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.
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