Requiem (71 page)

Hillyard checked his pockets to make sure he had everything and climbed out to meet the other three as they emerged from the back of the van, carrying their gear. The four of them went up the side of the building and rounded the corner just as Len smashed the floodlight over the main entrance and plunged the area into a darkness relieved only by the dim light that spilled out from the interior.

They assembled by the main doors. Again Hillyard listened, again there was silence. Len moved into the patch of light thrown out from the glass door-panels, and started on the locks. Soon there was a click, then another, and they were into the lobby, lit by a single fluorescent light.

The alarm buzzed its warning. In a certain time, probably less than a minute, it would go off. Len, moving with soft-footed agility, was in front of the control box, tools in hand, even before the last of them – the boy – was through the door and moving towards his station by the office window.

Hillyard shone a light onto the control box. Despite the surgical gloves, Len worked with extraordinary speed, running wires across three sets of connections, cutting two intervening wires without visible hesitation.

Nevertheless time was getting on. Getting into the box had taken a good ten seconds, while the wire work had taken another forty, maybe more. Still the warning buzzer sounded. If Hillyard hadn’t had such confidence in Len, if there had been anyone else to touch him in the whole of south London, he might have said something. As it was he tightened his grip on the torch and kept silent.

Len paused, a third wire held loosely in the jaws of his palm-sized cutters, and checked the connections. Giving an imperceptible grunt, he severed the wire.

The buzzing stopped. The silence closed in, shockingly loud.

Hillyard exhaled.

Len peered at him through his spectacles and asked hopefully: ‘What about them?’ He indicated the doors at the end of the passage.

Locks were a serious disease with Len and it positively hurt him to leave them untried. ‘No, my old darling,’ Hillyard whispered firmly. ‘From now on it’s amateur night.’

He went to the door of the front office. The boy was at the blinds, staring out into the night. The remaining two already had the pickaxes in their hands. At Hillyard’s nod they went down the corridor and began smashing through the double doors at the end.

The doors gave up without much of a fight. Leaving Len to tidy up his control box, Hillyard followed the others through the remains of the doors and, overtaking, led the way into the first room, immediately to the right of the passageway. Lighting a path across the floor with his torch, he lowered the venetian blinds at all four windows and shone the torch around the room until he found a desk lamp. Switching it on, he gestured to the others to begin.

They chose the most inviting equipment first: wooden carousels of test tubes which smashed with the satisfying crunch of crushed wine glasses; tiers of jar-lined shelves which bent and crumbled, shooting cascades of glass across the floor; complex electronic equipment with VDU units which imploded on impact.

Leaving them to it, Hillyard explored the rest of the place. Plain unmarked doors to the left of the passageway, one locked, the next – a store room – open, the last locked again. To the right, a small room with rows of white shoes in plastic bags and overalls hanging on pegs that led into another laboratory even larger than the first. He went into this room and, closing the blinds, looked for a small lamp. Finding none, he went back to the door and flicked on one of the overhead lights.

Returning to the first laboratory, he saw that the lads had finished with their pickaxes and were now creating a pile of chairs, papers and miscellaneous rubbish in the centre of the floor.

When they had finished he led them back into the passageway and asked them to tackle the two locked doors on the left. The first door revealed stacks of stored equipment, the second a much larger room whose occupants were announced by the pungent smell that went before them. The room was lined with banks of cages containing an assortment of rodents. Mice and rats; white, grey, piebald, black. There seemed to be hundreds of them.

Leading the two men into the second laboratory to start work there, he returned alone to the cages. ‘Now wouldn’t Beji love
you
,’ he said, dragging a gloved finger across the rungs of a cage of white mice. He tried lifting the cage, but it was fastened down in some way. Squatting, he examined the sides and base of the cage, and saw that it was clipped to the next cage. Once the clips were undone it was a simple matter to lift the cage and carry it out. He took it to the side door which he’d noticed on his first visit. The door was fastened with bolts, but also a bloody great mortise lock. Hillyard looked up the passage and saw Len still tinkering with the control box. Hillyard called to him. Len, perking up like a hunting dog, came hurrying along, pulling his skeleton keys out of his pocket.

It took him about five seconds to get the lock open, a speed which seemed to both please and disappoint him. The rest of the job took considerably longer. Hillyard carried the cages, a pair at a time, out of the building and round to the back area, which, though dark, was the only place that was sufficiently distant from the van. There, having opened each cage, he had to spend more precious seconds getting its inhabitants to leave. The first lot of rats fell out all right, but the mice clung stubbornly to their cages. He had to shake the cage quite violently to get them out. On the second to last trip, shaking out a cage of fat grey rats, one of them fell against his leg and clutched at his trousers. Jumping clear with a cry of repulsion, he landed on something soft which squelched and crunched underfoot. Cursing, he ran back to the side door and scraped his shoe repeatedly on the doorstep. Shivering with disgust he took the last pair of cages to the door and threw them out into the darkness unopened. He turned to go back inside then stopped suddenly, and, retracing his steps to one of the unopened cages, picked it up and threw it into the back of the van.

The others had finished in the second lab and were hovering tensely in the passageway, waiting for him to give the go-ahead for the next stage. Hillyard noticed they had already collected the jerrycans from the front lobby.

Hillyard looked at his watch. They’d been in the building twenty minutes. It felt like a long time. The men’s restlessness was infectious, the urge to cut and run almost overpowering, but Hillyard suppressed it. He knew that this job, above all, had to be done properly.

‘Not so quick, not so quick,’ he flung at them, leading the way to the store rooms.

Only when the store rooms had received the pickaxe treatment and all the filing cabinets in the front offices had been emptied onto the floor did Hillyard finally give the go-ahead for the jerrycans to be emptied over the piles of furniture and papers. ‘Not too much!’ he barked at one point. ‘We don’t want a towering bloody inferno!’

By the time he had supervised the fuelling, he was behind schedule. He hurried into the office and, yanking the phone out of its socket, smashed it hard on the corner of the desk. Pulling off the casing, he removed the tiny transmitter that he had put there on his first visit and put it in his pocket. Passing the boy at the window, he went out into the lobby. Pulling an aerosol can from his pocket, he paused at the main doors. On the nod from the boy he stepped outside. He shook the spray can until he could hear the metal ball rattling inside its housing. He chose the long stretch of wall under the windows of the main office for his first effort. Considering the poor light, it wasn’t too bad. For his next site he chose the main doors themselves then, as a final offering, a stretch of wall on the side of the building, which, though poorly lit, was nice and large, like a blank page.

As he finished, he remembered that the side door was still open. Finding Len, he sent him to close it again.

When Len returned Hillyard gestured questioningly towards the control box.

‘All set,’ Len confirmed.

Now it was a matter of getting things in the right order. He sent the boy to the main door, Len to the burglar alarm, and the other two down the passage to wait outside the doors of the labs. When everyone was in position he gave the nod. The first lab went up immediately with a great whoosh and flash of light; the other one he couldn’t see, but it must have gone up all right because the man in charge of lighting it came running out into the passage like a bat out of hell. As the two fire-lighters came through the smashed swing doors Len reset the burglar alarm and closed the box. Hillyard would have liked to wait and see the offices go up, but there wasn’t time.

He ran out and round the corner and jumped into the van. The boy was already at the gates, swinging them open. Hillyard fired the engine, drove the van out onto the front apron and reversed it up to the main doors. Len was bending over the locks on the front door. The moment he straightened up and moved clear, the other two attacked the doors with their pickaxes, as if they were only just going in. The sound of the splintering wood was horrendously loud, but it was nothing compared to the alarm, which went off suddenly a few seconds later, its bells piercing the darkness. It seemed to Hillyard that the whole neighbourhood must be up and looking out of their windows.

The flames in the front office were filling the window. The next moment there was a great whoomph! as the glass blew out. Hillyard pricked up his ears. Under the jangling of the alarm, he thought he could hear a siren in the distance.

He slid across the seat and yelled through the window: ‘Come
o-n
!’

The rear doors of the van opened and first Len, then the other two, jumped in. The boy flung himself into the passenger seat as Hillyard accelerated through the gates. The boy panted audibly all the way to the Chelmsford bypass.

Hillyard was panting too. Reaching across, he brushed his hand against the boy’s thigh.

A
LOG SETTLED
noisily in the grate, sending licks of gold up the oak panelling and into the dusty drops of the dark chandelier. The room was warm, the rug soft under Susan’s back. Lazily, she rolled over and picked a crumpet off the dish by the hearth. The crumpet, sagging with melted butter, pliant as a sponge, was heavy with the scent of schooldays and other diet-free eras of long ago. She bit into it with a delicious sense of rediscovery. It had been a long time since she’d allowed herself anything so wicked.

Keeping her eyes off Nick – he mustn’t feel she was crowding him – she looked casually towards the window. It was a filthy afternoon. Rain splattered against the glass, leaves streamed off the trees, and the sky was darkening rapidly. No sound penetrated the room – the double-glazing was too thick for that – and she was left with the curious but exhilarating sensation that everything that lay outside – London, people, family – was at a great remove, incapable of intruding on the afternoon.

She finally rewarded herself with a look at Nick. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, the wallpaper book open on his knees, his shoulders hunched, his face creased with concentration, like a student pondering some impossible maths problem. As always when she looked at him she felt a tiny proprietorial thrill, an involuntary spasm of excitement, the precise nature of which it wasn’t necessary to examine. It was enough, she’d decided, to experience the surge of feeling, to ride the rush of elation which, after a week of these tea parties, seemed to be spilling over rather pleasantly into every part of her life.

She watched him, and smiled affectionately. He had a way of chewing on the side of his lip, of splaying his fingers over his cheek, of drawing sudden hissing breaths on his cigarette that suggested a bafflement, a mild helplessness that was really very attractive. This hint of vulnerability, and his habit of letting people get closer to him only by the smallest and most tantalizing degrees, made him rather a challenge.

She was making progress though, chipping softly away at his defences. She thought, not for the first time, of how satisfactorily things had changed. When they had been together all those years ago there had been passion – on her part at least – but also some beastly misunderstandings.

Nick flicked over a page and pulled at his chin. Unlike Tony, he was one of those men who had improved with age. Lean body, thick hair, intriguing face.

She had promised not to interrupt him while he studied the wallpaper samples – a rather professional-sounding assurance, she had thought – but what had been a reasonable pause had now stretched into an unwieldy silence, and silences were not something Susan felt comfortable with.

‘I’m keeping quiet,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ve noticed.’

‘It’s no good,’ he said, snapping the book shut and sliding it onto the floor. ‘They’re all beginning to look the same. You’ll have to choose.’

‘No problem,’ she said happily. ‘We could paper one wall and if you don’t like it, we can take it down and start all over again.’

He nodded distractedly and she saw that she had lost him. This happened now and again: one moment he’d be there, listening attentively, sliding her the occasional glance in that oblique way of his, the next moment he’d slip away into a part of his mind that excluded her as completely as if he’d left the room.