Dangerous Games

Chapter 6 part 3

I woke at my usual time of seven, to find the bed empty beside me. Claire had written me a note on an empty envelope she'd found in the recycling. "So glad you had a DVD player. See you at work. C."

Normally I would jump straight out of bed – I've never been one of those people who can't force themselves vertical in the morning – but on that occasion, I thought I'd treat myself to five minutes extra between the sheets. There was indeed a lot to think about. Was Claire a one-night stand, or did she want something more? I was happy to take it further if that's what she wanted. On the other hand, if I was simply nothing more than a passing fancy to her, to be used and then cast aside in favour of someone better, then I could live with that too. I'm not a proud man.

And then, of course – and far less importantly – there was the fact that we seemed to have turned the universally accepted view of the way the world works on its head. You know, something minor like that! This could be something vast. If we played it the right way, it would be world fame for everyone involved, not least of which would be Claire and me. Play our cards correctly and we would be able to retire on the proceeds.

But it would be so easy to play it wrongly and get nothing, or worse. We could be vilified, or even sacked for incompetence. I don't know how long the Elevator Game has been on the Internet, but it must have been long enough for any number of people to have tried it. What about all those accounts that we'd come across by people who'd reported that they'd broken the laws of physics? What happened to them? Why hadn't they achieved world fame as the people who turned the universe upside-down? Some of them, somehow, must have had some sort of video footage, probably better than ours, and should have been household names, but they'd been relegated to the loony-toons corner of the web. If we didn't watch our steps, Claire and I could so easily go the same way.

These thoughts were still buzzing round my head as I arrived at work. I'd even had a near miss in the car when I pulled out into Galsworthy Road without looking properly right and left. Fortunately it only resulted in the other vehicle tooting me loudly. Being a police officer would have been no defence if I had crashed, which would have been a singularly inauspicious start to what I hoped would be one hell of an adventure. Thankfully, I did manage to get to work in one piece.

The day itself was filled with more following up leads from the public, and once more, I was manning the phones. However, you could tell that the steam was starting to go out of the enquiry. There's always a massive response when a missing person case hits the media. For the first few days everything goes mad – the phones ring off the hook. Most of the callers genuinely believe that they've seen the missing person, although they couldn't possibly have (we had a couple of calls from people reporting sightings of Anita in Australia, for instance). Then you get the crackpots who don't claim to have seen the person, but have a theory about where the missing individual is and are sure they are right. Why haven't the police tried using mystic crystals to find Miss X, or consulted the Book of Revelations to locate Child Z? There's one person I particularly remember, from a few years previously who always used to ring in claiming that the answer to the mystery was encoded in successive digits of the mathematical number Pi. Whatever the incident – murder, missing person, child abduction – the answer was always encoded in Pi somehow.

And last of all there are the time-wasters, who simply report sightings just to get a bit of attention. Whenever a major crime's reported, the nearest police station is deluged with nut-jobs who want to confess to having done it. In theory, they could all be prosecuted for wasting police time, but in practice it's impossible. The courts would be clogged for months, and many of these people wouldn't be able to pay court-imposed fines anyway.

Now it was day three of the enquiry, and despite the best efforts of the call centre, by now the majority of phone calls were nut-jobs and time-wasters. Perhaps they'd given up on a promising lead coming through and didn't want us to sit around waiting for the phone to ring. However, they all had to be answered, and the callers had to be treated with respect, or at least carefully concealed contempt. Normally I would be more towards the "concealed contempt" end of that spectrum, but now less so. After all, I was dangerously close to being a nut-job myself. The only thing standing between me and space cadets like them? One DVD, or rather twelve DVDs compressed into one. It was proof. Hard, physical proof, and how many of these wackoes had that? Nevertheless, I did get a certain frisson of pleasure when the voice on the other end of the line said "That girl, I'm sure she's on the Astral Plane." It took all my self-control for me not to say "Yeah, you and me both, mate!"

One call does deserve to be mentioned. A Mr. Edwards of Ambigem Building Management (Leeds branch) wanted to know when they could have their tapes back. I thought I detected a slight note of desperation in his voice. Thank goodness the call had been directed through to me, the one policeman on a team of ten who actually knew about their existence. Any other person would have said "What tapes?" and the matter might have gone further, but Lady Luck was smiling on me, and I was able to reassure him that the matter was being dealt with and that we would be able to reunite tapes and owner fairly soon.

I hadn't seen the papers that day, but they had probably found some other hobby-horse to occupy them. Certainly Superintendent Sugden hadn't dragged me into the office to tear me off a strip. In fact, I didn't see him all day. Neither did I see Claire either unfortunately.

A rather depressing mood always settles on an incident room at this point. The ideas are drying up, and leads proving fruitless. The first golden twenty-four hours are well and truly over and we all become painfully aware that the chance of finding Anita alive are gradually draining away down the plughole. Claire and I were the only officers with a viable lead, and there was nothing yet that we could do about it. However, it did occur to me that as the other leads petered out, what we had to offer started to look quite good by comparison.