Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Meridian Tower ·
Headcount at the Third Bell
The fire alarm at Meridian Tower sounds without a trigger. The staff assemble, are counted, and go back in. The count is one too many, and one of the names is a friend.
- filed: The Monday after the warning bell, by the tower's senior fire warden
- reference: Incident bundle MT/FD/03-11
Subject: Unscheduleable alarm, Meridian Tower, floors 2 through 11. Assembled headcount discrepancy, +1. Filed by the senior warden for the tower, T. Achebe, with the fire liaison clerk, Meridian Hall.
1. Summary. At 11:11 on the fourteenth, the tower's warning bell rang through all floors, first bell, second bell, third bell, in the three-stroke pattern of a full evacuation. No drill had been gazetted for the month. The plant book shows no trigger, no fault light, and no test in the log for that quarter. Occupants filed out by the staircases and assembled on the west lawn in the manner taught. The assembling was orderly and no person was harmed, and it is not the evacuation that is filed about.
2. Roll taken on the lawn. I took the roll myself, as I have taken it eleven times a year for nine years, against the tenancy lists held by Meridian Hall. Present on the lawn: sixty-four. The roll for the tower that morning, after subtracting leave and the three out on the ferries, was sixty-four. I marked the roll affirmed. The lawn was then cleared and certificates of assembly issued along the railings as is the custom, and the standing order was given to return.
3. Count on re-entry. On re-entering at the Marsh Road turnstiles I counted the passing staff on the clicker, as standing orders require. The clicker read sixty-five. I recounted. Sixty-five. I sent the second warden to the far turnstile to count independently. Sixty-five. On the lawn twenty minutes before, sixty-four people had stood on the wet grass, and sixty-four people had walked in, and sixty-five people are employed in the building as of that hour.
4. The difference. I did what the forms provide for and asked each person to say their name for the adjusted roll. All names were known to me; I have worked with most of the staff six years and the remainder for longer. No name was strange. One name gave the following pause and it is the pause that this bundle exists to record: an old friend from the year I was seconded to Meridian Hall, whose face I have known since factory canteen days and whose place of work I could not at that hour have sworn to. I asked where they had been sitting. Fifth floor, they said. It has always been like this, they said, with a whole smile, and carried on to the lift.
5. Small differences logged upon return. For completeness: the corridor outside the fifth-floor reprographics room now turns left where the plan on the noticeboard shows it turning right; the lift announces the floors in the order nine, eight, ten, which the lift engineer describes as "within tolerance"; the surname of one estimator in the third-floor bay is spelled now with a double letter where the tenancy list spells it with one. All of this was accepted, as far as I could observe, within the working day. A man in the fourth-floor bay who had been twenty-two years with the firm said only, "You know how plans drift."
6. What I cannot explain, and wish minuted as such. The plant log shows no alarm. The bell sounded. Sixty-four people heard it, including me, and stood on the lawn and were counted; and the building's own book of record, kept line by line by the caretaker and countersigned by Meridian Hall, has a clean page for 11:11 on the fourteenth, and a note in the caretaker's hand which he does not remember making: "third bell — count the heads."
7. Rolls since. The morning rolls for the tower since the fourteenth have carried sixty-five affirmations every day, and the tenancy list at Meridian Hall has been out to have its arithmetic amended twice by the paymaster, who withdraws his amendment each time on reading the schedules. Leavers have left; the count does not fall. New staff have been engaged; the count does not rise.
8. Outstanding for the fire liaison clerk, Meridian Hall. I file open. I have no form for the sixty-fifth affirmation and no evidence to place any person at any desk on the fourteenth beyond the ordinary. The roll is affirmed; I am the warden. I count the heads. I have begun to notice, now I look properly each morning, that the one I cannot place is always pleasant, always on time, and always, when the bell is being mended on the landing as it is this week, the first out of the door; and I would like minuted in the bundle that this is not an accusation against any person, and that my question is only this: whose count are we the one too many in?