Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler Read Free Book Online Page A

in her calf, she lay sprawled across the floor of the lift, her mind pitched into panicked possibilities. Suppose it was a stroke, like the one her mother had suffered? Her career would be obliterated in a heartbeat. She forced herself to consider her options. Could she crawl over to the brass button panel and find the alarm?
    Her legs were insensate, as if they had been injected with cocaine. What now? It became hard to think, or to feel anything at all, just numbness, blessed numbness. Someone was touching her useless limbs. She could definitely feel something cold gripping her ankles, but what was it? How could anyone touch her without opening the trellis door? She listened to the rasping breath and longed to turn her head, but her muscles failed to respond. Something was clutching her hard now, pulling at her feet. A feeling came at last, cold metal scraping her toes. Her legs were being moved, her body pulled and twisted so that her head slid onto the floor, forcing her to look up at the ceiling. What the hell was wrong with her feet?
    They were sticking out of the cage. Whatever it was that had taken hold of her had pulled her feet between the staves of the trellis, so that her ankles were resting on the crossbars. She was alone now, left in this graceless position, trying to imagine a way out of an absurd predicament.
    This is how people die, she thought. A bomb falls on the building, the bricks close in around you and you’re trapped until someone can dig you out. This is my worst fear made real. My mother alone in her kitchen, trying to call for the maid, attempting to reach the telephone in the hall. I should have been there for her instead of rehearsing, always rehearsing. Now it is too late.
    She heard a new noise.
    The click of a button being pushed was followed by the familiar whirring of oiled gears. The lift was being summoned on the floor above. She forced her head up and watched in horror as the concrete level of the floor descended to her sightline, down to her ankles, brushing, then touching, then pressing, then crushing.
    The audiences of the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, had delighted in a thousand lingering kisses, a thousand cruel deaths, a thousand emotional farewells. But there was no audience here tonight to witness the end of a dancer, to see the terrible cleaving of bone and flesh, the stream of blood, not lurid Kensington Gore but something real and dark and intimate, to hear the agonized screams of a woman in mourning for the end of her career as much as the loss of her feet.
    8
    THE ARRIVAL OF THE CUCKOO
    Sidney Biddle had never been in trouble with the police, so he joined them, and then the trouble began. At the outbreak of war, he entered training with a determination to be the scourge of the criminal world, anxious to change the ways of people he considered corrupt, stupid, lazy and weak. Any officer will tell you that a person entering the force with such a mentality is doomed to a lifetime of disappointment. Triumphs are transitory, failures painful, gratitude rare and grudging. Policemen and nurses are yoked together under the category of social services, but nurses bond with their patients. Policemen get no thanks from those they arrest.
    Not that Biddle expected appreciation, but he had been hoping for more concrete results from his zealous approach to the law. At school he had been hardworking and humourless, possessed with a religious fire. His parents were at a loss to understand him, and blamed themselves for having produced a child so determined to be a model citizen that they were forced to hide newspapers from him, in case he discovered new enemies within their pages.
    After police college, Biddle found himself inexplicably on the beat. He had expected to start in a position of greater responsibility, but his attitude had bothered his seniors, who wisely decided to drum a little humility into him before allowing their star pupil to turn his searching gaze on a sinning