The Deceit by Tom Knox

Author:Tom Knox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-05-08T23:00:00+00:00

27

London

Karen got off the Tube at Blackfriars. It was a cold and rather drizzly evening. Tourists were wandering along the Thames Embankment. She called the school to make sure Eleanor had been collected by Alan, as arranged.

Her first day back as a mother and already she was neglecting her daughter. Again. The guilt burned but Karen did her best to ignore it.

As she walked along, Karen gazed about; she’d always loved this part of London. The exotic clash of ancient and modern, the surreal quietness at night. She used to walk here when she was a student in the big city, loving the hushed and medieval precincts of the Temple, tucked between the shining offices and bank HQs, the cenotaphs of money.

She passed one particularly glamorous and empty new office block. The darkness of a cold winter evening had sent the office workers home. Spires of Georgian churches loomed between chasms of glass. And then she found it.

102 Chancery Lane. It was a rundown Victorian building, a sooty old heap with greyed windows, yellow brickwork and an air of sickliness. It was also pretty much derelict, ripe for redevelopment. Surrounding the ground floor of the block was a palisade of wooden walls, with scaffolding creeping up the sides. KEEP OUT signs were everywhere.

But the builders were nowhere, of course. The whole block was desolate. Indeed this whole quarter of London was so very quiet: another enclave of historic silence amidst the monied and glittering bustle.

‘Ah, hi. Darren Glover.’ The young site manager came running up the road. ‘Sorry I’m late, just got off the bus.’

He turned a padlock and pushed open a temporary wire door, and they squeezed inside the palisade. The last thing Karen saw of the outside world was a bus rolling down Holborn, and then she was inside. It was gloomy within. A couple of bare, shining bulbs were strung on naked wires, hanging from a cracked and corniced ceiling, but they didn’t seem to work. There was an old chandelier covered in oil lying in a corner of the lobby. Karen and Darren switched on their torches.

The ground-floor rooms were bare and bereft, having been already stripped by the developers and then left to go damp. They offered no sign of life, and no sign of habitation in the recent past. Darren Glover put his hands on his hips, vindicated. ‘I told you, it’s empty! Nothing here.’

Standing in the dank and chilly hallway, Karen frowned. Frustrated. Maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she was right. She remembered the newspaper piece: passing from the cold stone dusk of the stairs … ‘Let’s try the upper floors.’

Around the stairs the dust of old bricks, and old life, was thick. Karen went first this time, guiding them with her torchbeam, which pierced the dust as if it were sea-fog. The grand Victorian stairway led to an old stone landing, and then she saw in the darkness a large door, its size indicating that it led to a significant apartment.

The door was closed, but the smell hit them at once.

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