The Fear Index

‘It’s nothing personal. I’m sorry.’ The doors opened. He turned, stepped smartly through them and plunged from view. The doors closed.
    For a couple of seconds Hoffmann stood motionless, unsure of what he had just witnessed. He walked hesitantly along the corridor and pressed the call button. The doors slid open on to the empty glass tube of the elevator shaft. He peered over the edge, down maybe fifty metres of translucent column, until it dwindled into the darkness and silence of the underground car park. He shouted hopelessly, ‘Gana!’ There was no response. He listened, but he could hear nobody screaming. Rajamani must have fallen so quickly, no one had noticed it.
    He sprinted along the corridor to the emergency exit and half-ran, half-jumped his way floor after floor down the concrete staircase, all the way to the basement and out into the subterranean garage and across to the elevator doors. He jammed his fingers into the gap and tried to prise them apart, but they kept closing on him. He stepped back and prowled around looking for some tool he could use. He considered smashing the glass on one of the parked cars and popping the trunk for its jack. Then he saw a metal door with a lightning-flash symbol and tried that. Behind it was a space for storing tools – brushes, shovels, buckets, a hammer. He found a big crowbar almost a metre long, and ran back to the elevator doors and jammed it into the gap, working it back and forth. The doors parted just enough for him to shove his foot in between them, and then his knee. He wriggled the rest of his leg into the space. Some automatic mechanism was triggered and the doors trundled open.
    Light falling from the upper floors showed Rajamani lying face down in the well of the elevator shaft. There was a puddle of blood the size of a dinner plate that seemed to be growing out of the top of his skull. His photographs lay scattered around him. Hoffmann jumped down next to him. Broken glass crunched under his feet. There was an incongruous smell of tea. He stooped and grasped Rajamani’s hand, which was shockingly warm and smooth, and for the second time that day tried to feel for a man’s pulse, but again he couldn’t find one. Behind and just above him, the doors rattled shut. Hoffmann looked around in panic as the elevator car began its descent. The tube of light shrank rapidly as the car hurtled down – the fifth floor went, and then the fourth. He grabbed the crowbar and tried to jam it back between the doors, but lost his footing. He fell backwards and lay next to Rajamani’s corpse, looking up at the bottom of the car as it hurtled at him, holding the crowbar upright in both hands above his head like a spear to fend off a charging beast. He felt the oily wind on his face. The light faded, vanished, something heavy hit his shoulder, and then the crowbar jumped and went as rigid as a pit prop. For several seconds he could feel it taking the strain. He was screaming blindly into the absolute darkness at the elevator’s floor, which must have been only inches from his face, braced for the crowbar to bend or slip. But then a gear changed, the note of the motor became a whine, the crowbar came loose in his hands and the car began to rise, accelerating rapidly all the way up its cathedral column of glass, uncovering floor after floor of fresh white light, which poured down into the pit.
    He scrambled up and shoved the crowbar back between the doors, working it into the gap, parting them a fraction. The elevator had climbed to its highest point and stopped. There was a clunk, and he heard it start to plunge again. He hoisted himself up and jammed his fingers into the narrow opening. He clung there, feet wide apart, muscles straining. He threw back his head and roared with the effort. The doors gave slightly, then flew wide open. A shadow fell across his back, and in a rush of air and a roar of machinery he launched himself forward on to the concrete floor.

    LECLERC HAD BEEN in his office at police headquarters and on the point of going home when he received a call that a body had been discovered in a hotel on the Rue de Berne. He guessed at once from the description – gaunt face, ponytail, leather coat – that it was the man who had attacked Hoffmann. Cause of death, he was told, appeared to be strangulation, although whether it was suicide or murder was not immediately clear. The victim was a German: Johannes Karp, aged fifty-eight. Leclerc rang his