The back of the stage seemed to be full of people in work overalls, jostling aside other people holding clipboards and phones.
“Chloe. Lainie.” Margaret was there again, her face pale, her arms outstretched to herd them down into the stalls.
“Jesus Christ.” Someone spoke from the wings. “The floor’s caved in.”
A pause. An authoritative, rapid-fire question: “How many people were down there?”
“Troy and Farmer, for sure. Maybe others. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
The floor of the greenroom was the ceiling of the principal dressing rooms.
Lainie acted on autopilot. She was physically unaware of her feet as she began to walk forward, toward the wings, toward Richard. In her strangely calm mind, it seemed perfectly logical that she could just reach through the hole in the floor and pluck him out.
“Lainie.” Chloe was grabbing at her elbow. A masculine hand was closing around her upper arm.
Why was nobody going in there?
And she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. She was going backwards. Literally. Even when she was outside on the street, the cold wind biting against her cheeks, she didn’t realise how hard she was struggling.
It had happened too quickly. Her mind couldn’t catch up with her instincts. Which were urging her to go. Back. Inside.
Tourists were looking at her. People were talking to her. Bill, the props master, was hugging her, which seemed a bit inappropriate. She kicked him, with vague violence, and he yelped.
“If you see a posh prick in a silk shirt in there,” he said to someone, in his strong Geordie accent, “tell him to get his arse out here and deal with his own bloody woman.”
Obviously, it was ridiculous. She wasn’t Lara Croft. She would probably end up falling headfirst into the basement. Intellectually, she knew that. Intellectually, she was aware that other people, including Will, could also be inside. Under that floor.
She had no emotional reserves to focus on anyone except Richard.
She really hadn’t known that she loved him this much.
People in uniform were streaming into the Metronome. They didn’t have tickets.
She had admired that death trap. It had seemed to be full of...to be full of romantic ghosts.
She started to shake. She couldn’t breathe.
Richard was probably buried under a pile of bricks, and she was having her first ever panic attack, in the middle of a busy London road.
A camera flashed, and she winced.
“Lainie?” Chloe’s face appeared right in front of her own, nightmarishly close. The whole thing was a nightmare. And Chloe was almost forty years old, and had no lines on her face at all.
What was up with that?
Lainie wasn’t even thirty, and she already had permanent stress creases in her forehead. Probably crow’s-feet as well, after today.
Sanity began to return—and with it, crushing horror.
“Oh God,” she whispered. “Oh God. Chloe.”
Chloe took her hands and gripped them tightly. Her voice was calm and cool as she proved herself once and for all the mother of a teenager, used to hysterics. “They’ll be fine, Lainie.” She gave Lainie’s hands a single, forceful shake. “Keep it together. They’ll be fine.”
Lainie’s attention returned to the fa?ade of the theatre. It looked so innocent. If she raised her gaze above street level, where emergency services personnel were gathering in a buzzing cluster, like the epicentre of a beehive, it looked like any other day.
She was afraid to even blink, in case her whole world came crashing down when she closed her eyes.
*
It was a measure of how bad the past couple of days had been, that when Richard’s dressing room collapsed around him in a dusty pile of rubble, his primary reaction was irritation.
His Wi-Fi connection had kept timing out, which a few seconds earlier had seemed like the pinnacle on the mountain of crap he’d been dealing with for the past forty-odd hours. He was halfway out the door, in search of a stronger signal, when everything went to hell. It was an implosion rather than an explosion. The room literally seemed to buckle, folding in on itself like something out of The Matrix before it shattered.
He ended up on his knees, his eyes wet and stinging with grit, the ground quivering beneath him. Strangely, he was most aware of the hiss of an old-fashioned exposed lightbulb as it swayed and flickered from a broken beam. It was nearly impossible to see anything in the gloom, and difficult to breathe in the dense air.
He struggled to his feet, but had to bend at the waist. What was left of the ceiling in the hallway had lowered to proportions that even fifteenth-century cottage-dwellers would have found claustrophobic. The electrics were just barely hanging in there, but most of the lights had shattered.
What the everlasting fuck...