home and lying down in the middle of the road. It was then that I remembered that I still had the door-key of the old flat.
The Studies Centre was turning my lease over the following month. Possibly the phone was still connected. It was two minutes’ walk.
I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I gave it an extra couple of minutes, remembering how often I’d failed to hear it from the kitchen at the back. Then I used the old key and let myself in. The lights still worked. I’d always liked number eighteen. In some ways it’s more to my taste than the oil-fired slab of speculator’s bad taste that I’d exchanged it for, but I’m not the sort of fellow who gives aesthetics precedence over wall-to-wall synthetic wool and Georgian-style double-glazing.
The flat wasn’t the way I’d left it. I mean, the floor wasn’t covered with Private Eye and Rolling Stone, with strategically placed carrier bags brimming with garbage. It was exactly the way it was when the lady next door came in to clean it three times a week. The furniture wasn’t bad, not bad for a furnished place, I mean. I sat down in the best armchair and used the phone. It worked. I dialled the number of the local mini-cab company and was put up for auction. ‘Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham?’ Then, ‘Will anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with twenty-five pence on the clock?’ Finally some knight of the road deigned to do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with seventy-five pence on the clock if I’d wait half an hour. I knew that meant forty-five minutes. I said yes and wondered if I’d still be a non-smoker had I slipped that pack into my overcoat.
If I hadn’t been so tired I would have noticed what was funny about the place the moment I walked in. But I was tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’d been sitting in the armchair for five minutes or more when I noticed the photo. At first there was nothing strange about it, except how I came to leave it behind. It was only when I got my mind functioning that I realized that it wasn’t my photo. The frame was the same as the one I’d bought in Selfridges Christmas Sale in 1967. Inside was almost the same photo: me in tweed jacket, machine washable at number five trousers, cor-blimey hat and two-tone shoes, one of them resting on the chromium of an Alfa Spider convertible. But it wasn’t me. Everything else was the same – right down to the number plates – but the man was older than me and heavier. Mind you, I had to peer closely. We both had no moustache, no beard, no sideboards and an out-of-focus face, but it wasn’t me, I swear it.
I didn’t get alarmed about it. You know how crazy things can sound, and then along comes a logical, rational explanation – usually supplied by a woman very close to you. So I didn’t suddenly panic, I just started to turn the whole place over systematically. And then I could scream and panic in my own good, leisurely, non-neurotic way.
What was this bastard doing with all the same clothes that I had? Different sizes and some slight changes, but I’m telling you my entire wardrobe. And a photo of Mr Nothing and Mason: that creepy kid who does the weather print-outs for the war-games. Now I was alarmed. It was the same with everything in the flat. My neck-ties. My chinaware. My bottled Guinness. My Leak hi-fi, and my Mozart piano concertos played by my Ingrid Haebler. And by his bed – covered with the same dark green Witney that I have on my bed – in a silver frame: my Mum and Dad. My Mum and Dad in the garden. The photo I took at their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.
I sat myself down on my sofa and gave myself a talking-to. Look, I said to myself, you know what this is, it’s one of those complicated jokes that rich people play on each other in TV plays for which writers can think of no ending. But I haven’t got any friends rich and stupid enough to want to print me in duplicate just to puzzle me. I mean, I puzzle pretty easily, I don’t need this kind of hoop-la.
I went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe to go through the clothes again. I told myself that these were not my clothes, for I couldn’t be positive they were. I mean, I don’t have the sort of clothes that I can be quite sure that no one else has, but the combination of Brooks Brothers, Marks and Sparks and Turnbull and Asser can’t be in everyone’s wardrobe. Especially when they are five years out of fashion.
But had I not been rummaging through the wardrobe I would never have noticed the tie rack had been moved. And so I wouldn’t have seen the crude carpentry done to the inside, or the piece that had been inserted to make a new wooden panel in the back of it.
I rapped it. It was hollow. The thin plywood panel slid easily to one side. Behind it there was a door.
The door was stiff, but by pushing the rackful of clothes aside I put a little extra pressure on it. After the first couple of inches it moved easily. I stepped through the wardrobe into a dark room. Alice through the looking-glass. I sniffed. The air smelled clean with a faint odour of disinfectant. I struck a match. It was a box room. By the light of the match I found the light switch. The room had been furnished as a small office: a desk, easy chair, typewriter and polished lino. The walls were newly painted white. Upon them there was a coloured illustration of Von Guericke’s air thermoscope given as a calendar by a manufacturer of surgical instruments in Munich, a cheap mirror, and a blank day-by-day chart, stuck to the wall with surgical tape. In the drawers of the desk there was a ream of blank white paper, a packet of paper clips, and two white nylon jackets packed in transparent laundry packets.
The door from the office also opened easily. By now I was well into the next apartment. Adjoining the hall there was a large room – corresponding to my sitting-room – lit by half a dozen overhead lights fitted behind frosted glass. The windows were fitted with light-tight wooden screens, like those used for photographic dark rooms. This room was also painted white. It was spotlessly clean, walls, floor and ceiling, shining and dustless. There was a new stainless-steel sink in one corner. In the centre of the room there was a table fitted with a crisply laundered cotton cover. Over it there was a transparent plastic one. The sort from which it’s easy to wipe spilled blood. It was a curious table, with many levers to elevate, tilt and adjust it. Rather like one of the simpler types of operating table. The large apparatus alongside it was beyond any medical guess I could make. Pipes, dials and straps, it was an expensive device. Although I could not recognize it, I knew that I’d seen such a device before, but I could not dredge it up from the sludge of my memory.
To this room there was also a door. Very gently, I tried the handle, but it was locked. As I stood, bent forward at the door, I heard a voice. By leaning closer I could hear what was being said ‘… and then the next week you’ll do the middle shift, and so on. They don’t seem to know when it will start.’
The reply – a woman’s voice – was almost inaudible. Then the man close to me said, ‘Certainly, if the senior staff prefer one shift we can change the rota and make it permanent.’
Again there was the murmur of the woman’s voice, and the sound of running water, splashing as if someone was washing their hands.
The man said, ‘How right you are; like the bloody secret service if you ask me. Was my grandmother born in the United Kingdom. Bloody sauce! I put “yes” to everything.’
When I switched off the light the conversation suddenly stopped. I waited in the darkness, not moving. The light from the tiny office was still on. If this door was opened they would be certain to see me. There was the sound of a towel machine and then of a match striking. Then the conversation continued, but more distantly. I tiptoed across the room very very slowly. I closed the second door and looked at the alterations to the wardrobe while retreating through it. This false door behind the wardrobe puzzled me even more than the curious little operating theatre. If a man was to construct a secret chamber with all the complications of securing the lease to his next door apartment, if he secretly removed large sections of brickwork, if he constructed a sliding door and fitted it into the back of a built-in wardrobe, would such a man not go all the way, and make it extremely difficult to detect? This doorway was something that even the rawest recruit to the Customs service would find in a perfunctory look round. It
