Corporate Bodies (17 page)

They pressed on but Charles's control had gone. His eyes streamed and he could hardly get the words out through suppressed giggles. Will was managing better, but even his voice trembled on the edge of hysteria.

The killer came when Will supplied the line for ‘three':

‘
Three – beats all ri-i-i-i-vals
!'

Charles was finished; he could only wheeze helplessly.

‘This won't do,' said Robin Pritchard suddenly.

‘I'm sorry,' Charles gasped. ‘It just struck me as terribly –'

‘No, this song –
Green Grow the Rashes, O
! It could have very unfortunate associations. It might give potential customers the idea that the Delmoleen “Green” would bring them out in a rash.'

‘Oh dear, hadn't thought of that,' said Will, his voice heavy with concern. He turned sardonic eyes on his friend and the corner of his mouth twitched as he asked, ‘Had you, Charles?'

‘I, er . . . I, er . . .' Charles rose desperately to his feet, fighting down the hysterics. He rushed to the door of the office. ‘I'm sorry,' he cried, as he sped helplessly off down the corridor. ‘Asthma! Asthma!'

CHARLES regained sufficient control to return to Ken Colebourne's office and nod soberly through the rest of the meeting. The office politics and power games continued, and it was interesting to see how Robin Pritchard slowly gained the ascendancy. Maybe he was demonstrating techniques he had learnt at business school, though Charles suspected that it was just the fact of his having been there that weakened his opponents. Ken Colebourne and Paul Taggart had both risen through the ranks. In the past this would have given them confidence over any mere graduate; but in the paranoid climate of a threatened recession nobody knew anything any more, and the concept of ‘management training' had taken on a new mysterious potency.

The Product Manager for Cereals and Biscuits' positive gain from the meeting was the agreement to let
Parton Parcel
develop creative ideas for the presentation of the Delmoleen ‘Green' at the Brighton sales conference. The Marketing Director and the Product Manager for Beverages remained uneasy, but there was no doubt that Robin Pritchard had won the round.

The meeting broke up at half-past nine, but as Charles and Will were about to leave, Ken Colebourne called the writer aside. Could they have a few words about the budget . . .?

Since this was clearly money talk, no doubt a bit of haggling about how much
Parton Parcel
would be paid for the additional work, Charles discreetly withdrew. Will's timetable showed that the next – and indeed the last – train back to Bedford was at ten twenty-seven, so they agreed to meet at Stenley Curton Station.

Charles emerged into a warm, moonless night. The two Product Managers had hurried off to their executive cars (and no doubt their executive homes and their executive wives). The whole Delmoleen site was very still. A few lights gleamed from the main building, presumably somewhere security officers patrolled, but Charles felt as if he was completely alone.

He looked at his watch. Leaving time to get to the station, he still had half an hour to play with. He tried to persuade himself that what he wanted to do with that half-hour was make another search for the pub that must exist in the vicinity. It wasn't difficult. The prospect of a drink was always a strong persuader to Charles Paris and, in order to look convincingly executive at that evening's meeting, he hadn't touched a drop all day.

But, in spite of the seductive image of a pub, he knew – inexorably though unwillingly – that that wasn't where he was going to go. In his suit there was something which confirmed what he had intended to do from the moment he left his bedsit that morning.

His hand closed round the small torch in his jacket pocket, and he moved cautiously towards the warehouse in which Dayna had met her death.

The main doors of the warehouse were firmly locked. Charles circled the building to the loading bays at the side. He climbed up on to the concrete platform the lorries backed up against, and moved along, dashing a spurt of torchlight at the bottom of each rolling shutter, but here too the padlocks were secure.

Maybe he should have secreted a crowbar about his person as well as the torch. Nobody would have noticed; the suit was voluminous enough to hide a platoon of Royal Engineers.

He sidled round to the end of the warehouse where the offices were. His eyes had by now accommodated to the meagre light and he could see quite clearly. He cast cautious looks along the alleys between other buildings, but there was no one in sight.

The door to the back office was locked, and he turned his attention to the windows. Delmoleen's warehouses didn't run to air-conditioning, so there was a possibility someone might have left a latch unfastened.

Charles felt along the frames and was rewarded by the rattle of metal on metal. A loose fanlight. He hooked his little finger under the metal ridge, then the next finger and the next. He pulled the fanlight outwards and fixed it in the open position.

He looked around again, but the darkness was unpeopled. As he reached his arm inside, the sudden thought of security alarms came to him. He withdrew his hand and ran the torchlight round the adjoining frames. There were no signs of wiring or contact-breakers.

It was still a risk, but one that he had to take. On a big enclosed site like the Delmoleen one, he told himself, most of the security devices would be on the outer perimeter fence; there were unlikely to be alarms on individual buildings.

Whether this reasoning was correct or not, no warning bell sounded as he reached through the fanlight, firmly grasped the handle of the abutting window, raised it and pushed the pane outwards.

Breathing heavily, Charles Paris heaved himself up on to the sill and pulled his body through. It was more of an effort than he had expected, but, after some ungainly kicking, he landed in a heap on the floor. He hoped the suit hadn't got torn; still, it felt all right as he patted himself down.

He closed the window and the fanlight. Security men were bound to be patrolling at some point, and there was no need to leave a calling card for them.

Keeping the beam low, he flashed the torch round the room and then extinguished it. As expected, he was in the office where he had reported Dayna Richman's death to Brian Tressider. Oh yes, and Heather had been there too on that occasion. Charles had a sudden vision of the secretary sitting at home at that very moment, listening to her mother's continuing monologue of disparagement.

The door connecting the two offices was unlocked and he moved onwards. Through the windows ahead of him, the emptiness of the warehouse loomed.

With the interconnecting door closed, Charles Paris felt confident to leave his torch switched on. A sweep round the office revealed nothing untoward. Sheaves of invoices and dockets hung from clips on the walls. A planner chart listed staff holidays. On a calendar, gift from a haulage company, under a quaint Dickensian print of drayhorses, days had been diagonally scored through right up to the current date. Everything was neat and orderly. Heather ran a tight ship.

Charles stepped through into the body of the warehouse. The beam of his torch could not reach its ceiling, nor to the end of the long narrow aisles. His light ran questing along past huge boxes of Delmoleen ‘Bedtime', Delmoleen ‘Nutty Flakes', Delmoleen ‘Oat Nuggets', Delmoleen ‘Bran Bannocks', as it sought out the aisle in which Dayna had met her death.

At the office end of the warehouse forklift trucks stood in orderly rows, linked to the wall by their recharging cables, still, like tethered animals.

The stock had changed, but Charles counted his way along to be certain that he had found the right place. Then, with torch modestly lowered to illuminate only where he took his next step, he moved down the aisle.

The setting seemed different in the softly enveloping darkness, but once again there was a pile of used pallets against the far wall. When he reached them, Charles directed the torch across the jumble of slatted wood.

He wasn't certain what he had been looking for, but when his beam outlined the shape of a small door through the planks, he felt confident that he had found it.

It was impossible to move the pallets and hold his torch at the same time and, since there was nowhere he could prop it to shed any useful light, he flicked the switch off and dropped the torch into his pocket.

Charles's hands gripped at the roughly finished wood as he tugged the first pallet away from the wall. He tried to manoeuvre it silently, but hadn't been prepared for quite how heavy it was. The sweat trickled on his temples and down the small of his back as he struggled.

Suddenly the obstruction worked itself free. Charles sprawled backwards and the pallet crashed on to the floor, just missing his legs.

The impact was grotesquely loud in the cavernous emptiness.

But no other sound followed. Apparently there was no one in the warehouse to be disturbed.

Encouraged, Charles picked himself up and felt for the outline of the next pallet. This one he jerked and worried free, tipping it out of the way with noisy abandon.

The others shifted more easily, clattering aside as more of the wall was exposed. In a matter of moments Charles had unimpeded access to the small door.

He retrieved the torch from his pocket and focused it on the metal rectangle. Battered and dusty, the door had once had a handle, but now only a small circular hole remained. Charles hooked a finger inside and pulled. The hinges creaked, as the door reluctantly moved towards him.

He shone the torch inside. The space was about two-foot square. On the facing wall was some kind of electrical equipment, old ceramic-collared sockets, thick cables snaking to brittle plastic junction boxes, a black ribbed metal box inset with a large rectangular switch.

Maybe the set-up was some kind of recharging unit for earlier designs of forklift trucks. Whatever it had been, though, it was clearly long disused. Thick dust coated the components and an uneven carpet of fluff lay on the floor.

The torch beam flicked around the grubby walls. At first Charles could see nothing of interest, but on a second examination, he noticed something on top of the switching unit.

Black and dust-covered like the rest of the box, at first they looked like part of the structure, but now he could distinguish two flat rectangular shapes.

Charles Paris leant into the cupboard to blow away some of the dust, then gingerly reached for the top rectangle.

He sat back on his heels and trained the torch on to what he was holding.

It was a VHS cassette in a black cardboard case.

His mind just had time to register this fact, before a sudden crash of pain on the back of his neck seared fire across his eyes.

And then everything went black.

He probably wasn't out that long.

Maybe it was the hum of the electric motor that brought him round. Or the crunch of splintering wood.

He looked up to see two low headlights slowly approaching.

He was also aware of a lesser light source near him on the ground. It must be his torch, still switched on.

He reached for the floor, but something obstructed him. Wood. Planks of wood. He was lying on something slatted.

A pallet.

As his hand closed round the torch, he tried to lift himself up, but the movement resurrected the agonising pain at the top of his spine. He was almost blinded by it, and knew that for the time being he was immobilised.

He pointed the pathetic beam of his torch between the oncoming headlights.

The silver maker's logo gleamed against the yellow front of a forklift truck.

Raised higher, the torch beam cavernously shadowed the clenched face of the truck's driver.

Trevor.

And Charles Paris felt convinced that he was seeing the last thing Dayna Richman saw before she died.

HE BRACED himself for the pressure of wood against his body, but it didn't come. His fuddled senses pieced together the fact that there was nothing between him and the truck. He was not going to be crushed against the wall by a pile of pallets.

So at least, though Charles Paris's end might be the same as Dayna Richman's, the route by which he reached it was going to be different.

As the pallet jolted and shuddered beneath him, he suddenly understood what that route was to be.

Slowly he felt the wooden platform lift from the ground, and slowly, infinitely slowly, he felt it rise up through the darkness. Charles Paris had become an item of palletised stock.

And as he rose higher and higher, he remembered, with sickening clarity, the truck's ‘Quick-Release' control.

Being dropped from twenty feet on a pallet would ensure that Charles Paris never gave his definitive King Lear. Even a more-than-usually-deformed Richard III looked unlikely.

In fact, the end of his acting life was in sight. And not just his acting life. If the fall didn't finish him off, a couple more pallets dropped on to his broken body should do the trick.

Or, of course, the descent of a pallet loaded with stock would leave nothing to chance.

What a way to go. Crushed by hundreds of packs of Delmoleen ‘Bedtime'. The drink was marketed (at least in the British Isles) on its soporific qualities, but surely its manufacturers never intended it to impose quite so permanent a quietus.

Slowly and inexorably, Charles Paris's pallet, his proposed funeral bier, rose through the gloom.

He tried desperately to concentrate, to make his stunned mind work.

There must be something he had going for him. By the law of averages.

A quick review of his options suggested that the law of averages didn't operate in this situation.

How long had he got? Logic told him that Trevor would lift the pallet as high as possible before dropping him. And how high was that?

A little light from the headlights percolated upwards, showing the outlines of shelving on either side at the end of the aisle. The pallet was nearly level with the top shelf.