Dangerous Games

Chapter 4 part 2

The house where that girl lived was exactly the sort of place I would have expected given the photograph of her in the paper, a dingy terraced house with a small suggestion of a front garden. It seemed no different from all the others in that terrace – peeling off-white paintwork, loose guttering and single-glazed windows with plain, dark rooms beyond. The garden gate, hanging off its hinges gave access to a short path made of uneven paving stones choked with weeds growing up between them. In fact, the bright yellow dandelions were the most colourful thing about that house. Drab. Yes, that's the word to describe it. It was drab.

The door was answered by a rather plain woman with a cigarette permanently glued to her bottom lip. She looked at us blankly.

"Yes? What do you want?"

"Mrs. Fleming? Constables Claire Ogden and Tim Pritchard from the Metropolitan Police. We did ring ahead."

The blank expression didn't change. Then suddenly the penny dropped.

"Oh, yeah. You want to talk to Charlie, don't you. About that newspaper thing." She screamed up the stairs. "Charlie! Charlie!" A moment later there was an elephantine stomping down the stairs and the same fat, plain face that I'd seen in the paper appeared behind her equally fat, plain mother.

"Some policemen to see you." The mother lead us all to what must have been the living room and gestured us to enter. We went in and turned round, expecting the woman to have followed us, only to find that she'd gone off somewhere else. Claire called out round the corner "Err, Mrs. Fleming. You are entitled to be present when we talk to Charlotte, you know" but she didn't get any response. She shrugged. It didn't really matter. If we'd been interviewing her under caution, the law requires that there is an appropriate adult present – a parent or social worker – of course, but if we were just asking her questions informally about something that couldn't possibly be a crime...

The girl just flopped down in front of the television set which was already on. She stared at the screen with the same featureless expression that her mother had had.

"What do you want?"

"Er, look. Do you think we could have that thing off?" I asked.

She sighed and turned the set off with the remote, then swung lazily towards us, giving an excellent impression of someone clinically incapable of caring about anything.

"Charlotte – may I call you Charlotte? – I believe you spoke to the press yesterday about this Elevator Game."

"Oh yeah. That. I read about that in the paper so I decided I'd try it. And would you believe it, it worked. I ended up in this other dimension, and then I came back."

"Tell me what you did, exactly." This time it was Claire's turn to take out the notebook and look interested.

"I got the instructions from a web site, and then I did them. Look, I wrote them down." She got up off the sofa and went into the kitchen, rummaged around in the trash and came back with a screwed up bit of paper. I recognised what was scrawled on it from the various websites I'd seen, but Claire dutifully copied them down afresh.

"I'm surprised that the newspaper people didn't want to take this piece of paper away with them," Claire said, writing furiously all the time. "A piece of paper that's actually been to another dimension."

"They didn't even ask to see it. They just sent one guy round with a notebook and a camera. He talked to me and took a few snapshots. Then he went."

"That was quite an article he wrote. Several hundred words."

"Yeah, he made most of that up. He only talked to me for about ten minutes."

"Could you show us the lift where you did your thing?"