He watched Jordan walk out of the room. One of the Assistant Directors said into his microphone, ‘Hold all cast.’
No! Wheeler urged, silently. Bring them on, bring them on, get them into position!
Suddenly he saw a small boy, with mussed-up brown hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, walk into the room, duck under the ropes and walk towards the table. Gaia’s little brat, he recognized from earlier.
Fuck off kid! Get out of here! Clear off, you little bastard!
The boy wandered, curious, around the table. He peered, nosily, at the hams, chickens, haunches of venison, suckling pig, silver flagons of ales and wines, and bowls of fruits. Then he pulled up a chair at the table, sat down, and stared around him, with a regal air, as if imagining himself back in time.
Clear off, kid!
He looked just like his own son.
Suddenly there was a strange sound directly above him. A sharp hissing. He looked up, and to his shock, the entire interior of the dome above him had disappeared in a swirling mist of acrid smoke. He could feel it burning his lungs, parching his mouth.
Sudden panic gripped him.
There was a piercing, creaking sound.
He looked down for an instant, and the chandelier was trembling.
No, no, no.
His careful calculations had come out at thirty minutes. What had he got wrong?
It was shaking even more now, and the creaking was getting worse.
The damned boy was still sitting there, lifting a silver goblet as if pretending to drink from it.
He coughed, the acid fumes burning his eyes and searing his throat. Half blinded, tears were streaming from his eyes. He coughed again, a long, deep, choking, hacking cough. Get lost, kid! Scram!
His goddamn calculations were wrong. Had he screwed up on the acid strength? The calculations of the diameter of the aluminium?
There was a terrible screech of stressed metal, right below him. He looked down and to his horror could see the whole chandelier had moved, several inches, and was now off-kilter.
The shaft was about to snap.
The whole chandelier, as he had planned, was about to fall. But on to Roan Lafayette.
No.
‘Kid!’ he yelled. ‘Get away! Get away! GET AWAY!’
But no one could hear him from up here.
The boy continued to play happily with his goblet.
Of course he could not hear him from up here.
There was another piercing metallic shriek.
Through his observation hole, he could see the chandelier was swaying now. Any moment it would plunge down. No one had noticed. It was going to kill the kid and that was never his intention.
Oh shit, shit, shit, shit.
This was screwing up all his plans. He launched himself down the rest of the wooden slats, knocking over and then accidentally treading on and splintering the baby alarm speaker, squeezed back out through the narrow hatch, and then clambered down the ladder.
He felt surprisingly energized and clear-headed.
I am not killing a child. I am not killing a child.
He sprinted along the steel walkway, ignoring the handrail this time, then clambered in through the hatch to the apartment beneath the big dome. He ran through the main room, past the dust sheets, over the trapdoor secured by the two bolts, then down the spiral staircase, keeping well clear of the rickety handrail. Then he burst out through the door at the bottom, into the central hallway.
Two security guards standing there looked at him in astonishment.
As Wheeler ignored them and sprinted down the corridor towards the Banqueting Room, the guards ran after him. ‘Hey! Hey, you!’ one shouted. ‘Let me see your ID!’
Three grips, unwinding a cable drum, were blocking the entrance to the room. One guard caught up with Wheeler as he tried to barge past them, and grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Hey!’
Drayton Wheeler turned and punched him in the nose so hard he bust it, sending the guard reeling back, and at the same time agonizingly dislocating his own thumb. But he barely even noticed. He ran on into the Banqueting Room and looked up.
The chandelier was swaying as if suspended by a solitary, fraying piece of string.
At any second it was going to come down.
The stupid kid, in a world of his own, was now pretending to eat with a knife and fork. The rest of the crew in here were well clear of the table.
Wheeler clambered over the rope.
‘Hey!’ The other security guard shouted at him.
Wheeler ignored him. Ignored everything but the kid at the table and the looming, swaying shadow above him. He threw himself across the room and grabbed the boy, yanking him clean out of his chair by his arm, his knife and fork clattering to the ground.
‘Hey!!’ Roan shouted, furious and bewildered, moments before Drayton Wheeler, gripping him by the shoulder and buttocks, threw him, with all the force he could muster, across the polished wooden floor, sliding and spinning like a human curling stone.
Roan shrieked in protest as he crashed into a brass upright supporting the rope.
Then, before Drayton Wheeler had a chance to move, the chandelier dropped.
He sensed, fleetingly, the shadow, descending on him, enveloping him, far too fast for him to cry out. The full force of the chandelier struck him on the head, smashing him to the floor a split second before it demolished an eight-foot-long portion of the centre of the table.
The floor shook under the massive, splintering crash, as if a bomb had gone off in the room. There was a jangling, reverberating boom. Hundreds of the 15,000 glass drops shattered, sending a glittering, shimmering display of coloured light into the air, for an instant, like a firework. Lights in the grand room flickered. Goblets on the table crashed over, shattering, spilling their contents; plates, chandeliers and tureens slid down into the tangled mess of chains, gilded metal framework and glass. Then there was a gentle, almost absurd tinkling sound. As if someone had just dropped one single glass. That was all and nothing else.
It was followed by a brief instant of absolute silence. No one moved.
Then a male voice cried out in shock, ‘Oh shit, oh no!’
A female voice screamed, ‘There’s a man under there! Oh my God, there’s someone under there!’
There was another moment of stunned, awed silence. It was broken by a hideous, whooping, hysterical screaming from the film unit’s continuity woman. Bug-eyed, she was standing, pointing at a dark red pool of blood spreading out from under the mangled wreckage where the centre of the table had been only moments ago.
A single streak of stark white light flitted across the scene. Someone had taken a photograph.
94
Several of the film unit’s lights had been beamed on to the fallen chandelier. Under their glare, two paramedics in green uniforms, Phil Davidson and Vicky Donoghue, were picking their way through the shattered glass and twisted metal, trying to locate the victim’s head, being careful not to put any additional weight on the wreckage that could crush the man further. There was blood everywhere beneath them, spreading slowly outwards, and a terrible stench like a bad drain. Both of them knew what that meant. That the man’s stomach and bowels had been split open.
They could glimpse the man’s clothes in a few places. Repeatedly, Vicky Donoghue asked, ‘Sir, can you hear us? Help is on its way. Can you hear us, sir?’
There was no response. Outside, she could hear a cacophony of sirens winding down. Hopefully the fire brigade had arrived with lifting gear. Then she saw flesh. A wrist.
Carefully she eased her gloved hand in between the jagged leaves of glass palm fronds, and held the wrist lightly. It was limp. ‘Can you hear me, sir? Try to move your hand if you can’t speak,’ she urged. Then she curled her fingers around the wrist, feeling for the radial artery.