wood had been stripped to its original golden pine and there were mirrors and pictures to catch and emphasize what light there was from the small crescent-shaped windows in the doors at either end of the passage.
Yet he found that the stairs, light and airy and comfortable as they were, held more terrors for him now than they ever had as a child. The immediate cause of his fear lay on a step halfway up. It was a pink, furry carpet slipper, smeared with excrement.
The slipper lay on its side, shocking and obscene in its ordinariness, its gaudy colour clashing with the carpet. It turned his stomach as effectively as if it had been a freshly extracted internal organ left dripping on the stairs.
Slowly, he climbed the steps, pausing to pick up the slipper gingerly between finger and thumb as he would have done a vital piece of evidence. On the first landing, he paused outside a door, cocking his head for a moment to listen to the desperate, high-pitched whimper that came from inside. It was an inhuman noise, a mumbled keening like an animal in pain, forming no words.
Then Cooper opened the door, pushing it hard as it stuck on some obstruction on the floor. When he walked into the room, he entered a scene of devastation worse than any crime scene he had ever encountered.
‘Found by a man walking a dog.’
There was a wary silence. Diane Fry tried to look efficient and attentive, with her notebook open on her knee. At the moment, her hand was moving slowly through an elaborate series of aimless doodles that might, from a distance, have been taken for shorthand. A bluebottle buzzed fruitlessly against a window of the conference room, someone shuffled their feet, and the metal legs of a chair creaked uneasily.
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