A Bed of Scorpions (21 page)

Someone else’s were. Brisk footsteps sounded in the room I’d just left. A woman in heels, not a man. And the steps
were moving steadily, not stopping to look at paintings. Which meant that she wasn’t a journalist. They were more purposeful than a guard doing her rounds, and anyway, did guards wear heels? The reality, that I was standing in the middle of a national art collection, with guards wandering through regularly, with Aidan around the corner, with other Merriam–Compton staff, even Jim, coming and going, had no effect. I was in a blind panic.

There was the outline of a door next to the painting I was looking at. It had a doorknob painted the same colour as the wall, and only a thin edge of light behind it made it noticeable, that and a ‘Staff Only’ sign. I looked around. No one was in view. I turned the knob cautiously and pulled. No bells rang, no sirens sounded. I slid through it, and closed it softly behind me.

I was giddy with rebellion. In my mind, I am devil-may-care and do whatever I want whenever I want to. In real life, I am cautious to the point of being mistaken for street furniture. The height of rebellion for me is to toss aside an unopened utilities bill marked ‘Open Immediately’. And now here I was trespassing. I didn’t know what happened to people who were found with no authorisation in the private areas of museums, but I suspected it was frowned upon. Possibly using the police, and the courts. I shook my head. What had I been thinking? I’d slide back into the room and pretend nothing had happened.

I could still hear the heels as they tap-tapped into the gallery I’d been in. I waited for them to move off so I could emerge without embarrassing myself. But they didn’t. And instead of me turning the knob, I felt it turn in my hand. Without thinking, I leant my full weight against the
door. It gave fractionally, but I held it shut, as though it were locked. There was a pause, and then the knob was released, every bit as slowly and cautiously as it had turned a moment before. Which made me think it hadn’t been a gallery employee. The person on the other side did not want to be heard. Then nothing. Including no footsteps. I couldn’t now return the way I had come.

I took stock. How to find my way to the public parts of the museum without drawing attention to myself was the question. I was on a staircase landing. I knew that there were no galleries on the floor above, so the stairs up probably led to offices, or other spaces where I also didn’t belong. Downstairs there were galleries, and a second entrance hall. With luck, I could find my way to that.

I walked down without trying to be particularly quiet. I didn’t sing and dance and play the ukulele, but I decided it was better not to creep about, either. If the worst came to the worst and somebody saw me, I’d say I’d been to the press view and had got lost.

The stairs ended in a vestibule, with three doors. One said ‘Education’, which didn’t look promising. The second was a loo. By default, Door Number Three, then. I took a breath. Despite my best intentions, I opened it like a burglar in the night. An amateur burglar, on her first expedition. No one could remotely mistake me for a lost visitor.

It turned out not to matter. This wasn’t a public part of the gallery, because, apart from anything else, it was dark. I stepped forward and the door shut behind me, reducing the light to just a small rectangle from the landing. I waited for a moment for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. There was a faint smell of metal and damp. Nothing
unpleasant, but these weren’t offices, or even rooms that were used regularly.

I reached out to see what was beside me. A light switch, which I didn’t use. I couldn’t counterfeit that much confidence. Beside that, wood. What felt like bookcases, higher than my head. I stepped forward cautiously. Only a few feet ahead, the way was blocked by a wall. Was I in a corridor? I felt with my hands. No, not a wall. Smooth and cold, like a filing cabinet. And not much wider. Then a crack, then another smooth and cold section. And again. I ran my hand up higher, and felt a raised metal rectangle. Paper inside, like an old-fashioned label on an office door, telling you who worked there. I ran my hand down. A wheel. And I understood.

I was in an archive. These were rolling metal stacks, shelving that, to save space, runs on a track. The shelves look like ordinary library bookshelves, but if you turn the wheel at the end of each set of shelves, the whole unit rolls along, and one by one the sections close up against each other, giving double the quantity of shelving in half the space of conventional storage. Lots of libraries have them. T&R didn’t, but Tetrarch, being bigger, stored its archive copies that way.

If this was an archive, then I could assume a standard layout for it, and if I walked along beside the stacks, at some point the odds were there would be another exit. I kept one hand lightly on the units. The gloom wasn’t absolute now I’d been there a few minutes, but it was gloom all the same. If there was anything on the floor – a kick stool to help researchers reach the top shelves, or files or boxes – I wasn’t going to see it.

The shelving ended. I reached out to feel if I’d got to the end of the room, but I hadn’t. It was just a gap between two stacks, where someone must have been working earlier and hadn’t rolled the two units back together. I was about to continue when I heard – I don’t know what I heard. What I knew, however, was that someone else had entered the archive. Without even thinking about it, I slid my shoes off and stepped silently into the gap between the stacks. In hindsight I know I can’t have held my breath for the next ten minutes, but that’s what it felt like. There was nothing I could do. I had no idea where in the room the other person was, so going back to find the door I’d come in by was as impossible as going forward.

I waited. I made, and discarded, plans. I had my phone with me, but even if I kept it shielded in my bag, the light would tell the watcher where I was. And it was a watcher, not someone willing to turn on the light and move about looking for a file. I imagined a 999 call. ‘I’m in an archive in the Tate without authorisation, and a Bad Person, whom I cannot identify, is threatening me with harm. How are they threatening me? She – or possibly he – is breathing.’

Jake would take me seriously, and so would Helena or Aidan, but to call them I would have the same problem with light from my phone, and no guarantee I’d get anything except their voicemail. There was also no guarantee that I would even get that far. I was in a basement and there might not be a phone signal. I might give away my location and not be able to make a call.

I berated myself:
Where is Lassie when you really need her?
I call myself organised, but a really organised 
person would have bought a collie years ago, just in case she fell into a river and needed the townspeople to rescue her as she washed towards the rapids.
Get help, Lassie. Go on, girl!

I have no idea how long I stood there thinking these entirely un-useful thoughts. My watch was old, and not luminous, while my phone was unusable because it was luminous. It paralleled my situation: crap, whatever I did. If this had been in a novel and not real life, I would have written in the margin, ‘Symbolism too heavy-handed?’

My only hope was that a Tate employee would appear. But before that could happen, whoever was following me made up their mind. There was a flurry of steps – not walking anymore, but running – and then something heavy shrieked as it was dragged across the floor. Before I could begin to unravel the sounds, there was a huge crash, and what little light there had been was blocked out, as if by an eclipse.

I had retreated to the far end of the shelves, away from the entrance, where I’d entered the stacks. Now I waited, but still nothing happened. I moved, cautiously, towards the opening. As I got near, my feet scuffed across something that had not been on the floor before. I bent. Books.

I ventured another step. Nothing. Another, and I walked into what felt like a wall. I put up my hand. Wooden. A shelf. Another above it. I reached higher. Shelves as far as I could feel. And I understood. The watcher had decided I must be in the single open stack, but feared that I was lying in wait. And so they had pulled out the bookshelf on the opposite wall, tipping it over so that it fell against the entrance and trapped me.

I listened some more. Had the watcher trapped me and gone to get someone? I hadn’t heard a door open or close, although I probably wouldn’t have over the noise of the shelves falling, and the books crashing onto the floor. But if they hadn’t, what was the point? If I couldn’t get out anymore, they couldn’t get to me, either.

And then I heard a rumble. A rumble I knew well. Fear clutched me. It was one of the stacks starting to roll. I’d done it myself, often, one by one when I wanted to get at a book in the library. The watcher didn’t want a book, though. They wanted me. And they were rolling all the stacks, slowly but surely towards me.

I
BIT BACK A
scream, even though it no longer mattered if anyone heard me. There was no point in screaming now. No one would get to me in time. And if I let myself scream, I might never stop. I tried to calm myself. Because panic was going to make me slow, and it was going to make me stupid. And if I was either of those things, much less both, I was going to die.

I would probably die anyway, but I didn’t have to die berating myself for being a panicky idiot.

My phone. The watcher knew where I was, so that no longer mattered. I’d dropped my bag at some point, I didn’t know when or where. I was fairly sure I’d still had it when I slid into the stacks, so it had to be there somewhere. I scuffed my feet along, and then, as I reached the bag, I gave a grunt of triumph: there it was.

I scrabbled through it, searching for the phone even as I listened to the stacks banging, one against the other as they
came closer. Stay calm, I told myself. Concentrate. The stacks don’t matter. The phone does. I dug it out and clicked it on. I nearly wept when I saw no signal bars. I clicked again. Yes. The hum that said I had a line. I dialled Jake. Nothing. No connection. Again. Nothing. Did emergency calls connect better?
Just do what you’re supposed to, you crappy piece of technology
, I told it grimly. 999. ‘What service?’ Thank God.

‘Police.’ I tried to keep my voice calm, but I was a nanosecond away from wailing. ‘Emergency. Police!’

The connection was made, even as the rolling noise came closer. There was no time. I wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear, 1960s suburban-housewife style, and knelt down and hooked my hand in flat behind the first book on the shelf nearest the floor. Using my arm like a paddle, I shovelled as many books as I could in one sweep onto the floor, and went back for more.

‘Police.’

‘Please. I’m at the Tate. I need—’ I kept shovelling, moving along the floor on my knees.

‘Your name and phone number, please.’

‘There’s no time. Someone is trying to kill me. I’m in the basement of the Tate Gallery. The Tate. Pimlico. In an archive. I don’t know what it’s called but—’

‘I need your name and number, please.’

‘There’s
no time
. Call Jake Field. Detective-Inspector Jacob Field, CID. He knows about this. Tell him it’s Sam Clair.
He knows
.’

‘I’ll do that. It’s going through.’ The voice was calm and soothing, although I was neither calmed nor soothed by it. I continued to hook books out. ‘Give me your number so I can call you back.’

I was defeated. There was no time for telephone tag, and no signal for it. The books were more important. I dropped the phone and started putting the books I’d pulled out onto the floor into rows, but across the floor, perpendicular to the shelves, reaching across from one of the stacks to the other. It was a reference archive and the books were mostly thick, maybe encyclopaedias of some kind. If there were enough of them, and I packed them in tightly enough, they might block the rolling mechanism for a while. Scoop, stack, scoop, stack.

And all the while, the rolling sound continued. The whir of the wheel, and the clank as one stack hit the next and the growing wall of metal shelving got heavier each time, moving onwards. Towards me.

I scooted on my knees up to the other end, the blocked end, feeling around on the floor for the tracks. I started to stack more books along their line. Scoop, stack.

If I had any brains, I told myself as my hands kept stacking, I would have hung up and redialled 999 and called in a fire. But I’d dropped the phone. It was somewhere on the floor back where I’d built the first row of books. I couldn’t waste time looking for it.

It didn’t matter. It was too late. Rolling stacks are popular because they are easy to use. It didn’t take much time or effort to roll an entire row of stacks across a room. And I could hear that these ones weren’t more than a couple of units away from me now. I paused, crouched over and waiting, my ear cocked, as though I needed to hear what was going to happen. As though I wasn’t going to feel it.

Long before I thought they’d get to me, when I thought I still had a few more seconds, maybe even a minute, before,
most likely I’d be—I couldn’t let myself think the word. Before I’d
be hurt
were the only words my mind was willing to accept. Long before that, the shelf beside me bulged out with a clang. The great mass of rolling stacks had got to me.

I concentrated on the rows of books I’d built, even as I knew that they had as much chance of slowing down the stacks as a sand drawbridge protects a castle on the beach. I kept my hands hovering over them nonetheless. It gave me something to do, which stopped me lying on the floor and screaming in fear.

The stacks beside me bulged again, and a few of the books in my makeshift buttresses popped up. I pushed them back, and scrambled back to the other end. The same. My God. They were holding.

The shelf moved back. The pressure had been taken off. I stayed crouched on the floor. Waiting. I didn’t have to wait long. I heard the rolling move in the opposite direction, but I had no time to hope. Bang. The stacks were sent back as hard as the watcher could roll them. They crashed into my unit. Books poured out, a great cataract spray of them. I covered my head with my hands. At any other time, hundreds of books being flung onto my back and head would have been painful. These barely registered.

I scuttled back to the front row and felt along the floor again. If anything, the falling books had helped, adding their weight to keep my rows in place.

I could hear the shelves rolling back again. With fewer books on them, they’d probably move more easily the next time. I braced myself, waiting.

But nothing came. Instead, the lights went on, and a voice said, ‘Who is there? What’s going on?’

I shouted, ‘Stop that person by the stacks.
Stop her!
’ But even as I shouted, I heard footsteps running, and a door swing shut.

The voice was from the other end. ‘What? Who is there?’

I was resigned. ‘I think there’s only me now,’ I called. ‘I’m in the stacks, behind the bookshelf.’ With the light on I could see it, and it was exactly what I’d thought, a tipped-over bookshelf blocking my exit. ‘Someone attacked me.’

‘
What?
’ The voice was incredulous. So this wasn’t a result of my 999 call, but a museum employee who had heard the noise. Well, even if they hadn’t caught Celia – I had said ‘the watcher’ to myself the whole time, but I knew it was Celia – even if they hadn’t seen her, I’d been rescued.

I started to say it again, when another voice cut in. ‘Police. All entrances are blocked. Stay where you are, and identify yourselves.’

I was bitter. ‘It’s too late for blocking. She’s gone. It’s just me. She tried to kill me.’ I admit, in retrospect, that it might be possible to make a more comprehensive, and comprehensible, statement to the police, but that was the most I could manage.

I leant, one hand against the emptied shelves, my head down. I was breathing shallowly, unable to get enough air, and only now did I realise that I was also crying. When I thought about it, my mind moving slowly and hazily, I knew I’d been crying ever since the bookcase fell. In fact, I was a mass of tears, and snot, and dirt. My hair was stuck to my forehead, and was liberally smeared with the mixture. The nails on both my hands were torn from pulling down the books, and my arms almost to my shoulders were black with archive dust untouched for decades. And I was barefoot. It
took a real effort of concentration to work out why that might be, but that’s what I was trying to figure out when the bookcase was pulled back enough to let me out.

Or let someone in. Two policemen slid through the gap on either side, both wearing protective vests and carrying guns. And the guns were pointed at me.

We’ve become slightly more used to having armed police in London in the last few years, but it has never seemed normal to me when I see them at railway stations, or in front of embassies. It did not seem normal now, at close quarters, and in a museum. What had happened had happened so fast that I had had no time to think about the reality of it. Two men in bullet-proof vests aiming firearms at me removed all doubt.

I looked at the man nearest me, and said, in a wondering tone, ‘She tried to kill me.’ And then, in case he hadn’t understood, I turned to his partner and added, ‘She tried to
kill
me.’ And then I sat down on the floor, put my head in my hands, and cried.

I don’t think it went on for very long. Even as I wailed – and this was not the kind of movie glamour crying, where the heroine gives a few sniffles as her eyes well up photogenically, this was great, horrible, mouth-open sobbing – even as I did it, I was aware of the noise around me. Voices. The stamp of feet going back and forth, of doors opening and closing. And the crackle and static of radios as it was confirmed that the emergency had been contained and apparently comprised one hysterical middle-aged woman.

Finally I looked up. The same two policemen, but their weapons were no longer pointing at me. An
improvement. I said, wearily, ‘I’m sorry.’ I think that even if I were about to be executed, that reflex would kick in, that English middle-class female need to apologise for having inconvenienced other people, or even just made them uncomfortable.
I’m so sorry, will the blood be troublesome? It does stain, terribly, of course. Shall I move so you can decapitate me over the lino? That would make it so much easier for you to clean up afterwards.

One of the men shifted his weight, but neither said anything. It was up to me to make this social event go with a swing.

I wiped my face with my sleeve. ‘I got lost. I went through the wrong door. Someone followed me in the dark and trapped me in here. Then she tried to roll the stacks along, to crush me.’ My voice began to quaver again as I got to the end. Saying it made me realise I’d nearly died.

Their faces didn’t change, and they didn’t move. I wasn’t sure if it was because I sounded deranged, or they were just waiting for more information.

Then one said, ‘She?’

I nodded. ‘A woman’s footsteps. Heels. I didn’t see her.’

He didn’t respond. I started to stand up, and he tensed. ‘I’m going to stand up,’ I said carefully.

He nodded. His job was just to keep an eye on me.

I stood, and wiped my face with my sleeve again. Stylish. ‘My bag is by the wall. Can I get it?’

He looked undecided. He wasn’t senior enough to have undergone intensive handbag training.

‘There are tissues in it. I want to blow my nose.’

No tissue training, either.

I kept my eyes on him, attempting to convey my utter
harmlessness. He didn’t appear to be convinced, so I spoke carefully. ‘If I get the bag and hand it to you, will you get the tissues out for me?’ No dice. I tried not to sound aggrieved, or as if I thought I was auditioning for a part in a police procedural, but I’m sure I sounded like both when I modified it further. ‘If I don’t pick it up, just kick it down towards you?’

That was better. He agreed, and we did that. Tissue-transfer safely achieved without incident, I wiped my face. Not that it was going to do much good, but making a gesture towards normalcy made me feel better.

By now there were more voices, and lots of movement. Then, as swiftly as it had fallen, the bookshelf was moved back entirely, and for the first time I could see the space I was standing in. As I’d thought, it was an archive: a narrow passageway down one side of a room, the rest filled with rolling stacks. The door I’d come through was at the far end, and almost entirely blocked by police. There was another door, nearer to me, with another cluster of police, and, peering over their shoulders, a few people not in uniform.

A man in a dark suit with a tie that looked as if it had been knotted the day before yesterday stepped towards me. He was clearly in charge. Thirty-ish, short, wiry, and very, very peeved. Possibly with me. I rolled my eyes at myself. Definitely with me.

I didn’t wait for him to speak. I’d had a few minutes as I’d mopped up to think what I was going to say. ‘My name is Samantha Clair. I was at the press view of a new exhibition upstairs, and I got lost and someone followed me. I panicked and stepped into this space. They blocked it with the bookcase, and then tried to roll the other cases
down, to crush me.’ There was no doubt about it, ‘crush me’ were words to avoid, because my voice wavered again. Stop being a baby, I told myself. It didn’t happen. ‘There are people upstairs who will tell you I am who I say I am. And there’s ID in my bag.’ I gestured towards the policeman who still held it in the hand that wasn’t holding a gun. What the well-dressed copper is wearing this season.

The man waited. He wasn’t accepting what I’d said, but he wasn’t rejecting it, either.

I cleared my throat, the nice-girl preamble to a request. ‘May I come out?’ I looked at my hands. ‘I need to wash.’

‘Not yet. How did you get in here? And give me the names of the people who will vouch for you.’

‘That door over there.’ I pointed. ‘There are stairs. I came down from the floor above, a room in the exhibition space. I don’t know anyone who works here, but a woman named Esther something – Wolff, Esther Wolff – is the press officer, and she put my name on a list of visitors. A man named Jim Reynolds, who is a freelancer, but is working for the Tate, is also here. He knows me.’

He nodded again, still an acknowledgement that I’d spoken, no more. ‘Why did Esther Wolff put you on a list if she doesn’t know you?’

‘She was asked to by the art dealer who represents the artist being shown. He’s upstairs too, or was. Aidan Merriam.’ I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Maybe they’d gone home? I was so tired it could have been midnight. I rubbed at my face.

‘You said “she” attacked you, but you also said it was dark.’

‘The footsteps were a woman’s. Heels.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘I’m certain in my own mind, yes. But I didn’t see anyone.’ I realised exactly how little I could prove – not even that I was followed from upstairs. My eyes and nose began to clog again. I closed my eyes, willing myself not to cry. It wasn’t going to work. ‘Please. I need to wash.’ I have no idea why it was so important, but it was. I was shaking, and it occurred to me that I might have been shaking all along.