the door, you go.’
Jessie heard a rustle.
‘No one else move, the pits are open!’
‘We’re not,’ came the chorus.
‘Someone is moving!’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Mark. ‘Fucking pussies, the lot of you.’ Jessie heard the strike of a flint. Mark was holding up a lighter. Two more strikes. Two more lighters. Then another, then another.
Mark started waving his lighter in the air. ‘It’s like a fucking Barry Manilow concert.’ There were a few laughs.
‘What can we conclude from this?’ asked Mark.
‘That the place is spooked?’ said a voice from the darkness that Jessie recognised as Fry.
‘No, lad. That coppers smoke too much.’ More laughter. ‘Now, let’s get the fuck out of here and have a break and a smoke, like I suggested.’
All the lighters moved at once.
‘Not all of you,’ exclaimed Jessie. But the lighters kept on moving until there were none left. Jessie felt warm air on the back of her neck. Finally she found her torch. She swung round with it, illuminating Mark’s face. He stood a few feet away.
‘Very funny,’ she said, with no trace of humour in her voice.
‘What? Get that light out of my face.’
‘Stop pissing about.’ She could feel little hairs bristle as she rubbed the nape of her neck. She shone the beam of light towards the floor. Open, empty eye sockets gaped back at her. Startled, she nearly let go of the torch. ‘Now look what you’ve done, Mark!’
‘What? I didn’t do anything.’
‘You dropped him.’
She passed the light over the body again.
‘I didn’t.’
Jessie frowned. The lids lay closed as before. Hiding the holes that lay beneath. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘it must have been a trick of the light.’
‘Trick of your mind, maybe,’ said Mark. ‘Don’t tell me this place is getting to you. Not the fearless, indomitable Jessie Driver.’ He took two steps towards her, snatched the torch from her hand and switched it off.
‘Mark, don’t!’
She could hear him moving about in the darkness.
‘This is so childish. You could fall.’
He didn’t reply. She imagined the infantile grin on his pasty face.
‘Turn the light back on before you do yourself an injury,’ said Jessie, following the sound of him feeling his way through the dark. Still he didn’t reply. He was mistaken if he thought she’d fall to her knees and sob like a baby. That was his speciality.
‘I thought you didn’t like the dark?’
Silence.
‘Remember? In the dark, alone, scared.’ A cold blast of air came from nowhere, wrapped itself around her legs and made her shiver. She could still hear Mark. His shuffling was getting closer. She braced herself for whatever was coming. Blinding light in her eyes. More warm air on her neck. A soft moan. Rattling chains. What? What was it going to be?
‘I can hear your elf-like footsteps, arsehole.’
There was a bang. The sound of something heavy being dropped.
‘Stop messing around and put the fucking light back on!’ she shouted.
A pale blue bulb popped and glowed, then another. They got brighter as the power seeped through the circuit, gradually illuminating the long-forgotten boiler room. Jessie looked around. She was all alone. Curled around her feet lay the lifeless body.
Jessie sat high up on one of the spectators’ benches. She’d watched the last of the police officers leave and was just waiting for Moore to phone her with the all-clear to move the body. She looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps. It was Sarah Klein.
‘I didn’t know anyone was still here,’ said Jessie.
Sarah Klein sat down on the thin wooden seat next to her. ‘I can’t go out there.’ She looked at Jessie with red-rimmed eyes. ‘Just look at me.’
‘Ms Klein, did P. J. Dean really recommend me to you?’
She looked sideways at Jessie. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I thought – hell, what does it matter what I thought?’
‘What statement did you make?’
‘I told you, I couldn’t go out there. Your boss did it.’
They fell into an awkward silence. Jessie stared down at the empty pool and imagined what it must have looked like in its heyday. Line upon line of Italian marble tiles. Chlorine and laughter rising off the warm water. Sunshine streaming through the now filthy domed glass.
‘It’s a work of art,’ said a voice above them. Jessie and Sarah Klein jumped. ‘Do you know, that pool never leaked a fluid ounce of water since the day it was built? Not one. That’s real craftsmanship. Something to be proud of. Seeing it reduced to this … Well, it isn’t right, is it?’ He moved down the terraces. ‘Give me a shout when you want to go, and I’ll lock up.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jessie.
‘Who is that?’ whispered Sarah Klein.
‘The caretaker,’ Jessie replied quietly.
‘She isn’t here, you know,’ said the moustached man, looking back at them.
‘No, I don’t think she is either,’ said Jessie. Anna Maria didn’t look so lacking in streetwise that she would climb into a drug hovel for some spliff. In all likelihood she’d never been here. She was probably unaware such a place existed. In an area where space cost £60 per square foot, a disused building of this magnitude was unimaginable.
‘How do you know?’ asked the missing girl’s mother.
‘I’d have heard her.’ Jessie and the actress exchanged mystified glances. The caretaker looked back at the heavy set of keys in his hand. ‘Let me know when you want to leave.’
He climbed down the benches and disappeared through the double doors that led to the foyer.
‘What a strange man,’ said Sarah Klein.
‘Eccentric but harmless, I think.’
‘All mad people are harmless until they slash you with a razor,’ the actress said dramatically. ‘Maybe he did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘Killed my daughter.’
‘I don’t think
