The chiller is a room the size of a house kept at two degrees, and the door logs every badge in and out because a person locked in it is dead by morning. Every night a badge goes in at half past two. It does not come out. The chiller's temperature log, which is flat all night, shows a small rise when the door opens and then a slow fall back to two over about three hours, which is what a body does in there.
I am the night hygiene lead at a food distribution warehouse and the chiller is the room I am responsible for.
The chiller.
A room about the size of a house. Two degrees. Racking on three walls, pallets of chilled goods going through it at a rate. A heavy door with a badge reader on both sides, because the door locks and a person inside with a dead badge would be a body by the time the day shift came, and that is not a thing I am saying for effect.
The temperature is logged every minute to a tenth of a degree, for the food standards people.
The log.
Half past two. Door open, badge in. The badge is one of ours, an old format, no name against it. Door closed. No badge out.
The temperature: two degrees, flat, then at half past two a rise of about half a degree, which is the door, and then, instead of the quick fall back to two that a door opening gives, a slow fall. Three hours, a curve, the shape a warm thing makes cooling in a cold room. I have put a bucket of water at body temperature in there and logged it and the curve is the same.
Something at body temperature goes into the chiller at half past two and is at two degrees by half past five.
What has been checked.
The badge reader, replaced. The badge is read.
The chiller, walked, by me, at three, at four, at five. Pallets. Racking. The fans. Nothing in it that should not be. The camera inside, which shows the door open at half past two on nobody, and close, and the room empty for three hours.
The curve. Every night. I have stopped doubting the curve. A curve is a thing in the world.
Where in the room.
The chiller has four temperature probes, one in each corner, and the logger averages them. I split them out. The rise at half past two is on one probe, the back left, the corner behind the last rack, where there is a gap between the racking and the wall that a person can get into if they turn sideways, which is where a person would go if they wanted to be out of the way of a forklift.
The cooling curve is on that probe. The other three are flat.
I have been into that gap with a torch at three in the morning, and it is empty, and it is colder than the rest of the room, which is backwards, because the probe there says it is warmer, and I stood in it with the torch and the probe on my phone reading the cooling curve at about twenty degrees and the air on my face was the coldest in the building.
Who.
I did not have to ask. I looked at the incident file, which goes back to the building, and in 2009 a man on the agency night shift had gone into the chiller to get out of the way of a forklift in the aisle, and the door had closed, and his badge had been an old one that the inside reader did not take, and he had been found at six in the gap behind the back left rack, sideways, where he had gone to be out of the way, and the file had the temperature log for that night attached, and the curve on it is the curve.
It is his curve. Every night, on the same probe, he cools.
What is done about it.
The badge is blocked. It reads anyway. The inside reader has been replaced with one that takes any badge, any format, including his, so that if he presses it the door will open.
The log says he never presses it. The door never opens from inside.
What I do.
I run hygiene on nights.
I have started going in at a quarter to three. I open the door from outside and I prop it, which is against every rule I have, and I stand in it, and I say, into the chiller, to the back left corner, that the door is open.
The curve still falls. He does not come out. I did not really think he would: a man in the dark in two degrees who has found the one place he will not be hit does not leave it because a voice tells him to.
But the probe in the back left reads a tenth of a degree warmer, on the nights I do it, at the end of the three hours, than on the nights I do not. I have checked it over a month. It is a tenth. I will take a tenth. I will stand in a propped door in a cold room every night at a quarter to three for a tenth of a degree on a man who has been cooling since 2009, and I would like it on record that I know how that sounds.