Chapter Fifty-Three
BRODY HAD ARRIVED the moment the doors of the observation deck opened to the public for the New Year’s Eve party. He’d reckoned it would be easier to find a quiet place to wait and let the crowd build around him, rather than having to push through all those people just before he was due to come face to face with Anna. He’d hoped it would help to become slowly accustomed to the space, to the rising numbers of bodies, and he’d been right.
Yes, he was still hyper-aware of the people behind him that he couldn’t see. Yes, the music was too loud to his ears and the city lights stung his eyes. By his reckoning, he was somewhere between a six and a seven on his panic scale, nine being the point at which he started to slide into the full-blown attack of a ten. He probably would have got to that point already, but there was one thought he clung to as the sea of anxiety churned around him.
Anna.
She was his anchor.
It felt as if he’d been standing in this corner of the observation deck for days, but it must have only been two hours. He checked his watch. Ten fifty-eight. She would be here at any moment. She might be here already.
Taking a deep breath and keeping one hand on the rail in front of him, he turned, searching the crowd. It was hard to focus, the rising panic making things blurry, but as he began to breathe his familiar counts of three, it slowly became easier to fix on one person at a time.
Movement to his right caught his eye and he turned, looking towards the flash of midnight-blue beneath a coat of the same colour. His heart almost stopped.
It was her.
He would have recognized her anywhere, even though he only had that one photograph to go on. She started to smile, to lift her hand in a wave, but then she kind of… froze. The smile died on her lips. Before he could even make out what was going on, she was running. Running back towards the door she’d just come through, the skirt of her coat flying behind her.
Brody’s first instinct was to chase after her. He felt the pull of momentum inside his chest, but his brain hesitated in sending the message to his feet. His hand gripped the railing as if it were welded to it. It took a second or two before he managed to uncurl his stiff fingers and move.
She was out of reach, beyond the sea of people now. There was only one way he’d be able to catch up, and it didn’t involve skirting around the edge of the space nervously, one hand steadying himself against the glass and steel.
He had to find out what was wrong. He took a deep breath and plunged through the mass of bodies, not even caring as he bumped against them, as they turned to give him disdainful looks.
Anna had disappeared down the staircase she’d emerged from, the one that read ‘Emergency Exit and Disabled Only’.He tried to dart after her, but a burly security guard blocked his way and jerked his thumb in the direction of the staircase on the opposite side of the observation deck. He didn’t have time to argue, so he dashed through the people again, circling the central block until he reached it.
His feet pounded on the wooden risers edged with metal and he flung himself around each turn in the narrow staircase until he emerged on the sixty-ninth floor, panting and looking around wildly. His face was beginning to tingle, and his hands felt as if someone was jabbing four-inch pins into them, a sure sign that he was over-breathing, that his stress levels were through the roof. Under other circumstances, he might have found that funny, given that this was the highest point in the city and there was no roof above him save the heavens.
Anna must have come down to this level, but because he’d used a different staircase, it was impossible to guess which way she’d gone. The lift shafts and staircases ran up the centre of the building, so there was no clear line of sight from one side of the space to the other. Brody swallowed down his panic and did the only thing possible. Somehow, he managed to ignore the throng of strangers jostling against him as he moved through the crowd and completed a full circuit of the floor, but he arrived back where he’d started without even a glimpse of her.
Had she gone down one more level to where the lifts and the toilets were? It was the only place left to look. He headed down yet another staircase to check, thinking as he did so that, with two viewing decks and two different staircases, he and Anna might circle around this place for hours, finding endless ways to evade each other. The most sensible thing would be to go back to where he’d been standing when he’d first seen her.If she was looking for him too now, it was the obvious place for her to go. He was looking for the ‘up’ staircase to do just that, when he passed the bank of lifts that had brought him up here earlier.
There weren’t many people wanting to descend the tower before midnight struck, but a handful were waiting for the next available lift. The doors opened just as he spotted Anna at the back of the group, desperately trying to work her way further forwards, and she slid past the bodies and into the lift.
He reached the doors just as they began to slide closed. Their eyes met. She looked as panicked as he felt. Maybe more so. His chest tightened further.
‘I’m so sorry, Brody. I—’
The doors cut off whatever she’d been about to say, and Brody was left standing alone in a spartan corridor of polished steel and bare white surfaces.
That was it. He’d been cut free. His anchor was gone. The full storm surge he’d been trying to hold back all evening finally hit him.
Gasping for breath, he clutched at his chest as he stumbled back against the wall and began to slide towards the floor. His vision went blurry and breathing became impossible. He closed his eyes as he heard the lift attendant shout, ‘Hey! Someone call an ambulance! I think this guy’s having a heart attack!’
Chapter Fifty-Four
THE LIFT SPED downwards, causing Anna’s ears to pop, but she hardly took in the journey at all. It was only when a blast of cold air hit her as she stumbled out onto the street that she had any sense of where she was. She was unable to process a single thought, and the adrenaline flooding through her system propelled her forwards and away. Fight or flight, they said, and just like last New Year’s Eve, flight seemed to be Anna’s thing. She was such a coward.
What are you afraid of, then?
The question curled its way into her consciousness but only served to spur her on. She pointed herself towards the crowds and busy traffic of London Bridge Road and staggered along in her heels.
She couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about why she was running or what she had just done. Better to just lurch along numbly in this insulating haze.
She turned the corner onto the main road and was swept along with a group of people at the crossing. She found herself in one of the outlying areas of Borough Market, a kind of glassed-in picnic area on most days, but tonight it had been transformed. People ten years her junior mingled, drinking, talking, laughing.
Anna entered and pushed her way through them until she reached the solid structure of a bar and clung onto it with both hands. ‘Gin! Double!’ she yelled at the bartender. The gin arrived in what looked like a goldfish bowl on a thin glass stalk, but Anna didn’t care what kind of glass it was in; it wasn’t going to be staying in there long anyway. She downed it and shoved the glass back in the direction of the bartender, who nodded and refilled it as nonchalantly as if she’d been politely asking for a vanilla latte.
