Peter May - Runaway

The gardens were even more overgrown than they had been back in the day, and the Victoria Hall itself was boarded up, graffitied and neglected, abandoned to future demolition and redevelopment.

Luke drew his Merc into the kerb at the front door and looked up at the grim, decaying edifice that had once played host to a brave experiment in the treatment of mental illness. ‘Locked up tight. We’ll not get in there.’

‘Aye, we will,’ Maurie’s voice came from the back seat, surprisingly strong and filled with resolution. ‘There’s always a way in. Help me out.’

Ricky and Dave slipped out from each of the back doors, then helped Maurie on to the pavement in front of the hall. Broken glass crunched underfoot, just as it had that final day when Jack came looking for the others to tell them he was going home. Jack came around to join them, and Luke stood hesitantly by the open door of his car.

Maurie managed a smile. ‘I don’t blame you, Luke. I wouldn’t want to leave my Merc here either — if I had one.’ He turned towards Ricky. ‘That’s why the boy here’s going to stay with it, park it a street or two away so we don’t frighten off our visitor. If you trust him with it, that is.’

‘Of course I do,’ Luke said.

But Ricky was disappointed. ‘I want to come in with you.’

Maurie shook his head. ‘It’s none of your business, laddie. And nor should it be. You stay with the car and keep it safe.’

Luke chucked him the keys, and Ricky caught them reluctantly.

Maurie looked at his watch. ‘Come back about twelve. We should be done by then.’

Jack nodded to his grandson, and Ricky slipped huffily behind the wheel, slamming the driver’s door shut and starting the engine. He revved several times, filling the cool night air with the toxic fumes of carbon monoxide, before slipping into gear and driving slowly away, turning at the end of the street to disappear from view.

As the sound of the motor faded, an uncanny silence fell on the square. Lights in windows dotted the darkness around them, but there was no one in the street. Four of the original five members of The Shuffle stood in the shadow of the Victoria Hall. They had neither played together nor stood together on this spot for half a century, and although fifty years had passed and much had changed, the ghost of Jeff still hovered among them, as if he had always been there.

‘So how do we get in?’ Jack said.

‘Service entry,’ Maurie said. ‘Always was the weak spot.’

He pulled his heavy winter coat around himself, as if he were cold, and Jack thought how he looked drowned by it. Diminished by his disease, a shadow of the man he had once been.

They followed the wall along the front of the building, ignoring the main door, until they reached a rusted wrought-iron gate that blocked the way into a narrow alley leading down the side of the building to a service door accessed through a brick archway. On the other side of a broken-down railing, the gardens lay brooding darkly in their leafy neglect.

Dave tried the handle of the gate, and it swung inwards with a creak of rusting hinges. The alleyway was littered with debris. Bricks and broken glass, bits of a dismembered doll, the ragged remains of a coat, the skeleton of an umbrella, a single, soggy trainer.

Luke drew a torch from his jacket pocket and shone it into darkness, picking out the detritus of decades of abandonment. They stepped carefully through it to a black-painted door beyond the arch. It was padlocked.

‘No way in here,’ Luke said.

‘Aye, there is.’ Dave’s voice boomed out of the dark. ‘Gimme that torch a wee minute.’

And he took the torch from Luke’s hand and made his way back along the alley, before turning the light and his attention towards the broken fence. It took him less than two minutes to break one of the palings free of its rusted anchor and return, brandishing it triumphantly.

‘Okay, light the lock for me. A wee leaf oot of Jeff’s book here.’

He thrust the torch back at Luke, and in the circle of its light slipped the paling through the loop of the padlock and braced himself against the door with his foot. Years of bending pipework, and hefting baths and sinks and toilet bowls, had built muscle in his arms and shoulders that was still there and still strong.

But in the end it wasn’t the padlock itself that gave. It was the bracket that fixed the clasp to the door. Wood splintered and cracked in the still of the night and it came away in its entirety, padlock and all.

A flimsy Yale lock then offered no resistance to Dave’s boot as he slammed it into the door once, twice, three times. He stood panting triumphantly as it finally gave, and the door swung into the blackness beyond.

He grinned. ‘Missed ma vocation, eh?’

Maurie snatched Dave’s flat cap from his head and chucked it at him. ‘Here, go and hang that up on the gate, so our friend knows where to get in.’

‘Ma guid bunnet?’ Dave protested.

But Maurie was dismissive. ‘No one’s going to steal your greasy old cap, Dave.’

The darkness beyond the door was full of must and memories, and an all-pervasive reek of damp and decay. Luke led the way through a rubble-strewn hallway, shining the beam of his torch on the floor ahead, then up the narrow service stairs to the landing, which led to the common room and the hall. Here, faded paint on scarred walls bore the faintest traces of the designs once painted on them in shit by the demented Alice.

No one spoke as they all trooped into what had been the common room. A table stood at its centre, white with plaster dust, lumps of broken ceiling strewn across its surface. It might have been the very table they had all sat around in those long-ago days of madness. Luke righted a couple of toppled chairs before swinging the beam of his torch briefly into the old kitchen. An ancient rusted cooker still stood there, its door open and hanging off a broken hinge. Incongruously, a blackened aluminium cooking pot sat on one of the rings, as if waiting for someone to make their morning porridge.

With the others close behind him, he stepped through into the hall itself. A couple of table-tennis tables were half covered by dust sheets. The wooden floor had been marked out in different colours at some time for badminton and basketball. There were hoops mounted on the walls at either end, and old moth-eaten badminton nets lay in a discarded pile at one side.

‘They must have used it as a youth or community centre at some point,’ Jack said. He turned to Maurie. ‘What now?’

‘We wait.’

‘When’s our visitor due?’

Maurie checked his watch. ‘Not for another hour. I wanted to be sure we were here well ahead of time. Who knew how long it might take us to get in?’

Back in the common room they dusted down chairs and sat themselves around the table. But Luke was dubious about how long the batteries in his torch might last, and he went in search of the fuse box to see if there was still power in the hall. The others were left in the dark, sitting at the table and listening to his footsteps as he moved around on the landing and up the stairs.

When he returned, he shook his head. ‘No juice.’

He went into the kitchen and rummaged around in cupboards and drawers before they heard his ‘Aha!’ and he returned with a cardboard box of old candles, some of them half burned, others with pristine waxed wicks.

‘Anyone got a light?’

No one had, and Luke’s smile quickly faded. He laid the candles on the table and went back into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a renewed smile on his face and a box of matches clutched in his free hand. But they were damp, and old, and one after the other they sparked and sputtered and shed their phosphor, but failed to ignite. Until the second from last, which fizzed and popped before bringing flame to the splinter of wood. Quickly he lit the first candle, and they all grabbed one, lighting each in turn, and setting them on the floor along the walls, fixed in their own molten wax.