Between Floors

The lift stopped at 11:14, between the ninth floor and the eighth, and Ansel Roe’s first thought was that this was going to look extremely deliberate.

His second thought was that Tobias Vance was standing eighteen inches away from him and had not yet said anything, which was worse.

“Don’t,” Vance said.

“I haven’t said—“

“You were going to say something about the building.” Vance pressed the emergency button with the flat of his thumb, held it, released it. “You’ve been saying things about the building for six months.”

The line rang. And rang. Somewhere below them a mechanism made a sound like a throat clearing and then decided against it.

Six months was accurate. Ansel had counted.

Six months of filings, of records requests, of standing in a corridor outside a hearing room while a press officer explained that the firm did not comment on ongoing matters. Vance had been the press officer for the first two months. Then he had been promoted, which Ansel had noted with a professional interest he had not examined closely.

“They’ll come,” Vance said.

“It’s eleven at night.”

“There’s a service contract.”

“There’s a service contract with a firm you took off the maintenance rota in March,” Ansel said. “It’s in the disclosure. Page four hundred and something.”

Vance turned his head. In the lift’s emergency lighting his face did something Ansel had not seen it do in six months of corridors: it stopped being a surface.

“You read all of it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Nobody reads all of it.”

“I read all of it.”

The lift hung where it was, nine floors of building above and eight below, and neither of them said anything for a long moment.

Then Vance sat down on the floor, put his head back against the panelling, and said, “Page four hundred and twelve. It’s four hundred and twelve.” He closed his eyes. “I flagged it. In March. In writing.”