(1992) Prophecy (36 page)

On the far side, a pretty girl came tripping out of an office and greeted a young man in a suit with a hug and a long kiss. Frannie enviously watched the carefree way they linked arms and walked away. Normal life was going on and she felt excluded from it.

The pavements were crammed with people moving quickly, urgently. Men jostled past her in funereal suits and peacock ties, women in two-pieces, their necks trussed importantly in Hermès and Cornelia James scarves. The traffic stopped and she crossed over.

People were queueing in the sandwich bars, and she heard the usual lunchtime hubbub as she passed a pub, then silence as she walked through the shadow laid across the pavement by the Gothic façade of a church. She glanced up at the windowless wall. Fear pressed to her skin like brass against tracing-paper, rubbing dark lines across her face. A siren wailed. She
slowed her pace, her feet weighted with uncertainty. An ambulance flashed across, ahead, its siren a swirling banshee that beat her stomach like an egg whisk.

She passed sights so familiar from childhood that she scarcely noticed them. In the City, things rarely changed; when they did it was brutal: radical surgery; a familiar comfortable sight cut away like a mastectomy; cranes, skeletal girders rising like prosthetic limbs. She passed the Record Album shop, Boots the Chemist, Austin Reed, reassuringly unchanged, then orange lights winked ahead of her. Temporary bollards in the middle of the road. A triangle of barriers; the reflectors of unlit red lanterns. She felt the first prickle of apprehension as she saw the hoarding sticking out into the road, encasing an entire block of empty buildings; as she saw the huge sign on it:
MACFAZEDEAN BROTHERS PLC. CITY FIELDS DEVELOPMENT
.

MacFazedean Brothers. The name lodged in her gullet. Bastards. The slick young men in their grey striped suits who served the eviction notices, took her father’s ranting with barely a twitch of their facial muscles and had the gall to tell him it was the best thing for everyone.

It was a large development. Seven acres. Two giant cranes rose from its midst, one with a demolition ball suspended from its jib and swinging menacingly in the wind. There was a cacophony to jar the ears and a pall of dust hung in the air above the entire site.

On some of the buildings visible above the tall hoarding the façades had been torn off, leaving rooms that were open to the elements, like a scene from a war movie of the Blitz, and Frannie felt for an instant as if something had been torn from herself, leaving her raw and exposed. Number 14 Poulterers’ Alley was behind that hoarding; somewhere. She crossed over and ran
along a boarded walkway where the pavement had once been, past the words
GARBUTT MCMILLAN ARCHITECTS
on a smart red sign.

Taking her bearings from the shops opposite, she reached what should have been the start of Poulterers’ Alley, but the hoarding went across it, sealing it off. There were small viewing slits cut into the hoarding and she pressed her face to one and found herself looking straight down the alley. It was gloomy and forlorn; the windows were boarded up and all that remained were the names of the shops and offices, and closed doors. She could see the café, and the sadness she felt was tempered by a rising fear.

The whole central core of the site had been disembowelled. She could see right into the cellars. One was filled with water; another was now bare mud, shored up with iron pilings. A hook was sinking down from the jib of the massive crane and she saw the demolition ball swing out of sight. There followed a crash of rubble, the gears of a bulldozer meshing, metal clanging, and then a steady hiss of compressed air.

Dust dried the back of her throat as Frannie walked on and reached the site entrance. She went in through the wide-open gates, on to rubble-strewn mud that was rutted with tyre treads, and was confronted by a hive of activity: bulldozers; dumper trucks; tippers unloading; men in hard hats measuring, digging, drilling. Two men were attaching an iron piling to the hook of the crane. Three others on a rooftop were hauling up tools on a rope. Someone was shouting instructions. Over to her right the demolition ball swung against an unsupported wall belonging to one of the buildings immediately behind Poulterers’ Alley. The wall buckled. The ball swung again. In its wake a bulldozer was clawing at the rubble like a crab scavenging
a carcass on the seabed. In one of the deep rectangular pits a yellow JCB digger was pounding a stone floor, tearing great chunks of it out, lifting them up and dumping them in a skip. It looked as though it were ripping out the entrails of the earth itself. She stepped over some cables, then had to move out of the way of another truck. She checked her watch. Five to one.

She turned and left the site, then crossed the road, quickening her pace. As she reached the end of the next street, she could see Seb Holland’s office building ahead. The Winston Churchill Tower, its bronze walls rising sixty storeys high out of the open square in which it sat. Her favourite modern building, which she had watched go up as a child, but which she had never been inside.

She remembered how it had always seemed to absorb the different moods of the weather and now it darkened suddenly as a cloud slid across the narrow corridor of sky like a roof hatch closing. A ferocious gust ripped across the open square, whistling eerily like a mountain wind, bending the conifers in their marble tubs and blowing the spray of the fountains sideways; the spots of water striking Frannie’s cheek gave the illusion for a moment that it was raining. Her jacket thrashed like a loose sail and she had to hold it tight around her chest. One of the local criticisms was that the building created a wind tunnel around it.

Frannie pushed through the revolving door into a vast marble lobby that was strangely quiet. She heard the ping of an elevator, then another. The names of the companies housed in the building were engraved on a tall brass plate like a roll of honour on a cathedral wall. She scanned down it.

The fortieth floor, she remembered Seb Holland had told her.

The centre of the lobby was dominated by a Henry Moore sculpture, and presided over by an elderly commissionaire in black serge, his jacket breast covered in rows of decorations and his shoulders looped with bright white rope. Beyond him the lobby narrowed to an alcove containing two banks of four elevators each. One of them disgorged a group of men who walked across the lobby in silence. Two office girls came out of another and walked past Frannie, snippets of their chatter trailing behind them.

A man and a woman emerged from another, the woman talking emphatically. Frannie stepped into the elevator. It had a deep bronze carpet, black lacquered walls with bronze-tinted mirrors and reeked of a perfume she did not recognize.

She touched the button marked
40
on the panel and it lit up, but for a moment nothing happened. She tidied her hair in the mirror, then pulled a tissue out of her handbag and quickly wiped the mud from the building site off her dark blue shoes. The doors closed, decisively and smoothly. For an instant, again, nothing happened. Then an unseen hand lifted her by the insides of her stomach. The carpet pressed up hard against her feet. She felt a great weight on her knees. There was a rush of air and a faint drumming. Numbers spun on the digital dial above the doors. Her stomach rose up through her body. 15 20 25 30 35.

The pressure eased. The floor shrank away from her
feet. Her stomach was lowered gently. The display slowed, 38, 39, then halted. 40. Ping. The doors opened. She walked out, slightly dazed, into a hallway. The four elevator doors opposite faced her, and there were double oak doors to her right and left. The one to her left had a large brass plate which said:
HOLLAND DELARUE PLC. RECEPTION
.

Frannie went through into a sumptuous oak-panelled room, with deep leather armchairs and sofas on either side of the reception console. Large gold letters on the wall behind her proclaimed the dozen countries around the world in which Holland Delarue plc had offices, and the centre-piece was a large blue and gold ‘Queen’s Award for Export’ emblem.

The receptionist was a woman in her late forties with silver highlights in her coiffed black hair, chatting busily on the telephone in a nasal voice and filing her nails at the same time. ‘Melanie didn’t come in today, another of her migraines, so I’m stuck over lunch hour. I thought I might try the new Asda superstore this evening. I’ll just put you on hold a moment, don’t go away.’ She pressed a switch then looked inquisitively at Frannie.

‘Could you tell Sebastian Holland that Frannie Monsanto is here, please.’

‘He’s expecting you, is he?’

‘Yes.’

She pressed two buttons on her telephone, lifting the receiver to her ear. ‘Oh, would you tell Mr Sebastian that Frannie Monsanto is in reception. Yes, no, I’m still here. Melanie didn’t come in today, so I’m covering lunch hour.’ She held the receiver to her ear in silence for a moment. ‘Righty-ho. Thank you very much.’ She looked at Frannie again. ‘He’ll be out in a
couple of minutes. Take a seat.’ She flicked a switch and resumed her conversation.

Frannie sat in a deep leather armchair and glanced at the magazines and papers on the table beside it. The
Financial Times. Fortune. Business Week. Lloyd’s Log
. The walls were hung with framed colour photographs of modern office blocks. The telephone warbled again. It was a different world in here; a long way from the one in which Seb Holland, the archaeology student, had gone down into a cellar beneath a sandwich bar for a lark.

The doors behind her opened. ‘Frannie! Hi! Sorry to keep you!’

She stood up and turned round. Seb was looking tired but cheery, the same slightly larger-than-life Seb: tall and hefty with his generous grinning face, big white teeth, black hair fashionably long and with a hint of gel, and his rich green eyes. His well-cut clothes and the executive trappings suited him. He looked good on them.

He gripped her shoulders and kissed her on each cheek, smelling heavily of aftershave as she remembered he always did. ‘God, you look great! Hope you’re still available in case Lucy dumps me at the last minute!’

She smiled. ‘You look good too. Being engaged suits you.’

‘Yah. It’s great! Right, let’s dash. I’ve booked at a little place around the corner. We’ll have to be quick if you don’t mind – bit of a crisis has come up and I’ve got to be back here by two o’clock.’

‘You’re off to New York tomorrow?’

‘A hassle. We’ve got some real problems over there at the moment. So where are you working? British Museum, did you tell me?’ He held the door for her,
then stepped across and pressed the elevator button. ‘Are you doing something with archaeology? You don’t look like an archaeologist.’

‘How are we supposed to look?’ she said with mock indignation.

‘Thought you’d be in an anorak and wellies.’

‘Like I was wearing at dinner?’

He grinned. ‘So, smart dates, eh? You’re going out with Ollie Halkin?’

‘Yes.’ It sounded strange hearing Oliver’s name abbreviated.

‘Good stuff. How long?’

There was a ping behind her and they turned. A strip of green lights was flashing on an art deco display above an elevator. The same one she had come up in, she noticed.

The door slid open and Seb stepped forward quickly, holding his arm out to catch the door. ‘Hello, young fellow!’ he called out. Frannie felt a blast of cold air. ‘Have to get in these things quickly,’ he said; ‘the doors are really vicious bru –’

His voice stopped in mid sentence. She saw his eyes widen in wonder. Another blast of wind curled around her, sucked her, as if it was trying to draw her in towards him. There was blackness all around him. The wrong blackness. Not the black lacquer of the elevator walls and the bronze tint of the mirror.

No bronze-carpeted floor.

A dark, matt blackness. Air poured out. Cold air that smelled dank like a cellar. The blackness of the bare shaft. Cables ran down the back wall. Grooves were cut into it; ridges and guides.

There was no fear in his eyes; just a look of surprise; like a child opening a parcel and finding nothing inside it. His hand grabbed once at the steel door-frame; his
fingers slid for a few inches down its shiny surface, without any hope of purchase.

Then he dropped from her sight in complete silence.

For a moment, for just a fleeting instant, Frannie thought it was one of his pranks. She stepped two inches forwards, moving slowly as if she were wading through water. Her hand touched the cold steel frame of the door and she stared into the darkness, breathed in its dank, oily smell.

A bunch of bright yellow wires, held together by thick black tape, ran down the far wall into a junction box with a warning bolt-of-lightning label on the outside. Ducting pipes ran down beside them; she dropped to her knees and inched forward on her hands, still protected by a layer of disbelief.

‘Seb?’ she called out in a feeble croak, her throat clamped shut like a sprung trap.

Her hands touched the metal rim and her eyes strained into the square black tunnel that dropped sheer away for forty storeys. The dust in the draught made them smart. ‘Seb?’ it was a whimper now. She looked up. The ribbed black ceiling was only ten feet above her; wires looped down from it. It was a moment before she realized it wasn’t the ceiling, but the floor of the elevator that had stopped inches above the top of the door. ‘Seb?’ the darkness sucked up her voice. She looked up at the elevator and down into the shaft again.

Then the reality hit her and tore the scream from her throat.

She backed away from the edge, scrambled to her feet and burst, stammering, through the double doors into the reception area, her eyes transmitting her terror
like semaphore flags to the woman she’d seen earlier and who was still chatting merrily.

‘Get help! Oh God, get help!’ Frannie screamed. ‘He’s fallen. He’s fallen down the lift. Call an ambulance. For God’s sake call an ambulance! Keep people away from the lift. Don’t use the lift, the door’s open.’