TWENTY-THREE

Behind the large desk Piotr moved heavily to his feet and wiped at his forehead. ‘Hello Miss Apryl. How can I help you today? Maybe the umbrella it is you need?’

It was raining again and she’d been caught in a downpour walking to Knightsbridge from Bayswater. Her mood had slipped further into the black when she’d seen Piotr grinning behind the desk. She’d been hoping for Stephen. ‘Sorry, I’m dripping on the carpet.’ Slowly, she warmed up after the chill from the wind and the heavy burst of rain outside, leaving her slightly dizzy in the heat of the lobby.

All about her brass door handles sparkled. Glass shone on the doors and picture frames. And the thick clean carpets beneath the heels of her boots made her feel self-conscious about tramping dirt inside. This part of the building was immaculate – dust free and show-home lit – but still unable to conceal the fragrance of age that seeped down from elsewhere. The reception area was nothing but a front. Behind this little capsule of bright light and warmth she could already sense the sepia gloom of its stairwells and rotten apartments, waiting up there to frighten her. How soon her impression of the place had changed. Staying in the hotel room and taking a few days out to explore the city had given her a distance, put her back in touch with herself, and now just the merest whiff of Barrington House made her remember the fear and confusion of her nights here.

But not long now and she would be free of the place. The cleaners would be in this week and then the estate agents. After that she’d never have to come back here again. Ever.

‘Got caught in quite a storm out there,’ she laughed and patted at her hair; the rain had flattened it. ‘I never know what the weather’s doing in this city. The sky was blue when I left Bayswater.’

She kept up her smile, but the affability of the fat porter failed to put her at ease. It always felt like he was making a pass. He came around the desk and stood too close, one hand reaching out to take her elbow. ‘Please. Sit down. You must rest, no?’ His shirt seemed too tight again, as if the collar was squeezing his round head up and out of his body, and then strangling him.

She took a step to the side and placed one hand on top of the desk to regain her personal space. ‘I’m fine. Just a bit damp.’ She put her bag on the counter, patted her leather coat down and then removed her black gloves. She couldn’t avoid Piotr today; she needed him.

He maintained a constant and irritating banter. ‘You know, it is nice to be in the warm and dry, no? And I am always happy to let the beautiful ladies come inside from the weather, yes?’ He finished with a loud, excitable laugh.

It was becoming difficult to maintain the smile. But what she intended to do was invasive. She had shown up in the rain to interrogate the staff, and potentially a long-term resident, for information about apartment sixteen. She knew from Stephen that these exclusive apartment buildings in west London were often havens where the wealthy and famous expected the strictest privacy and security. Porters were forbidden to give out any pertinent information about the residents or the building. Stephen told her kidnap was now an ever-present danger for the children of the wealthy.

‘So what can I do to help you, Miss Apryl? Today I am the happy man because of the pay day see? So anything at all I am happy to do for you.’

‘Well, I have a strange request.’

Piotr slapped one hand over his heart. ‘At last the day is a here. When the beautiful lady comes into the Barrington House and say she have a request for me, no?’

Don’t push it, fat boy. ‘I don’t know whether you know, but this building has some history. You see, a painter lived here. A man called Felix Hessen.’ Without revealing the fact that he lived in number sixteen, Apryl watched Piotr’s face for traces of recognition, but it remained blank and slightly distracted as if he was merely thinking of the next thing to say to her. Before he could interrupt, she told him of her research into her great-aunt’s life and of her desire to speak with a long-term resident, someone who had lived in the building since just after the Second World War.

‘Ahh.’ He raised one finger in the air. ‘I think there are two peoples that live here after the war, no? Mrs Roth and the Shafers. Very, very old now, yes? But their nurses tell Piotr that they live here oh so long ago.’

‘That’s amazing. My great-aunt said she was friends with Mrs Roth, and Mr and Mrs Shafer. How do you spell those names?’

He moved back behind the desk and opened a leather-bound ledger on the desktop.

One of his plump fingers moved down a list of names and telephone numbers stored beneath the laminated pages of the desk ledger.

Quickly, she leant over the desk. Her eyes became frantic, flicking up and down the names and searching for apartment and telephone numbers. She looked at the place in the ledger where Piotr’s index finger had paused: Mrs Roth, followed by three phone numbers. One was next to what had been misspelled as Dawter, another was next to Nerse, and the third read Landline. This was an 0207 number and she quickly committed it to memory while fishing for her cell phone.

While Piotr talked quickly about them meeting for ‘the coffee, no? To speak about the history and the aunt Lillian, yes?’ she smiled and nodded, half-listening but trying to screen out the sound of his voice while she quickly added Mrs Roth’s number to the address book of her phone. When she caught Piotr studying her, she raised the phone to her ear, as if to listen to a message. ‘Sorry, I have to listen to this. A voicemail.’ She rolled her eyes as if irritated. After a suitable pause she snapped the lid of the phone shut, shaking her head. ‘Not what I thought.’ Then looked into Piotr’s eyes and smiled.

He went into a diatribe about ‘the mobile’, while her eyes scoured the page of the open ledger again to find the Shafers. There it was: number twelve, with one phone number given, which she also rehearsed and then surreptitiously inputted into her cell phone by holding it below the top of the desk.

‘It is not so good at this time to speak to Mrs Roth and the Shafers.’ Piotr beamed and held out his arms. Then closed his eyes. ‘Ahh, but I will surely tell them that you asked about the aunt Lillian, no? In the mornings they don’t like to be disturbed. Maybe if we meet and you tell me the interesting story about the aunt Lillian, then I can say to them: hey, I know this really nice lady who comes to our lovely building and is the relative of Lillian. Then I think they might say the yes, no?’

‘No.’ She couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice. But then softened it to say, ‘I don’t have time. I’m very busy with sorting out the apartment and seeing . . . friends in the evening. I can catch up with these people another time.’

Maybe the Shafers and Mrs Roth would be annoyed when she called. They’d already refused to see her once. It was all such a long shot. But it was a shot she had to take if she was to validate anything in Lillian’s journals. Miles had said as much in the bar in Notting Hill the night before. After reading a few of Lillian’s journals he was suddenly very keen for her to find out whether anyone had seen Hessen’s paintings in Barrington House before he disappeared. For an art historian, this kind of information would be a coup.

Apryl was shepherded by Piotr up to the door that connected the lobby to the east wing. Close to her, his breath was unpleasantly warm on her face and neck, and the broken-English banter was relentless, insistent, until she practically fell into the sombre elevator to escape the bulbous shape beaming through the glass of the doors as they slid shut. He mimed the holding up of a phone, while showing her all of his little square teeth.

She half-turned and pretended not to see his hand signals. But then saw something else from the corner of her eye. She glimpsed it in the mirror at the back of the carriage. Something moving quickly behind her shoulder. Tall and thin and whitish, it rapidly vanished from her line of sight.

Sucking in her breath, she lurched around to see the gleaming but empty carriage. Nothing there but her. ‘Jesus,’ she said, breathing out. Then looked at the panel, as the elevator made what felt like a deliberately slow ascent. Six, seven . . . come on . . . eight . . . nine. And why wasn’t the door opening now? It hadn’t ever taken this long before, had it?

With a swish the doors finally opened and she rushed out of the carriage, looking back over her shoulder, at herself in the elevator’s mirror, at her frightened pale face. A face with an expression she’d only ever seen before in the mirrors of Barrington House.

‘Who is this? What do you want?’ The tone of voice was as unsettling as the smashing of crockery on a tiled floor.

Apryl cleared her throat, but the thin voice that slipped out was not one she cared to recognize as her own. ‘I’m . . . Er, my name is—’

‘Will you speak up! I can’t hear you.’ Mrs Roth’s voice rose beyond annoyance. Elderly, sharpened by age, too brittle for warmth, it instantly made her want to hang up.

‘Mrs Roth.’ She raised her voice, but couldn’t banish the tremor from her words. ‘I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you, but—’

‘Of course I do. Who are you?’ In the background she could hear the music from a television show.

‘My name is Apryl Beckford, and I’m—’

‘What are you saying?’ the old woman shouted, adding, ‘I don’t know who it is’ to someone who must have been in the room with her. ‘No! Don’t touch it. Leave it! Leave it!’ she shouted at the other occupant.

‘The television. Perhaps you should turn the television down,’ Apryl prompted.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m watching it now. There’s nothing wrong with it. Stephen fixed it for me. I’m not interested in anything you have to sell.’ The phone hit the cradle with a sound like a stone hitting a windshield.

Apryl winced and listened to the dialling tone for a few seconds, too stunned to move.

Three hours later, sitting on the bed in Lillian’s bedroom, she called again. This time there was no sound of a television booming in the background. Instead, the woman sounded as if she’d just been roused from sleep.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, I hope I didn’t wake you.’

‘You did.’ The words uncurled like something dark and mean, and in her mind Apryl saw small cruel eyes narrowing. ‘I don’t sleep at night. I’m not well. How can I sleep?’

‘I’m very sorry to hear about that, Mrs Roth. I hope you get well soon.’

‘What do you want?’ The question was more of a bark than a sentence.

‘I’m . . .’ Her mind went blank. ‘Well, I’m calling because—’

‘What are you saying? You’re making no sense.’

Then shut your mouth, you evil bitch, and I’ll make some sense. ‘I’m very interested in Barrington House, Mrs Roth. The history. You see—’

‘What’s it got to do with me? I don’t want to buy anything from you.’

Apryl imagined the phone crashing down again and braced herself. ‘I’m not selling anything. I’m the niece of Lillian Archer, Mrs Roth. I’m just trying to find out about her. I never knew her. And I believe you’ve lived here for a long time. I would really like to talk with you because I’m sure you have some very interesting stories. Especially about the artist—’

‘Artist. What do you mean, artist?’

‘Erm. A man called Felix Hessen. He lived—’

‘I know where he lived. What are you trying to do? Frighten me? I’m not well. I’m old. And it’s a cruel thing to call me and remind me of him. How dare you?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, ma’am. Only, I’m visiting here from America to sort out my great-aunt’s—’

‘I’m not interested in America!’

Apryl closed her eyes and shook her head. What was wrong with these people? Apart from Miles, every tenuous connection to Hessen led her to the unstable, the dysfunctional and the senile. It was wearing her out. It was impossible to communicate with them. They didn’t listen. She was just there to function as an audience for their craziness. She took a deep breath. ‘You don’t have to be interested in America. Please, just listen to me. It’s quite simple really. I’m not trying to sell anything. Nor am I trying to frighten you.’ Irritation gave a force to her words.

‘You don’t have to shout, dear. It’s not very nice.’

Apryl bit her bottom lip. ‘I just want to talk to someone who knew my great-aunt, and the artist Felix Hessen. She wrote about him a lot. Nothing more. Just a conversation.’

And then an extraordinary thing happened that filled Apryl with remorse at having raised her voice to this confused and elderly lady she’d woken from a nap. Mrs Roth’s voice quivered with emotion and then thickened with a sob. ‘He was an awful man. And I can’t sleep because of him. He’s doing it again.’

‘Mrs Roth, please don’t cry. I’m sorry I upset you. I just want to speak to someone who was here when Lillian was alive.’

The crotchety voice disintegrated into a few frail words interspersed with sniffs. ‘I can still hear him. I’ve told them downstairs.’

Apryl struggled to comprehend what she was being told. ‘Mrs Roth, I’m sorry you’re upset. You sound so sad. My aunt was too. Because of him.’

‘Well I am, dear. And you would be too. You believe me, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do. Of course I do. And talking to someone might help. I think you need a new friend, Mrs Roth.’

Somewhere in the apartment, the metronome of a clock’s hand struck a steely echo that travelled like sad tidings throughout the empty rooms. But she couldn’t see the clock or seem to be able to get any closer to the far-off sound. And it was still hard to believe homes like this existed in Barrington House: peeling and faded with neglect from floor to ceiling, room after room.

As the small Filipino nurse, Imee, scurried ahead of her, Apryl found herself in a daze, dawdling down the long hallway of Mrs Roth’s apartment, the soles of her boots landing hard against the worn carpet. It might have been blue once, but was now threadbare and grey.

To the side of the hatstand and telephone table, a small and aged kitchen presented itself, cramped with an old enamel cooker and refrigerator. It looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

Apryl glanced into the living room. With her quick eyes she caught glimpses of elegant disorder. A silver drinks trolley sat idle, loaded with crystal decanters, an ice bucket, tongs, and half-empty bottles of spirits. Ageing heavy furniture retreated sorrowfully into the corners. The air was shadowed by leaden drapes, drawn by heavy gold braid. And all this beneath a magnificent chandelier, hanging like a gigantic ice crystal over a mahogany table.

The thin light caught these once glamorous but now dust-filmed objects. They seemed frozen in a forlorn disappointment at the absence of whoever it was who once peopled the space. It made her melancholy. In the noisy maelstrom that existed outside, of angry traffic and marching strangers, of ugly, tragic council estates, of wind-blown garbage, beggars, and the intense energy that both drained and invigorated you at the same time, how could such stillness exist? Shabby with neglect but undisturbed and ominous in its silence, it was another quiet relic from an era of elegant ladies in long dresses and gentlemen in dinner jackets.

And there was nothing on any of the walls. No pictures, no mirrors – not so much as a single watercolour. Nothing.

An open door beside the bathroom revealed a smaller bedroom with an unmade bed. The nurse’s room, beside the Queen’s chamber. Outside which they came to stand. The nurse paused before the closed door and lowered her solemn eyes, too tired to even attempt an encouraging smile. Behind the antique door the sound of a television boomed. Imee knocked so loudly it made Apryl jump.

When a voice, fierce with age, cried out from the other side of the door, she entered the master bedroom.

Apryl suspected the wizened figure had been deliberately positioned and prepared for her arrival. Small as a child, with mottled arms as thin as sticks resting upon the covers, the big hands incongruous below the lumpy wrists, Mrs Roth sat propped up in bed. She was clad in a nightgown of blue silk edged with white lace, an outfit that did nothing but add to the horror of the aged body inside it. The carefully arranged but grotesquely old-fashioned hairstyle had the unmistakable sheen of hair that had been recently attended to. It was as high and perfectly conical as a bishop’s hat, but transparent. And the lipless beak of a mouth above the heavily grooved chin, protruding like the muzzle of a small dog, had been painted bright pink. Small eyes full of mistrust watched Apryl enter.

‘Sit there,’ the voice commanded while the hard eyes glanced at the two chairs at the end of the bed, arranged on either side of the television.

Smiling weakly, Apryl unlooped her bag from her shoulder and made a move for the nearest chair. ‘Hello, Mrs Roth. It’s so good of you to see me. I—’

‘Not there!’ the figure barked. ‘The other one.’

‘I’m sorry. I was just saying—’

‘Never mind all that. Take your coat off, dear. What kind of woman wears her coat indoors?’

On either side of the enormous bed in which the tiny figure was huddled at the very centre, surrounded by large white pillows, two small dressers were cluttered with photographs. The black-and-white faces all looked towards the foot of the bed, where Apryl now sat, uncomfortable on a hard chair with wings that obscured the room on either side of her head, tunnelling her vision forward to the little creature among the pillows.

An audience had truly been granted. But what kind of audience? Mrs Roth’s manner was hardly conducive to any kind of reasonable conversation – but that was the point. The clever old bird maintained complete control of both the discourse and the visitor by immediately unsettling and belittling them with her unpleasantness. And who was anyone to object, either as a guest or as a disempowered member of staff on her payroll, like the porters downstairs? Even the garrulous and feckless Piotr shuddered at the mention of Mrs Roth. And poor little Imee’s face reflected the same fear and aversion. The nurse didn’t enter the room – some rule probably forbade her doing so. Instead, she waited at the door.

But as Miles had reminded Apryl, Mrs Roth was one of a small and shrinking group of people still alive who could attest to the existence of Hessen’s mythical paintings. She was now here on Miles’s behalf too. More importantly, Mrs Roth had known Lillian. And the last tangible traces of her great-aunt’s life were evaporating.

At least Mrs Roth was more lucid than Alice from the Friends of Felix Hessen, and beneath her inhospitable carapace there was a vulnerability about the old woman.

‘I don’t want to talk about him,’ Mrs Roth said, as if reading her mind.

‘Mmm?’ Apryl asked.

‘You know who I am talking about. Don’t play games with me. I’m not stupid. But you are a bloody fool if you think I am.’

Then why did you agree to see me? She couldn’t risk an argument. Mrs Roth was not someone to trifle with, but to weather until the woman’s mood changed. And she knew from experience that the rude and unpleasant were not insensitive to flattery; the very insecurity that created a menacing facade could be turned into an Achilles’ heel.

Apryl smiled her sweetest and most guileless smile. ‘Not for a minute would I suggest such a thing, Mrs Roth. Would a fool live in such a grand apartment? I’ve never had the pleasure to see such a place.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s terrible.’ But no sooner had her attempt to win Mrs Roth been rebuffed than the old woman’s mood changed swiftly to something more agreeable. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes flared with self-importance. ‘You should have seen it when my husband was alive. We had such wonderful parties, dear. You’ve never seen anything like them. Full of lovely people. The kind of people you would never meet. You have no idea how charming the men were. You’ve never met such gentlemen. And the beauty of the ladies. You girls are nothing compared to how we used to be. I mean, look at you, dear. You should do something with your hair. It’s awful.’

Apryl tried to maintain her smile. ‘Yes, I should. Maybe you could recommend somebody. As soon as I came in, I noticed the lovely colour of your hair. It’s so shiny.’ Apryl looked at the carefully domed wisps and smiled as sincerely as she could.

Mrs Roth blushed. ‘Would you like some tea?’

‘That would be nice.’

The old lady picked up a small brass bell from her bedclothes and began to ring it furiously. ‘Oh where is she?’ she cried out at exactly the same moment she began to ring the bell.

In seconds the door opened and Imee shuffled in, her eyes lowered to her white gym shoes. ‘We want tea, Imee. Tea! My visitor has been in the rain and you have forgotten to make tea again.’

‘I am sorry, Mrs Roth,’ the woman said.

‘How many times must you be told. And cake. Bring in the cakes. I want the yellow one and the pink one.’

Mrs Roth glared at Imee until she’d left the room, then said, ‘Look over here. Here, dear. These are my daughter’s grandchildren. They are so beautiful. I took Clara to Claridge’s for lunch yesterday. And when the head waiter asked her what she wanted she said, ‘Fish and chips.’ What a darling she is. You’ve never seen such a beautiful child. Look. Here. I said look here.’ Irritated because Apryl hadn’t moved quickly enough to satisfy her most recent and impulsive demand, she began pointing in the general direction of the cabinet on her right side.

When Imee returned with the tea and cakes on a small silver trolley, Apryl looked at the floor. Squirming in her seat and powerless to act, she listened to Mrs Roth humiliate the nurse, going so far as to call her a ‘bloody fool’ for not positioning the tea things in the manner she had been told to ‘a hundred times’. Imee responded by saying, ‘I am nurse, Mrs Roth, not waitress,’ before scurrying from the room on the brink of tears.

‘Cake, dear. Have a slice of cake, dear. I like the pink one. My daughter bought it for me.’

It was so cheap and dry, Apryl struggled to swallow a mouthful of it.

‘You look like Lilly,’ Mrs Roth said, dabbing crumbs from the side of her mouth with one swollen knuckle.

‘I do?’

She nodded. ‘When she was young. Very pretty woman. Such a shame she went mad.’

And then, quite suddenly, Mrs Roth asked Apryl to turn the television on so she could watch some quiz show, during which she was forbidden to speak. But by the first commercial break, Mrs Roth had fallen asleep while the television boomed within the room.

Watching the sleeping figure, who made infrequent whistling sounds through her nose, Apryl sat still for a few minutes. Then she called out, ‘Umm, Mrs Roth. Mrs Roth,’ three times, but to no effect. The woman could not be woken. Perhaps she was dead. But when Apryl became desperate for the toilet and stood up, Mrs Roth’s eyes opened. Milky orbs drifted around her eye sockets, then locked on to Apryl. ‘Where are you going? Sit down at once.’

‘I was going to use the bathroom.’

‘Oh.’

‘You were asleep.’

‘What?’

‘You fell asleep. Maybe this is the wrong time.’

‘What? Nonsense! I did no such thing. Don’t make things up.’

‘No. Well, I was mistaken then. I’ll just be a moment.’

The bell was hoisted aloft and Mrs Roth began furiously ringing it again. Apryl and Imee passed in the doorway and exchanged tired, nervous but ultimately knowing glances. A look familiar to those beleaguered by the petty and the powerful.

When she returned from the bathroom, she tried to formulate a tactful way of bringing the conversation back to Felix Hessen, but Mrs Roth pre-empted her. It seemed she was now ready to speak of him without a prompt. It was as if until now she had been testing her guest’s fitness for disclosure. Playing a game, unwilling to give her what she wanted until she’d tormented her first. And mercifully, the television was silenced.

‘So you want to know about Felix. That’s why you’re here. I’m not fooled by you, dear. But it’ll do you no good. You won’t understand. No one does.’

‘Try me. Please.’

‘He drove Lilly mad. You know that much, don’t you?’

Apryl nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. But I want to know how.’

Mrs Roth looked at her hands in silence. When Apryl began to wonder if the woman would ever speak again, she said, ‘I don’t like to think of him. I never wanted to remember him.’ Her voice was tired. Every vestige of her brittle, difficult, impossible character was now absent from her words. But she was unable to meet Apryl’s eye as she spoke. ‘When he was finally gone we all hoped that was the end of it. But we were naive to have thought so. Men like that don’t follow the same rules as the rest of us. Lilly knew that. She’d have told you the same. No one would believe us. But we knew.’

Apryl leant forward in her seat.

‘When he first came here . . . I don’t remember when . . . but after the war, when Arthur and I came back from Scotland, he was here.’ She paused to paw at the bedclothes with her knotted fingers. ‘He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. We all thought so. But he never smiled. Not once. And he never spoke to a soul. We thought it odd. It had never been a building for recluses. Quite the opposite. It was nothing like it is now. This was once a wonderful place where your neighbours were your friends. We all entertained each other. Only decent people here, dear. Not like today. It’s full of rubbish now. People with no manners. You should hear the noise they make. We have no idea who is living next to us any more. People move in and out all the time. It’s intolerable.’

Mrs Roth began to sniff. From under the sleeve of her nightdress she removed a white tissue and began to dab at her eyes. A long heavy tear that appeared incongruous on her face rolled down her cheek and splattered against her wrist.

Instinctively, Apryl went to her and sat on the side of the bed. Mrs Roth immediately offered Apryl her free hand. It was crooked with arthritis and very cold. Apryl warmed the fingers between her palms. The simple act made Mrs Roth cry harder, in the same way a child’s grief intensifies within the safety of a parent’s arms.

‘One would often come across him in a stairwell. He never used the lift. He would be standing alone and looking at the pictures. He would take them from the wall and study them. But he would turn on you if you disturbed him. I hated it. No one liked to look into his eyes, dear. He was a lunatic. Quite mad. No one in their right mind had eyes like that. No one was comfortable with him here. Many of us were Jewish and knew he’d been one of those Hitler people. What are they called?’

‘Fascists.’

‘Don’t interrupt me, dear. Nothing upsets me more than a woman with no manners.’

‘Sorry.’

‘But that was how it was for years. I never once had a single conversation with him. Nothing. No one did. The porters didn’t like him either. They were frightened of him. We all were, dear. He lived in the flat underneath us. Down there.’ She pointed at the floor. ‘And he was always making such a noise at night. Moving things. Waking us up. This bumping. And shouting. You could hear him talking in a loud voice. As if he was in another room of our home. And right up against his ceiling we heard the other voices. Under our feet. But we never saw any visitors coming or going. No one knows how he got them up here. We asked the porters and they swore no one had called on the gentleman in number sixteen. But he had company. It wasn’t a radio. Radios never sounded like that, dear.

‘Sometimes it seemed like his flat was full of people. As if he was having a party, but not a very nice one. His other neighbours said the same thing. We all heard it in the west wing. And it got worse. Before his accident. The noises and voices. People were leaving because of them.

‘And then one night – I’ll never forget it – we heard such a dreadful commotion. Screaming. It was awful. This screaming from below us. Like someone was in agony, dear. Like they were being tortured. We were so shaken. We couldn’t move. Arthur and I just sat together in bed and listened. Until the screaming stopped.

‘And then Arthur went down there. He called your uncle Reggie, and Tom Shafer, and they went down with him. They were all in their dressing gowns. Reggie came because he had been trying to get Hessen evicted from here. The head porter was called too, and the police. And when they opened it up, they found him in the living room . . .’

Mrs Roth covered as much of her face as possible with the handkerchief and sobbed. When she spoke again her voice was broken. ‘I went down with Lilly to help. He’d had a terrible accident . . . His face was all gone . . . Down to the bone.

‘They took him away. We thought he would die. No one could have survived those injuries. And no one knew what had happened to him. He must . . . he must have done it to himself.

‘But he came back. Months later. With his whole head in bandages. And there was a nurse, who he dismissed a few days later. Some of us even sent flowers and cards to the wretched man. We knew he was in there, but he wouldn’t come to the door. Like before, he just wanted to be left alone. So we left him alone. At least until it began again. And the next time it was worse than before.

‘He was evil. I told you that. And now I have them again. The nightmares. They killed Reginald and Arthur. It was the dreams, dear. No one would believe me now, but we knew then. He killed them both.’

Apryl couldn’t remain silent any longer. ‘How, Mrs Roth? I thought he was just a painter.’

‘No. No. No,’ she shook her head, the rims of her eyes now inflamed. ‘I told you. He was all wrong. Evil. I never knew anyone could be so bad, dear. He should never have come here. I don’t remember why he did. But he ruined the building. Killed it.’

‘How, Mrs Roth? My great-aunt wrote the same things. What did he do?’

‘The shadows have come back to the stairs. We could never get rid of them then, and they’re back here now. They changed the lights but it never made any difference. People stopped coming here. People left. But some of us refused to let him ruin our home. It was such a wonderful place until he came here.’

‘Did you see . . . his paintings?’

Mrs Roth nodded. ‘Horrible things. You’ve no idea. He didn’t know what beauty was. He made us all dream of them. We thought the Colonel was going gaga. He used to live here, the Colonel. And Mrs Melbourne. They saw them first. At night, dear.

‘People took pills and went to doctors. Real doctors. Not like you have now, dear. They don’t know anything now. They’re bloody fools. But even our doctors could do nothing for anyone who had the dreams. Reginald had them next. And Lilly. Then me. I was only young.’ She began to weep again and to squeeze at Apryl’s hands.

‘What were they? I don’t understand. What were the dreams?’

‘I can’t say. I don’t know how to. But he made us see things. You think I’m mad, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yes you do. You think I’m a silly old woman. I’m not.’

‘No. No.’ Apryl rubbed Mrs Roth’s back, to which she responded with a surge of sobs.

She began to sniff and talk at the same time, in a tearful voice. ‘The voices came out of that flat and onto the stairs and into our rooms. Arthur and I used to sit together and hear them. There was never anyone there, but we could always hear them around us. Anywhere near his flat, you could hear the things he brought with him. They came out of there.’ Again, she pointed a twisted hand at the floor.

‘Oh, it was terrible.’ Mrs Roth began to speak in bursts between her sobs. Apryl moved her head closer as it was becoming difficult to make out exactly what she was saying. ‘And Mrs Melbourne jumped from the roof. I saw her down there in the garden. She hit the wall. She wasn’t the last to do it either.’ The last sentence she spoke softly and with a genuine remorse that shook her words, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t look at Apryl as she spoke.

‘Oh, Mrs Roth. I’m so sorry. They were your friends. It must have been terrible.’

‘You have no idea. It was his fault. He did it.’

‘With his paintings?’

Mrs Roth drew a deep breath and swallowed a sob. She nodded, once. ‘They confronted him. Reginald and Tom and Arthur. They went to see him, dear. They were so angry, you can’t imagine. We were all going mad with it. So the men went to his flat because he wouldn’t receive our telephone calls and wouldn’t answer letters from the management. The men took keys from the head porter and let themselves inside.

‘And . . . and he looked terrible. They said his head was all wrapped up in something. Over his face he wore this mask. It was red. Cloth. And through it they could see the terrible shape of his face, dear. It was so tight on his face. No one knew what to say. But Reginald tried to be calm. Asked him what it was he thought he was doing to our home.

‘He laughed at them. He just laughed. They were very reasonable. They were all good men. But he just laughed. His face in this . . . this red thing. They could only see his eyes.

‘And then the men saw them again. On the walls. What he’d been doing in there for so long. They were worse than before. All the terrible things from our dreams. The paintings . . .’

‘What were they like? Please tell me. Please.’

‘And then Reginald lost his temper. They . . .’

‘They?’

Mrs Roth sat up in her bed and released Apryl’s hand. The sobbing and sniffing stopped abruptly, and her face froze back into a grim facade. ‘I’m tired.’

‘But . . . I mean, you were telling me . . . about the paintings?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not important.’

‘But you were so upset. I want to understand.’

‘It’s none of your business. I want Imee. Imee. Where’s my bell? It’s time for me to eat. You shouldn’t visit at mealtimes. It’s rude.’ The bell was ringing next to Apryl’s ear, the action deliberate, she felt.

She moved back to the chair to collect her things. Then turned to speak as Imee came through the door – but Apryl found herself too bewildered by Mrs Roth’s story to move her lips. And it was clear the woman was terrified and had told her far more than she ever intended to.

Apryl moved quickly from the bedside, only looking behind once she reached the safety of the doorway to see Imee beside the bed, bent by the force of the shrieked reprimands issuing from amongst the pillows. A cushion over that old face would not be unreasonable. Apryl felt shocked at the presence of such a thought that did not feel like one of her own.

She would let herself out. What kind of woman lets herself out, dear? Relief to be away from the dreadful woman pushed her down the aged hallway, and excitement at the revelations she would recount to Miles made her nimbler in her high-heeled boots. Until she opened the front door and passed through onto the landing.

With a breath-stealing suddenness, there was a quick flurry of whitish motion on her left side. Cringing, she sucked in air so fast she issued a tiny shriek. Then looked past the gloved hand she had raised to fend the thing off. In her peripheral vision she’d seen a flapping shape speeding towards her, with a smear of red above what could only have been bony shoulders.

And as she peered through her gloved fingers at the large polished mirror on the wall opposite the elevator, there was a brief billow of something white within the gilt frame. Which made her turn about swiftly to see the origin of the reflection on her right side.

Terrified she had flinched at a reflection and not the actual assailant, she staggered back two steps and braced herself for the impact.

But there was no one on the landing with her. She scoured the stairwells and elevator door for what had come rushing at her, but nothing moved, with the exception of the rapid ascent and descent of her own chest that struggled to take a breath.

TWENTY-FOUR

‘What are you doing?’

The sharp voice pierced him from behind. Seth didn’t even need to turn to identify who had caught him unlocking the door of apartment sixteen. It was a voice he’d heard on the house phone most nights for the last six months. But when he did turn to face Mrs Roth and saw her dressed in a pale blue housecoat and red slippers, the childlike vulnerability had gone, along with the frailty and confusion she exhibited last time they met, outside this very door. Now her hair was perfect; the bulb of thin silver covering the mottled skull hadn’t even touched the pillow. She’d sat up all night waiting for the sounds to begin.

Panicked at being caught trespassing – he could be sacked for entering this flat, and would be blamed for the noises coming out of it – Seth tried to speak. But failed, muted by his own fear. Mrs Roth would be sure to tell Stephen first thing at daybreak, if not before. She wasn’t just angry; she was furious at the sight of him before that door with keys in hand. Her face was red, her bottom lip trembling with emotion, the small eyes sharpened by rage. She raised her arm, the elbow bent, the quilted sleeve of her housecoat slipping down an emaciated forearm, stained with blue veins and continents of liverish discolorations.

‘I asked you a question. What are you doing?’ Her voice rose as she spoke until she was shouting. It could carry. He wanted to shut her up, but was powerless to act, to placate her. She was too clever. Too aware of the weakness of others, of his lowly status, and of her instant advantage as a resident. Too eager to expose and torment.

Seth swallowed. ‘I heard something. I thought someone had broken in.’

‘Liar. You are a liar. It’s you. You! You make the noises in there. I knew it! You do it to frighten me because you know I am upstairs. You are a terrible man to frighten an old woman. I want Stephen now. Call Stephen. Now!’

He felt sick. Couldn’t dislodge that huge lump of fear clogged behind his breastbone. It was like being a kid again. She always flustered him.

Bitch.

The very sight of her filled him with a rage of such intensity he imagined smashing her dried-up stick body against a wall. That idiotically big head, the threadbare hair, the pointy, vicious face above that child-puppet body of old sticks and loose flesh: why couldn’t she die? Her own family despised her. She couldn’t keep a nurse for more than a month. Reduced them to tears every day. No one could work for her. Or stand her. She had even driven the taciturn Stephen grey with her impossible demands.

Seth felt himself go white with loathing from head to toe. An antipathy that frightened him; the kind that would astonish him once it passed. Something he regularly experienced now, but never grew accustomed to; he’d never before been able to hate with such intensity, or to create from it with such integrity. And didn’t she understand that he had no choice – that something far greater than him was calling him up here to study its genius?

At last he found his tongue, but managed to suppress the anger, quickly thinking of a tactic to sidestep this mess. ‘I am responsible for the health and safety of the residents in this building at night. And I am sick of the noises in here.’ He jabbed a finger at the door. ‘And I can do nothing because of some stupid rule about the key. And you phone every night complaining to me about the noises in the empty flat beneath you. It’s gone on for too long, Mrs Roth. And tonight, I decided to go inside. So phone Stephen if you want. I really don’t care. Because I’ve had enough.’

At first she seemed startled that anyone would dare to take such a defiant tone with her. But the anger gradually softened from her face, only to be replaced with an expression of suspicion as she regarded him in silence, and thought on what he’d said. After a few seconds of deliberation, she raised the crooked hand again, showed him her big knuckles and fingers lumpy with arthritis. ‘Don’t you lie to me. You have been going in there. At night. And moving things. Making noises.’

Seth did his best to muster a stance of impotent frustration. It wasn’t hard, he’d had plenty of practice. He shook his head, stared at the ceiling as if to beseech a higher power. This had to be good; even though most of the sting had gone from her voice. ‘Mrs Roth, you believe what you want to believe. I am only doing my job. Would you rather I sat downstairs and ignored a break-in? So be it.’ He locked the door and walked towards the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, the bent finger jabbing the air again.

‘I’m going back downstairs, Mrs Roth. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Don’t be a bloody idiot. Get it open. I want to see for myself. Go on, open it. Now.’

He tried to fight a smile. He could tell Stephen she forced him to open the flat because of the noises, and that he only entered the apartment to finally shut her up. He should have called first, but he didn’t want to wake Stephen, knowing how tough he had it with Janet being so sick and everything. Maybe he and Stephen could keep it between themselves. Didn’t they have an arrangement of sorts, anyway? So what was the point of making trouble?

But what would Mrs Roth think of the paintings? He imagined her pale with shock, moments before the impact of a stroke; envisaged some tiny black blood vessel inside that heavy brain, its hard wall cracking, springing a lethal leak.

And she would ruin everything if she survived the ordeal of looking at them, by shrieking her ignorant complaints at Stephen. Seth might be fired; no head porter job for him. At the very least, the locks would be changed and the door alarmed. Sealed off from him. His access would be over.

Why tonight? Why did she have to make her move tonight? He was desperate to see the last room. Terrified, but alert to the potential of its influence on his own work, back at the Green Man. On the walls. Wet on the walls. So vivid. Something to bring the London art world to its knees. Oh yes, he was having his doubts. Was sick with fear at what he was doing, what he was becoming, what he was seeing inside his very home . . . But an artist must be courageous, and what was flowing from his hands was too spectacular to deny.

‘You bloody fool! I own the flat, it’s my property. Get it open. I’m telling you to open that door. Do as you are told.’

He started to fret again. To taste panic at the back of his mouth. He removed the keys from his pocket. Fumbled with them. But how was this possible? How did Mrs Roth own this place and the ghastly wonders inside it?

And then another voice spoke. From the stairwell, behind Mrs Roth. A voice he also knew well, its words coming from the cold, windy shadows of deserted council flats, from the rain-blurred streets of Hackney, and from the dim horrors inside the rooms of the Green Man. His hooded companion had returned. ‘Go on, Seth. Open it up for the old lady. There’s someone down there who wants to see her. An old friend, like. She’ll be taken care of. She’ll get what’s coming.’

Inside the mouth of the stairwell and half-obscured by the wall, Seth glimpsed the lowered cowl of nylon hood. The face was lost in darkness and the melted hands were tucked away in the rustling oversized pockets.

She’ll get what’s coming.

What did he mean? Seth felt sick.

‘Give them to me! Get out of my way!’ Mrs Roth came across the landing, quick on those clawed feet for an old lady. Her face animated by fury at his indecision, one of her lumpy hands snatched for the bunch of keys.

He held them up, out of her reach. Stared down at her, keeping his voice even. ‘Please. Would you just let me do my job?’

It was no use; she gave him no choice. He slid the frontdoor key inside the lock. He was not responsible.

‘Hurry up. Hurry. Why are you just standing there?’

Seth unlocked the door and pushed it open. He stood there and stared into the darkness in front of him. A cold draught wiped across his face and made his neck shiver.

Around his elbow he felt the clutch of her hand. Despite her anger and the way she had spoken to him, she still expected to be escorted in there. And protected.

He glanced down at her. Could see how agitated she had become. How frightened she was of the place. What did she know about it? She knew something. She’d lived in this building since the Second World War, and must have known the former resident of this apartment. They had been neighbours. And now she owned the flat.

Seth led her into the darkness, pausing inside the front door to reach for the lights. Into the hallway came the crimson glow.

‘Don’t they work? It’s so dark. Have you got a torch?’

So her eyes weren’t that good. No surprises there; she was nearly a hundred. Seth looked over his shoulder quickly. The hooded boy stood on the landing, watching.

‘Leave the door open. I don’t like it,’ Mrs Roth muttered. ‘Can you see anything?’ The strength had gone from her voice. Now she was just a frightened old lady, squeezing his elbow. Asking for reassurance. How could he ever have been afraid of her?

And yes, Seth could see everything: the paintings covered by the dirty ivory sheets, hung upon red walls, and all lit by the dim rose light silting through patterned glass. Just as he’d left it. But Mrs Roth didn’t appear to notice the paintings, which he thought odd. She was still complaining about the dark. Pressing herself against him, her head only rising to his bottom rib. A flicker of sympathy caught in his chest before he banished it, knowing this was no mark of friendship between them, or of respect. She despised him. She needed him now, that was all. In the morning she’d be reporting him to Stephen. Ruining everything between him and the treasures in this sacred place.

‘Can you see anyone?’ Her voice was shaky and imploring. Then she called out, ‘Who’s there?’ into the darkness; the obtuse tone was back in place, but seemed to lose its power inside the hallway.

‘Mrs Roth, who lived here?’

‘A terrible man,’ she said. The strength in her voice was slipping away again. She sounded confused and frightened. Misery and fear combined to sag around her mouth, to bow her head, as if she were being forced to remember something acutely painful. She seemed more stooped over than ever before. ‘We don’t want him coming back.’

He led her down to the middle of the hallway, aware of her breathing, that seemed laboured, as if she were enduring some strenuous exertion as opposed to merely wandering on slippered feet between these red walls. Walls she took no notice of. He heard her whimper.

‘An artist lived here, didn’t he, Mrs Roth?’

Mrs Roth said nothing as she looked at the closed doors.

‘Someone you didn’t like. Probably didn’t understand. So tell me, Mrs Roth, who was he, this terrible man? And what did you do to him?’

‘I don’t want to think of him. Don’t ask me again. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to remember him. Not in here. I bought this place to get rid of him.’ And then, her voice practically a whisper, ‘After he’d already left.’

‘What did he do, Mrs Roth?’

‘Shut up!’ she suddenly shrieked, then pointed at the door to the mirrored room. ‘In there. Do you hear it? I can hear him in there. He’s laughing. It can’t be. We got rid of him.’ The sudden force of her fear made Seth jump. She was shaking. White with shock and looking so frail now, he was practically holding her up: a papier-mâché puppet with bones of bamboo.

‘He can’t come back. It can’t be him. Someone is playing a trick on us. We got rid of him. We wouldn’t allow him to be here. Open that door. Open that door and turn the lights on. I want to see. I don’t believe it.’

Unsure of what to do and so aware of the power inside that room, he hesitated. Just standing near the door made him tense with an unpleasant anticipation. And Mrs Roth was witless with fear. Was trembling against him. What could she hear? She said she could hear him laughing. But Seth could not hear laughter . . . Just the wind. Yes, the suggestion of a far-off wind. The sense of some tremendous cold distance approaching, as if a black sea were making its way towards them on some impossible tide. One that washed in from above them, and somehow below them at the same time.

‘No. It’s not safe. We have to go,’ he whispered desperately at her.

‘Open it! Open the door. I want to see. This isn’t right. It’s not right. He can’t come back.’ She was becoming hysterical. The perfect dome of silvery hair was falling apart. What pitiful remnants of blood still survived inside her veins appeared to have drained from the surface of her skin. She looked ready to collapse; her flesh had taken on a greyish tinge and he was seeing far too much of the whites of her eyes.

But he couldn’t just stand here and let her scream. She might wake someone. Right now another resident might be banging on Stephen’s door, or calling the front desk. Or worse, the police. He was losing control again. Control of this stupid panicking old bitch. Anger replaced his unease and fear. Anger could do that; it had its uses. ‘All right. All right,’ he said, his teeth clenched in a grimace. He reached out and seized the cold brass handle of the door. But when the moment came to give the handle one full turn, it was pulled from his hand. Opened from inside with a force that made them both cry out.

Seth sat behind his desk. Unmoving. Staring at the glass of the front doors and the blue-black of dawn behind. Shivers ran across his skin, beginning somewhere inside, but spreading out and over his entire form. In the ceiling the lights made tinkling sounds from their own heat. Somewhere outside, a powerful car accelerated into the distance.

He wanted to keep his mind clear but couldn’t even follow the action on the television screen below the desktop. It was just a senseless mosaic of flickers and colours and distant voices. The pictures in his head were far more compelling. And they refused to stop or be still, but surged forward to reassemble the events that had occurred so quickly around him upstairs.

He remembered jumping back, instinctively, away from the dark, empty rectangle of space behind that middle door. At least that’s what it had looked like. A room that failed to materialize when the door had been torn from his hands by an eagerness within.

And then he saw Mrs Roth fall. Slowly, sideways. Down to the marble tiles at his feet. She went down quietly. Never cried out for help. Or got her arms out to break her fall. Just hit the hard tiles with a smacking sound. And lay still, with her face turned towards the door. She looked dazed. Her lips moved but she made no sound.

Seth had looked into the room. Some of the dim reddish light from the hall fell through the doorway, to reveal the glint of a distant mirror and the suggestion of long, shadowy rectangles on the opposite wall. As if solid, tangible matter had suddenly recomposed itself inside that space that had previously appeared dark and empty. And just for the briefest moment, he was sure he saw something lope quickly across the face of the door. From right to left. Hunched over. Indistinct and moving with a rustle, just below the sound of the approaching wind.

‘Quick, Seth. Quick. We got a deal, mate. I told you. So hurry it up. Put her in. Put her inside. There’s not much time,’ the hooded boy had said from behind him.

Mrs Roth had seen something too. Her eyes bulged from a face so ashen it looked like a plaster death mask. They seemed strained to bursting around the corneas and were fixed, unblinking, on the open doorway. A long dribble of spittle hung from the side of her mouth closest to the floor. She began to make a low moaning sound, like an animal. A frightened, wounded animal trying to breathe from injured lungs and growl at its attacker at the same time.

Seth felt disgusted by her. Repulsed at this display of incapacity. Wanted to get away from the broken figure on the floor.

She wouldn’t listen to him. Not a word. It served her right. The stupid bitch shouldn’t have been in here. He’d tried to tell her.

‘Seth. Seth,’ the boy said in an urgent, hissing voice. ‘Do it. Do it. Put her inside. Get rid of her. You got to be quick. It don’t stay open for long. And she’s hurt bad. Yous’ll get in trouble. They’ll blame you. Do it. Do it now.’

And that compelled him to kneel down beside the old lady. To reach for her narrow, pointy shoulders. He acted on the instinctive assurance that once he put her inside this room, the problem would be solved. Once and for all. So he did it.

She moaned as he tried to move her, but she didn’t move her eyes from the doorway. She felt so thin and hard under the nightgown. The housecoat flapped open. It was hard to get a grip.

‘Quick, Seth. Quick like. Put her in and close the door. You got to. Do it now. Do the bitch.’

Desperate to put an end to this confusion, this fear, this terrible suspension of reason and decency, he slipped his hands under her warm armpits, hoisted her up in front of him and turned her to face the door. Limp, unmoving, and now strangely silent, she hung from his hands, her eyes still open, about to be offered to the room.

You should never move an old person who’s had a fall. He remembered the first-aid training they’d had down in the staffroom. They can go into shock. She’d probably busted her hip. But they were past all that now. Way past it all.

‘That’s it. Get her in. Put the bitch inside,’ the hooded boy said, his voice breathless with excitement and starting to break into a humourless, eager laugh. ‘But don’t look up, Seth. Just don’t look up.’

Seth obeyed. Knowing this was going to lead to a swift end to the nuisance she had become, he walked forward. Not breaking his step, or looking left, right, or up above as he marched to the middle of the room. And then he laid her down.

It felt like walking through a dream in there. His own body was weightless. The air was strangely thick around him and so terribly cold it punched the breath from his lungs.

Nothing made sense, but it didn’t need to, as he immediately obeyed the rules of this space and did what he had to. Did what was asked of him. Did what was necessary in a room in which the ceiling – he was quite sure of this without even looking up – had vanished and become a terrific circling of air and half-formed voices. Rushing downward from somewhere miles away towards where he stood, a cold and fathomless turbulence above his head was rotating backwards at a frightening speed and getting closer. Spiralling down. He’d heard this sound before and hoped it had been a distant radio. But he knew for certain now that it was no such thing. It was the infinity he had seen depicted in the oil paintings that hung upon these red walls. And it existed with a force and energy that made him feel more insignificant than he had ever felt before any wonder of nature.

As quickly as he could, Seth turned and scurried back towards the door and the hall outside. He lurched through the doorway, his legs shaking, knowing that he was only back in the hallway because he had been allowed to leave the room. And then he wasted no time in closing the door behind him. He kept his eyes down, so that when the door moved on its arc to become flush with the doorway, he never saw, clearly, what it was that suddenly rushed across the room and covered Mrs Roth up.

Her scream was short. Started deep. Went high, warbled, then ceased abruptly. This was followed by a loud snap, then a series of dry cracklings that put in his mind the image of fresh celery being broken between strong hands. And of dry kindling being snapped to fit into a small fireplace.

And the noise of the wind, that inexplicable circling, the static crackle swooping, and inside it the sense of figures being swept away, their voices whipping through the air, suddenly built up to a crescendo he was sure every resident in Barrington House could hear while sitting bolt upright in their beds. A climax of such force that he waited, cringing, for the sound of the windows to blow out.

It never came. And before the noise suddenly stopped he heard what sounded like an assembly of hooves against a wooden floor, scraping in their haste to get to the place he’d left Mrs Roth.

The silence that followed was almost harder to endure than the preceding series of noises that had sapped all feeling from his arms and legs. Because it wasn’t a tranquil silence. Instead, it was loaded with anticipation. And when the silence lengthened Seth wondered if whatever grisly business had been conducted on the other side of the door had finally been concluded.

The hooded boy had moved down the hallway from the place where he had directed the proceedings. He stood beside Seth, who winced at the sudden gust of spent gunpowder and singed cardboard.

‘You’s done all right, Seth.’ The boy giggled and the hood of the parka trembled from the activity inside that Seth was glad he could not see. ‘Bitch had it comin’, mate. Bitch. Old bitch. He’s gonna be pleased wiv us, mate. He’s wanted that old bitch for ages, like. Now you get inside there and clean up, mate. You’s ain’t finished yet.’

He had to go back inside there. And clean up. A terrible shudder racked his body and he bit his bottom lip to prevent the mighty sobs that wanted to shake him from head to foot.

‘Come on Seth. You’s got to be fast else yous’ll get caught, mate.’

Pressed against the door of the mirrored room, Seth listened intently. Strained to hear through that heavy wood to search out any sign of occupation or activity. If he’d heard anything he was sure he would have fled and not stopped running until he’d cleared the building. But he heard nothing. It was only the gradual recession of his shock and fear that made him think again of Mrs Roth. An aged woman lying on the floor of a flat he should never have set foot inside. A woman badly injured now, or worse. He opened the door.

And saw her lying on the floor, hunched up, in much the same position he had left her, on her side, facing the mirror. The mirror in which he could see her face, contorted into a mask of such extreme fright he could almost hear the scream all over again. And above the reflection of Mrs Roth’s unmoving clump of nightgown and stick limbs he saw a flurry of movement.

Way down inside the mirror, inside the silvery rectangular tunnel of reflections created by its position opposite another identical mirror on the facing wall, something moved in quick flits like the images from a film struggling through a projector. But whatever it was he thought he had seen vanished before he had taken more than two steps into the room. Even after all he had endured and heard and seen in this place, he was still sickened with fright at the suggestion of something long and pale, with a reddish smear for a head, moving away inside the reflective distance of the mirror. And it was dragging a pale blue lump by the ankle, away from this room and deep into whatever existed down there.

Seth then turned and briefly looked about him, at all eight of the undraped paintings; one on either side of the mirrors positioned in the centre of each wall. And inside him everything seemed to stop moving, as if shut down by the sheer force of the images.

Each painting depicted the same face, but in different states of disintegration amid a terrible upward blast of air, moving so fast it must have seared the flesh from the bone with the efficiency of an acetylene torch. It was as if the entire demolition of the head above the seated body had occurred instantly. The eight portraits showed, in sequence, the head of the figure being pulled apart, torn and then sucked upward, while the body was still fastened to a chair. He recognized the bits of face in the piecemeal head. It was Mrs Roth.

Seth closed his eyes and shook himself. Rubbed at his face.

Don’t look up.

He knelt beside the cold body of Mrs Roth. He prodded and whispered to her, but elicited no response from the stiff shape, bunched inside the blue housecoat. Her eyes were still open, but he preferred not to look into them, either in the reflection of the mirror or on the actual face, that had been stretched by terror into the rictus of a scream that barely had time to leave the lipless mouth.

Wasting no more time, he scooped up the bundle of bone and its lolling head and moved quickly with it through the flat, out the door, up one flight of stairs, through the open door of flat eighteen, and then down the hallway to the master bedroom. And positioned the body at the foot of the bed, as if it had fallen heavily, head first against the floor, after losing its balance. Not even little Imee was roused by the sounds he made. Perhaps that tormented drudge only responded to the sound of a bell.

Seth then stood back and surveyed his work. Satisfied with the position of the shrunken, broken thing, with one foot tangled in its bedclothes, he turned on his heel and moved quickly out of the flat. He pulled the front door closed behind him and then went back downstairs to apartment sixteen to cover both his tracks and the paintings in the mirrored room, deciding he would keep his eyes closed when so near the shrieking horror of that face, depicted in paint still wet.

TWENTY-FIVE

‘They killed him, Miles. They murdered him.’

Miles paused in the process of removing his jacket. ‘Who? What are you talking about?’

Apryl was breathless, wasn’t making any sense – she knew it – but couldn’t stop herself the moment Miles entered her room at the hotel. ‘My great-uncle, Reginald, Mrs Roth’s husband and Tom Shafer. The men who lived there. In Barrington House. They killed him. They went to confront him. About the dreams. The shadows. They thought he was haunting them. Like my great-aunt, in the journals. It all changed after he moved in. Then he had some kind of accident. And it all got worse after that. Don’t you see it all makes sense?’

‘No, I don’t. What the hell are you talking about?’

‘The residents killed him. They saw the paintings. In his apartment. They must have destroyed them. Burned them. And killed him too. He didn’t disappear. They killed him.’

‘Sweetheart. Please. Sweetheart, sit down. Here. Please. Slow down. I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re talking like a crazy thing.’

But Apryl continued to pace back and forth. ‘She didn’t mean to tell me, but she wanted to. Part of her wanted to confess. She’s very old, Miles. But she’s not senile. Oh, no. She’s as sharp as a cut-throat razor. She knows exactly what she’s doing. My God, she’s a control freak. But she can’t control her conscience. No. It’s why she’s such a miserable bitch. She’s got a guilty conscience. And she wants to confess to someone. Anyone. I caught her at a vulnerable moment. Whenever she wakes, she’s vulnerable. Her judgement is impaired – you know how it can be – and she just needs to get it off her chest.

‘She’s so spoilt she’s still like a child,’ she went on. ‘But she doesn’t have long left now. She knows it. And it’s all been building up inside her. She did something terrible. A long time ago. Lillian too. They all did, and kept it quiet. And now her mind is playing up and she’s convinced that Felix Hessen has come back to the building. For revenge, or something, I don’t know. She claims she has heard him in his apartment again. Moving about underneath her. Like he used to do. She lives right on top of his old place. And the stairs are full of shadows again. Like they used to be. Shadows he brought with him years before. She can hear the voices again and is seeing things and everything. Like Lillian. It’s contagious. It’s so creepy up there. I mean, Jesus, I . . . thought I saw something. Again. But it’s like . . . it’s her conscience. It’s just so fucking gothic, but it explains everything. What happened to Hessen. To the paintings.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Listen. Listen to me.’ Apryl sat beside him and held his forearm tight with both of her hands.

‘But—’

‘Just listen. Please. Do me a favour, Miles. Just listen to me.’

When Apryl finished a less frantic account of her meeting with Mrs Roth and what she’d gleaned from her, Miles leaned back on the bed and rested on his elbows. He looked at her, his face inscrutable.

‘You see?’ she said, her eyes and hands still flitting with excitement.

‘Jesus, what a terrible story.’

‘Yes. It’s the story of Hessen’s missing years, and of the proof he painted.’

‘Maybe. And it’s just a maybe.’

‘Oh Miles!’

‘Hang on, sweetheart. Just cool your boots. I’d like to speak to this Mrs Roth myself before I make up my mind.’

‘She won’t see you. I’m sure of it. Or me again. I just know it.’

Miles raised his eyebrows. ‘But what do you make of it? All that business about the shadows. And the sound of raised voices in his apartment. It’s pretty damned eerie if you ask me. It’s exactly the same thing Lillian wrote.’

Apryl smiled; she was so excited she wanted to scream. ‘Isn’t it! Have you read all the journals? Tell me you have.’

A frown creased his forehead. ‘I have. Finished the last legible one this afternoon at work. In fact, I’ve read some of them twice. But darling, Mrs Roth is probably crazy. Like that Alice character you told me about at the Friends, who claims she knew him. And like your great-aunt . . .’

‘Lillian was nothing like Alice.’ Then Apryl paused and clapped her hands to her cheeks. ‘Oh, God. Alice. Alice said the same thing. About an accident. She said Hessen had an accident. She must have known him. They both must have known him after the war. I think he self-mutilated.’

‘Oh, hang on, girl.’

‘Why not? You’re the expert aren’t you? Didn’t Van Gogh cut his own ear off? Hessen was all alone in there, tormented by his vision. Working furiously. His mind disintegrating. A mind that was never truly like anyone else’s to begin with. You said so. It all adds up. Talking to himself. Shouting. Doing those rituals that got him thrown out of places. God, he must have lost the plot in there and . . . mutilated his own face. His own beautiful face.’

‘Apryl. Let’s not get carried away. Please. Let’s just bring it down a notch. You’ve no proof. Just a couple of half-crazy old women telling you stories. I mean you were telling me a few moments ago how the residents of Barrington House carried out an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Mrs Roth in the dining room with a candlestick.’

‘If you’re going to laugh at me, Miles, then I want you to leave.’

‘Hey.’

‘I mean it. I followed the clues my great-aunt left me. And it led to this. The man was murdered in his own home. Who knows why? Who knows what he really did to them? She said there were a lot of Jewish people in that building and they would have known he was a fascist. Mrs Roth is Jewish too. I mean, her name? There’s all kinds of motives.’

‘Well, yes, that’s one, and it’s pretty flimsy. Oswald and Diana Mosley had Jewish friends before and after the war. They didn’t rub them out. Different rules applied up top. Far more forgiving of each other’s faux pas, darling. But—’ Apryl turned to him with an expression suggesting a complete absence of patience with his doubt. ‘—if you truly believe he was murdered, then it is a matter for the police.’

She nodded. ‘But I need to know more. Find out more.’

‘How?’

‘I need to go back and talk to the Shafers. Get it all confirmed. They’re still alive. I’ll even stop them in the street if I have to. I still don’t know how Reginald died. I didn’t get the chance to ask. But I know, I just know, it’s connected to this.’ She turned and looked at Miles. ‘I want the whole story. For Lillian’s sake.’

TWENTY-SIX

Bruised by worry and lack of sleep and from having seen things he had no defence against, Seth didn’t recognize his own frightened eyes staring back at him from the dirty mirror he kept on the mantel in his room. He looked away. Inside his mind a crowd jostled in fear.

He struggled to breathe. His heart beat too fast and cold sweat leaked from his pores. He couldn’t sit still and paced up and down his room instead, looking from the walls to the windows. He thought he might be sick.

What had he done?

Shivering by the glowing radiator, he rolled and lit another cigarette; the sixth in as many minutes. Smoked half of it then stubbed it out in the saucer already overcrowded with a hundred other butts on a thick bed of ash. The sight made him feel worse.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d been living off mugs of tea and cigarettes for days. Too much tobacco, caffeine and stale air. Nor could he recall the last time he’d opened a window.

The watery grey light of the late-afternoon sun, soon to die into dusk, turned the orange fabric of the curtains whitish in the places they were most worn.

The grubby half-light revealed red-black colours smeared across two walls. The sight of it made his guts convulse. How had it come to this, to fall so far? Had he lost his mind? Or was this a new mind that painted such fragments of faces and body parts over his walls before killing an old woman?

Dear God, did he?

He wasn’t sure what he’d done. In his memory the events of the previous night had a jerky, insubstantial quality. If he could only slow his head down for a moment, maybe then he could remember what he had done, and what he had seen in that flat, on the walls. See if any of it was possible. But his hands still seemed to bear the weight of her bony body. And he couldn’t suppress the image of Mrs Roth lying on the floor, her face stricken but staring. Or of the quick shadow racing across the floor of the mirrored room and covering her up. The room he’d carried her into like a priest taking a sacrifice into the heart of a temple. And then he recalled her body on the floor of her own bedroom, where he’d planted it, at the foot of the bed, unmoving and broken. Where they would find it today. Her nurse would be there already. Any moment someone could call, maybe Stephen, maybe the police.

In the mirror – what did he see in that mirror? Something scrabbling like a thin white bird with a broken wing, with something red stretched over a face that didn’t look right. And dragging her away, deep into the reflection.

He couldn’t trust his memories. Couldn’t even distinguish what was real and what was a nightmare. No. It was not possible. He’d been hallucinating for weeks. First the dreams and then the visions of that boy. His sick mind had made it all up. This is what happened when you spent too much time alone. Sleep deprived, not eating properly, depressed and anxious, a consciousness turns on itself. He’d left the path so long ago and now he couldn’t get back on it. It was too late for all that.

Seth sat down again. Closed his eyes. Clenched his teeth and bit down against the sudden re-emergence in his mind of Mrs Roth’s sharp dead face, and against the morbid hints of that other head framed on the walls of the mirrored room. The one coming apart, being stripped down to the bone. In paint that was still wet.

He had to leave London. Get out of this vandalized and smeared room. Get away from apartment sixteen and what it made him do. Break out of this blockade of misery, aggression and indifference the city was perpetually shrouded within.

He’d completed a shift pattern and now had a few days off work. If questioned, he could say he’d only gone home to visit his mother. Then his desertion of the city might not be seen as an admission of guilt, were he suspected of causing Mrs Roth’s death.

Clinging on to this logic, he rose to his feet. Unsteady on tired legs, his vision almost pixelating from lack of sleep, he fumbled through the pile of clothes in one corner and retrieved a rucksack. Stuffed some dirty clothes inside it. Then snatched up his overcoat, keys and wallet, before leaving and locking his room – a room that was a testament to delusion, to mania, to futility. A place he would never set foot inside again.

The traffic never stopped on New North Road. He waited by the kerb, blinking in the dim light that still managed to make his eyes burn. Cold winds buffeted him from three directions. Dusty, fume-drenched air swirled up around his face.

Eventually the lights changed. He moved on, further up the Essex Road, into Islington. Angel tube station his target. And then King’s Cross and away. As he moved he shivered and sweated at the same time. Feared a re-emergence of the fever. He just didn’t feel right. Staggering about to avoid the loitering pedestrians, he felt like he was either stuck in one place or moving backwards.

The sky was so low. Disconsolate and grey, it appeared to be no more than a few yards above the top storeys of the tallest buildings. Sodden with muck, it silted a brownish murk down to the ugly red bricks and stained concrete of the buildings, so that it was hard to see much further than a few hundred feet ahead.

And the people here, how they looked like the final dregs of a diseased race. Shambling under the grotesque loads of their fat bodies. Huffing irritably, elbowing and shouldering each other as they walked the cramped pavements. He tried not to stare at these faces about him. What had the city done to them? They made him feel sick.

Everyone was being worn down in increments here. Some, like him, had just fallen further than the others. And it didn’t help to dwell too long on those who were most damaged, in case you hastened your own descent to their musty forgotten corners: the stale bedsits, the damp rooms and labyrinthine concrete estates where trees didn’t grow and where the air constantly shouted with the belligerent voice of the fast angry traffic.

Away from this. Oh God, to just be removed from this place that didn’t work. A city regenerating its timeless contamination through the misery of the occupants. That was how it found nourishment. By dousing hope and disturbing minds. By instigating crisis and breakdown. With the shock of poverty and the tyranny of wealth. With the eternal frustration of being late; the suffocation of mania and the binding of neurosis; the perpetual cycle of despair and euphoria; the murderous anger at the trespasser who sits too close; the dead stares of faces at bus windows; the mute absorption and quiet humiliation of the underground; delinquency and drink; a thousand different tongues snapping in selfish insistence. City of the damned. So ugly, so frenetic. And all beneath the white sun in the forever greyness of sky. Where the damned are swallowed and forget who they are. He loathed it.

His horror spurred him on. Made him walk faster even though he was out of breath and uncomfortably sweaty under his bag. In the dull windows of the shops and cafes he caught glimpses of himself: shabby and hunched over like a beggar with its old sack. And when he saw his face it looked sickeningly white. Bleached by fear, sharpened by anxiety, lengthened by misery, but the eyes were full of the bewilderment of a man tormented by an absence of sleep. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered, amongst the other mumblings in which he rehearsed the directions of his journey, over and over again: ‘Northern City Line to King’s Cross. Buy a ticket to Birmingham. Get on the first train . . .’

Near the glassy face of a building society he rested before the final surge to Angel tube station. He was close to the crossroads and the air was all wrong. It felt like a hand on his chest was holding him back while his legs went numb with pins and needles. At this place a stream of visions poured into his head, appearing and vanishing quicker than heartbeats. They were everywhere, the damned.

The two tramps on a bench told him to fuck off. They were using drink to hold back their own visions.

This was a place only the mad could see. But the insane are so filled up with it they can only stand and stare, or wander and mutter like forgotten prophets and dethroned kings.

‘You cunt of a whore,’ he said to the pavement that tripped him up. ‘You cunting shite of Christ the devil,’ he said, before spitting at the speeding cars. ‘Stinking bile and shit of shit of shit . . .’ he said at the tube station when he found it closed due to industrial action.

He prayed for the strength to destroy the city with a hammer.

He’d have to continue on foot. Stumble down the Pentonville Road to King’s Cross Station. Rage drove him. He ground his teeth to sand. He would not be defied. Not by the uneven pavement, the lights that never changed, the sudden roadworks that forced a lengthy diversion, or the yellowy faces that looked up, beseeching, with their horrible parchment mouths moving in the darkened windows of basement flats. Something like a crab, with legs as thin, scuttled behind a dusty privet hedge. He closed his eyes against it.

It seemed to take hours, with frequent stops becoming necessary to wipe the sweat from his eyes and readjust the backpack that was close to giving him a spinal injury. His vision was beginning to dissolve at the edges into white flashes. Sound was slowing down, and elongating.

At King’s Cross most of the road was open around the front of the station and surrounded by orange plastic mesh. No one was working in the strata of tarmac, soil and clay piping. The signs had been knocked down. People were walking across them. The sound of their heels against the dented tin ricocheted inside his skull. The roof of his brain was a bruise now, pushing darkness into his eyes.

Two police cars were parked outside the main entrance to the station, but he couldn’t see the officers. Six feral dogs on rope leads were fighting, blocking the main entrance. One of the owners had a beard that reached his waist. It was grey and tangled into dreadlocks. The other was a skinny punk with acne-covered cheeks and stripy leggings, trying to sell the Big Issue. They tugged at the ropes fastened to their dogs and swore at each other. People with jobs walked past the commotion eating sandwiches from Pret A Manger and talking on mobile phones. Inside the station someone was screaming, ‘Get your stinkin’ hands of me. Get them off me you stinkin’ ape,’ and then three police officers burst out of the station dragging a black woman out. She had no shoes. All of the officers had lost their hats.

The black woman looked derelict, homeless, insane from huffing crack. In one hand she still clutched the stub of a half-chewed baguette. Two little Chinese women followed the struggle. They wore the red and white uniforms of catering staff. Their expressions were identical – silent indifference.

If he’d had a gun, Seth believed this would be the time to start shooting. To clear his path of dogs and degenerates. But the red flare of anger only made him feel weaker. Close to a faint.

Once inside King’s Cross Station, and once he’d managed to keep his eyes focused on the departures board, he realized he was in the wrong place. Trains didn’t run from King’s Cross to Birmingham New Street. It was Euston he needed. Fucking Euston.

Hands on his knees, head bowed, he tried to contain both his anger at himself and his delirium from lack of sleep. It had been so long since he’d left London for even a day. A year since he’d travelled to Birmingham. He’d forgotten how to get out. But he would get out. He’d walk all day if necessary, until he collapsed, to find a way to leave this hell.

Back out on the Euston Road, he plodded west. Euston Station wasn’t far. The signs said so. Above him the sky was turning white. Or rather, he could see a bright shimmer through the gaseous sheet of grey. His face was hot and now his vision swam. Streets, buildings, lamps, cars, stunted trees, road signs and pedestrians all rotated and blurred about him. If he lay down he would pass out.

Slowly, slowly, he made his way up the long white glaring tunnel of the road to the station. A sudden flood of hope pushed him across the grass to the main doors of Euston.

But inside the station he felt even worse. The effect was immediate. He began to panic. Within the glare of white lights and chatter of sound, the push and sweep of the crowds, the buffeting of bags and screech of cases on wheels, he felt an overriding desire to run back outside.

An echoing announcement he couldn’t fully understand was listing delays and cancellations. He couldn’t see Birmingham on the departures board. Woozy and screwing up his eyes against the vertical judder in his eyesight, he soon found it too painful to look up at all.

He went in search of help, which was in short supply. Non-existent in fact. He decided he would ask at the ticket office, then saw the enormous queues that turned in serpentine coils and decided he’d better head for the toilets. But in the middle of making his way through the crowd on the main concourse he suddenly paused. Standing before the red-yellow smear of the Burger King facade was the figure of a hooded child. His hands were pressed deep into the nylon pockets of the snorkel coat and the face was lost in darkness, but he turned in Seth’s direction.

A man behind Seth knocked him off balance, then wheeled round in a whirl of overcoat and tie not in order to apologise but to grimace. Seth looked back to where he’d seen the hooded figure, but it had gone.

Breathing hard from the shock at the sighting, he told himself it was a hallucination. But then he caught a flash of schoolish trousers and scuffed chunky-heeled shoes flitting past a concession that sold sunglasses and watches.

Impossible; the boy couldn’t move so quickly. There were other kids in here. it must have been one of them. He was being paranoid; was paranoid and sick. He pushed his way through a cluster of French travellers and headed for the ticket office.

But maybe the boy was here to prevent him from leaving. There had been nothing but obstacles in his path since he left the Green Man. It was like the whole city was conspiring to keep him stuck within certain boundaries.

In the queue, he kept his eyes down and closed so he wouldn’t see something in a hood watching him. Trying to focus his vision, he took deep breaths of the warmish air to hold the panic back; the panic boiling at the back of his throat and threatening to come up as a high-pitched scream. It made him want to tear at his clothes and run madly through the crowd.

Instinctively he believed that if he moved back eastward, back towards the Green Man, he would feel better again. Something was letting him know he was not allowed to leave the city. Something he had willingly gone into partnership with the night he opened the door to apartment sixteen.

Finally he stood before the glass screen, behind which sat a fat man in a red waistcoat. Seth rediscovered his voice and asked for a ticket to Birmingham.

The man looked exasperated. ‘Have you not heard the announcements or seen the signs? No services to Birmingham today.’

‘What?’

‘No services from Euston.’

‘So how do you get to Birmingham?’

‘Marylebone. Chiltern Railways. Or the coach station at Victoria.’

But just the names of those distant places, so far off in the cluttered and crowded city, doused the last flicker of his spirits. He wanted to punch the wall until his hand was jelly and bone fragment loose inside purple skin.

‘Can you move aside for the next customer,’ the man in the red waistcoat said.

Seth drifted away from the counter. He knew the Tube and the buses wouldn’t take him anywhere he wanted to go, and he didn’t have the strength to walk any further. All of his energy was gone apart from the reserve set aside to feed his panic. Even if he managed to reach another station the swift sickness would swamp him again.

He had to sleep. To go home and lie down. Maybe he could try later, after some sleep. He could think of nothing else now, and refused to even acknowledge the hooded boy who waited for him outside the ticket office, and who then fell into step beside him as he left the station.

The following day he tried to walk south, but could go no further than the Strand, where he vomited in a pub toilet.

The north presented an impossible maze. He was disoriented by brick walls, pointy black roofs, iron railings, bitter air and the half-seen whitish things that called out to him from building sites and moved quicker than rats down there in the uprooted foundations. His effort to escape was turned back to the centre, where he discovered himself to be in the evening, somewhere between Camden and Euston, wasted by hunger and exhaustion.

On the third day, in the east, he nearly suffocated between a row of grey terraced houses with front gardens full of rubbish. He shook and wept, watched by Pakistani children in strange clothes. And then he turned for home: the only direction that offered any relief from the nausea, the hot-cold sweats, the gasping for breath, and the constant calls from the bone-things in windows with their yellowy faces and wide-open maws.

The next evening, he went back to work.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Outside the Shafers’ apartment the smells of Barrington House clouded: wood polish, carpet shampoo, brass cleaner, and dust. And something else. A hint of sulphur. Of something recently burnt, like gunpowder.

Descending and ascending on either side of the elevator, the stairwells were lit by the electric lights, but the very air was gloom. Half-lit like a photograph taken in poor light. It made Apryl uneasy, but strangely apathetic too. Unless she kept moving and focused on specific tasks, she could imagine herself just lying or sitting in silence and waiting, alone, in here. But waiting for what?

At the thought of knocking on the Shafers’ door, her stomach went hollow with nerves. They were old and difficult and didn’t want to be disturbed. Stephen and Piotr had said as much. Their rejection of her request to meet them was down to their connection to Hessen and what they had done to him. With her great-uncle Reggie leading the way. Only under emotional stress had Mrs Roth confided in her. Maybe she had even expected her own end was near. The thought made Apryl deeply uncomfortable, as she must have been one of the last people to see Betty Roth alive. Stephen confirmed as much that morning when she arrived.

But the elderly resident had confided enough, and Lillian herself had hinted at the same ghastly series of events occurring half a century ago. But in her fear of interrupting Mrs Roth’s scant and haphazard disclosure, she had failed to ask about Reginald’s death. Not even Lillian had been able to share those details, because the final truth of what happened back then was too unpalatable for Mrs Roth and her great-aunt to recount. And so she was left with suggestions of Hessen’s evocations of unnatural powers and terrifying sounds, of hideous paintings and a plague of nightmares that even direct confrontation with the man had failed to erase. Things she too had glimpsed and was terrified of encountering again in these dim halls and wretched rooms, where the shadows were all wrong and where every mirror she looked into suggested a presence. She looked about, anxious when her eyes moved over the mirror on the landing.

But there had been a conflict and it had ended badly for Hessen. Of that she was certain. A murder they had kept secret all these years. A secret that drove them apart and into isolation and madness. But it was a story she would have retold now. She would know how Reginald died, and how Hessen had been murdered, and she would know this afternoon.

She raised her hand.

Her index finger met the cold brass of the door buzzer.

She pressed the button softly, too softly. It made no sound. She depressed it more firmly and held it down within the decorative brass surround.

What did you do here?

There was a pause and then the buzzer vibrated against the tip of her finger. At the same time, behind the heavy wood of the front door she heard a faint chime.

And across the greyish glass of the window in the stairwell, the weak sun must have moved its face further behind the ever-present cloud, because she felt the air cool and darken about her.

She stepped back and waited. And waited. Because no one came. She leant forward and pressed the bell button again. And again.

And then she heard footsteps rapidly descending from the floor above, down the communal stairwell, and felt the guilty urge to run away like a kid. The waiting was draining her confidence, her purpose. A shadow reared up the wall and she turned to greet the figure coming down in such haste. It must be a child, to move with such alacrity and speed. But could a child cast such a shadow?

To her right voices eventually came forward from deep inside the apartment. They gathered around the sound of the chime. A woman’s voice, sharp and anxious. Though Apryl could not make out the words. And then much closer. Close enough to be directly on the other side of the door, an elderly man’s voice came to life. ‘Well I’m trying to find out.’ It was raised in annoyance and directed back down the hallway towards the distant cries of the woman.

Apryl looked back at the staircase. The shadow grew larger but thinner and dissipated up near the ceiling. The footsteps on the stairs stopped. No one came around the bend in the staircase. ‘Hello?’ she said, her voice weak. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Who is it?’ For an old man, the voice on the other side of the Shafers’ front door was surprisingly strong, his American accent still detectable, though tempered by decades spent in London. His voice was directed at her, so she guessed he was peering through the little spyhole in the door. She could hear the rasp of his breath from the exertion of moving.

She looked away from the stairwell, suddenly eager to get inside the apartment with the elderly couple. ‘Hi, my name is Apryl. I just wanted—’

‘Who? I can’t hear you?’

She sighed with exasperation. ‘Apryl Beckford, sir! Can I come in, please?’

‘I can’t hear you.’ And then he shouted behind himself again, at the woman. ‘I said I can’t hear them. So how do I know? Would you just quit it! I said I’d take care of it. Don’t bother. Don’t bother getting up. I said I don’t need you.’

‘I just wanted to . . .’ Apryl began to say. No use, he wasn’t listening and couldn’t hear her even if he was.

Old fingers scraped and fumbled at the latch as if it were the first time they had performed the operation. Tom Shafer’s breathing grew louder and more strained, as if he were lifting something heavy.

When a gap appeared between the edge of the door and the frame, the man was so tiny she had to look down to see his face, which nudged forward. Severely lined baggy skin, dotted with bright white stubble, hung about a wet mouth, from which the lips had withdrawn. A rivulet of clear drool shone in a deep ravine at the corner of his mouth. Thick glasses magnified his watery eyes. They were so dark as to appear black in the moist discoloured whites. A blue mesh baseball cap was perched untidily on the little figure’s head.

‘Yes?’ Like that of a cigar smoker, his rough voice seemed to emerge from somewhere behind his breastbone and was liquescent but incongruously deep and bone dry at the same time.

‘Hello sir. You don’t know me.’ She spoke loudly, but not at a volume that would carry to the woman back inside the apartment who she assumed was Mrs Shafer. ‘I’m the great-niece of Lillian from apartment thirty-nine and I really need to speak with you, sir. Please, just for a few minutes.’ The door was partially open, but she instinctively felt it could close very quickly. She cast a final nervous look over her shoulder at the staircase, suffering the feeling that whatever had thrown such a shadow and moved so swiftly was now waiting just out of sight, and listening.

Occasionally blinking, Tom Shafer looked at her in silence. His expression crumpled into an anxious suspicion that she felt was a near-permanent feature. Slowly, he shuffled his body about to look behind him, down the hall, as if making sure his wife was not visible. Then turned back to face her. ‘You look just like your aunt. But I can’t see you. I’m sorry. We told Stephen. He should have made that clear.’ He began to close the door.

Apryl stepped forward, surprising herself. ‘Please, sir. I have to know what happened to my great-aunt and uncle. They were your friends. Your neighbours.’

He breathed out noisily. ‘That was all a long time ago. We don’t remember anything.’

‘I know about Felix Hessen.’

At the mention of that name, he looked up, his wet eyes startled into an animation they’d previously lacked.

‘I just need to know if what my great-aunt wrote is true. That’s all. Some closure on her life. Please sir, it’s just for me and my mother. We won’t tell a soul.’

Tom Shafer squinted at her. His heavy glasses moved up his small nose. ‘Young lady, your great-aunt was as crazy as a snake. And you’re starting to remind me of her. She used to come up here with just the same attitude. We don’t want to be bothered by any of that.’

That? What did he mean? She smarted at his flippant remark about Lillian. ‘She had her problems. I know that. But you know why too. Mrs Roth told me. She told me what happened. Before she died.’

The door reopened, wider than before. ‘Betty wouldn’t say a word. She was many things, but she was no gossip.’ Despite his wizened body and little head in the ludicrously oversized hat, she was again surprised by the power of his deep voice. It suddenly made her feel foolish and guilty, like a kid caught misbehaving and bothering adults.

She cleared her throat. ‘Mrs Roth didn’t tell me everything. But she was very frightened before she died. And she needed to confide in someone. In me. She felt she was in danger. That something in the past was having repercussions right now. She told me about the paintings, sir. And about Hessen’s accident. What he did here. How he changed things for all of you. My great-aunt wrote of it too, in her diaries. Between them they’ve told me a lot of things. Including what happened after Hessen came back here and started tormenting you all over again.’

Tom Shafer didn’t speak for a while, but the tension of the space between them was filled with his raspy breath. He suddenly looked ill and terribly frail as if he could easily fall and not get up again.

‘I just want a few minutes of your time. That’s all. I have to know.’

‘I can’t. I’m sorry. My wife . . .’

This aged and fragile man suddenly made her think of Lillian, alone and afraid and abandoned, but never relenting in her struggle to escape the ghosts in her memories that had become the terrors of her every day. She’d never given up. Not like Mrs Roth and the Shafers, imprisoned here until death with their nurses and pettiness and powerlessness. Apryl wiped at the tear that tickled her cheek.

Without looking at her, as if he was too ashamed to meet her eye, Tom Shafer opened his front door and then hobbled away into the darkened hallway. He paused after a few unsteady steps and turned his head to the side. ‘You coming in or what?’

Dabbing at her nose, Apryl walked behind him. But now she was inside she wasn’t even sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.

‘Keep your voice down,’ he whispered. ‘If you disturb my wife you’ll have to leave.’

She nodded, but wondered whether he’d said this out of protectiveness for his wife or out of fear of her.

She followed him between the bare and stained walls of the hallway and into a large living room. It appeared the couple only used the one little corner of this space, the part with the television and the two worn armchairs huddled together about a little table on wheels, covered with small Evian bottles, tissues, sweets, a half-eaten bunch of purple grapes and scattered packets of medication. The rest of the room was empty save for an ancient sideboard and a dinner table piled high with cardboard boxes, faded towels and wrinkled bed linen. It was another poorly lit and miserable little pocket of Barrington House. With all their money they lived like bums in one corner of a penthouse. The carpeted floor was covered with crumbs and bits of paper. There were no pictures on the walls. No mirrors. Only the outlines of frames that once hung there, the paper bleached around the dark rectangles and squares.

The Financial Times was spread over one of the two chairs. ‘Take a seat. I can’t offer you a drink. It’d take me an hour to get to the kitchen and back. And we don’t have that much time.’

‘Please, don’t apologize. I’m sorry to disturb you. I really am. I know I came here uninvited. I don’t want anything but a few words. An explanation. It’s just—’ She swallowed the tightness in her throat. ‘—I’ve found out so many things since I’ve been here. Things I now wish I didn’t know. But I can’t go home without knowing the rest of my great-aunt Lillian’s story.’

After falling into the chair and panting to get his breath back, Tom Shafer peered up at her. His aged face was calm now, his stare unfaltering, resigned, with no time for social discomfort despite the squalor of his surroundings. ‘You really do look like Lilly,’ he said, and finally smiled. ‘She was a very beautiful lady.’

Apryl’s face suddenly suffused with warmth at what he’d just said. Not because he thought her attractive, but because he’d confirmed the connection between her and Lillian. ‘Thank you. She really was, wasn’t she? I’ve seen the pictures of her and Reginald.’

Tom Shafer kept on smiling. ‘Sometimes it hurt just to look at them. They were something else.’ He looked away, at nothing in particular. Just out there into the scruffy room he occupied every day. ‘But things change. Enjoy what you have when it’s there. Don’t go looking for trouble.’ It sounded like a warning. He looked back at her. ‘I hear you’re going to sell that place of Lilly’s. Well I’m going to ask you to do it, right away, and to get out. Don’t waste any more of your life here than you have to.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I thought you knew.’

She avoided his eyes and looked instead at her hands clasped in her lap. ‘I know some things. But not everything. I can’t put all the pieces together.’

‘And you think I can?’

‘But you were there. Back then.’

He shook his head. ‘But who can say what happened? I’m not sure I can. Betty sure couldn’t. Nor Lilly. And the others aren’t with us any more. It was not something in the normal course of a person’s experience. Not something we were prepared for, or could deal with. It should never have happened. We just got caught up in it because we were too proud and too damn stupid to get out when we had a chance.’

‘But caught up in what?’

He let out a long sigh. ‘I don’t suppose it makes a goddamn bit of difference who knows now. I can’t believe Betty told you anything. I really can’t. But who would believe a damn one of us old fools? And I have no idea what the hell Lilly was writing. She wasn’t herself. Not for a long time. It all beats the hell out of me, but something happened for sure. By God, we’ve paid our dues for it. We all have.’

Apryl looked down at her lap again, feeling herself fill up with a familiar frustration and despair. ‘But you can tell me how Reginald died. Lillian couldn’t bear to write it down.’

Tom Shafer looked up at her. ‘You ever heard the expression that two people can love each other too much? Well that was Lilly and Reggie. We never thought she’d survive Reggie’s passing, and I guess we were right in some ways about that.’

‘But how did he die?’

His stare hardened. ‘He killed himself. Jumped from the living-room window of their apartment.’ He spoke without a pause, blink or stutter.

‘Where the roses were,’ Apryl said. ‘Where she put the roses. It was a memorial.’ She looked deep into Tom Shafer’s eyes. ‘Because of Hessen. Because of the way he tormented them and drove them crazy. But how did he do it?’

Tom Shafer shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You must. My great-uncle was a war hero who flew missions over Europe. I have his medals. He survived and came back here to the love of his life. And then killed himself over a dispute with a neighbour? And in the process broke his wife’s heart so badly she went crazy from it. I can’t accept that no one knows the reason why he would do that. You were close to him once.’

Tom Shafer shook his head. ‘Now you are getting ready to understand why we don’t speak of it and never have done. Beside your aunt, who never let it go. Maybe she had more cause than the rest of us. But how can I explain it? You can’t understand unless you were there. Reggie wasn’t the only person to take his life. Mrs Melbourne did too. She was the first. Went right off the roof and hit the damn fence. They had to cut her from the railings. And then there was Arthur. Betty’s husband.’

‘No.’

He nodded. ‘Oh they covered it up with some damn bullshit about heart failure, but he took an overdose.’

‘But why did none of you leave? Why can’t you leave? Lillian died trying. I don’t get it.’

Tom Shafer’s voice rose in anger. ‘Don’t you think we damn well tried? But we can’t! And that’s all there is to it. Can’t go further than a damn block in any direction and we don’t know why.’

‘The paintings. The Hessen paintings. It’s about the paintings. My great-aunt said it was all connected.’

Tom Shafer’s little body seemed to shrink further into the large chair. Now he looked like he was just bone and skin inside a plaid shirt and sweatpants. His gnarled hands trembled on the armrests. He closed his eyes and soon his entire body was shivering. Apryl felt an urge to go to him, like she had done with Betty Roth, and to hold him. To go to this tired and broken-down old man and to comfort him as no one had comforted Lillian. ‘I don’t want to remember them if I can help it,’ he murmured.

‘Lillian dreamed of whatever was inside those paintings. Then she started to see it. Around her.’

‘We all did. Somehow it never stayed inside those damn paintings.’

‘It’s why Reginald took his own life. And the others.’

Tom Shafer nodded. ‘Maybe they were the lucky ones who had the guts to get out of this. But we suffered too you know. We never had any children because of it. She miscarried every time.’

‘I’m sorry.’

A silence thickened around them in that dusty little corner of nowhere. Tom Shafer broke it and spoke as if to himself. ‘My wife still thinks she can protect us in here. She doesn’t know any better. I can’t afford for her to be upset. Not in here. So you’ll have to go soon.’

‘You burned them.’

Tom Shafer never said a word or even nodded.

‘And killed Hessen. Together. I know you did. You and Arthur Roth and Reggie. I don’t want to make trouble with this. I just need to know why Lillian couldn’t come home to us. It’s what she wanted. She said so in her journals. But something was done here that drove her husband to kill himself. The same thing that kept her here until she died. I want to know how Felix Hessen could make all this happen after his death. Can you tell me?’

Tom Shafer shook his head in despair. ‘You have no idea what he was. I don’t know what Betty told you, but he brought things here. We didn’t know what. Or how he did it. I still don’t. None of us ever did. Lilly had some crazy ideas, but we weren’t buying it. But whatever it was, it was more than us. All of us together or individually. We soon found that out. And it was the end of Reggie and some other good people too. Including your aunt and now Betty. I’m pretty damn sure. That woman had a strong heart. I don’t believe it failed. Me and my wife are all that’s left.’ He stopped talking and swallowed. Perspiration had begun to make his forehead shiny and he began to look grey in the thin light as if he was seriously ill.

‘Are you OK, sir?’ She reached for his arm.

‘Don’t believe a damn thing they’re saying downstairs’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘Something’s not right down there. Just get yourself out of here, girl. Like we should have done.’

Tom Shafer then shook his head and sighed as if reluctantly accepting bad news. It was the weariest sound she’d ever heard come out of a person’s mouth. ‘The whole damn building used to shake. It came out of his apartment. About a year after he moved in here. Make no mistake, he was a crazy bastard before all this started. Never left the building. Not once, I’m sure of it. You’d bump in to him on a staircase, or down where the staff used to live, making his weird signs in the air like he was drawing. Messing around with the pictures on the walls. Talking to himself, and not in English or any goddamn language I ever heard. The porters used to catch him all the time. They kept an eye on him. They never liked him.

‘And at night he was doing things in his apartment that could dim the lights on the other side of the building. Used to fill the air in Betty’s apartment with something you couldn’t see, but could tell was there all the same. And if you listened real hard you could hear voices. Not like you and I are speaking, but a hundred voices. All going round and round down there with him.

‘We all heard it for the first time in Betty’s place. We were having dinner and we heard it coming up out of the apartment below. In Hessen’s place. And once you heard it you never stopped hearing it.

‘Whatever he had in that damn place came out. It came out of there and got into everything else. Came through the building. Got behind the walls and inside mirrors and pictures. You saw things in them that weren’t there before. Even if you were the only damn human being in a room you suddenly knew you weren’t alone when you looked into a mirror. Sometimes it was one of them things, sometimes more than one. But you saw them. Moving. And then they came into our dreams. They got inside our sleep.

‘I don’t know how he did it. I made a hundred million on Wall Street. I’m good with what I can see and explain. But not with this. We had no defence against it. Neither did he.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He lost his own goddamn face down there. He lost his whole face and his whole goddamn mind in whatever he had moving around down there. Something he couldn’t control once he got it started.’

Apryl swallowed. ‘What happened to his face?’

Tom Shafer kept his eyes lowered. He thought for a while and then swallowed. ‘Arthur called Reggie and Reggie called me. Betty and Arthur had heard screams. Hessen screaming. So we went down with the head porter and let ourselves in. And found him in the living room. All on his own with all the rugs pulled back to the wall. But you could see how messed up his face was. Like frostbite, Reggie said. Black and burnt-looking, with the flesh gone down to the bone and eyes. But there was no fire. No chemicals. No blood. And he sure as shit hadn’t been to the North Pole, though we may have wished it on him. We had no idea what caused those injuries.

‘An ambulance took him away. And we thought that was the end of it. But he survived and when he came back, he just started it up all over again. All them noises, circling. Like a whirlpool. All down in his place.’ Tom Shafer broke his train of thought and looked at her. ‘How did Betty die?’

‘In her sleep, Stephen said.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s a damn lie.’

‘Betty said he’s come back. Do you think he could really come back?’ Apryl prompted him, terrified he’d stop talking, like Betty Roth had done.

‘Back? He never damn left. He’s kept us here and he’s been waiting for something to start it all over again. He’s still here for us. Which makes me as crazy as Lilly for just saying such a thing. He’s been biding his time. Until now, he couldn’t do much else beside scare the shit out of us if we went near a picture or mirror. Or make us sick as a dog if we tried to leave the neighbourhood. But things have changed again. Now it’s different. Like he’s got some help.’

Apryl struggled to control her voice. ‘And Reginald . . . You all killed Hessen.’

Tom Shafer shook his head. His voice was barely audible. ‘It wasn’t a case of killing a man. Reggie just put him in there with it. We did nothing to stop it. And that crazy bastard never came back out again.’

‘Put him in with what?’

‘I don’t know. None of us did. But it sounded the same as whatever was in them paintings on his walls, or filling that room that must have been the size of a football field.’

‘I don’t understand . . .’

Tom Shafer swallowed, noisily. ‘Second time we went down there, we took the keys from the head porter’s safe ourselves. Reggie took a pistol too. We let ourselves in and Hessen was waiting for us in the hall. So damn thin he looked like he could barely stand on his own two feet. Just wearing his dressing gown with this mask over his face. Made from something red that went over his head like a hood and tucked into his collar. But you could still see through it. See that fool’s messed-up face.

‘Reggie demanded to know what he was doing. What he had in that room, making all that noise. The living room. And Hessen just laughed at us. Like we were nothing. Like we were pointless. That’s how he made you feel.

‘And Reggie lost his temper. Got him by the collar and mixed it up with him. Knocked him down over a chair that busted right from under him. We tried to hold your uncle back while all the time trying not to look into those pictures on the walls. But your uncle was a strong man and he just shrugged us off and dragged Hessen by an arm across the hall floor. Right up to that room he dragged him, and opened the door.’

Tom Shafer stopped talking and began shaking. He reached for a bottle of water, which Apryl quickly uncapped for him.

‘Well, Hessen really started struggling then. And carrying on like he did the time he lost his face. Screaming like a lunatic. But Reggie tossed him into that dark space. With all the cold coming out of it. And those noises. All them voices speaking at once and crying out for help. A room where you couldn’t see much beside the bit of the damn floor with all them markings on it. Voodoo shit or something, right behind the door. But it was a place you knew went on forever. And Reggie threw Hessen in there. Like he was a doll. Just picked him up and threw him through the damn door.

‘And we all held that door shut on him.

‘We heard him carrying on for a while. Screaming and banging and begging for us to open the door. And then just bumping against it, like he had no strength left. Until he stopped that too. Until it all stopped.

‘It was like he faded away, with all them other voices in the wind and cold. Don’t ask me what it was. None of us had a goddamn clue. But we all felt about twenty years older the day after.’

Apryl gulped. Her voice was only a whisper when she spoke. ‘Hessen was dead?’

Tom Shafer shrugged. ‘When we opened the door, the room was empty. Not a soul in there. Just them four mirrors and the candles that were still burning in the middle of all the marks on the floor. I swear to God almighty that’s what we all saw. But he wasn’t there. He’d vanished. Hadn’t gone out the window either. They were all locked, and anyway, no one would walk away from a fall from the eighth floor.’

‘The paintings . . . You . . .’

‘Every damn one of them. Took them down from the walls in the hallway and in all the bedrooms. Burned them to ash. Bust them out of the frames and burnt that crap he’d done and all the strange markings under them. Put them all in the furnace they used to have here to burn coal.’

From the hallway outside the lounge door, a shrill voice suddenly destroyed their whispered sharing. ‘Is there someone in here? I can hear ya’ll talking through that damn wall! It’s driving me crazy.’ The voice was breaking down into tears and hysteria.

Tom Shafer suddenly broke out of the miserable trance he’d fallen into while recounting the story. His face was now stricken with panic. The door handle turned. He struggled to his feet. Apryl stood up quickly too and turned to face the doorway, her own discomfort turning to fear. In this place it was contagious. The door opened.

A huge bulk of a body filled the gap between the lounge and the hallway outside. The moon of Mrs Shafer’s face was terribly old, but the skin had a curious sheen to it, as if she were wearing a thin plastic membrane over her features. It must have been some kind of face cream. Coils of black hair were piled under a blue headscarf that was sloppily pinned in place. It was squashed flat on one side where she must have been lying against a pillow. The small black eyes were ferocious.

Mrs Shafer clasped each side of the doorway as if to support herself from the shock of seeing this stranger in her home. Immediately her lips began to tremble, whether from rage or grief it was hard to say. ‘What is going on in here?’

Tom Shafer raised two thin arms that wavered out in front of his little doll body. ‘Now don’t go getting all upset.’

‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’ She stared at her husband in astonishment, as if the greatest betrayal of their entire time together had suddenly been revealed. ‘She’s got to go! I’m telling you. I want her out of here! I don’t believe my eyes! I mean, what were you thinking? God damn you for bringing trash into my home!’

She was insane. Apryl understood this in a heartbeat. ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. I never meant to disturb your rest.’

Without even looking at her, without breaking her stare from her husband, as if the sight of Apryl was intolerable, she began to speak in a deeper and more controlled voice that was somehow worse than the shrieking, ‘We don’t want you here. You’re not welcome. I told Stephen and you pushed your way inside here. You took advantage of this dear old man.’

‘Now dear. All she—’

‘I’m not talking to you!’ she suddenly shrieked at the tiny figure in the crooked baseball cap, her face flushing a dark crimson. ‘I surely don’t want to be speaking to you for a long time!’

‘It’s not his fault. I meant no harm.’

‘Leave here now! I won’t have such, such, such things in my home. How dare you! How dare you! I’m calling Stephen.’

‘You won’t call a damn soul!’ Tom Shafer suddenly roared at his wife.

Apryl fled for the door. ‘Then excuse me and I’ll leave,’ she said to Mrs Shafer, who still wouldn’t look at her for even a moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom Shafer said to Apryl in the hallway, as he hobbled after her. ‘She’s not herself. Not today. It’s all very hard for her.’

‘Can I call you?’

‘No you cannot call! Or come up here again!’ Mrs Shafer shrieked. She would follow them, stop, then follow some more and clasp her hands over her mouth. As her little husband shuffled in front of her, Apryl half expected to see Mrs Shafer reach out and seize her diminutive mate, before dragging him into the great belly that pressed through the stained front of her floral housecoat.

Tom Shafer reached out and touched Apryl’s elbow by the front door. She turned about and looked into his frightened eyes.

‘I can’t believe this is all still going on!’ Mrs Shafer had recovered her voice. ‘I wonder how long it has been going on!’ And now she had begun to cry, while crowding behind them, her great body hovering protectively and threateningly behind her tiny husband.

‘For the love of Christ,’ Tom Shafer whispered to himself. Then turned and shouted, ‘Would you shut your damn fool mouth!’

It made Apryl shake and want to be out of this terrible place without delay, but the old man’s crooked fingers dug into her arm. He was breathing so hard now she thought he could die at any moment. His lips were moving. She leant down towards his wet mouth.

‘Don’t trust them,’ he said. ‘None of them downstairs. They’re helping him.’ And with that he released her arm and turned back towards his weeping wife.

TWENTY-EIGHT

‘Heart attack. A big one.’ The news about Mrs Roth was delivered quickly by Stephen. The head porter had been waiting for Seth to come in for the evening shift. Piotr stood beside Stephen, beaming. The nurse, Imee, had found Mrs Roth at the usual time, six o’clock, when she’d taken her breakfast in that morning.

But to his barely concealed amazement, Seth wasn’t asked about the events of that night. Whether she had called down at all. Nothing. Neither of his colleagues seemed upset either. At least she wouldn’t be troubling them again, that seemed to be the tone: relief. Stephen was even whistling, which Seth only remembered him ever doing after receiving a big tip. He clapped Seth on the shoulder too, which he had never done before, and then passed through the fire door to enter the staircase that would take him down to his flat.

A ninety-two-year-old woman’s sudden death in the night as a result of heart failure, while alone in her room, was hardly likely to arouse suspicion or instigate a forensic investigation. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d been telling himself, as if he had been rehearsing a mantra, as he’d stumbled towards all four points of the compass looking for a way out of London over the last few days? And tonight he had to assume, with a relief that made him shake, that he’d got away with it.

A respite short-lived. His fear of the police swiftly turned into a terror of what occupied apartment sixteen, of what it was capable of, and of what it might want from him next. Because there was no saying no. It changed him. The same as when he was painting – he could forget who he was. He became its tool, its assassin. He understood that now. The hooded boy, that stinking bastard in the parka, had said as much. They’d make him a great artist, liberate him from living death, if he did things for them. Like murder. Fucking murder.

When Piotr went home, Seth waited out the hours under the hum of the lights in reception. And it was not an easy wait. What was left of his conscience kept him company as gravity increased its pressure in the building. In anticipation. It was palpable. Sleeping or awake, things happened here. On terms that were not his own.

At certain times he would be required to act. Always. Here. To be complicit in a vengeful business he seemed to have brought back to life. Business long unfinished at Barrington House. And he could do little but guess at its origins, while having no control over its ghastly outcome. But people had to die here. Old people. Maybe lots of them. Old bitches who had harmed the thing that was once a man in apartment sixteen.

Impossible. Just preposterous. But happening, right now.

He fidgeted in the leather chair, or paced up and down the hall.

By eleven he’d smoked 12.5 grams of hand-rolling tobacco: Drum Yellow. Too wired to yawn, he stared at the screens of the security monitors, the greenish view never changing. He drew nothing. His desire to re-create the world in red and ochre and black upon his walls was absent. He now knew such insight demanded a terrible price. His new talent was only there by virtue of a collaboration with something in this building. A presence that wouldn’t let him leave the city.

Jesus Christ.

Why had he waited until he had no control over anything? His dreams, his actions, and now his movements were not his own. And to have been pulled back here tonight. To have been summoned and not given any choice in the matter accounted for this brief renewal in his health. The stomach cramps and nausea and dizzy spells had gone. Completely.

Had they ever existed? Yes, and he feared their return. Would do anything not to feel like that again. Seth slid his face into his hands and shut his eyes. Shut his eyes at the impossibility of it all. Of what had been done.

The hours passed him like indifferent pedestrians. Six thirty became midnight. But where was the watchdog? The hooded one, able to enter his dreams at will and shepherd him around the streets of London and the floors of Barrington House for its own purposes. Maybe the boy was here right now spying on him. Able to read his thoughts and be aware of his every intention.

Or maybe Seth was schizophrenic and hallucinating. No one else could see the figure of the boy. And Mrs Roth had been unable to see anything in the dark flat, which to his eyes was a place lit red. And he was seeing the city in a way all others were blind to. Maybe this was how it was for those who killed because of the voices in their heads, or obeyed commands uttered by visions of the dead or heard messages from televisions and radios. So maybe it was time. That time to surrender. To turn himself in to the authorities. How was that done? They would have to come to him. He could get sick if he tried to go to them. Break down before he even reached whatever doctor or constable was required to remove him from life. And could any of it even be explained?

A terrible shudder racked his body. A lump closed his throat down. He clawed at his cheeks and tried not to cry. ‘Jesus. Jesus. Jesus Christ,’ he said. There was no barrier between sleep and waking. No division between what was real and what was not real. All of it was the same thing. Coming together. Out of him and into him.

‘Come on Seth. They’s got summat to show you.’ The hooded child’s voice woke him at two and his sinuses filled with the scent of firework sulphur, cold winter streets, cheap clothing and the seared flesh that stuck to it.

The boy’s coat swished as he turned and walked away from the reception desk. How long had he been standing there watching him? The thing in the hood moved to the lift doors and paused to wait for Seth, hands in the pockets of its snorkel coat. ‘Don’t mess about, Seth. Get the keys.’

‘Go on, Seth. Look. She’s in there now. Where she belongs. Down there with the rest of them.’

He couldn’t stop the shaking in his arms, or in his hands that tried to cover his eyes, or in his legs that seemed ready to give way and reduce him to his knees.

Up there hanging on the wall at the very end of the hall was Mrs Roth. Depicted in bright oil paint. Recognition carried an impact that stopped the ticking of his watch, the pulse and pull of blood in his veins, the flit and reprise of thought. But by no means was it a literal portrayal of the former resident of flat eighteen. More of an impression of her. Incorporating suggestions of her distress at the very end. Distress both at her dispatch and at her sudden realization of her fate thereafter, because there was no end to awareness.

The skin of the face was twisted about the skull. Skewed somehow as if wrenched by invisible hands. The watery eyes had been rearranged. They were on different parts of her head now, but they were hers for sure. Bright with surprise and wide with something else. Thin bones, stripped of flesh, clawed for purchase where there was none in the black torrent of upward. Through which she seemed to both travel and hang. A frail configuration of sticks taken away. Away with it all. With no delay.

‘No,’ Seth mumbled.

Here he was again, between the red walls, to view a painting that was absent the last time he’d knelt before some contortion inside a gilt frame. This one was new. And worse than all the images combined of Mrs Roth that he’d seen on the night of her death. Because this one told him where she was now. Where he’d put her. And his sense of incapacitation was stronger than ever, if it was possible, as he lost himself before those bones in the rags of a nightdress, propelled through the dark.

‘There’s more, Seth. Come on,’ the boy said, and stood outside the mirrored room. ‘Gotta see it through, Seth.’

Seth turned away from the painting. Forced himself to remember where all his limbs were, so he could move, directed by the boy, to the mirrored room. He felt ready to scream, but never for a moment did he even consider resisting the will of the hooded boy. An unpleasant desire to see even more, until he was again taken to the boundary of himself, to endure the psychic strain of these creations, pressed him into that mirrored room.

Where a new exhibition had been organized for his eyes. The fragmentation of face series was gone. In its place he was treated to five blank canvases, reflecting an impossible sense of depth no two-dimensional medium should have been able to create, preceded by a triptych that began next to the door he had entered.

The three new paintings were in frames, but still gleamed wetly as if recently finished. He could smell the oil paint from where he knelt. It was a series of paintings in which, as he sat still and unblinking, he glimpsed something resembling a narrative. The first two pictures were separated from the third by a mirror positioned directly across from its counterpart on the opposing wall, creating an infinite silver corridor that retreated to a distant pinpoint.

In the first picture, out of the smudge of background came the suggestion of a staircase in Barrington House. He recognized it immediately from the hundreds of times he had walked those passages on patrol. Only here the walls were coloured like dried blood. Orange orbs glowed to light the darker places using some technique and mix of colour he couldn’t help but think masterly, despite the sight of the three figures in the foreground. Monstrous things that made him recoil.

Three men in evening dress, with peeled heads and thick sullen lips that parted with an imbecile vacancy, moved up the stairs on legs that never fully formed or separated from the grey swoops at the bottom of the frame. And it was as if all three figures grew from the same source and were in possession of only one arm. There was an oversized and raw hand at the end of the arm, clutching a metal object that had been designed for hammering or shooting.

Which is precisely what they seemed to be doing to the swathe of bloodied robes and naked limbs inside the next frame. It could have been a fourth figure, and the three grotesque idiot figures, their faces now animated with a hideous mirth, were destroying it. No face was visible within the wet linen that surrounded the victim, only two thin legs that shot out from the coils of the slaughter in progress.

In the third and final picture only the fourth figure – the victim – remained in view. It was inside some kind of transparent membrane that possessed a bluish tinge to its see-through walls. But the victim now resembled meat still wet on the bone, and it lay upon a gore-sodden platform of some kind. What looked like a head, with no face, hung over the side, flattened and misshapen, with the solitary eye closed. A long shadow crept away from it like running blood and filled the entire lower portion of the picture. And beside the crude plinth it lay upon was a red rag that could have been a mask or some sort of deflated hood, with a partial face still embossed upon the front of it.

And then something moved. Quickly and backwards, in the mirror before him.

A figure. The indistinct face reddish, as before, but hunched over and vanishing the same moment he caught sight of it. Leaving only a reflection of himself, seated and bewildered, in the silvery corridor of mirrors.

‘Others are gonna get done in later for what they did to our friend, Seth. And you got to help out wiv ’em,’ the hooded boy said, faceless inside the tatty fur trim that circled the hood.

‘No,’ Seth said, unable to stop the shaking that began again as he crawled towards the door. ‘No more. No more. I don’t want to do any more.’

The boy crossed the room quickly and blocked the door. Seth winced as his mouth filled with the smell of scorched flesh and charred cloth. ‘You bring them Shafers down here. Call ’em up and get ’em down here quick,’ the boy said. ‘You owes us. We got a deal, like.’

Behind him and up above him at the same time, he then heard a sound that washed his face of colour. A distant wind. Moving anti-clockwise, beyond the ceiling of the mirrored room, with the faint suggestion that within the turbulence, many voices were crying out in the blindness and unreason of terror.

‘And be quick about it, like. It can’t stay open for long, uvverwise too many fings get out, like. And we want them old Shafer cunts chucked in before it closes.’

‘A fire? What do you mean?’ Mrs Shafer’s waxy face confronted him from the open doorway. Then she looked away, down the stained hallway of her flat, in the direction of the distant bedroom, where her husband was still in bed, and cried out, ‘I don’t know what he’s saying, dear . . . Something about a fire?’

‘Who is it?’ Mr Shafer called out in that southern accent of his.

‘It’s . . .’ Mrs Shafer couldn’t remember his name. ‘The porter!’

‘Hold on, would you? Let me get . . . my glasses.’ Mr Shafer sounded preoccupied and breathless. He must have been trying to get out of bed.

In all the excitement his wife’s bottom lip quivered and her eyes were watery from interrupted sleep. ‘Are you sure?’ she said to Seth. In her tone a prelude to hysteria was making itself known.

Seth nodded. ‘Afraid so, ma’am. We have to evacuate. Now.’ He had to get them out of their apartment and into number sixteen quickly, before anyone heard or saw what he was doing. The floor above was occupied, and if Mrs Shafer raised her voice any higher, he wouldn’t be surprised to hear a door unlatch up there.

‘But . . . I’ll have to get dressed. I mean, look at me.’ She was in her nightdress; a baggy red garment beneath a scruffy tartan housecoat that looked like it had been made for a man. Whatever was on her head – a wig under a scarf, or possibly real hair dyed black – had begun to drape about her ears. They were multi-millionaires – Stephen had once mentioned a fortune of over one hundred million – and they dressed like vagrants. They disgusted him.

‘There’s no time, ma’am,’ he said, raising his voice to a command. ‘Go and get your husband. Now.’

Immediately she shambled back inside the apartment and Seth wished he’d been as firm with her before, during all of those evenings when she’d tormented him with her pettiness. But she wouldn’t be able to inflict herself upon him for much longer, not if she walked between those mirrors. The very thought of them, and of what flickered through their silver-white depths, and of what was spinning above it all, made him so weak he leant against the door frame to wipe the sweat from his forehead. His skin was cold. He felt sick.

Mrs Shafer reappeared further down the hallway, holding her husband by one elbow and leading him out of their bedroom. A black walking stick in his other hand, Mr Shafer looked up, blinking. ‘Where is he? Who is it, dear?’

‘He’s there!’ she scolded the old man. ‘Right before your eyes. We have to get out because of a fire and you’re asking me these questions now? I mean, for God’s sake.’

As usual Mr Shafer fell silent, knowing better than to argue. He just sighed with the fall of every foot, his face tense from the exertion.

‘We’ll take the lift.’ Seth struggled to find his voice. The enormity of what he was doing took his breath away: waking elderly residents in the early hours with a story about a fire, in order to lead them to a grisly execution in there.

He held the door of the lift open and watched them shuffle inside. Seth crammed himself in too, ignoring Mrs Shafer’s murmurs of annoyance.

He stopped the lift on the eighth floor, but they didn’t seem to notice they’d gone up instead of down. ‘Here we are,’ Seth said. ‘That’s it,’ he added, helping Mrs Shafer out onto the landing by holding her arm.

He then steered them toward the unlocked door of apartment sixteen; left shut but on the latch. ‘We’re going to evacuate through this apartment. Downstairs is blocked,’ he said, praying they wouldn’t question his instructions that were patently ridiculous: there were no external fire escapes and they were on the eighth floor, between flats sixteen and seventeen. It was no place to make an evacuation.

‘Well I guess we better do what the young man says,’ Mrs Shafer said to her husband, leaning down and shouting into his face.

‘Well, yeah, but where’s the fire marshal?’ he asked her. ‘This man isn’t qualified. I’d like a word with the fire marshal. I mean, do you smell smoke? I thought I did back there,’ he said to his wife, but allowed himself to be led.

Only when he came to cross the threshold of the flat and enter the red hall did Mr Shafer stop. ‘Let go, dear. Let go. I said let go a me. This ain’t right. Where are we? This says sixteen, right there on the door. It’s that apartment, dear. He’s taking us into that apartment.’

No mistaking the emphasis. Seth’s neck stiffened.

Bewildered, Mrs Shafer stopped tugging on her husband’s thin but wilful arm and looked about herself until she also saw the number on the door. ‘What? I don’t understand? In here. We can’t go in here.’ Her voice was rising again.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mr Shafer demanded, his voice growing in strength and volume. A voice of business, one that must have come in useful when he was amassing all of those millions.

‘Look. There is . . . I’m trying to help,’ Seth said uselessly as they talked over him.

Mr Shafer was pushing his way back out now, around the bulk of his wife. His head was lowered with a determination to escape. ‘Call Stephen now. I want to speak to whoever is in charge. This is ridiculous.’

Seth tried to regain control of his voice. ‘You have to. You must. In there.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen the fire marshal. Stand aside.’ The old man prodded Seth in the stomach with his cane.

He shouldn’t have done that. Belittled him with the stick. Shouldn’t have touched him. Seth couldn’t breathe. Inside he felt himself go black. And too hot for reason to act as a coolant.

Mrs Shafer was still looking at the brass number on the door, then down inside the unlit hallway, then back towards her husband with her mouth open and her eyes all wild, when Seth kicked the stick out of her husband’s hand.

It hit the wall.

Mrs Schafer screamed.

Seizing the old banker by the collar of his nightgown, and then fisting another handful of thermal cloth near the small of his back, Seth lifted the figure from the ground and walked quickly through the front door. Mr Shafer’s feet never touched the ground.

‘Outta my way,’ Seth said to Mrs Shafer, his teeth clenched. And she stood aside, which surprised him. Just stood aside and let him pass, like he was carrying an unruly child to a family car on a trip the child had spoiled with a tantrum.

Mr Shafer never made a sound. Not a word. Nothing. Just hung from Seth’s hands and let himself be carried down the hallway. It was only when they stood outside the partially open door of the mirrored room, where the sound of the wind inside embraced them and the unnaturally cold air gusted out to burn their faces, that Mr Shafer spoke. He said, ‘Oh dear God. No. Not in there.’

Seth kicked the door open.

The lights might have been off, but it was clear the air of that room was occupied. Alive and electric with wind and animate with something else on the floor he couldn’t see, but could hear as a swish of eager movement around the edges. Just audible under the spinning.

As if he were simply throwing a log into a furnace, he hurled Mr Shafer into the room. Head first, into the darkness. And the old man didn’t make a sound as he hit the floor, as if something was there to catch him when he came down in the dark. But Seth didn’t have time to stop and think about what he was doing and what had become of his victim – best not to think of that – he just returned his attention to Mrs Shafer, who stood mute in the entrance to the hallway and stared at him.

He grabbed hold of her and marched her through the flat. ‘That’s it. That’s it. Come on. Here we go,’ he said to himself, to drown out the part of his mind that was screaming at him to stop.

She didn’t make a fuss either. Just whimpered. Dazed with shock, she even walked right into the room after her husband, requiring not so much as a shove. And it was noisy in there now. In the dark it sounded as if the ceiling had opened to let in a thousand voices all crying out at the same time, but not to each other. It was as if they couldn’t see each other, but were crowded together in some terrible dark confusion.

Seth closed the door on it all. Then fell to his knees and held the handle with hands white as bone, forcing it up so nothing could get out. And he tried to shut his ears to the new sounds defining themselves from out of the wind, and the cries so thick inside that room.

When he heard the bumping up against the door, as if someone had lost their balance and fallen heavily against the other side, he desperately wanted to take his hands from the brass door handle and block his ears, but knew he couldn’t afford to leave the door unsecured. This instinct for self-preservation was reinforced when out of the circling swept-away voices came a snarling in the foreground, like a dog worrying something between its teeth, up near the door where he had heard the bumping. And when someone tried to twist the handle down on the other side to get out, Seth was sure he heard the scrabbling of clawed feet on a wooden floor.

The wind and the voices were gone, the red lights were switched on, the paintings were all covered with dust sheets, and Mr Shafer was dead. Seth could see that straight away; the eyes turned around and gone all white, the mouth wide open, the hands frozen into claws and the legs wide apart. You didn’t strike a pose like that when you were still breathing.

But his wife was moving. She was hunched over before the mirror on the wall opposite the door. On her knees. Tottering ever so slightly, from side to side, and looking into the mirror for something she had lost in there. Her lips were moving too, but no sound was coming out of her mouth.

Seth locked her inside apartment sixteen in case they came back for her, and then carried the frozen bundle of sticks that was her husband’s body up the stairs to their flat. He then placed the thing that had once been Mr Shafer back inside the bed and covered it with the sheets, up to the chin, all the time taking care not to look at the face. And then went back down to collect Mrs Shafer, or whatever was left of her.

She was still kneeling, but now silently rocking back and forth. Her mind must have gone out like a blown fuse. And she offered no resistance as he coaxed her to her feet and slowly walked her out of the flat and into the lift.

‘She’s finished, Seth,’ the hooded boy said, reappearing when Seth guided Mrs Shafer out of the flat. ‘She won’t say nuffin’. Her head’s all bust inside. It was the ’usband he wanted most. Don’t forget his stick. Take it up wiv his missus. He won’t need it where he’s gone. You’s done well, mate. Our friend’s gonna be pleased.’

‘I don’t want to do any more. It’s finished. You tell him that.’

‘Nah ah. Yous don’t tell us nuffin’. We tells you what to do, like. And I fink you might be ready for a little treat for being so helpful and all. Summat nice might be comin’ along soon. ’Stead of all these old uns.’

Seth scowled at the reeking thing in the tatty hood, who trailed him as he led Mrs Shafer inside her apartment. He decided to put her back on her knees beside the bed. The Shafers only had an occasional visiting nurse, but they always came down in the early evening to walk to the local shop on Motcomb Street. Piotr would soon notice they’d not been around for a while. He’d check on them soon enough.