet for Mrs Shafer’s stains. There were none. He thought he was going to cry. When he sat back down, the desk and security monitors seemed somehow larger, looming over him and coming closer until they held him in a corner. Then the front doors of the building retreated into the far distance, as if he were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope.

Seth shut his eyes and pulled his coat over his head until his breath turned wet against his face. After taking his shoes off he sat on the floor behind the desk and curled his body under the coat.

‘We need help,’ an elderly voice said. ‘Please come with me.’ It was Mr Shafer who woke Seth. But he was not as Seth had ever seen him before.

Naked, Mr Shafer tottered beside the desk on his long, bony feet. All of his toenails were yellow and cracked. His limbs were wizened and his ribs pushed against the thin bluish skin of his torso. Hook-nosed and unshaven, his grey head appeared too big for the spindly neck to support. Below the hollow pelvis, Seth looked at the stub of genitals and the shrunken sack and then looked away. Such was the state of his emaciation it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.

‘Can you come up please?’ Mr Shafer said, politely, a tone that usually served as an antidote to his wife’s shrieking.

Obeying instinct, Seth stood up and walked around his desk until he towered over the shrunken old man. Like a child, Mr Shafer held Seth’s elbow with his long fingers. There was no strength in his touch.

So slowly, it was as if Mr Shafer were walking on a tightrope, Seth led him to the lift. And stared at the enormous hump deforming the elderly resident’s back and shoulders. Under the taut skin, a vast network of gristle and black vein had grown to a hillock. It disgusted Seth, but he felt an urge to touch it and see if it was hard.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, and felt immediately foolish for asking such a question, when Mr Shafer had come down to reception naked and his wife was a grotesque arachnid. But Mr Shafer said little more apart from mumbling about it being ‘the right time’.

As soon as they entered the Shafers’ apartment on the sixth floor, Seth covered his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his blazer. But that did little to keep out the stench. Scores of bin bags were piled up against the walls of the long corridor that ran the length of the rectangular apartment. Each sack had been labelled with a yellow sticker that read ‘Medical Waste’.

All of the doors to all of the rooms branching off the hallway were open. A brownish gloom filled every room, as if the smell was visible. Each was filled with more of the plastic bags, and with piles of newspapers and magazines, plates encrusted with dried food, and crumpled clothes; it was as if nothing had ever been discarded from their long and miserable occupation of the suite. Under his feet the carpet was moist and covered in whitish stains.

There was no sign of the nurse. ‘Where is your wife?’ Seth said in a tense whisper.

Mr Shafer lifted the chicken bone of his forearm and pointed forward, to the living room at the end of the corridor.

‘Your nurse?’ he repeated, desperate to keep control of his voice. ‘You have a nurse.’

‘She was no good,’ Mr Shafer said and blinked his milky eyes. ‘Your help will be sufficient.’

‘What can I do? Is it the television again?’

Mr Shafer cut him off with a shake of his grizzled head. ‘It will be fine.’ His voice changed to something Seth found unpleasant; there was a wheedling aspect to his tone and something sly about his smile. Of more concern, as they neared the shadowy living room, old Shafer began to make a sighing sound that seemed sexual, and his limping sped up so his head began to dramatically bob up and down next to Seth’s shoulder. Around his elbow the bony fingers tightened their grip.

At the mouth of the living room Seth thought he might be sick. In the far corner of the room he could see Mrs Shafer. She was on her knees, head down, with her great back towards them. Still covered in the dirty gown, she turned her face to them as they entered and then raised her broad buttocks. The slight movement seemed to push a fresh gust of putrefaction across the room and right down Seth’s throat.

Mr Shafer released Seth’s arm and began to excitedly stumble about the floor of the living room. Ungainly, he looked like the skeleton of a dead child taking its first unholy steps around a crypt; a child with one leg shorter than the other.

Mrs Shafer watched Seth closely; her tiny red eyes were fierce in their disapproval, but also expectant. ‘Are you capable of helping this dear man with his medication?’

Mr Shafer pranced on his bird legs to a cardboard box with Chinese writing on the side and a large inky stamp to show it had been through Customs. From out of the box his needle fingers pulled a length of rubber hose and an old glass syringe with large metal hoops for the injector’s fingers. He dropped them on the dirty floor and then rummaged in a second box. Polystyrene packaging spilled over the lid and fell about his gnarly feet. He pulled a jar out but the weight of the object seemed ready to pull him over and onto his face.

‘Why, help him!’ Mrs Shafer roared.

Seth broke from his appalled trance and moved to Mr Shafer’s aid. He took the glass jar from the old man. It was dusty and filled with a yellowy fluid. Preserved in the serum and crammed against the side of the glass, Seth could see a soft shape the colour of a kidney. When it moved and opened a little black eye he dropped the jar.

‘Be careful!’ Mrs Shafer screamed. Her husband fell to his knees and began scrabbling near Seth’s shoes, clawing at the glass container. A rubber tourniquet was already tied around one wasted thigh.

‘The treatment is more expensive than you could imagine, and we don’t have much left! Are you an idiot? Can’t you do anything right?’ Mrs Shafer demanded, her voice trembling with hysteria. ‘We pay your wages. This is not much to ask.’

Mr Shafer sat on the floor with the jar between his legs. Hastily, he stabbed at the metal lid with the end of the syringe. His head began to wobble from some kind of palsy, and either his face was screwed into a smile or the man was on the verge of tears.

Inside the jar, the small creature began to move in a series of contractions that appeared defensive. But the activity behind the smoky glass only served to excite Mr Shafer even more and he stabbed at the lid with a greater vigour. A strand of saliva hung from his chin and swung like a pendulum from the energy of his efforts. When his clumsy attack on the metal lid eventually created a puncture, something hissed from inside the jar. It could have been air escaping, but Seth thought it sounded like a tiny scream.

‘You’re hopeless,’ Mrs Shafer said to Seth with exasperation in her voice.

When Mr Shafer finally pushed the needle of his syringe deep inside the jar, Seth stood back and put his hand over his mouth. Yellow fluid sprouted from the metal lid and ran down the side of the glass. Seth wanted to believe what he then heard was a sudden wheeze of excitement from the old man, but he knew it had actually been a rasp of pain from the thing inside the jar.

Whatever fluid was then withdrawn into the syringe Mr Shafer wasted no time injecting into his groin. Seth looked away.

‘Is that good, darling?’ Mrs Shafer called out to her husband. ‘Is it working?’ And then added to Seth, ‘We ordered boys. They usually cheat us with girls. But these are definitely boys.’

‘I think it’s better,’ Mr Shafer mumbled, but seemed at once unsure and confused.

It was not the response Mrs Shafer wanted. Her face coloured and her great body began to shake under the kimono. ‘I said to you we should never have swapped brands.’ Then she turned her outraged face to Seth as if for his support in an argument. ‘He will not listen to me. Spending a fortune on this rubbish. It has to come all the way from China. Romania was closer, and from their stock at least we got results!’

Mr Shafer looked dejected and more tired than ever. ‘I didn’t like the last company. I told you. They were crooks.’

‘Everyone is a crook!’ she screamed. ‘And now what is to become of me? You’ve known for months this is my time.’

Mr Shafer lifted his skull and grinned at Seth. ‘He can do it.’

This seemed to placate his wife. ‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she said to Seth.

‘What?’ he said.

Mr Shafer shook his head. ‘Another idiot. Not a bright man, are you?’

‘You could get a monkey to sit behind that desk downstairs,’ his wife added. They both laughed together, enjoying their first moment of agreement in what seemed like a long time.

Mr Shafer stood up and pressed a coin into Seth’s hand. ‘Here. This might help.’ Seth opened his hand. There was a ten-pence piece in his palm.

‘Now you see,’ Mrs Shafer said. ‘That’s what it takes. How did I guess? This is a service we have already paid for. You have no right to expect a tip.’

Seth tried to pull away from Mr Shafer. ‘What are you doing?’ The old man’s fingers had suddenly become busy as knitting needles about Seth’s belt buckle.

‘Please. No. I don’t want to.’

‘It’s not like it’s much to ask. Do you think Stephen would be pleased to hear about this?’ Mrs Shafer said from the corner.

Seth swatted Mr Shafer’s insistent fingers away from his crotch. His attentions seized by what Mrs Shafer did next, he took a step away. ‘Oh God, no.’ In the corner, she’d pushed her abdomen higher in the air and drew the kimono slowly from her rear in a parody of seductiveness. Revealed for the moment Seth could bear to look at it was a wet slit with grey lips and pinkish insides, opened in the middle of her hirsute backside.

‘Well?’ she then shrieked at him.

‘Be careful, Seth!’ a voice called from behind.

The hooded boy stood in the doorway of the living room.

‘Who is he?’ Mrs Shafer screamed, pulling her great skirt down and mercifully concealing the fleshy eye.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mr Shafer asked Seth. His eyes had become squinty and his mouth stretched into a mean suture.

‘But what can I do?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. His words quivered and his jaw started to tremble.

‘You got to do ’em. They deserve it.’

‘Call Stephen!’ Mrs Shafer screeched at her husband.

‘I intend to,’ her husband replied, and staggered across to a phone on top of a stack of medical catalogues.

‘How?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. Never had he felt so weak and useless. ‘I can’t.’

‘You have to. They had it comin’ a long time. They knows it.’

Seth gritted his teeth and felt the comforting glow of anger replace his panic and fear. Soon, a great molten power coursed through his every limb. Mrs Shafer could sense it. ‘Hurry, dear,’ she said to her husband. ‘I think he’s unstable.’

The old man groaned under the weight of the handset. He squinted at the keypad and one of his fingers hovered above the buttons. Seth walked across to him and seized the phone. The old man held on. ‘How dare you?’ he said. And then, ‘Let go or you’ll be very sorry.’ Seth pushed him away.

Immediately, the old man collapsed on the dirty carpet and began to moan. The phone fell after him, down and into the petrified deformity of bone and parchment skin to crack against his skull.

‘Now you’ve done it!’ Mrs Shafer shouted, before she began to scream. The noise was hideous and deafening.

Seth looked at the hooded boy. Who nodded.

Seizing the brass stem of a lamp stand from behind the wreckage of a dozen cardboard boxes, Seth pulled the whole thing free of the floor and wall. The electric cord snapped from the base and left the plug in the socket. He strode towards the corner of the living room where the bulk that was Mrs Shafer trembled. She stopped her screaming to ask him, ‘Have you lost your mind?’

‘I hope so.’ He brought the heavy base of the lamp down against her upturned face.

‘Oh,’ she said, in a daze after the thunk of antique walnut and metal against her tiny features. Then she sat up and tried to regain her dignity. She wiped a strand of bloodied hair from off her forehead and pouted her lips as if to apply lipstick.

Seth brought the lamp down even harder. Like wielding a pickaxe, every muscle and tendon in his back and arms went into the second blow.

‘That’s it,’ the hooded boy said from behind, his words partly obscuring the crunch of skull.

Seth laughed to prevent himself from falling to his knees and weeping. Mrs Shafer stopped talking but her lips still moved. He brought the lamp stand down again and again and again against her face, hoping the great body would stop trembling under the kimono. It didn’t seem ready to stop so he slammed the base of the lamp into her abdomen. After the second strike against her distended belly he heard something tear under the kimono and her entire body appeared to soften and finally relax.

‘My wife. My wife. My wife,’ Mr Shafer cried out in a weak voice from the floor, where he lay tangled in his own disability.

‘Don’t feel sorry for him,’ the hooded boy advised Seth. ‘They’ll all feel sorry for themselves at the end, but they had this comin’.’

Seth nodded in agreement and walked across the carpet to finish Mr Shafer off. Under his feet something squelched. It was fluid seeping from under Mrs Shafer’s kimono.

‘It’s not that hard once you start,’ Seth said in amazement to the hooded boy. ‘You just lose your temper and go all hot.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But what amazes me most is that they’re nothing. In the end, they mean nothing.’

The hooded boy nodded excitedly.

Seth brought the lamp stand down into the middle of Mr Shafer’s body. It was as if a giant metal foot had trodden upon dry twigs on a forest floor.

‘There’s another fing you need to see tonight, Seth. I’s been told to show you,’ the hooded boy said.

‘No, please. Not in here.’ Seth stood outside apartment sixteen. The teak veneer shone like gold, and from beneath the heavy door a reddish glow dispersed across the green carpet of the landing. From within the flat he sensed a resolution to a journey that filled his body with panic. And with it came the far-off sound of something he’d heard before but could not place. Voices. Swirling about. Rotating, but going backwards like a record. Faint, like the sound of crying children inside a distant house, heard on a winter’s afternoon, just as the sun is dying into dark clouds. Forlorn. And fast becoming a much bigger chorus. Inside the apartment but elsewhere. Above him.

His body rigid with fear, he tried to step away, but the door just moved closer.

‘You have to,’ the hooded boy said. ‘He wants to show you all them other ones, them down there that can’t get out. They’s all waiting. He’s got it open just for you, mate.’

Twisting and pushing his limbs against the heavy thickness of air that swelled against his back and threatened to topple him forward, Seth tried to resist. He knew instinctively that if he were to cross the threshold of this place something terrible would happen. He would be forced to confront something that could stop his heart with a bang.

And then they were standing in a red hallway on the other side of the door he never saw open. Side by side. Him and the boy that smelled of burnt flesh, of exhausted gunpowder and singed cardboard. A smell that filled his nostrils and seared the back of his throat. Made it difficult to breathe, while the circling sound of the chattering crowd moved closer like a playground full of terror. It was coming from further down the reddish hallway, as if a room behind one of these heavy doors contained a whirlpooling violence of air in which so many people were caught up and dragged backwards, around and around, until they were too dizzy to do anything but scream.

Already he could sense himself falling a long way down if he opened the wrong door. So far down into that sound and at such great speed.

The boy stood behind him. ‘Go on, Seth.’

The hooded presence pushed Seth forward. His legs were numb, his feet beset by pins and needles. His jaw seized up and he struggled to breathe. But down the hallway and across the black and white squares of marble he went. Beneath the old glass lamps that threw out the dirty light that never reached the ceiling which he couldn’t see, and that was too dim to illumine much of the reddish walls. Ox-blood red around the big pictures in the gilt frames. Heavy gold frames, acting like the frames of windows beyond which existence had stopped while the void moved.

The void. Absorbing his stare. Pulling it from his body, leaving the rest of his face behind. Tugging it towards the flat darkness of the pictures. Paintings of an absence that made him feel both cold and afraid of heights at the same time, as if he could fall through into it.

But if he stared long enough at the darkness inside any of the frames, things could be seen. Ever so faintly, emerging like pale fish from still, lightless and forgotten waters.

Here and there he began to think he could see things moving quickly. A flash of grey bone. A smudge of face looking back over a shoulder. Teeth yellow and chattery. Then gone. Or was it just a trick of the faint light that distorted any real sense of shape among the swirls of paint?

But as he passed the largest rectangular frame he was sure he saw the wet brick walls of a shaft descending away from the picture frame. And within the tunnel the pallid silhouette of something turned and scurried away, but backwards.

Gradually, as he passed more of the large, dark backgrounds in the picture frames, new shapes emerged and took more definite form. And the paintings began to resemble distant unlit rooms. Inside them he caught sight of things huddled and twisted. The faces were covered or turned away from the light. Other frames issued impressions of fleshy presences, whose mottled skin was like discarded clothing, empty of the rigidity supplied by muscle and bone but still moving. Moving against thin pins that nailed the flayed opacity to walls stained with rust or rot.

And then he too was moving forward. Pushed onward against his will, flitting past the occupants of so many dark rooms within the frames he passed. Wanting to look straight ahead, or at his feet, at anything but the terrible walls and what hung upon them, he wrestled with his neck to stop his head whipping from side to side. But he still caught glimpses of things at the edge of his vision, or up ahead in other picture frames, as his eyes stubbornly refused to obey his will. He clenched his jaw to stop himself screaming at the tangled things, gnawed to the bone. The torn things. Fragments of fleshiness ripped like cloth. Sometimes a smudged whitish face, caught in the act of a scream, hung in space. Until, on either side of the walls, a terrible momentum gathered. As if a call had gone out and summoned the subjects of the portraits to gather for an audience.

Dim faces, transformed by animal features, soon pressed outward from the darkness. Limbs dangled with an increasing frequency. All obscured by the poor light as if a full revelation would be too much of a shock, even in a dream. But the women still tried to show him their dirty teeth. And the men, tied in knots, revealed a rapture of pain so great it made their shrieking faces turn blue and disintegrate around the edges.

And then he was inside another room off the middle of the corridor where the swirling sound was at its loudest. He had to cover his eyes and crouch down, to make himself small, where he shivered against the cold air that swooped about his body. Air that carried a hundred voices all telling a frantic story.

Against the wall. Against the wall. Smash it against the wall.

I can’t. I won’t. He said he’d come back. Wait here. I know it’s cold, but wait here, love.

Stamp on it. Break it.

Seth peeked through his fingers, terrified but compelled to see who was speaking and shouting and screaming all about him.

Bleached faces groaned but kept their eyes closed. They rose and faded on the dark walls.

I coughed it up. Coughed up my heart.

Was that an ape? The thing with the hair around the mouth?

I fink he’s coming. Fink he’s coming down. There’ll be hell to pay now.

Could an old woman have such teeth?

Excuse me. Please. Excuse me. I think I fell down.

He saw three baby-things with big heads and doll bodies hanging against some wet bricks in a sewer.

Are you all asleep? I’m sorry, but are you all asleep? I need the doctor. But the door is locked. I’m sorry to wake you, but they turned all the lights off.

The walls were paint. The ceilings were paint. It was still wet. Reddish but dark, like blood or moist rust.

He turned to look at a black beak that said, Blood. It’s in the blood, but it vanished and he watched hind legs kick away into the liquid shadows.

Oh Jesus Christ.

There were no angles where the walls ended and the ceiling began. What had been a room was now just a space.

To his left, at head height, four women turned about on their hands and knees. All of their joints were in the wrong places. Teeth and hair grew in clumps from out of the grey and pink flesh of their bodies.

Hello? Is somebody there? Who are you? Please help me.

In between a procession of bluish bony things that dragged themselves through the darkness in a circle, round and round at the edge of the room, up near where the ceiling should have been, following each other’s paralysed legs and useless hooves, and beyond the chitter-chattery teeth, clacking like the muzzles of wooden horses, was an intense blackness. It moved. Seethed.

Seth screamed and a terribly thin figure rushed at him on all fours, its wisps of hair wild in the freezing wind, but then suddenly fell away, or was yanked backwards, so that something else, inside a sackcloth bag, could struggle forward on its elbows, its eyeholes stitched shut, hissing and desperate to reach him but blind and unable to locate him.

Am I awake? Please. Can you tell me, am I awake?

Everything in here was suspended in a freezing ether. An eternity of living oil in which so many things drowned and resurfaced before being sucked back down again. The room had transformed into a terrible broth of liquid and gas in which these things were all stuck and barely aware of each other. Some crawled blindly and bumped into others they then challenged or screamed at, insane with fear. Others hung silent, or were pinned fast against the darkness momentarily, before fading back into the void once again. The roar of the wind was the roar of tens of thousands of voices. Vertigo tried to turn Seth’s stomach inside out when he realized he was but a pinprick in a seething that stretched forever.

He covered his eyes. Stood up and started to stagger about. To feel for the door he’d slipped through. There was no door. He had to peek between his fingers again, but it was so dark now he couldn’t even see his feet. And things were brushing against him in the moving air. Something like a tongue lapped between his fingers. A dry, bristly face pushed into his stomach. Was it speaking or gnawing? Thin fingers touched then pressed against his face. The tips were cold but urgent in their examination as if suddenly surprised to find him here in the darkness. A hand grabbed his thigh and squeezed. A woman screamed. A hide of scabs brushed the back of one hand. An awful sexual panting erupted behind him and he sensed the feverish motion of something wet and raw directed at him in the darkness.

Seth staggered towards where the walls had once been. He’d taken no more than a few steps when the temperature plummeted. His body froze. Shivering with a violence that made it hard to breathe, and even with his eyes closed, he sensed that he stood near the edge of a precipice. The floor of the room had become nothing but a small platform in a bottomless night. A darkness overcrowded with suffering and confusion and madness. And it was all crawling onto the platform with him as though the room were a solitary life raft in a freezing black sea.

He fell to the ground and clung to the floor, while the deformed and fragmented subjects of what he had mistaken for paintings in the hallway clambered over him.

It was the phone ringing that pulled him out of sleep with a cry. It was a strangled sound that suddenly disintegrated into an anguished sobbing, a noise he had never heard himself make before. And as the bright yellow light of the reception area burned into his wide eyes, and the solidity of the leather chair pressed against his back, his sobbing turned into panting.

Tears dried on his face. He coughed to clear his throat of mucus. His hands gripped the arms of the chair until they became bloodless, as if they were still obeying some command designed to prevent him from falling from a great height.

Seth looked about him, the sudden shock of consciousness sobering him from terror. The familiar world of security monitors, clipboards and ringing house phones reassembled around him and chased the vestiges of suffocating darkness out of his mind. The nightmare drained away, as, mercifully, did his waking notion that all he had just witnessed had been real.

He was ill. Really ill. He must be.

Someone wanted him. On the phone. Jesus, how long had it been ringing? What time was it? He swung about in his chair and yanked the receiver from the switchboard.

He cleared his throat and quickly and instinctively spoke into the phone. ‘Seth speaking.’

Bad line. But someone was speaking inside the crackles and static. ‘In here,’ he thought they said. Or was it ‘Down here’? It was a man’s voice, but not one he recognized. He looked at the switchboard. The red light was flashing for flat number sixteen.

Recalling bits of the dream, Seth dropped the phone.

NINE

The mirror was turned so it faced the wall. All night long it had reflected nothing but the noble image of her great-aunt and uncle in dusty oil paint, instead of her lying frightened and tense in bed.

She had turned the mirror round because it frightened her. But it was just a long mirror in a dark room, in an old apartment, in a strange city, in which a tired and excitable girl had become overwhelmed by all the things she had seen, thought and imagined. Just an overwrought mind imagining a presence in a mirror. Nothing more.

Dim morning light hovered around the window frames, emitting a thin greyish haze through the net curtains. She hadn’t closed the drapes the night before in order not to feel trapped, as if the windows above Lowndes Square offered the possibility of a quick escape. All the lamps were still on too, along with the ceiling lights.

Confounded by how her mind had invented terrors to torment her, she clambered out of bed and looked out at the sky, already dark, and rippled with stripes of tangerine. It was as if night was ready to reclaim the earth again at nine in the morning.

Tired and tense, as if she hadn’t slept at all, she pulled the net curtains back to allow more light inside. As she rearranged the gauzy fuss, something hit the floor at her feet and bounced. A blue and white saucer lay upside down on the carpet and near it was an iron key with butterfly-wing handles. About the right size for the drawers of the bureau. She moved quickly to the heavy and dark piece of furniture opposite the foot of the bed.

The key turned in the first lock with a tiny thump that she felt in her fingers rather than heard.

There were so many tickets in there. For train and plane travel – even tickets for journeys by sea. They were arranged into stacks by year and then secured with red rubber bands in the uppermost drawer. But not a single ticket had been clipped, stamped or torn along the perforated strip. These were tickets for journeys planned but never taken. And most of them listed the United States as the destination. From as far back as 1949, Lillian had been planning to go home.

Apryl thought about what Stephen had said about Lillian’s final farewells as she left the building for her morning wanderings. There had been a little case with her too, with an expired passport and a plane ticket inside, clearly packed for an overseas journey, on the day she died. But why had Lillian broken contact with her sister and family, when the United States was such an important a place for her to reach? It didn’t add up.

She’d heard of ritual obsessives and their precise but irrational routines, and this was further evidence of her great-aunt’s deteriorating mind. A demise beginning four decades earlier. Wearing an antique hat and veil and launching out of the building with America in mind as her destination, only to return confused and disoriented an hour later, before she reset herself and began the process all over again the following day. If it hadn’t been her own aunt and benefactor she might have smiled at the idea; but instead she wondered how in this day and age so wealthy a woman had been allowed to go on like that for so long.

In the drawer below there were copies of birth certificates for Lillian and Reginald, some old unfranked stamps, Reginald’s service medals, his wedding ring, and hair clippings in a plastic sachet. Beneath all this lay a densely stacked assortment of private papers that looked like investment statements, insurance documents and household bills, neatly ordered inside linen envelopes. Her aunt had been meticulous as well as batshit crazy. Apryl figured she’d have to make sense of it all later.

The opening of the bottom drawer, unless there was a safe or bank vault somewhere, represented the last undiscovered remains of Great-aunt Lillian’s estate. The scent issuing from it pierced her sinuses with the strong but not unpleasant fragrance of pencil shavings, dust, and dry ink. It clouded over her face and then quickly sank back into the dark wooden space that she could see was full of books. All with plain covers and from a time when book binding and production was seen as a craft. Each volume had a woven fabric or leather cover. Dusty and neglected but of some quality – which just about summed up the end of her great-aunt’s life.

Opening the red book on the top of the stack revealed lined pages filled with handwriting, but with no dates given. She flicked through the stiff pages and soon realized that a separate sheet had been used for each entry, written by an unsteady hand.

The writing was difficult to decipher. Was that a b? And what at first looked like an s was actually an f. It also slanted so far to the right that the longer strokes were in danger of lying flat and crushing the vowels against the blue lines on the paper. She flicked through to the last entry. It said something about ‘trying again in the morning’. And ‘taking the Bayswater Road, which I’ve not seen in years’.

Going back to the first page, she pressed her finger under each word and moved her lips like a child learning to read, slowly moving through parts of the scrawl, and abandoning whole sentences and paragraphs when the jumble of letters and scratchings defeated her. But on occasion an individual word would stand out, or even a clause, such as: ‘further than before here. Years ago.’ And: ‘There are cracks to get through where he won’t follow. Or be waiting.’ At least that’s what seemed to have been written, but she couldn’t be sure and the tiny muscles behind her eyes were beginning to strain. The light in the bedroom was too dim for the task.

She put the first journal aside and raised five more out of the drawer. The writing in these was similar to the first, but at least one volume had months written above the entries, though there were often question marks following them – ‘June?’ – as if Lillian were unaware of the date as she wrote.

There were twenty of these journals in total and Apryl placed them all on the top of the bureau in the exact order in which they had been removed from the drawer, assuming that Lillian’s arrangement followed a chronological pattern, with the oldest diaries at the bottom.

She was right. The writing was much clearer in the last journal to leave the drawer. It was nearly all legible and very attractive to look at. And there were no errors, as if what had been written had been carefully composed.

Delaying the phone calls she had to make, Apryl went back over to the bed and sank into the musty goose-feather pillows. And from the first journal she began to read pages at random:

Most of the other entries in the journal were along similar lines. Catalogues of fatigue and curious bodily sensations in different locations around London that Apryl couldn’t picture or even place on a map. But it seemed that her aunt had suffered acute anxiety attacks whenever she strayed too far from Barrington House.

Increasingly, the entries became lists of directions she assumed her aunt had tried to follow in order to leave, or even escape, London. Train stations abounded: Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Charing Cross, Victoria. Lillian had tried to reach them all but succumbed to an attack of nerves combined with unpleasant and paralysing physical symptoms at each attempt. Something she began to refer to as the sickness.

Or maybe she was attempting to test some kind of boundary she felt had been imposed upon her freedom. Sometimes it seemed these obsessive journeys were taken as a form of reconnaissance.

Some entries involved other people who were never described in any real detail, because her dead husband, to whom these journals were addressed, was already familiar with them:

TEN

Weakened, his stomach hollow and burning, Seth woke in his room. Pissing into a large saucepan and drinking warm tap water from an old bottle, he had kept himself alive and maintained a basic toilet until the worst of the fever passed.

Through the thin curtains he could see the glow of electric lights spreading in the apartment building at the back of the Green Man. It was dusky and darkening already. The travel alarm clock told him it was four o’clock. Avoiding all daylight now seemed inevitable in this life he led. When he finally saw it, he wondered whether the sun would replenish or kill him.

Upstairs at the Green Man, all was quiet; the other tenants must still be at work, or out wandering, or down inside the bar. Soon they would return and begin frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen. It was all the others ate, fried breakfast. The thought made his stomach deflate.

Wrapped in the duvet, Seth edged off the bed and took the one step required to reach the fridge. He turned the kettle on and opened the fridge door to retrieve the plastic bottle of milk. The vanilla light from the fridge hurt his eyes. There was only a dribble of milk left and he sniffed it. It must have begun to turn some time during the morning when he was out cold. Without milk he couldn’t eat cereal, and there was no bread. He looked across the shelves and saw a nub of hard cheese, some spice bottles with coloured lids, three stock cubes, soy and Worcester sauce, a dried garlic clove and a half-empty carton of withered mushrooms. Nothing to constitute a meal, in combination or if taken separately. On the fold-out table in the centre of the room two small apples had gone soft and become dusty. It would be like biting into the stuffing of a cushion.

It couldn’t be avoided: he would have to go out.

Feeling faint, he sat back down on the end of the bed and rolled a cigarette. Three drags made him dizzy.

Should he wash in the sink downstairs before he ventured out to the supermarket? He decided against the idea. This place was unclean; it was for the unclean.

The kettle was boiling. He poured the water on to a tea bag and heaped four spoons of sugar inside the mug: that would get him up the road to Sainsbury’s. Looking at the floor, he sipped the tea. Cherishing the warmth of the mug in his cupped hands, he thought of the hallucinations of the last few days and nights but was surprised by his lack of concern. The horrific nature of the dreams, their macabre themes and terrifying situations sustained night after night, the reappearance of the hooded boy: all this, surely, gave cause to question his mental state. But to him there seemed to be something both natural and necessary about it all: even the execution of the Shafers in that long and tortuous dream. What followed that nocturnal sojourn in their wretched apartment, he refused to dwell upon. The vaguest recollection of the indistinct apparitions in apartment sixteen still jangled his nerves.

But for the first time in over a year he was intrigued by himself. Never had nightmares seemed so real, though he could not account for this. Perhaps he was just too miserable and lethargic to be bothered by any further signs of slipping away from the path that others walked. Inertia killed motivation. Isolation made him paranoid. Poverty left him wretched. He knew all this. Put yourself through it and you never know how you will react. Hardship was supposed to be good for art. But what kind of art and at what cost?

One month previously, an uninterested doctor had tried to give him Prozac again. ‘Stop working nights. It obviously doesn’t suit you,’ he had said, bored, his pen poised over a prescription pad. But it wasn’t as simple as that, Seth had wanted to tell the man. People make me manic. They exhaust me. They drain me. Isolation is my only defence. I have to be awake when they sleep and asleep when they are awake.

‘Fuck it.’ He stood up and stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer he used as an ashtray. There were over twenty butts in there already, stiff and gnarled like the fingers of old puppets. A cloud of fine grey ash erupted from the dish when he put it on the dining table. What did his lungs look like? That would be worth painting. An exhibition of one man’s decay; his mind and emotions and morals represented in the colours and shapes of his dissected body. Maybe he should try a sketch later.

Seth sat down and rolled another cigarette.

Although they were creased, damp, and a little short in the arms and legs, Seth wore the same clothes he’d worn two days earlier. The cold came through them.

Out on the street it was hard to see anything clearly. It was like looking at this tiny rumple of the world through the watery windscreen of a car with ineffective wipers. Darkness swallowed the yellow street lights. Drizzle smudged definition. But he did notice one thing when standing on the pavement under the creaking sign and dripping gutters of the Green Man: a small boy in a hooded coat on the other side of the road, waiting solemnly between two parked cars.

He flinched at the sight of the urchin who had led him through his own dreams. But once the quick jolt of shock dissipated he attributed a sullen insolence to the small figure, imagining a weasel face inside the dark hood, grinning like a bully at the surprise and alarm on the face of its victim.

Leaning into the rain, Seth dug his hands deep inside the pockets of his overcoat and strode away from the pub and the watching figure.

A swift wind buffeted his unprotected head. Blankets of newspaper, made heavy by water, slapped into his shins. Kicking out at the tangled mess, he lost his balance and tumbled into the plate glass of the bookie’s window. It took his weight. He straightened up, swore, and tried to hurry on into the blowing air and pinpricking drizzle. Even the buses and cars on the road seemed to wheeze and struggle against the energy that came down the street like a flash tide. Raising his face in acceptance of the rain and swirling vapours, he called the universe a cunt.

Outside the paper shop a news stand displayed the Standard’s headline: Police give up hope on missing Mandy.

Anger turned to shame. That kid in the hood was out in the rain and cold and darkness. Impulsively, Seth turned towards him and raised an arm. But in the air his hand dithered, useless and indecisive. Did you wave these days or do the thumbs up? Or was some kind of rap salute the only thing cool enough to guarantee a response from a youth? He slid his hand back inside his pocket and waited for a bus to pass the kerb where he had last seen the hooded boy. When his view of the road was clear the child had gone.

Wiping a rivulet of rain from his nose, Seth turned and pushed on to Sainsbury’s. With only nine coppery pennies in the pocket of his jeans he would have to go somewhere where a bank-card transaction was possible. ‘That fuckin’ kid,’ he said to himself, and dodged between two women carrying umbrellas to get to the pedestrian crossing opposite the taxidermist’s shop.

But something was wrong with the supermarket.

Despite most of the shelves displaying a wide variety of products, he could see nothing edible.

As usual, scores of people were pushing and nudging against each other as they filled their wire baskets. But Seth wondered how they were finding anything fit to eat. He was tempted to stop someone and ask how they intended to prepare and then consume the things they were taking off the shelves. But the young woman nearest to Seth filled him with disgust. What was wrong with her skin? Mottled pink and grey and white, it resembled the surface of luncheon meat that came in cans with a self-opening lid. And her red feet made him recoil. Even in December she wore flip-flops. Her feet looked like defrosting beef, with yellow crocodile toenails hanging over the ends of the rubber soles. Her clothes smelled of damp.

Seth moved away from the overripe tomatoes she was prodding with a finger. He would not be able to touch anything in that part of the fresh produce section knowing her salty pork face had been near it. She turned towards him and elbowed him aside so that she could inspect the hard, dry onions. Her muddy eyeballs had a blunt glaze. Her mobile phone began to ring. Clawing it from her clutch bag, she cocked her head back, delighted with the opportunity to shriek in public.

Seth walked away. But none of the other produce was fresh either. A bunch of spring onions that he held before his face sagged between his fingers. When he saw it was priced at one pound and seventy-five pence, he crushed it and threw it into the yellowing Chinese leaves.

His hunger was desperate, but what could he find to eat here? Turning his face away, he dropped celery and a round lettuce into his basket. ‘Compost. I’m buying compost,’ he said with a smile full of teeth.

He turned to look for fruit. The bananas were brown, the pears were fluffy. No oranges left either and everything else was too soft, split, white with thick pesticide, spindly, old, or rotten.

About him, people with grey faces and cheeks encrusted with pimple scars scurried and clawed at the plastic baskets and shelves to gather up rubbery mushrooms, gamey fish portions, fatty mince and expensive imported chillies sealed in jars filled with a murky red embalming fluid.

He tried another aisle, but found himself unable to stop staring at a fat old woman who was collecting bricks of lard in waxy paper. She was going bald and stank of sweat. Through her coat and pink cardigan he sensed the texture of her back: fleshy but slick, possibly fungal.

He shook his head and covered his nose and mouth with the back of his forearm. Burping gassy hunger air from the pit of his stomach, he began to feel faint and leant against a long refrigerated bin full of frozen paper they were selling as chips. Breathing deeply with his hands on his knees, he gathered his wits before moving on.

But in every aisle he became hemmed in, shoved, sneered at. The faces of the children were like Halloween masks, carved pumpkins, spiteful and grinning. They banged into his legs and gobbled freely the sweets that smelled of chemicals. Scruffy old men in dirty trainers shuffled around the tinned beans.

Near the bakery counter he was overwhelmed by the stench of human piss: briny, kidneyish, raw. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he said, and appealed for understanding from the couple in dirty denim jackets and flared jeans who selected tiny misshapen loaves made from organic flour. ‘Can you smell that? It’s piss.’ They looked at Seth with their pale fish-belly faces and then exchanged glances with each other. When was the last time they’d slept? Dark circles around their eyes had begun to look like bruises. They said nothing and turned their backs on him as if he were raving.

Dropping his basket against the tiled floor, Seth shook with a rage that made him dizzy. Clenching his fists, he stared at a row of birthday cakes; the coloured icing was smothered with fingerprints. Someone had taken a bite out of a chocolate fudge cake and returned it to the shelf.

The smell of piss was even worse by the naan and pitta bread selection. He watched a woman in a smart business suit who had greasy hair arranged in a ponytail. She picked up the spoiled fudge cake and dropped it into her basket. Her leather shoes were misshapen by her long feet and masculine toe joints. Seth wanted to leave.

Vestiges of the fever were still alive in his body. That’s why the world looked this way. Every now and then he would shiver and huddle his arms inside his coat. Bitter white and glaring, the ceiling lights scalded the back of his eyes and made him squint.

A trolley was pushed into his shins. The mother-of-three behind the carriage looked daggers at him and bared her dirty horse teeth. Her breath was a gust of sour yogurt.

‘Fuck off!’ Seth said, his voice cracked. Grabbing her children against her legs, she stumbled away from him, repeatedly looking back over her shoulder as she took flight. Even at ten feet he could see her moustache.

The tins of tuna that he picked up to buy had something sticky on their dented lids that smelled rancid. Contaminated. He put them back. Inside the sardine tins he knew the silver bellies of the dead mothers were full of tiny brown eggs. Seth burped and wiped a layer of milky sweat off his forehead.

Down an adjacent aisle he found it impossible to believe that a cluster of people in smelly coats were buying bags of rice in which moist rodent droppings were clearly visible through the polythene wrappers.

There was nothing in his basket but soft celery and a brownish lettuce. He added a few bottles of still water. The wire handle dug into his tender fingers. He threw out the lettuce and celery. He would have to find things sealed inside metal that had not been tampered with or touched, sniffed at, breathed upon. But not the fish. He wanted uncorrupted edible matter, so much the better if it were a tasteless paste that had been processed by the metal fingers of robots who stood in long lines in dust-free factories. He wanted nothing that had come into contact with people.

Soup! Of course. Seth smiled and walked quickly into the central aisle and looked above his head for directions on the hanging signs. On his third trip down the length of the main aisle his neck ached and still there was no sign of soup.

Someone touched his elbow. ‘Sir.’

Seth wheeled around and saw a black man in a white shirt and blue tie. His eyes were yolky and bloodshot. Above the shirt pocket a plastic name tag revealed his identity: Fabris.

‘Oh, soup,’ Seth said, hurried, harassed, desperate to communicate. ‘Soup. Soup! I can’t find the soup.’ His gibberish was slow and interspersed with swallows. Inside his skull a thick insulation of white fibres seemed to prevent him from putting the words in the right sequence. His tongue was swollen and clumsy. He hadn’t said much in days; it was like he had already forgotten how to push sound from his mouth. Seth cleared his throat so aggressively the security guard took a step back and held his hands out, peroxide palm first.

‘No. No,’ Seth said. ‘Soup. It’s the soup. I can’t find the bloody soup.’ At last! His voice had come back. ‘Where the fuck is it?’

‘Follow me, sir,’ Fabris said.

Seth smiled and nodded. ‘It has to be in tins,’ he told the man. ‘I’ve got water. But I need soup in tins. Won’t touch anything else. People . . . well, you know, you work here. I can’t stand stuff that’s been touched. They don’t wash very often in London. And their clothes. Stink. Someone pissed on the bread, Fabris.’

Seth was led down the aisle and back towards the fruit and veg. Another two black men also wearing blue ties and trousers joined Fabris. Between the four of them they should find the soup.

‘Now, what a crazy place to put it. By the bloody newspapers,’ Seth said. ‘The tinned stuff is usually way over there. How weird.’ He waved his free hand in the air.

Fabris gently took the basket from Seth’s fingers.

‘No. It’s OK,’ Seth said, touched by the gesture. ‘I’ll carry it. And you don’t have to call me sir.’

Fabris insisted and took the basket.

Fabris and the other two men, who were now smiling and trying not to laugh – it must have been his observation about the ludicrousness of putting the soup by the newspapers – formed a tight semicircle behind his back and led him with firm hands past the papers and the cigarette kiosk. It was only when Seth felt the cold on his face sweeping through the main entrance from the dark street outside that he realized what was happening. There would be no soup. Fabris and his colleagues were throwing him out of the shop.

Wheeling around to face the three men in the mouth of the door, he suddenly noticed a large crowd watching him. Three women on the checkouts had paused in their scanning of products across the little red eye to observe his ejection from the building. ‘What? Why?’ he said.

It was then he saw the mother-of-three with the long yellow teeth and moustache standing beside a manager in a suit and tie, by the frozen orange chickens that smelled of antiseptic. She must have complained about him.

The sense of injustice boiled. ‘What? Because of that fat bitch with the fucking beard, you’re throwing me out?’ Fabris and his allies stared at him, straight-faced. ‘She slammed her trolley into me. Outrageous. And the condition of the food in here! You’re bloody lucky anyone comes in at all.’

Fabris took a step closer. ‘I’m gonna ask you to leave now, sir.’

‘Fuck you!’ Seth shouted, and his voice carried a note of triumph he hadn’t intended. He left the supermarket with a dramatic swish of his overcoat and barged his way through the crowd outside to get away from the burning white lights.

By the time he reached the main road he was laughing in the rain. Uncontrolled belly laughing that hurt and made him think of suffocation. For a few moments he felt totally free and weightless.

Shaking from the confrontation, Seth walked to the nearest cashpoint. He withdrew a ten-pound note. A beggar sitting inside a cardboard tray asked him for change.

The rain was coming down harder and he needed soup. With money he could go to the twenty-four-hour minimarket; it was nearly all tins in there. Expensive, but what choice did he have? And he was close to passing out. From now on he would have to bestow his patronage on local shopkeepers.

In the cold and rain he found it hard to believe the episode in Sainsbury’s had taken place. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. He was well behaved, well brought up. But it was the city. It did terrible things to people: made their hair greasy and their skin blotchy and grey. Everyone around him had that pallor, induced by old air, exhaust, dust particles, bad milky water from Victorian pipes, rotten food at high prices, stress, isolation, pain. Nothing worked here: lights, phones, wires, roads, trains. You couldn’t rely on anything. And this darkness, the eternal night of soot and black air. His chest went tight. It was hard to breathe. Where were all the dogs and cats and pink babies in pushchairs?

In the mini-market the shopkeeper never slept. A Bangladeshi man with coal-black skin and half-open eyes operated the cash register without looking at his fingers on the keys. ‘Than you, sssur,’ he said all day and night by the light of the fluorescent tubes overhead. He sold vodka to teenagers and cigarettes to children. ‘Than you, sssur.’ It was too dangerous around here to say no to anyone. The empty bottles were smashed outside the Green Man and in the bus stop.

‘Do you have soup?’ Seth asked.

‘Yes, sssur.’ He pointed to the back of the shop. Seth squeezed around the old Irish men who tottered and swore by the two-litre bottles of dry cider. They stank. Today everybody stank. Didn’t people have time to wash?

As well as six tins of soup, Seth bought hard crackers that must have been compressed to a wooden consistency by a large machine. He added bleach and a bottle of water to his purchases. The bill exhausted all of the ten-pound note.

His face hidden inside the round darkness of his hood, but slightly raised and cocked to one side in anticipation, the boy was waiting for Seth as he jogged across the wet mirrored pavement towards home. This time things were different. Contact was unavoidable. The boy had moved to his side of the road. Seth smiled to himself. Maybe speaking to the real version of this figment of his crazy subconscious mind would dispel the spectre from his sleep.

He stopped running and stood beside the wall of the pub. The boy waited on the pavement near the kerb. Rain had turned the khaki of his coat black.

Seth looked up at the sky, an impenetrable murk of ink with flashes of silver water falling across the sodium of the street lights. He wiped a hand over his face. His overcoat felt heavy and sodden but underneath his body was warm. His muscles loose, his skin hot, he had gone past the point of tiredness and hunger and fatigue. He looked down at the boy who waited and watched quietly. ‘Seen you round here a bit. You in trouble?’

There was a long, mute pause followed by a shake of the head. In the bottom half of the hood Seth thought he caught a hint of something red, but wasn’t sure. ‘You lost? Homeless or something?’

Another shake of the head.

‘So . . . what? Why are you here? I mean you can be here if you want. There’s no law against it.’

The boy didn’t speak.

‘But it’s wet.’ Again Seth looked at the sky.

‘Don’t bother me,’ the boy said with a shrug. The voice was strong enough to let Seth know he wasn’t scared.

Seth smiled, but felt his smile didn’t penetrate the hood, which seemed to be a silent and empty space. ‘And cold,’ he mumbled.

The boy shrugged again. One of those kids who can stay up late, call adults by their first name, never go home, ring doorbells when families are sitting down to eat, and look blankly at anyone who shouts at them. He sensed something hard and insensitive inside that cowl, but not callow, not mean, not delinquent. Just lost and able to bear it without question or feeling self-pity. ‘So your parents are inside the pub?’ Seth asked, and immediately felt both foolish and wary at the way the question sounded. It was the kind of thing he imagined white-haired men saying inside the warm interiors of cars as they leant across the passenger seat to invite someone else’s child into the vehicle. He didn’t want this kid to think he was a nonce.

The boy shook his head and then looked down the street. There was something hopeless about the way he confronted the road.

‘You should go home where it’s warm. Watch television.’ What could he say to connect with the boy? ‘Why hang around here? It’s a dump.’

Still no response. He thought of offering some money for sweets or cigarettes, but realized he had none to give. With a sigh Seth turned to go.

‘I seen worse.’

‘At least stand under the porch. You’ll get soaked.’

‘Don’t bother me.’

‘Your mum won’t be pleased if you get pneumonia.’

‘Don’t got one.’

‘No mum? Your dad then.’

‘Live with me mate.’

Was this some rehearsed ploy to extract sympathy? ‘Well you better take off. It’s no night to be out.’

Two girls walked by without raincoats. Their blonde hair was pulled back tight from their foreheads and Seth wondered if the rain was able to penetrate the smooth hair. It always looked wet in that style. They wore training shoes without socks, tight black leggings and baggy sweatshirts with Reebok logos hanging in the loose folds at the front. A cigarette was passed between them. The taller girl held a bottle of Bacardi Breezer in her ring-encrusted fingers. They both looked at Seth and giggled. Both of their freckled faces suggested something dog-like – wet and snouty and ill-disciplined. ‘What you doing out then?’ the one with too much green eye make-up said, mimicking his voice.

‘What?’

‘You should take your own advice, mister,’ the one with the bottle said.

‘I wasn’t talking to you.’

The girls stopped. ‘Who was you talking to then?’

‘Don’t, ’Shell,’ her friend said, giggling at the same time.

‘To this lad here.’ He gestured towards the hooded boy.

The girls turned and looked at where he was pointing and then laughed in a hard, humourless way.

‘Piss off,’ Seth muttered. You couldn’t stop on this road for long before someone bothered you. You had to keep moving.

‘Piss off yourself,’ the taller girl said. Her breath smelled of pineapple. They carried on walking and laughing and chewing gum.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ Seth told the boy.

‘Don’t bother me. Not no more.’

Seth turned towards the pub, his interest in the children of the night exhausted. ‘Anyway, I better get on.’

‘Can’t do nothing to me.’

‘Eh?’

‘Them girls. Can’t do nothing. Boys neither.’

‘Glad to hear it.’ Seth walked away.

The boy followed him to the entry of the Green Man. Seth groaned to himself, realizing the terrible mistake he had made in talking to this character. He should have ignored him like everyone else. Now he could be stuck with the kid every time he left the building. The boy came closer until he was standing inside the entry with Seth, the hood bowed so the hidden face could peer down at the dog shit by his chunky heeled shoes.

‘Sorry. You can’t come in. Get yourself home.’

‘Ain’t got one.’

‘Eh?’

‘Go where I like.’ The boy removed a hand from inside a pocket. A collection of burnt and deformed fingers were revealed.

Seth was meant to see them. ‘Do . . .’ He had to clear his throat. ‘Do I know you?’

The hooded boy nodded.

‘From where?’ Seth moved out of the entry and back into the rain. It was better to stand in the cold and wind than with the stench of sulphur and burned meat that lingered in the confined space of the entry.

‘Seen you a few times.’ There was something cocky about the voice and the angle of the head now. Inside the blackness he guessed the child was grinning. From head to toe Seth prickled with static.

‘Told you fings was going to change, didn’t I?’ the boy said.

Seth shook his head and closed his eyes. Then opened them. The boy was still there looking up at him in the wet street. ‘You seen it in the shop before they chucked you out.’

Seth could not speak or swallow. He retreated back up the main road. The boy came after him. ‘That’s just the start. It’ll get bad, Seth.’

‘You know my name.’ Seth broke from his stupor. ‘Is this a joke? This is a fucking joke.’ His voice was a whisper.

The boy shook his head. ‘It’s what you wanted. You takes your chances.’

Seth stepped into the path of an elderly man carrying an umbrella. Somehow he found his voice. ‘Excuse me.’

The old man looked startled. His whole flabby face quivered.

‘This kid?’ Seth pointed at the hooded boy, who turned to face the old gent. ‘You can see him, right?’

The old man dipped his head and walked around Seth, only to stop once he’d gone a few feet to look back at him with a mixture of boredom and curiosity.

‘Him!’ Seth yelled and pointed into the chest of the boy. The man turned and hurried away.

The boy giggled inside his hood.

Seth forced himself to smile politely at a West Indian woman who struggled past with a cluster of shopping bags. ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’

‘Yes?’ she said, her face on the verge of a smile but held back by instinctive suspicion.

‘This boy here is lost.’

‘Eh?’

‘This kid here. He’s lost. I want to help him.’

‘You is lost?’ she said. ‘Where you wanna go?’

‘No. I’m fine. I live here. But this kid. Here. This one. Do you know . . .’

She looked to where he was pointing and then screwed up her eyes to stare at Seth, puzzled for a moment and then wary. After a moment of silence she said, ‘Come out of it. I got to go home. I got nothing.’ She waddled away from him.

Seth looked at the boy and swallowed. ‘No,’ he said, and then ran back into the doorway of the pub. He dropped his shopping bag to fumble a key into the Yale lock. Scooping up his bag of tins and bleach, he fell inside the building and slammed the door behind him.

ELEVEN

Apryl sat in bed with the second journal and skimmed through another series of aborted trips and paranoid fantasies. More crazy stories about how Lillian and her friends in the building were being terrorized. Haunted even, by someone she had yet to name.

When she spoke to her mother an hour after midnight, she didn’t mention Lillian’s madness, or her own unease in the apartment. And to her mother’s delight she even hinted that it might be possible after all for her to return to New York on the date previously planned. She then rang off and cuddled back under the eiderdown with a mug of camomile and honey tea, promising herself she would only read the beginning of the third journal before getting some sleep. The antique dealer was due at ten the next morning, and an auctioneer at noon, so her alarm was set for eight thirty.

But two hours later, after delving into the third volume, she realized the last thing she would be able to do was sleep in this bedroom:

Apryl closed the book. It had gone two and she couldn’t bear to read any more. Lillian was a schizophrenic. But how had it gone undiagnosed for so long when she was seeing so many doctors? Maybe it was Alzheimer’s. Didn’t that make you see things too? Did they even know what it was in those days?

There were no cars at all in the square outside the building. She missed the swishing sound of their tyres on wet tarmac. They were the only company she had as she lay alone with the lights on. Lights that were so dim they barely lit the room. She was no longer sure how she felt about the big wardrobes either, and wondered if she should go and turn the keys in their doors and make sure they were locked.

She looked at the ceiling. The paint was cracked around the light fitting. Three times she felt herself swoon into sleep, but forced her eyes to open each time. She was desperately tired but wanted to stay awake, because when you are asleep you can’t keep watch. But the next time her eyes closed they never reopened to lift her from sleep.

Until, in the faint far-off world outside her sleep, she heard a door open and close. A door inside the apartment. And after that came the sound of feet moving swiftly across the floorboards of the hallway.

Then she was awake and sitting up with her heart in her throat and her body stiff with fright. And as her eyes travelled to the doorway they passed over the mirror still facing the wall and the painting of Lillian and Reginald. But she didn’t look at the bedroom door for long because she was compelled to return her gaze to the painting. There were now three figures in the picture where there should have been only two. And the one standing in the middle, between her aunt and uncle, was terribly thin.