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.”
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