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.
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