The air is thick with years of dust, smells of old timber and crumbling brick that catch at the back of my throat.
A floorboard creaks beneath my feet and I freeze. There is the weird sense that I’m somehow intruding on someone else’s private space. I know it’s ridiculous. We own this house now—and everything in it. From the swirling 1970s carpets on the top landing to the stack of rust-crusted paint pots in the cellar, thefading cookbooks abandoned in the pantry and the stippled Artex ceiling in the sitting room, stained a dull yellow from years of cigarette smoke. All of it left behind by the elderly previous owner. All of it belongs to us now.
The bright light from my phone throws dancing shadows as it sweeps over the room, cobwebs filling every corner. Old rugs nailed to bare brick on one side, the slope of the eaves on the other. There’s a low, tatty armchair with a tiny side table next to it, a brown ceramic coaster where someone long ago might have placed their cup of tea. A battered Welsh dresser crammed against the wall, the wood dark, almost black.
A bare bulb dangles from the ceiling. I pull on the cord but nothing happens; the bulb is long dead.
The dresser has a single large door on the right, with eight small drawers to the left, in two columns of four. I pull the handle of the door and it opens with a rusty creak.
Empty, except for more cobwebs and the cocooned carcasses of dead insects. I try the top drawer. Locked. As is the one beside it, and the one below.
Curiosity piqued, I feel a small spike of frustration added into the mix—a dangerous combination for me ever since I was a child. A locked dresser, a hidden door, a secret room. Now Idefinitelyneed to see what’s inside. Maybe there was something valuable hidden here, money or jewelry, a stash of gold coins, or the key to a safe deposit box at a private bank. All of which would come in extremely handy, especially now.
I’m pretty sure I can lever the drawers open if I use a little brute force and ignorance. I bend to duck under the low doorway and back out into the main room, to my toolbox on the landing, where I find the biggest flathead screwdriverI’ve got, an old chisel, and then—as a last resort—my crowbar, the steel smooth and heavy in my hand. Dumb, dumber,dumbest.
I start with the chisel, sliding the blade into the gap between the top drawer and the wooden frame. Levering the handle back, putting my weight into it—
With a dullsnap, the blade of the chisel breaks off.
I’m left with just the old wooden handle in my clenched fist. I pull the broken blade free and study the dresser with a new curiosity.
This old thing wasreallywell made. Before I mangle this antique with the crowbar, I should at least have a proper look at it.
I make my way down both sets of stairs to the Minton-tiled hallway on the ground floor, taking a sixty-watt bulb from one of the boxes labeled “MOVING SUPPLIES” in Jess’s neat capitals. In a bowl on the windowsill are a bunch of house keys handed over to us on the day we exchanged contracts, for the front and back doors, the garage, the shed, and some others I haven’t identified yet.
I take them back up to the hidden annex and go through them one by one, trying to fit them into the locks by the light of my phone, perched on the edge of the old armchair.
None of the keys work.
None of them are even the right size to fit into the eight identical keyholes of the small dresser drawers.
I let out a sigh and shove the bunch of keys back into the pocket of my jeans, the pulse of my curiosity beating stronger now. In all likelihood the right key was lost forever in a box or a cupboard or an old jar of odds and ends. Or buried beneath aton of rubbish on some landfill site, separated forever from the drawers to which it belonged.
Or… maybe not. Would you go to all this trouble to create a hidden place, but then keep the key in plain sight? Where it might be easily found?
I replace the bulb and pull the light switch again, blinking against the glare for a moment while my eyes adjust. The room seems older, less grim, and more functional in the wash of white light. Everything is more unnerving in the dark, I suppose. Using the torch on my phone for extra illumination, I play a beam of light all around the dresser, on the wall behind it, the wooden door frame beside it.
A floorboard creaks beneath me again and I crouch down, testing each dusty plank to see if one might be loose. Studying the rows of bricks, I run my fingers over rough mortar to seek out any gaps. The bricks are flaking, the mortar unevenly applied, but I can’t find any obvious place for a key to have been tucked away. The exposed wooden frame around the doorway is like the back of a stage set, the side of the wall that no one ever sees, the timber raw and unfinished. But it’s very solid and itiswide enough to accommodate a key.
I reach up to feel around the top of the frame and almost immediately there is a sharp stab of pain in my index finger.
Pulling it back with a curse, I see a dark orb of blood rising from the skin of my fingertip.
Shining the phone torch directly onto the frame, I can see what I’d missed: nails that have been hammered through from the other side. Half-inch points showing through around the door, on the wooden panels, some above my head in the sloping ceiling. A dozen at least, dotted around the small space, tiny traps for the unwary.
I stand back, sucking the blood from my punctured finger, staring at the dark wood of the dresser, the untouched layer of dust on every surface. Each of the small brass handles on the drawers taunting me, goading me.
They’re probably empty. But that’s not the point.
There’s something else weird about it, I realize: it’s too big to have fit through the doorway into this little room. It’s not a huge piece of furniture, but it’s still too large, too tall to have been manhandled through such a small opening—the angles are all wrong. Ditto the old, low armchair I’m sitting in. So they were put in placebeforethe extra wall was built, bricked in here with no prospect that they would see the light of day again. Stuck in here for good.
I heft the thick steel crowbar in my hand, ready to wedge it into a gap in the drawers and crack the wood, break the lock to force it open.
This old thing was not going to beat me.
I jerk up at a sound behind me, banging my head on the low ceiling.
“You going to smash that up, Dad?”
