Well. He will find out soon enough.

Through the window the rest of London looms, large and devoid of welcome. The more he stares the darker it grows; and larger too, by the minute.

But at least there is still brandy in the bottle, he thinks.

Though in this, he is mistaken.

Continue reading

Continue reading

for a preview of

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED

1

1

The longer she sat there, the colder she became. With her back to the cistern, and her feet drawn up beneath her, Maggie perched on the closed lid of the toilet, and concentrated on being as still as possible. An hour earlier, a spasm in her leg had caused the overhead lights to switch on. Their electric hum had startled her more than the glare. Someone would hear it, she thought, and come investigate. But nobody arrived, and the spasm subsided, and a few minutes later the lights turned themselves off again.

“How long do I have to hide in the toilets?” she had asked Harvey.

“Until twelve. At least.”

“The guard patrols all night long.”

“But there’s only one of him. And he can’t be on every floor at once.”

She had an urge to confirm that the flash drive was still in her pocket, but any movement would bring the lights to life, and besides, she had checked three times already.

Alone in the dark Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to shiver, and made herself invisible.

Quilp House was twenty-seven storeys high, each spreading out from a central lobby area where the lifts were, and around which the stairwells ran. In the lower half of the building the floors were open-plan, with rows of desks divided into three or four work-stations apiece. During the day a kind of electricity filled the air, which was not so much the ambient excitement caused by communion with the world’s markets as much as it was the repressed emotions of people forced to work in close proximity, and thus hold in their baser reactions, their bodily rumblings.

From the twentieth level, the building changed character. Here, people worked behind closed doors, in progressively larger offices. Views became spectacular. The higher up you were, the further off you could see the weather.

On these floors cameras blinked at corridors’ ends, little red lights above their lenses signalling vigilance. Occasionally they swivelled, redirecting their meerkat gaze.

“What about the CCTV?”

“There are two guards on the night shift,” Harvey had explained. He was patient with her. Without having to be told, she knew he understood what it was to step across the lines that bordered daily behaviour. “One to patrol, and the other to watch the screens. The TV monitors. Do you know how many of these there are?”

She had a vision of a wall built of pixels, boasting as many views of corridors as there were satellite channels screening sport.