They were having lunch several weeks later in a vast and deafening Wardour Street restaurant. Marrick hated the food but ate here because it was fashionable. The hard wooden seats were designed to discourage lingerers, and Jonathan had to shift awkwardly about to stop his legs from going numb. 'I don't understand,' he said as the appalling truth sank in. 'Why would they have accepted such a bid?'
'Because they can't build a restaurant there any more. No fucking planning permission. Modern laws require safety exits, and they ain't got any.'
'I'm sure I saw an alleyway at the side of the building. Couldn't they have applied to make use of that?'
'Could have done if it was theirs, old fruit, but it's not. It belongs to the building next door, my little auction-purchase. Their bloke contacted me and tried to get the right-of-way signed over.'
'And what happened?' asked Jonathan, dreading the answer.
'I told him to fuck off, obviously.'
'But surely they can appeal?'
Marrick looked at him suspiciously and seemed about to speak, then changed his mind. 'No,' he said finally, raising his glass and draining it. 'They can't appeal. How can they build exits when the only other properties bordering theirs are mine? Anyway, the deal's already going through. Their hands are tied good and proper. They'll find some other dump to tart up. I'll have all three buildings down within a month, crash, bang, bosh, clear the space and flog it off as office units. I feel like celebrating. Let's get another bottle of this, if we can find a fucking waiter.'
It made perfect sense, of course. He'd seen it on the map, but had chosen to ignore an obvious truth; the three properties were worth more knocked flat and sold in newly arranged packages of landspace. The packages could be tailored to suit modern business requirements. London's existing old buildings found it difficult to incorporate the conduits that were required to carry computer cables.
In Jonathan's mind the golden windows of La Belle Epoque dimmed, the glittering crystalline structure dismantled itself and disappeared into the night, leaving behind a deep, dirty pool of shadow. He could not bring himself to hate Marrick; he was merely disappointed that the past had been cheated out of a chance to return.
The spirit of London sinks from a powerful roar of flame to a single glowing ember, and soon that too will be extinguished. For cities, like people, must eventually grow old and die. Even a city as ancient as this…
Scotland Yard, named after the palace where the kings of Scotland lodged when visiting London, is founded on the site of an unsolved murder. Mutilated portions of a woman's body were secreted on the building site in the 1880s, and the officers of the CID were never able to discover the identity of the murderer or his victim.
Jonathan turned on the desk light and tilted back the green glass shade, then unfolded the photostat across the cleared surface of his desk. Marrick was planning to inspect the vacated premises with him tomorrow. After that it was simply a matter of sorting out the paperwork and waiting for the demolition order to be cleared. He withdrew a magnifying glass and checked each of the rooms and staircases in turn. Something about the map bothered him. Or rather, something about the way it matched the experience of actually visiting the property. He checked the specifications of each of the buildings against the photographs he had taken, but the anomaly eluded him. Why couldn't he see it? Something was wrong, something at the heart of the land itself. He removed his reading glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. Perhaps the answer would come to him tomorrow. He refolded the map, switched off the desk-lamp and wearily headed for bed.'
I don't know why they had to turn the fucking lights off,' moaned Marrick as he and Jonathan passed beneath the cracked AIKO sign and entered the ground floor of the building. 'Look at it out there, ten in the morning and you'd think it was fucking midnight. Did you bring a torch?'
'Yes. The main staircase is to the rear of this room.' Jonathan clicked on the flashlight and raised its beam. The showroom had been stripped to a few piles of mildewed carpet tiles and some battered old shelf units. It smelled bad – damp and sickly. From far above them came the drone of heavy rain and the warble of sheltering pigeons. They reached the foot of the stairs and started up.
'I wanna make sure they cleared everything out. Barney couldn't get here this morning, his wife's sick or something.' Barney was an ex-bouncer and former prison warden whose aggressive temperament perfectly qualified him for his position as Marrick's site manager. Unpleasant things happened in Marrick's company that Jonathan did not know about, that he could not allow himself to discover. Not if he wanted to keep his job and his sanity.
Although Marrick was young, he was considerably overweight; the stairs were already defeating him. He reached the second-floor landing and looked up through the centre of the stairwell, catching his breath. 'You can check out the top two floors, Jon, make sure we ain't got any squatters in. Fucking hell, it stinks in here.'
Jonathan stopped on the staircase and stared out of the rain-streaked window into the centre of the block, where the backs of the buildings met.
Rooms. Something odd about the rooms. He studied the brick walls of the courtyard formed by the other properties. He felt as if he had a cold coming on. Getting his jacket so wet hadn't helped matters. He should have bought himself a new umbrella. He sneezed hard, wiped his nose on a tissue. Spots of dark blood, a crimson constellation. He looked from the window again. The bricks. That's what it was. The bricks to the right of the window. They were in the wrong place. There should have been an empty space there. It was marked on the map, but not there from the window.
There was one room too many.
'Adrian, come and look at this a minute.' He beckoned Marrick down and pointed from the glass. 'There shouldn't be another room in the centre-well. The old wall to the right, do you see?'
'Yeah, so?'
'It's not on the plans.'
'Why would that be?'
The brickwork was ancient, and the spaces between the blackened bricks were filled with bedraggled weeds. Near the top of the wall was a tiny window less than a foot long. There was no glass in it, just a single iron bar running across the gap. Jonathan frowned, trying to understand. 'The 1933 plans were drawn over much older ones, but when they traced the new buildings in, they didn't add the existing layout.'
'So what was there before?'
'I don't know. The original drawings have been lost, misfiled somewhere.'
Marrick looked at him as if he was going senile. 'I'm not following you, Jon.'
'There was another building already here at the centre of the site, or at least part of one. A very old one. Look at the bricks. There must be an entrance to it.'
'Wait, before you go off on a fucking treasure hunt, how about we finish what we came here to do?'
'This building has been cleared.' Jonathan scrubbed his fist across the filthy pane.
'We have to find a way into that room.'
'Why?' It was useless to assume that Marrick had a natural sense of curiosity, so Jonathan appealed to his greed. 'It could have been sealed off for years. There might be something of value in there.'
'If there was, it was probably nicked years ago. Someone's bound to have been in there already.'
'I think that's unlikely. There's no immediate access, and it looks like it belongs to part of another building. It's hard to even see.'
'Hmm. You have a point there.' They both started looking for a doorway. There was nothing on any of the landings, or on the second floor. At the bottom of the stairs they found a door leading to a basement, but it was locked and there was no key. Marrick picked up a chunk of discarded pipe and smashed at the lock until the damp wood around it splintered and fell away.