Dangerous Games

Chapter 3 part 2

"So, Pritchard, any success finding Miss Patel?"

"No, sir. We've done a door-to-door, interviewed the people who were with her that night, and checked the CCTV for the building. Nothing. As far as we know, she stepped into that lift and just vanished."

"Right, well I've let you mess around with your detective work. From now on we do it by the book. We'll get the special team in straight away." He picked up the phone on the desk. "Oh, by the way, do we have a photograph of the missing girl?"

"Yes, sir, on the board."

"What's it like?" He meant, of course, is she photogenic?

"Perfectly suitable. She's quite pretty so she has a good chance of grabbing the public's attention, but still looks fairly vulnerable, so they'll feel sympathetic to her."

"Good. Get plenty of colour copies made. We're going to need lots of them!" He started tapping numbers into the phone, then looked up. "You still here? Scram!"

When I got back to the office, it was a very different place. As far as I could see, instead of doing their proper work i.e. chasing up on car theft, filling in the paperwork for up-coming court cases and what-have-you, everyone was discussing – you've guessed it – the Elevator Game. Anything to distract themselves from the boring reality of life in the modern police service. Everywhere I looked all the computer monitors were filled with page after page with a spooky or Gothic background and pictures of lift doors. Some were open, some were closed, and one even had the demonic form of the woman from the fifth floor peering out from behind it.

Never have I seen uniformed police officers behaving more like schoolchildren! Somebody would make some remark about one of the sites, and a small group of people formed round that monitor. Then somebody else would say something and the group would disband, only to reform round the newcomer's computer. What fuelled them, of course, was the possibility that their humdrum jobs might – just might – have been touched by the supernatural. In spite of myself, I found myself rising to that thought as well.

"Look, this person claims to have carried out the ritual and actually visited the other world. He writes... no, wait, it's a she... she writes that she ended up on the tenth floor of a building which was surrounded by a thick swirling fog."

"Writes, you say. Couldn't she take a photograph? Would be so much more believable with a bit of hard evidence."

"Ah, but it says on this page, that when you go into the other dimension, electronic devices stop working."

"And start working again when you come back to our world? How convenient."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, don't you see? It means that they have the perfect excuse for not producing any evidence like photographs or video. Oh dear, my camera has stopped working!"

"Well, there's a person on this site who claims that he actually did video his trip."

"I bet he hasn't posted the footage though, has he."

And so it went on. The room was dividing between sceptics and believers, or rather people who thought it might just be possible, since nobody was going to admit to being an actual believer. I shook my head gently. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that behind this lay the fact that a vulnerable teenager had disappeared and that it was our job to find her. Still, I couldn't blame them. Within hours, the station would be taken over as the child-protection team moved in. It was only natural that they would want to enjoy these last few hours of normality.

...

And sure enough, the next day, all hell broke loose. The whole team were summoned by a voice on the telephone that I didn't recognise in at eight o'clock for what was termed a "debriefing". I don't mind the occasional early shift – Lord knows, I've done my fair share of them – when there's a particularly nasty multiple murder or a pile-up on the A3, but for a missing-child case like this one? No thanks!