Not Dead Yet

– the only weapon he had – and eased himself forward, keeping as flat against the wall as he could. He saw a shadow, growing larger. Then suddenly the ex-Sergeant-Major security guard loomed into view. The old soldier jumped with shock when he saw him, shouted something, and dropped his torch, which hit the ground with a loud crack and went out.
    ‘Blimey, you gave me a fright, sir!’
    ‘That makes two of us,’ Grace said. ‘What’s happening? Has anyone found anything here?’
    The guard knelt down, bending his stiff frame with some difficulty, and picked up his torch. ‘Nothing, sir, not so far. But it’s a bloody big place to search and you have to know your way around to do it. So many corridors – it was designed as a sort of a double skin, so that staff could move all around the ground floors without going into any of the main rooms unless needed. I’ve been here seven years and even I keep finding new spaces all the time. Be easy for someone who knows it well to avoid being seen.’
    ‘What’s up there?’ Grace pointed to the steps he had just come down.
    ‘Takes you up to the main hallway, just inside the front entrance, and the toilets.’
    ‘I’m certain Gaia’s abductor must have brought her along here, sometime in the past couple of hours. Where could he have taken her from here?’
    ‘Well, he couldn’t go any further along this passage. If you shine your beam along there you’ll see.’ He pointed along the continuation of the tunnel and it was bricked off a short distance along. ‘He’d either have to have taken her back the way he came or up these stairs.’
    Grace suddenly recalled the smell of fresh chocolate. The abandoned Crunchie wrapper with a trace of lipstick on it.
    Anna Galicia’s lipstick?
    ‘Follow me, will you?’ Grace said, and sprinted up the stairs, through the open half-gate, then across the hall to the half-concealed door on the far side, where he had been taken by the Curator yesterday. He pulled it open, then began to lope up the spiral stairs.
    Some way behind him, he heard the panting voice of the elderly security guard. ‘Don’t touch the handrail, sir, it’s dangerously rickety!’
    He reached the top and entered the old, abandoned apartment beneath the dome, with its unpleasant musty smell and dust sheets over the uneven, angular shapes. But he didn’t even notice the smell. Or the dust sheets. Or the Crunchie wrapper still lying on the ground.
    He was staring, transfixed at the bizarre and horrific tableaufacing him. It could have been two actors rehearsing a scene in a play. Except neither of them was acting. They were both standing on a dangerously rotten trapdoor, and one had a noose around her neck.

118
    Gaia, in jeans and a sweat-darkened white T-shirt, her face glistening with the perspiration of fear, stood on tiptoe, a noose of razor wire around her neck pulled tight and looped around the pulley system high above the trapdoor. Blood trickled down parts of her neck where the wire had dug into her skin. A small strip of duct tape lay, curled, on the floor. The skin around her mouth looked red and raw, probably from that bit of tape that had been ripped away, Grace thought, feeling fury at what he saw, tinged with relief that she was still, at this moment, alive.
    Her hands were tied behind her back. Inches from her sparkly trainers was the sign on the trapdoor that read in bold letters, DANGER – STEEP DROP BELOW . DO NOT STAND ON DOOR .
    Her eyes, filled with stark terror, locked on to his. He tried to flash back reassurance. His heart went out to her, she looked so vulnerable and helpless.
    Crouched beside her was an apparition, caked in make-up, dressed in female Regency clothing and wearing a huge, lopsided wig, staring at him with a strangely triumphant smile. One hand was on each of the two rusty bolts that secured the trapdoor from opening downwards – and taking them both with it, plunging through the hatch, down the forty-foot drop straight to the store room above the kitchens. On the floor beside this creature was a vicious-looking open-bladed hunting knife and a mobile phone.
    There was a sudden, sharp crack, like a gunshot.
    Gaia yammered in terror. The apparition’s eyes darted momentarily down.
    Grace realized what it was. The trapdoor was starting to give way. His mind was racing, spinning, trying to get traction and figure what to do. The two of them were about ten feet in front of him. Three fast paces, he assessed.