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.
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