An old man like me, hasn’t much use for it.’
Durrant stopped and peered thoughtfully at Mr Goddard. ‘That’s kind of you, Goddard,’ he said at last. ‘Very kind.’
Mr Goddard smiled deprecatingly. ‘Don’t give it a thought. I like to stand by the firm, you know. Forgive me mentioning it, but would fifty be any use to you?’
Durrant’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Yes, it would be a lot of use.’ He paused, then asked quietly: ‘Are you doing this off your own bat, or did Sellings put you up to it?’
‘Put me up to it—?’
Durrant closed the interval between them, and in a harder voice rapped out: ‘You must have been following me around for days. You know just about everything about everybody, don’t you, Goddard? I’ve a damn good mind to report you.’
Mr Goddard backed away, wondering how to retrieve the situation. Just then he noticed that they were alone at the showcases. The groups of people who usually milled around the windows were pressing into the alleyway beside the store; there was a lot of shouting in the distance.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Durrant snapped. He joined the crowd in the alleyway and peered over the heads.
Mr Goddard hurried back into the store. All the assistants were craning over their shoulders and whispering to each other; some had left the counters and were gathering around the service doors at the rear.
Mr Goddard pushed his way through, someone was calling for the police and a woman from the personnel department came down in the freight lift carrying a pair of blankets.
The commissionaire holding the throng back let Mr Goddard past. In the yard outside was a group of fifteen or twenty people, all looking up at the fifth-floor balcony. Tied to the railings was the lower half of a home-made ladder, jutting up into the air at an angle of 45 degrees. The top section, a limb about twelve feet long, had been lashed to the upper end, but the joint had failed, and the section now hung down vertically, swinging slowly from side to side above the heads of the people in the yard.
With an effort Mr Goddard controlled his voice. Someone had covered the two bodies with the blankets, and a man kneeling beside them presumably a doctor — was shaking his head slowly.
‘What I can’t understand,’ one of the assistant managers was whispering to the commissionaire, ‘is where they were trying to climb to. The ladder must have pointed straight up into the air.’
The commissionaire nodded. ‘Mr Masterman and Mr Streatfield, too. What would they be building a ladder for, senior men like that?’
Mr Goddard followed the line of the ladder up towards the sky. The rear wall of the yard was only seven or eight feet high, beyond it lay the galvanized iron roof of a bicycle shed and an open car park. The ladder had pointed nowhere, but the compulsion driving the two men had been blind and irresistible.
That evening Mr Goddard made the rounds of his house more perfunctorily than usual, glanced briefly into the empty rooms, closing the doors before the cat had a chance to do more than test the air. He shut it into the kitchen, then hurried off to unlock the safe.
Carrying the box out into the centre of the floor, he unlatched the lid.
As the town came to life below him he scrutinized it carefully, moving up and down the miniature streets, peering through all the windows in turn, fixing the identity and role of as many as possible of the tiny inhabitants. Like a thousand shuttles weaving an infinitely intricate pattern, they threaded through the shops and offices, in and out of countless doorways, every one of them touching a score of others somewhere among the pavements and arcades, adding another stitch to the tapestry of incident and motive ravelling their lives together. Mr Goddard traced each thread, trying to detect any shift in direction, and untoward interlocking of behaviour.
The pattern, he realized, was changing. As yet it was undefined, but slight variations were apparent, subtle shifts in the relationships between the people in the box: rival storekeepers seemed to be on intimate terms, strangers had begun to talk to each other, there was a great deal of unnecessary and purposeless activity.
Mr Goddard searched for a focus, an incident that would unmask the sources of the new pattern. He examined the balcony behind the lift shaft, watching for any further attempts to escape. The ladder had been removed but nothing had been done to replace it. Other potential escape routes the roof of the cinema, the clock tower of the town hail — revealed no further clues.
One incident alone stood out, puzzling him even more. This was the unique spectacle, in a quiet alcove of the billiards saloon, of Mr Durrant introducing his bank manager to the bookmaker. The trio were still in earnest conversation when he closed the box reluctantly at two o’clock the next morning.
Over the following days Mr Goddard watched the crowds passing through the store, waiting to detect, as it were in the macrocosm, some of the tendencies he had observed in the box. His sixty-fifth birthday, soon due to fall, was a handy topic which provided ready conversational access to the senior members of the staff. Curiously, however, the friendly responses he expected were missing; the exchanges were brief, sometimes almost to the point of rudeness. This he put down to the changed atmosphere in the store since the deaths of the two ladder climbers. At the inquest there had been a confused hysterical outburst by one of the saleswomen, and the coroner had cryptically remarked that it appeared that information was being deliberately withheld. A murmur of agreement had spontaneously swept the entire room, but what exactly he meant no one seemed to know.
Another symptom of this uneasiness was the rash of notices that were handed in. Almost a third of the staff were due to leave, most of them for reasons that were patently little more than excuses. When Mr Goddard probed for the real reasons he discovered that few people were aware of them. The motivation was purely unconscious.
As if to emphasize this intrusion of the irrational, one evening as Mr Goddard was leaving the store he saw the bank manager standing high above the street on the clock tower of the town hall, gazing up into the sky.
During the next week little occurred within the box to clarify the situation. The shifting and regrouping of relationships continued. He saw the bank manager more and more in the company of the bookmaker, and realized that he had been completely mistaken in assuming that Durrant was under pressure of his gambling debts — in fact, his role seemed to be that of intermediary between the bookmaker and bank manager, who had at last been persuaded to join them in their scheme.
That some sort of conspiracy was afoot he was sure. At first he assumed that a mass break-out from the box was being planned, but nothing confirmed this. Rather he felt that some obscure compulsion, as yet unidentified to itself, was generating within the minds of those in the box, reflected in the bizarre and unpredictable behaviour of their counterparts in the outside world. Unconscious of their own motives and only half aware of themselves, his fellow employees at the store had begun to resemble the pieces of some enormous puzzle, like disjointed images fixed in the fragments of a shattered mirror. In conclusion he decided on a policy of laissez-faire. A few more weeks would certainly reveal the sources of the conspiracy.
Unfortunately, sooner than Mr Goddard anticipated, events moved forward rapidly to a spectacular crisis.
The day of his sixty-fifth birthday, he made his way to the store half an hour later than usual, and on arrival was told that Mr Sellings wished to see him.
Sellings first offered his congratulations, then launched into a recapitulation of Mr Goddard’s years of service to the store, and concluded by wishing him as many years again of contented retirement.
It took Mr Goddard several moments to grasp the real significance of this. Nothing had ever been said to him about his retirement, and he had always assumed that he would stay on until, like many members of the staff, he was well into his seventies.
Collecting himself, he said as much to Sellings. ‘I haven’t exactly been expecting retirement, Mr Sellings. I think there must have been some mistake.’
Sellings stood up, shaking his head with a quick smile. ‘No mistake at all, Mr Goddard, I assure you. As a matter of fact the board carefully considered your case yesterday, and we agreed that you well deserve an uninterrupted rest after all these years.’
Mr Goddard frowned. ‘But I don’t wish to retire, sir. I’ve made no plans.’
‘Well, now’s the time to start.’ Sellings was on his way to the door, handshake ready. ‘Comfortable pension, little house of your own, the world’s your oyster.’
Mr Goddard sat tight, thinking quickly. ‘Mr Sellings, I’m afraid I can’t accept the board’s decision. I’m sure, for the sake of the business, I should stay on in my present post.’ The smile had gone from Sellings’ face; he looked
