The Devil You Know

“Look—on each floor, she turns up in a whole lot of different places, but they make a rough circle. A really big circle in the basement, then a slightly smaller one on the first floor. Smaller still on the second, but still with more or less the same center. On the third floor, you’ve just got a scattering of points, all very close together. But suppose you mapped all of this in three dimensions. What would you get?”

“A headache,” said Cheryl bitterly.

“You’d get a hollow hemisphere.”

“The higher she gets in the building,” I said, pointing, “the less room she’s got to move in horizontally. Don’t you get it? Think of a dog on a leash. If its owner beats it with a stick, what’s it going to do?”

“Run away,” said Cheryl. “I think I’m being patronized now.”

“No, you’re not. Just see it in your mind. The dog will run away as far as the leash will let it. And then it will keep running, but it will only be able to go in a circle, right? A circle with the owner—and the stick—right in the middle.”

“Okay.”

“But suppose it was a space dog. With a jet pack. It would still go out to the full extent of the leash, but it wouldn’t be a circle anymore—because the dog would be free to move up and down and all around . . .”

“So it’d be a sphere.”

“Exactly!”

Cheryl looked again at the overlaid plans. The black crosses showed clearly through: concentric circles, narrowing as they went up through the building.

“There is a fixed place,” I said. “A tether of some kind—but she’s not haunting it. She’s getting as far away from it as she can. She’s running on the end of a leash.”

“And the man with the stick—”

“Is at the center. The place where she doesn’t want to go. The place where she’s never been seen.”

Cheryl took the plans from me and laid them down on the table again. “It’s got to be on the first floor,” she murmured. Then she glanced at Pen and me to double-check her logic. “The first floor or the basement. I mean, she’ll have the widest circle where she’s on the same level as . . . the thing. The place. Whatever.”

Pen nodded emphatically. “So where is it?” I asked. “What’s at the center of the sphere?”

Cheryl traced the line of the main corridor, muttering to herself. “That’s the front desk. These are the first-floor strong rooms. A, B, C. Ladies’ toilet . . .”

She tailed off into silence, but her fingers still moved over the map. Finally she looked up at me, her face a picture of bemusement. “It doesn’t work,” she said. “You’re wrong.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Well, this room here—that’s the dead center, right? That’s smack in the middle of the circle, in the basement. That’s what she’s avoiding. It’s called SECOND CONFERENCE ROOM on here.”

“Yes? So?” I pressed her with a slight sense of unease. “What’s it called now?”

“It’s not called anything now, Felix.” Cheryl’s tone was flat. “Because it isn’t bloody there.”

Sixteen

TWENTY-FOUR FEET IS EIGHT PACES, ROUGHLY, SO COUNT them off. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Good. Then do a ninety-degree turn and count again, to ten this time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Then I bumped into the wall and whistled softly and tunelessly in the dark.

Cheryl was right.

Despite my earlier fears, it had been easy enough to break into the Bonnington with my lock picks. Their internal security was as spiky as hell, but the front door rolled over and played dead for me after only a modicum of manual stimulation. All the alarms were on the strong room doors, thank God, and I wouldn’t be visiting any of those. The reinforced door at the back of the reading room that led through into the staff-only part of the building was a lot harder and took me ten anxious, sweaty minutes. As a fallback, I had Cheryl’s ID card in my back pocket, but I was hoping not to have to use it, because the card readers on the doors probably had some kind of an internal memory.

I’d come alone. Pen was going to be my alibi in case things got nasty, and Cheryl didn’t need to be anywhere nearby while I was breaking into her place of work. But it would have been useful to have her all the same. It was hard enough making sense of the plans in a well-lit kitchen; standing in a dark corridor, working by filtered moonlight, it was frankly a bit of a bastard.

But all I was doing was pacing out distances, after all; once you got past the logistical problems, it wasn’t exactly complicated. Fifteen minutes bumping and shambling in the dark brought me to the only conclusion that made any sense.

There was a room missing. The corridor doglegged around it in a way that made it obvious, once you knew that something had been there and had been excised.