this. Conscience, perhaps. Dick will give you all the details.’
Brock found Chivers scowling into a coffee mug. He looked up and nodded.
‘Musical chairs, eh? Help yourself to a coffee.’
Brock did so and sat down. ‘Yes. Tough luck.’
‘I simply don’t understand it. We were leaning on that little bastard for days, trying to squeeze something out of him, and he didn’t say a word, not a hint. Then suddenly he’s on the record with the complete works-bank account numbers, transactions down to the last penny. What made him do it?’
‘We’ll have to ask him.’
‘Fat chance.’ Chivers pushed a piece of paper across to Brock. ‘Seems he caught a flight to Athens this morning without telling anyone. He could be anywhere by now.’
‘Was he alone in that room where he was being filmed, do you think?’
‘No idea. Why, you think he had help?’
‘I don’t know. What else have you got for me?’
Chivers indicated a neat stack of files. ‘Our records of interviews and daily summaries. You should find the paperwork up to date.’ He was famous for his paperwork, Brock thought.
‘My team is at your disposal, and I won’t be going anywhere for a few days, so you can get hold of me any time, day or night.’ Then Chivers reached into his pocket and laid down a bunch of keys. ‘Queen Anne’s Gate. It’s all yours again, Brock.’
Brock walked over to Queen Anne’s Gate, the files under his arm, through deserted streets. He opened the front door of the darkened building with the keys and made his way up to his old office. It looked unnaturally tidy and there was a faint smell of Chivers’ aftershave.
He sat at the desk and dialled Dot’s number. She lived in East Barnet, he knew, near the station in a house she’d bought with the husband who had died soon afterwards of a heart attack, but Brock had never been there and had no mental image of the place. She answered almost immediately, a phone beside her bed or armchair, perhaps, and he told her what had happened.
‘It was on the ten o’clock news, that he’d killed himself,’ she said. ‘I wondered what they’d do.’
‘Can you phone round the team and get everyone to Queen Anne’s Gate first thing tomorrow morning, please, Dot? I’ll speak to Bren and Kathy myself.’
When he rang Kathy’s number he wondered what he might be interrupting, but she answered immediately, sounding calm and slightly distant. After he’d told her of developments, he added, ‘That was a pleasant meal. Sorry I had to dash off. I hope John didn’t think I was rude.’
‘’Course not. He’s gone back to the hotel. I can contact him if you want to see him again.’
‘Not at this stage, Kathy.’
John Greenslade returned to Chelsea Mansions after a brisk walk that failed to clear his head of troubled thoughts and doubts. He said a quick hello to Toby and Deb, and went upstairs.
In his room he stripped and stood for a while under the pathetic dribble of warm water that passed for a shower, then lay on his bed, trying to decide what to do. To return to Canada having achieved nothing would be like a defeat, and yet he seemed to have boxed himself into a corner, making it almost impossible, he thought, to confront his father with the truth. The turning point had been his gaffe about the frogman, Commander Crabb. He had seen, in Brock’s dismissal of the idea, any curiosity and interest that he might have had in John vanish. The only way to retrieve the situation would be to come up with something to make up for the mistake and establish himself as someone to be taken seriously. But what could that be?
He thought of the message revealed on the back of the 1956 photograph, and the signature ‘Miles’. If Miles had been Toby’s father or uncle, then the family’s records might have confirmed it, yet he couldn’t remember any such references in the boxes in the attic that he’d gone through. When he had searched them it had just seemed a bit of fun, something to bring him closer to Kathy, but now it took on a deadly seriousness. He wondered if he had missed something, and remembered Toby’s comment about moving the records out of the basement where they had originally been stored. Perhaps some had been left behind, he thought. He should ask.
By the time he’d come to this conclusion the hotel was silent, the lights out. He decided to wait till morning, and to consult Toby first about his father. But he couldn’t settle, and after an hour of restless turning back and forth on his bed he got up, dressed, and padded silently downstairs.
The door to the cellar was unlocked, and he felt inside for the switch for the light on the stairs and went down. He felt the sudden chill radiating from the rough old concrete columns and slabs that had been built down there in 1939 to protect its occupants from a direct hit on the house above. There was a smell of damp, and something else, something sour like old drains recently disturbed. There were a couple of tea-chests standing against the far wall. He went over to investigate their contents and found that they were full of old china, wrapped in ancient newspapers. Nearby was a bench with a few tools and boxes of rusty old nails, and beside it a rack of industrial shelving next to a solid door set flush in the wall. It had a large handle and two heavy bolts set in its steel face, as if it were the entrance to a bank vault or, more likely, a blast-proof inner shelter. And he noticed that the floor in front of the door was streaked with smears of muddy footprints.
He took hold of the handle, turned it and pulled. The heavy door creaked open, and a stronger smell of fetid air gusted out. The room inside was in pitch darkness, and it took him a moment to find the light switch on the wall outside, by the shelving. He turned it on and peered back into the chamber. The first thing he saw was a pick and shovel leaning against a side wall, next to a section of the brick-paved floor that had been dug up, with a pile of rubble and earth heaped beside the hole. The room was like a cell, he thought, imagining how claustrophobic it would have felt to be inside, feeling the thud and tremble of the building around you as the bombs fell.
Beyond the hole, on the far side of the room, was something else, a piece of gym equipment perhaps, and John went in to investigate, skirting around the diggings. It looked like a bench that was higher at one end than the other, to form a sloping platform, and next to it were coiled several thick leather belts and lengths of rope, and a bucket containing a damp cloth. An unpleasant memory stirred in his head, a TV film of the torture of prisoners in Iraq, and an image of a man stretched out on such a contraption, feet up, head down, his face covered by a wet cloth onto which water was being poured to induce the sensation of being drowned. Waterboarding, he thought. But why would-?
Then John heard a sound from the cellar outside. As he turned to look, the light in the chamber was abruptly switched off. He heard the scrape of steel on stone and gave a shout as the rectangle of light from the doorway began to narrow. The heavy door slammed shut, plunging the room into absolute darkness.
‘Hey!’ He scrambled towards the door, tripping blindly over the bricks, and heard the bolts, one and then the other, being rammed home. When he tried the handle there was no movement. He beat his fists against the steel and yelled, and the sounds seemed to sink, deadened, into the mass of the material in which he was now entombed.
After a minute of shouting, kicking and banging on the door, he subsided with a groan. This was ridiculous. Who had locked him in? Not Toby or Deb, surely, nor Jacko with the artificial leg, or Julie or Destiny. Garry then, the silent one. But had he realised that anyone was inside the room? John thought back. Yes, he had definitely called out before the door closed. Was Garry deaf?
John shivered, suddenly very cold. He felt in his pockets and realised he’d left his mobile phone upstairs in his room. He swore out loud. What if Garry hadn’t heard him? He’d probably been doing his rounds, locking up for the night, never imagining that there was someone down here. How long would it be before they wanted to get into this room again? A day? A month? He felt a skitter of panic in his chest. There was a spade and pickaxe, he remembered. Could he dig his way out? What else might be hidden in the corners of the room? A flashlight? Matches? He turned to blindly feel his way around and promptly stumbled onto the pile of rubble beside the pit. He reached out his hand and felt something smooth and hard and rounded, like an old copper cistern ballcock, perhaps. An old copper cistern ballcock with two holes, like eye sockets. And a row of ragged teeth. He dropped it, swore and fell backwards, cutting his hand on something sharp and hard. Broken bones. ‘Dear God,’ he groaned. ‘What’s going on here?’
An hour or so later, John, hunched against a wall and shivering with cold, heard a faint sound from the direction of the door. He strained his ears and then heard another noise, a more substantial clunk, and then a heavy creak and a thin line of bright light appeared.
‘Thank goodness!’ he cried, and tried to scramble to his feet, but his knees had locked with cramp and he staggered, momentarily blinded by the sudden dazzle as the door was flung open. He made out the black silhouette
