The Manhattan Puzzle (32 page)

It took at least two seconds for her to recognise the close-up picture of Detective Grainger’s face and, beside that, the face of what must have been that poor dancer from that stupid club in London.

Both of them had bloodsplatters on their faces. Both had their eyes open and were staring as if shocked by their own death.

A pounding in her chest was affecting her throat, tightening it. Then a tingling in her fingers made her rub her hands together. She rocked in her chair. Whoever had done that had to be capable of doing the same thing to anyone else. To Alek. There was a creeping cold moving inside her.

‘Mrs Ryan.’ Gus Reilly had a hand on her arm.

He was looking around, as if trying to work out what she’d been staring at. Then his hand gripped her arm tighter. She felt the veins in her arm throbbing under his grip.

‘Do you know if your husband reported BXH for breaking UK money laundering regulations earlier this year?’ His tone was soft. He let go of her.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Has he ever reported them for anything?’

‘Not that I know.’

‘Have you ever known him to be violent?’

‘No.’ She felt a flush on her cheeks. Was she being honest? What about that episode when he’d held her shoulder? She clamped her lips together.

Reilly rubbed his chin. He looked troubled.

‘My son is missing,’ she said, softly. Her voice broke, catching in her throat. ‘I need to get this over with.’

He looked at her, as if he was examining an unusual specimen. ‘Why don’t you just give up on your husband?’

‘I believe in him.’ Loyalty had been drummed into her as a child. It was impossible to give up. ‘Please, let me go. I have to book a new flight.’

Reilly let out his breath in an exasperated stream.

‘Okay, you just hold on. I’ll see what I can do.’ He stood, headed towards the other end of the room without a backwards glance.

She looked around.

No one was looking at her.

The door at that end of the room was only ten feet away.

This was her chance. It had to be.

A vein in her chest, under her arm, started beating. She didn’t turn her head. She stood, headed for the door. This was not what Reilly meant by holding on, she was reasonably sure of that, but it was what she had to do.

A voice in her head was shouting,
don’t do it
.

But she wasn’t going to listen.

There were uniformed officers in the hall. One was leaning against the wall. He was talking to a shorter officer who was shaking his head. The shorter one stared at her as she passed. Isabel was sure he was going to say something to her.

‘It’s gotta be three feet thick at least, the concrete down there,’ said the officer with his hand on the wall. His accent was a thick New York growl, like something from an old movie.

She didn’t hear any more.

And she didn’t stop.

Her feet were moving her automatically. She had to tell them not to run. They wanted to. She was sure everyone would spot her guilty face, notice that her veins were throbbing.

But no one did.

So she kept walking. Where was Mrs Vaughann? What had those officers been talking about? Were they looking for Sean?

The elevator wasn’t far away. All she had to do was pass the other open door of the conference room.

She heard a shout and nearly jumped out of her skin. But it wasn’t her name that had been shouted. And she was near the elevators.

There were two uniformed NYPD officers standing in front of the elevator doors. They were talking to two women waiting there, tapping away at handheld screens at the same time. Were they logging people in and out of the floor?

What about the other corridor? The one that led to that service elevator. She headed across the lobby area in front of the elevators and went straight towards the other corridor, as if that was where she was going all along.

There were three NYPD officers near the service elevator. They looked as if they were waiting for it to arrive. They all had their backs to her, but they would definitely all turn as soon as they heard her coming up behind them.

Was she crazy even thinking she could move around this building, avoiding all these police officers? And any second now a shout would go up behind her from Gus Reilly. The throbbing in her chest was pounding faster now. And her scalp was tingling.

You’re totally crazy, Isabel.

And then she saw the words FIRE ESCAPE on a door. The letters were almost the same colour as the door. She’d nearly missed them.

And then one of the officers turned. He was tall, black-haired, like a young Clint Eastwood. He gave her a wide smile. She smiled back at him. They were ten feet apart.

She reached the fire exit door, pushed at it. It opened.

She let it close behind her and stood waiting, her breathing way too fast.

But the door didn’t open behind her. No one came after her. Again, she felt as if a truck had passed her by within inches.

The stairs were laid with black tiles, like an expensive bathroom. The roof and walls were painted black up here too. And the lighting was thin LED strips. She headed down.

As she reached the next landing she heard voices far below. She peeked over the edge of the stairs. People were coming up. The vein in her chest went into double time.

She had to get off the stairs.

She pushed the door on the landing open, closing it gently behind her. The spill of light from the door had been enough for her to see the corridor and an elevator door further along. Each floor had a similar layout, though it would have been a lot better if this one had had its lights on, like the floor above.

She stood in the darkness, listening. All she could hear was a faint hissing. And for one sickening moment she imagined some animal lying in wait, until she convinced herself that it had to be the noise of a Xerox machine or some other piece of equipment that hadn’t been switched off.

She felt along the wall for a light switch. There had to be one.

The darkness was almost complete now. A thin strip of light under the door to the fire exit was the only illumination she could see. This floor felt way colder than the one above too. It wasn’t freezing, but it wasn’t far off. There was a slight chemical smell in the air as well, as if the carpets had been cleaned recently.

She got a sudden flashback to the time she’d spent in that cave in Israel. There had been insects there. She could almost feel the scorpions walking over her again, see their red eyes in the darkness.

She pressed her fist to her forehead. There weren’t any scorpions in New York.

Suddenly, she felt an urge to go back, to throw herself at the mercies of the NYPD.

At least she’d be safe.

She held her fist in front of her, ready to hit out.

She felt a slight breeze on her fingers, then on her face. Her skin tightened. She stopped, waited, waited some more, then took a small step forward.

This was one of the empty floors Sean had told her all about, the result of all those thousands of people who’d been laid off over the past few years, after the financial crisis.

Every office and division had ended up like a war zone, he’d said, with their own casualty stories about people who’d never made it back from meetings with senior managers.

Then she saw the faint gleam of the elevator doors and heard a rattle as it passed. It didn’t stop. She reached around for the elevator button, feeling the wall in giant circles. She found it. It lit up when she pressed it.

Gus Reilly’s cell phone was warbling. He was on his way back to see Isabel Ryan. He’d spoken to the sergeant who wanted to interview her. The man was in no mood for compromise.

‘Reilly here,’ he said, into the phone.

‘You gotta get back down here, now,’ said a voice. ‘And bring every officer up there with you. We got a full scale riot going down. If we’re not careful we’re gonna lose this goddamned building!’

It was the desk sergeant he’d just been with in the foyer.

‘What about your officers outside?’

‘Some idiot called them away.’

He could hear shouts in the background. The sound of glass breaking.

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Someone turned the goddamned BXH ATM machines off!’

A uniformed officer rushed past him, heading for the elevator. Reilly followed him.

Isabel Ryan would have to wait.

The elevator lurched. The sick feeling in her stomach was settling in deeper with each floor she went down. An image of Detective Grainger and the cockroaches had come into her mind. She coughed, bent over and dry retched. The acid lingered in her throat. It felt as if she was descending into some haunted basement.

With a ping, the elevator stopped.

The doors slid open.

There was no one in the well-lit corridor in front of her. No murderer. No welcoming committee of policemen. That had to mean the NYPD were breaking through concrete somewhere else, on one of the unused floors.

She stepped out into the corridor. There was a plaque on the wall high up to her left. It was wooden, faded. It looked as if it had been there since the building had been constructed.

It read: PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON SPENT THE NIGHT BEFORE HIS INAUGURATION, APRIL 29 1789, AT THE FREE MASONS ARMS ON THIS SITE. THE FOUNDATION WALL BENEATH THIS PLAQUE WAS PART OF THAT BUILDING.
APRIL 29 1933. GOD BLESS AMERICA
.

A low grinding noise filled the air. It sounded as if it was coming from the walls. She moved forward, past a double-width doorway. A sign on it read DRAINAGE PLANT.

She kept walking. The next door had the words GENERAL POST on it. It was locked. The corridor was way longer than any of the corridors she’d seen up above.

The light was different down here too, more yellowy. And it flickered occasionally, sending shadows shimmying across the walls, trembling in time to the grinding from the drainage plant room.

And the lights here were on the wall, not on the roof. They were old gas-lamp-style bulbs, which looked as if they had only recently been converted to electricity.

There were boxes at the end of the corridor.

But someone had left just enough room between the boxes and the wall on the right to squeeze past them. She peered beyond the boxes. There was a red steel door back there.

That meant she was right.

It was exactly what she was looking for. The article Sean had been reading on that website had shown the tunnels connecting the old Grand Central Post Office that originally stood next door, to the underground tracks connecting into Grand Central.

When she’d seen the page on his laptop in the penthouse she’d wondered why he was looking at it. And then it had dawned on her. If you want to find Sean, go wherever he’s been interested in.

She squeezed into the gap. She could smell damp paper, and something less pleasant, as if an animal had been peeing down here. It wouldn’t be easy to get away if she had to get out of here fast.

But she had to see if the door would open.

There was a foot-wide gap between it and the last of the boxes. She touched the door handle. The door was locked, the handle chillingly cold. For a second she thought her fingers might stick to the steel handle, but they didn’t.

Then she saw it. A small round wooden box hanging on the wall. It was surrounded by cobwebs. But inside it there was a brass key.

This was still an emergency exit. She took the key, put it in the lock, turned it and pulled the door towards her.

That was when she heard Mrs Vaughann’s voice.

‘Isabel!’

She looked back along the corridor. Mrs Vaughann was walking towards her. She had almost reached the boxes. Behind her was the bald security guard. And he looked angry.

Meeting him down here felt all wrong. Tentacles of fear reached around her.

‘We need to speak to you, Isabel,’ said Mrs Vaughann, sharply.

‘Sure,’ she said as calmly as she could.

She looked at the key in her hand. Would she ever be able to test her theory if she went back?

They were still coming towards her.

‘You know you shouldn’t be down here, Isabel,’ said Mrs Vaughann. There was amusement in her tone. ‘And you shouldn’t keep running away from my friend Adar. He’s the new head of security at BXH.’

Mrs Vaughann was smiling. It was a fixed smile. The smile you might see on a mannequin. The man’s gaze, Adar’s gaze, was fixed too. On Isabel.

There was a wide-eyed intensity to it. Just like the way he’d been when he’d tried to stop her getting away in the elevator.

Then they reached the boxes.

She looked at them, expecting them to stop, but Adar manoeuvred himself sideways into the gap quickly, as if he didn’t want to waste a second. And now she couldn’t see Mrs Vaughann any more.

But Adar had something in his hand. It was a six-inch-long black-handled knife.

It’s blade sparkled in the yellowy light. And there was a wild intensity to his progress that was unsettling, as if nothing was going to stop him from reaching her. She turned and put the key in the lock.

Her hand didn’t even shake.

He’d be here any moment.

And with that weapon he could kill her with one slash.

The door had to open.

She turned the key. It turned only halfway.

She tried the handle. It wouldn’t open.

‘Stop!’ he said.

She could smell him. It was the same sickly-lemony aftershave smell from her dream back in London.

She turned the key the other way and yanked at the handle.

The door opened.

She slipped through, banged it closed behind her, jammed the key in and turned it.

The handle jerked out of her hand.

Her head almost exploded with the pressure flowing through the veins in her neck. The handle moved again and again. The door shook. But it held.

Relief, like a cool breeze, ran through her as she realised he wasn’t going to get through.

What the hell did this mean? That Mrs Vaughann was in league with some crazed murderer? Or was she getting it all wrong? Was he carrying that thing for some other reason?