Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘Why don’t I phone him again?’ Celia suggested. ‘I can try to find out what he’s going to do and how far away Kaj might be. I might even try to convince him he should go out until Kaj gets there, visit some friends or go to a café.’

I thought. ‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Call me back.’

‘All right. Be ready to move.’

‘Oh, I am,’ I said. Ceel rang off. I was about to close the phone when the display faded of its own accord. Oh. No. I closed the phone and opened it, but the phone had turned itself off. I tried turning it back on again and it got as far as vibrating once and beginning its start-up procedure, showing zero bars out of three of available battery power before confirming this by going dark again. Out of power. I supposed I’d been lucky to get what I had out of it after such a short charge-up time on the Temple Belle this morning.

I sat there, breathing almost normally, with the little phone a dead lump in my hand, then I holstered it and sighed. So I was on my own now. Poor Ceel; she would worry, not being able to contact me. She’d guess the phone was out of juice, I hoped. The keyhole again. Still nothing happening in the gym. I supposed I ought to put on my other glove.

Ah; the other glove. Now then, where would that be?

I shook my head at the darkness. Swivelling and sliding back to where I’d been squatting earlier, in the rear corner of the store, I banged another shin on something very hard. At this rate it wouldn’t need Kaj to jump up and down on my knees to wreck my fucking legs. I felt around on the floor. I felt the glove. And some relief. One more tiny hurdle accidentally set up but then cleared. Oh, Christ, I was getting very tired. I was going to spend the rest of my life in this fucking posh house, just trying to get the hell out of it.

Maybe I could just lie here and go to sleep and nobody would ever find me. I could squat here; stow away. Live secretly here in the house like a sort of soft hermit. Celia would discover me and bring me something to eat each evening, like a child sent to their room by a strict father brought food by a forgiving mother or younger sister.

My knees were getting sore from all this squatting. Sore knees. Think about that. Think of that pain, hold that image; Kaj’s big face and short blond hair as he smiles at you and goes boingy-boingy on your fucking leg bones, man.

A surprisingly large part of my brain really did seem to want to do nothing. A significant and very vocal minority of my brain cells seemed to think that just resting here in the darkness was actually quite a good idea. It had proved all right so far; I hadn’t been discovered, it was quiet and unthreatening; maybe if I stayed here everything would somehow be okay. I knew this was nonsense, obviously, but that was the temptation. Stay put. Leaving my dark, musty-smelling sanctuary meant going out into the light, braving the landings and stairs and floors and halls and doors of a house whose owner was present and suspicious and potentially – and very possibly by now – armed. And who was anyway a crime boss. And who had just ordered his personal Dolph Lundgren-on-steroids bodyguard here to investigate what was going on. Oh yes, staying here in the darkness and hiding quietly seemed like a seductively good idea. Or maybe I could go back to Ceel’s bedroom and hide there, and our intense sexual karma would spookily protect me even from a determined and thorough search, until she got back and could smuggle me out when the coast was clear…

No. Out. Get the fuck out. Now. Get back to the door. Look through the keyhole. Confirm nothing happening and nobody there. Take hold of the door handle. Twist handle and slowly open door. Rise. Feel knees complain, as though they’re anticipating what might happen to them later if this all goes horribly wrong. Take deep breath. Close door again. Walk quietly to door of gym. No keyhole so can’t look out to hall.

Stop and listen. Can you hear a power shower pump operating? No. So, what to do? Go back to the cupboard and wait there? Keep an ear to the keyhole so you could hear when the pump did start up? But then what if the pump couldn’t be heard from inside the cupboard? Wait here, at the door leading to the hall? But then what if Merrial took another look inside the gym before taking his shower? He’d already been in here, but he might want to check again.

A house this size was probably well in excess of some mathematically provable topographical limit that defined when a space became too big for one person ever to search perfectly. You could confirm that there was nobody on a certain floor, but then while you were in the depths of one of these large rooms, checking in an en suite loo or whatever, the person doing the hiding could slip out of a not-yet-searched room and creep up to one of the already-searched rooms without the searcher being able to spot them. So checking a room twice would make some sort of sense.

Oh fuck, I didn’t fucking know. I looked behind me. Opened blinds. The window Merrial had been standing at while he’d been talking to Ceel on his mobile. I could see the house on the far side of the square, visible through the leafless trees of winter. Probably too far away for it to be a problem. I wondered if there was any way to get out of the window and down to the ground without causing a fuss. Or making it to the upper storey, to the loft and then out onto the roof and then finding a way down. If I still had a working phone I could call 999 and ask for the fire brigade because there was a major fire in the place, and hope to get away in the confusion. No; all of these just led to more complications and more opportunities for things to go appallingly wrong.

Footsteps outside in the hall, coming closer. Oh shit. Did I have time to get back to the cupboard? Probably not, and certainly not quietly. I shrank back behind the door. If Merrial did open the door, and he was daft enough not to look behind it as soon as he’d opened it, then I might still escape.

The footsteps went past. A door closed. Closed and locked, I thought. I waited for the sound of a shower. I looked around the gym. If there was a phone extension in here, did I dare phone Ceel in case there was something vital she now knew that I needed to? But then what if Merrial was already on the land-line? Bit of a giveaway, hearing that old other-extension click.

I waited. But how long did I have? Where was Kaj coming from? King’s Road? Regent’s Park? Somewhere else? And how fucking long did it take Merrial to get ready for a fucking shower, for fuck’s sake? Come on, man; stop fucking about and get your fucking clothes off and jump into the fucking thing. Twist that dial and lather up.

Maybe Ceel had been exaggerating about how loud the pump was. Maybe she had more acute hearing than I did. Maybe some eccentricity of the way sound was transmitted through the house meant that right here where I was standing in the gym was the one place you couldn’t hear the goddamn pump. I tried to listen really carefully. Was that the sound of a pump? Jesus, if my phone still had power I could phone Ceel and hold the phone up and ask her, Is that the sound of the pump, that barely audible hum way in the distance? Or is that the central heating, or the fucking drinks fridge in the study or something? Maybe Merrial was using a mains-pressure shower over his bath instead for some reason I could only guess at. Ha! Maybe he was showering as quietly as he could specifically because he didn’t want to let his supposed junkie with a knife know where he was, even if he had locked the bedroom and presumably the bathroom door.

When the pump did start up I jumped again; it sounded like it was just through the wall from where I was standing. I thought about that phrase about somebody being as nervous as a kitten and thought what a load of crap it really was; I’d never seen a kitten as nervous as I’d been over the last couple of hours.