A rubbish book, in a month

Days Twenty-Five to Twenty-Seven: 3,694 words

2007-11-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

He was beginning to get a bit hacked off, frankly. Although he was sure that Susan hadn’t meant to get embroiled in a web of intrigue, murder, gun-wielding bankers and Napoleonic furniture, at least she had the small consolation that the furniture in question was – if not actually hers – probably going to earn her a fairly sizeable reward when it was returned to the Jarrold Collection. In the meantime, however, he had lost his job, his car wasn’t working, he would probably have to move out of his flat due to lack of money, and to top it all off he had a slight pain in his shoulder where he’d been wrestling with the van. Maybe the others had been too busy, shocked, or worried to ask him how he felt, but if they had asked him, he would have probably been honest and said he felt pretty shit, really, all things considered. He had been the one who’d hired the van, and – at least for now – paid for it, with money he didn’t have on a credit card he should never have taken out, as for a while now it had been bucking under the weight of the bills, meals, one month’s rent, and games for the Playstation that he’d put on it. And he would be the one they’d come running after asking for the money to replace the van – which was probably, what, fifteen grand or something? Add to that the almost certain fact that he would never be able to be insured on any vehicle ever again, and things weren’t really looking up. He entered the maze, for the second time in two days, with a certain malaise and his head in a haze, and followed the sounds of the other two.

“Come on,” Susan called urgently from further ahead. “We don’t have time to mess around.”

“I’m coming as fast as I can,” Paul said crossly. “How do you know your way through here without a map, anyway?”

“I don’t,” Susan replied from the other side of the hedge. “That’s why we need you to catch up.”

He rounded the hedge at the far end and almost ran into them. “We took a wrong turn, I think,” Susan puffed. “I think it’s this way, but can we look at the map?”

Paul brought the tiny map up on his phone again. “We’ll have to be careful how much we use this,” he cautioned, “I haven’t charged the battery in two days – it’s running down, look.”

Susan didn’t reply; she was studying the map. “OK,” she said finally. “I think it’s this way.” She set off, followed by Xavier, who seemed to be in a daze: understandably, perhaps, given that he had just seen an old friend of his shot dead. “Hey, Susan,” Paul called, in an urgent half-whisper, as she charged ahead.

“What,” she called back.

“Can I remind you that the only reason we’re here is because of that maniac shooting at us. I think we may have managed to lose him, what with your daredevil car-jack stunt. We’ve certainly lost our only means of getting out of here alive, now we don’t have a van –”

“I’m sure we’ll find a golf buggy if we’re desperate,” she puffed, jogging.

“That against a BMW is even worse than a bloody Transit,” Paul pointed out. “The fact is, though, if he’s still chasing us he’ll have had to run up the drive, and he didn’t look fit. But he does know the layout of the house. So can we stop a minute,” he added, an agonised look on his face as he came to a halt, doubled over and put his hands on his knees for a few moments, breathing heavily, “and come up with a plan?”

Susan stopped, ten yards ahead. Xavier almost ran into her.

“Are you all right?” she asked him, noticing for the first time, properly, how washed-out he looked.

“I…” Xavier seemed unable to speak, the colour drained even more than usual from his normally pale face. “I still can’t believe that – that Damien –”

Against all her expectations, Susan held out her arms and gave Xavier a big, comforting hug. At least, she hoped it might be comforting. “Nor can I,” she admitted. “Up until today I’d never actually even seen a gun, let alone had one… pointed at me…”

A tear appeared in one of Xavier’s eyes, slid down the side of his nose, and dissolved in his mouth. “He didn’t deserve that,” he said, his voice quavering. “Nobody does. I wish to God I’d never involved him.”

“How were you to know?” Susan asked, as Paul walked up, rubbing his shoulder. “If any of us had thought for a moment that Arbuthnot might go to those lengths, we’d have – I don’t know, gone to the police – earlier.” She looked at Paul for some backup.

“We need a plan,” he repeated flatly. “I’m getting pretty pissed off with being in this bloody maze all the bloody time, in the dark, with no idea what we’re doing.”

“We’ve got to hole up somewhere before we think of a plan,” Susan said reasonably. “If he’s still after us, he’s got a gun, and whether he’s going to get arrested or not, I’d rather be alive when he does. So let’s get to the middle, go underground, and find somewhere we can hide for a couple of hours or something until we know the coast’s clear.”

“Are you sure the cabinets are safe?”

“How the hell should I know, Paul?” Susan said. “Stop asking me all these questions. At the moment I couldn’t care less about them, frankly, I’m just trying to get us out of here alive.”

They pressed on, not saying much, and presently got to the corridor with the bridge going over the top of it. They were having to lead Xavier a bit by this point; he still seemed shell-shocked, and Susan was trying to chivvy him along as gently as she could, knowing that if they stopped he would probably not be able to carry on. Several times, Paul hung back a bit and slowed down, listening for any sounds from Arbuthnot; but he couldn’t hear anything, and after a few times of doing that satisfied himself that they weren’t being followed.

“Right,” Susan said to Xavier, trying to keep his spirits up, “it’s just round the corner at the end, and we’re pretty much there.”

“Must we continue?” Xavier implored. “Somebody has been killed, which is illegal, by a handgun – which is also illegal. In a public place, too. The police will be combing the scene now, there’ll be a murder inquiry, TV appeals and reconstructions on Crimewatch. We’ll be implicated. The more we run, the more guilty we’ll look. We should go to them immediately, offer ourselves up as witnesses, and stop running away.”

“I don’t think he’s following us,” Paul concurred. “Xavier may be right.”

“I want to be sure,” Susan persisted. “At least we know that once we’re in the cellars, it’s pretty secure. I don’t think Arbuthnot would know the code on the pagoda door.”

“You’re not thinking straight,” Paul said. “Xavier’s right. The more we run, the guiltier we look, until we look so guilty that they’ll take us in anyway. It’s been a couple of hours since the shooting, and it’s impossible that it won’t have been discovered by now.”

“Well, OK,” Susan said forcefully, “whatever you say, Paul. I agree, we don’t want to be implicated. But at the same time, we’ve first got to get past a banker with murderous intentions. And as you said earlier, it hardly looks innocent of us to have trashed the van, does it? It’s got bullet holes in it that will match Arbuthnot’s gun, and we’ve also probably damaged the house when we crashed the van into it.”

Paul sighed. “Look, I just don’t want to get us in the shit,” he said wearily, running his hands through his hair. “Any more than we already are, that is.”

“How about a compromise, then,” Susan suggested. “We get into the pagoda, then at least we know we’re safe if Arbuthnot is following us. Then we call the police, tell them where we are, and meet them outside the maze or something.”

Paul considered this. “Xavier? What do you think?”

Xavier also considered this. “Is there somewhere in the pagoda that I can sit down?” he asked.

“I think there’s a bench just outside it,” Paul offered, “if that’s any good.”

“Well, then,” Xavier relented, “that’s OK by me.”

Five minutes later, they rounded the corner by the bridge, which was silhouetted eerily in the full moonlight, crossed over the hedgerows into the central eye with the pagoda in it, and caught sight of a body.

For a few moments, they froze where they were. It was difficult to tell who it was; the figure was lying in the shadow of one of the hedges and wearing dark clothes, and none of them felt willing to approach it. The shooting earlier had been a sort of overload for Susan and Paul, at least, neither of whom had seen a dead body before, and to have to deal with another one within the space of a couple of hours was almost too much. It was Paul, finally, who gingerly tiptoed down the steps towards the prone figure, gave it a gentle prod with his foot to confirm it was dead, and bent over to see who it was.

He straightened up. “I think it’s Thimble,” he said, ashen-faced.

“Oh shit,” Xavier mumbled.

“Right,” Susan said. “We phone the police right now, before things get any more complicated.”

Forty minutes later, the three of them sat in the back of a police van, not speaking, as it hurtled them towards Eastwestchester police station.

It was not a very pleasant evening. They were interviewed, one after another, by a police sergeant who seemed to have already made up his mind that they were guilty. The only coffee that was available was utterly disgusting and served in a plastic cup from a dispenser that looked like it had been there for twenty years, and it did nothing to staunch Susan’s cravings for caffeine. Paul tried to keep calm, but got irritable when it was suggested in his interview that he was guilty of the murder of much-loved local antiques expert Damien Casablanca; because he felt so innocent, and yet so flustered, he was on the back foot and ended up overjustifying things and probably sounding more guilty. Why was it so hard to remain calm in circumstances like this?

“I didn’t do it,” he spluttered. “None of us were involved at all – I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” and he described the sequence of events, as far as he could remember them. He could feel the policeman’s eyes boring into his skull as he recounted Arbuthnot’s sudden appearance from behind his car, their headlong dash to escape, and the reason why they’d ended up wrecking an otherwise perfectly usable van against the wall of Opocapopopoulos House.

“So why did you throw a car jack at Mr Arbuthnot’s car?” the policeman asked. “Would you not say that that was rather a dangerous thing to do?”

“That wasn’t my idea,” Paul admitted. “We were in a Transit van, and he was in a BMW. He’d have overtaken us at the first available opportunity, so we felt we had to do something to – to stop him.” He stopped uncertainly. “Don’t look at me like that,” he pleaded.

“What do you mean, ‘like that’? I’m just looking at you,” the policeman said levelly. His name was Yarrow, in case you were wondering. “I’m just trying to find out why it is that we’ve got two dead bodies, a wrecked van, and the only people who have guilt written all over their faces are you three.”

“Three dead bodies,” Paul reminded him, “if you count –” he had to stop himself from saying “Bartholomew” – “Mr Opocapopopoulos.”

“His is a separate case,” Yarrow said dismissively. “We don’t think there’s any reason to connect his death to these two. Can we get back to the point? We were just trying to find out why you fled the scene of a crime if you aren’t guilty of it.”

“We weren’t fleeing the scene of a crime,” Paul said indignantly, “we were running away from a lunatic with a gun. Who had just shot someone in cold blood. Have you arrested him, by the way?”

“Arrested who?”

“Algernon Arbuthnot, of course,” Paul said, perplexed. “The one with the gun, remember?”

“There’s no proof Arbuthnot even had a gun, let alone tried to shoot you,” Yarrow said flatly. “All I’ve got to go on is your statement. Which doesn’t tie in at all well with Arbuthnot’s reputation as a highly-respected, successful business leader.”

“But –” Paul was beginning to think he’d gone mad. “I saw him there. We all did!”

“Yes, you’ve obviously concocted a very convincing story,” Yarrow said sarcastically. “Yet if you look at it, you’ve got far more of a reason to shoot Mr Casablanca, since he was the one who’d told you the cabinets your sister inherited were stolen.”

“Hang on,” Paul interjected. “We were perfectly OK with that. We’d gone down to the Jarrold Collection so that we could meet up with the museum director and arrange to give these cabinets back. We didn’t, for a moment, feel any bitterness towards Casablanca at all. Xavier – Mr Franks – had known Mr Casablanca for years, and as you can see he’s pretty shaken up about his death –”

“An overwhelming proportion of murders are committed by someone who knows the deceased,” Yarrow cut in. “Just because your uncle knew Mr Casablanca is no reason for him not to be killed by him.”

“None of us carry guns,” Paul protested weakly, “or ever have. Or would even know where to get one if we wanted one, which we don’t.”

“Your uncle professes an interest in the occult, though, doesn’t he?” the policeman mused. “He’s cropped up on the old radar a few times.” He frisbeed a few sheets of paper towards Paul; they were photocopied news articles from the local paper, mainly about local residents complaining about Xavier’s activities.

“These are from years ago,” Paul frowned, studying them. “He hasn’t had his hair like that since his early thirties.”

“Nevertheless,” Yarrow said. “I think this is anything but a clear-cut case. On the one hand, we have the three of you: speeding, causing reckless criminal damage to a hired vehicle, driving dangerously, endangering the lives of others, fleeing the scene of a crime, damaging property, trespassing, etcetera etcetera. On the other hand, we have Mr Arbuthnot, a pillar of the community, whose posh car is a write-off due to your actions, and who is currently too shaken up to talk about what happened.”

“And what about the gun, then?” Paul spluttered. “You’re not denying that a gun was used to shoot Mr Casablanca in the head, presumably. Have you found it?”

“Not yet,” Yarrow said, “but we will be searching your and Miss Franks’ property in due course.”

“Hang on,” Paul said, “if you’re searching our homes, are you doing the same to Mr Arbuthnot’s?”

“We will,” Yarrow said smoothly, “as soon as we can find the money, and do the paperwork, to travel to all of Mr Arbuthnot’s properties, which are located in the Canary Islands, Monaco, New York, London and Ipswitch.”

“So, the upshot of that is…?” Paul said. “You’re going to let a rich man walk free, but just because you can investigate us, because it’s cheap, you will?”

“We will do whatever we can,” Yarrow said, “to bring this investigation to a speedy close.” There was a pause while he and Paul looked at each other. “Interview ends,” he said, and stopped the cassette recorder.

Outside, Susan had been sitting next to Xavier, nursing her plastic cup of shit coffee. Xavier was still not saying much, so after a period of trying to cajole him into better spirits, she’d given up and resorted to staring at the wall, until the man sitting in the hard plastic chair opposite her had interrupted her thoughts.

“What’re you in here for, then?”

“Oh,” Susan began, and then decided not to go into it. “We had our car stolen,” she said. “How about you?”

“Oh, mine is a woeful story, an’ no mistake,” began the other. “Up ’til recently, I enjoyed a wondeful lifestyle, truly wonderful. I drove a number of fine cars around the country – around the world, in fact. I worked for a lovely gent, couldn’t have been a better man to work for. Then one day, I come back, and find ’im gawn. I mean, I was expectin’ to find him one place, and he was somewhere else. Mr Opoca – Opopopo – Ocadopop –”

Susan leaned forward in her chair. “Opocapopopoulos?” she prompted in an urgent voice.

“Yeah, that’s ’im,” said the other man. “Not a name I ever found easy to say, and I certainly never bloody learned to spell it. You know ’im, then?”

Susan resisted the urge to be truthful. “Well, you can hardly avoid the name,” she said, trying to paper over the lie with a half-laugh. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Cabin,” said the man. “Orson Cabin. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss –” “Franks,” Susan replied, shaking his hand guardedly. “Susan Franks. Go on? You were saying –”

“Yeah,” Cabin said, withdrawing a large handkerchief from his top pocket and blowing his nose loudly, “Mr O goes an’ gets himself killed. I shit myself, I really did. I ran away for a few weeks to spend a bit o’ time with me mum, I was so worried about what might ’appen to me if I stayed.”

“Why?” Susan asked. “If you weren’t guilty?”

“I ain’t guilty,” Cabin protested. “I just din’t want the police to find out about the envelope ’e left me, that’s all. ’Course, finally, me mum persuades me to go to ’em anyway, see. I din’t hand meself in, but I went an’ tole the police, an’ that’s where me troubles started.”

“What’s in the envelope?” Susan asked innocently.

“Nuffin, now,” Cabin replied. “I din’t dare open it for ages ’cause I was so shocked at ’im dyin’, an’ that. But when I finally plucked up the courage… I was ’opin’ for some kinda bonus, but all there was was this photo of ’im and this other geeza, throwin’ money around in some kind of vault.”

“What?” Susan almost jumped out of her seat. “Who was the other guy?”

“Difficult to tell,” Cabin replied sadly, “but I reckon it was this Arbuthnot guy – Mr O’s mate from way back. I couldn’t work out why he’d left me something like that, though. An’ then,” he continued, oblivious to Susan’s sudden interest in his story, “I tell Fil about it, an’ next thing I know, he’s askin’ if he can have it. Well, of course, I said no. It’s bin left to me, so why should Fil take it? I felt sure Mr O would’ve left Fil something, too – very fair, he was,” he added, misty-eyed. “Very fair. But you know what – one day I get back from doin’ the shoppin’ – I was stayin’ at me mum’s at this point, you know, couldn’t face goin’ back to live in the flat on the estate – and it’s gone. Turns out Fil had turned up, an’ talked me mum into givin’ him the photo! God only knows what he wanted with it, why it was so blinkin’ urgent that he had it. Anyway, I ’ad a right go at me mum, as you can imagine, called ’er every name under the sun. I didn’t hit her, mind,” he continued, “of course I din’t, but it was a bit of a blow, I can tell you, cos I held Mr O in high regard, and I respected him a lot. He was a great man. I jumped in the Rolls I’d borrowed from ’is garage – I tell you, they ain’t ’alf a bugger to fill up, cost me damn near a hundred quid just to get into town – and went over to Fil’s flat to try to talk ’im into givin’ me back the photo, but ’e wasn’t there. I ’ad to force the door a bit, but to be honest we used to do that quite a lot – we worked closely with each other, see, an’ I ’ad to get in his flat sometimes when I din’t ’ave a key. Then tonight, they find him – they find ’im –” He stopped, and blew his nose on the handkerchief again, seemingly unable to carry on. “They find ’im dead, in the middle of the maze,” he said finally, in a despondent whisper. “An’ the next fing I know, I’m being rounded up and bein’ brung ’ere. They tell me I’m under suspicion of ’is death, just ’cos I knew ’im. I’d never ’ave killed him, never!” He broke down, sobbing into the handkerchief. Susan reached forward and patted him on the arm.

“Don’t worry,” she said soothingly. “If you’ve got nothing to do with it, you’re fine – they can’t convict you of anything if there’s no evidence.”

Just then, Paul burst out of the interview room, in a foul mood. “They’re telling me they think we had something to do with Damien’s death,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

“The truth,” Susan said truthfully. “We’ve got nothing to hide. Xavier said exactly the same, as far as I know.”

Paul looked at Xavier, who had nodded off. “They’ve said we can go, for now,” he said. “But they’ve got more they want to ask us tomorrow. Are you busy?”

“Well, I’ve got some reading I need to do,” said Susan. “But look, I need to tell you something.”

And she led Paul into the yard outside the door of the police station, and told him what she’d just heard.

Day Twenty-Four: 1,873 words

2007-11-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

“You could have warned us,” yelled Susan above the screaming noise coming from the van’s engine, “that Arbuthnot was a bloody gun-wielding psychopath.”

“How was I to know?” Xavier shouted back. “That’s not his style – usually he gets other people to do his dirty work for him.”

“I didn’t come here,” Susan bellowed, “to get shot at. I don’t go anywhere to get shot at, actually.”

“Is he following us?” Paul yelled, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

“I can’t see any lights…” Susan craned forward to see out of the wing mirror. “I think that’s a motorbike behind us. Where are we going?”

“Where else can we go?” Paul roared. “Opocapopopoulos House. There might at least be people there, so he’d think twice about shooting at us.”

“I don’t think he’ll follow us anywhere,” Xavier said, a bit more quietly. He was clearly shaken. “He almost certainly didn’t mean to – to kill Damien. I think the lights and the noise must have taken him by surprise. He isn’t the sort to usually use guns.”

“Well, neither am I, which means I don’t,” Paul said bluntly. “I wouldn’t even know where to get hold of one. What the hell must be in that photo for him to be so worried about it?”

“And what’s happened to Thimble? How come he found out about Thimble sticking the photo in there?” Susan wondered out loud.

“I dread to think,” Xavier said. “I’ve only heard about Thimble from the paper and what you’ve told me about your exploits in the maze, and he seems like he’s been trapped between a rock and a hard place.”

“Do you think that Damien would have told Arbuthnot where the cabinets are?” Susan said suddenly.

“It’s possible,” Xavier said. “I had always thought that Damien was the soul of discretion, but it seems that Arbuthnot must have –”

“He saved us,” Paul shot back. “He actually just died for us, even if he didn’t mean to. Whatever he told that crazy bastard back there, he must have felt extremely guilty for it.”

Susan, looking in the wing mirror at the road behind, said, “Whatever it is, that light seems to be gaining on us.”

Paul glanced in the mirror. “I can’t see anything.”

“It must be over my side –” Susan began. “Shit. It’s Arbuthnot. I think we must have broken one of his headlights. How fast are we going?”

Paul looked at the speedometer. “Fifty miles an hour,” he said. “It’s limited, I think.”

“So it’s a safe bet that he can go faster than we can,” Susan said slowly.

“He’s driving a turbocharged BMW six-series with a 4.7-litre engine,” Paul said slowly for Susan’s benefit; he knew she didn’t know a thing about cars, whereas he made a point of watching Top Gear every Sunday. “The only reason he’s not overtaking us is because the road’s too narrow and twisty. Otherwise, we’d be fucked.”

“It widens when you get inside the grounds,” Susan pointed out. “The driveway’s easily wide enough to fit two cars down.”

“Fine, then,” Paul snapped. “If you’ve got a better suggestion –”

Susan was silent for a few moments, then had an idea. She began unbuckling her seatbelt.

“What are you doing?” Paul asked. “This isn’t one of your stupid ideas, is it? Because now probably isn’t the time to have one.”

“I won’t know if it’s stupid,” Susan said resolutely, “until I try it. Try to drive as smoothly as you can.”

“Where are you going?”

Susan twisted round in her seat until she was kneeling on it facing backwards. “Help me over here,” she said to Xavier, who supported one of her shins as she clambered into the back of the van; there wasn’t much space between the top of the seats and the roof, so she ended up having to do a sort of handstand. “What does a car jack look like?” she asked, straightening up.

“There are lots of types –” Xavier began. She waved a metal object in his face. “Is this one?”

“Yes.”

“Will we need it?”

“I think there was a clause in the contract about –”

“Well,” Susan interrupted, “tough shit.” She rooted around the back of the van – it was mostly empty, but there were a few odds and ends in it – until she found a couple of long strap things that the hire company had left in there to enable people to lash large items to the side of the van. Wrapping one of them around her waist, looping it through one of the metal struts near the rear doors and buckling it loosely, she took the car jack firmly in one hand and held onto the door with the other.

“Right,” she called. “Can you see him?”

Paul checked. “Yeah, he’s still right behind us,” he confirmed. “What are you –”

In one swift movement, Susan opened one of the back doors, and heaved the jack straight at Arbuthnot’s windscreen. It hit slightly off-centre, instantly turning the glass to a crazed, opaque mosaic of shards, and causing Arbuthnot to brake sharply. The rear wheels skidded a little, but the car came quickly to a halt as Susan slammed the door shut again, ducked, and shouted, “Keep down!” just as another bullet punched through the upper half of the door and exited via the van’s roof.

“We are going to have so much trouble getting the deposit back,” Paul shouted, as Susan unbuckled herself and tottered towards the front seats against the bucking motion of the van, as they rounded the corner at the bottom of the drive leading up to Opocapopopoulos House.

“What do we do about the guard?” Susan reminded Paul. “We can’t really stop and sweet-talk him this time, I doubt that will stop Arbuthnot for very long.”

“I’m going to chance it,” Paul replied, “and drive through. I think the gate’s open, look.”

He was right: the lone guard stood silhouetted between the gateposts, hands behind his back, looking bored and slouched. As the van drove towards him he noticed it and held out his hand, but once he could see it showed no signs of slowing down he ran to the guard’s hut. He had obviously pressed something, because the gates started to close; Paul revved the engine and changed down a gear as the van screamed up the hill.

“We’re not gonna make it –” Susan yelped, somewhat uncharacteristically for her.

But they reached the gates just in time: Paul aimed right for the middle of the gap, there was a screech of grinding metal as the heavy gates tore silver gashes down both sides of the van, and then they were through, with the closing gates receding into the darkness behind them.

“You know what,” Paul said, “I don’t give a shit about getting the deposit back now.”

“Head for the maze,” Susan suggested. “I doubt Arbuthnot will know his way through.”

Paul steered the now rather crippled van across the lawn, up an ornamental slope and round the orangery, stopping just short of the box hedge next to the maze. He turned the engine off, and all was silent.

“Now,” Susan said. “We’re a bit better prepared this time, I hope.”

They looked at each other.

“Well,” she tried, “at least Paul and I have been through the maze once. Between us I think we’ll be able to find our way around it again, and if we can’t there’s always the map on Paul’s phone.”

“And then what?” Xavier asked, somewhat wearily. “Don’t forget, Arbuthnot has been here quite a few times before. He knows the house very well, you won’t be able to escape from him if you try and hide in there.”

“Yes, but does he know the cellars as well as you do?”

“I’ve only been in them once,” Xavier reminded her, “and I was ten. I have no idea if he knows the cellars; it is probable. At the very least, his associates do… Kel and the others.”

“Well, it’s our only chance, I think,” Susan said. “Paul, what do you think?”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m doing here,” Paul replied, sounding suddenly tired. “What any of us are, in fact. I’ve gone from… from elatedly thinking we might get a reward which would pay my rent until I can get another job, to being shot at in a car park by a maniac. And now, for the second time in two nights, we’re contemplating navigating the world’s third largest hedge maze in pitch darkness, to end up – if we’re lucky – in a dungeon which has so far killed at least two people. Meanwhile, the police will be dusting Damien for fingerprints or evidence or whatever, and coming to find us – and if this van is anywhere near the maze, in they’ll go. With bulldozers, if they have to.”

The other two were silent for a few moments while they digested this. Paul was right: on the surface, at least, the odds didn’t look good.

“In that case,” Susan said, “we’ve got to get rid of the van.”

“Are you nuts?” Paul said forcefully. “A: where? And B: why? We’ll not only never get our deposit back, we’ll probably be arrested. Again.”

“We can explain later,” Susan protested. “We don’t have any time to lose – you’re right, the police will be showing up any minute now. We’ve got to get rid of the evidence.”

“Whatever,” Paul sighed irritably. “Where, then?”

Five minutes later, the van was primed and ready to go. Paul had found an ornamental stone plant pot that wasn’t too heavy to lift, had started the engine, and was crouched in the driver’s side with the door open.

“Ready?”

“Go for it,” Susan answered.

He plonked the plant pot on the accelerator, at the same time as he shifted the van into third gear and jumped backwards out of the way. The van jolted forwards, picking up speed as it headed for the moat, hit the lip of stone surrounding it, and launched itself briefly, its back wheels spinning on nothing in slow motion, into the air.

Then it hit the moat with a splash, bounced off the bottom, and socked into the wall on the far side, coming to rest next to the house with steam and smoke pouring from its shattered engine.

Paul doubled over, clenching his fists in his mouth, and screamed silent curses at the sky. He took a few moments to regain his composure enough to be able to speak, but finally took a deep breath and said, “I don’t have swearwords violent enough for this.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say that,” Susan remarked, breathing heavily as the adrenalin started to subside. “Come on. The sooner we’re in that maze, the better.”

She turned her back on the sorry wreck of the van, and headed for the maze the other side of the box hedge, followed by Xavier. Paul looked around for something he could take his anger out on by throwing it hard at something else, but couldn’t see anything, and so after some silent cursing under his breath stamped off in the same direction as the others.

Day Twenty-Three: 1,336 words

2007-11-22T16:05:00.000-08:00

The Jarrold Collection (“where art comes to life and life comes to the gift shop”) was based in the neighbouring town of Sprean, in the grounds of the former home of Charles Jarrold, who had made a fortune in the 1800s as an importer of textiles. The illegitimate ninth son of a strumpet and a ne’er-do-well, he had started his business in the grounds of the village church, much to the chagrin of the local vicar, who quoted John 2:16 at him: “To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my father’s house into a market!’” In response, Jarrold had quoted Charles 1:22 at the vicar, which basically went: “Fuck off, mate.” He had progressed rapidly and ruthlessly up the textile ladder, acquiring a large collection of interesting artifacts and finally building a modestly large house overlooking the river in a field he’d bought from a local farmer, but at the age of 52 had experienced his Road to Damascus moment: a small child holding a teddy bear, standing in the street and crying its eyes out because of its lack of exposure to ancient Etruscan pottery. From that moment on, Jarrold had resolved never to keep his enormously valuable collection to himself ever again, and had thrown open the doors to his estate so that anyone who wanted to and who had a spare two shillings could experience it at first hand. It was a roaring success, and he eventually sold his textile business so he could concentrate on hanging around auction rooms looking shifty, a skill which he found he was very good at, and buying more stuff to add to it. The collection grew and outgrew the house, and was moved in the 1930s into a purpose-built museum in the grounds designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, being swiftly moved back inside again – and underground – at the start of the Second World War. It now occupied an enlarged version of the original building, sold pencils, notepads, postcards, snow globes, coffee-table books, packs of cards, posters, plastic puzzles and other themed merchandise at vastly inflated prices from its gift shop, and Jarrold’s house had become a hotel run by some people in Surrey who most of the time forgot they owned it, which suited the Collection just fine.

It was getting late, and as the van pulled up in the car park Susan began to think they’d have to come back tomorrow, as the gift shop was closed and the car park was all but deserted. The only other vehicle in it – a dark silver BMW – must belong, she assumed, to the museum’s director or somebody equally important. Damien, who had had some business to attend to, had said he would follow them a few minutes behind, as the Transit van only had three seats in it, but he’d phoned ahead and the chief curator, Esther Crumplesnatchskin, had immediately agreed to meet them for a short time before she left for the day.

All was quiet: the crunch of Susan’s trainers on the gravel seemed disproportionately loud as she stepped down from the van. The other two followed her over to the visitor entrance, which looked very firmly locked. She tried opening it in case it wasn’t, but only succeeded in setting off a distant and not very loud alarm.

“Security hasn’t improved, then,” Paul commented. “Did you get this woman’s number?”

“No, Damien said he would phone ahead,” Susan replied, slightly puzzled. “He said he wouldn’t be long, anyway.”

Xavier, closer to the van than the other two, said, “Hmm. I don’t like this. Did either of you hear Pamela’s voice when he was speaking to her?”

They thought about this. “No – I don’t think I did, now you come to mention it,” Susan said. “You don’t think he’s up to something, do you? You said yourself he was trustworthy.”

“I’ve known Damien for years,” Xavier stated. “I know that you can never trust anybody, but inasmuch as you can trust anybody, he’s somebody I would trust. Up to a point.”

“That’s reassuring,” Susan said, and was just walking back in the direction of the van when a voice – a clear, level, clipped voice – said, “Good evening.”

They turned, to see someone emerging from the shadow of the BMW holding a gun. A short man. One of the two men Susan had seen in Trent’s office.

Algernon Arbuthnot.

“Arbuthnot,” Xavier snarled. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“Protecting number one, Jameson minor,” Arbuthnot snapped. “I want that photograph, Susan.”

“What photograph?” Susan said. On the outside she seemed calm – inquisitive, even, as if Arbuthnot were holding a banana instead of a firearm – but her insides had turned to terrified sheets of ice. The only thought she had at that precise moment was keep him talking.

“The one you seem to have inherited,” Arbuthnot shot back. “Or have you not followed the instructions?”

A picture flashed into Susan’s mind of the piece of paper which said DESTROY ME. “I – I don’t understand what you mean,” she said. “I inherited a pair of cabinets. But –”

“We all know about the cabinets,” Arbuthnot said. He had moved towards them, still pointing the gun directly at Susan, but not near enough so that any of them could have run around the back of him and wrestled the gun from his grasp. “You appear to have discovered their provenance from my friend Mr Casablanca, which I had hoped you would eventually. But it seems that Thimble has thrown a spanner in the works.”

“Is that so?” Susan replied, not having a clue whether it was so or not. “And how did you find that out?”

“I have my ways. I don’t care about the cabinets, Susan, but I want that photograph.”

“Well, tough,” Susan said, with a bravado she didn’t feel. “It’s locked away, covered from every angle by CCTV cameras, and there’s a code on the door. You won’t break in, and we’re not going to let you in.”

“You matter to me,” Arbuthnot said, sifting through every syllable like a baleen whale filtering seawater for krill, “far less than the discovery of that photograph would. May I remind you: I have a gun.”

All of a sudden, there was a screech of tyres, and Susan turned for a split second to see headlights heading straight for them. “Move!” she shouted. Xavier flattened himself against the wall of the transit van, Paul scrabbled for the keys, and Susan dived to one side as Arbuthnot turned, half-blinded, and fired two shots at the oncoming car, before staggering out of its way at the last minute. Paul managed to stuff the right key in the lock, wrench the door open and leap up into the cab, closely followed by Xavier, in the same instant that Susan saw who the driver of the car was: Damien Casablanca, who screamed in slow motion as blood pumped from the hole in his forehead, and was unable to stop his car hurtling at full speed into the glass wall of the gift shop. The back wheels lifted a full two feet into the air with the force of the impact, and an avalanche of pens, erasers, teddy bears in branded boob tubes, keyrings, pottery kits and T-shirts wrapped in plastic bags cascaded down over the bonnet of his car. Susan was too shocked to move for over half a second, but then she felt Xavier’s bony hands grab her shoulders and yank her into the cab as Paul crammed the accelerator to the floor, spinning the wheels and spraying pebbles everywhere like bullets. Susan’s open door flew wide open as he screeched the van tightly to the right, hit Arbuthnot’s car, breaking one of the headlights, and earned a bullet-hole in the van’s back door. And then they were off, straight out into the road – luckily it wasn’t a busy one – and, ignoring the speed cameras, heading out of town at top speed.

Day Twenty-Two: 1,398 words

2007-11-21T15:32:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, in another part of town, an unremarkable front door to an unremarkable flat suddenly opened, startling the flat’s only occupant, who dropped his cup of tea in alarm.

“Who – who’s there?”

In response, a masked, hooded figure strode through the door, tucking a piece of bent coathanger which it had used to open the door into its pocket. It reached into its other pocket, withdrew a handful of postcards, sorted through them until it found the one it was looking for, and held it up for the man to read. He did so, rather timidly.

“‘Thank you for the note’,” he read. “I – I din’t send you a note –”

The hooded figure sorted through the cards again, and held up another one. “‘Yes, you did.’ Er – look, mate, I’m telling you I din’t.”

The figure jabbed the card in the air again in front of the other man’s face, and then found another.

“‘We know it was you because of your handwriting’? But it was typed – oh shit –”

Another card. “‘Ha! Busted.’ What the hell is this, some kind o’joke?”

The hooded figure paused menacingly, and found a final card. “‘Watch your back’,” the man read. “Mate,” he said, with a bravado he didn’t feel, “bugger off outta my gaff, now. Or I’m callin’ the police.”

The creature raised its head in what would presumably have been a contemptuous sneer, if it had had a visible mouth to sneer with. Then it tucked the cards back into its pocket, turned on its heel, and marched back out of the flat, closing the softly behind it as it left.

Damien Casablanca, a tall, thin man with a cadaverous face and a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain hanging from its breast pocket, stood in the doorway to the small metal room, gazing at Susan’s inherited Napoleon III cabinets with a gleam in his eye. “Well, well,” he said thoughtfully, “these are a find.”

He moved into the room and slowly around the cabinets, examining them minutely from every angle, just as Xavier had done. Susan, Paul and Xavier stood in the doorway: Paul to block his escape, Susan to make sure he didn’t damage them for any reason, and Xavier – well, who knew what could be going on in his mind. Susan certainly didn’t, despite his reassurances.

Finally, Damien straightened up. “Well, the good news is,” he announced, “they’re not fake.”

“Well, that is a relief,” Paul said. “How much?”

“There is some bad news too, unfortunately,” Damien continued, ignoring Paul. “I’m afraid they are not rightfully yours, Susan. These belong in a museum. The Jarrold Collection, to be exact.”

“What – what do you mean?” Susan asked, although she unwillingly had to admit to herself that she probably knew the answer.

“They were stolen from the Collection eighteen years ago,” Damien continued half an hour later, in his cramped office; he was standing behind his desk, reaching for some files, and the other three were squashed onto a sort of antique chaise longue obviously not designed for the purpose. He opened a box file labelled STOLEN ITEMS, and extracted from it a sheaf of papers in a cardboard sleeve. “They are quite a find simply because nobody ever thought they’d be seen again; I am intrigued as to how they ended up in your possession, although of course I am not suggesting,” he added, seeing Susan’s expression, “that you were involved in the theft.”

“I’d have been a precocious eight-year-old,” Susan pointed out. Damien smiled a thin-lipped smile.

“Quite,” he replied, and passed them some papers taken from the cardboard sleeve. “You say you inherited them from Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos.”

“Yes.”

“I probably would have hesitated to draw this conclusion while he was alive,” Damien said hesitantly, “but it would appear that he either stole them, or caused them to be stolen. The top sheet there is a photocopy of the original newspaper article that reported the theft, from the Eastwestchester Jester.”

They looked at it. The headline was: ‘Jarrold Collection Break-In: Priceless Cabinets Stolen’, and the article continued:

The Jarrold Collection was in disarray last night after it emerged that one of its most prized objects, a pair of Napoleon III ormolu-mounted tortoiseshell pietra dure side cabinets, had been stolen over the weekend. The cabinets, which date from the third Napoleonic era and are worth over £250,000, were last seen by Pollux Gnomon, the Collection’s head of security, on Saturday evening as he was conducting routine checks. The thieves appear to have broken in via a ground-floor window, which set off multiple alarm systems, but by the time the police arrived half an hour later the cabinets had been taken. A spokesman for the Collection said that they were “devastated”, adding, “Utterly devastated”. Police are trying to establish a motive for the crime other than money, but have so far drawn a blank.

“Oh,” said Susan. She re-read the article. “Do you think Bartholomew would have had anything to do with this?” she asked Xavier.

“It’s possible,” Xavier admitted. “I wouldn’t put it past him, anyway. This sounds suspiciously like it could have been one of his and Arbuthnot’s pranks.”

“Well, whether it was a prank or not,” Damien said, “the fact is that it is stolen. There was a reward offered at the time for their return –”

“Really?” Paul said, looking interested. “From the Collection, you mean?”

“Yes. I am not sure if it still stands, but it’s worth asking them. You won’t be culpable if you hand them over.”

“Fine, then,” Susan said decisively. “There was another thing, though.” She told him about the note she and Paul had found in the drawer, and he let out a brief, forced laugh.

“Destroy these? What a ludicrous idea. Why would you want to do that? They’re not even yours.”

“I don’t really want to. But I can’t help wondering why someone would have put the note in there like that.”

“Insanity, perhaps? A sadistic streak? These are priceless, Susan. When they were stolen they were one of only two surviving such examples in the world. They are now the only ones left, the others having been lost in a shipping accident in 1993. The Jester there calls them priceless, but puts a price tag on them; these days, they literally are priceless. Destroying them would not only be a crime against art history and the Napoleonic era in general, it would also be a horrible waste of a beautiful and irreplaceable pair of objets d’art.”

He sat down, exhausted.

“I am still a bit puzzled, though,” Susan persisted. “I can’t work out why Bartholomew would have left them to me, when he doesn’t appear to have left anybody else anything. I also can’t understand why he would have left a note in them like that. I mean, if he stole them or knew they were stolen, and if he was worried that he’d get exposed as an art thief after his death, why not destroy them himself? Why give me the responsibility?”

Damien spread his hands wide. “Who knows?” he asked rhetorically. “He took delight in being a difficult character to work out while he was alive; why should that change after death?”

Susan sighed, and was silent for a few moments while she weighed up her options. “I think I’ve got two options,” she decided finally. “I can’t keep them, and I can’t sell them, so I have to either destroy them, or give them back. I don’t really want to destroy them, but I’m still intrigued by that note, and who could have left it.” She suddenly had an idea. “Do you know if the Collection has a, I don’t know, some kind of workshop or something?”

“Yes, I believe they do. Why?”

“Well, look at it logically. Even a total philistine wouldn’t want something that valuable to be destroyed, assuming they knew what it was worth, without a very good reason. So I’m guessing that there’s something hidden in the cabinets somewhere – something that whoever left me the note was really desperate for me to find. So, if I give it back to the Collection under the condition that they examine them for anything that’s hidden inside, and give whatever it is to me quietly without making a fuss, then everybody’s happy.” She looked at the others. “Aren’t they?”

There was a pause while everyone considered this.

“Sounds like a plan,” Paul admitted. “Do we still get the reward?”

Day Twenty-One: 1,584 words

2007-11-20T13:37:00.001-08:00

They arrived back at Susan’s flat to find Paul, in his pants and with hair like Don King, trying to warm a cup of tea in the microwave. “For God’s sake, Paul,” Susan said irritably, “put some clothes on, Xavier’s here.”

Xavier wandered into Susan’s pokey little lounge, and looked at the cabinets thoughtfully. “I see what you mean,” he said, stroking his little goatee beard. “Have you examined these thoroughly? I see they’re visible from the road, too,” he added. “Perhaps you should move them.”

“Where to?” Susan replied. “My bedroom’s hardly big enough to fit my bed in it, let alone these monsters.”

Xavier walked round them – or at least, squeezed and stumbled his way round, falling over Susan’s sofa and almost knocking her TV off the small table on which it stood precariously, balanced amongst piles of books. He looked at them from every angle, squatting down and shining a small torch underneath them, opening all the drawers, and examining the surface with a magnifying glass, as if he was trying to find traces of explosives on them. Finally, he straightened up. “Have you had these valued?” he asked. “I’m no expert, but they do seem to be genuine.”

“No. I found a similar pair on eBay though, going for about thirty grand.”

“Are they insured?”

Susan sighed. “No, nothing in here is. I can’t afford it.”

“The moment,” Xavier said sharply, “that the wrong people find out that these are here, your flat will get turned over. Do you understand? They won’t last more than an hour.”

“Yes, I know the risks, thank you,” Susan retorted. “That’s partly why I haven’t had them valued, though. I’m not sure I really want anyone to know about them.”

“I know of somebody in town who would do it. He’s very discreet, his name’s Damien Casablanca. He is not in any way connected to organised crime, battering-rams, Rottweilers or men with tattooed necks. We must find out where they came from, I’m serious about this. And I don’t want you to be at risk because they’re here. In fact, insurance alone wouldn’t really compensate if they were stolen – you need them somewhere secure…” He stopped and snapped his fingers together. “Can we put them into a storage unit? We can rent them fairly cheaply, I think. I’m even willing to go halves on this with you, if that makes it an easier decision.”

Susan stood there, unwillingly mulling over the options. It was almost certainly true that she wouldn’t be able to keep the cabinets in the long term, and probably a good idea if she didn’t have them in the flat in the short term, either. But why was Xavier so interested in them all of a sudden – and apparently cared enough about her that he’d offer his own money to help her out? Did he want some of the proceeds from the cabinets when they finally got around to selling them?

“Xavier,” she asked, “do you want some of the proceeds from these cabinets when we sell them?”

“No, actually I don’t,” Xavier replied. “I’m interested in them because I’m interested in Barty. I don’t know where they came from, and why his will appears to have been so short, and not made public. I don’t know why the note was in the drawer, and who put it there. I am worried, though, that in the time we take to find some answers to these questions, your flat will have been turned over unless we can put them somewhere safe.”

“In that case, I think you’re right,” Susan agreed. “Let’s see if we can get them up to a storage room somewhere. We’ll need a van. Paul,” she called, “you can drive a van, can’t you?”

“You know I can,” Paul called back. “Hiring one might be quite useful, anyway. My car’s still off the road and I need to do some shopping.”

And so it was that a few hours later, the three of them sat in the front of a Transit van, with the cabinets in the back – carefully repackaged, and braced on all sides with random bits of furniture to stop them sliding about – while Paul drove them through a wet town centre towards the Big Lemon storage depot in a trading estate on the outskirts of town. When they got there, Xavier’s somewhat vampiric appearance caused a few sidelong glances, but pretty soon they were guiding a pallet trolley with the huge, heavy packing-crate on it down a narrow corridor flanked with yellow metal doors, finding the one they’d hired, wheeling the crate in, and then locking it up with the lock they’d had to buy (cost: £12.99).

Xavier handed Susan one of the sets of keys, and kept the other. “Now,” he said, “would you like me to call Damien? He can come and value the cabinets here. The place is riddled with cameras and you need a code to get in, so even if he were dishonest – which, as I’ve said, he’s not – there isn’t much he could do about stealing them.”

“I’m happy for him to do that,” Susan said. “Paul?”

“Don’t look at me,” Paul said, “they’re not mine anyway. If you’re happy, though, I’m happy.”

“Fine,” Susan said, and handed Xavier her phone as they left the building. “Do you want to call him now, see if he can maybe do tomorrow?”

Meredith had moved her investigation on to the outside of the house. Her team hadn’t found anything much inside apart from some strands of hair, a load of fingerprints, and a few small specks of blood in one of the corridors, so while they were sending those away to get analysed she decided it would be a good time to explore the grounds. The actual location that Opocapopopoulos had been found, of course, had already been examined, but had yielded nothing much apart from the same observation made by Dodecahedrus Grunt: that wherever he had died, it hadn’t been where he was discovered.

She was at one side of the house, standing at the edge of the moat. She wanted to examine the outside walls of the building, but the moat was about twenty-five feet wide, and there was no ledge between it and the house, so she couldn’t go over the drawbridge and then edge round. The house’s exterior walls just plunged straight into the moat and went straight down, disappearing into the algae.

She consulted her plans to see if they showed how deep the moat was, but couldn’t find any indication of depth labelled anywhere. A frown creased her brows, and she briefly considered calling in a diving team, but dismissed the idea: either it was possible to get into the house over the moat, or it wasn’t, and if she couldn’t do it – in broad daylight with a variety of scissor-lifts, cherry-pickers and Simon hoists at her disposal – then it was fairly safe to assume that anyone trying to get into the building couldn’t, either. That was, it seemed, the whole point of having a moat there in the first place.

She carried on walking along the straight section of moat until she reached the end, where it took a ninety-degree turn to the left and carried on for maybe a hundred feet before going underneath the rear drawbridge. The walls here, too, were sheer, with no ledge, and she was just running her eyes over them, studying how it might be possible to even get across the moat, let alone scale them, when she noticed something that looked out of place. One of the window ledges on the ground floor – roughly eight feet above the surface of the moat – had a chunk taken out of it, which looked rather like it had been made with a pickaxe or some other sharp instrument. The area of stone revealed when the chunk had broken off looked brand new compared to the slightly more weathered appearance of the rest of the ledge, and this was a bit odd: there were other parts of the building which had been damaged, of course, but the only one they’d found so far that hadn’t been repaired was the observatory on the east roof, and that had definitely happened after Opocapopopoulos’s death, during a freak meteorite shower three weeks ago. So this, logically, had happened either after the death, or just before.

She was just pondering what this might mean when a heron swooped down low over the water, stretched its legs out in mid air, and landed in the moat. In the moat. The water reached just over its knees.

Meredith literally slapped her forehead in disbelief. How come nobody had realised that before? The moat wasn’t built to stop hordes of invading armies; it was just for show, like so many other things in Opocapopopoulos’s life. The broken window ledge suddenly made sense, and she found herself speedily jumping to conclusions, constructing possible explanations in her head: an intruder had waded across the moat, thrown some kind of grappling hook onto the window ledge, and broken a bit of it off. Or they’d thrown the hook, climbed up it, left it there, and broken the ledge on the way back down.

She stopped. Come to think of it, those were actually the only two explanations that made any sense.

She reached for the walkie-talkie in her pocket, and arranged for someone to come and take some photos and measurements.

Day Twenty: 1,552 words

2007-11-19T15:38:00.000-08:00

“Well,” Susan began, “I think you asked Jill about the will? Whether it had been sorted out and so on.”

“I was interested,” Xavier replied, “purely out of academic interest, of course.”

“I got a phone call last week,” Susan pressed on, “from someone called Trent Napkin. He said he was representing the – sorry, can I just get rid of this cat?” She scooped the cat up from her lap with both hands held out flat like shovels, which took it by surprise, and so she was able to dump it on the floor before it could dig its claws in. It looked at her hatefully, turned away with a superior flick of its tail and padded out of the room. “Sorry, my legs have gone totally dead. Ow,” she winced, stretching them.

“Don’t mind Mephisto,” Xavier said, “he means no harm.”

“No, I’m sure he doesn’t.” Susan rubbed her legs, and carried on. “Where was I? Oh yes – this guy Trent Napkin. He called me to his offices, read the will, and I seem to have inherited a pair of rather valuable Napoleon III side cabinets.”

“Really,” Xavier mused. “How was the will read?”

“Well, he kind of got the three of us in a room, and –”

“Only three of you?” Xavier was surprised. “Do you not think that a man as wealthy as Bartholomew would have a few more people to leave his money to? What did the others get?”

“I don’t remember,” Susan admitted. “I was so dazed I’d got anything, I wasn’t really paying much attention.”

“And who were they, do you remember that?”

“One was called Rankin, and the other –”

“Algernon Arbuthnot,” Xavier said softly.

“I think he was Arbuthnot, actually, yes. How did you know?”

“He’s turned up on the old radar many a time,” Xavier said. “I thought he’d be involved in this, somehow.”

“Who is he?”

Xavier got to his feet, crossed over to the writing-bureau again, pulled open a drawer and carefully extracted another dog-eared envelope, from which he slid a number of press cuttings held together with paper clips. “These,” he said, “are from the Eastwestchester Jester. Do you remember it?”

“Oh yeah,” Susan said, intrigued. “Vaguely. Didn’t it close down about twenty years ago after a fire?”

“Yes, it did. I think the Windsock’s headline was something like, ‘Rival Paper Reduced to Ashes Tragedy’, or something similarly sarcastic. Truth is, the Jester burnt down because of Arbuthnot. They’d always been less fearless than the Windsock, and more tenacious, in digging out the dirt on Bartholomew and his dealings. Arbuthnot, in answer to your question, was a business associate of Bartholomew’s; they met at the Bank, when Bartholomew was a junior.

“In those days, Bartholomew and I communicated quite regularly. He told me a fair bit about the dealings going on there – without ever revealing anything secret, of course; he was always the sole of discretion. Arbuthnot cropped up an increasing amount, as he was Bartholomew’s mentor, his boss if you like. He was the star trader, making the Bank tens of millions, and this was in the days when ten million pounds was worth a lot more than it is today. I clearly remember Barty, in one letter, admitting to me that he wanted to be as successful as Arbuthnot: he looked up to him in a way which I felt at the time wasn’t entirely healthy.

“Anyway, they became good friends. In the 1970s they were involved in a minor scandal which involved manipulating oil prices in the Middle East to make short-term gains in stock prices – ‘pump and dump’, I think they called it. These days they might get fired and that would be an end to their career, but in those days, before a lot of the big corporate scandals there have been lately, they escaped with a slap on the wrists. I believe this is what fuelled Barty’s lust for money, which is what I think drove him through the latter half of his life. I mean,” he leaned forward, fixing Susan with a penetrating gaze through his hooded eyes, “if you knew you could make almost unlimited sums of money in a slightly illegal way, and you wouldn’t suffer any of the consequences, wouldn’t you do it?”

“No, actually,” Susan said flatly. “I know it’s probably easy to say that because I haven’t got any, but money just doesn’t do anything for me.”

Xavier raised his eyebrows. “Well, for Barty this was an attractive proposition. The problem was, of course, that the deeper he got into what were effectively Arbuthnot’s shady deals, the harder it was for him to get out of them. At one point in the early 90s, just before Black Wednesday, he owned over thirty vintage cars, three helicopters, a racecourse and a chain of cinemas. He just couldn’t spend the money as fast as he was making it, you see.”

“What happened to the chain of cinemas?” Susan couldn’t help asking.

“Oh, he sold it to help patch up the holes when Black Wednesday hit,” Xavier said dismissively. “Didn’t patch them all up, of course, but it helped. Meanwhile, Arbuthnot had been hit a lot harder: he’d got into currency speculation. The rumour has it that a lot of the money George Soros made that day betting one way on the euro, came from the money that Arbuthnot lost betting on it the other way. He had to sell three of his houses – one in Monaco, one in Aspen, Colorado, and a Knightsbridge townhouse he’d just spent a vast sum renovating.

“The 1990s came and went, and they both recovered and went on trading, but Arbuthnot was bitter. He had begun to hate Barty for not helping him out when the schemes and scams he’d taught him for so many years came back to bite him on the arse – and I think there was also jealousy there, too, that Barty seemed to have emerged unscathed when Arbuthnot hadn’t. By this time, I was following their exploits in the papers – there’s an article in there from the Economist from 2001,” he indicated the envelope Susan was holding, “and features from the FT, the Sunday Times ‘Money’ section, and Smash Hits magazine.” He noticed her quizzical look. “They had a number 1 in 1998, with a remix of a Schleswig-Holsteinian drinking song. They were going through a phase of making each other increasingly outlandish bets: Barty bet Arbuthnot that he could buy a number 1 hit, and Algy took him on. And lost.”

Xavier sighed.

“On the outside, they seemed like inseperable cohorts, but the resentment that I mentioned just now was, I think, seething underneath the surface. You know when you’re playing around with a close friend, and you can insult them or sometimes even cause them inconvenience but you both know it’s fine? Well, Arbuthnot was constantly trying to trip Barty up, and it became quite nasty at times. At an awards ceremony a few years ago, he arranged for Barty’s acceptance speech to be swapped for one Hitler gave in Munich in 1941. Not at all amusing, and very embarrassing for Barty… he, however, took it as one long joke, despite the difficulties it caused him. They were their own worst enemies.”

The cat stalked back into the room again, caught Susan’s eye, and stared unwaveringly at her. She tried to take it on, but lost: it raised a supercilious eyebrow, turned away from her and flowed itself upwards onto the sofa Xavier was sitting on.

“So my guess,” Xavier summarised, “is that Arbuthnot was there to… hang on. You said there weren’t any others present.”

“I think there was an independent witness there. Miss D’arblay.”

Xavier frowned. “The name doesn’t ring a bell,” he mused. “But I’m almost certain that you have in some way been set up. Had Barty ever spoken to you?”

“No, hardly ever,” Susan admitted.

“As you can probably gather, he wasn’t the kind of person to make random gifts,” Xavier said, “except when he was in one of those moods, I suppose. There’s very little reason why he would have given you something which sounds quite valuable, and left nothing at all to, for example, me.”

“There’s – one other thing about the cabinets,” Susan said hesitantly. “We looked in one of the drawers, and found this note.”

She produced the piece of paper with DESTROY ME written on it. “It was in an envelope addressed to me,” she added, “so it can’t have been an accident. Why would –”

“Have you destroyed the cabinets?” Xavier asked quickly, taking the note from her and scrutinising it. “Please tell me you haven’t.”

“No. I’m a bit loath to, I have to admit. They are utterly hideous, but I can’t help feeling a museum might want them, even if I don’t.”

“That’s good. Does anyone else know about them?”

“Only Paul. And we – we mentioned them to a forensic scientist who’s involved with the work up at the house… Meredith, I think Paul said.”

“Right,” Xavier said, passing Susan back the piece of paper. “Where are the cabinets?”

“Back at my flat. In my front room. Stopping me from watching TV.”

“Then let me get a couple of things,” Xavier replied decisively, “and let’s go there.”

Days Eighteen and Nineteen: 4,862 words

2007-11-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

Susan woke early the next morning – moving quietly around Paul, who was still asleep on the sofa – and headed for the library, determined to find out everything she could about the land that Opocapopopoulos’s house had been built on. She came prepared, with her battered but trusty old laptop, a large pad of paper, several pens (she was something of a stationery fetishist, and could never resist buying a pen she saw if she didn’t already have one like it) and a thermos flask full of coffee, which she was hoping she’d be able to sneak sips from while nobody was looking.

It was quiet in the library, unusually so. There were only three people she could see: an old lady browsing the Barbara Cartland section, a bored-looking teenager using the computers, and a man in a suit who appeared to be deciding which U2 album to borrow. She sat down at a table, plopped the laptop in front of her, and left her bag on the chair while she went and browsed the History section.

When she got back, she had found about six books which looked like they might be useful. There was E. N. Gyroball’s A Short History of Eastwestchestershire, which had a load of old photos in it that might show something or other, Matilda Spangleton’s Crypts and Catacombs of Great Britain, Jackson Ummagumma’s three-volume Encyclopaedia of Modern Ruins, and three books of collected local ephemera that contained letters, newspaper cuttings, land reports and other bits and bobs dating back to the 1700s. A Short History of Eastwestchestershire looked like it might be the most accessible of the bunch, so she flipped it open and began to read. There was a photo of the High Street, the way it had looked in 1904, with gas lamps and omnibuses and people dressed in bowler hats. A series of photos of the local manor-house in the 1870s, which appeared to have been a very grand affair before it had been pulled down in the 1960s to make way for a grotesque block of flats which had at the time been designed as a “garden in the sky” but had in no time become a magnet for drug-users and dealers. A few plans of the railway station before it had been built –

Hang on. She went back to the section on the manor house, and read:

Originally built in 1607 by the first Baron Drevenell of Manstordean, Eastwestchester Hall was considerably enlarged during the period 1750-1810 by the fifth Baron, with gardens sculpted by Capability Brown and the frontage of the house redesigned by Robert Adam in 1761. Notable amongst its features were a 1200-yard drive, a set of formal boating lakes in the shape of a crucifix, modelled on those at Versailles, and an extensive underground network of cellars, built to house the Baron’s extensive collection of wine.

Now that, thought Susan, might be it. Where had the manor been built?

Construction of the main house, she read, began on an eight-acre plot of land owned by the Baron’s father, a noted highwayman and itinerant mendicant-made-good, just outside the village of Retchford, now a suburb of the town. The site – at the top of a gentle hill overlooking the town, and bordering some woods – was chosen for its good drainage, its lush vegetation and the fact that you could, in the words of the Baron, ‘roll a Turde at marauding peasants, and notte have them Roll it back up at you’. The house faced north-south, with the cruciform boating-lakes pointing due north towards Oxford. It was noted shortly after construction began that the house would lie directly on a ley-line, but works had already begun and it was felt too expensive to restart somewhere else, so there it stayed.

Susan found a map in one of the other books, and traced a line from the centre of town through Retchford, now one of its nicer areas, out towards the woods where Opocapopopoulos House was. That must be it, she thought: presumably the Sixties block of flats which replaced the original mansion were converted into a block of executive flats in the Eighties in a desperate bid to try and move the place upmarket, but that didn’t work. She wondered briefly why anyone would want to demolish a perfectly decent stately home in the middle of the countryside to build a stonkingly ugly concrete tower block there, but put the thought from her mind. The cellar complex that she and Paul had been in, she decided, must have been part of the old house; were there perhaps plans that she could get from somewhere? It was doubtful, if the tunnels they’d seen were anything to go by, that the layout of the cellars had been changed much since they’d been built, so the original plans would be enormously useful. She turned to Crypts and Catacombs of Great Britain, which had been published in 1963 and which might therefore have something in them about the original house, found the section on Eastwestchestershire, and read:

The fictional county of Eastwestchestershire has a far higher than average count of underground cellar complexes. Notable among them are those of Bagpuss House (p. 45), built for the wealthy cloth importer Maximillian X. Tackett; Wampire Common School (p. 76), which counts the explorer Olaf Sigurdssen and the actress Dame Hilary Tennell among its alumni; and Eastwestchester Hall (p.70), the magnificent neo-classical seat of Lord Drevenell of Manstordean.

She turned to page 70, and read on.

Eastwestchester Hall, originally built in 1607 by the first Baron Drevenell of Manstordean (yes, yes, thought Susan, I know all this), possesses some of the finest and most comprehensive subterranean catacomb complexes in the whole country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. They extend beyond the main house like the roots of an oak tree, and have been added to over the years, but so far in sympathy with the existing construction. They are accessed not only from the house itself, but also from an exterior pagoda constructed by William Chambers in 1763, and modelled on his famous reconstruction of a Chinese Ta at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. Containing over 2.2 miles of underground corridor, they were originally contructed to house the first Baron’s extensive collection of whisky, but became something of a folly for successive Barons, who seemed to want to compete with each other to extend them by the largest amount. Presently the cellars are disused, but the ninth Baron, who at the time of writing doesn’t have any children yet and that reminds me I must write to him again and see how he is, pays for their upkeep by conducting guided tours around them every third Tuesday of the month. Last year (1962) he conducted a successful Christmas party in one of the crypts, which was attended by 120 children from St Hoosier’s School and raised £4 6s 9d for charity.

Now that was interesting. So the pagoda had been there all along, she thought to herself, but it had just had the maze built around it a few years ago… which presumably hadn’t been widely reported, since by that time Opocapopopoulos had cut the rest of the world off from what went on inside his walls. There was unfortunately no map of the cellars in Spangleton’s book; she looked through the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ruins, but found only a short reference to the house being pulled down and no further information that would help.

She jotted all this down in the pad of paper she’d brought with her, and stared into space for a few moments, trying to think what she could do next. There was something she was sure she was missing, but she couldn’t place it.

Then, in a flash, she knew what it was. St Hoosier’s School was where her uncle Xavier had gone. It was a long shot, but maybe it would be worth seeing if he knew anything more about it –

She dialled her mum, not caring at this point that she was using her phone in the library, and guessing that the two other people in there – the man in the suit evidently still hadn’t found what he was looking for – wouldn’t either. The phone rang a fe times, and then Jill answered.

“Hello, Blitherington 960.”

“Mum, it’s me. Susan,” she added, before her mother had a chance to be vague. “Listen, I think I’m on to something about Bartholomew. Have you got Xavier’s number?”

“Xavier? Yes, I think so. He called here yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh really?” Xavier was one of those types of people who never called to see how you were. “What did he want?”

“He was interested to hear if the will had been read. I think he wanted to know if he was going to inherit anything, really.”

“Oh yeah?” Susan suddenly realised she hadn’t told her mum about the cabinets, and decided now probably wasn’t the best time to, either. “Do you know if it has?”

“Actually,” Jill admitted, “I don’t. I wouldn’t expect him to leave us anything, of course, but you might think that a will of that size would be reported in the press… ah, here it is. It’s Bradfield 516497.”

Susan dialled the number, feeling a strange tingle of excitement, and waited. It rang and rang, and then went to an answerphone message, which started with a dolorous Chinese gong, and then Xavier’s sepulchral tones: “I am not in. If you wish me to reply, please write to me; otherwise, leave me a message.”

Bollocks, Susan thought, but decided not to hang up. “Hi Xavier, it’s me, Susan,” she said. “I just wanted to pick your brains, really – I’m investigating the catacombs at Eastwestchester House, and I wondered if –”

There was a rattle and a clink, and then a bonk as if someone had picked up the phone and then dropped it. Susan stopped, and there was a pause. Then from the other end came Xavier’s voice: “Hello?”

“Oh, you are there,” Susan said brightly, “that’s good. How are you?”

She remembered a second too late that Xavier wasn’t the kind of person to give you updates on how he was; he was awkward with small talk. “What are you trying to find out?” he asked, after a moment’s silence.

“Well, it’s a long story,” she replied, “but Paul and I ended up in the cellars at Opocapopopoulos House last night –”

“Really,” Xavier mused. “Go on.”

“They looked too old to have been built when the rest of the house had been, so I came to the library this morning to see what I could learn about when they’d been built. Turns out they were part of the original manor house. And there was a bit in one of the books I found, about St Hoosier’s.”

She heard him suck in his breath. “”Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” he said slowly, “a looooong time.”

“You did go there, didn’t you?” she prompted.

“Yes, I did,” Xavier replied. “It was a very long time ago – a period in my life that I prefer to forget about. But I do remember very clearly that we took a day trip up to the Hall, before it was demolished, one Christmas.”

“Can you remember the layout of the cellars?”

“May I ask,” Xavier asked, “why you are so interested?”

“Well, we think –” Susan began, and then lowered her voice, glancing quickly round the library to make sure nobody was listening. “We think we’re onto something about Bartholomew’s death. We followed his gardener, Thimble, back to the house last night – he was with a friend who seemed paranoid that something they were doing, or that they’d done, was going to be discovered. He went into the cellars via the pagoda in the middle of the maze, but we lost him, and then we decided that we didn’t really know what we were doing, and that we’d better find out more about the layout of the cellars before we went back.”

There was silence for a few moments, and then Xavier said:

“Are you free to come over to see me about this? I don’t think we should be talking about it on an open line.”

Why the hell are you being so paranoid, Susan thought, but decided to play along with him. “Yes, I’m free now,” she said. “See you in about half an hour?”

So it was that, roughly forty minutes later, she stood in an anonymous street in a suburb of town, scanning the numbers on the doors for a 71c. It wasn’t easy to find, but she finally decided on one that it was likely to be, went down the steps to it, and knocked the knocker, which was shaped like a lion’s claw. A low, muffled booom echoed in the depths of the flat, there was a pause, and then a small panel in the door slid across, revealing a pair of eyes.

“Have you been followed?” Xavier hissed.

“No,” Susan said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, positive.”

The door opened a crack. “Come in, then,” came Xavier’s voice. “Quickly.”

She entered, and Xavier hastily snapped the door shut behind her, drawing across a couple of bolts and sliding a chain into place. It was dark inside, and Susan’s eyes took a few moments to adjust to the gloom, but once they had she saw low ceilings draped with parachute webbing, a cramped toilet to one side, and a narrow corridor leading into a small, higher-ceilinged, galley-style kitchen, little more than a slightly wider section of corridor.

“Tea?” Xavier asked. “I have Earl Grey, peppermint, Lapsang Souchong, Darjeeling or builders’.”

“Earl Grey, please,” Susan replied, although she wasn’t really concentrating on what he was saying; the flat was crammed with so much interesting stuff it was an assault on the senses. The skeleton of what looked like a shark hung from the ceiling, painstakingly stuck together with thread, and so low she could have touched it if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. Through the door on the other side of the kitchen was a corridor, with shelves on both sides piled high with books, box files, model dragons, broken things she couldn’t quite make out, and a set of antique weighing scales.

“Biscuit? Hob Nob, Garibaldi, Bourbon or Jaffa Cake?”

That was easy. “Jaffa Cake, please.”

They sat in Xavier’s cosy living room, which was painted blood red and somehow managed to accommodate two sofas despite its size. Susan put her cup of tea on the carved wooden coffee table next to a copy of White Dwarf magazine, and Xavier fixed her with a penetrating stare.

“Please go on,” he said. “I apologise for being so cautious, but there are… many reasons for me to be. You were saying about Bartholomew’s death?”

Susan explained about the conversation Paul had overhead in the Oily Moon between Thimble and his friend; how they had followed the four of them to the house, and then followed Thimble and Kel through the maze, into the pagoda and down into the bowels of the cellars. She told him about the odd ranks of numbered lockers, and the activity down there that had necessitated golf buggy deliveries. She stopped short of telling him about the Napoleon III cabinets with their mysteriously destructive exhortation. When she had finished, she took another sip of tea, and Xavier leaned back in the sofa and said, “Interesting.”

“So I was wondering,” she carried on, “since you went to St Hoosier’s, you’d probably be the best person to ask about the Hall, as they knocked it down not long after they’d started showing people round it.”

Xavier’s eyes glazed over. “I’m not sure I’d be the best person to ask,” he said, in a faraway tone of voice. “Tell me – do you happen to know why the Hall was demolished?”

“No,” Susan said; the question had thrown her a little. “I just assumed it was because that’s what happened to grand old buildings in the 60s.”

“It’s what happened to a great many grand old buildings,” Xavier corrected her, “but that was not the reason why the original Hall was demolished. No, it was demolished because of a scandal – a scandal involving the very class at St Hoosier’s that I was in. It was a big item of news at the time: I’m surprised that you didn’t turn up anything about it in your research.”

Susan remembered the book of newspaper clipping she hadn’t got around to reading. “What happened?” she asked.

“It was 1964,” Xavier replied. “I was ten. St Hoosier’s – which isn’t there any longer, I believe they’ve turned it into executive flats – was just the local state school; it didn’t have any money. Christmas for us was generally a poor affair, not much to celebrate.”

A cat jumped up on the arm of Susan’s sofa, and she started. It looked at her, measuring her up, and then, deciding she would make a good cushion, padded carefully down onto her lap, and pawed her thighs, looking up at her with an expression that seemed to say: if you move one inch in any direction, lady, I’ve got claws. Xavier ignored it.

“This Christmas, the buzz went round that one class would be chosen to have a tour of Eastwestchester Hall. The Baron only gave one tour per year, and these were generally sponsored: he only let a maximum of twenty-five people look round it at once, and chose the group at random from the local schools. This year, it was our turn, and the Headmaster announced in assembly one morning in November that the class with the best marks throughout November would be the lucky ones selected to have the tour.

“Naturally, we all worked like anything. My favourite subject was what you would probably now call religious studies, but back then was called Divinity, although I wasn’t much interested in the divine – I just liked the stories of gods and plagues, kings and servants, temples and pillars of salt. I slogged away like I’d never slogged before that month, as we all did. Every week, the Headmaster would produce a leaderboard showing where all the classes were in relation to each other, and we were consistently near the top, but never in the first position; that was 5H, the Headmaster’s own class, who were renowned for being beastly swots. In the last week, the entire school had a big Divinity test, and I stayed up almost all night revising for it. I can still hear my father’s voice telling me to go to bed, as he practised his flaming unicycle routine in the front room – he was a circus clown, too, just like your dad; I think that’s where your mother met Gareth.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true; ask her. Anyway, in the morning I was dog tired and didn’t want to go to school, but they dragged me in and we all sweated our way through this test, and then at breaktime we stood around in huddles. Nobody wanted to run around and play, we were all too knotted up about the results of the test, and busily comparing our answers. I was feeling confident that I’d got them all right, and from what the other children were saying I felt I probably had. That afternoon, we got our results back, and I was ecstatic to find out that I’d got them all right, bar one. Between us, we totted up the marks we had got, and we felt hopeful, at least, that we might have a chance of winning the chance to have the tour of the Hall.

“The next morning was the headmaster’s assembly. We all sat down quietly – it was the quietest I’d ever heard it – and waited for the headmaster. He was a minute or two late, but finally he strode to the lectern at the front of the school hall, where a blackboard had been set up on an easel. He turned to it, and began writing the class names and their overall marks down, starting at the bottom of the board with the lowest. We all craned our necks to see what he was writing: each line drew a groan from one class or another, but ours – 4C – didn’t appear. Finally, he got up to number two, and in the ‘name’ column wrote 5H. It was clearly painful for him to do that. We didn’t even see what score they had, or what score we had; it didn’t matter, we were going on the tour.

“The day of the tour came, and we dressed up as smartly as we could, and walked the mile or so to the gates at the end of the drive – I think Bartholomew kept those pretty much as they were. A liveried servant opened them for us, and we walked up the drive and met the Baron, who was standing resplendent in mink and ermine robes with a fucking great crown on.”

The cat on Susan’s lap lazily dug its claws into her thigh. She winced, and tried to get her hand underneath it to shoo it away, but it squeezed a little bit harder and so she stopped.

“He welcomed us to the house, gave us a bit of a spiel and so on, and then led us away from the house and into the grounds, towards a walled garden. Above the walls we could just about see the top of the pagoda, and we were all twittering amongst ourselves wondering where we were going; we had assumed we would be getting to the cellars via the main house. Once inside the garden, we stopped in front of the pagoda, and the Baron motioned for us to be silent.

“‘What you are about to see,’ he said, ‘very few people have ever seen. I do not allow members of the Press into the cellars, so if anybody has brought a camera with them, please hand it over to me now.’ We all giggled nervously, but of course nobody had a camera; we could hardly even afford shoes. ‘Then, we shall go in,’ announced the Baron, and led the way into the pagoda, down the spiral staircase – it sounds, from your description, as if that hasn’t changed – and into the catacombs.

“It was dark down there, and cold; there was no electricity or heating system, but the Baron lit a wax flare with a match, and used that to light a number of gas lamps set into the wall. We walked for probably two hundred yards along the corridor you and Paul were in last night, which bends around to the right, as I remember, and ends at a T-junction, at which we turned left. The tunnel opens out after that, and we found ourselves standing in a sort of crypt, like an underground chapel. There was a long table set out in the middle of it, laden with all manner of fine foods, and exactly twenty-six chairs around the table – one for each of us, and one for him.”

Susan had produced her pad of paper, and was making notes, trying not to lean on the cat on her lap, which was being unambiguous about what might happen to her if she did.

“‘In a moment,’ said the Baron,” continued Xavier, “‘we shall eat. But first, I would like to show you my life’s work.’ He led us across the floor of the chapel and out of a small door at the opposite corner, which led into a corridor with hundreds of oak casks stacked along one wall, and lit at intervals by more gas lamps. There was a door at the end, which was locked, and we stopped; from behind the door came a low, insistent thrumming sound, like a hundred tractors under a duvet. ‘In here,’ the Baron confided, ‘is a machine which, I am hopeful, will one day make writing by hand obsolete. It is very big, very dangerous, and very loud. So that none of you get injured, I would ask you all please to take the greatest care when moving around it. There are lots of wheels and cogs which are moving very fast, and it is only a prototype, so safety has not been my primary concern when designing it. Do you understand?’ We all nodded and made encouraging sounds, but the truth was that we were all too excited to listen to him properly, and couldn’t wait to see whatever it was that he wanted to show us.

“He opened the door, and we trooped in. The room beyond was huge, bigger than the chapel, and three storeys high; we had come in on the third level, and were standing in a gallery overlooking what looked like an enormous factory filled with whirring machinery. The gallery covered three sides of the room, with the fourth being taken up by stairs so you could get from one level to another.

“We followed the Baron around the gallery and down two flights of stairs until we reached the bottom level; we must have been about a hundred feet underground by this point. Workmen scurried to and fro, pushing trolleys filled with stacks of paper. ‘This machine,’ yelled the Baron above the roar of the machinery, ‘takes the input of a modified typewriter, and prints it in virtually any way you choose. It can even do colour.’”

“We pretended to be impressed, but in fact we were all just deafened. I noticed two of the boys, Henry Filigree and Oliver Knightmeyer, slip away towards the machine; they’d always been troublemakers, and I wondered what they were going to do. The Baron hadn’t noticed, of course. I was about to try to attract his attention, but he turned away, leading us around the side of the machine, to show us another part of it.

“Just then, there was a piercing scream, and everyone turned to look in the direction it had come from. Those two boys had climbed up the side of the machine and were trying to dare each other to walk along the top of it.”

Xavier let out a long sigh. Susan’s leg was going dead.

“The Baron’s face went as white as a sheet. He cried, ‘Boys! No!’, and Henry, who was balancing on a strut at the top of the machine, turned to look at him. The act of turning his head made him overbalance, and he tumbled in; Knightmeyer tried to grab him as he fell, also overbalanced, and he, too, fell in.

“Everyone cried out in shock. The Baron rushed to a panel set into the wall, pulled at a large lever, and the noise of the machine slowly died down, but by then it was too late. I noticed three small drips of blood come out of a pipe above my head, and I turned around, and was sick.

“Then everyone made a mad dash for the exit. The Baron, panicking no doubt, tried to block our way; but we pushed past him, knocking him over, and raced up the steps to the third level, through the door, down the corridor with the barrels in, back through the chapel, along the tunnel and up the spiral stairs at the end. We didn’t stop running, or screaming, until we arrived back at the school.

“Well, there was pandemonium. Nobody believed us at first, but the police soon came, cordoned off the entire estate, and arrested the Baron on charges of manslaughter. He was bailed a week later, and escaped to Paraguay, which is where I believe he died eight years later, from syphilis.”

Xavier lapsed into silence; the room appeared to have grown colder, apart from the patch of Susan’s legs with the cat on it. “That’s awful,” she managed, finally. “So how did –”

“Ever since then,” Xavier interrupted, seemingly without hearing her, “I have had an innate distrust of authority, a fascination for crypts, and problems sleeping. But you asked about the layout of the basement,” he continued, getting to his feet and crossing the room to a small writing-bureau with a dead geranium on top, in a mildewy glass of water. “I have these plans which I drew shortly after the incident, which might not be much use to you – the cellar complex is much, much bigger than this, and I don’t think we did much more than scratch the surface of what was down there.” He handed Susan a tattered brown A4 envelope. “This is the only copy I have, so please be careful with it.”

“Thank you,” Susan breathed, and wondered for a few moments whether now was the right time to tell him about the cabinets. “There’s – there’s something I should tell you.”

Xavier leaned forward in the sofa, and cradled his dying cup of tea like a prisoner holding a mouse that he’s got attached to in a prison cell he can’t escape from.

“I am all,” he said softly, “ears.”

Day Seventeen: 2,166 words

2007-11-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

The inside of the pagoda followed its exterior hexagonal shape. The windows, which from outside had looked convincing enough, were blacked out from the inside; the rest of the structure, which must have been at least forty feet tall, was presumably just there for show, as the ceiling wasn’t more than nine feet high and there were no stairs leading upwards. In the centre of the room they were standing in was a spiral staircase, descending into the ground, from which a faint light cast a warmly eerie glow. Paul shoved his phone into his pocket, and they both stood there for a moment, listening. No sounds of footsteps, discussions or henchmanly scheming reached their ears, so they crept over to the spiral staircase and listened again, trying in vain to pick out the faintest of sounds.

Susan looked at Paul, shrugged, and started slowly down the steps. He followed a few paces behind, in case she had to suddenly turn and run, and together they descended, winding round two full revolutions before they got to the bottom.

Ahead of them, a long brickwork tunnel stretched away into the distance, dimly lit at intervals by fluorescent tubes. It looked in cross-section like a sagged circle, with a broadly rounded ceiling which came down on each side to meet the floor in a languid curve. Every twenty yards or so, symmetrical tunnels on opposite sides joined on to it, leading off into the darkness, and there were a few metal locker cabinets along the length of the side, their bases a couple of feet away from the wall and their tops, at the back, scraping it. The tunnel was deserted, and there didn’t appear to be a sound. They looked at each other nervously.

“If we meet anyone,” Susan said quietly, “you know we’re really fucked.”

Paul nodded. The whole construction had evidently been designed for exactly that purpose: to escape, you’d have to race up the spiral staircase as fast as you could, then grapple with the locked door at the top, get over the wooden bridge, and then navigate your way round the maze – by which time, Opocapopopoulos would have had the opportunity to have a platoon of whatever sort of people waiting for you that he wanted you to meet.

She padded over to the nearest smaller tunnel that lead off the one they were in, and peered carefully round it. It wasn’t lit as well as the main tunnel, and she couldn’t see far down it, but from what she could see it wasn’t very long. Its sides were straight rather than curved, and its walls appeared to be lined with row upon row of lockable cupboards, all the same size, and all numbered. She looked at the numbers, which started at 000001 and went – she scanned them, trying to find the highest one she could – up to 000191 or beyond. Glancing down the main tunnel again, she counted the offshoots; there were more than thirty that she could see.

Paul approached her. “What do you think we should do?” he asked in an undertone. “Forwards?”

“I don’t see what else we can do,” Susan said. “If they know they’re being followed and are lying in wait up ahead somewhere, there’s not much we can do about it. If they think they’re not being, then we might still have a chance though. What’s in these lockers?”

She bent down and examined the nearest metal lockers, looking for something – anything – with which they could defend themselves if attacked. Most of them were, predictably, locked, but a few minutes of trying all the doors they could find yielded one that hadn’t been. Inside it was a mouldy sandwich, a pair of scruffy boots and a large torch, the kind that are about eighteen inches long and which you hold near the front in a fist above your head, so you can hit someone with the back end if you need to.

“Eww,” Susan whispered, referring to the sandwich. “This’ll do, though. You have it.”

She passed the torch to Paul, carefully closed the locker door, and they started off down the tunnel. It was disorientating at first, as its features were so regular: it reminded Susan of one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom’s chasing Jerry down a hallway with a door, a small table with a plant pot on it, a broom, and then a door, another small table with a plant pot on it, and another broom. She had to keep looking back at the spiral staircase at the end to remind herself how far they had come, and she noticed, too, how the tunnel wasn’t actually as straight as it had first appeared, but instead curved in a slightly irregular way as if it had been built a long time ago and then subsided. The floor was smooth enough so that if you stood at one end and dropped a large marble on it, it would have rolled in a somewhat drunken way towards the tunnel’s midpoint, stopped, and then lazily drifted to the right, finally settling in a small pile of dust next to another set of lockers.

Paul, a few paces ahead of Susan, was by now wishing he’d never decided to follow the four men, who had become two men, and who were now two men they knew the names of but who seemed to be up to no good. He was also rather unsettled by the way that Thimble and Kel didn’t seem too ruffled by the thought that they could be being followed – they must have seen them pass on the golf buggy, and even if for some reason they hadn’t, surely their suspicions must have been raised by the noises they’d heard in the maze? The whole thing was rather odd. Why, for example, had Thimble not noticed that he’d dropped the piece of paper with the entrance code on it?

His thoughts were running thus, when Susan suddenly grabbed his elbow and pulled him into the nearest alcove. They retreated into the darkness, pressing themselves against the lockers (Susan noted that the numbers here went from about 001540 to 001720) and waited, while the distant high whine of an electric motor became louder as it approached. They stayed absolutely motionless as another electric golf buggy similar to the one they’d borrowed whooshed past, driven by someone dressed in overalls. It had a pickup-truck-style open-topped back, in which were a stacked a number of large cardboard boxes which were all neatly labelled, and as Paul risked a careful peek around the corner to watch the buggy as it carried on away from them, it slowed and turned into one of the corridors leading off the main tunnel. He waited until it was out of sight.

“That might be coming back,” he hissed at Susan. “We’ve got to move.”

She nodded. They ran out of the corridor they’d been hiding in, and keeping as close as they could to the tunnel walls – not that it would help much, as there was no cover they could use apart from the lockers, if they were spotted – they scampered along the tunnel, looking in each smaller corridor as they passed it in case it led anywhere. About twenty yards on, Paul stopped and ducked into one of the alleyways; Susan followed him, and saw that he’d seen a door at the far end. She could hear the whine of the golf buggy as it whirred back towards them, and scrabbled about in her bag for something they could use to try to get the door open with. Paul took a more direct route, and grabbed the door handle. The door was locked, and he cursed under his breath as the golf buggy’s motor noise became louder and louder until it seemed to fill his entire head. Susan found a credit card in her purse, slipped it down the crack between the door and the frame, and somehow managed to wiggle it in just the right way so that the door opened and they tumbled through, slamming it quickly shut behind them, seconds before the golf buggy passed where they had just been standing.

“That was good,” Paul said, surprised. “Where did you learn to pick a lock like that?”

“That subscription you bought me, remember? The one to Total Burglar magazine. I learned a lot, but never thought I’d use it.”

The corridor they were standing in felt a lot damper than the tunnel, and wasn’t lit. Paul produced his phone again and shone a small pool of light from its screen, and they could see bare, exposed brickwork, a small amount of mildew on the upper portions of the walls, and a flagstone floor. It was difficult to tell how long it was; Paul felt as if they were back in the maze again, as the feeble light from his phone seemed to be beaten back by the darkness.

“This looks too old,” Susan frowned. “I thought the house was only built about twenty years ago?”

“It was,” Paul replied. “You’re right, though. This looks Victorian. Well, you should know.”

“Unfortunately my MA doesn’t cover architecture,” Susan said ruefully. “If I’d known we might end up here, I’d have chosen a different subject.”

“Where does this go to?” Paul wondered out loud, walking a few paces into the corridor. “It looks like catacombs or something.”

Susan remembered something she’d stumbled across in her research, which had concerned an eccentric English aristocrat who’d been so shy, or just plain weird, that he’d constructed a series of underground tunnels linking his family home with the local railway station so that when he had to go somewhere he didn’t have to run into any servants. These tunnels obviously hadn’t been built recently, so why were they here, and what were they left over from?

“Hang on,” she said to Paul. “Have you still got that map on your phone?”

Paul pressed a few buttons, brought the map up again and handed it to Susan. “Why?”

“Well, look,” Susan said, moving the image so that the maze was on one side of the screen and east side of the house could just be seen on the other. “We went in here,” she indicated the tiny blob in the middle of the triangle, “and here’s the house. I think that must be the moat, it looks about wide enough. How far down the tunnel do you think we are?”

Paul looked back at the door they’d come in through, as if that would help him calculate. “About fifty yards?” he hazarded. “I think this is the eighth corridor on the left. Why?”

“Well, I’m trying to work out roughly where we’d be if we were above ground,” Susan explained. “I think the distance between the middle of the maze and the house, once you’ve got under the moat, is about two hundred feet, or three chains. Or almost a third of a furlong.”

“Right.”

“So I reckon that since the moat is about twenty-five feet across, that makes it roughly a hundred and seventy-five feet from the pagoda at the centre of the maze to the edge of the moat. We’ve gone about a hundred and fifty feet, so there can’t be much further to go before we start getting underneath the house.”

“And then what?”

“You tell me,” she said, handing back his phone. “It wasn’t my idea to come out here, I’d’ve been just as happy watching the indie bands in the pub.”

Paul let out a frustrated huff. “We’re not prepared for this,” he said, “at all. Is it worth going back while we still can, and coming out again tomorrow?”

“And doing what? Storming the place? We don’t even know what’s going on here.”

“No, but that’s what I want to find out, and I think we should have come better prepared. Maps, you know. Hey,” he suddenly remembered, “did you ever get a call from that Meredith woman?”

“No, I don’t think I did,” Susan said. “I’m in two minds about that, actually.”

“Look,” Paul interrupted, “should we walk and talk?”

They quietly opened the door, checked they weren’t being watched, and slipped out into the tunnel. They had to dodge a couple more golf buggies delivering their unidentified loads into the side tunnels, but within about five minutes they had climbed the spiral staircase again and were standing in the pagoda.

“Right,” said Susan. “Plan of action, then. First, the cabinets. I don’t know if I really want anyone else to get their hands on them, actually. I’m becoming quite attached to them.”

“Fine,” Paul said, as they made their way out of the pagoda and over the bridge. “Where are you going to put them, then?”

As they talked, from an unlit fourth-floor window high above the moat, Filimore Thimble watched them thread their way back through the maze, a brooding look on his face.

Day Sixteen: 2,304 words

2007-11-15T16:48:00.000-08:00

It got very dark very quickly, to the point that the phones’ screens became almost unbearably bright, and they couldn’t look directly at them because it ruined their night vision for a few minutes afterwards. This brightness, however, was only an illusion, as the phones didn’t manage to penetrate more than a few feet into the gloom, and so it was virtually impossible for them to plan where they were going, or remember where they’d been. They kept close together, creeping guardedly along, round corners and along hedgerows that seemed to get narrower and narrower. Finally, they rounded a corner and were confronted with a dead end.

“Back we go,” muttered Paul. “What do you reckon, shall we go straight ahead this time?”

They’d taken a left at the last junction, which had been a three-way split: paths led off it left, right and straight ahead, and then curved gently around to the left. Or at least, they’d assumed the other two had curved round in the same way the left fork had done.

“Hmm,” Susan mused. “Think about it logically. This one seemed to be bearing left all the time, and the curve got tighter and tighter. Therefore, I think we’re in the middle of a big spiral. If we go out of here and head straight on instead, that way could also go into the spiral, or it could lead into the path that went right. I think we should go further back and find one of the other junctions we went past.”

They were keeping their voices low as they retraced their steps back to the crossroads. Suddenly, Paul held up his hand, and they both listened.

From somewhere over to their left came the muffled sounds of an argument, conducted at a level which suggested the arguers didn’t think they could be overhead. They were moving in roughly the same direction as Susan and Paul.

“This ‘ole fackin’ operation was a bodge from the start, Thimble, and you know it.”

“Fuck off, Kel. I’ve done my bit, I ain’t buggered up nuffin.”

“I knew you was the wrong choice. Too bloody loyal, that’s your problem. If we’d’ve known he was gonna end up dead –“

“I din’t kill ‘im!” spluttered Thimble. “We both know ‘oo did.”

“Ain’t sayin’ yer did kill ‘im,” Kel replied gruffly, “but you could’ve stopped it, if you‘d stood up for yerself a bit more. Anyway, what’s done is done.”

“I ain’t ‘appy,” Thimble said bitterly, “but what can we do about it.”

“All I’m sayin’,” said Kel in a deliberate tone, “is that I fought you knew the way through this bloody maze.”

“An’ I do,” Thimble retorted. “I must’ve bin from one end to the uvver an ‘undred times. But just not in the dark. I’ll get us there, it’ll just take a bit longer’n usual, is all.”

“You din’t even bring a torch.”

“Din’t fink I’d need one, did I? Din’t fink you’d’ve bin bovvered abaht the woman findin’ the wine cellar. Which is all it is, like I said,” he added, “a wine cellar. We wouldn’t even ‘ave to be ‘ere now, if you weren’t so bloody paranoid abaht it.”

The other man snorted derisively. “Don’t pretend like there’s no time limit,” he shot back, “and there ‘as bin, now, for weeks. If ‘e ‘adn’t’ve died, we could’ve carried on like there was no problem. But now, ‘s only a matter of time before the ‘ole place gets divided up an’ sold off. So I ain’t bein’ paranoid, ‘specially not now they’ve found one bit of the cellar. That ain’t gonna stop ‘em ‘til they’ve blown the lid off the ‘ole thing, an’ then we won’t even be able to get in this way.”

They continued in silence. Three hedgerows away, Paul and Susan turned a corner and found themselves back where they’d started, next to the entrance.

“Shit,” Susan cursed, and then had an idea. “Have you got internet access on your phone?”

“Yes, why?”

“This maze is probably big enough to show up on Google Maps, isn’t it? We could see what it looks like from space, and then follow the path round like that.”

A big grin spread across Paul’s face. “Now that is what the internet was made for,” he said, and fiddled about with his phone for a few minutes until a small aerial photograph of the gardens appeared on the screen. He zoomed in on the maze, and they could see that it was roughly triangular, with an entrance at one corner and an oval space in the middle with some kind of building in it.

“Come on,” Paul said, “let’s do it on the hoof.”

They jogged along a long path that ran round the edge of the maze, ending suddenly and presenting the mazee with two choices: hairpin back, or take a left. Paul scrutinised the map on his phone for a moment or two, and decided on the hairpin, and they were off again. The voices of Kel and Thimble had faded away now and become indistinct, and Susan felt they must have found the right way and be heading towards the centre. She tried to run as quietly as she could, though, in case the other two were still blundering around: it wouldn’t be a good thing at this stage if they ran into them.

All of a sudden, Paul slowed down and held out his hand for Susan to stop. He indicated on the screen where they were, somewhere about halfway in between the entrance and the middle. Susan listened, straining to hear whatever she could, and then heard the crack of a twig.

All was still, deadly silent. The crack sounded like it had come from the next pathway, just over the hedge on their right. She couldn’t hear the two men talking any more, and they seemed to be holding their breath too, possibly aware that they were being followed. Paul put his finger to his lips, and pointed through the hedge; Susan nodded. Instinctively, they both crept back into the murkier pools of darkness next to the hedge on the other side of their pathway, trying to make as little noise as possible, and waited.

There were the muffled sounds of movement from the other side of the hedge. It was clear to them both now that whatever Thimble and Kel had felt before about not being followed, they were now suspicious, guarded. Nothing happened for a full minute, and then they heard the sound of footsteps creeping off to their right, going away from them.

Susan carefully let out her breath, in a controlled way so as not to make any noise.

“That was close,” she breathed into Paul’s ear. He nodded. He’d pressed the phone to his chest when they were trying to avoid being heard, to mask the small amount of light that spilled out from it, but now he pressed a button on it to make the screen come on again. He formed a shade with his cupped hand over the top of the screen to try to limit any light getting anywhere it shouldn’t, and showed it to Susan.

“I think they were there,” he breathed, so quietly that she had to strain to hear him, and indicated the next row along. “They’re heading straight for that blobby thing in the middle, looks like a building. So are we.”

She nodded.

“I think we’ve got two options,” he continued. “We either follow them at a distance, maybe five minutes behind, and count on the building not being locked when we get there – I’m assuming it’s connected to a tunnel or something. Or, we catch them up, and try to overpower them.”

Susan looked at him, bathed in the cold glow of his phone screen. “You’re not a hard-boiled private eye,” she whispered, “and I’m not much of a femme fatale. So I think we should go with the first option.”

He nodded, and they padded towards the end of the hedgerow where it made a hairpin turn into the row where Thimble and Kel had stood a few minutes before. Peering cautiously round it to check the coast was clear, which it was, he motioned for Susan to follow him. He checked the map on the phone: they were about three rows out from the building in the middle, but tracing the line of the path round it seemed that the path they were taking would lead away from the centre before it lead back towards it. He suddenly noticed something he hadn’t seen before, and tried to zoom in for a closer look, but the map was already zoomed in as far as it would go.

“Look at that,” he whispered, passing the phone to Susan. “What do you think it is?”

She stared at it for a moment or two. “It looks like a bridge.”

“I think so too,” Paul said quietly. “We’d better be careful.”

They carried on, past a couple of blind turns and navigating three or four more crossroads and T-junctions, until Paul judged that they must be coming up to the straight section of path over which the bridge crossed. It appeared, from the fuzzy image on his phone screen, that the bridge was their final obstacle, leading straight to the building in the middle, which would explain why at first glance it had looked oddly asymmetric. Now he looked at it more closely, he could see it appeared to be two structures: the bridge, and a round building in the middle of the oval clearing at the centre. With a jolt, he suddenly realised that the maze was built to look like a gigantic All-Seeing Eye, the triangular symbol on a dollar bill with an eye in the middle of it.

They moved stealthily around the corner and saw the bridge, straddling the path, and suddenly noticed two shadowy figures crossing it. They instantly retreated back around the corner, slightly shocked.

“Do you think they saw us?” Susan breathed.

“I hope not,” Paul whispered. “Although there’s not a lot we can do if they did.”

He peeked around the corner, saw the second of the two figures move down the steps leading from the bridge into the central oval area, and tiptoed forward. The moon was directly in front of them, fully illuminating the pathway over which the bridge crossed and leaving no hiding spaces: if either of the men decided to walk back up the steps onto the bridge while they were in the corridor below it, they’d be seen. Running, however, probably wasn’t a good idea, because of the crackly leaves and twigs underfoot, so they walked as briskly but quietly as they could towards the bridge and the kink at the end of the corridor.

Paul kept his head down, studying what he could see of the terrain ahead to avoid stepping on anything noisy, but Susan, a couple of paces behind him, was paying more attention to the bridge. There was a creak, and she tapped him on the shoulder; he popped his phone into his pocket and looked up at the bridge, but saw nothing. Another creaking noise, the kind made by a foot on a wooden step.

“Fuck it,” muttered Paul, and the two of them broke into a run, hurtling towards the bridge as fast as they could. They reached it just as one of the men came into view, looking up and down the corridor suspiciously.

“See anyfink?” growled the other, from the central area. It sounded like Kel.

“Nah,” said Thimble. “Must’ve been a fox, or summink.”

From where they cowered under the bridge, Susan thought: What’s he talking about – he must have seen us –

Thimble looked up and down the corridor, but saw nothing. He turned to Kel. “Plenty o’ wildlife round ‘ere, y’know.”

Kel looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing.

“Go an’ ‘ave a look yerself, if yer don’t believe me,” Thimble offered.

“Nah, yer all right,” grunted the other. “If there’s anyone followin’ us, we’ll know as soon as they get in anyway. We got more important fings to do that worry abaht that.”

He turned to the pagoda, a hexagonal structure about twelve feet across with a door in it. “Got the code?”

“Yeah,” Thimble said, fishing a scrap of paper out of his pocket. “’Ere, I wrote it dahn.”

He crossed to the door, next to which was a numeric keypad, and keyed in the code from the slip of paper. There was a click, and he pushed the door open.

“After you,” he said, letting Kel through first. “I gotta check it’s shut prop’ly, see –“

The door clicked shut. All was silent for a few minutes, and then Susan and Paul creaked up the steps, across the bridge and down the other side into the oval, still moving cautiously in case there was anyone around. When it was clear that there wasn’t, Paul pulled out his phone again.

“I reckon –“ Susan began, but Paul had noticed something. Bending down, he picked up a scrap of paper from where it had fallen next to the door, and shone the phone’s weak light on it. The numbers 102929 showed up clearly.

“I don’t like this,” Susan whispered. “Something’s not right about this at all, it feels like we’re walking into a trap.”

“Then we go carefully,” Paul murmured in reply, and went to the door. He punched in the code, and there was a click as it unlocked.

They looked at each other.

“Normally I’d say ladies first,” Paul said, “but I suppose I got us into this mess, so –“

The two of them entered the pagoda, and the door swung shut behind them with a soft, menacing click.

Days Fourteen and Fifteen: 2,971 words

2007-11-14T16:03:00.000-08:00

He didn’t bother to wash his hands – something he would always usually do – but with a sense of renewed urgency, while still trying to appear nonchalant, he opened the door to the toilets and checked the table which Thimble and his friends had been sitting at. It was now occupied by a bunch of drunk estate agents – he recognised at least one of them from flathunting a while back. Shit, shit. Where had they gone? He had to find Susan. His hand moved instinctively to the phone in his pocket, but then he realised the music was too loud and she wouldn’t hear it. So he went over to the girl on the door, paid his four pounds, and thrust his way into the room, looking around wildly for where she might be.

He soon found her, near the bar, being chatted up by a couple of blokes. Although Susan didn’t flirt, and wasn’t really a flirty type, she would talk to anybody. Since she and Paul often went out together, but were actually both single – Paul because he didn’t seem able to commit to anything, and Susan because she generally found books better company than men – people often mistook them for partners rather than siblings, and thought things to themselves like they say people go for someone who looks like them. Susan found this quite funny. Paul just found it a bit weird.

He pushed his way up to Susan. “Sorry to interrupt – Susan, we’ve gotta go.”

“Hey mate –“ one of the men began.

“No time to explain. Leave your drink,” Paul said urgently, and pulled Susan away before she or the men had time to resist.

“Paul, what’s going on?” Susan wanted to know, as they went back out of the door into the main area of the pub. “Why the urgency?”

“I need to follow Thimble,” Paul explained. “I overheard him and a mate of his, I think they’re going to the house tonight. They’re worried about people finding something, but I don’t know what.”

“Where are they?”

“I think they’ve left. Sorry to pull you away like that, but.”

He left the second half of the sentence hanging as they emerged into the cool night air. The street was pretty empty – it was the kind of street you’d only go down if it was the shortest way for you to get where you were going, or if you were going to the Oily Moon itself – but four shambly figures at one end of it stood out. If they were indeed on their way to Opocapopopoulos House, they were going the right way.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s not be seen.”

They moved as stealthily as they could in the same direction as the four figures: Paul could tell Susan had had a couple more drinks than he had, and he felt it was important to keep on moving as much as they could so she didn’t start to fall asleep. They followed them at a distance through the centre of town, out along the road that led to the station, and then out of town altogether and up the gently sloping hill that led eventually to Opocapopopoulos’s sprawling estate.

“I’m an idiot,” Susan said, her arms crossed tightly in an effort to keep warm. “I didn’t bring a jacket.”

Paul didn’t reply, but kept his eyes fixed on the indistinct, blobby shapes up ahead. The street lighting stopped, and soon they were winding their way along narrow, high-hedged country lanes; it was almost impossible to see anything at all. In the still of the night, random snatches of the men’s conversation drifted over to them, and they both strained to catch what they could, but could make nothing meaningful out of what they could hear. Eventually, the men stopped a couple of hundred yards short of the massive iron gates leading to the house, which loomed like a giant black hole out of the inky blue darkness, swallowing all traces of light around it. Opocapopopoulos had installed what had been, at the time, claimed to be the most advanced security system money could buy. An eight-foot-high wall ran right the way round the estate, topped with sprinklings of broken glass and loaded with motion sensors. The entrances, of which there were officially two, were formed of eleven-foot-high solid iron gates weighing three tons each, opened and closed by hydraulics and activated by either a key – of which there were only two copies in existence, both now in the custody of the local police – or a retinal scan. Over five hundred motion-sensitive closed-circuit TV cameras dotted the perimeter wall, which fed back to a central control room on the fourth floor of the house, were analysed by computer, and had provided Opocapopopoulos with up-to-the-minute reports on the precise location of any ramblers, deer or political canvassers who were idiotic enough to approach within fifteen feet of the wall outside. The whole thing functioned like a giant, trembling spider’s web, and had been described by Practical Paranoiac magazine as “the closest thing to feeling safe that money can buy”.

That said, of course, since there were now so many people swarming around the place during the day, the gates had been left open. A local security firm had been assigned to patrol the grounds, but there’s not much you can do with three men and a dog when you have to patrol such a large area.

Paul and Susan watched as the four men in front of them split up. Two of them split off the pathway and vanished into the bushes on the right, and the other two – it was impossible to see which one was Thimble – carried on towards the temporary security hut as if nothing was amiss. They’d stopped talking a while back, but now struck up what sounded, even to Susan and Paul, like a rather phoney conversation: it had a false sense of jocularity which until a few minutes ago none of the men had shown a hint of.

They watched as the two men reached the gate. A guard stepped out of the hut, and blocked their way; they gestured and were talking to him in reasonable, measured tones, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Then Susan, who hadn’t been watching the men as intently as Paul, nudged him and pointed. The other two men were creeping past the guard, who had his back to them as he argued with the first two, and as quickly as she had noticed them, they’d disappeared into the darkness beyond. Paul raised his eyebrows, the two men arguing with the guard raised their arms in theatrical shrugs, and they turned away, presumably saying something like, “Awfully sorry, we’ll bring the correct accreditation the next time we need to access the house at half eleven at night”. Paul and Susan ducked down into the bushes as the went past.

“What now?” Susan whispered.

“I don’t know,” Paul admitted. “They look like they’re heading back into town. But we can’t follow the other two, can we?”

“We might be able to. Have you got your council ID card?”

Life as a security guard, man. You didn’t sign up for the excitement, but mate this could get boring, so boring. At least standing around outside clubs until five in the morning, you’d see a few things and get to break up a few fights or maybe start some other ones, you know, control what was going on and that. The strip club had been the best, when he’d got to know the girls, and been for a few nights out with them draped over each arm, grinning from ear to ear and attracting the envious stares of every man who walked past. Almost as good as the job driving cars about from showroom to showroom before they’d been registered, when you could pretend you owned whatever bran new car you were driving: the Bentley he’d picked up for a Russian oil tycoon had got a gentle thrashing down the A3 towards Sunningdale, in the stretches between speed cameras. But this… this was something else. After the incident involving the riot van outside Bacchus nightclub, when he’d sworn blind he hadn’t punched anyone but had actually kneed a vicious little chav in the bollocks, serve him right the little herbert, he’d ended up here, out on a bloody limb. Wasn’t even the possibility of Opocapopopoulos being generous any more, as he was dead: there were stories both sides of the fence, but a couple of people he’d met in the pub who’d either worked for him or knew someone who had, said he could be the most generous man in the world if you got him in the right mood. And now here we are, he thought to himself bitterly, it’s getting on for midnight, and the only entertainment there’s been so far this evening has been two tossers claiming they were working up at the house during the day and forgot something. Well, hard luck, he wasn’t that stupid. Bloody cold too, though, should’ve brought some gloves.

Susan strode up towards the guard. “Hi,” she said. “Dr Susan Franks,” she flashed her student ID card at him, “and this is Detective Paul Jameson.” Paul flashed his ID even more quickly. “We’re on a call-out about the disturbance up at the house.”

“Disturbance? Ain’t been a disturbance, not as far as I’m aware.”

“Hm.” Susan reached into her bag for her phone, pressing a button just before she drew it out so it lit up. “Hello? Yes, we’re just here. At the gate. Whereabouts are you?” She paused. “OK, see you in a minute.” The phone went back into her bag. “We only just got the call – I’m sure it’s nothing urgent, but we’re on alert with this one.”

“OK,” said the guard. “Do you need me to escort you up there?”

“No need, thanks,” Susan said, smiling a brief smile. “You’re on your own here, we wouldn’t want anyone getting in that shouldn’t. They’ll meet us up there anyway.”

“Do you want to take the golf buggy, then?” the guard asked. “Just bring it back, o’ course.”

“Thanks,” Susan said graciously as he handed her the keys, “that would make things a lot easier.”

She clambered into the golf buggy with Paul, neither of them able to believe their luck, started the engine, and as soon as they were out of sight of the guard hut, floored it. The buggy put on a sudden jolt of speed as if it had been stung, to the point at which it was doing nearly twenty miles an hour.

“Nice one,” Paul said. “Is that how you got through your degree?”

“Pretty much,” she admitted. “It’s amazing how far you get in life if you can bullshit with confidence.”

The drive wound gracefully around an artificial lake with an enormous stone fountain at its centre, up a light slope, and then crested the top of the rise at a point which coincided perfectly, and deliberately, with the point at which you would be the most impressed by the house beyond. The house itself stood silently at the end of two hundred yards of straight driveway flanked by marble elephants and poplar trees. The collision of styles was so all-encompassing that it couldn’t have been the work of someone who didn’t know what they were doing: surely you would have had to have a deep knowledge of every possible period in art and architectural history to have come up with a gestalt whole, no two parts of which in any way collided.

They puttered up the drive, slowly now, trying not to make too much noise. The thought crossed Susan’s mind that since the two men who had slipped past the guard couldn’t have got up to the house in the time they’d taken to get there, they must have passed them somewhere along the way, and she suddenly regretted saying yes to the buggy. On the other hand, it would probably have looked suspicious if they’d declined the offer and walked the mile and a half instead; at least this way, even if they’d been seen, they were probably still ahead of the others. They stopped just short of the moat, and she turned the buggy off. The drawbridge was up.

“Let’s leave this here,” she whispered to Paul, “and see what they do.”

Paul nodded, and leaving the keys in the ignition they crept into the shadows, out of sight. They didn’t have to wait long before the two other men appeared over the top of the rise, walking guardedly, and saw the buggy. One nudged the other, and indicated it.

There was some hushed whispering, and then one of the men produced a torch, which he swept around in a slow arc, illuminating the four lions rampant flanking the main entrance, the drawbridge, the urns with their overflowing foliage, and the buggy. Susan and Paul held their breath as the two moved towards it, looking at it suspiciously in case it was booby-trapped or bugged or something, and then in a rush of movement they hurled themselves onto it, started the motor and screeched off, heading round the side of the house.

“Quick,” said Paul, and the two of them scrambled out of their hiding-place and ran full tilt in the direction the two men had gone. Paul elbowed Susan as they ran, and put a finger to his lips; and the two of them veered off the crunchy gravel path and dodged between bushes in an effort to be less obtrusive.

They rounded the corner of the house and saw the buggy up ahead, still going at full tilt, as it rounded the next corner, its reflection shimmering in the moat, the moonlight backlighting it dramatically. Paul tried to remember the plans he’d seen, and realised it was probably heading towards the rear entrance and the loading bay. They eased off a little, and took a wide path, skirting around herbaceous borders and the grass that until a few weeks ago had been so neatly clipped, and reached a point where they could see the rear entrance clearly without being seen, and then they both stopped.

The drawbridge was up, and the golf buggy was nowhere to be seen.

“Now what?” hissed Susan, out of breath.

“I don’t know,” Paul spluttered, “they can’t possibly have gone in and raised the bridge that fast, can they?”

“I have to admit,” Susan replied, “I don’t have too much experience of drawbridges. Could they have gone anywhere else?” She opened her eyes wide, trying to see further into the darkness, but gave up; there were too many hedges, bushes, shrubs and other possible hiding places for it to be worth the effort.

A light suddenly went on above Paul’s head. “The maze,” he murmured. “It’s just over there. I would bet you anything that’s where they’ve gone.”

“What?” Susan was incredulous. “What are you talking about?” The last thing she wanted to do, right now, was stumble in the dark around an unfamiliar maze. Even a familiar one would have been bad enough.

“Bartholomew built a maze,” Paul explained, “a few years ago. I remember seeing it on the plans, and I think it’s near the rear entrance to the house. He modelled it on the one at Longleat, I think.”

“Why the hell would these two people, and can I remind you we’re not even sure who they are,” Susan said accusingly, “be buggering about inside a maze if, from what you said they’d said, they know a way into the house?”

Paul took a few moments to disentangle her sentence. “Maybe,” he suggested, “that is the way in.”

“What kind of a –“ Susan began, and then stopped. “Look, let’s find them first,” she said. “Then let’s decide whether we want to go through a maze to get in. This is the stupidest night out ever,” she added, “and don’t try to deny that.”

Paul shrugged. “The bands didn’t sound that great, though,” he pointed out, “so you’re unlikely to have missed much. Come on,” he started jogging roughly in the direction he thought the maze was, “and let’s be quiet about it.”

It took them about five minutes to find the maze, which was somehow hidden half behind the orangery and half behind a formal box hedge. When they got there, the abandoned golf buggy parked at its entrance told them all they needed to know.

Susan looked at Paul. “I can’t believe this is the only option,” she huffed, but there was a note of resignation in her voice. “Can’t we just take the buggy and try and get in a different way?”

“I bet they’ve taken the keys,” Paul whispered back, and checked. “Yup.”

She looked at the entrance to the maze, an impenetrable wall of yew which stretched away into the darkness on both sides. They were at one corner. It was impossible to tell how big it was.

“When you say modelled on Longleat,” she began, “what do you mean?”

“Longleat Maze is the largest hedge maze in the world,” Paul replied. “I read an article in Hedge Maze magazine. Bartholomew built this one to be bigger, but I don’t think he actually ever finished it. So it’s currently the third largest.”

“Bloody great,” Susan muttered. “You first?”

Paul moved towards the entrance, and then stopped. “Have you got your phone?” he asked. “I mean, it’s not run out of battery or anything?”

“No,” Susan said.

“Good, we might need it as a light.”

Mobile phones held out in front like shields, the two of them advanced slowly into the maze, pressing cancel every few paces to avoid the screens going blank.

Days Twelve and Thirteen: 2,285 words [falling behind here a little]

2007-11-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

The following night, Susan decided she’d had enough of trying to make connections between obscure historical events and even more obscure art-historical non-events, and besides, if she had to put up with Paul moping around the house, getting alternately angry and depressed about losing his job, she felt she was going to scream. So they decided to go to the pub, where a band that a friend of one of Susan’s friends was playing, and have a night off.

The Oily Moon, a large building which wrapped itself in a dilapidated way round the corner of one of the main roads going into Eastwestchester, didn’t look like much from the outside, and that’s the way it liked it. There was a sign outside proclaiming Hot Food Served Cold Daily, and occasionally a couple of people standing outside buying heroin from each other, but otherwise it was fairly featureless. The original sign, which depicted the moon melting into a pond at night-time, and which according to local legend had been painted by Salvador Dali, had been stolen so many times that the landlord had given up bothering to try and get it back, and was currently (although hardly anybody knew this) hanging on the bedroom wall of Klimm Tangweiler, 26, an unemployed German techno artist who lived in one of the blocks of flats near the Moon and who’d thought it would be a good way to add some visual interest to his otherwise stark and empty room. Three months after all this had blown over with Susan and the cabinets and Opocapopopoulos’s house and everything, the police conducted a raid on the wrong flat, mistakenly battering in Tangweiler’s door with five feet of solid metal ramrod. They didn’t find the kilos of crack they were after, but the return of the Oily Moon’s sign was celebrated halfheartedly by its regulars, and typed into a police report where it was never read about again, but contributed to a small overall reduction in the local crime rate.

Inside the Moon, chaotic students mingled with builders, local office workers and everyone in between, although to be fair it was mainly chaotic students. There were four bands playing that night, one of which Susan knew about and the other three of which might be crap, but you never know, and it’s only £4 with a flyer (which someone was helpfully handing out as they came in) so you can’t lose really. Paul offered to buy her a drink while she went to the loo, and while he was waiting at the bar he suddenly caught sight of someone he was sure he knew. He stared harder at the man, trying to place him, but couldn’t. As Susan rejoined him, pushing her way through the throngs of people watching some football on a big screen, he pointed the man out. “Who’s that?”

Susan looked at him. “I think that’s Filimore Thimble,” she said. “It must be. I recognise him from the sketch you drew of the artist’s impression you saw on that website.”

“That’s who it is,” Paul said urgently. “I knew I knew his face. Let’s see if we can get him drunk and see what we can find out about him.”

“Careful,” Susan said. “Probably best not to get him too drunk too early. He’ll definitely be with other people, and you don’t want him remembering you.”

“No, good point,” Paul replied, and studied Thimble again as he turned away from the bar carrying a tray of pints. “Looks like he’s either with three other people, or he’s ragingly thirsty.”

They ordered drinks, and found somewhere they could perch and watch Thimble unobtrusively. He was out for the night, it appeared, as he showed no signs of going anywhere. A plate of nachos was delivered to their table, which the four of them tucked into enthusiastically, and then one of them went to get another round of drinks in.

“Who’s winning?” Susan asked him, indicating the football, to pass the time.

Paul glanced up. “I’ve got no idea,” he said. “You know as well as I do that I don’t know anything about football. You’d be better off asking me who’s winning the baseball.”

“There isn’t any baseball.”

“Exactly.”

Susan glanced at her watch. “Do you want to come and see some bands,” she asked, “or are you going to sit here all night?”

“I’m kind of fascinated to see what those guys do,” Paul said. “Aren’t you? I don’t want them to leave.”

Susan shrugged. “To be honest,” she admitted, “I’m not all that bothered. I thought we came out here to unwind, not to start following people like we were in some kind of film noir.”

“Look,” Paul said, “you go. I’m not sure I can justify spending four pounds on a bunch of shit bands, when I’ve just lost my job.”

“Are you joking? That’s the best reason to spend four pounds on a bunch of shit bands. Look, I need a night off… if you’re happy here, I’ll go in.”

Paul nodded, and sipped his pint as she disappeared towards the door to the back of the pub where bands played in a darkened, skanky room with sweaty walls that seemed to throb. He kept half an eye on the football, because even a TV that’s showing something you have no interest in is better than being sat on your own in a pub appearing to stare at everyone else, but his mind was elsewhere, a whirl of contradictory thoughts and odd clues that didn’t add up. Why had Susan been left a hugely valuable piece of furniture, and why was she being asked to destroy it? What dark secrets could Filimore Thimble fill him in on, and was evidence gathered when you were both drunk legally binding? Why had the paper said that Opocapopopoulos had been discovered in clothes he hadn’t even been wearing at the time he was killed, four days beforehand? Why was this woman Meredith so intent on finding the basement to the mansion, and what did she think she’d find down there?

Was Opocapopopoulos really dead? This one sent a chill down his spine. Surely, surely, he must be. If he wasn’t, who was the body that Dodecahedrus Grunt had found, which presumably had been formally identified by… whom? If Opocapopopoulos lived as a recluse, had cut himself off from his family, and at the time of his death hadn’t had a significant other who would have been able to identify his body, who had the police turned to – sorry, to whom had the police turned, he corrected himself – for identification? Was this whle thing a massive conspiracy involving the police force, every forensic scientist who’d been involved, all Opocapopopoulos’s supposedly invisible staff, his entire family and everyone he’d worked with, in order to provide cover for Opocapopopoulos himself to do something dastardly? And what was that?

He felt someone tap his shoulder, and turned to see Cheryl, the project manager from work, standing there with a couple of people he didn’t know.

“Hi there,” Paul said, again forgetting that she was called Cheryl and only remembering a fraction of a second too late to append her name onto the end of his greeting. “How’s it going?”

“Fine thanks, Paul. Saw you from behind and thought, that can’t be Paul Jameson on his own, can it? What are you doing here?”

“I actually came with my sister, Susan,” Paul explained, “but I wanted to – er – watch the football… she’s gone in to watch the bands.”

“Oh, I didn’t come here for that,” Cheryl said dismissively, “but I couldn’t miss the match. I mean I know they came back from two years of Chelsea dominance to win the Premiership for the ninth time last season, but do you really think a side like Ferguson’s got at the moment is better than any he’s had before?”

“Well –“

“I mean look at it,” Cheryl said, counting off on her fingers. “Contrast now with the ’94 team, when they won the double. You’ve got Gary Neville, Scholes and Giggs still in it. But Ronaldo’s suspended, Rooney’s been injured, Neville’s been out for the whole season so far, and there’s –“ she did a quick count – “five other players who either are out injured, or have been. I don’t see how that’s better than thirteen years ago, do you?”

“Er, no,” Paul said. “No, it doesn’t sound it.”

She cocked her head. “You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Nope,” Paul agreed. “You’re right, I’m a fraud. To tell you the truth,” he lowered his voice, “I’m still trying to find out what I can about Opocapopopoulos. I actually came here because I lost my job –“

“You what!”

“Oh, yeah – sorry, you probably didn’t know about that. I got canned for not turning up enough. Apparently they had a file about me that ran to about a hundred pages… they were keeping tabs on everything I was doing on the internet, the phone calls I was making, the lot.”

“Shit,” Cheryl said. “All I do all day is look at lingerie.”

“And then I came here,” Paul said, “and who do I see but Filimore Thimble, who was Opocapopopoulos’s gardener, and so far the only person who seems to have been definitely employed by him. That’s him, look,” he indicated Thimble, laughing and chatting in the corner with his friends, “and I feel like I need to speak to him.”

Cheryl looked at Paul for a few moments, a thought forming in her mind. “You know,” she began, “– and don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you getting laid off might be a good thing, in the long run.”

“Why?”

“Well, look. You’ll get another job, no doubt about that. In the meantime, though, you’re now free to satisfy your curiosity. Did you say you and Opocapopopoulos were related?”

Paul looked at her. “No, I don’t think I did.”

“Oh… maybe I was thinking about someone else. Happens all the time. Get IN,” she suddenly shouted at the football, and joined in the cheering as someone scored a goal or something. Paul drained his drink, got up and made a sort of “I’m just going to the toilet” hand gesture to Cheryl, but she wasn’t paying attention any more.

He hated urinals, for an obscure reason that had something to do with a school trip he’d taken, when, aged twelve, he’d gone for a day trip to a Roman ruin in Wales with a coachload of other kids. Susan, being in the year above, wasn’t there: she’d always been his protector and would have stood up for him in times like this. They’d stopped at a motorway service station near Bristol, and while he was standing at the urinal trying to force out some wee in the desperate knowledge that this was his last chance until they got to the visitor centre, one of the other kids had sauntered up next to him, unzipped his flies, and started peeing. This was in its own way disconcerting, mainly because the kid had come and stood next to him in a urinal with no other occupants, but Paul had been doubly unsettled when he’d seen, out of the corner of his eye, the kid trying to sneak a glance at his dick. He hadn’t said anything, of course, but had finished up as quickly as he could, and ever since then had preferred to use cubicles. They also had the advantage of occasionally having paper, to save the difficulties of embarrassing drips.

He was just reading through a long-winded graffito about gays – he couldn’t quite work out whether it was about wanting some nice fat cock, or hating people who wanted that sort of thing – when, over the dull throb of the music coming from one of the live bands, a conversation at the urinals caused him to prick up his ears:

“’Course, nobody else knows who done it, see.”

“You fink?”

“I know. Them forensic scientists’ve been crawlin’ all over the place for two weeks, but they ain’t found nuffin yet. They ain’t even found out about the cellar.”

“No shit.”

“Nah, I’m tellin’ yer. Safe as houses, they’ll never find it.”

“Gotta be careful, though,” the other grunted. Paul guessed that the first one was Thimble. “You’re sure they ain’t gonna find anyfink?”

“I got Baz livin’ down in the cellars at the moment,” cackled Thimble. “Keepin’ watch. ’E says ‘e give one of ‘em a bit of a fright the other day. She’s in the billiard room, innit, an’ she only goes an’ starts takin’ out all the books –“

“Fuckin’ what?” the other man shouted.

“Easy,” Thimble said, a bit taken aback. “She din’t find nuffin. ‘E put all the books back before she could go dahn, scared her right up.”

“And you fink that’ll stop her, what, ‘cos she’s gonna fink there’s a ghost in the place or summink?” the other man growled. “Bollocks, there you are one minute sayin’ they ain’t found the cellar, then the next she’s found the secret door. There’ll be a fuckin’ team of ‘em down there in no time. Why din’t you tell me this before?”

“That ain’t the actual cellar, though, is it?” Thimble protested. “If you go dahn there you don’t get nowhere, remember, that’s ‘ow Opocap built it. The real entrance is –“

“Yeah, shut up,” the other one cut in in a low voice, “you don’t know who’s listenin’.”

They both stopped speaking. Paul heard the door swing open and shut again, and then silence – apart from booming bassline and thumping drums.

Days Ten and Eleven: 2,959 words

2007-11-10T11:19:00.000-08:00

Paul looked at his stacked-up in-tray, and than back at the screen on his computer. He was in two minds. He had work to do, which mainly involved checking forms that people had submitted, signing or countersigning them, logging them on “the system” and forwarding them to another department, and part of him knew that really he ought to be doing that. On the other hand, he found himself intrigued by the idea that Opocapopopoulos had employed people that nobody, now, knew about. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t have had access to the parts of “the system” that held all that information, and in fact he didn’t, but whoever had designed that way of doing things and satisfied themselves that merely locking people out of some computer software would stop them finding out things they shouldn’t be able to had forgotten that the paper copies were kept in filing cabinets that anyone could access if they asked nicely enough for the key. Sharon, who worked in some department to do with local employment legislation, was his entry point here. She had a copy of most of the keys he needed. If Opocapopopoulos had employed people properly, and filled in all the forms and so on – and there was no reason to think that he had, but it was at least worth a shot – then records of his employees would be held somewhere in these filing cabinets. He looked at the cup on his desk, and it was empty, so that swung it for him: he’d go and make a cup of tea in the kitchenette that was a bit further away, and on the way would see if he could bump into Sharon and get the key off her.

On his way, he happened to glance at the local paper, which someone had folded so only the front page was visible:

Another New Twist To Unpopular Millionare’s Untimely End

He stopped, and looked around to see if it seemed to belong to anyone, but everybody seemed to be out at a meeting or something. Well, surely they wouldn’t miss it if he brought it back: he quickly picked it off the table, thrust it under his arm, and carried on towards the kitchenette with a new sense of purpose.

Once there, he put the kettle on, opened the paper out, and read the rest of the article.

Shocking new evidence has come to light in the case of murdered local tycoon banker Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos, which throws a fresh light on everything. The previously confusing case, which looked like suicide but which has most likely been murder all along, has been given a new twist by the confession of a local man, Orson Cabin, who claims he was employed by Opocapopopoulos as a chauffeur, which would fit as it appears that Opocapopopoulos had an extensive collection of cars but couldn’t drive. Cabin claims that on the day of the murder, he had been ordered by Opocapopopoulos to drive to Guildford to pick up a package waiting for him at a post restante address in the town. When he returned with the package, Opocapopopoulos was nowhere to be seen, but there was an envelope pinned to the door of Cabin’s room. He has refused to divulge the contents of the envelope or what was in the package under data protection laws, which in a way doesn’t make this much of a confession, but frankly we’re not expecting you to have read this far anyway.

That sounded odd, Paul thought, pouring hot water into the cup. As he carried his fresh tea towards where Sharon worked, he couldn’t help feeling a small niggling feeling of there being more to this than he, or anyone, knew. What was all this weird stuff with packages? Why had Susan inherited something, anything, from Opocapopopoulos, when apparently only two other people had been present at the –

He stopped dead. That was what wasn’t quite right. He needed to find a phone... it was Wednesday, which meant that Susan would be probably at the library –

He found a free desk (where was everyone, and why did they spend their entire time in meetings?) and dialled her number. Amazingly, and somewhat gallingly, he got straight through without having to ask permission to dial a mobile number. It rang a few times, and then Susan answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey, listen, it’s Paul. Look, I’m at work and I don’t have a lot of time. But can you remember what the other two people at the, er, will reading were called?”

A pause. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“You’ve got to try. I don’t think it was real. I mean, I think it was a sham.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it, Susan. That’s not the way wills are read out, is it? Not even if there’s nothing much to hand out, and especially not if you’re talking about someone who was in the Sunday Times Rich List as one of the most unlikeable multimillionaires over fifty. Can you imagine the kind of legal crap you’d have to go through, the number of people who’d come out of the woodwork claiming to be related to him, the lawyers and the slanging and everything? Anyone who was even slightly related to him would want a piece. It’s a process that would take weeks, and as far as I know not much of the house has been touched... I mean, those sideboard things surely weren’t the only valuable thing he owned, so why isn’t the rest of it being left to somebody? Why is it just sitting there?”

Susan paused again before answering; Paul got the impression she wasn’t really listening. “I don’t know, Paul. What are you trying to say – that I should give those cabinets back?”

“No, but I do think you shouldn’t just be accepting that that’s the last you’ll hear about them. I guarantee it won’t be. Are you sure you can’t remember who the other two people were?”

“One had the same name as a photographer, I think. Wasn’t Snowdon or Mapplethorpe or Bailey, but somebody like that... began with an R perhaps.”

“Rankin?”

“Yes, that was it. The other one began with an A, as far as I can remember, but I’ve got no idea what his name actually was.”

“Well, Rankin’s a start. Do you remember what they inherited?”

“No.”

“Did you leave after you heard your bit?”

“No, but I was a bit shocked. I don’t remember there was too much blurb after the bit about the cabinets, but this guy Trent asked us whether we had any questions after he’d finished reading the will.”

“And were there any?”

“What is this, Mastermind? Why are you so interested?”

“I think the whole thing was a charade, and that the other guys were stooges. I think Opocapopopoulos is somehow using you to ‘inherit’, in inverted commas, something he didn’t want anyone to find out about – maybe you were the only family member he could remember, apart from Mum, and we know there was no love lost there. And he’s also, it seems, trying to get you to destroy it. I have absolutely no idea why, though.”

“Look –“ Susan’s voice was somewhat strained. “I’m a bit busy at the moment... I’m sort of stuck in the midle of an essay. Can’t this wait?”

Paul huffed a bit. “You haven’t moved the cabinets, have you?” he asked, not answering her question.

“No,” Susan sighed, “they’re still stopping me from watching crappy telly in the evening.”

“Well, at least they’re fulfilling some kind of purpose, then. Do you mind if I make some enquiries about them? I’ve been in contact with one of the forensic scientists who’s investigating things up at the house, and she kind of owes me a favour. She might be able to unearth some clues, if we can get the cabinets up to her so she can have a look at them.”

“Do whatever,” Susan said. “A week ago, I didn’t have them anyway, and apparently I’m supposed to be destroying them, so I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to damage them. It might be easier if we broke them up in Bartholomew’s house, anyway... sort of fitting.”

“I’m not talking about destroying them,” Paul retorted, “just trying to find out what the hell is going on. I’ll give Meredith a call.”

“Great,” Susan said, nonplussed, and rang off.

Paul considered his options. If he could find out some more information about Opocapopopoulos’s possible employees – apart from this chauffeur who had suddenly popped out of nowhere, about whom Meredith presumably already knew – that might be a good thing to offer her in exchange for some forensic expertise, he felt. He wasn’t usually the Machiavellian sort, creeping around and politicking people in exchange for favours, but perhaps because he was both disinterested – as he hadn’t inherited anything, and couldn’t think that he particularly stood to gain anything from getting to the bottom of this mystery – and interested at the same time, he felt a certain sense of detachment from everyone involved in the case which lent him an extra boldness he didn’t often feel. It was also nice to have a purpose, and to feel like he was able to get something out of the council for once rather than the other way around.

So he located Sharon, and persuaded her to lend him the keys to a set of filing cabinets which, he hoped, might contain some more information about Opocapopopoulos’s hiring and firing activities. Half an hour of fruitless file-riffling, however, yielded nothing, and he was about to give it up as a bad job when he chanced on a single sheet of yellowing A4 paper, which appeared to be part of a form the rest of which had been lost. He decided to photocopy it anyway, handed the keys back to Sharon, made his way back to his desk – dropping the paper back where he’d found it on the way – and picked up his phone to call Meredith. This made him realise he didn’t know her number, so he unlocked his computer to see if it was on the bottom of the email she had sent him, and was just about to delve into one of his many folders to dig out her email when he noticed a message he hadn’t read marked IMPORTANT. He would normally have ignored this, since emails came through all the time marked IMPORTANT which weren’t, but the subject line of this particular email made him hesitate – “Disciplinary Hearing, Thursday 11.00am, Meeting Room 305”. He opened it, and read:

“Dear Paul, This is official confirmation of your disciplinary hearing scheduled for tomorrow morning. An independent arbitrator will be present, as will myself and Nigel Slipknot, Human Resources Manager. Please bring any supporting material you feel would support your case against dismissal. Kind regards, Ursula Spineshank.”

Paul’s blood ran cold. What disciplinary hearing, and why? Didn’t they have to give him two written warnings before they could threaten to fire him? He felt suddenly angry and self-righteous. Could he try to bring a union representative? It wasn’t that he liked his job or wanted to keep it, but at the same time it did pay the bills, and he’d always wanted the satisfaction of being able to leave rather than being forced to go. For a moment or two he thought about writing a snotty email back to Ursula saying “you can’t do this”, but was suddenly struck by the thought that they might have tried to contact him and failed. He did have – he glanced at the count, in bold text – 4,388 unread messages in his inbox, and it was true that the many times recently that he’d taken days off sick, whether they’d been legitimate or not, when he had come back to work he had usually ignored all the emails he’d got while he’d been away, reasoning that it would take him far too long to read through them all, and if any were important people would email him again about them. He did a quick search for any other emails that Ursula had sent him, and his blood ran cold all over again when the search came back with a whole page of them. Merely scanning over the subject lines was enough; it was suddenly, and terrifyingly, obvious to him that Ursula had indeed been asking him where the hell he was for about three months now. Two of them were headed “WRITTEN WARNING”.

Sweating, he forced his attention away from this new horror, and found Meredith’s phone number. As he dialled it, he tried to steady his voice. This is more important, he told himself. Why? he asked himself. Because, the answer came back, because –

“Meredith.”

“Hello, Meredith, it’s Paul Jameson from the council planning department. I think I may have something you might be interested in.”

“Oh, really?”

“My sister Susan inherited a piece of furniture from Mr Opocapopopoulos, which was delivered yesterday. We’re a little bit... suspicious about where it might have come from, and wondered if you might want to take a look at it.”

“We might,” Meredith replied, a little cagily. “Where is it at the moment?”

“It’s in her front room,” Paul explained. “It’s rather big. She can’t move.”
“Hmm,” Meredith said thoughtfully. “What is it?”

Paul explained about the cabinets, and the strange note they’d found in the drawer. When he’d finished, Meredith said decisively: “Yes, we would be interested in seeing it. Can you bring it up to the house?”

“I don’t think it would fit in the car,” Paul said apologetically, “it was delivered in a van. Could you come and pick it up?”

“We could, I suppose,” Meredith said doubtfully. “Let me have a word with someone, and call you back.”

She didn’t call back that day, and the following morning Paul was too preoccupied with thoughts of his disciplinary hearing to bother answering the phone. At a minute past eleven, he knocked on the door of Meeting Room 305, feeling a mixture of anger and helplessness, and Ursula’s voice called from within: “Please enter.”

Inside, Ursula sat behind a desk between two men Paul didn’t recognise. There was a chair positioned about six feet in front of the table, with the three of them facing him; Paul felt like he was auditioning for one of the shit TV talent shows that Susan now couldn’t watch because of the priceless, tasteless cabinets that blocked her view..

“Good morning, Paul,” Ursula said, and indicated the man on her left. “This is Nigel Slipknot, and this is our independent arbitrator, Mike Hemicalromance.” Neither man said anything. “Please, take a seat,” she motioned.

Feeling he had no option, Paul sat. He noticed a cassette recorder on the table, its tiny reels slowly turning. Who still used cassettes? he couldn’t help wondering.

“I don’t need to reiterate what this meeting is about,” Ursula began, but did anyway. “Following two written warnings to yourself, sent on the first and the fifteenth of last month, to which no reply has been received, this is a disciplinary hearing at which you will have to prove your ongoing commitment to Eastwestchestershire Council, and more specifically to your rôle –“ Paul felt annoyed that he could hear her pronounce the ô – “within your department. There is a clearly-defined procedure within our Human Resources Manual for registering absence due to sickness, a procedure to which you have consistently not adhered.”

There was a silence, which Paul felt compelled to fill. “I’ve got doctors’ notes,” he tried. “I haven’t just been – what’s the phrase? – ‘chucking sickies’.”

Ursula’s facial muscles twitched. “It has been detailed in our communications to you on this matter,” she said pointily, “the correct manner in which sick leave must be registered. However, on a further matter, it has furthermore been noted that your internet usage is unacceptably high, and has been for quite some time. What have you to say for yourself on this matter?”

Did this woman speak English? Paul wondered. “I don’t see,” he began, “how my internet usage can be considered unacceptably high, when two desks down from me, Anthea Popplewell does nothing all day but shop on eBay for designer lingerie.”

“You should be careful,” Ursula fired back, “that your comments are not taken the wrong way. An Equal Opportunities tribunal might find it sexist that you consider a lady’s essential items to be outside the realms of what is allowable internet usage, and a sexual harrassment hearing might furthermore see fit to discipline you for staring at pictures of designer lingerie on another’s computer screen without their consent.”

“So...” Paul began, “what are my options here?”

“Well,” Ursula replied, squaring up the papers on the desk in front of her, “it appears that you are making no effort in your job, you are absent whenever it seems to suit you, and that you are teetering on the edge of costing this council an unspeakably large sum of money should any of these misdemeanours ever go to court –“

“Sorry,” Paul interrupted, “what misdemeanours?”

“Sexual harrassment and discrimination,” Ursula said. “As we have just discussed. It appears to me that we have no option but to release you from your current duties without a period of leave, i.e. with immediate effect. Before we conclude this meeting do you have any comments to make?”

Paul shook his head dumbly. Which is how he found himself, that afternoon, on Susan’s doorstep, asking if he could sleep on her sofa. That night, the pair of cabinets loomed over him like starry monoliths, twisted and turned themselves into all manner of bizarre and ominous shapes, and he couldn’t sleep.

Days Eight and Nine: 3,367 words

2007-11-08T14:43:00.001-08:00

Meredith decided to get to work early this morning, and try to figure out where on earth the entrance to the basement could be. She’d requested a portable scanning device from the office – it was a new piece of technology, so she wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was supposed to function as a sort of metal detector for holes, and would in theory bleep if she was standing over a cavity in the floor. There wasn’t anybody in yet as she got out of the car, and the air was still cold and a bit damp. Her breath hung in it like a sail.

Inside, she found the case containing the scanning device where one of the technicians had left it for her the previous evening, and opened it. Inside, the device gleamed at her like a ripe tomato from its polystyrene bookend packaging. The manual was on top, and she picked it up and flicked through to the “quick start” section.

A figure moved silently through the house, pausing to peer round each corner before continuing. It checked the entrance hall, saw Meredith, and quickly withdrew behind the wall, peeking out from the doorframe to study what she was doing. She didn’t notice it, but carried on unpacking the device and plugging parts into other parts. Finally, she straightened up. The device sat on the floor on wheels, resembling the kind of vacuum cleaner that hotels use, with a thick plastic ring with a handle on it connected by a springy, coiled cord. There was another handle attached to the top of the scanner by which she could pull it along, and a small screen on the hand-held bit which would indicate what she’d found, if she found anything.

She turned the machine on, and carefully dragged it out of the hall and into the corridor, towards Study 1. The figure at the other end of the hall watched her intently, before withdrawing as silently as it had arrived.

“Paul? It’s me.”

“Not you again.”

“Yeah. Listen. I need a hand with something, are you busy?”

“Er… not really.” The sounds of a paused computer game burbled indistinctly in the background. “What do you need help with?”

“I – er – I’ve got some heavy lifting that needs doing.”

Susan looked at the enormous wooden crate that the removal men had just dropped off in her hallway. It was eight feet long, four feet wide, five high. She could hardly move. She felt like Indiana Jones raiding the lost ark.

“You haven’t bought something else from Ikea, have you?”

Susan had occasionally had problems with the Ikea website – mainly, that things on there looked a lot smaller and lighter than they ended up being in real life. “No. I’ll have to show you, I think. When can you come round?”

An hour or so later, Paul stood in the doorway looking at the crate. He didn’t have much option, really; it wasn’t particularly easy to get past it.

“Oh,” was all he said. “What the hell is it?”

Susan explained about the odd phone call, the appointment at Trent’s office, the other two people, and what she’d inherited from Opocapopopoulos. “I haven‘t opened the crate yet, obviously, so I don’t know what’s actually in it. But from what I can tell, it’s actually quite valuable.”

“Hm,” Paul grumped. “Nice of him to give me something. Not that I mind, of course,” he added. “Well… do we get this into the lounge first, and then open it, or what?”

It took forty minutes of inching, pushing, swearing and leverage, and two rolling pins, to get the crate into Susan’s small lounge. She managed to push most of the clutter out of the way, piling a lot of it up on the sofa, and tried to ignore the way the crate had ploughed up the carpet, but at least they could actually move around the place now, if only a little. “Have you got a crowbar?” Paul asked.

Susan shook her head. “I’ve got a screwdriver,” she sighed, “that’s it.”

Using the screwdriver, Paul slowly prised the panels apart, nail by nail. This took another twenty minutes and two cups of tea, which at least Susan could now get to the kitchen to make, but there came a point when, with a satisfying crack, the front panel folded down onto the carpet, spilling polystyrene granules everywhere. They were full of static, and stuck to everything.

She could hardly believe it. In front of her was an amazingly ornate, intricately carved pair of cabinets, smoothly curved at the top, inlaid with birds, flowers, trees, patterns, ribbony bits and cherubs, in a variety of different colours: mother-of-pearl featured heavily, as did gold, silver, semi-precious stones, about eight different types of wood, and a thin border of what looked like copper framing each of their four drawers.

They were possibly the most disgusting things she had ever seen.

“Wow,” said Paul, partly amazed and partly horrified. “Who did they make these for, P Diddy? They’re the biggest piece of bling ever.”

“Hmm,” Susan agreed, slightly dazed. “I looked it up – the ones I found didn’t look quite like this –“

“If these two are worth anything at all,” Paul said decisively, “anything – Susan, you’ve gotta sell them. Even if you only get fifty quid for them. At least you get your lounge back.”

She frowned, studying the cabinets more carefully. Yes, they were totally over the top; and yes, they were nothing she’d have ever chosen, even for free. And, yes, she now didn’t have a lounge she could use. And no, they didn’t fit in, not even remotely, with any of the other Savva or Båtvik or Løpen or Hekki furniture she had. But they had been left to her in a will – even if it was the will of someone she hadn’t cared much for, and certainly had never known. Why had he chosen her? she wondered. Why leave her something like this, when he could have been almost certain that she wouldn’t be able to keep it?

Paul was looking at her. “You can’t keep these things,” he repeated. “Do you know how much they’re worth?”

Susan shook her head, even though she did have an idea. She couldn’t bring herself to admit to him how much she thought they could be worth, both because she was kind of hoping she was wrong anyway, and because she knew that if Paul knew their value it would only increase his determination to sell them for her. “They’re… antique,” she managed. “Old. I didn’t know what these would look like, and they don’t look like any other ones I found, so I don’t know.”

“Zanni,” Paul said sternly, using the kiddy name he sometimes used if he was annoyed at her. “Look, this is your thing. I’m not trying to take it off you. I’m just interested, that’s all. How much were the others worth?”

Susan hesitated. “I found one on eBay,” she said finally, “which was bigger than this, and didn’t have all this –“ she waved her hand vaguely at all the inlaid cherubs and birds – “ stuff on it. But it was going for about thirty grand.”

Paul actually took a step backwards. “Thirty grand,” he repeated. “Don’t you think we should get it valued, at least? I mean, if you want to keep it –“ he gave a shrug which somehow managed to convey “though God knows where you’d put it in this tiny flat” – “your insurance would need to know about it.”

“Paul, you know I don’t have insurance,” Susan said snappily. She was getting a little irritated now. “You helped me get round that when I moved in.”

Paul fell silent, studying the cabinets from the angles it was possible to study them from, given that they were still mainly in their wooden packing crate. “Well,” he said finally, “in, or out?”

Susan shrugged. “Out, I suppose.”

They slowly managed to manouevre the cabinets from their crate, Susan doing her best to tidy up polystyrene granules as she went and Paul not caring much. She remembered one Christmas when they’d been little, when their parents – who had never had very much money, since their dad had been a clown and their mum a chartered surveyor who never had any time to survey anything as she had to look after the children while he’d been getting hit in the face with custard pies and shot out of cannons – had decided that instead of presents, they’d build Lapland in their front room. They collected all the packing granules they could find, spent a few hours trying to build a reindeer by putting the family dog in a brown jumper and a hat with antlers on (he didn’t want to wear the hat, so they eventually gave this up as a bad job and used a few cushions instead), and constructed an elaborate igloo-cum-Santa’s-grotto out of crumpled-up newspaper, more polystyrene, cardboard boxes and whatever else was to hand. You had to crawl into it through a tunnel Jill had made out of sleeping bags draped over a couple of half-unfolded camp beds, and in the grotto their dad had dressed up as Father Christmas; instead of presents, he handed out advice. Susan always remembered it as the best Christmas ever. Her advice had been: “Never give the people what they want – give them what you believe in.” It was a principle she’d applied ever since, first to her A-levels, when she’d believed in getting marks so low that nobody thought them possible, then to the degree she only just managed to get into, when she felt everybody wanted her to fail. She’d emerged with a second class degree, with honours, which had finally allowed her to start her Master’s – a course she’d been doing on and off for a few years, fuelled by erratic patches of funding. Paul’s advice had been more whimsical: “Interesting things happen to people who say yes.” He had left school, immediately said yes to a job at the local council, and stayed there. He was still waiting for something interesting to happen to him.

They finally got to a point where the cabinets were not really in the crate any more, and managed to slide them off the last panel which had formed the crate’s base. Paul leaned the panels against the wall, and they stood there for a moment, looking at the cabinets and not saying anything.

“I still think they’re hideous,” Paul admitted. “What kind of room would you have to have, for them to fit in with the rest of the furniture?”

“What kind of room would it have been in?” Susan wondered out loud. “I still don’t know why Bartholomew left me these things. What did he expect me to do with them? And why me?”

Paul shrugged. “If they’re worth a lot of money, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said. “Get them insured, that’s the first thing. You’ll have to get them valued to do that, so that kills two birds with one stone.”

As he spoke, he absent-mindedly slid one of the drawers open, and Susan noticed a manila envelope in it similar to the one Trent had had in his office. “Hang on,” she said, “what’s that?”

Paul pulled it out, flipped it over, and did a double take. “It’s got your name on it,” he said uncertainly.

“What?” Susan took it from him, and studied the lettering on it. It clearly said SUSAN, in bold, handwritten capitals. “How… how come –“

They looked at each other. “Well, open it,” Paul suggested. “Or do you want me to?”

She shook her head, confused and a little scared. Was it for her, or someone else called Susan perhaps? There were no other markings on the envelope which seemed to suggest it was, so she carefully slid her finger under the gummed-down flap, and opened it.

She pulled out a sheet of paper, and read:

DESTROY ME.

She looked at the paper, back at the cabinets, and at Paul, and again at the paper.

“Destroy me,” she said dumbly. “What the fuck –?”

“I’ll get a sledgehammer,” Paul said brightly.

“No – wait –“

“What? This can’t be real, so why not do as it says? I’m sure I’m actually playing a computer game or something, and it’s so realistic that I’ve just forgotten. I wonder if I can swap weapons by doing this –“ he jerked his hand up and down – “no, hang on –“

“Paul. This is real. It’s weird, but it is actually real. Stop being stupid.”

“OK then,” he said, flopping himself down on her sofa, “what do we do with it? We can either sell it, or keep it as it is, or smash it into little bits. I don’t think, if it’s worth all that money, we should really smash it into little bits.”

“No, nor do I. I’m not sure I can keep it, though. I don’t have the space, for a start.”

“Do you want to keep it? I mean would you, if you had the room?”

She considered this. “I’m not sure I would. I mean look at it… it’s repulsive. It might be a good talking point, for a while, but frankly, I could use some of the money to fund my course with. If I want a talking point, I can probably get one just as good at a car boot sale.”

“So then.”

“Do you want it?”

Paul looked at it. “No,” he said flatly. “I actually don’t care how much it’s worth, I haven’t got the room for it either.”

“So… I sell it?”

“I think it’s your only option, don’t you?”

She nodded, trying to take it all in.

“Tea?”

It was mid-morning, and Meredith was on her twelfth room, so far with no success. Study 1 had yielded nothing; neither had the cloakroom, either of the toilets, the kitchens or the scullery. The smoking-room and the library had similarly featured a disappointing lack of holes, and she was just about to give up and try something else when the machine bleeped.

She was in the billiard-room, a room which – apart from the full-size snooker table in the middle of it – had a couple of leather sofas, a deep-pile carpet, a flatscreen TV set into the wall above the fireplace, and two sets of bookshelves facing each other, one on each of the smaller walls. The windows had been bricked up, which she had thought was odd given that the house had been built recently to Opocapopopoulos’s specifications, and at the point when the machine bleeped she was standing in the alcove where one of the windows would have been, moving the handset over the bookcase nearest to her. She frowned, and consulted the plans she was carrying; the wall which the bookcase was against looked no thicker than any of the others. But there had been a bleep. She moved the handset in wider circles, and the bleeping became more insistent. She clicked her radio.

“Peter? Are you free to come into the billiard room for a minute?”

While she waited for Peter to get there, she studied the titles of the books on the shelves more closely. There was a complete set of Lewis Carroll books – not only Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-glass, but also Sylvie and Bruno, The Hunting of the Snark, and a compendium of the word puzzles and acrostic poems Carroll had written by the dozen. Next to those was a book about the rules and tactics of billiards, and next to that was a book called –

“Hello, Meredith,” Peter said, shuffling into the room. “You wanted me?”

Meredith straightened up. Peter was somewhere in his mid-fifties, with greying, balding hair and the kind of spectacles that had never been, would never be, and in fact could never be, remotely fashionable. He wore his shabby suit with the carelessness of someone who has worn the same suit for so long they’ve forgotten it’s actually clothes that you can change, and not a second skin you’re stuck with. He smelt of pipe tobacco and aftershave, a smell which clung to his yellowy beard permanently and which lingered long after he left a room. He wasn’t a bad old sausage, she thought, but he was just One Of Those. Those unchanging fixtures of the working landscape who have been there forever, and who people can’t imagine working anywhere else.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I’ve found something, look.” She passed the handset across the front of the bookcase again, and there was a bleep.

“Have you studied the plans?” Peter asked. “I don’t remember that this wall seemed thick enough to hide anything.”

“Yes, and you’re right – it doesn’t look it on the printout. I wanted a second opinion, though, before I started removing the books.”

He looked at her, then at the machine. “It is still new,” he ventured, “could it be – I don’t know – a chimney flue, or part of the air conditioning system, or something?”

“I suppose so. But there’s nothing like that on the plan, either. Have these books been catalogued?”

“No, you’re the first person in here.”

“Right,” she said decisively. “Then I’ll take them out in fives, and stack them on the billiard table. They mustn’t be moved – can you find me some post-it notes or something?”

“Better than that, I’ll get some blank sheets of paper,” Peter wittered. “And a pen.”

“Brilliant.”

He shambled off, leaving Meredith to start removing books. She made a note of what books went where, and created neat, methodical piles of them, emptying the shelves row by row. As the shelves got emptier, no gaping hole in the wall revealed itself, although she wasn’t anticipating one: she got what she was looking for when she removed a leather-bound set of A La Recherche de Temps Perdu (in French; had Opocapopopoulos been a linguist? she doubted it) and discovered behind it, set into the wood of the bookcase, a door handle.

Hurrah! she thought to herself, elated. Possibly the oldest trick in the book – a fake bookcase. Could this be the secret entrance to Opocapopopoulos’s cellars? Hardly daring to breathe, she pushed the handle downwards, and the bookcase swung silently outwards on well-oiled bearings.

Behind it was a short space of perhaps two feet, and then bare bricks. Going from it down into the darkness, however, was a flight of steps. She hesitated, because she didn’t have a torch – not that she was afraid of what might be down there, because she was sure there wasn’t anything – but just because the blackness swallowed up what little light the room had pretty quickly. It seemed to boil and swirl, like indigo ink lurking at the bottom of a glass of water.

She glanced at the door, but Peter was nowhere to be seen; he hadn’t returned with any paper or pens, but she’d gone ahead with emptying the shelves anyway, trusting that she’d be able to remember where things went. It wouldn’t take long to go and get a torch, she decided, so she went out of the room, crossed the corridor into the ballroom, and went up the sweeping staircase at the far end – whose only function, as far as she could see, was to provide a grand entrance for people as they arrived at the ball and had their names called out – and turned right at the top, went along the corridor, and found the makeshift operations centre. There were a couple of torches under the table, so she took one of them, went back down the staircase into the ballroom again, across the corridor, and was shocked.

Every book had been replaced where it had come from, the door to the steps had swung closed, and the machine had been turned off.

Her blood ran cold, and she reached for her walkie-talkie. Her voice shook a little.

“Peter? No need for those sheets of paper, now… I think you’d better come and have a look at this –“

Day Seven: 1,419 words

2007-11-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

Susan sat in the capacious reading-room of the town library, trying to make sense of the pile of books she had to plough through. The library had been partially funded by Opocapopopoulos; one of the first things he’d done when trying to manoeuvre himself into the village and buy everyone’s trust was to promise a brand new, state-of-the-art library complex with an exhibition centre. It would hold over a million books. It would have a space outside where visiting artists would be able to display enormous statues made of bronze, stone and steel. It would have a gift shop.

He’d given a then-still-wary council an initial sum of money to build the structure, which they had, but had then cut off the rest of the funding once he’d moved into Opocapopopoulos House, and bogged them down with legal battles when they tried to ask for the rest of the cash. So the library had rather embarrassingly stood empty for a while, until the university had tentatively asked whether it could use at least some of it to store some of its large amount of books, to which the local council had almost fallen over themselves to say yes to. The result was an enormous, echoing building designed by Richard Rogers or Frank Gehry or Norman Foster or somebody: in one corner, books huddled together for warmth, and the rest of it was gradually being taken over by temporary offices. There was talk that some of it might be turned into executive flats.

Susan had stacked a sizeable percentage of the library’s history section on the table in front of her, and was thumbing through them making notes. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she dived to take it out before it started ringing. It was a number she didn’t recognise. “Hello?” she said quietly, glancing round to see if anyone else was looking at her with one of those “do you mind? this is a LIBRARY, and you’re not supposed to use your phone in it – if you want to talk, go outside” expressions on. Nobody was.

“Hello. Is that Susan Franks?”

“Speaking,” Susan said, a little uncertainly. “Who’s this?”

“My name is Trent Napkin,” the voice said. “I represent the interests of the late Mr Opocapopopoulos. I am at present engaged in executing his will.”

“Right,” Susan said flatly.

“Are you available to come into our offices this Thursday?” Mr Napkin asked. “We’re reading through the will then. I’ve already read it, of course, but parts of it concern you.”

Susan paused before saying anything. “Er,” she managed, “yes?”

“Thank you,” Mr Napkin replied, and gave her an address. “We’ll see you at two o’clock.”

He was just about to ring off, but Susan said quickly, “He’s not left me anything, has he?”

A microscopic pause. “We wouldn’t be asking you in if he hadn’t,” was all she got. “We’ll see you at two.”

Susan carefully placed the phone down on the table, and took a moment to steady her nerves. Bartholomew was not noted – in as much as he was noted for anything – for leaving people small gifts. If he was at a restaurant and left a tip, it would generally be at least three figures, and sometimes four; the rare occasions (twice in his life, in fact, and nobody knew about the first time) he’d donated any money to charity, the cheque had been a big cardboard one with lots of noughts on the end. He’d been the kind of person to crush the nut of unimportant problems with the giant sledgehammer of money. And the last thing she really wanted, or needed, was money. Paul, she was sure, would love it; he was always trying to think of ways to escape the crushingly dull humdrum of his job and go and live somewhere sunny with a pool that someone else would keep clean for him. But she was quite happy, thanks, with the life she had. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with a huge wodge of cash, anyway – she couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t been overdrawn, and she knew it would only sit there, smugly grinning at her in numbers before a decimal point, every time she used a cash machine.

And yet… her heart was beating faster, even though she didn’t want it to. If he’d left her, say, ten grand, that might be enough for the deposit on a flat, or to stick away in a savings account so the interest could at least pay her gas bill –

No, no, no. She turned back to the Boer War and how it traced a line to the Goon Show. And forgot all about the appointment until ten to two on Thursday, when, deep in a dissection of comic songs related to the Battle of Adowa, she caught sight of her phone lying on the table in front of her in the same way as it had been lying two days before, just after she’d spoken to Mr Napkin, and suddenly remembered. She swore to herself – quietly, because this was a library – and gathering up her stuff as quickly as she could while not making too much noise about it, bundled everything into her voluminous cheap bag (£4 from a nameless high street shop: how were they able to sell something so cheaply and still make a profit – which they obviously were – without exploiting anyone, which they didn’t claim they weren’t?) and arrived at Mr Napkin’s anonymous-looking offices two minutes late. “You’re two minutes late,” said the bored receptionist. “Doesn’t matter, though, nobody else is here yet. Can I get you a drink? There’s a water cooler in the corner,” she continued before Susan had had a chance to speak, “they haven’t come back to collect it yet, so help yourself.”

Susan made a sort of noncommittal “thanks” face, although she couldn’t be bothered to actually say anything, and sat down. She’d finished about half an inch of the cup of water when two other people came in that Susan didn’t recognise; the receptionist picked her phone up, dialled a number and said, “Mr Napkin? I think everybody’s here. Through the door on your left,” she added to Susan.

Susan followed the other two people, who hadn’t introduced themselves, into a small but tidy office which looked almost identical to the reception, but with the addition of a carpet and a drippy-looking woman carrying a leather folder, who sat on a chair to one side. A small but tidy man with a neat moustache stood up from behind the desk as they entered, and shook each of their hands in turn before they sat down. “Trent,” he explained. You must be Susan,” he said to Susan, who nodded, “and you must be Mr Arbuthnot and Mr Rankin – pleased to meet you. Now,” he continued, before Susan could ask why Trent was on first-name terms with her but not the other people, “to clarify, we are here to hear the last will and testament of Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos. Miss D’arblay is an independent witness, who is here to make sure that everything is conducted in a lawful way.”

An alarm bell was ringing in Susan’s head, but she couldn’t place why. She noticed a manila envelope on Trent’s desk, which his fingertips lightly touched. “I shall now read the will,” Trent continued, and pulled a sheaf of papers from the envelope, which he clacked on the desk once to square them up; he then began:

“This is the last will and testament of Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos, of Opocapopopoulos House, Rawndale Drive, Eastwestchester. This expressly revokes all wills and codicils heretofore made by me –“

Susan found herself drifting off; she tried to fight it, but the urge to let her thoughts roam was almost impossible to resist. She noticed a picture of a child on a horse that was pinned to a noticeboard on Trent’s wall: was that Trent, she wondered? The photo was taken from the side, with both the horse and the child looking straight ahead as if they were waiting for something, and looked too posed to be real. She had ridden a horse once, when she was about seven, and from what she could remember they didn’t tend to just stand there like that.

“… to my niece, Susan Franks, I leave my matching pair of Napoleon III ormolu-mounted tortoiseshell pietra dure side cabinets.”

Susan blinked. That was her. She was now the proud owner of a pair of cupboards.

Day Six: 1,861 words

2007-11-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

He shook the memory from his head, and looked at the date on the folder. It covered a period after the house had been built, and was mainly full of complaint letters that the council had been amassing from disgruntled residents with which they hoped to be able to ask Opocapopopoulos nicely to leave. Replacing the file on the shelf, he tried a few others, and after a couple of tries found what he was looking for, so he spread the contents out on a nearby table, and being as careful as he could to keep everything roughly in order, began riffling through the pages to see if he could find anything that might help.

He’d been at this about ten minutes when he became aware that somebody had stopped and was watching him. He looked up, and saw it was Cheryl, a project manager he’d worked with occasionally. She was holding a cup of tea, and seemed to be trying to read what Paul was looking at without looking as if she was trying to.

“Hi,” Paul said, remembering what her name was a fraction of a second too late to say “Hi, Cheryl” without an unacceptably long pause between the “Hi” and the “Cheryl” that would make him sound like a dork.

“Hi there,” Cheryl said. She was sort of taken aback, but at the same time knew that Paul probably wasn’t meant to be there either. “He seems to be taking up a lot of our time, even now.”

Paul had never said anything about being related to Bartholomew, and since they had different surnames nobody had ever made the connection, so nobody he worked with was bothering to be sensitive about Opocapopopoulos’s death; several people had made comments to him like “thank the Lord he’s dead” and “that’s a weight off my in-tray” which even Paul, who hadn’t really cared much for his uncle, had thought was a bit offensive. “Yes, I had no idea he had so many files,” Paul shrugged, indicating the whole shelf full of Opocapopopoulos impedimenta which bore Bartholomew’s name. “I was just trying to find out some more information about the house, actually. You know… how it was built, the plans, and so on.”

“Have you tried Kerner & Sutch?” The architects.

“Yeah, but they’ve only supplied five floors – no basement. I’m trying to find out what we know about the basement, because according to the forensics team they don’t have any information about it.”

“Hmm. Can’t they just go down there and have a look?”

“I suppose not. I didn’t ask, but I’m sure if they could’ve done that, they would’ve.”

“What are you looking for, anyway?”

“I don’t know, really,” Paul admitted. “They’re trying to find out if Opocapopopoulos had any other staff, I think. I don’t know if they’re expecting to find some of them hiding in the basement, though, or what.”

“I don’t know if this would be useful,” Cheryl began hesitantly, “but my brother works for Grimnells, the building company which built the house. I don’t think you’ll find anything useful in those,” she indicated the plans, ”but he might be able to tell you something about what happened when they built it. They say,” she leaned in conspiratorially, “that some of the workers who built his master bedroom suite were sealed in airtight rooms forever, so they couldn’t speak of the secrets they had seen.”

“Really,” said Paul, nonplussed.

“No, just kidding,” Cheryl admitted. “But I wouldn’t have put it past him, though. Shall I email you Chris’s mobile number?”

“Yes, thanks,” Paul sighed, narrowing his eyes and trying to place where apart from at work he’d seen Cheryl before. “That would be great.”

Back at his desk, and following a ten-minute phone call to the IT department to unlock his phone so he could call a mobile, he rang Chris. Most of the time he wouldn’t have bothered doing something that was five times this urgent, but there was something nagging at him about this that he couldn’t place, and he wanted to find out what it was. Anyway, he wasn’t very busy.

After a few rings, a male voice answered. “H’lo?”

“Hi… is that Chris?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

Briefly, Paul explained who he was and what he was after, concluding with: “I’m just trying to find out anything you could tell us, basically.”

“Well, you’ll be lucky,” Chris said bluntly. “I’d tell you anything I could, but Opocapopopoulos had all the plans for the basement destroyed after it was built – he even destroyed what the architects had. We all worked on different parts of it, so there isn’t anyone as far as I know who knew the whole layout. I’m guessing that once it was built he probably, I dunno, walled the whole thing in or something. God only knows what he wanted it for anyway, though, you know what I mean?”

Odder and odder, thought Paul, scribbling down notes. He called Meredith. “I think you may need a drill,” he suggested.

She was shocked that she’d not only spoken to someone who had called her back, but that they’d also called her back with an answer to the question she’d asked, and all within an hour or so. She tried to think when the last time that this had happened was, but couldn’t. “Thank you,” she said, frowning. “How strange. So not only are we probably missing several members of staff who seem to have vanished off the face of the earth, but we’re also missing an extensive basement complex which doesn’t appear to be connected to the house any more.”

“Yes,” came Paul’s voice from the other end of the phone, which if phones had been clearer and less crackly and distorted would have had the slightly mellow quality of being next to a fresh cup of tea. “Can I let you into a secret?”

Meredith glanced at her watch. “If you like.”

“I’m –“ Paul hesitated, not wanting to spill the whole truth – “distantly related to Mr Opocapopopoulos. I’d be interested in any… information you can tell me about this, if it’s no trouble.”

Meredith considered this. “Well, I obviously can’t tell you anything we have to keep schtum about,” she replied, “but if anything… planning-related should emerge, I’ll keep you informed.”

She replaced the phone on its receiver, and turned to the plans again. Well, well. If all the plans for the basement had been destroyed, and Opocapopopoulos had never had planning permission for the rest of the house, what had he been trying to hide? They had already given the whole place a cursory exploration, going into each room in turn and giving it a unique identifier on their own maps, and all the rooms had been measured. The thought popped into her head of a Sherlock Holmes story, The Norwood Builder, the plot of which hinged on a secret room built at the end of a corridor, which only Holmes had managed to spot because he’d measured the house inside and out, and concluded the measurements didn’t match. That wasn’t the case here, though, surely. They weren’t looking for secret rooms, just a way into an underground cellar complex. How deep was the moat? she suddenly wondered. It was about twenty-five feet wide and completely encircled the building; Opocapopopoulos had built two means of entry or egress to the house, the first at the front being a stylish steel hydraulic gantry which lead into the central atrium with its oak tree in the middle, and the second, round the back, a rather less hi-tech and more utilitarian drawbridge type thing which was strong enough to drive a forty-ton truck across, for deliveries. If the moat was as deep as it looked, it meant that any cellars would be contained within the boundaries of the house, at least for the first thirty feet. Which meant that unless there was some kind of elaborate deep-level tunnel leading to some rabbit-hole elsewhere on the estate, there must be a way in through the house, even if it looked like there wasn’t.

She took the ground-floor map with her and descended the left-hand flight of the main stairs, feeling like Audrey Hepburn in War and Peace, or at least perhaps Kate Winslet in Titanic, and crossed the hallway to an archway on the left which led into the ballroom. The sprung oak floor was light to the touch of her feet as she moved across it; there was no carpet or any other means of hiding trapdoors or anything, so for now it would have to be discounted. Doors from the ballroom led off into the main corridor which formed a sort of U shape, like the ones on the third and fourth floors, and into a drawing-room. She realised that these large rooms, on the outside of the house, almost certainly wouldn’t be capable of hiding anything; they were too big. Far better to concentrate on the smaller rooms on the other side of the arterial corridor, which clustered around the circular atrium in the middle with its oak tree growing from the centre of it; these all had slightly curved outer walls, and were mainly studies, toilets, cloakrooms, kitchens and other less grand things. She crossed the corridor and went into the first room, which on the architects’ plans was labelled STUDY 1.

This room was much as she’d last seen it, when she was doing the initial survey of the place. A dimply red chesterfield nestled against one wall adjacent to a fireplace, either side of which were bookshelves set into the wall that ran right up to the ceiling, a distance of perhaps twenty feet; a ladder was set up to run from side to side on a rail so you could get at the top shelves. Between the two windows was a bureau with a dying spider-plant on it; to its left, and in front of Meredith as she stood in the doorway, was a large dark wooden desk with a leather top, scattered with bits of paper. They’d removed the laptop which had been still open on the desk to allow the computer specialists to have a look at it, but everything else had been left untouched, because nobody had got this far into the house yet. Set into the wall to Meredith’s left was another large, full-length bookcase. She glanced at some of the titles: The Wealth of Nations, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, a complete set of Hansard transcripts dating back to – she ran her eyes along the shelf – 1829, when they were first published. There was a thick red rug covering the stone flagstones on the floor, but when she lifted it up it didn’t seem possible that anything could be hiding under there.

And yet… and yet. She unhooked her walkie-talkie from her belt, and clicked it twice.

“John Gordon, over.”

“John – Meredith. Can we get a couple of people in Study 1? Something,” she paused partially for dramatic effect and partially because her mind had for a split second wandered off-topic, “isn’t quite right.”

Day Five: 2,171 words (get in)

2007-11-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

The phone on Paul’s desk rang, startling him out of mid-morning internet games of Scrabble with people he’d never met and the cooling leftovers of his third cup of tea. It was an external number, which hardly ever happened, as he’d taken great pains to work his way into a department at the council that didn’t have to deal with external calls. He glanced at the sheet pinned to the hessianette wall panel, scanned down the list of numbers to see if it was anyone he should be avoiding, and as he couldn’t see anyone that the number matched decided to pick the phone up. He hesitated briefly before answering, wondering if he should pretend to be someone else covering for him while he’d nipped out for a fag or on maternity leave or something, and then decided against it. “Hello, Paul Jameson’s phone,” he said, not entirely lying.

“Is Paul Jameson there?” It was a professional-sounding voice on the other end of the line, the kind of person who doesn’t sound like they want to bugger about.

“Whom should I say is calling?”

“It’s Meredith Etherington,” the voice replied. “I’m head of the forensics team investigating the death at Opocapopopoulos House. Is this the Planning department?”

“Yes, it is,” Paul said. The bit we just did with Meredith standing on the first floor and talking to Patrick was about a week before Paul got fired; his disciplinary hearing was scheduled for tomorrow. “I’ll just get Paul for you.”

“Thank you,” Meredith replied. Paul waited. “Hello, Paul speaking,” he said after a bit. There was a small pause. “Sorry, wasn’t I just speaking to you?”

“No, that was someone who must have sounded like me. I get that all the time. Can I help?”

“Hmm. I’m trying to find out a bit more about Opocapopopoulos House, if I can, and I was thinking your department might be able to supply plans of the house when it was built. Assuming, of course, that Opocapopopoulos actually got planning permission for it?”

“What information are you trying to find out?”

“Well. The plans I’ve got from the architects who built the house suggest that it’s only got five floors, with no basement. Or, in fact, attic. But I’m sure that a house this size would have a basement, possibly with its own basement, and an attic. Or at least space for one.”

“Right, OK. Why are you trying to find this out?”

“I need to cover the entire house and see what evidence we can find which might clear up how Opocapopopoulos died. Also, I’m just nosey. Haha.”

“Haha,” Paul replied, with the same level of jollity as if an overweight van driver had just reversed over his foot in a car park. “Well, I’m not sure we can supply that. To tell the truth, I’m not actually sure if Opocapopopoulos even applied for planning permission when he built the property.”

Meredith paused, thrown off-kilter a little. “Sorry? How is it possible that such an enormous building as this could be built without planning permission, when it’s taken me six months to get the forms signed to put a Velux window in my loft?”

“Well, because it’s not visible from the road,” Paul admitted. “And every time an inspector was sent round to have a look, Opocapopopoulos set his wolves on them. That’s off the record, of course.”

“Are you sure he didn’t have planning permission?”

“I can check for you,” Paul sighed. “It might take several weeks, though. It’s not that we’re inefficient, it’s just that I can’t really be arsed.” He said this last part of the sentence quickly, muddling the words together so to Meredith it sounded like someone at the next desk eating a sandwich. She thought she knew what he’d just said, but couldn’t be sure.

“Thank you,” she said, a slight note of huff in her voice. “That would be swell.”

“You’re welcome. Can I take your number and I’ll get someone here to call you back?”

She gave him her number. “Thanks then,” she said resignedly. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

Paul sat staring at the phone for a few moments after she’d rung off, thinking. There were plans, he knew. In order to seem like a good bloke, Opocapopopoulos had started off his contact with the town well, filling in all the right forms and making all the right noises about community relations and creating jobs, and had merited a front-page headline in the local paper: “500 New Jobs In Town: One Free For Every Reader”. As soon as he’d moved in, however, he had walled off the eight or so acres he’d bought from the council at a knock-down price in return for all the new jobs he was going to create, and the chattering had started. This was one of the main reasons why Paul’s mother Jill had moved to the village 98 miles away with its own duckpond: she’d been going to chattering classes every Tuesday evening for tea and biscuits, but they had all become too much. She had sold the small house she’d lived in for the past 30 years with their clown father, and moved. Shortly afterwards, Opocapopopoulos had bought the house, demolished it and spent a year and several million pounds trying to erect a large bronze statue of himself where it had stood.

But there had, at least initially, been plans. They probably weren’t as accurate as the plans Meredith had, but they might at least show the foundations of the building, which wouldn’t have changed much as they had started digging them as soon as Opocapopopoulos had bought the plot of land. And at that stage, council inspectors were making regular visits, in the mistaken belief that here was a fine future pillar of the community who was going to bring joy and eternal sunshine to the area.

Paul cocked his head to one side, and decided that on the way to making more tea he would stop by the archiving department. This covered one and a half floors of the council’s drab 1960’s office block, was bathed in the light from a thousand fluorescent tubes, and contained planning records, forms, pieces of legislation, sandwich wrappers, and pornography dating back to when the office itself had been built. If you’d had a lifetime to waste digging through the records, you might have been surprised to locate a piece of paper which once decoded would indicate that planning permission for the council’s own buildings was still pending.

Maybe you wouldn’t.

Paul passed between the shoulder-high ranks of cases, each about twenty feet wide and containing six shelves, in search of O. Finally, he found Bartholomew’s file. It was pretty thick, and as he pulled it out he noticed that the next box had B. OPOCAPOPOPOULOS stamped on it. And the next. In all, he found fifteen files of varying ages relating to Opocapopopoulos’s building activities since he’d moved.

And that was another thing. Bartholomew, he had to keep reminding himself, was his uncle. He hadn’t even realised that until a few years after he’d moved into town, when he’d gone to visit his mother one weekend, and over tea and Eccles cakes the truth had emerged.

“What are you talking about?” he’d said.

“Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos –“ she said the name with difficulty – “is your uncle. We all thought he was dead; I think Xavier was closer to him than I was. Certainly closer in age. I often think that might be a reason why he turned out a little… different.”

Paul had thought of Xavier’s dungeon, of his collection of samurai swords, his nunchukas, the wrought-iron goat’s head which greeted you, red light bulbs for eyes glowering, as you edged in the front door.

“How did you not know?” Paul wanted to know. “Did he go… missing, or something?”

Jill had closed her eyes; the pain was too much for her to bear. Or maybe she was just a bit tired and had a headache. “We were camping in Devon one year – me, Bartholomew, Xavier, your grandpa and grandma… my mother and father. We always went there every year, it was something of a tradition. This year, we decided to go on a canoeing trip. We couldn’t afford a canoe each, so we only got two: your grandpa was in one with me, and grandma was in the other with Xavier. Bartholomew wouldn’t fit, so he perched on the back and held onto Xavier’s coat.

“The river wasn’t particularly deep, or fast-flowing, so we thought we’d be safe. We couldn’t afford a map, but your grandpa had peeked over the shoulder of an elderly gent taking his dog for a walk to see the map he’d been reading, and thought he knew the way. Off we set, and at first the going was good. We had a sort of unofficial race on, with the two boats. Whoever got back to the car first would get a cup of tea which Mum had made in a thermos flask, and we were neck and neck for a while. I had a paddle, Dad had one on the other side, and we were sort of going in a straight line for a while.

“Then the current got faster. The spray started to get in my eyes, and I couldn’t see where I was going. The day grew dark, and storm clouds gathered overhead. We shouted to the other boat, but they didn’t hear us, so we decided we’d try to pull into the side to see if we could wait for the storm to ease off a bit. Well, when we finally got to the bank, we were both soaked; we huddled together under Dad’s great oilskin coat, shouting for the others to come and find us, but it was fruitless, and we couldn’t see them. Finally, the rain eased off a little, and we resolved to set off downstream again to see if we could catch up: perhaps, we thought, they had done as we had, and pulled to one side. After about ten minutes or so, we rounded a bend, and then we saw them – or at least, we saw Mum and Xavier, both frantic with worry. Xavier – he was about fifteen at the time, bless him – was jumping up and down on the bank, screaming “Barty!” at the top of his lungs. We paddled over to them, and I calmed Xav down while Dad asked Mum what had happened. It seems that during the storm, they had hit a rough patch of water, and when Xavier had turned round to check whether Bartholomew was all right, he wasn’t there.”

Paul had digested this, while the background noise of irritated ducks trying to disentangle themselves from razor wire had slowly seeped back into the room. “What did you do?” he finally managed.

“What could we do? We went to the police, of course, as soon as we could; they sent out search parties, combing the area for anything they could find, but they didn’t find anything. Weeks passed, and we grew less and less hopeful of ever finding him alive again. When six months had gone by without hearing anything, Dad planted a tree in the garden, with a small plaque next to it, that simply said Barty. Well, we all moved on; I married your father, Mum and Dad passed away, and then – it must have been thirty years after we thought we’d lost him – I read in the paper about a hot-shot fund manager called Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos. I nearly dropped my cup of tea in surprise. Opocapopopoulos wasn’t his real name, of course – it was Franks, like the rest of us – but it was a play name he used to use when we three were pretending to be vampires or nurses or whatever, when we were growing up. He used to say, ‘One day I’ll rule the world!’ and we never believed him, but suddenly here was this story about someone with his pretend name, and how many other Bartholomew Opocapopopouloses must there be in the world? Bartholomew isn’t a Greek name, and Opocapopopoulos certainly sounds like it is, so it’s not a very likely name for anybody. I immediately set about trying to get in contact with him, but all my attempts came to nothing – this was in the days before the internet, so you couldn’t just email someone. I was still sure it must be him, though, and then when he moved to Eastwestchester all my assumptions were proved right.”

“Did you get to talk to him?”

“No,” Jill said sadly. “He didn’t want to talk to us – any of us. I think his feelings were made pretty clear when he destroyed the house I’d inherited from Mum and Dad, and tried to build a big statue of himself where that tree had been.”

The memory dissolved around Paul like spilt petrol on a summer forecourt, and he was left holding one of Bartholomew’s files and feeling oddly torn.

Day Four: 1,755 words

2007-11-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

The sun peeked over the gently rolling hills to the east of Opocapopopoulos House, spreading creamy golden light over the orangery, the three swimming pools (one shaped like a giant dollar sign, one like a pound sign and one which had been a deutschmark but had been remodelled to look like a big O for Opocapopopoulos since the introduction of the euro, which Bartholomew hadn’t been too keen on), the cherry orchard, the cement garden and the Caucasian chalk circle which Bartholomew had had installed after reading about them in Wallpaper magazine. It dappled the gently rotting tomatoes in the greenhouse, the moat with its creeping carpet of algae, and the glass dome covering the mansion’s central atrium, a four-storey courtyard with an oak tree growing in the middle of it. The observatory on the east roof had a hole in from where it had been hit by a small meteorite; while Bartholomew had been alive it would have been repaired as soon as it had happened, but now it was letting in the rain. The house, which from space looked like a big O and was pretty much big enough to be viewable from space if you had a big enough telescope and weren’t too far away, stood silently, slumbering, as if waiting for its master to return before it awoke.

Inside, forensics teams dotted the place, brushing every marble sculpture, giant plasma TV and gold tap for clues. They were all dressed in white, with breathing masks and white gloves on, and looked like a jumbled, uncoordinated dance troupe. Occasionally one of them would stop what they were doing for a while – you couldn’t easily tell, with all their gear on, whether they were each male or female – and look at something long and hard for a few seconds, thinking they’d found something. In almost every case, though, they hadn’t, and resumed dusting or brushing or scanning things with high-tech bleepy devices. The head forensic expert, Meredith, stood at the top of the twin sweeping marble staircases in the grand entrance hall and surveyed the scene with the eye of someone who’s been there before, who’s seen it all, but who for some reason is still intrigued by it. Something didn’t make sense to her, and although she wasn’t sure what it was – she knew it was only a hunch, and in her business you don’t work on hunches, you work on hard evidence backed up by DNA – she felt certain that sooner or later they had to uncover some piece of evidence that would prove her right. This was the third day they’d been there; they’d been called in after reading the piece in the Eastwestchester Windsock about Opocapopopoulos’s gardener, which had sounded fishy to them. Since Opocapopopoulos had been a rich man, they were also hopeful they might find a few bin bags stuffed with money somewhere, which might help patch up the leaky roof at the office. Meredith frowned, although if you’d been standing in front of her so you could see her do that you wouldn’t have been able to anyway due to her breathing mask, which covered her face entirely and made her look like a beekeeper who’d mislaid all her bees. What was she missing? she wondered.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was her husband, who was a forensic pathologist. They’d met while they were both chemistry students in Manchester; he was in the year above, and had introduced her to a cocktail consisting of vodka, lemonade, blue curaçao and something which he’d “cooked up in the lab”. Three days later, she’d come to in the university hospital, and sworn never again to touch another drop of alcohol. He had been charged with three counts of trying to get girls into bed by rendering them chemically unconscious, and had been about to be convicted when she’d stepped in, entranced by the steely beauty of his eyes and the way he managed to wear spats without looking like a pretentious eejit. A year later, and once she’d let him romance her almost to the point of exhaustion, they’d been married in a simple ceremony on the Isle of Wight, where his parents were from, and they’d both decided to do postgraduate forensics courses: his was to do with chopping up dead people and hers seemed, at least at the moment, to be something to do with watching thirty-five people in white boilersuits stare at tiny parts of wall for hours on end. She sighed.

“Patrick.”

“Hi, Dith.” That was another thing about him that she’d kind of liked at the time: the fact that he shortened everything, as if there just wasn’t enough time in the day. “Meredith” was too long, at three syllables, so it had become “Merry”, “Dith”, “Red” and then metamorphosed into “Dithuthed” which then became “Dithuthed EarthWorkth”. It was the kind of thing that made her want to hit him with a plastic spade, now, but most of the time she couldn’t be bothered to go and find one.

“Is this urgent, I –“

“Survey going fine? Right. Found something. Might be useful. Got to get back to the slab in a few mins but briefly. Opocap had only one employee, right?”

“Yes, his gardener –“

“Wrong. Had three. Gardener, we know about. But also PA and chef. Got this from chap here who played golf with him sometimes. Says he ‘members Opocap mentioning this, few months ago.”

“Oh. Thanks,” said Meredith, not sure what she should do with this. “We’re only really trying to find fingerprints.”

“True. But where are PA and chef? Had cars, too? How about driver? Lived on his own but had had girlfriends too, I heard.”

That was true. For many years Opocapopopoulos’s private life had been the main subject of the local paper’s gossip column; since the town it covered wasn’t really all that large, the rest of the gossip consisted of what might be termed – well – non-gossip, concerning local flower shows, charity events and the occasional launch of a new swanky bar. Opocapopopoulos provided its weary editor, Crankum McGultz, with the only ray of hope they had that they might one day be able to bundle a red-top magazine called something like Top Starz in with its Sunday edition. When he’d moved into Opocapopopoulos House he had been involved with a beautiful but expensive Russian called Olga Dolmaiacheva, who had come very close to marrying him before deciding that even the inevitably huge eventual divorce settlement wasn’t worth having to spend time in the company of someone so repellent, and had purposefully driven one of his Ferraris into a tree before trying to set the garage containing the rest of them on fire. Since then, he had had flings with the daughter of a Las Vegas casino owner, who had eventually threatened Bartholomew with suicide (Bartholomew’s) if he didn’t leave her alone; a French heiress called Françoise, whom he had somehow managed to bankrupt (the Eastwestchester Windsock speculated that she might have been too nice for her own good), and latterly, the beautiful but utterly vacant daughter of one of Austria’s wealthiest wood-pulping mill owners. She had lasted well, until she started demanding that her highly-trained team of interchangeable chiahuahuas be allowed to roam freely throughout the house. Bartholomew had flown her, then and there, to the nearest airport by helicopter, forwarding on twenty-nine large trunks full of her stuff the following day.

“Isn’t that a police matter, though, if they’re missing?”

“Yes. But if were me, would be looking for proof they might have done it. Sorry. Got to get back.”

Meredith crossed the corridor overlooking the hallway to a decorator’s table on which had been set up a makeshift operations centre. There was a computer, lots of printouts, and a complete set of diagrams of the house which they’d managed to extract from the architects who had built it. By all appearances, they had been only too happy to wash their hands of the whole project, which (the Eastwestchester Windsock had sorrowfully reported at the time) had ended up running £15 million over budget, which Opocapopopoulos had refused to pay and had then counter-sued them when they sued him for it. They’d eventually settled out of court for “an undisclosed sum”, which to the Windsock had meant that Opocapopopoulos had probably ended up paying them more than that. The plans they’d sent her detailed five floors of the mansion and as much of the ornate landscaped gardens as they’d been involved with; Opocapopopoulos was never satisfied and had kept changing his mind, firing whoever was working on the gardens and taking on someone else only to fire them. There was a big sheet of paper for each level: she could see the ground floor, with the oak tree in the middle of the courtyard and the grand entrance hall she was standing overlooking, and on the next sheet was the first floor. She mentally marked out a small flashing blob marked You Are Here, and traced a path going clockwise around the O, passing bedroom suites, bathrooms, staircases and rooms which didn’t seem to serve much purpose other than to further inflate the clearly already monstrous ego of a monomaniac materialist. Her path climbed the stairs going over the bridge which Opocapopopoulos had modelled on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, but due to not listening to the tour guide when he’d been in Venice had called it the Bridge of Size, and passed Opocapopopoulos’s five-chamber master bedroom suite before coming around the corner to her right and bumping into the flashing blob again. The next floor was pretty much the same, and it was possible to trace the same closed loop; the third and fourth floors stopped either side of the bridge, however, forming more of a U shape. How come she didn’t have the plans for a basement? she wondered. And in a house this size, how come nobody had ever questioned the apparent fact that Opocapopopoulos had only ever had one member of staff? A place this size, which had – she counted – fourteen bedrooms, a ballroom, a dining-room, a catering-grade kitchen complex, eight bathrooms, three studies, two drawing “slash” living-rooms and numerous smaller rooms, not to mention the outhouses, would surely need more than just one gardener. Did Opocapopopoulos do all the cooking in a kitchen the size of a squash court, heating up a microwave meal for one every night? She doubted it. But who might know the truth?

Day Three: 1,468 words [may contain swearing]

2007-11-02T07:00:00.001-07:00

The rest of the day had passed much as funerals usually do, except with no clowns. Paul had located crisps he was satisfied with, but made no secret of the fact that he didn’t really care too much about the fact Bartholomew was dead. Even the somewhat sudden and possibly suspicious way he’d died didn’t seem to be arousing much comment. Susan found herself circulating, making small talk with people many of whom she didn’t know, and the same sort of conversation would crop up again and again:

SUSAN (to batty old lady, absent-minded elderly gentleman or whoever else she happened to be talking to): So – did you know the deceased?

FUNERAL-GOER: Yes, I did. He will certainly… leave his mark. Um, his shoes won’t easily be filled. How do you know him?

SUSAN: I – er – know him through a cousin of mine. I used to work for him, you know… odd jobs around the house –

It was only later, when everybody was slowly dispersing to go home, that she’d found a small lump in her throat and couldn’t explain why. And now, leaning against the oven in her kitchen, she still couldn’t explain why. “Yes, I did care that he’d died,” she said. “But I’m not sure why. I mean, I didn’t know him. Why’s this so important to you, anyway? You didn’t know him either.”

“No, you’re right. But I suppose the fact I’ve got a sort of family connection with him counts for something, even if he wasn’t particularly pleasant. I wasn’t busy today, anyway, and I fancied some tea with salt in.”

“It’s Friday,” she remembered. “How come you’re not at work?”

“I couldn’t be arsed,” he shrugged, “so I pulled a sickie.”

“Come on then,” she said decisively, “let’s go into town. I need to do a few things.”

Once they’d got into town, which involved negotiating three overpriced buses and took them an hour and twelve minutes, they went to Susan’s favourite bookshop, the kind that is becoming increasingly rare these days: family-owned and -run, huge, cluttered, but friendly, and staffed by people who knew what you were looking for and had in all probability already read it. She’d unearthed countless fascinatingly dull tomes about the British East India Company, Queen Victoria, 80s shoe fashions and Amazing Chickens – this one wasn’t actually dull at all, since it was basically a picture book which featured 126 full-colour photos of different prizewinning species of chicken. It also had a coffee shop, which had been added in the last year or so due to public demand, as the nearest Starbucks was over fifteen yards away across a road which was occasionally busy enough to have cars on. Susan and Paul found a vacant table in the coffee shop, and sat down, Susan with a pile of books she wanted to look at.

“Since you’re ill,” she said, giving extra stress to the word ill, “you can help me with this. I need to find some info about Sir Robert Clive and whether bushy moustaches had anything to do with Monty Python.”

“I’ve got things to do too, you know,” Paul protested. “What if somebody from work sees me here?”

“What are the chances of that? You’ve said yourself that nobody you work with has ever read a book. And I know what you’d be doing if you weren’t here – buggering around on the Playstation, probably.”

Paul said nothing, but conceded it was a fair point. When he got days off, unless he’d actually organised something to do with them he tended to use them without knowing what he’d done afterwards. The last time he’d claimed to be ill had been a few weeks ago – he had to be careful, because he knew they kept records – and he had ended up trying to learn how to beatbox, using the tube from an empty kitchen roll, because he’d seen someone doing it on Richard and Judy. He’d made three cups of tea, farted about on the internet for a bit, gone for a walk, and watched one of his vast collection of DVDs for the third time, but apart from the small start he’d made cleaning the bathroom, and the beatboxing, he hadn’t really achieved much. He was, when pushed, capable of great things, or at least fairly OK things. Once he had drunkenly agreed to take part in a marathon, which he’d spent the next six months halfheartedly training for and crapping himself about, and when the day arrived the friends he’d agreed to do it with had chickened out and didn’t bother turning up; they later claimed to have had hangovers that made it impossible for them to move. To his credit, though, he’d gone ahead, finishing in about five and a half hours, and raised several hundred pounds for a local charity that specialised in providing better polo training for advantaged teenagers. In return, he’d been off work for four days with chapped testicles, and even now had back trouble from time to time because of it.

They’d been there for about half an hour, and Susan was on her third coffee, when she noticed Paul suddenly freeze. His chair faced outwards into the shop, and it seemed as if he’d caught sight of someone he didn’t want to see.

“What?” Susan began, but before she could turn round to see who it was, whoever it was bumbled up to them.

“Ah, hello, Paul,” the whoever began, and as he passed Susan she caught a whiff of ancient cologne. She noticed he had a bushy moustache, and discreetly marked the page she was looking at before closing the book, so as not to cause offence. “I didn’t expect you would be around today. I thought you were ill?”

Paul suddenly, but seamlessly, had gone from interested browser of arcane history books to brave recoverer from typhoid and scarlet fever. “Well,” he managed, “I am. I’ve been in bed all day, but my sister Susan here suggested I come out for half an hour to get some fresh air. Er – Sister Susan, this is Cedric.”

Cedric looked at Susan quizzically, as if trying to imagine her in a wimple and habit, but failing. She tried to look like what she thought a nun might look like, which was pretty hard since she’d actually never seen one in the wild. Her only frame of reference was the 1989 film Nuns on the Run, with Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle, so she tried to look a bit fat, male and grumpy, as if she was only in drag because she was being chased by gangsters.

“Very – ah – pleased to meet you, Sister,” Cedric said politely. “Paul, you should perhaps get some rest? You don’t look quite well enough to be coming back to work yet.”

“N-no, Cedric, I don’t feel very good,” Paul admitted. “I was going to self-certify myself for now, and then see what happened.”

“You can always work from home,” Cedric suggested. “We could get you a laptop.”

“Oh… that’s very kind of you, er, Cedric,” Paul countered somewhat forcefully, “but I er – I don’t think in my present condition I should be staring at small brightly-lit screens, do you think Sister?”

“No,” Susan agreed. “You should be in neutral lighting conditions, really. No bright lights, no exertion, and plenty of rest.”

“Well, let me know how you’re feeling tomorrow,” Cedric offered. “We can arrange cover, if need be.”

“Thank you, Cedric, that’s very nice of you.”

Please, please just bugger off.

“Well, I won’t keep you,” Cedric said pleasantly, “you seem to have a lot of –“ he glanced at the pile of heavy history books – “work to do.”

“We’re researching cures,” Susan said brightly, and immediately regretted it. “Trepanning, leeches, that sort of thing. We’re a very – erm – traditional order.”

Cedric nodded, looking somewhat bemused. “Well, good day to you,” he said, and ambled off.

As soon as he’d gone, Paul got up to leave. “What are you doing?” Susan asked him.

“I’ve had enough,” Paul said. “What the hell were you thinking of talking about trepanning, for God’s sake?”

“Sorry, that came out unintentionally,” Susan admitted.

“Well, that’s me fucked anyway,” Paul huffed. “I’ve already had 27 days off sick this year, and it’s only May. They’ve got me on some kind of warning system thing.”

“I really wouldn’t worry about it,” Susan said, although she was a bit worried about it. “You know how fast councils work, it’d take them ‘til Christmas to do anything.”

Two weeks later, Paul knocked at her door. “I’ve been fired,” he said. “They said they couldn’t legitimately pay someone who never bothered to turn up for work, and even when he was there didn’t put in any effort. Can I sleep on your sofa?”

Day Two: 1,936 words

2007-11-01T04:25:00.000-07:00

“Well,” Susan began, handing back the laptop to Paul who plopped it down on one of Susan’s coats, which had been on the side ever since she’d inherited it from a drunken night out three weeks earlier. It still smelt of booze and fags, and there was a suspicious stain on one lapel which Susan hoped was shampoo, but couldn’t be sure. She didn’t want to touch it.

“Do you see why this could be important?” Paul said. “Bartholomew didn’t kill himself after all. At least, I don’t think he did. I knew that gardener was a bad egg all along.”

“Hang on,” Susan interjected, “you didn’t know whether he was a gardener or a butler a moment ago.”

Paul got up out of the chair he had been sitting in until the moment he got up and started pacing thoughtfully around the room. “You know what this means, though,” he said. “Bartholomew left everything to his gardener in his will. He had a nice garden, but it wasn’t that nice. I mean, it had never won any awards or featured on a TV programme about nice gardens or in any magazines, books or even on websites or a throwaway blog post. Ever. I checked. So why was it so important that Bartholomew left all his money to Thimble instead of to us lot? Wasn’t there enough to go around? He lived in the biggest house in town, the one he’d built for himself twenty years ago which caused such a furore at the time because he demolished a whole block of executive flats to do it. Just because he could. And that was actually at a time that the idea of executive flats hadn’t even been thought of.”

“Look,” Susan began, “I don’t care about the money –“

“Well, I don’t care about all of the money,” Paul admitted, “but a few million would be nice –“

“I’m happy here,” Susan said flatly. “I’m doing an MA in obscure history. I have a shitty flat that I don’t have to pay too much rent for. Why would I want a whole load of money to come along and screw all that up for me?”

“I’m not saying you would,” said Paul, and sat down. Susan’s flat was indeed quite small, and it wasn’t easy to pace around its kitchen for very long without bumping into something, most likely Susan. Especially if you were trying to do it for dramatic effect, which in a way he wasn’t. He looked up at Susan. “Why did you put salt in my tea?”

“I wondered if you’d notice. Would you like another one?”

“No, sod it. I’ll have an éclair instead.” Paul helped himself to one of two slightly soggy éclairs from the fridge and bit into it, hoping the water content from it would help slake his somewhat dry thirst. “But anyway,” he continued through a mouthful of cream, “I mean… you don’t seem too bothered about this one way or the other. Did you care about Bartholomew’s death?”

Susan knew that Paul knew only too well how she’d taken Bartholomew’s death: he’d helped her through it only six weeks before. When the news had reached her she had been in the middle of a particularly tricky piece of research, which involved finding amusing videos of cats on YouTube and sticking them on people’s pages on Facebook. The library, archaic institution that it was, hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that virtually all of its computers were being used in this way rather than for whatever they were meant to be used for. Her phone had gone off rather loudly, she had scrabbled about for it in her bag, and answered it in a low, quiet voice: “Hello?”

“Hello, Susan,” her mother had said from her end of the phone, which was situated 98 miles away in a charming village with its own duckpond, which the locals were fiercely proud of to the extent that they had installed gun emplacements and razor wire around its perimeter in an attempt to protect it. “Are you busy?”

“No, er –“ Susan had closed down a video of a talking cat saying “ooooh yes oooh yes oooh yes” which she’d had to plug her headphones in to be able to listen to, and was still trying to stop herself from giggling about. “I’m just in the library. What is it?”

“Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some sad news,” her mother, whose name was Jill, had said. “Your uncle Bartholomew passed away last night.”

Susan had stopped in her tracks. Her uncle? But he wasn’t very old. How had that happened? “How did that happen?” she said, in a suddenly very small voice.

“I’m afraid we don’t know at this stage,” Jill replied. “The police have got involved – it seems there may be some element of foul play. He was found in woodland near Opocapopopoulos House.”

“I’m… sorry,” Susan found herself saying. She hadn’t known her uncle too well, as he’d always been distant and aloof due to his all-consuming habit of accumulating money as if it was dust. Her mother had always made the effort with Bartholomew, though, and Susan knew his death would have affected her quite badly. “Are you all right?”

“I’m coping,” was all her mother would say. “Yes, I’m coping. I’ve told Paul, I rang him just now.”

“Who else knows?” said Susan automatically. “Do you want me to call anyone?”

“No, don’t worry. Sue and Susannah and Matilda are ringing round everyone. I don’t want to interrupt you.”

Susan had rung off feeling somewhat numb, and found herself unable to concentrate on funny videos of cats any more. A week later when she and Paul turned up at the funeral in Paul’s battered old Nissan Bluebird, which he’d crashed gently into a wall a few days before and which now did a maximum of 38 miles per hour, the assembled throng was subdued in a way that people are at a funeral, but there also was a certain element of grief missing from the expressions on everyone’s faces. It was as if they were all there out of a sense of obligation. Susan had located her mother, which was quite hard in a sea of people all wearing black with big hats on and their heads bowed sorrowfully. She had been crying, Susan could tell. Paul wandered off to find some crisps.

“So good of you to make it,” Jill sniffled quietly. “What a nice turn-out.”

“I wasn’t not going to be here, Mum,” Susan said. “Are any of his other family here?”

“Yes, his other brother – my other brother – your other uncle, and Paul’s too – is here. Xavier.”

Susan had never wondered before about why her grandparents’ three children had been called Bartholomew, Xavier and Jill, but she inexplicably found herself wondering this now. She had mat Xavier infrequently, usually at funerals or weddings, and once randomly on a station platform which had been quite embarrassing because he hadn’t known who she was. Xavier was a bit weird, by any token. He dressed in black, did a mysterious job involving coffins or embalming or witchcraft or something – nobody was quite sure what – and professed to have the largest collection of Gothic and proto-magical knick-knacks in existence, although he hadn’t called them knick-knacks – he’d used an obscure word Susan couldn’t remember, because she never needed to describe that sort of stuff. He lived in a crypt, which was actually a basement flat with no light bulbs which he didn’t bother to clean, but was somewhat spooky all the same. Susan suspected that he’d only turned up at the funeral because it was a funeral, and had free tea and biscuits. Was it possible to be a serial funeral crasher? she wondered, and pictured him turning up at the funerals of people he’d never met, just so he had an excuse to stand there dressed head to toe in black and look moody. She was absolutely sure that if she went round to his flat and looked hard enough she’d find a few fluffy toys, all seven Harry Potter books and a collection of Disney videos.

“Do the police know anything more?” she had asked, without feeling able to stop herself.

“No, they said it might be about five weeks before anything else emerged,” her mother replied sadly. “We shall have to wait.”

The three other funerals Susan had been to before had been a bit different from this one. Her father’s had been a jolly affair, with three clowns turning up in a car that honked and fell to pieces, towing the coffin on a flatbed trolley covered in whipped cream. They’d formed a human pyramid, honked their noses sadly and played one of those Last Post type pieces of music that only ever get dragged out at funerals on a swannee whistle. Afterwards, they’d solemnly pushed the cakes and pies Jill had laid on for everybody in each other’s faces. Poor Jill smiled wanly at all this but didn’t say anything; by then she was used to their antics, and Gareth had been the undisputed king of cocking about for as long as they’d been married, so she’d let it go. Secretly she wished that either he hadn’t been a clown, or she hadn’t been a chartered surveyor, but wasn’t sure which she wished louder.

The priest, who like most priests seemed to know everyone in his catchment area without in some cases ever having met them, cleared his throat. “Dearly beloved,” he began, “we are gathered here today to mark the passing of a great man. Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos was always mysterious, he moved in interesting circles, and some of us may not have known him as well as we’d have liked. It’s true that he kept his counsel, and could be a difficult man to get to know. But as the Lord saith, still waters run deep. I first met Bartholomew when he moved to this village over twenty years ago, and when I was just a newly qualified rabbi. Despite the fact that he was the newcomer, he took me under his wing, and over the course of the next twenty years taught me the true meaning of the word tolerance.”

Susan couldn’t resist looking round at the other members of the congregation to see what they might be thinking about all this. Everyone knew that Bartholomew had been an utter bastard from the get-go. From the time he moved in, demolishing anything that stood in the way of his plans for a twenty-bedroom mansion with faux battlements, a moat and a battery of concealed anti-aircraft rocket launchers under the lawn, through the endless legal battles he fought with anyone who questioned how he did things, to the time only a few weeks ago when he’d decided he wanted the right to conduct dogfights over the village in a pair of decommissioned ex-Soviet MiG fighters he’d somehow acquired through one of his shady contacts (he protested he’d simply bought them off eBay), he had seemingly done everything he could to alienate people and arouse their disgust. It had almost reached the point where Susan felt she was somehow tarred with the same brush, despite not having any contact with Bartholomew at all, or having the benefits of any of his money. Did all the people who’d turned up to his funeral just want to make sure he was actually dead? Did they think they might have a hope in hell of getting their hands on any of his cash? Susan doubted it very much.

Day One: 1,706 words

2007-11-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

Susan started at the sudden knock at the front door, knocking over her freshly-made cup of coffee in the process. It had been six weeks since the death of her rich, eccentric and despicable uncle Bartholomew, whom everybody had hated because he was so obnoxious. In the intervening time, she had been in mourning – as anyone would be – although she had harboured a secret sigh of relief which she didn’t even like to admit to herself: she would never, ever, have wished anyone dead, but at the same time, there was nobody she would have wished deader than he. Or him. It was the ninth coffee of the morning and her thoughts were a little fractured.

The door knocked again, as a result of someone standing the other side of it and hitting it with something hard, perhaps their knuckles or the spine of a phone book or even a brick. Her shoulders sagged: it was probably somebody trying to get her to change her gas supply or sign up to a charity or something. Or maybe.

Bang, bang, bang.

She got up, walked down the hallway to the door, and was just about to open it when the thought crossed her mind to look through the small peephole – she’d once been told it was called a “whoozit” – her brother Paul had helped her to install the previous year. She peered through it, and saw it was Paul.

“What do you want?” she said, not opening the door.

“Let me in,” his voice came back. “It’s bloody raining out here.”

She opened the door. Paul, speckled with fine droplets and looking like a duck in an overcoat, crossed the threshhold and stamped his muddy boots on the doormat. “Bollocks,” he huffed. “My car’s broken, I had to walk.”

He lived the other side of town – at least a ten-minute car journey, so it must have taken him forty minutes or so to walk it. “Can I get you some tea?” Susan offered. “What’s wrong with the car?”

“Wouldn’t start,” Paul shrugged. “But I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t had something I needed to see you about. I’d love a cup of tea, thanks. I can’t remember if you have the internet here?”

Of course he could remember: he’d helped her to install it only the previous summer. “Yeah, I do,” she replied, stretching to the top shelf in the cupboard to reach the crappiest, brownest mug she could find. It was a family tradition that they treated each other like shit, in the nicest possible way; ever since they had been barely old enough to laugh at words like poo and willy they had delighted in stitching each other up in any way that could think of. It was possibly due to the fact they were so close in age, or then again maybe it was because their father, who had died tragically in a human cannonball accident, had been a circus clown into his 70s and never seemed to hurt himself when he took a tumble. She kept a mug she hardly ever washed on the top shelf specifically for when he came round to visit, which had caused problems when her last boyfriend had been almost seven feet tall and almost ran away because he’d thought she was so unclean. Then again, he had turned out to be a bit of a freaky kind of guy, in his way. The 18-inch height gap between them hadn’t helped either.

“I read something about Bartholomew in the paper today,” Paul said abruptly. “I thought you’d be interested.”

Susan cocked her head like a perplexed basset hound. “Really?” she said. “What?”

“I wanted the full text from the internet,” Paul explained, “because I can’t remember the ins and outs. You know how bad my memory is.”

She knew, only too well: she’d helped him lose it only the previous summer, or maybe the one before, she couldn’t remember – when they’d hooked up with some friends and spent a delirious six weeks ripped to the tits on magic mushrooms, peyote and speed. Don’t do it, kids. Her own dependence on caffeine, she was sure, was probably due to the after-effects of this reckless abandon, in the same way that heroin addicts often have to climb down gently from their addiction by using morphine or ketamine or Sudafed® mixed with Nyquil™. “Can you remember the gist of it?” she wondered out loud, for his benefit so he’d be able to hear what she was thinking and say something in reply.

But he was already grubbing about on the sideboard – her flat wasn’t large, so things didn’t really have much of a place – and eventually located her battered laptop underneath a pile of books and coursework. She was, it’s probably useful to mention at this point, doing a part-time masters’ course in Victorian history. The full title of her dissertation was, at least at the moment: “The British East India Company: An Historical Fulcrum in the Development of Postmodernist Irony, 1967-1975”. She didn’t have a clue what the hell she was going to do with it when she’d finished, or even if she was going to do anything with it. But she’d been able to secure a small amount of funding for it, and it certainly beat having to bother going to work or concentrating on anything she didn’t want to do. It was quite fun being totally skint but feeling that you were doing it for a cause, rather than just because you couldn’t be arsed to get a job.

Paul had turned the laptop on. “What’s your password?” he asked.

“You know what it is,” she sighed. “You helped me to set it up a few months ago.”

“Ah yes,” he remembered, and typed in PASSWORD. While he was waiting for the internet to fire up, he reached into his pocket and drew out a stubby pencil and a sheaf of scrap papers, formed from torn-up sheets of highly-classified A4 which he’d been meant to shred, but hadn’t bothered to. He worked at the local council, and God knows what would have happened if news of the planned changes to Byelaw 139.11.(c).iv had leaked out into the local press: there would have been a public outcry, a smear campaign, leafletting, demonstrations, rationing and mass suicides. He drew a couple of stick figures and a crappy diagram on one of the sheets of paper and handed it to Susan. In return, she handed him a cup of tea with salt in it instead of sugar.

“This is something like the sketch of the people in court I saw on the website of the local paper,” he explained, sniffing his tea absently and putting it down on the sideboard, where it would never be touched again and in three weeks would be almost vomited on by a slightly wiser Susan, who would at that point vow never to leave dirty cups lying around like that again. “The guy on the left is Basil Unctuous, he’s Bartholomew’s lawyer. The one on the right is I think meant to be somebody called Filimore Thimble, but I don’t think I’ve quite got his jawline right.”

“Who’s Filimore Thimble?” Susan wanted to know, almost without meaning to want to.

“Filimore Thimble,” Paul said carefully, “is the guy that they now think killed Bartholomew.” Susan gasped. “Or he might have tried to save him, or perhaps I think he was Bartholomew’s butler and didn’t know anything about it. Anyway, this is what I need the internet for. Hang on.”

He found the local paper’s website, and after a bit of digging around located the page he was looking for, buried on the site’s equivalent of page 14 next to an advert for replacement car exhausts. “There,” he said, carefully passing the laptop to Susan so she could have a look, “I thought so.”

Susan read:

New Twist in Rich Dead Guy Case

Opocapopopoulos’s Gardener “May Have Ignored Body”

New evidence has come to light this week in the case of expired banking magnate Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos, whose deceased corpse was found six weeks ago in woodland which he happened to own. As reported in this paper at the time (“Cops Cop Copse Corpse”, 12th April), Opocapopopoulos was allegedly discovered wearing full equestrian clothing, despite having shot his last horse only days before, and with a sealed envelope in his hand addressed to Filimore Thimble, his gardener, the contents of which have never been revealed. Legal pressure on Thimble to reveal the contents of the envelope has been mounting ever since the non-revelation of the contents, if there even are any contents, was revealed. But new evidence from a man out walking his dog, who up until now was too scared to admit he was trespassing on Opocapopopoulos’s land, has now come to light. The man, who can’t be named more than once for legal reasons, told this paper that at 8.33am he had just stooped to pick up a dog muck nugget, when, upon straightening, he glimpsed through the emerging verdant canopy a boot sticking out at an angle which suggested that its occupant was lying down. On further investigation he realised that it belonged to Opocapopopoulos, and using his 30 years’ experience as a forensic pathologist he deduced that the man had been dead for at least four days, had been dragged there to where he lay, and also hadn’t been wearing those clothes when he died from what must have been a rather painful blow to the head. Dodecahedrus Grunt, 65, told us that he also noted that nobody else had raised the alarm, but that from what he knew about the routine practised at the Opocapopopoulos mansion, Opocapopopoulos’s gardener must have known about the body for days but not done anything about it. He told us all this down a crackly telephone line from the Azores to where he had escaped out of fear for his life, fearing that associates of Opocapopopoulos would be after him or whatever. This artist’s impression of the recent court hearing involving Thimble and Opocapopopoulos’s lawyer, Basil Unctuous, clearly shows the two men facing each other wearing suits, and is available as a podcast from our website.