13. FRIDAY 2:37 PM
Ben reaches the directors’ boardroom and bursts in.
The directors number a dozen men, no women – there’s a surprise. They are seated beside Dr Hugo Samphire, drinking coffee at the long, walnut-veneer table, which is surrounded by colour-coded plans on raised boards. Some are furtively eating digestive biscuits. The front-man is talking to his New York audience at the start of the satellite video presentation. They’re completely oblivious to what’s been going on below.
‘Who are you?’ Dr Samphire snaps at Ben. ‘The satellite presentation is about to start. What the hell do you mean by barging your way in here?’
Ben is momentarily dumbfounded. He looks at the wall vents, which should be pumping the same poisoned air into the room as in the rest of the building. ‘You give your staff different air,’ he says, amazed that Miranda has been right all along.
The directors are glancing at each other; how can an employee know about this? The audience on the video monitor is starting to look puzzled.
‘Kill the link,’ someone orders. ‘We’ll call them back.’ One of the directors breaks the satellite connection. ‘You have to leave right now. Somebody call security.’
Ben is starting to understand the true nature of management. ‘You don’t even know what’s going on down there, do you?’ he realises. One of the directors is trying to call security, but having no luck. ‘The line’s dead,’ he tells the others.
Dr Samphire’s sense of order has been affronted. ‘There’s nothing in the air that’s not perfectly safe to breathe,’ he bridles.
‘There’s a dead body in the main ventilation shaft.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Think so? Try breathing this.’ Ben goes to the door and slams it wide open. On the other side of the corridor, he wedges open the stairwell door. The poisonous air pours in, rolling across the floor like plague-pit fumes.
‘The compounds we’re using will all be fully approved.’
‘You added drugs.’
‘Only to enhance efficiency for the purpose of preparing today’s presentation.’ Dr Samphire tries to sound reasonable in a we’re-all-men-of-the-world way.
‘Meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, you had a separate air supply installed up here.’
‘We don’t need to work as hard as our staff. We’re directors.’
The directors are in an uproar. Nobody wants to risk breathing the bad air. They are arguing among themselves, two or three heading for Ben, when Clarke appears in the stairwell doorway. He has his razor-edged cricket bat slung across his back like some kind of Home Counties bounty hunter.
‘Mr Harper reports to me,’ Clarke explains. ’I’ll enjoy taking care of this.’
With the door between June and Miranda, June fights to get the deadbolt key in the bottom lock. Half-Swan appears to have vanished into the tropical undergrowth, wriggling away like some kind of grotesque reptile. Meera chooses this moment to fall out of the tree, hanging onto the palm fronds, and lands in the soft earth. With her sari torn open, Meera increasingly looks like a Bollywood action heroine, except when she opens her mouth.
‘Jesus F*ck. Ow. Bollocks.’
June is shouting for someone to help her. Meera grabs the key and turns it, opening the door. As she does so, and pulls herself and June through, Half-Swan springs from the bushes, hauling himself along by his hands, shoving his way inside with them. He slams the door shut, turns the key in the lock and makes off with it, dragging himself away into darkness.
‘Christ, what is keeping him alive?’ asks the shocked Miranda. She turns to June, who has fallen in beside her. ‘There’s got to be another way out.’ She looks at the torn and bleeding Meera. ‘What the hell happened to you?’
‘I fell out of the building, all right? We need to find Howard.’
‘Why?’
‘Let’s just find him, okay?’
Clarke walks Ben ahead of him, goading him with the razor-sharp tip of his cricket bat. ‘This is what happens when you leave your workstation unattended.’
‘Have you seen what’s going on down there?’
‘What’s the matter, Mr Harper, are you afraid of a little hard work?’
‘It’s not the work that bothers me, it’s the mass psychosis of a building filled with deranged, homicidal maniacs.’
‘That’s the trouble with people like you, Harper. There’s always an excuse.’ He swings the bat at Ben’s throat, and somehow manages to pin him to the railings by the handle. He produces a huge roll of silver tape and starts taping Ben up.
‘You killed Felix,’ says Ben, dumbly.
‘A little man trying to hold back a big industry. People like him – people like you – don’t deserve to survive. I bet you don’t even vote.’
‘Why did you hide his body in the air-pipe?’
‘To infect the others.’ Met with an uncomprehending stare, he sighs and explains. ‘From the day I started work, I just wanted to do my job well. After thirty years of late nights and no holidays, I became a supervisor. I had no friends, no woman, no life, but it didn’t matter. I sacrificed everything for my employers. Then along came Mr Draycott …’
… Clarke studied Draycott, hating his crisp, white shirt and gym-toned chest, hating the cool, young new boy with all the answers in his report. He raised his cricket bat, and his righteous anger did the rest.
Disposing of the body was a bit of a fag, though. He had to drag, shove, fold, drop and bend Draycott to get him inside the grille, ramming him through to the steel shaft below. As the body landed with a slam, his employment papers drifted down after him. Moments later, the air-con system started up. That, of course, was the problem right there …
‘Don’t you think I knew my days were numbered?’ Clarke hisses at him. ‘All I ever wanted was a little respect. A little acknowledgement. Was that too much to ask?’
Now completely taped up, Ben is stuck at the top of the stairwell. The worst thing is having to listen to his supervisor play the sympathy card. ‘I can see how you feel,’ he says carefully. ‘If you don’t have a job in this country, people treat you like shit.’
‘They treat you like shit if you do,’ warns Clarke, somewhat mollified. ‘When I come back, I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate your contract.’