breathing smoke, you wanted to get through the tunnel as fast as possible. You certainly didn’t want to stay in there permanently, let alone stop at an equally enclosed station to take on passengers. So they tried pneumatic tunnels but they couldn’t maintain a seal. They tried superheated bricks but they weren’t reliable. They burnt coke but the fumes from that proved even more toxic than coal smoke. What they were waiting for was electric trains, but they were twenty years too early.
So steam it was. And because of that the London Underground was a lot less underground than originally planned. Where the tracks ran under an existing roadway they put in steam grates and, wherever the tracks didn’t, they tried to leave the roof off as much as possible. One such ‘cut’ famously existed at Leinster Road where, in order to hide the unsightly railway from sensitive middle-class eyes, two brick facades were built that seamlessly replicated the grand Georgian terrace that had been demolished to dig it. These fake houses, with their convincing but blind painted windows, became an endless source of humour to the kind of people who think making minimum-wage pizza delivery guys go to a false address is the highest form of wit.
Everyone knows about Leinster Road, except perhaps minimum-wage pizza delivery guys, but I’d never heard of any fake houses west of Bayswater Station. Once you knew what you were looking for they were easy to spot on the satellite view of Google Maps, although their nature was somewhat disguised by the oblique angle of the aerial photograph. Me and Lesley talked our way into one of the flats above the shopping arcade on the Moscow Road, which had a good view over the back of the house where Kevin Nolan had delivered his greenery. From there it was obvious that, while the buildings were less than a full house, they were more than just a facade.
‘It’s like someone only built the front rooms,’ said Lesley.
Where the rear rooms and back garden should have been there was a sheer drop to the track bed six metres below.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why?’
Lesley dangled the keys she’d confiscated from Kevin Nolan in front of my face.
‘Why don’t we go find out?’ she said. She must have detached them from Kevin when we put him in a car to send him off to AB to be interviewed.
Both of the houses were part of the same facade but we chose the door that Kevin had used on the basis that he’d known what he was doing.
It looked like an ordinary front door, set deep in the mid-Victorian fashion with a rectangular fanlight set above. Close up I could see that the door had been crudely repainted red without stripping the original paint first. I picked a flake off and found it had been at least three different shades, including an appalling orange colour. There was no doorbell but a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. We didn’t bother knocking.
I’d expected the inside to resemble the back of a stage set, but instead we found ourselves in a classic Victorian hallway complete with a badly scuffed black and white tiled floor and yellow wallpaper that had faded to a pale lemon. The only real difference was that instead of running front to back it ran side to side, linking both of the notional terraces. On our left there was a duplicate front door and ordinary interior doors at each end.
I went left. Lesley went right.
Beyond my door was a room with bay windows, net curtains and bare floorboards. There was a smell of dust and machine oil. I spotted something green on the floor and retrieved a lettuce leaf – still crisp. The back wall was plastered, grubby and devoid of windows. It was a locked-room mystery – the case of the missing vegetables. I was just about to go and see if Lesley had had more luck when I noticed that a black iron ring had been inset into a floorboard. A closer inspection revealed that it was the handle for a trap door and, with a surprisingly easy lift, it opened to reveal a six-metre drop onto the tracks below. Carefully I lay down on the floor and stuck my head through the hatchway.
I was disconcerted to see that the two half-houses were held up by a series of wooden beams. They were old, black with soot and spanned the width of the trackway, bolstered at the ends with diagonal beams that had been fitted into the brick walls of the cut. Attached with iron bolts to the nearest beam was a long flattened contraption made of iron, dark-coloured wood and brass. It took me a bit of squinting but I finally realised that it was a staircase in the manner of a folding fire escape neatly concertinaed and stowed to the underside of the house.
Within easy reach of the hatch was a brass and leather lever with a clutch handle like those you find on vintage cars and steam engines. I reached out to see if it would move.
‘What’s down there?’
I turned my head to find Lesley staring down at me.
‘A folding staircase I think,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to see if I can unlock it. It should drop straight down onto the tracks.’
I reached once more for the lever, but as I did so a Circle Line train clattered directly beneath me on its way to Bayswater Station. It took about thirty seconds to go past.
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ asked Lesley.
‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘it would be better if we call BTP first. What do you think?’
‘I think you may be right,’ said Lesley.
So I got to my feet, closed the hatch and called Sergeant Kumar.
‘You know you said that the whole point about secret access points is that they weren’t secret from you?’ I asked. ‘Care to make a bet on that?’
He asked me where and I told him.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Lesley.
‘He said not to do anything stupid until he gets here,’ I said.
‘We’d better find something to keep you occupied then,’ she said and made me call the Murder Team to let them know what we had found and ask whether they’d traced the owner of the warehouse on Kensal Road yet.
Three minutes later Lesley got a phone call. ‘That’s right,’ she said and then looked at me. ‘Not so far,’ she said and then. ‘I’ll tell him – bye.’ She put her phone away.
‘That was Seawoll,’ she said. ‘Stephanopoulos is on her way down and you’re not to do anything stupid until she gets here.’
You burn down one central London tourist attraction, I thought, and they never let you forget it.
Stephanopoulos arrived ten minutes later with a couple of spare DCs in tow. I met her at the front door and showed her around. She stared gloomily down the hatch as another train rumbled underneath. Despite the noise the room stayed remarkably steady.
‘Is this our case, your case or BTP’s case?’ she asked.
I told her that it was probably related to the James Gallagher murder, likely to have ‘unusual’ elements and had definitely spilled into the bailiwick of the British Transport Police.
Stephanopoulos looked abstracted. She was thinking about her budget – I could tell from the way she bit her lip.
‘Let’s say this is your case until we know for sure. Although CTC are going to have a fit if they think person or persons unknown have had unrestricted access to the Underground,’ she said. ‘You know how sensitive they get.’
Having hived her budget problems onto the Folly, Stephanopoulos gave me a grin.
While we were waiting for Kumar we got the finished pool check on the warehouse. Apparently it was owned by a company called Beale Property Services who, as a matter of interest, had owned it under one company name or other since the nineteenth century.
‘Is that significant?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
‘I’d like to know who’s been using it,’ I said.
‘See if you can’t set up an interview at Beale Property Services, the more senior the better,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘I’ll come with.’
Before I could do that, a BTP response vehicle screamed to a halt outside and Sergeant Kumar came running into the half a house with two uniformed BTP officers. I showed them the hatch and they looked down it.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Kumar.
