At times he almost suspected that she was deliberately exhausting herself, and that the bruises on her wrists and knees were part of an elaborate system of conscious self-mutilation, an attempt to win back her husband—each day when he returned home he half expected to find her in an invalid chair, legs broken and trepan bandage around her shaven

The dominant tenants of the high-rise, Laing reflected, those who had adapted most successfully to life there, were not the unruly airline pilots and film technicians from the lower floors, nor the bad-tempered and aggressive wives of the well-to-do tax specialists on the upper levels. Although at first sight these people appeared to provoke all

Listening to the animated conversations around him, he was struck by the full extent of the antagonism being expressed, the hostility directed at people who lived in other sections of the high-rise. The malicious humour, the eagerness to believe any piece of gossip and any tall story about the shiftlessness of the lower-floor tenants, or the

Without his make-up, the expression of outrage on his face made Crosland resemble an announcer tricked for the first time into reading an item of bad news about himself.

The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air-conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electrical switching systems provided a never-failing supply of care and attention that a century earlier would have needed an army of

Giving up, Laing stood to one side. He watched as the shocked young woman stumbled into the mouth of this eager gauntlet and was pummelled through a circuit of fists before she was allowed to disappear into the stairwell. His reflex of chivalry and good sense had been no match for this posse of middle-aged avenging angels.

In an absurd moment of panic he wondered if he himself was the victim.

This was followed by a spate of reports that many residents had returned home to find their apartments ransacked, furniture and kitchen equipment damaged, electrical fittings torn out. Oddly enough, no food supplies had been touched, as if these acts of vandalism were deliberately random and meaningless. Had the damage been inflicted by the owners

Part of the control panel had been damaged in an obvious attempt to prevent the lower floors signalling the car.