The murder of Tobias Fell remains unsolved, and it is unlikely it will ever be known what actually happened that night, or what those thirteen ill-fated guests truly saw.
1st
Night Work
Violet Ng
114 Banyan Court
‘I’m sorry to hear that, it must be awful.’
Violet’s mother had always warned her against talking to strangers, of course, but unfortunately it seemed nobody had warned them against talking to her. She bit back her response as the old man gave a sympathetic little tilt of the head, his lips pursed as though sharing her pain.
‘My son used to work nights as well,’ he continued, ignoring her silence. ‘He hated it. Used to say he could never get the sleep right. It’s not humane, I reckon.’
Violet had grown up buried beneath her mother’s paranoid fear for her safety, weighed down by a hundred cautionary tales, thinly veiled urban legends that supposedly happened to some distant friend of the family. She’d never even mentioned the greatest threat that apparently seemed to plague only her: sympathetic strangers. The elderly man sat opposite was leaning forward, clearly waiting for an answer.
‘Must have been hard,’ Violet said at last, doing her best to look anywhere else, but the windows of the underground carriage showed only darkness. Her mother’s tales had always started the same way, with looking a stranger in the eye. It was her version of ‘Once upon a time’, but for ending with someone dead in an unmarked lorry. To Violet, the greatest danger of eye contact was that people thought you were interested in their opinions.
‘I read somewhere working a night shift can take almost a decade of your life!’ her new friend said, relentless in his concern for her wellbeing.
‘It’s not for everyone,’ Violet replied, falling back into the rote half-answers she always ended up using on family who decided they needed to tell her how much she must hate working nights. It happened a lot.
‘What exactly do you do?’ the old man continued, undeterred.
Violet considered for a moment. She could try to explain it to him, how much she loved it. She could try to vocalise that sense of being adjacent to the world, walking through and beside it, but never quite letting it touch her. She could tell him about her ‘lunch’ breaks, walking the streets around her office, drinking in the 2 a.m. silence, that wonderful emptiness. Describe watching cars and lorries slowly streaking a down the motorway towards Reading or Basingstoke, like a slow-moving river of lights. She could try to vocalise the almost spiritual connection she felt to the slumbering city. A city her mother had always claimed would kill her.
‘I work on the ingestion and editorial management of syndicated media for a large scale B2B-focused press-aggregator, ensuring licensing and copyright compliance for future consumption in data and analytics.’
That shut him up.
Violet emerged from Whitechapel station just as the sky began to fully turn to dawn. The early morning air was cool and refreshing, before the summer heat really started, and she felt the first tinges of a satisfied exhaustion at the edges of her limbs. Her eyelids were pleasantly heavy as she slowly walked home. It wasn’t long before it loomed before her, blotting out the sunrise.
Banyan Court rose above the streets of Tower Hamlets, gazing down with a paternalistic pity for the homeless and the struggling who simply hadn’t had the good sense to be born rich. Violet smirked quietly to herself and walked quickly past the shining glass front doors. They didn’t like it if you loitered. She passed the small patches of immaculately maintained greenery and turned down the small alleyway that ran along the side of Banyan Court. Between the rows of huge bins far too unsightly to be left visible from the street (and easily large enough for a dismembered body, her mother would have said), and past the line where glass gave way to concrete and old brick. Violet made her way to Resident Entrance B.
The small concrete courtyard was swept about once a month by the council, but the bars over the ground floor windows prevented any attempt to keep the glass clean. Those bars, heavy and painted a bright warning yellow, had been added when the building was first renovated, and they had always struck Violet as being a message, rather than a response to any actual crime. Like the CCTV signs that became more numerous as you approached the door to the rear apartments, no longer warning passers-by that residents were protected by surveillance, but instead reminding the less-trusted occupants that they were being watched.
She took a moment to breathe it all in, taking a seat on the raised section of concrete where teenagers sometimes gathered to smoke and laugh. She placed her hand on the cold, rough surface and closed her eyes. Her family had never understood Violet’s decision to move to the city. The youngest of two brothers and four sisters, raised in a warm home near the Scottish border that had somehow always been kept immaculate, her choice of lifestyle baffled her siblings. They had made their lives near home, with children and dogs and wide-open sky. Violet’s existence, by comparison, was grimy and cramped: living in a tiny, squalid flat to grind away at a pointless desk job in a lightless office. They never understood that that was the point. Violet secretly loved that hardscrabble urban life, skirting poverty and wearing her fingers to the bone. It was something that her parents had once dismissed as ‘the resilience of youth’, but here she was aged thirty-one and this was still the life she wanted. It was a part of her so deeply ingrained that no amount of what her mother called ‘harsh reality’ could dislodge it.
She looked over the rusty basketball hoop on the nearby wall, just above the defaced sign that had once read ‘No Ball Games’ and smiled as she remembered one of her mother’s classic pieces of ‘reality’: the gruesome tale of a young man who moved to London and caught the eye of a violent gang. They killed him, of course, and played a rousing game of basketball with his head. Her mother had read it in the paper, she claimed, but couldn’t quite remember which one, and got quite upset when Violet gently questioned how exactly one could dribble with a human head, which traditionally was one of the less-bouncy pieces of sports equipment.
Violet turned away and got out her key, but Resident Entrance B apparently hadn’t latched, and she didn’t need it. Still smiling quietly to herself as she entered the cool of the dark hallway, she ignored the vandalised letterboxes. Though her mother’s dire predictions of robbery, murder or kidnapping had never come true (yet another way Violet had disappointed her), she had been right about how harsh and ugly London was. If you couldn’t find the quiet joy in that ugliness, it might be a bit much for some people.
The lift was working for once. She leaned heavily against the smudged mirror, appreciating the slow journey towards her flat and ignoring the small voice that called her lazy for not taking the stairs. Home was two cramped and dingy bedrooms at the back of the eighth floor with a laundry list of problems that appealed to her stubborn pride. She loved it. She and her flatmate Marie were the last of their university friends still renting in central London. When they’d first seen the listing, a few years ago now, Violet had assumed the low rent must have been a mistake. The pictures had showed the luxuriant glass frontage, with only a couple of clearly recycled stock photos of the interior. Once they’d actually viewed the place the reality of ‘Resident Entrance B’ became clear. It might have been the closest Violet ever got to being in one of her mother’s stories, as they were led to the crumbling, bare apartment by a shifty looking estate agent. But the doors never slammed shut behind them, the bedroom wasn’t a secret kill-room, and by then Marie’s housing situation had deteriorated to the point where being fussy simply wasn’t an option. So, they’d had to take it. Violet would never tell her friend how glad she was that decision was forced on them, but sometimes she thought Marie knew.