Mansell was walking close enough to Riley that their shoulders crashed together every few seconds, and even he could barely hear what she was saying. It seemed as if the stairs had grown louder, the thunder-rush of a storm-sea which had risen to drag them all away.
"I just don't see how he could be anywhere but on this floor," Riley half-shouted, wincing as her movement caused a sound like nails down a blackboard. "Just listen to that."
Waiting for Buchan's inevitable doom-filled proclamation, Mansell almost missed a step and barely saved himself from falling upwards onto the first landing. Whatever prophecy of destruction was brewing in the historian's head stayed there, unusually, and he was grateful for that.
"Where should we start?" he asked, because they wouldn't find Kent if all they did was spout various theories about how he could possibly have gone missing. And once they found him, he would be able to tell them.
"Kent's room," Riley decided, offering them both a grim smile. "Might be something that the boss didn't see. Hopefully Kent."
A few more seconds, and that hope was dashed on the rocks like a rowing boat in a tsunami. In Mansell's opinion, there had never been a room as empty of evidence, in the history of both rooms and evidence, as this one. Maybe Buchan could have confirmed it.
"Looks like he only moved in five minutes ago," he muttered disgustedly. His own room was a mess, though Kent's was more empty than tidy. He glanced through the door into the bathroom, and found a lack of either Kent or anything that might be useful in finding him. It was too bright in there to be so useless, the white-clean porcelain of everything gleaming in the mirror and striking up the beginnings of a headache in the back of his skull.
Mansell turned back into the main room in time to see Buchan straightening from checking under the bed, and resisted the impulse to snap.
"He doesn't appear to be here," the historian announced, voice the same timbre as that of a tour guide. "Shall we move on?"
Mansell led the way out, glancing at Riley and wondering if he should offer her some sort of raised-eyebrow-and-smirk combination at the prospect of looking for Kent in the boss' room. After all, acting as if everything was normal might make the situation feel a little better, somehow.
She was looking past him, and then the door handle was turning under his hand and it was too late.
There was no sign there, anyway. And Mansell could feel the fear starting to stir, fear that felt like the empty space at McCormack's desk.
Across the hallway, Buchan's room. The historian had brought more books than could possibly be healthy, but there was no sign, and he could see the slump he could feel in his own shoulders sloping into the others'. The creases etching deeper into their foreheads with each place they found empty.
"Erica's going to kill me," Mansell found himself muttering as they turned towards the last door, breathing out hard through his nose.
"Not if whatever took DC Kent gets you first," Buchan said, his eyes as wide as if all the lights had been switched off. Mansell doubted that he had meant it to be comforting.
"Shut up," Mansell snapped, knocking on the skipper's door with a little more force than necessary. He could feel Riley's gaze on him, questioning. He hadn't knocked on the others, he knew, but somehow he hoped that if he did something differently, the end result would be different, too. "Kent!"
There was no answer, and the silence stretched as if on a rack. But Mansell, immobilised by his need for a response, couldn't move to break free of the waiting, and it was Riley who shoved past him to open the door.
Mansell trailed after her, his eyes on the ground. He knew what they would find, but the stupid desperate hope inside his head fluttered anyway, a moth, and he if he looked up and confirmed the nothing that he knew was there, it would be as if it had flown into an open flame.
No one said that there was no sign, but he could tell it from the tone of the silence. He tried to turn his listening downwards, deciding that Chandler and Miles were about to call up that they had found Kent. He imagined the way that their voices would sound, muffled but audible, the noise of their feet on the stairs as they rushed down, steps lighter than before.
It had to be imagined, because he wasn't about to hear it.
"To the next floor, then?" Buchan said softly, breaking the quiet into shards. "We have two more to go, after all."
Two more, Mansell repeated to himself. Kent would be on one of them, and he would be alive. Riley would hug him, and then she would slap him upside the head for worrying them. He would act like he'd never even been concerned, and the boss wouldn't have that frantic look in his eyes any longer.
The sound of Riley's feet on the stairs shattered his illusion, and he had to force himself to move through the real world again.
"We would have heard him," she repeated, almost to herself. "There's no way we wouldn't have."
"It's like he just vanished into thin air," the historian said hesitantly, offering her a mournful glance. "Even with someone in the walls, there would surely have been signs of a struggle. There would have been something."
"We'll find him," Mansell said, because one of them needed to keep saying it. "And he'll be fine."
"If he was fine, don't you think that he would have come to find us and tell us that himself?" Buchan retorted, the tone of his voice suggesting that he hated the holes he was picking, but felt that they needed to be picked. "I'm not trying to be the voice of doom –"
Really? Mansell thought. But you're so good at it.
"– but someone needs to say it."
They turned onto the second floor, and Mansell strode ahead to open his door, then wasn't sure what to do with the extra time. Perhaps he had assumed that the ten seconds before Riley and Buchan joined him would be sufficient to tidy his room into something vaguely acceptable.
It wasn't.
"How did you manage to do this, when we've only been here three days?" Riley enquired, and he wondered if he should shoot her a glare and mutter something about there being a time and a place for a commentary on his lack of cleanliness.
"It's not so bad," he retorted instead, because the anxious pull to her face knew exactly what was happening. "You can see the floor." But not Kent. Not Kent, because he's not here. He isn't anywhere.
"As much as it would be scientifically interesting to stay here and study what is no-doubt a thriving colony of bacteria," Buchan said, hovering in the doorway as if he wasn't quite brave enough to step inside. "Should we check the next room?"
"You mean, my room?" Riley muttered, and Mansell would have given her a significant glance, if Kent hadn't been missing.
All the same, he was grateful to shut his own door behind him. As the others headed over to her room, he found himself looking across the hall, and wondering how many other places they had to search, given that the doors across from them were locked.
He was still wondering, trying to hide from the answer that his mind had found, when Riley and Buchan left her room, and Buchan immediately hurried over to the first of the unoccupied ones. Mansell opened his mouth to stop the historian from wasting his time.
"That's – "
The handle turned under Buchan's hand and the door opened inward.
"– locked," Mansell finished, exchanging confused glances with Riley.
"Aren't you going to join me?" Buchan called from inside the unoccupied room.
Mansell and Riley tried to go through the door simultaneously, and their shoulders impacted, Mansell stumbling off sideways as she overtook him and then hurrying after her.
Mansell didn't know what he'd been expecting. The room was almost completely empty – it made Kent's look as bad as his. No sheets on the bed, no one under the bed, just a room with the minimum fittings and barely any dust.
"I could have sworn they were both locked," Mansell said, and Riley nodded, looking more than a little disconcerted.
"Why would anyone have unlocked the doors?" she demanded, as Buchan checked the bathroom.
"I think the question is who unlocked the doors," Mansell told her, and her face twisted, troubled.
"I didn't think there was anyone else here," Buchan said, emerging from the bathroom. "Other than us. Maybe you just turned the handles the wrong way?"
"Maybe," Riley said, but she didn't sound convinced. Mansell supposed that they could talk about that after they had found Kent. Maybe their absent colleague would have some answers.
"He's not here," Mansell pointed out, unable to think of it as one room closer to the one where he was any longer. Not when it felt like there was suddenly a possibility for him to be in none of them. "Next room."
They were out in the hall, pausing for Buchan to shut the door behind them, when he heard it. A clattering from the floor above, like dominoes falling, followed by a wave-break crash.
"Did you hear that?" Riley asked, a frown twisting her face.
Mansell was running almost before his brain had computed the positive answer for her, the stairs shrieking at his passing, a slam like a car crash snapping against his ears as his feet hit the upper landing. He barely heard Riley and Buchan shouting after him amongst the noise, but he didn't look back, there wasn't time for him to look back. Not when one of the doors along the hall was slightly ajar, promises leaking out like the end of Pandora's Box. He ran for it, half-expecting it to slam shut and lock in front of his eyes, hope shuddering in his throat, a desperate excitement that wouldn't let him breathe, no matter how much he knew that he needed to.
Even with his sprint, it felt as if he would never reach the door. It was too far away and far too important.
Then his hand grazed at the whorled wood of the its panels, and he shoved it wide.
The room beyond was almost completely empty. No furniture, just a wooden floor scarred as if by acne. And, curled on the far side with his back to the door, Detective Constable Emerson Kent.
A/N - So, I did mean to get this one up on Friday, but in my defence I had new Friday lectures and failed to time-manage. If it helps, I am also about ten thousand words behind on my NaNo. I don't know why it would help, but there we go. I'll try and put the next one up before the end of the day because otherwise I'll owe you a chapter and my schedule will get confusing.
