Vicious Circle

I murmured a few variations on om mane padme om, and he kicked the heel of my shoe resonantly with his Met-issue heavy-duty policeman’s boot. I was sitting on the floor in front of him with my knees drawn up, so I suppose it could have been worse.

“Just tell me if you can see anything, Castor,” he suggested. “Then you can hum away to your heart’s content.”

I got up, slowly; slowly enough for Coldwood to lose patience and wander across to see if the forensics boys had managed to shag any prints from a battered-looking desk in the far corner of the room. He really wasn’t happy: I could tell by the way his angular face—reminiscent of Dick Tracy, if Dick Tracy had joined-up eyebrows and a skin problem—had subsided onto his lower lip, forcing it out into a truculent shelf. His body language was a bit of a giveaway, too: whenever he finished waving and pointing, which he does when he gives orders, his right hand fell to the discreet shoulder holster he wore under his tan leather jacket, as if to check that it was still there. Coldwood hadn’t been an armed response unit for very long, and you could tell the novelty hadn’t worn off yet.

I ambled across the warehouse toward the door I’d come in through, away from the forensics team, watched curiously by two or three poor bloody infantry constables who were there to maintain a perimeter. Coldwood knows my tricks, and makes allowances for them, but to these guys I was obviously something of a sideshow. Ignoring them, I looked behind the filing cabinets that were ranged along the wall to the right of the door, banged on the cork notice board behind them, which had sheaves of dusty old invoices clinging to it like mangy fur, and turned the girlie calendars over to look at the bits of gray-painted cinder block they were covering. Disappointingly, there was nothing there. No hidden doors, no wall-mounted safes, not even old graffiti.

I looked down at my feet. The floor of the warehouse was bare gray cement, but just here by the notice board and the filing cabinets there was a ragged rectangle of red linoleum—a psychedelic sunburst pattern, very retro-chic unless it had been there since the seventies. I’d noticed another piece, with the same pattern, underneath the desk. Here, though, there were scuff marks in the dust where the lino had been moved in the recent past. I kicked down experimentally with my heel. There was a slightly hollow boom from underneath my feet.

“Coldwood?” I called over my shoulder.

He must have caught something in my voice—or else he’d heard the hollow note, too—because he was suddenly there at my elbow. “What?” he asked suspiciously.

I pointed down at the lino. “Something here,” I said. “Does this place have a cellar?”

Coldwood’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Not according to the plans,” he said. He beckoned to two of the plods and they came over at a half run. “Get this up,” he told them, gesturing at the lino.

They had to move the filing cabinets first, and since the cabinets were full they took a bit of manhandling. I could have helped, but I didn’t want to get into an argument about demarcation. The linoleum itself rolled up as easy as shelling peas, though, and Coldwood swore under his breath when he saw the trapdoor underneath. It was obviously something he felt his boys should have spotted first.

It was about five feet square, and it lay exactly flush with the floor on three sides. On the fourth side, the hinges were sunk a centimeter or so into the surface, but it was a professional job with the narrowest of joins so no telltale lines would be trodden into the lino above. There was a keyhole on the left-hand side: a lozenge-shaped keyhole with no widening at the shank end, so this was most likely a Sargent and Greenleaf mortice—not an easy nut to crack.

Coldwood didn’t even bother to try: he sent two of the uniforms off to get some crowbars. With a great deal of maneuvering, a few false starts, and a hail of splinters as the wood screamed and split, they finally succeeded in levering the entire lock plate out of its housing. Even then the bolt could scarcely be made to bend. The plate stood out of the trapdoor at a thirty-degree angle, rough star shapes of broken wood still gripped by its corner screws: a wounded sentry who’d been sidestepped rather than defeated. Now that their moment in the spotlight was over, the plods stood back deferentially so that the sergeant could open the trapdoor himself. Coldwood did so, with a grunt of effort because the wood of the trap turned out to be a good inch thick.