Behind, me, silhouetted in the light from the bedroom, is a slight figure in jeans and a T-shirt, ducking her head under the wooden door frame. My eldest daughter stares around the small space, nose wrinkling at the smell.
“Hey, Leah.” I put the crowbar down. “How’s your unpacking going?”
“Slowly.” She peers into the gloom. “Whatisthis?”
“Some sort of storage room, I think.”
“Storage for what?” she says. “Stuff you never want to see again?”
“Perhaps,” I grunt. “I think maybe it was just forgotten about, years ago.”
“Creepy.”
“I know, right?”
“Maybe we could put Callum in here,” Leah says with a mischievous smile. “When he’s naughty?”
She leans in further and I hold a hand up. “Don’t come in; there are nails sticking out of the wood all over the place.”
“You’re bleeding,” she says, pointing at my hand.
“Just a nail.” A thin red line of blood tracks through the creases in my palm and drips from my wrist, dark drops spotting the floor. “There are some paper towels on the landing; could you grab me some?”
She disappears for a moment and returns with a couple of sheets.
“Probably better if you don’t come in here for the time being, OK?” I wrap tissue around my bleeding finger. “Not until I’ve flattened these nails and made it a bit safer. And we need to make sure your brother and sister don’t either.”
“Sure.” She nods, already losing interest. “Oh, Mum says what are you doing and can you come down to sort out the thingamajig.”
“The what?”
“The thingy, you know. The boiler, or whatever. She just said to come down.” She flashes me a grin. “When you’ve finished smashing the antique furniture.”
She turns and is gone, the lightness of her footsteps receding onto the landing.
I turn back to the old dresser. Now this weird little room has drawn first blood, maybe Iwillbreak it open with the crowbar.
But not yet.
I nudge the tools out of the way, making space so I can kneel down and reach behind the dresser—feeling my way carefully to avoid any more sharp surprises—and heave it toward me. It’s heavy, the feet making a loud scraping protest on the bare floorboards as I shift it away from the wall. A whisper of something on my skin as a spider runs over the back of my hand.
I kneel down and pull again, opening up a gap of about a foot between the bulky dresser and the brick wall it has stood against for years, batting away a new cloud of dust as it rises into the musty air. The back of the dresser is not a single flush piece of wood but sunken slightly into its own frame, solid right-angled thicknesses of wood that are nothing like IKEA furniture: no MDF, no fiberboard, no tiny panel pins to keep the back on. I lean back to allow the light from the bulb to shine on the back panel, the wood thick with old cobwebs and the curled remains of desiccated insects waiting for the spider’s return.
Something else, as well.
In the bottom of the frame, an inch-long trench has been gouged out of the wood with a chisel or a blade.
Nestled in the shallow indentation is a key.
3
The key is short and thick, a stub of dull, dark iron barely two inches long. Brushing cobwebs out of the way, I lever it out of its hiding place and blow on it to shift some of the dust. It looks like the key to an old jewelry box or a desk drawer, the metal cold and surprisingly heavy in the palm of my hand.
Almost as if it’s been waiting for me, all these years.
From far away down the stairs, I can hear Leah calling for me. But tucked away here on the top floor, her voice is hardly audible at all.
I’ll go down in a minute.
