Barry Maitland: The Marx Sisters

Try the same again.

She repeated her earlier manoeuvre on the next ladder, with painstaking caution, feeling like one of the counters on her favourite childhood board game of snakes and ladders, praying that she didn’t come upon a snake. Two more levels, twenty-six treacherous steps, then in to the comparative safety of another scaffold platform. Piece of cake.

She sank on to her heels, leaning her back against the wall of steel-sheet piles which were retaining the sides of the pit. Gradually her breathing returned to a more normal rate, but she was in no hurry to move. She waited like that, her head tilted up towards the sky hidden above by the layers of dark scaffolding, until she was shaking so much with the cold that she just had to move.

She tilted forward on to her knees. She felt agonizingly stiff, and, reluctant to get back up on to her feet, she crawled forward to the scaffolding edge and looked down.

There were another two levels below her to the base of the pit, but she could make out its features quite clearly now. The pale grey grid which she had seen before was now apparent as a network of concrete beams, and when she focused carefully she could see the carpets of steel reinforcing mesh laid between them. There was something else. Sprouting from the top edges of the beams, and also through the intervening areas of mesh, were hundreds of steel rods sticking vertically into the air, like sprouting shoots of some nightmarish metallic rice paddy. These were the starter bars which would tie the foundations into the next layers of reinforced concrete which would form the base of the lift shaft core.

In the middle of this ferociously spiked floor was a square hollow, shrouded in black shadow except for a pile of milky white plastic sheeting at its centre. Kathy guessed that this must be Eleanor’s box, wrapped ready to receive its concrete burial in the morning.

Suddenly she heard a soft rustle from the white plastic shape, and the black shadow around its edge began to move. Her breathing stopped and she strained forward to see what was happening. A figure was detaching itself from the surrounding darkness. For a moment she saw its form against the pale bundle. She heard the soft ripping of a blade through plastic sheet.

She fumbled in her coat pocket for the torch, tugging its clumsy rubber body with her frozen fingers. She had it out now, groping with unfeeling fingertips for the button. She squeezed. Light burst out of the wrong end and the torch jumped out of her hands like a live thing. It dropped away into the void, its beam spinning round through the darkness for a few brief moments before it hit the ground with a crash and the light extinguished.

Oh, terrific.

The torch beam had blinded her. She stumbled to her feet. Another blaze of light hit her, coming up from the centre of the pit below. Too late she jumped back out of the line of sight, slipping as she went and slamming hard against the steel wall.

Someone moved quickly down below. Now the metallic ring of feet on a ladder. Her brain worked fast. No weapon, and the other had at least a knife. Coming up which ladder? She couldn’t see. Try to get up to the surface first? She thought of that long series of rungs, and of someone coming up below her, grabbing her ankle. She turned to the right and moved as quickly as she could, skipping and slithering across the icy planks, hoping to find the ringing ladder. Nothing. The platform came to an end. The ringing had stopped. The other must be behind her. Now she was cut off.

If only there were a weapon. She looked desperately around. Across a five- or six-metre gap she could see the scaffold structure forming the opposite side of the core, and on the same level as her a stack of something-steel tubes or short lengths of timber-piled near the edge. Spanning the gap was a single timber beam, as narrow as the one Bob Jones had described in his story about Danny Finn and Herbert Lowell. She felt a sudden rush of empathy with the pompous architect.

She put her left foot tentatively out on to the beam. It would only be ten or a dozen short careful steps. She put out of her mind the possibility that the beam might be slippery with ice. Two… Three… Four… She kept her eyes fixed carefully on the beam just in front of her feet, and definitely not looking past it to the steel rice-paddy on the ground below. Eight… Nine… Ten. Must be nearly there. She lifted her head, and saw the hooded figure just an arm’s length in front of her.

She yelped.

The dark figure was standing on the edge of the scaffold platform, waiting for her, a length of timber in its hands. As it swung the weapon up to shoulder height the hood of its anorak pulled back and she saw the face of Felix Kowalski, snarling with rage. She automatically put up her left arm to deflect the blow as it came, smashing across her forearm and bouncing up to slam into the side of her head. She saw a flash of light and half turned, stunned, feeling her right foot slide away. Then her other foot gave way. She went down, arms and legs flailing, and hit the beam hard with her left shoulder. Instinctively her arms went round the beam like a baby round its mother’s neck. She could hear herself snuffling like a baby. She looked up, past the beam from which she hung, and saw him raising his timber club again. The blow came on her right hand, although she didn’t feel it. She just knew that she was flying.

Felix Kowalski was led into the basement interview room shortly after midnight. Despite the events of the previous hours, he held his bandaged head high, and appeared alert. His eyes took in the room, the metal office desk and chairs, the flask of water, the tape recorder, with interest. He sat in the chair which Gurney pulled out for him, clasped his hands loosely on his lap, and looked around confidently.

Alerted by Kathy’s scream, the two security guards hired especially by Danny Finn had come upon Kowalski, peering over the edge of his platform at her body sprawled down below. He had reacted by leaping to his feet, swinging the length of timber, so that they had felt no compunction in using their sticks to beat him into a more co-operative state, with the result that he now had a heavily bandaged crown, one purple, swollen eye and a bandaged hand. The security men had radioed for the emergency services, as well as for Danny Finn, who arrived on the scene shortly after Brock. By that stage the rescue team had managed to extricate Kathy, badly injured, from the pit, and sent her off in an ambulance. Kowalski too had been taken to hospital, with Bren and another detective, to have his injuries X-rayed and dressed before he was pronounced fit for questioning.

It was Finn who explained to Brock about Peg’s box in the foundations of the building, and her announcement at Eleanor’s funeral. Together they went down to see where Felix Kowalski had been disturbed as he sliced away the polythene sheeting which had been wrapped around the box. Grunting with effort, Finn pulled the sheeting away to reveal a shiny black cube.

‘I thought you said it was a wooden box?’

‘Aye, it is. But it’s covered with bituminous paint-that black stuff. It’s used for waterproofing.’ He poked gingerly at a corner of the dark shape and his finger came away covered with black goo. ‘You’d get in a real mess trying tae get it off now tae get at the screw heads holding the lid down. Do ye really need tae get into it?’ Finn looked doubtfully at Brock. He was panting with his exertions, his breath steaming white in the glare of the arc lights which had been set up overhead for Kathy’s rescue, and were now being dismantled.

‘What did Peg put inside?’

Finn shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She came down tae the site office about 6 this evening with this big handbag she carries, and I left her alone for a couple of minutes. I offered her plastic bags tae put the canister of ashes and whatever else she had in, but she preferred tae wrap them in newspaper. I suppose suggesting plastic bags was a bit tactless under the circumstances. Then I screwed down the lid, and the two men from the security firm carried it down here with me. I had a drum of the bitumen paint, and I more or less poured it all over the box tae seal it. It won’t set in this cold. Does it really matter what’s inside?’