Robert Young - Gatecrasher

He shook his head.

Stiff and cold.

Griffin Holdings.

He knew that he must have been saying stiff and cold. He was bleeding heavily, apparently drunk, looked a mess. Maybe he’d been outside for a while in a chill autumn night. Of course he’d be stiff and cold. At the very least.

But he also knew, with absolute certainty, that wasn’t what he’d said at all. Somewhere through the alcohol fogged memory a flash of recall and a dash of logic had filled in the blanks, incorrectly. But as soon as he had read the words in the paper the memory had returned, clear and unambiguous. ‘Griffin Holdings,’ the man had said.

There was no question about that and the more Campbell tried to talk himself out of it, to convince himself that he had heard ‘stiff and cold’, the more certain he became that he hadn’t.

He ducked into a large convenience store and toured his way through the freezer cabinet, picking up a frozen Lasagne, past the DVD rentals, picking up a comedy and then headed for the till and asked for ‘anything with Ibuprofen’.

Half an hour later he was changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and stood barefoot in the kitchen trying to peer though the darkened glass of the oven door where the lasagne bubbled away gently. It looked reasonably edible despite his reservations about frozen food. Anything would do right now, anything with a minimum of effort.

As he waited he heard those forced, weak words echoing over and over again. He struggled against his eager imagination, which kept conjuring extraordinary scenes with the man that had ended up on his kitchen floor and the break in the week before; on the run from police, hopping his garden wall in his desperation to escape. Or a witness to the break in, terrified and taking refuge in his home and finding only tragedy… the wound in his throat nothing to do with the glass at all…the burglary of Monday morning nothing to do with cash or Campbell’s DVD player.

Marching into his living room Campbell began rifling through the compact discs on his shelf pausing at some aggressive, bass heavy hip hop and then selected some noisy rock, put the disc in the player and turned his amplifier up. He needed to distract himself. He needed to drown out his wandering thoughts.

He couldn’t.

Campbell felt tired, strung out. Spread thin. He knew that he looked it too, his face looked pallid, the skin almost grey but dark ringed around the eyes. He paced the room as the guitars roared over thumping bass and drums, closing his eyes he tried to listen to the chords, the words but he could hear nothing except that dying man’s weak voice saying it over and over again. Griffin Holdings.

He was telling me something. He was trying to pass me something before he died. Oh God! He knew he was dying. As he lay there in a strange room next to some drunken stranger he must have realised that he was going to die.

Campbell clamped hands over his eyes, pressed against them as if he could push everything out. He tried not to think about how the man must have felt lying there cold and frightened and faced with the reality of his own mortality, that he had found his end. Who was he? Where had he come from? A life? A wife?

He couldn’t imagine the anguish of those final moments, whether the realisation would have been attended by great fear or great calm, by panic or acceptance. Weak and shivering in a spreading pool of his own blood in a place he didn’t know, had the man felt any sort of gratitude to Daniel that he did not spend those fading moments completely alone? That there had at least been somebody there to help him, to try at least to save him. What a shock to have met such a shocking and sudden end. That such a terrible and painful accident could so swiftly have robbed someone of a husband, a brother, a son, defied logic and understanding. Campbell had a brother. He too had loving parents that would be shattered to wake one morning to find that their eldest son had suffered a fatal wound whilst out drinking and trying to have fun one night. Just gone one day forever.

And what now would become of him? The police seemed satisfied that it was an accident, a coincidence. They seemed to see nothing overly suspicious in what had happened, even considering the burglary. Why not? Campbell wasn’t so sure. Especially so since he knew something they didn’t. Should he tell them? This man had said those words to him as the last thing that he could do. Had he been telling Campbell something more? Perhaps the man had been involved in the break in at Griffin Holdings that Campbell had read about and perhaps that was more sinister and significant than anything the newspaper report had indicated. Perhaps this man had been killed for what he knew. After all, had anyone seen the accident happen? Nobody had admitted to it.

What more to this situation was there to discover? Campbell wondered how he would ever find out what with the state of his memory of that night.

The music stopped abruptly and snapped Campbell from his train of thought. Maybe that was it. Maybe he shouldn’t trust his shaky memory anyway. Perhaps, after all the fretting and the paranoia, he had in fact heard ‘Stiff and cold’ and was just blowing everything out of proportion. Making connections where none existed.

Glancing at his watch he saw that he had a few minutes before the food would be ready so he and turned on the TV and his home cinema equipment.

That finished, he trotted back through to the kitchen and pulled open the oven door. He scooped the foil tray off the shelf in the oven with a dishcloth over his hands and swung round to slide it onto the worktop as he kicked the oven door shut behind him with his heel.

Slipping a plate underneath the lasagne he tugged the dishcloth away from under it but as he did this, a thread caught on the crimped edge of the foil tray and Campbell could only watch helpless as his dinner slipped back off the pate, flipped in the air and spread itself across his kitchen floor.

‘Deep breath,’ he told himself and took one and then swore loudly anyway. He lifted a hand to his face, covered his eyes and started to shake his head. Swearing again he turned to the cupboard under the sink and pulled out the dustpan to begin cleaning the mess away. He had lost his appetite completely now as he stared at the steaming mess of yellow, brown and red and decided to bin it and sit in front of a noisy, mindless blockbuster of a film.

On his knees with a wet cloth Campbell found himself again cleaning a large patch of lino with a headache and the smell of alcohol in the air which had still not quite cleared and he was glad at least that this time it wasn’t blood. Judging by the price of the frozen lasagne in fact, he wasn’t sure it was even meat.

He noted that the sauce had splattered up over the door of the oven and he leaned over to wipe that too when he noticed something in the inch or so gap between the oven and the floor.

He stared for a minute, frowning. Why hadn’t he noticed that on Sunday when he’d last been down here cleaning? Too hungover probably. Or still drunk.

It looked from his angle like a large key fob. It was black, less than two inches long and looked clean and grease free, unlike the other detritus down there.

He reached his fingers in gingerly, the heat from the oven making him cautious and he tried to drag it but it stuck where it was. He shifted around and worked his hand a little flatter so he could reach in further and this time his fingers got purchase and it began to slide out toward him.

Picking it up he examined it. Dark rusty smears across the plastic left no doubt who had left this here — must, in fact, have hidden it he realised. There was a logo on it identifying the manufacturer and the end of it slid off to reveal a USB key. This was a memory stick.