Twenty-nine

‘Apryl, please. Just take it easy. For your own sake. You’re starting to worry me. I mean, really worry me.’ Miles leant over his desk, his fingers wound tightly together, trying to look into Apryl’s wild and excitable eyes and to still them because they were flicking about and blinking as fast as the thoughts and ideas were streaming into her head.

‘I’m starting to worry myself. Jesus.’ She stood up again from the chair on the other side of Miles’s desk. Could not keep still, and walked across his office to the door. Then stopped, and clasped both hands on either side of her cheeks. ‘I have to, Miles. I have to do something. I can’t walk away from this. People are dying. Lillian tried to help them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

‘Have you any idea, any idea at all how preposterous this all is? I mean, you are suggesting that Hessen is still in that building in some. some. I don’t know, altered state and murdering those who wronged him back in the forties, one by one. Listen to yourself, woman. It’s nuts.’

Apryl was deep in thought and did nothing but shrug Miles off. She removed her hands from her cheeks and slapped them against her tight-skirted hips. ‘I need to go in there at night. That’s when it all happens. When people are in danger. And someone is helping him. That’s what Mr Shafer said. Before he was killed. Murdered. I’m sure of it now. Mrs Roth, then him. And I’m responsible.’ She turned to Miles, her eyes moistening with tears. ‘Don’t you see? I made them talk to me and now they’re dead.’

Miles sunk his head into his hands and slowly drew his long fingers down his face. ‘I cannot believe I am hearing any of this come out of your lovely mouth. You know, a gay friend of mine claims that all women are latently mad, and by degrees the lunacy gradually surfaces. Right now, you are a testament to his insight.’

Apryl sat down and sniffed, then dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘I’m not going to cry. ’ By the time she was attempting to pronounce the last word a big bubble popped in her throat and she was crying. ‘Fucking eyeliner’s going to go everywhere,’ she said, sniffing again.

Miles came around the desk to her. ‘Hey. Hey. Go easy on yourself. You are putting yourself under a lot of strain. Just sell that bloody flat and put all of this behind you. Come on.’

She moved away from his embrace and shook her head. ‘I can’t. I just keep thinking of Lillian. All those years, Miles. On her own. That terrible. thing, frightening her. Night after night. That poor old lady. Who lost the love of her life. And then suffered for so long without him. And. I know what it’s like. Hessen, I mean. I saw him too.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not someone I can tell things like that to.’

‘Hey. Now that’s not fair.’

‘You’re not. But I did. It. he was in the mirror I brought up from the basement. And in the painting of Lillian and Reggie. And in other places. Whenever I’m in that building, Hessen is watching me. Trying to scare me away, I think. Because I’m getting closer to him. He follows me about, like he did the others, who just hid and waited for the end. Lillian never did. That brave, brave woman tried to escape every day for fifty years. Every day, Miles. After he killed her husband. Drove him out that fucking window.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the look of disbelief and pity on Miles’s face. ‘You’ve never seen him, Miles. And be glad you never have.’ She said this with such force she surprised herself, and Miles leant back, away from her.

‘Before I even met Betty Roth and Tom Shafer, I’d already seen the same thing. In mirrors, paintings. Hessen. The residents didn’t suggest it to me. I saw it independently. Because when I arrived he’d become more active again. Because someone is helping him. That’s what Tom Shafer said. Shafer was as sane as you and me. He said someone in that building is helping Hessen now. To kill, Miles. To kill those terrified old people. Hessen’s been able to keep Lillian and the others all stuck there, and has tormented them with his population of the Vortex, or whatever the fuck he brought into that building, but he hasn’t been able to kill them. Not until now. Because now someone in that building, maybe someone who works there, is doing his bidding. Maybe all of them. Piotr, Jorge, Stephen. This morning, when Stephen told me about the Shafers, I pressed him about the coincidence of three elderly residents dying like this. Three people who knew Hessen. Tried to talk to him about what Betty Roth and Tom Shafer had insinuated about Hessen still being in the building. And he looked really uncomfortable. Cagey, you know? He’s avoided me ever since. And there’s another guy too I haven’t met. Who only works the night shifts. Or who knows? Maybe it’s a resident behind all this. They could all be in on it.’

‘Then go to the police.’

‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous.’

‘Because that is how your story will sound. Because it is fucking ridiculous. It’s wild and unsubstantiated. You can’t just go around accusing people of murder.’

Apryl turned to him, her face tight and fierce. Miles raised one hand, palm outward, in an appeal for silence. ‘Now hang on. Let me finish. Mrs Roth and this Shafer chap were in their nineties. Their nineties, Apryl. That is a fact. People in their nineties can keel over at any moment. That is also a fact. Your great-aunt had been ill for a long time, and she was in her eighties. There was no evidence of foul play in any one of these deaths. That is a fact. Heart failure, strokes, all natural causes. I’ve no doubt at all that they knew Hessen. Or that his antisocial behaviour and his paintings, which they destroyed I might add, affected them profoundly. They never forgot him or his work. And I’m also beginning to believe they may have killed him and burned the evidence. But as they got older, their minds. well, their memories became less effective. And now the trauma of the original crime and its lingering influence have warped into this. this ghost story.’

Apryl sat quietly and stared at the floor. ‘But why didn’t they ever leave Barrington House? Explain that.’

Miles shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. The rich often huddle together in a castle-keep mentality. Look at all of these gated communities springing up. Safety in numbers.’

‘That’s bullshit. None of them have gone more than a block from the building in fifty years. Fifty years, Miles.’

For a moment Miles looked at his lap in silence, his eyes half shut, his lips pursed. Then he said, ‘OK, OK. Let’s look at this from another perspective then. From within your current point of view. And I am only speaking hypothetically here. By no way is this an endorsement of your theory—’

Apryl waved a hand in the air with frustration. ‘Yes. Yes. Just tell me.’

‘Well let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Hessen did summon something into Barrington House. Something demoniac. From one of those rituals he learned from Crowley. And that the Vortex exists somewhere in that building. If this is truly the case, then what in hell are you going to be able to do about it?’

She had no idea. None at all. But she was going back to Barrington House. To stake it out. To harass Stephen, the rest of the staff, whoever she could suspect of an involvement. And she was going to get proof. somehow. She’d even break into apartment sixteen if she had to, to find out what the hell was still inside that place. There had to be something, inside there, allowing Hessen’s presence to remain. Something that her great-uncle and his friends overlooked so long ago. Betty had been hearing Hessen at night in there, right up until she died. She said it had become worse all over again. The noises, the voices. It was all coming out of there, that apartment. Where it began, so long ago.

Something was going down inside that place. Something very wrong that she had found impossible to accept, no matter how hard she thought about it. Until now. Until Betty and Tom died. That was no coincidence. So soon after Lillian. People were dying who had known things about Felix Hessen. Who had made him and his art disappear. And maybe there were others, still inside that dreadful building. Trapped. People in grave danger. Imprisoned and stalked and tormented like Lillian and her circle from way back, until the time was right to take revenge, if that’s what it was; something coming back from the dead to settle a score. And she couldn’t just leave them in such a situation. That crazy bastard had killed her great-aunt and uncle, her own flesh and blood. And maybe even now, after death, they were still trapped inside the building, like Hessen. Didn’t Lillian suggest as much? She couldn’t leave her there, in limbo, for ever. Inside those terrible places with those hideous things he painted.

But as she walked away from Miles’s office at the Tate, with the wind gusting and darkness coming down over every building and turning the stone a darker grey, she felt herself suddenly seize up inside, in a paralysis of fear, at the very thought of setting foot inside Barrington House again, at night. Could I, she asked herself, as she steadied her body against a bus stop with one hand, could I get trapped inside there too?

Thirty

And the next night Seth waited for the call, all the time unable to stop shivering in the warm reception area. Anticipating the moment the solemn hooded figure would appear before his desk, to instruct him on who was next. Who he was to escort not merely to their death, but to something infinitely worse that came after.

But would the boy come for him first? Or would it be the police, wishing to speak to the porter on duty when two of the most senior residents had died within a week of each other?

It had been just over two hours since Stephen left him alone. The head porter had been waiting for Seth to come in, and had told him there was ‘some more terrible, terrible news’. Mr Shafer had died in the night and his wife had suffered some kind of breakdown. ‘Looked like a stroke to me. Poor thing must have lost the plot when she realized her husband was dead. They were very close, you know. They had their moments. We all know that. But they were inseparable.’

And Stephen had nearly called him at the Green Man this time, to ask how he’d missed finding Mrs Shafer while he was on patrol in the night. Mrs Benedetti from flat five had discovered Mrs Shafer on the first-floor landing the following morning just before six, looking as if she had been slowly making her way down to the ground floor all through the night. She was found, still dressed in her nightgown, on her hands and knees, catatonic with shock and cowering in front of the mirror on that landing, as if she was looking at something above her. But then Stephen had assumed by the state of Mrs Shafer that her husband must have died after Seth’s last patrol at two and that she’d lost the presence of mind to raise the alarm.

‘Terrified. Absolutely witless,’ Mrs Benedetti had told the front desk before Piotr went up to investigate. An ambulance was then called and Stephen ventured up to the Shafers’ apartment to find the front door open. Inside the main bedroom he found Mr Shafer, still tucked up where Seth had left him. ‘His face, Seth. Must have been very bad at the end for him. Perhaps that’s what set her off.’

‘Must have been,’ Seth had muttered, his entire body so tense he expected his mind to snap like a corroded rubber band stretched too far.

‘And you know what they say, Seth. Death comes in threes. Makes you wonder who’s next, eh?’ Stephen had said, trying to add levity to a conversation that made Seth so deeply uncomfortable he’d forgotten to breathe. ‘Or was Lillian the first? Which would make Shafer number three. Who knows? Still, let’s keep our chins up, eh?’ he added, with a smile that seemed to be battling with his casual solemnity.

Had he got away with it? Too early to tell. But he would be caught soon enough. Surely. Because he sensed his work here was unfinished; and knew that another death during his shift would certainly put him under suspicion. There had been no sign that he would be released from the tasks set him by the presence upstairs. From his involvement in it all, to procure revenge, because that was what this was: a murderous vengeance, and there was no refusing a call when it came. He wondered who was left; who else had wronged that enduring genius in apartment sixteen. He just had to sit here and await guidance.

But what would become of him when his grisly work was finally done? He wondered this with a tightening of the gut, followed by a wave of anxiety so acute it made his heart hammer and his head feel dizzy.

Despite his fearful anticipation of the malevolent presence that required so much of him, his hands seemed to automatically resume their work with charcoal and paper. As if they had a story to tell, and needed to record the further progression of this nightmare there was no waking from, his scratching and smudging and rubbing on a sketch pad were soon audible in reception.

Unaware of the passing of the early evening, and only mildly conscious of the pain in his bladder that demanded he urinate, Seth withdrew inside himself to where the world had been reshaped. For once he wasn’t disturbed by the men from Claridge’s delivering Mrs Roth’s supper, or by the calls from Glock for cabs, or by the shuffling nuisance of Mrs Shafer. He was permitted to fill the hours and the pages with what only he and the presence in apartment sixteen could see of the world.

It wasn’t the hooded boy who finally interrupted his frantic work just after the security clock clicked nine; it was the appearance of an attractive young woman standing in front of the reception desk of Barrington House.

She was pretty. Verging on beautiful. Unchanged. Unlike the creatures with the lumpy grey complexions hidden by makeup whom he saw on his journey to and from the building, or glimpsed on his rare forages for food in Hackney. This one was slender and well-groomed, and walked with grace. Like something off the silver screen; a vision from the past.

He’d never met her before, but had seen her captured on the security monitors coming in through the back door of the east block. An American girl. The niece or something of crazy old Lillian who snuffed it in a black cab. The girl Piotr lusted after, always rolling his eyes whenever he mentioned her. And Seth could see why.

So chic in a black leather jacket and that tight pencil skirt and high heels, her hair styled like a film star from the forties, with her big dark eyes flicking up to the camera as she came in through the rear doors, either alone or with that guy with the half-smile, like he knew something about you he kept to himself for fear of embarrassing you.

But tonight she came through the main entrance of the west wing alone and into reception to speak to him. Immediately, his eyes dropped to the flash of the new leather of her boots, and to the smoky gauze of dark nylon clinging to her shapely knees. Then his stare roamed up across her tight curves to her pale throat and pretty turned-up nose. She smelled so good.

His body warmed with desire. A feeling so alien and incongruous its sudden re-emergence made him dizzy. Glock’s escorts used to make him feel the same way when their painted and scented loveliness had been summoned to service the rotund body of the director. He’d forgotten a woman’s body could offer any pleasure.

Seth stood up, both to receive her as he had been taught to greet all residents and visitors, and also to continue his admiration of her figure before it was concealed against the front of his desk.

Under that smile she was nervous. ‘Hello,’ she said, with a beautiful painted mouth and perfect white teeth. He felt his idea of himself immediately shrink and hunch into something unkempt and unwashed. His uniform was a creased disgrace. His shirt unclean, the collar brown and rubbery against his skin. He could not recall the last time he had bathed or shaved. Or cared about such things.

‘Good evening, miss. How can I help?’