Under a Watchful Eye(82)
‘Let us go out of here and enlarge upstairs.’
‘Mark. Please. Stop saying that.’
The bare floorboards became an amplifier of their footsteps. They might have been wearing shoes with tipped heels as they walked into the shrinking circles where their torch beams ended on the brown walls, the circles of light growing brighter as they narrowed, the darkness welling behind their shoulders. Both of them sneezed, as if one had set off the other.
The first floor existed in total darkness. Twelve rooms arranged around a broad corridor that ran through the building widthways, with the staircase opening in the middle of the floor. And like the hall below, these walls were wood-panelled, the doors large and thick with yellowing emulsion.
Every bedroom door had been left open, and inside each room the wood panelling ended at a picture rail. Wallpaper stained brown with age continued to the cracked and flaking ceilings. And, as if awaiting new guests and donors, the old SPR beds remained. All were neatly made with a white sheet folded over a cream blanket. Any other furniture had been cleared, leaving dark patches and scratches on the wooden floorboards.
‘This is where they projected from,’ Mark said in the first bedroom they entered, his eyes wild with excitement. ‘From these actual rooms. Incredible, isn’t it?’
It was something, for sure, and Seb’s own gaze flitted across the walls as if he expected to see a prostrate shape, still hovering above its earthbound double. He felt no admiration, only trepidation.
A locked door blocked the stairwell and any access to the top floor where Hazzard must have lived.
‘Don’t! Please. Don’t,’ Seb said, as Mark heaved and pushed at the door, rattling it within the frame. ‘Let’s look downstairs again. There’ll be a cellar.’ Seb realized he lacked the courage to go any higher. Whatever was up there, he wasn’t ready to see. He needed to go back down and regroup his wits before Mark forced his way into what remained upstairs.
Near the kitchen, behind a door they’d previously mistaken for a pantry, a staircase descended to a lower ground level and opened into a large storage room. The walls flaked and were lined with rusting pipes and a later addition of strip-lights.
A second flight of shorter stairs rose to a broad trapdoor, once used for receiving supplies and the fuel required to maintain a large house. Most significantly, the room was lined with long metal cabinets, each labelled chronologically. It was the SPR archive.
Mark wasted no time and began hauling open drawers, his thick fingers soon flicking through the folders inside. He held the butt of the torch handle between his teeth.
‘Look here,’ Seb said, shining his torch at the floor around two tables. The surfaces immediately struck Seb as too bright.
‘What?’ Mark asked, without even looking over his shoulder.
‘The floor.’ It was tracked with scuffs that hadn’t been recoated in dust. The surfaces of the two tables were definitely cleaner than they should have been too. One was cluttered with stationery, biros and copier paper, some of it reasonably modern and still in place. ‘Someone has been in here, recently.’ More footprints became visible beneath the table. A track had also been worn through the dross, to and from the filing cabinets.
Mark rose from his knees, wincing. ‘Ewan?’
Seb nodded. ‘I think so. That bastard was in here.’
‘But look around,’ Mark said, smiling, and indicating the emptiness and signs of dereliction. ‘There is no SPR any more. Your mate got inside and took some files. And there’s far more than reports in these cabinets, Seb. That first one is full of accounts. Bank statements. Utility bills. Receipts. Masses of them going back decades. Evidence of a fully functioning business and household. It’s a treasure trove. It’s just bloody amazing! The explanation of how the organization was run must be inside this room.’ Mark returned to the cabinets.
The squeal of the drawer runners grated on Seb’s nerves. ‘All undisturbed, Mark, and for so long? How is that possible for a building of this size? No inheritance, will or probate? No further occupancy? I don’t buy it.’
From his rucksack, Seb removed half of the SPR files that Ewan had taken from this very room. He stacked them upon the table. From Mark’s rucksack, he removed the second half and placed them alongside. The action of returning the documents provided some relief, but it also felt pitifully insufficient, a mere gesture.
Beyond the archive room Seb inspected the subterranean alcoves.
Each brick cubicle was filled with shadow or made grey where rays of sunlight struggled to enter through the dirt-encrusted windows near the ceiling. From what he could make out, the storage spaces were filled with paint tins, stacked garden furniture, some rusted tools, hundreds of empty wine bottles, and all of it coated in cobwebs and dust.
He also found a fire poker, unused light bulbs, an old pith helmet, rotting deck chairs, broken tennis racquets, mattresses soaked by water as if there had been a flood, an old iron cot and perambulator, the fabric mildewed and decomposing.
At the end of the concourse he came across a column of cardboard boxes that were sealed and not nearly as old and speckled as most of the surrounding materials in the basement. The boxes bore the stamp of a printer in Crewe.
Seb tore open the first box and pulled away the bubble-wrap. The container was filled with books. At least two dozen copies of the same book. Another two dozen copies were waiting inside the second box that he tore into. And this was a book written by an author that Seb knew fairly well, because that man was currently standing inside the SPR archive and noisily pulling open drawers.