10
I clicked the door shut, and everything retreated into darkness. The reception desk, a curved piece of pale wood -- built upon a single foundation -- and a sofa and a couple of tub chairs.
As I flipped on my penlight, shadows shifted, former corners of the room and around the doorway to the right. I pulled the door closed.
I made a beeline for the passage leading off the area. As I crossed the room, I viewed the lower-than-normal ceilings, and how the lines of the interior stood off, and beyond another three further doors.
The first on my left led to a smaller room with two desks facing each other, and a wall stacked with portfolios. I moved inside, sweeping the light across the mantle. They alphabetized the information, addresses of the sales on the spine. I searched for boathouses or hulks, but they didn't appear here.
The workstations contained a PC, three-tiered in trays, and a table diary. Some photographs stood on one of them, the same attractive woman in all the shots, and on the other one a small cactus, with Post-its stuck to the front, reminders scrawled all over them.
I booted both computers, inspecting the pictures of the woman in her forties, with an exquisite figure and a welcoming smile.
A man monopolized the other desk: in one drawer, I found some hair-gel, as well as a can of lynx. I couldn't dismiss either person as irrelevant, but somehow I doubted their involvement in whatever might be going on, and I became more convinced as I started going through their PCs.
With no password protection, the inboxes stayed full of bland work emails, and nothing to the individual's Internet records, which may connect Cape Ore.
I returned to the corridor.
Through the second door, opposite the office, a small, closet-style toilet. In front of me, at the far end, a solid, bricked wall. Between this, and where I stood, a third door with a nameplate.
MR JONES
As I pushed open his door, I found myself in a bigger, much nicer workroom, divided in two. They set one half on a raised platform, where Jones placed an eight-seater table, and a sideboard with a TV above, and video-conferencing facilities. In the other part of his desk, shelves cluttered with more binders, and a line of five filing storage cupboards behind his chair.
I went through the folders in the same way as in the other office — and this time I found something: a file on the bulkheads.
A history of the work Mill-House Properties undertook in the tenancies for the houseboats.
Jones' name showed throughout. His signature, on forms and letters, some so old they'd yellowed, and at the back the paperwork associated with the move Clarissa Briggs made to the bulks.
I leafed through the pages with care, but couldn't spot a particular letter, form, or agreement. This became tethered to the two dead men.
Frustrated, I changed to the cabinets behind his workstation. Inside each of the files, a growing, predictable mix of house moves. Nothing connected to the houseboat occupied by the murdered men.
I glanced at Jones' desk, at his computer, and switched on. Chiming into life, I went through the drawers of the cabinet at the other end of the room and turned on the video-conference equipment. A soft ping as a fifty-inch monitor blinked on, and I reached for the lens underneath and twisted the device away from me to be safe.
Picking up the remote control, I began cycling through some menus on the left of the picture. At the bottom, an option for Recent Calls. Most appeared to be the names of properties I recognized from the binders', but some of them included red dots next to their locations. Soon, I realized what secrets they held.
Recordings.
I pressed play and got my first glimpse at the inside of a military submersible pertaining to the Russian Navy.
The action started for'ard, the feet of the cameraman soundless on the black rubber decking past vast machines identifiable as turbo generator sets for producing electricity. Heavier banks of instruments, a door, besides a thirty-foot-long narrow connection.
As the video operator passed along its length, I sensed a heavy vibrating hum on the soundtrack. The submarine's thermonuclear reactor needed to be nearby. This would be beneath him.
Circular hatches on the passageway deck, and covered by the lead glass windows, inspection openings which would provide the nearest and only approach to the fission furnace far below.
The next moment, everything on display shook, and the commentary transformed from one of arrogance to one of sheer panic.
I didn't understand Russian, but from what I understood, the vessel experienced a collision.
The screen went blank, leaving me staring at the television, asking myself why an estate agent gained a film of an unexplained incident on a nuclear submarine.
When I played the second recording, I discovered they filmed from a trawler, noting the coastline in the distance.
The camera then concentrated on some objects floating far away. With the image zooming in, the shapes became defined.
Bodies.
The dead trawler men.