The Sleeping Dead (3 page)

Fairls stared at him for a moment longer, and Jackson thought he recognized anger or even disgust in the chief executive’s expression. He turned to Jackson. “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, please continue. You were explaining your role within a team.”

Jackson nodded. He could feel his skin warming under the interrogation and for a moment the desire to ram his fists into his own armpits and copy Laine was almost overwhelming. He bit down on his lip and dragged a breath of cool air into his lungs.

“Thank you, Mr. Fairls,” he said. “As I was explaining…”

It felt like he had been in the room for only a few minutes when John Fairls stood up to conclude the interview. Jackson took the hint and stood himself, pushing his chair back. Walker stood, Handford stood. Laine sat in his chair. The rhythmic motion had crept back and now he was rocking vehemently, slamming the front legs of the chair down on the floor with each cycle.

“I’m sorry,” Fairls said to Jackson. “I can’t explain…”

“Thank you for the opportunity,” Jackson said quickly, and hoped he’d earned himself brownie points by engineering it so that the chief exec didn’t have to apologize about the performance of one of his staff. He shook Fairls’s hand, and then Walker’s and Handford’s. He looked at Laine for a moment, but the man no longer seemed aware that he was in the room. His lips were moving slightly and Jackson realized the man was arguing with himself. Jackson wanted to reach across the table and grab the man by the shoulders. He wanted to scream into his face that he needed to get a hold of himself, pull himself together. He wanted to slap him. He wanted to…

Jackson clasped his hands together. He nodded to the stricken figure of Laine. As he walked to the door, he heard the fevered whisperings of the man and the
creak-stomp
as he slammed the chair back down onto the wooden floor.

Laine stood up.

“Malcolm?” Fairls asked.

Malcolm Laine rushed around the edge of the table and almost pushed between Jackson and Fairls as he made for the door. Walker took a step to follow, but Fairls held up his hand. “Leave him.”

When Jackson left the room a moment later, the corridor outside was empty.

Fairls took his hand again and shook it twice with the vigor of a man pump-priming a well. “I want to apologize again…”

“There really is no need,” Jackson said.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Fairls said, his tone softer now, anger replaced by astonishment.

Jackson shrugged, mindful that it was possible he could be speaking to his future boss. He shook his hand again and allowed himself to be directed back to the reception, where a woman sat in the chair he had vacated. She looked as nervous as he had felt and he gave her a weak smile.
Good luck
, he thought,
but not too much
.

And then he was back in the hallway, feeling as if he had just escaped from some tremendous pressure bubble. Through the translucent window behind him he could see shapes moving and he knew that John Fairls was offering his hand to the next interview candidate. Jackson felt a brief flare of hot anger at the woman, even though he knew it was misplaced—it was not her that he was angry at, it was fucking Malcolm Laine. Why did he chose the middle of
his
interview to have a nervous breakdown?

He walked the hallway back toward the elevators, taking his phone from his pocket to send Donna a quick text. He turned the corner at the end of the hallway. The bank of closed elevator doors was on the right. At the end of the corridor, silhouetted against the bright sky and the tall windows, was a man. It took Jackson a fraction of a second to recognize the figure.

3

“Mr. Laine?”

Jackson took a step closer to the man. Laine didn’t seem to know he was there. He was standing at the window with his hands pressed against the glass, fingers spread wide.

“Mr. Laine, can I help? Do you want me to get someone?”

Jackson looked down the corridor. He could be back at MedWay’s offices in seconds, but he imagined himself bursting into the reception and saying to the boy behind the desk, “Mr. Laine is…”

Mr. Laine is going to throw himself out the window.

Jackson stared at the man. Was that what he really thought was going to happen? He shook his head. The guy was just having a bad day, that was all. Maybe he’d heard his divorce had become final or one of his kids had been picked up for smoking dope. That was all, just a bad day.

“Mr. Laine?” Jackson raised his voice, but the man didn’t turn round. He reached out and touched Laine’s shoulder. He felt the tremors flushing through Laine’s body. Jackson jerked his hand away.

“Jesus. What’s
wrong
with you?”

Laine’s breathing reflected back from the window—rough and jagged. Jackson stood next to him, careful not to touch him. It occurred to him that whatever Laine had might be contagious.

“Wait there, I’ll get someone,” Jackson told him.

“Dshfgfd.”

Jackson turned back. “I’m sorry?”

Laine spoke again, his voice too low for Jackson to understand. He probably wasn’t saying anything sensible anyway. Jackson had an idea that whatever was wrong with Laine, he had passed beyond sensible a little while ago.

Jackson leaned in close. The man was whispering rapidly. Words churned from him like water boiling in a pan.

Laine tucked his hands back into his armpits and began to sway. His utterances became more fevered. He began to grind his head against the window, as if he wanted to burrow through the glass.

“Let me help you,” Jackson said.

Laine did not seem to hear the offer. He pulled his head back, the muscles in his neck straining with the effort, and then slammed his forehead against the glass.

“Jesus. Fuck.”

Jackson reached out to pull Laine away from the window. For a moment Laine looked at Jackson, but he seemed to stare right through him. A large red welt sprung up in the center of his forehead where he had hit the glass. Jackson tugged on his arm, but Laine wrenched himself free.

He hit the window again. Harder. The sound reminded Jackson of a bird slamming into a glass door.

Laine hit the window again.

“Jesus.” Jackson turned around, but the corridor was empty. “Help!” he screamed. His voice drifted down the corridor, all urgency lost. “Hey, I need some help here.” He grabbed for Laine. The guy was going to hurt himself if he carried on.

Laine hit the window. When he pulled back this time, there was a smear of blood on the glass.

Jackson wrapped his arms around the man, but it was like trying to hold on to a bag of snakes. Laine shifted and wriggled and flexed beneath him, but still Jackson hung on. The little man was stronger than Jackson had appreciated. He had no muscle on him—just a pipe-cleaner thin body on which someone had hung a gray suit—but Jackson struggled to contain the man.

Laine bowed his head, and bit Jackson’s hand.

Jackson screamed, more in surprise than pain. The bastard had actually
bitten
him. He looked at his hand and the tooth marks were bright white within a red ring.

Laine ran at the window and hit it with a heavy, ominous crack. A drop of blood rolled down the glass. He backed up a couple of steps, and before Jackson could respond, he threw himself at the window once again.

This time the impact drew a jagged line down the center of the glass. Laine backed up once more, shaking his head like a prizefighter in the fifteenth round.

When he hit the window the next time, it exploded. Shards of glass fell inside the corridor but more fell outward, down to the ground eight stories below. Laine teetered for a moment, halfway out the window.

Jackson ran toward him but Laine removed his hands from under his armpits and placed them on the jagged bottom of the window. Immediately a flood of fresh blood washed down the broken mountain range of glass below him. He pushed down and, in a single graceful movement, pulled himself over the window ledge. For a moment he seemed finally balanced, teetering on the edge, and then Laine fell.

The sound of the man landing on the concrete reached up the eight floors—hard and wet. A moment later the screaming began.

Jackson stared at the broken window, unable to accept what he had just witnessed, and then turned and fled down the corridor, back in the direction of MedWay.

4

The whey-faced boy from MedWay’s reception placed a cup of black tea on the table in front of Jackson and took a step backward.

“Thanks,” Jackson whispered. The boy nodded and then fled the room.

Jackson took a sip from the cup. The harsh taste of black tea was underlined by an intense sweetness—the boy must have dumped at least five spoons of sugar into the cup.

A figure passed the door. It had happened regularly since he had staggered into MedWay screaming about Laine’s suicide, as if word had got round the company and they were taking it in turns to get a look at the man who had seen it happen.

But this time the figure didn’t pass by. The door opened and Fairls came in.

“How are you feeling?”

Jackson shrugged. He didn’t have any words to explain what emotions were running through him. He didn’t know Laine, not really. His overall feeling toward him had been annoyance that his antics had been screwing up his interview, but that was replaced by…shock? Horror?

“I couldn’t stop him,” Jackson said, aware that he had said the same thing to everyone who entered the room.

“I know.”

“He was so
determined
.” He stared at Fairls. It was strange to see the face that had seemed so hard on the other side of the interview table, now appear so brittle.

“The police will be here shortly. To interview you, I assume. But they say they’re held up with other incidents. Although I don’t know what’s more important than a man throwing himself off the eighth floor of an office block.”

Well, he can’t hurt anyone else
, Jackson thought, and tried to bat away the idea.

“And we’ve spoken to…Donna.” Fairls hesitated over the name, as if he was checking to make sure he had got it right. “She said she’ll be over as quickly as she can.” Fairls smiled. “She asked how you were doing.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you were shaken up, probably in shock. I suspect that when the paramedics have finished with Laine’s body, they’ll want to come and check you out.
I’ll
want them to come and check you out.”

“Thanks,” Jackson said. He took another sip of the tea and grimaced. Fairls peered at him and it occurred to Jackson that this would have been a good place to work. He kept the thought to himself—it felt a little like dancing on Laine’s grave to be thinking about the interview at the moment.

“I need to go and sort out some things,” Fairls said. “We’re going to send everyone home and I need to get in contact with Malcolm’s wife.”

“He was married?” Jackson asked, not sure why he was so surprised.

“And they had a ten-year-old girl.” Fairls’s voice broke.

Jackson nodded, although the idea of ringing up Mrs. Laine and telling her that her husband had thrown himself out of a window was too terrible to consider.

“I thought he was happy,” Fairls said.

Jackson didn’t answer, there was nothing he could say.

Fairls shuddered, and as Jackson watched him he seemed to draw himself together, to stand straighter and become stronger. The transformation was incredible to watch. He put a hand on Jackson’s shoulder and the contact felt reassuring.

“Hang in there.”

Jackson nodded, not sure he had any alternative unless he planned to follow Laine’s example.

Fairls closed the door behind him and Jackson was left alone with the syrupy cup of tea and the image replayed in his mind of Laine battering his forehead against the glass. What could have been so terrible about his life that he felt suicide was the only way to escape?

Jackson forced himself to drink all of the tea, persuading himself that it had to have
some
medicinal qualities. He put the empty mug down on the table and glanced around. They had put him in a room away from any windows. He wondered if that had been intentional.

He inspected the pictures on the wall—prints of advertisements he assumed MedWay had produced. He stood up and walked the small cell before returning to his chair. For one horrible moment he thought they’d put him in Laine’s office; he imagined opening the drawers to find the dead man’s car keys and wallet, and maybe a photograph of his wife and their ten-year-old daughter. He shook the macabre suggestion away. The office was bare—maybe it was where he would have sat if they had given him the job.