Dead Men's s Boots

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he scoffed, with less conviction than Bart Simpson saying ‘It was like that when I got here.’

‘Try me,’ I suggested. ‘Listen, you’ve been sitting out here watching the building all this time. Did you see someone go in?’

Bass hesitated, torn between wanting to play it cool in the face of my threats and not wanting to piss off a man who now knew more or less where he lived.

‘There was a big fat man,’ he said.

‘And did you see him come out again?’

‘What?’ Evidently Bass had worn himself out on the starter for ten.

‘Did he come out again?’ I repeated more slowly. ‘Did you see him come back out onto the street?’

‘No.’

Interesting. Very.

‘Okay, thanks for your time,’ I said, dropping the fire extinguisher at Bass’s feet and making him jump. ‘If you do feel a burning desire to talk to the police, I’m about to call them. All you have to do is wait right there. They’ll be along presently.’

I heard the doors of the van slam behind me as I went back into the block, and the engine start before I reached the stairs.

I went back up to the flat and dialled 999. The police rolled around an hour or so later: a rapid-response Krap1em unit, obviously. Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbours, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement. They ended up, as I’d more or less expected, by putting the whole thing down to accident. The cables had snapped off clean, the nice constable said, which ruled out any foul play with bolt-cutters or hacksaws.

Two things made me less than a hundred per cent convinced by this diagnosis. The first was that the two other lifts turned out, despite the OUT OF SERVICE notices pasted across them, to be working as well as they ever did. The second was that I’d checked out the name of that courier firm – Inter-Urban – while I was waiting for the boys in blue to show, and it didn’t exist. I hadn’t really expected anything different: to quote Iago the parrot, I almost had a heart attack from not-surprise.

After the police had left, I waited a half-hour or so for the last of the onlookers to go back to their interrupted evenings, and then I went down to the basement to look at the remains of the lift car. It had hit the bottom of the shaft with enough force to demolish the motor housing, and the splayed remains of it kept the lift doors open.