‘We’re not stupid,’ the woman said.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘you wanted to be found out. You know about Vaughn. You probably know about all the raving Nazi sympathisers in the country, yet you set up shop here, right under his nose.’
Bunny nodded encouragingly. He seemed pleased.
‘You’re trying to draw them out,’ I said. ‘Pushing them into making a move. So you can hold him up as an example of what happens to silly boys who get caught playing for the wrong side. How close am I?’
One of the young men poked his head in the door.
‘Five minutes,’ he said, before disappearing.
The woman got up. She hadn’t touched her whisky.
‘Come and watch the show,’ she said.
53
I followed them along the hall, towards the stairs. Presumably they had the transmitter in a bedroom, or even the attic. Probably the best place to send a clear signal.
The woman paused before we got to the stairs. She looked back at me, and at Bunny, who nodded approvingly. She pressed one of the panels on the side of the staircase, and a door opened.
‘Keep up,’ she said. ‘We’re late.’
*
I followed them through the door under the stairs. There was another staircase, this one leading downwards, as if to a cellar. But it went deeper than a cellar. Before I even started down the stairs, I could hear the woman’s footsteps far below, still descending.
I counted the steps. Twelve steps in my house from the ground floor to the cellar. Here we took forty down, more than three storeys. At the bottom, we found ourselves in a narrow passageway, like a miniature version of the London Underground. It had curved walls, painted white, with electric lights on the ceiling. Everything smelt new.
The woman was already thirty yards ahead, her partner hurrying to keep up.
We hurried along for five minutes. Quarter of a mile, give or take. The tunnel was perfectly circular, like the Tube, apart from one point where we passed what looked like an escape hatch above us. All the while, we were on a slight slope upwards. I tried to calculate our heading based on the alignment of the house, and the direction we’d taken, but it was impossible to be sure.
‘Quite a feat of engineering,’ I said. ‘Must have been tricky doing it all without anyone noticing.’
‘Six months’ construction,’ Bunny said. ‘Three months digging, three months outfitting. A whole division of Canadian troops working around the clock.’
After ten minutes we reached a vestibule, two doors leading from it, one on each side. To our left, a grey, metal door with a terse sign:
High voltage.
No entry.
The other door was like something from a submarine. A metal oval, set into a solid metal plate, sealed tight with a circular mechanism that looked like a steering-wheel. The door had a small glass window, and the woman peered through it. She looked back at Bunny.
‘We’re late,’ she said.
‘You go ahead,’ Bunny replied. ‘I’ll give our man the grand tour.’
Bunny gestured to the door with the sign. High Voltage. No Entry.
*
‘This is the power plant!’ Bunny had to yell over the noise of the large diesel generator, easily the size of a London bus.Ductwork criss-crossed the concrete ceiling, presumably carrying away the exhaust, and cables as thick as my wrist disappeared into the darkness.
‘How far down are we?’ I shouted.
‘Four storeys! Over sixty feet, each storey constructed from blast-proof concrete reinforced with steel.’
