But in the end it wasn’t the padlock itself that gave. It was the bracket that fixed the clasp to the door. Wood splintered and cracked in the still of the night and it came away in its entirety, padlock and all.
A flimsy Yale lock then offered no resistance to Dave’s boot as he slammed it into the door once, twice, three times. He stood panting triumphantly as it finally gave, and the door swung into the blackness beyond.
He grinned. ‘Missed ma vocation, eh?’
Maurie snatched Dave’s flat cap from his head and chucked it at him. ‘Here, go and hang that up on the gate, so our friend knows where to get in.’
‘Ma guid bunnet?’ Dave protested.
But Maurie was dismissive. ‘No one’s going to steal your greasy old cap, Dave.’
The darkness beyond the door was full of must and memories, and an all-pervasive reek of damp and decay. Luke led the way through a rubble-strewn hallway, shining the beam of his torch on the floor ahead, then up the narrow service stairs to the landing, which led to the common room and the hall. Here, faded paint on scarred walls bore the faintest traces of the designs once painted on them in shit by the demented Alice.
No one spoke as they all trooped into what had been the common room. A table stood at its centre, white with plaster dust, lumps of broken ceiling strewn across its surface. It might have been the very table they had all sat around in those long-ago days of madness. Luke righted a couple of toppled chairs before swinging the beam of his torch briefly into the old kitchen. An ancient rusted cooker still stood there, its door open and hanging off a broken hinge. Incongruously, a blackened aluminium cooking pot sat on one of the rings, as if waiting for someone to make their morning porridge.
With the others close behind him, he stepped through into the hall itself. A couple of table-tennis tables were half covered by dust sheets. The wooden floor had been marked out in different colours at some time for badminton and basketball. There were hoops mounted on the walls at either end, and old moth-eaten badminton nets lay in a discarded pile at one side.
‘They must have used it as a youth or community centre at some point,’ Jack said. He turned to Maurie. ‘What now?’
‘We wait.’
‘When’s our visitor due?’
Maurie checked his watch. ‘Not for another hour. I wanted to be sure we were here well ahead of time. Who knew how long it might take us to get in?’
II
Back in the common room they dusted down chairs and sat themselves around the table. But Luke was dubious about how long the batteries in his torch might last, and he went in search of the fuse box to see if there was still power in the hall. The others were left in the dark, sitting at the table and listening to his footsteps as he moved around on the landing and up the stairs.
When he returned, he shook his head. ‘No juice.’
He went into the kitchen and rummaged around in cupboards and drawers before they heard his ‘Aha!’ and he returned with a cardboard box of old candles, some of them half burned, others with pristine waxed wicks.
‘Anyone got a light?’
No one had, and Luke’s smile quickly faded. He laid the candles on the table and went back into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a renewed smile on his face and a box of matches clutched in his free hand. But they were damp, and old, and one after the other they sparked and sputtered and shed their phosphor, but failed to ignite. Until the second from last, which fizzed and popped before bringing flame to the splinter of wood. Quickly he lit the first candle, and they all grabbed one, lighting each in turn, and setting them on the floor along the walls, fixed in their own molten wax.
Then they sat at the table again, as they had done all those years before, their shadows dancing around the walls to remembered music. Jack recalled all those faces, pale and drawn, many of them bearded, eyes lit by madness, a fug of cigarette smoke and marijuana hanging over them in a cloud. And JP tipped back in his chair at the head of the table, bare feet crossed in front of him, regaling them with tales of insanity and miracle cures, his charm and charisma the single factor that bound and kept the residents of the hall together.
Dust settled around them, along with their silence, and they waited in the flickering darkness with the ghosts of the past, and Jack could almost imagine that Alice was still dancing out there in the hall, slashing the air with her brush, painting their ordinary lives with extraordinary colours. And for just a moment he believed he could actually hear the distant echo of the Kinks playing on that scratchy old Dansette. They had been so tired of waiting back then.
Jack, too, was tired of waiting. He had spent a lifetime wondering what had become of Rachel, and still Maurie was giving nothing away.
‘What the hell was it with you and Rachel?’ he said suddenly.
And Maurie’s eyes flickered towards him.
Although his focus was on Maurie, Jack could feel the tension among the others around the table, like a fist clenching.
‘And don’t tell me it’s none of my business, or that you don’t owe me anything. Not after all these years. Not after everything I’ve been through to get you here.’
Maurie’s expression was bleak. His eyes held Jack’s for only an instant before they slipped away to stare off into some long-buried past. Or perhaps towards a dwindling future that promised nothing but pain and death. Whichever, it brought him little comfort, and Jack saw how his hands bunched into fists on the table in front of him, turning his knuckles white. A physical manifestation of what they all felt.
‘You always wanted us to go to Leeds, didn’t you?’ Jack said. ‘That’s why you had her letter with you. One way or another you’d have talked us into going there and getting her out of that place.’ Jack’s thoughts raked through old coals and found that there was still a glow among the embers. ‘Maybe that’s the only reason you came with us in the first place.’
It was a thought he had never entertained before, and hadn’t seen coming until now. But he saw how it affected the wreck of a man sitting opposite him. Like a physical blow, bringing a hint of pale colour to a dead-white face. Maurie unbunched his fingers and laid them on the table in front of him.
‘I was eleven years old when I found the letter from the Beth Din.’ His voice was thin and reedy, and not much more than a whisper, but somehow it filled the room. ‘I don’t know what my parents had it out for. Maybe the rabbi had asked to see it, I don’t know. But my father had left it on his bedside cabinet. I used to sneak into their bedroom sometimes when they were out, to look at the soft porn magazines he kept hidden under the bed. Which is when I saw it.’
He dragged his eyes away from their focus on his hands, and he looked around the faces silently watching him. And in spite of himself he smiled at their consternation.
‘The Beth Din’s a Jewish court that rules on matters of Judaic law. The letter was marked “Confidential” and addressed to both my parents. The Clerk of the Court was writing to advise them that the Beth Din had established that Maurice Stephen, their adopted son, was of Jewish birth, and that an entry had been made accordingly in the Proceedings Book.’
‘You were adopted?’ Dave said.
Maurie nodded.
‘And you never knew till then?’
‘Nope.’ A sad smile attempted to animate his face but somehow failed. ‘It’s quite a feeling when everything you thought you were and knew falls away from beneath your feet. There were only two things in my head. The first was that they had lied to me. My parents. By omission, perhaps, but it was something they should have told me. I had a right to know.’ He paused, and they all heard his breath rattling in his windpipe. ‘The second was a question. Who the hell was I?’