She’d tried to get out: those were the sounds I’d heard. She’d hammered and clawed at the door and probably screamed for help, but only faint echoes had come up to the projection room, and I’d been too absorbed in what I was doing to decipher them.
Now she looked to be in a bad way. The monitor only resolved in black and white, but there were dark patches on her hands, which I assumed were probably blood - her fingernails damaged from trying to pull on the edge of the doorjamb - and when she briefly came out of her huddle to grab a gulp of air, I saw that her lips were swollen in a way that suggested dehydration.
I got up and paced around the room, trying to think it through. I wasn’t capable of panic, but I felt a dull, blunt volume of unhappiness expand inside me, like the intestinal gases back in the first stage of decay.
I could just let her die
was the first thought that came to mind.
I could open up the doors to let her back out the way she’d come, but she might be too weak to move. She might die anyway.
If I opened the doors, someone else could get in. Safer just to leave her.
But someone could have seen her climbing inside and not come out again. Someone might be looking for her right now or calling the police or crawling through that hole with torches and crowbars and . . .
No, nobody else had found the hole. The CCTV cameras didn’t show anyone else, either in the room where the vent let out or anywhere else in the outer keep.
I should have put more sophisticated alarms in
, I thought irrelevantly - movement sensors, or infrared scanners, or something. I shouldn’t have let this happen. Now here I was, already guilty of false imprisonment or some such bullshit, with the police probably searching the goddamned neighborhood and Christ only knows what kind of trouble to look forward to if she was found here, alive or dead or anywhere in between.
I stopped pacing because I’d come up hard against a wall. I wanted to punch it, but that would have been a really stupid thing to do - no blood flow, so no scabbing, no skin repair. Any wound I opened in my own flesh would stay open unless I sewed it shut.
I stared at the wall for maybe five minutes, galloping through the same rat-runs inside my head. When I’d done it enough times to be sure they always ended up in the same place, I got moving again.
I had no choice. I had to bring the dumb bitch up to good-as-new spec before I cut her loose. I had to make sure there was no harm and no foul, whatever that took.
I found a bucket the builders had left behind and a washbasin in what had once been a cleaner’s cupboard behind the projection booth. I cleaned the bucket out as far as I could, then filled it with cold water. I flicked some switches on the main board, releasing the locks on all but one of the doors between me and the woman - leaving just the door that she was leaning against.
Then I went down, let myself out through the inner and middle keeps, and made my way around to her stretch of corridor. She must have heard me coming, because when I turned the last bend, I caught the sound of her fists banging on the other side of the door, and her voice, muffled through the thick wood, telling me she was stuck.
I left the bucket of water right in front of the door and went back up to the projection booth. I watched the woman on the CCTV hook-up: she was still hammering and shouting, pushing at the door, thinking or at least hoping that someone could hear her.
I relocked all the other doors before opening just that one. Since she was leaning her weight against it, she just tumbled through when it opened. She saw the bucket, stared at it with big incredulous eyes, and finally cupped her hands and drank from it. She coughed up a storm and vomited a little, too, but she was alive at least. That was a good start.
Food was more of a problem, because unless there were a few hardy rats down in the basement somewhere, there was nothing edible in the entire building. I got around that by going to the Ocado Web site, whose online order form allows you to specify exactly where you want the food to be dropped off. I specified the mailbox, which was actually a double-doored receptacle like the ones post offices use - big enough to take thick bundles of legal papers, and, as it turned out, big enough for a bag of groceries too.
I ordered stuff she could eat cold, to keep things simple - turkey breast, bread and rolls, a bag of ready-cut carrot slices, some apples. I added some fun-size cartons of orange juice, and then on an impulse, a bar of Cadbury’s dairy milk.
This time I had to approach her from the opposite direction, since she’d gone through the door to get to the water bucket and was now on the other side of the door. It didn’t matter: from the master board up in the projection booth, I could open up any route I liked and make absolutely sure of where she was before I moved in, did the drop-off, and retreated again to the booth and the CCTV monitors.
At the sound of the lock clicking, she went scooting back through the door like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
She wolfed the food down like she hadn’t seen bread since the Thatcher years. It was a fucking unedifying sight, so I turned off the CCTV and left her to it for a while.
The next time I checked, she was done. The floor was strewn with wrappers, apple cores, a crumpled juice carton. The woman had spotted the camera and was staring at it as though she expected it to start talking to her. Actually, it could do that if I wanted it to: the cameras each came with a speaker as standard. But I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to her: I just wanted her to eat, drink, wash, fix herself up, and fuck off out of there.
Wash. Okay. I ordered some more groceries and added soap and shampoo to the list, not to mention another bucket. The next time I fed her, I left both drinking water and wash water, but she didn’t take the hint, maybe because the water was cold. Too bad. I didn’t have any way of heating it up, and I wasn’t running a fucking guesthouse.
I spent about three days plumping her up. On the second day I left her some bandages and antiseptic for her fingers, which she ignored, just like the wash water. On the third day I made a similarly useless gesture with some clean clothes, ordered online in the same way from the ASDA superstore at Brentwood.
Okay, so my reluctant houseguest wasn’t interested in personal hygiene, even on a theoretical level. I don’t know, maybe the dirt acts like insulation out on the street, and maybe after the first month or so your panties get welded to your privates past the point where you can take them off. Maybe not, though, since she had to be managing to piss somehow. Following that thought through, I realized it was probably a good thing that the cameras had such crappy resolution. I could see the corner she was using as a latrine, now that I looked for it, and I sure as hell didn’t want to see it any clearer.
Well, the bottom line was that she had to go out looking no worse than when she came in: I wasn’t under any obligation to make her look better.
On day four I drew her a map, showing her how to get back to the vent pipe, and left it with the food. Then I threw the lock on the door behind her and all the other locks leading back to the outer wall and her exit point.
She examined the map as she ate her breakfast, which was croissant and apricot jam. She’d shown a real taste for pastries by this time and none at all for fresh fruit or cereal.
But after she’d finished, she didn’t make a move to step over the threshold. She just wiped her mouth on the napkin provided, dropped it into the water bucket - which always drove me crazy because I had to fish the fucking thing out again - and settled back down against the wall.
What was she playing at? She had to realize I was allowing her to leave.
‘Come on!’ I shouted at the monitor. ‘Get out of there. You’re free as a bird. Go!’
She settled into her characteristic, head-bowed huddle.
Impulsively, I flicked the microphone switch on the CCTV board. I’d never used it before, so I had no idea if it even worked, but a light flashed on the board and the woman jerked her head up as though she’d just heard something - a click, maybe, or else a little feedback flutter from the speaker.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Time to go, lady.’
She blinked twice, her face full of comical wonder. She took her time about answering, though, and when she did it was kind of a non sequitur.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘The owner,’ I said, and then, not to be put off, I repeated, ‘Time for you to get out of here.’
She shook her head.
I blinked. ‘What do you mean, no?’ I asked, too incredulous even to be pissed off. ‘This is my place, sweetheart. Not yours. You’re not wanted here.’
The woman just shrugged. ‘But I like it here.’
The way she said it made me want to go down there and up-end the water bucket on her head. She sounded like a little kid asking if she could stay a bit longer at the beach.
‘How can you like it?’ I demanded, really annoyed now. ‘It’s a fucking corridor. You like sleeping on concrete?’
‘That’s what I was doing outside,’ she said, calmly enough. ‘And at least here I don’t have homeless guys wanting to charge me a blow job for a place by the fire.’
‘Because there is no fire.’
‘But there is food.’
‘Food’s off,’ I said bluntly. ‘That was the last of it.’
She put her head between her folded arms again, as a way of telling me the conversation was over.
‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘Food’s off. You stay here, you starve to death.’
She didn’t answer. Fine, so she wanted to be alone. I turned off the sound and left her to it.
‘Dumb bitch,’ I said to the monitor, even though she couldn’t hear me now.
That was going to be the first item in a varied agenda of invectives, but I realized suddenly what had just happened, what was
still
happening. I was angry. I’d managed to get angry, somehow, even though on the face of it I didn’t have the necessary equipment any more.
If I could do anger, then presumably I could do other flashy emotional maneuvers too. Quickly I fired up my computers and logged on to my U.S. trading board. I didn’t surface for five hours, and by that time I was three hundred thousand up on the day.
Saint Nicholas was back, with gifts of ass-kickings for all.
After I closed out on the day, I checked in with the woman. She seemed to be asleep, but she stirred when I clicked the mike back on.
‘What’s your name, darling?’ I asked her.
‘Janine,’ she muttered, looking muzzily to camera.
‘I’m Nick.’
‘Hi, Nick.’
‘You can stay here to night,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk.’
But we didn’t. Not much, anyway. I made a food drop at 6:00 A.M., before she was even awake, then came back upstairs and logged on. I had another good day on the markets, and the day went by in a blur. I did order a folding bed, though, and some blankets and pillows to go on it. I picked a local store that could deliver immediately, had them leave it round by the back door, and lugged it in myself after they’d gone. It made my skin prickle just a little to be in the outside air again, even though it wasn’t a warm day or anything. Just psychosomatic, I guess.
Over the next few days, I furnished Janine’s corridor pretty lavishly. She arranged it: all I did was buy the stuff and bring it to the door then let her choose for herself where to put it. I’d started to leave the mike on by this time so she could tell me what she wanted - a chair and a table, a kettle for making tea, a chemical toilet, even a little portable DVD player and a few movies for her to watch while I was busy on the trading boards.
The weirdest thing of all, though, was that I actually started talking to her while I was dealing. It seemed to help me concentrate, in some way I couldn’t quite define. Most of the things she liked to talk about were stupid and irritating - her favorite celebrities, previous seasons of
Big Brother
, her hatred for supermodels. I just made ‘I’m still listening’ noises whenever they seemed to be called for and channeled the aggravation into some world-class short-selling.
It got so that if she actually shut up for a while, I’d throw in a question or two to get her talking again. Questions about herself she didn’t like to answer, except to say that she was living on the street because of something that had happened between her and her stepfather back when she turned eighteen. I got the impression that it had been a violent and dramatic kind of something, and that the stepfather had gotten the worst of the deal.