‘Handsome-looking chap,’ she said. ‘Looks a bit like you in the right light.’
‘What’s for pudding?’ I asked, peering up at the menu board.
The pudding was more of a success. Spotted dick. Hard to mess that up, although they’d clearly done their best.
*
The wheezing man was waiting for us. He’d found something. Could barely contain his excitement. Probably as good as it got in his line of work.
He pushed a sheet of paper across the reception desk. The form from the clipboard – one code number per property. He’d researched each property and filled in the salient information from the files. He’d completed each line in immaculate handwriting. Each line was the same.
‘No information on file.’
‘What does that mean?’ Margaret asked.
‘It means there’s no information for those properties,’ he said.
‘That’s impossible,’ Margaret said.
He shook his head.
‘Records get lost. Or they get returned to the wrong file. Once that happens it’s impossible to track them down. They show up when they show up.’
‘But you don’t think this is a coincidence,’ I said.
‘Seven properties, all connected,’ he said. ‘Unlikely.’
‘What’s the connection?’ Margaret asked, looking at the old man for the answer.
‘We’re the connection,’ I said. ‘Or rather, the criteria that put each property on the list. On the Forest. Recently vacated by the tenants. And now we’ve got proof that something’s going on. Someone’s been here and messed about with the records to make it hard to find who owns them.’
We hurried back to the map room. The yellowing map sat on the table, with its pieces of colourful card seemingly placed at random.
‘Is there another way we can find out who owns these properties?’ I asked.
‘You could find out who did the conveyancing,’ the old man said. ‘But I doubt they’d tell you.’
The answer was in front of us, I was sure. I walked around the table to look from another angle. A trick I’d learnt from Blakeney, my old CO. But all I could see was an upside-down view of Sussex.
Then I saw it.
39
‘Look at the contour lines,’ I said. ‘The Forest is a number of peaks, each one with a clump of trees.’ I pointed to five high spots on the map, each surrounded by close-set red contour lines.
I used my pencil as a pointer, moving away from one of the high points, pointing to a succession of fainter red lines.
‘These lines show we’re going downhill from the peaks, but quite soon the ground levels out again. We end up with a plateau, lower than the peaks but higher than the surrounding countryside. It’s like a tabletop, and the peaks are additional bumps on the table. The rest of Sussex is somewhere down below.’
I found the contour line I was looking for and traced it with the pencil. The wheezing man kept a close watch, making sure I didn’t mark his map. The contour line made a large shape, encompassing a fair portion of the Forest, with seemingly random inlets and extrusions.
‘This is the edge of the tabletop,’ I said. Anyone inside that edge has a pretty good view across the whole area. Anyone outside that edge can’t see up onto the top. They’d see sky.’
I squatted down, my eyeline level with the table.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘When I’m above the level, I can see across the table.’
I lowered myself, so my eyes were below the table.
