‘Hm? What?’
‘You seem a bit … distressed. I wondered if you wanted a cup of tea.’
‘Tea? No, thank you. I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’
He did not look fine. His face was grey and his hands would not stop shaking.
‘I think I’ll get you one anyway,’ said Rachel. ‘A nice strong cup of tea with plenty of sugar.’
He said nothing in reply to this, but Rachel went to the staff kitchen to make the tea and then found, when she came back to offer it to him, that Mr Blake had returned to his office. He had a plywood desk in there, covered in architects’ drawings which had been annotated and scribbled over repeatedly in different-coloured inks. They, like everything else in the office, appeared to be in a state of total disarray.
‘Yes?’ he said, looking up in confusion when she came in.
‘I said I’d bring you some tea.’
‘Oh, thank you … Rachel, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, look, if you’ve come to complain about the noise, there’s nothing I can do. You can’t dig a hole this size in complete silence, you know.’
‘I’m not here to complain about the noise. I brought you some tea because I thought you looked a bit upset.’
She cleared a space for the mug on his desk, and set it down gently. There were two seats in the tiny office, but he didn’t ask her to sit down.
‘You … work for her, don’t you?’ he said, without touching the tea.
‘Yes.’
‘Is she …’ He swallowed. ‘Is she completely insane, do you think?’
This was the last question Rachel had been expecting to hear. ‘Lady Gunn, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘What makes you say that?’
At last he noticed the mug, picked it up, took a tentative sip and then a longer one.
‘I’ve worked on more than fifty basement conversions,’ he said. ‘More than fifty. All over London. But nobody has ever proposed … anything like this. Do you know —’ He looked at her directly, urgently. ‘— Do you know how deep we’re going?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Rachel. ‘It does seem a pretty big hole.’
‘Pretty big?’ he repeated. ‘Pretty big? She wants one hundred and fifty feet. That’s deeper than most tube stations.’
‘Is that … even possible? Wouldn’t you hit the water table at some point? Wouldn’t everything start flooding?’
‘Oh, that happened ages ago. That’s taken care of. They’ve installed three massive pumps. They’ll be running twenty-four hours a day. You see, anything’s possible, in fact. That’s precisely the problem.’ He picked up the mug and took another sip, staring sightlessly ahead of him. ‘The people we took this over from quit, you know. They couldn’t stand it. And a man died. Do you hear that? A man died.’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I heard.’
‘She doesn’t care. It hasn’t made any difference at all.’
‘A hundred and fifty feet is how many floors?’
‘It depends how high you make them, of course. And she keeps changing her mind about that, but at the current count, there are eleven.’
‘Eleven? What does she want to do with them all?’
‘That keeps changing as well. She’s given me a new set of instructions just now. About ten minutes ago. Here, why don’t you have a look? You should understand the kind of person we’re dealing with.’
Rachel sat down, finally, and drew her seat closer to Mr Blake’s desk. He scrambled around among the papers in front of him, and at last found the one he was looking for. It showed the excavation as a tall column, divided into eleven separate cross sections, each one numbered and labelled.
‘Here’s the first floor,’ he said. ‘That’s where they keep the cars, as you know. And here’s floor number two, which is going to be the children’s playroom, with a full-size bowling alley. Underneath that is the cinema. Then the gymnasium. And then we have the pièce de résistance — the swimming pool. Which is going to take up the next three floors.’
‘Three floors? Why three?’
‘Because she wants a diving board. A high one. And palm trees. Palm trees!’ He began to laugh, almost hysterical. ‘We’re going to have to get palm trees in there.’ Soon he had started shaking again, but with a few more sips of tea he managed to compose himself, and then pointed at the next level. ‘So now we’re down to level eight, which is the wine cellar. Temperature-controlled, of course. Level nine is the vault. A secure vault. You’re going to need to take a special lift to get to that one, the normal lift won’t be stopping there. Level ten — well, lucky you, that’s where you lot are going to be living. That’s the staff quarters.’
‘You mean we won’t be living in the house any more?’
‘Not above ground, no. You’d better forget about natural daylight, because you won’t be seeing much of that when this job’s finished.’
‘OK,’ said Rachel. ‘And what about this one?’ She pointed at the lowest level on the drawing. ‘Number Eleven. What’s going there?’
‘Number Eleven?’ He laughed. ‘That’s the one she told me about this morning. Number Eleven is new. She’s only just asked for it.’
‘So — what’s it for?’
‘Nothing. She can’t think of anything that she wants it for.’
Rachel frowned. ‘So why are you digging it? Why does she want it?’
‘She wants it,’ said Mr Blake, ‘because she can have it. Because she can afford it. And because … I don’t know — because no one else has an eleventh floor in their basement? Or she’s just heard about somebody who has ten and she wants to go one better? Who knows? She’s mad. These people are all barking mad.’ He took one final look at the drawing, and pointed again at level Number 11 with an unsteady finger. ‘And this is the proof.’
12
From: Val Doubleday
To: Rachel Wells
Subject:
23/01/2015 21:55
Dear Rachel
I’ve been meaning to write ever since I saw you up here a couple of months ago. Very difficult, though, to say what I have to say.
Anyway, I won’t mess around. I would have liked to say it was lovely to see you but, as I’m sure you noticed, I was far too embarrassed to feel that. In fact I will be brutally honest and say that I felt totally humiliated. As you clearly realized, I was not collecting food for my elderly next-door neighbour at all. I don’t have an elderly next-door neighbour. I was collecting it for myself.
Yes, I was on the television a few years ago. I took part in a dreadful reality show but I soon got through the money they paid me. Most of it was spent paying off debts and then I stupidly used the rest to pay for expensive studio time to record demos which no one wanted to listen to and got me nowhere. I was working in a library for a while but then the hours went down further and further until they let me go altogether. (‘Let me go’ is good, isn’t it. They’ve even got me speaking like them.) For a while after the TV thing I was diagnosed with PTSD, which entitled me to some sick pay, but apart from that I’ve just been living on jobseeker’s allowance and Council Tax support. It’s been tough, especially this winter when I’ve hardly let myself put the heating on, but this was the first time I’d ever been to a food bank. I never thought I’d find myself asking a charity for free food. Thanks to you it will be the last.
Anyway, I didn’t want to tell you about me I wanted to tell you about Alison. I said she was ‘doing fine’ but that was another lie. In fact ‘doing time’ would be more accurate. (Sorry for the rotten joke. Sometimes I think you have to laugh just because there’s no alternative.) She’s in Eastwood Park prison in Gloucestershire doing twenty-six weeks for benefit fraud. They say twenty-six but really it’s thirteen, which means she’ll be out in a few weeks now. I won’t tell you the whole story but basically she was stitched up by this bitch of a journalist called Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, who wrote a horrible, vicious article about her. (Link below.) It happened more than a year ago and it’s been a total nightmare, the whole thing. When I ran into you again she was just about to start her sentence. Of course I told her that I’d seen you and she made me swear that I wouldn’t say what had happened but as of last week I think she’s changed her mind and if you felt like visiting her I think she’d like that. You can book a visit online and I’ll give you the link at the end of this email too, but I expect you’re probably very busy with one thing and another.