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 –“
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