‘This is it,’ said Caleb.
He pointed to the GPS on the dashboard of the car.
51.5195° N 0.1269° W.
He parked on the pavement, the looming silhouette of the British Museum dominating their peripheral vision.
In front of them was a three-storey, nineteenth-century terraced house, the only one in a line of white houses in which lights were not blazing. It stood out, like a rotten tooth in the white enamel line of the street.
This was the end of her quest. Some mysterious hand had pointed her here, from behind the fog of her forgetting. She looked over at Caleb. It was unsettling for her to be sharing this intimate moment with a stranger.
She opened the car door and stepped out, looking up at the house in front of her.
Some part of her was disappointed. Deep down she had hoped the locket would turn out to be a calling card left by her mother for Sara to find her way back into her arms. But there was no chance of that. The house looked like it had been abandoned decades earlier. Scaffolding covered the entire structure like an exoskeleton. If there were answers waiting for Sara inside the house, they were going to be dusty and inanimate.
In front of her, two sides of aluminium siding were tied together with string, marking the makeshift entrance to the building.
‘Shall I come in with you?’ asked Caleb.
Sara shook her head.
‘Thanks. But …’
‘Of course.’ Caleb nodded. ‘I’ll go and park the car, it’s too conspicuous here.’
Sara watched him drive off and then lifted the corrugated metal flap at the front of the building and ducked inside.
The building was little more than an empty husk.
She could see all the way through to the back. It was a large space, covered with discarded debris from building operations. An overnight light lit the space in dim fluorescent white, giving it a clinical air. Debris lay everywhere in the form of loose fittings, wiring and aluminium sidings.
She could see the building work was being done on the remains of an older house, as original brick and ironwork peeped through in several parts of the floor and wall sections. The effect was unsettling, as the house seemed neither one thing nor another, and had been stuck in this state for so long that even the renovations that had been attempted now seemed dated.
Whatever she had been expecting, this was not it. The place was lifeless. There had been no one here for years, possibly decades. Her mother was clearly not here. What Sara was looking at seemed to be the very definition of a dead end. But whatever doubts she had, she still had the bone-hard conviction that the locket held answers.
But what answers could there be here, in this abandoned site? Why would a woman brainwash a young girl, then abandon her, only to give her clues to this empty space?
Unless this wasn’t the space to which her mother was directing her.
Maybe there was somewhere else her mother wanted her to see?
About ten feet away, two desks were pushed against one wall. A layer of dust, over an inch thick, covered them both. On top of one of the desks, a heavy industrial flashlight the size of a car battery lay face down next to a schematic.
Sara picked it up and turned it over.
It was a design plan of the property as purchased.
She could see the plans for the commercial building, drawn up in the 1950s, built over the top of the Victorian house. As she lifted up the blueprint, another one slipped off the table on to the floor. She reached down and picked it up. It was an identical drawing, but in it there was an outline of another structure inside the Victorian house. It was an ornate construction, an elaborate room with a domed roof.
In a tiny gothic font above it was written a date: 1685.
There was a building-within-a-building that pre-dated the Victorian structure; something else on which the Victorian house itself was built. Sara pulled the outline she had seen of the current building and laid it on top of the new one. The plans were on vellum, and she lined up the two plans neatly on top of each other.
The effect was eerie; three successive structures built on each other, each separated from the other by hundreds of years, none cognisant of the other, yet adapting their contours to them, like the generations of a family.
This must be the reason why the property was derelict. The developers must have discovered the ruins of the seventeenth-century building and had to abandon their development plans.
She ran her finger along the pages, looking for some connection between the buildings, some common structure they might share. If something existed, it could be the way to pass between them. Her finger stopped as she traced a line.
It was some sort of flue that connected all three.
She grabbed the larger flashlight from the desk and headed deeper into the building. Her heart was beating faster now, not with panic but with anticipation.
She noticed that the centre of the structure had no Victorian elements at all; it was all sanded-down concrete and wiring.
At the rear was a wall section of rust-coloured brick, and the recessed square of what must be the old fireplace.
A few feet away there was a lead pipe.
The third strike with the makeshift battering ram loosened the brickwork. She pushed a few bricks, and they began to work loose. A few more strikes and she was able to remove several more. A cool wind blew between them, and sooty darkness peeped through the gap.
She shone the flashlight in, and hunched close to the brickwork on her haunches to peer through. She could just about make out the flue of the chimney, the gate to a dense blackness the flashlight could not penetrate. She leaned in further and angled the flashlight to illuminate the other walls and corners, but the angle was too constrictive. She stood up and hacked at a few more bricks. Another loosened and came free in her hands.
She shone the light into the chimney and then what she saw caused her to stumble back, arms flailing, losing her centre of gravity, tipping back into a heap on the floor, her breathing ragged.
Her flashlight dropped a few feet away, and, as it rocked back and forth on the floor, the beam picked up the object of her panic.