The housing estate was made up of one and two-story brick row houses with steeply pitched, black shingled roofs, dropped haphazardly into the middle of some magnificently fertile farmland. On three sides it was surrounded by green fields and copses that stretched out and out until finally reaching a distant horizon of blue hills. On the fourth side, across the main road, was another, older housing development with a few shops and a pub inhabiting the boundary. I turned into the estate and found myself on a street that curved and wound around groups of houses broken up by small, wild parks that looked like bits of the original forest left untouched by the builders. A second phase on the east side of the estate was still under construction. I could hear the distant sound of nail guns and earth movers through my open window. The recent rain had left the weirdly empty sidewalks damp and an earthy petrichor emanated from the lawns and plantings in the yards. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single car since entering the development. None driving, none parked. The houses all seemed dark too. The place was uninhabited.
Just then I came around a bend and saw the facade of the former asylum rising up at the end of the street. Red brick with a black shingled roof echoing the houses in the subdivision, it stood apart, seeming to rise up out of the fields beyond, clearly older and more ornate yet possessing very little architectural character nonetheless. A massive chimney jutted up from the center and, on either side of the four story main building, two story wings extended out. There was parking at the front of the building so I pulled up awkwardly, still figuring out how to adapt to maneuvering from the right side of the vehicle, and shut the engine off. I walked up to the main entrance, gravel crunching loud under my shoes only making the stillness of the place more eerie—a place made by and for humans but no humans around. Above the main entrance was a weird, out of place lunette window split into five wedges by radiating glazing bars. The door below it was wide and solid looking with a brass mail slot inset. Just above the mail slot was an engraved plaque bearing a logo I recognized followed by the business name: Greenbriar Industries Ltd. Below that: Powick Meadows Sales Office. I wasn’t surprised. It had been nagging at my mind that if anyone owned the old Powick asylum property and was developing it into a housing estate it might as well be Morgan Jutting. A billionaire obsessed with Elgar surely wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to purchase the asylum where the composer got his start—especially if the property had potential for development. I tried the handle and, surprisingly, it turned. Inside I found a small lobby with a reception desk but no receptionist. I stood for a moment, unsure what to do, while my eyes roamed around the space, taking in details. Behind the reception desk was a multifunction copier/printer/scanner on a small table. An ethernet cable ran from the printer down to a wall plate with two ports. One of the ports was unused. The open port reminded me of Ashna’s sneaky little box—a little single-board computer in a beige plastic case no bigger than a deck of cards. It had an RJ-45 ethernet plug poking out of one side and was light enough that you could plug it in to a wall port and it would just sit there, hopefully unnoticed, until its battery died—or, if the port provided power over ethernet, until it was discovered. Ashna had given it to me and told me to plug it in to any open port I found if I ever needed a corporate network hacked. I ran out to the car, dug through my collection of weird gadgets, found it near the bottom of my pack, and ran back in. Crossing the lobby, I thumbed the switch on the back of the device and plugged it into the empty port.
As I straightened up I heard a distant clack clack of heels on wooden floor boards, growing louder. I scrambled back to the other side of the desk, sat down on a caramel colored leather couch, and picked up a brochure from the glass topped table in front of me. The clacking grew louder until a young woman burst through the swinging door behind the desk. She wore a navy skirt suit with a white blouse and had wavy blonde hair to her shoulders framing a foxlike face.
“Sorry!” She exclaimed. “I was doing some filing. Not many visitors right now. We have a buzzer that alerts me…” she gestured toward the door.
“No problem,” I answered, glancing at the door, then back to her. “Not in a hurry.”
“Can I help you with something?”
“Yes. I’m visiting from the states. I’m interested in finding a property in the area. I was driving by and liked the look of the houses. Are they not for sale yet? They seem finished.”
“Yes. I mean no. Sorry. They will be for sale. Phase one was completed several months ago. But we can’t give an exact date yet when sales will begin. The developer has decided to hold them off the market for now.”
“Interesting. Would it be possible to view one of the houses?”
“Of course. I can take you around. There are several floor plans. How many bedrooms are you looking for?”
“Two or three.
