MONOLITH (17 page)

LONDON; 1933

He had been waiting for them.

The old man had been sitting patiently in the kitchen at the rear of the building for more than an hour now. He had felt no fear and no anxiety as he glanced every few minutes at the large clock that was mounted on the wall opposite.

He had watched the time tick around towards midnight and he had felt nothing except a strange sense of anticipation. Now as he sat motionless at the wooden table with a small glass of vodka before him he heard sounds coming from the front of the shop. First voices and then a heavy contact with the front door.

He knew the time had come.

Even when the blows against the door grew both in volume and frequency he didn’t move but just sat sipping his drink, seemingly oblivious to the commotion that was growing by the second. Even when the first loud crash of breaking glass sounded he only looked around slowly, giving the sound little more attention than he would give a buzzing fly.

When the second crash echoed through the shop he calmly finished his drink and replaced the glass gently on the table top before getting to his feet and heading not into the shop itself but towards the door of the cellar which he unlocked and pulled open.

Only then did he make his way into the shop.

He stood behind one of the display counters in the darkness, his arms immobile at his sides and he saw the glass that had been strewn across the floor when the front window had been broken. But he stood in the gloom without concern, listening now to the increasingly violent impacts against the heavy wooden front door of the shop.

It was another minute or so before the door was sent crashing inward, slamming back against the wall behind and creaking on its hinges.

Three men spilled into the shop and the old man could see that the leading pair were carrying what he recognised as a crowbar and a sledgehammer. It was those that had been used to force the door and which they now brandished menacingly in his direction. And yet still the old man didn’t move from his position behind the display case.

They shouted something at him, something threatening. And then three more men pushed their way through the doorway and faced him with only a couple of feet and the display case separating them. Some of the words they shouted so vehemently at him he recognised. Words of hate and ridicule that he had heard too many times in the past. Some of the other words he didn’t understand but he knew that they were shouted with such hatred and vehemence that they must be shot through with the same kind of antagonism he was so familiar with.

When one of the men took a step towards him, raising the crowbar above his own head as if to strike, he merely took half a step backwards but looked away from the man, his attention focused in the direction of the rear of the shop.

From there he heard a loud thud.

It was followed seconds later by another.

And now the men heard it too and two of them also looked in that direction.

More of the thuds followed, growing louder and closer.

The other men in the angry group heard them now and seemed more concerned with them than with the old man. The man with the crowbar even lowered the weapon and turned towards the source of the increasingly loud thuds. Everyone in the building knew that the sounds were coming from the cellar and they all realised too that someone was coming up the stairs from that subterranean room.

The old man stood impassively and looked at the group of men. He told them that they should leave now. Leave his shop, leave him alone and never bother him again. For a split second it seemed that his calm warning might have the desired effect. As the impacts from below grew louder and more insistent three of the men actually turned towards the door of the shop and seemed as if they would leave but instead, as the sounds filled the shop, they hesitated as if hypnotised, as if their determination to discover what was making the sounds had overridden all other considerations.

The heavy sounds had reached the top of the cellar steps. Whoever had made their way up from the room below had finally reached the same level as the old man and the group before him.

There was movement to his left in the doorway between the back of the shop and the cellar itself and the group of men finally saw the figure that stood there. The figure that had emerged from the cellar and now faced them defiantly.

Three of the men turned and fled.

The others wished they had.

Jess closed the apartment door behind her and headed off down the corridor towards the lifts.

She glanced at her watch thinking that she had perhaps fifteen minutes before she had to get back. Hadley, she reasoned, could keep the estate agent occupied for that length of time or even longer not that her whereabouts were any of his business. As she reached the lift and hit the Call button she decided the best place to start her search was the underground car park. After all that was where the latest accident had happened. There might be some clue there.

Jess stepped into the lift as the doors slid open and glanced at the panel there. She was about to press the button that would take her down to the subterranean parking area when she hesitated, her finger hovering over one of the other buttons. She jabbed the one marked 32 and stepped back as the lift doors slid shut.

It began to rise slowly and Jess watched the illuminated numbers above the doors rising as the lift itself travelled higher.

It bumped to a halt at the thirty-second floor and Jess slipped out as the doors opened.

The only thing that appeared immediately different about this particular floor was the colour of the décor. Instead of the subtle and neutral magnolia of the floor she’d just left this floor was decorated in subdued greens and blues. Colours which Jess had read somewhere were meant to have a calming and soothing effect. She saw that there were also paintings in frames set at strategic points on the walls along the corridor. She didn’t recognise any of them but she wondered if they were the real thing and not the imitations one might normally expect.

Jess glanced around then moved into the corridor, straining her ears for any sounds of movement, her own footfalls muffled by the thick carpet beneath her feet.

The silence was quite oppressive in fact and as she moved along towards the end of the corridor it seemed almost palpable in its intensity. Jess turned a corner and saw a fire escape door. She smiled to herself and moved towards it.

There would, she told herself, have to be a manual exit even from the penthouse apartment in the event of fire, Voronov wouldn’t be able to rely on the executive lift should the place be burning, he’d have to run down a fire escape like the rest of the mere mortals in the place. And if the fire escape stairs led down then they also led up. Jess put both hands on the bar of the door and pushed.

It opened with surprising ease and Jess supposed that all of the security systems had yet to be installed. Certainly she had expected some kind of barrier to her journey through the building but she was grateful that the obstacles she had anticipated didn’t seem to be in evidence yet. She saw a set of steps to her right that led downwards and to her left that led up. Service stairs in case of lift failure she thought but exactly what these stairs were for wasn’t her concern at the moment.

She took the left flight and moved cautiously up towards the fire door above.

Even though the building was not yet occupied she was sure that the fire door that faced her now must be unlocked. She put her hand on the bar and moved it gently.

It wouldn’t budge.

She muttered under her breath then tried again.

There was a metallic groan and the bar lifted. The door opened a crack. If there were meant to be alarms around the frame of the door then those, Jess thought with relief, hadn’t been installed either.

Jess smiled and peered through the small gap.

There was a large hallway before her, the floor of bare polished marble by the look of it. Whether or not anyone was on the top floor she didn’t know but what she did know was her shoes would make an appalling noise as she crossed the marble. She slipped them off and padded barefoot onto the cold stone, her eyes darting in all directions as she tried to take in her surroundings.

Away to her right she could see what were obviously the doors to the private lift. To her right there was a solid oak door. Straight ahead a wide corridor that led towards three more doors. Jess moved onwards, glancing up at the walls for anything like CCTV or surveillance cameras. There were none or at least none that she could see. She could only imagine what kind of security a man as rich as Voronov would allow himself up here in this most private of inner sanctums but for now she moved on, not caring if she was being watched or not. None of Voronov’s security guards had appeared yet and if they knew she was here she guessed they would have descended on her by now. Jess glanced at her watch again then headed for the first door on her left.

She pressed her ear to it for a second trying to detect any sounds coming from the other side and, when she heard nothing she reached down and prepared to try the handle.

At the last minute she pulled a tissue from her jacket pocket and wrapped it around the metal.

Leave no fingerprints.

She took a breath and pushed down.

To her surprise the door opened.

Jess eased it back on its hinges, relieved that they didn’t creak. The door moved slowly partly due to the incredibly thick carpet that it had to pass over as she pushed it. She took a step inside the room, glad that her bare feet were momentarily being spared the chill of the marble floor she’d just crossed.

The room was huge.

What it was eventually going to be Jess had no idea because there wasn’t a stick of furniture in it and the walls were still bare. Only the expensive carpet beneath her feet gave the room any feeling of warmth or offered any clue that it would at some time become part of a home. She moved into it and across to the huge windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. The view from here was even more impressive but Jess had no time to admire the visual delights of Voronov’s penthouse. She turned towards another door, peered inside and saw that it was the kitchen so she proceeded down a short corridor that led off to her right, heading towards another door.

Still carrying her shoes in one hand she turned the door handle gently, once again slightly surprised that it opened so easily.

She stepped inside, the breath freezing in her throat.

There was a figure inside the room.

Jess tried to back out, conscious that the figure close to the centre of the room hadn’t seen her.

Perhaps if she could turn and run fast enough she could get out of the apartment and back to the lift in time she told herself as she stepped back across the threshold, her eyes fixed on the immobile shape before her.

Only as she tried to push the door shut to hide her escape did it strike her that the figure hadn’t moved an inch since she first entered the room. Either whoever it was hadn’t heard her or was just ignoring her but how likely was that she asked herself. Her entrance had been as stealthy as she could manage but it had by no means been silent. Whoever was standing in the middle of the room couldn’t have failed to notice her. And yet they were still standing stock still, not moving an inch to look in her direction.

Jess paused and squinted more closely at the figure, finally releasing a breath which it seemed she had held in her lungs since she’d first seen the shape.

Now, instead of retreating, she took a couple of steps back into the room towards the figure. It was facing her and yet still it remained motionless as though completely uninterested in her presence. Jess frowned, her lips opening slightly as she stared almost transfixed at the shape before her.

Only as she got within four or five feet of it did she realise why it wasn’t moving.

Standing sentinel in the centre of the room was a statue.

Not the kind of statue she normally imagined when she thought of that term. This was no Rodin or David. This was the kind of thing a young child would shape from plasticene. It was rudimentary to say the least.

And it was big.

Jess guessed that it was over seven feet tall, its bulk formed by what appeared to be one single lump of stone that had been hewn and shaped by someone who looked as if they were practising their craft rather than having perfected it. There were two legs and a very basic torso with a couple of large and bulky arms that looked as if they’d been stuck on at a later date. The legs were also thick and necessarily so to support the weight of what was obviously a considerable lump of stone. Jess frowned and took a step nearer, taking several pictures of it with her Leica. Was it stone? It was grey in colour, the same hue as sun dried concrete but it was also covered by a thin film of dust, some of which drifted into the air when she touched one of the arms. Motes of it turned in the still air as it was disturbed. Jess looked down at the dust on her fingertips then brushed it away.

And now she looked at the head and saw that it too was bulky and incongruously large and it bore the most basic of features. A mouth, a flattened bulbous nose and two wide eyes that were little more than holes that appeared to have been drilled into the stone. The weight of it she could only guess at but it looked capable of dropping straight through the floor such was its bulk. She took more pictures, still puzzled by the object before her.

Was it the work of some new and much sought after pop artist who she wasn’t aware of she wondered? Surely a man like Voronov wouldn’t have this kind of monstrosity in his personal penthouse unless it was worth a considerable amount of money but this pile of rock looked as if it had been produced by a tribe of Neanderthals who had just discovered flint chisels.

It stood on a stone plinth, large and clumsy looking blocks of rock that were meant to be feet holding it upright. Jess shook her head as she surveyed it from top to bottom.

There was something scratched into the forehead.

She moved closer, peering at the markings which resembled hieroglyphics at first. They didn’t seem familiar. It wasn’t a foreign language as far as she could tell although she couldn’t be sure. She held the camera close to the symbols and clicked off several more pictures but, as she glanced at them on the screen it was difficult to make them out. She took a couple more anyway. Jess shook her head puzzled not just by the appearance of the statue but by its very presence.

Perhaps Voronov was a bit of an amateur sculptor in his spare time, maybe that explained the basic, almost childlike appearance of the shape. No doubt when the room was fully decorated and furnished it would form some kind of centrepiece or a necessary addition to what else would be placed around it but at the moment it looked all the more incongruous by its singularity.

Jess stepped away, glancing down at her watch. She’d already been gone for ten minutes. The time was passing quicker than she’d imagined. She wondered if she should make her way back down to the apartment where Hadley and the estate agent were.

Her mind was made up for her by a low electronic whirr which came from behind her.

Jess realised immediately what it was and she spun away from the statue and ran towards the door of the room on her bare feet, wrenching it open and dashing through into the next space and then onwards out onto the cold marble floor of the hallway.

The whirring sound was now louder and Jess looked to her right as she moved towards the fire escape, now sure beyond all doubt of what she had heard only seconds earlier, certain of the source of the sound.

The private lift was rising. Someone was heading up to the Penthouse.