Page 38 of Right Place, Right Time
‘So … it’s on the wall between our two shops. There shouldn’t be metal there – there should be either brick or board, or even plaster, depending on when the wall was erected. Why would there be metal?’
‘I don’t know,’ Adam says, sighing as he sits down on the floor next to me. ‘I’m too tired for trivia questions tonight.’
‘It’s not a trivia question, it’s a genuine one. There shouldn’t be metal there. Not that sort of metal, anyway. I’m not talking a metal pipe, I’m talking a heavy, thick piece of metal like you’d get on a safe or something like that.’
Adam looks wearily at me. ‘You’re not going to let this rest, are you?’
‘Considering what we were talking about yesterday, I’d say this is a rather interesting development.’
‘I’d probably agree with you if I wasn’t so damn tired.’ He looks down at his dusty T-shirt. ‘Well, I don’t suppose I can get much dirtier today.’ He rolls down onto his stomach and pulls himself towards the shelves. Then he reaches under the bottom shelf and taps the wall. ‘You’re right – it is metal.’ As he reports back, I hear a tearing sound. ‘And it seems to go further up the wall too.’ He pushes himself out again.
‘Shall we try to find out what’s behind there?’ I say excitedly.
Adam, still laying on his stomach, wearily rests his forehead on his arms and mumbles into the floor. ‘I knewyou were going to say that. Can’t you go back to your “I’m not that bothered in finding out what’s behind the wall” mood?’ He turns his head to look at me again.
‘What’s happened to all your excitement? You were the one super keen to solve the mystery yesterday.’
‘That was when I still had an ounce of energy in me. The only way we can find out what’s behind that wallpaper is to rip it down, and to do that we would need to take all the books off the shelf, so we can move it away from the wall.’
‘Look, I can see you’re tired, so if you don’t want to, I can stay and do it.’
‘Yeah, right, like I’m going to let you do that on your own while I disappear off upstairs for a hot bath. What sort of guy do you think I am? And that’s not me being sexist. I’d say the same if you were a man.’
‘I thought you might say that,’ I say, grinning at him and jumping up. ‘Right, let’s get started, then.’
Adam, still on the ground, shakes his head and sighs. ‘I think somewhere back there I was conned and the worst thing is I’m too tired right now to figure out how.’
We spend the next half an hour or so removing all the books from the shelves and piling them up in order so they can be easily replaced. Then, after we’ve pushed the bookshelf to the side, we begin to carefully tear as much of the wallpaper away as we can without damaging too large an area.
‘I can’t believe I only paid last week for this to be redecorated,’ Adam grumbles as we stand side by side, gently peeling large strips of wallpaper from the wall. ‘Why couldn’t we have discovered this before the decorator came in?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll help you repair it. I’m a dab hand with wallpaper paste. This is a bit like a vintage pass-the-parcel, isn’t it? There are so many layers of paper, andeach one tells you so much about the era it was put up in, just from the pattern and the colour scheme.’ So far we’ve seen the muted plain magnolia of the nineties, the bright, bold primary colours and prints of the eighties, the nausea-inducing orange and brown of the seventies, a sharp black-and-white print from the sixties, and now we are moving on through the floral chintz of the fifties into a fairly dull cream-and-green utility print that could equally be from the 1930s or forties.
‘I’m glad you’re enjoying this.’ Adam pulls quite a large chunk of paper away from the wall. ‘I can’t say this lists very highly on my ideal way to spend a Sunday evening.’
‘Look!’ I say as his last effort begins to reveal a large piece of hardboard nailed to the wall. ‘It’s about the size of a door. Why would someone board up the middle of the wall like this if there wasn’t a door behind it? The rest of the wall is plaster behind the wallpaper – it’s only this bit that has a board covering it.’
As we pull off more paper, we find that the wood is rotting at the base, which has allowed whatever metal is behind it to begin to show through.
‘Gerald did have a flood here a number of years ago,’ I say. ‘I remember him telling me about it when I first took over my shop. That would explain why the wood has begun to rot away – it must have got wet and never dried out properly.’
‘We’re going to need something stronger to get this wood off. It’s nailed all the way around the edge and these nails look old. They’ve been in here a long time.’
‘Do you have a toolkit? I think we need a hammer.’
‘Of course I do.’ Adam goes over to where his new cash desk will be and reaches underneath. ‘Here,’ he says, passing me a hammer. ‘I have two, luckily for you.’
With the claw part of the hammer, we spend the next few minutes painstakingly removing each nail one by one until the hardboard begins to come away from the wall.
‘Stand back,’ Adam says. ‘I’m going to try to break the last part out.’
I move away from the wall, still holding my hammer. Adam gets some safety goggles and thick gloves from his toolkit, and pulls them both on. Then he goes back to the hole we’ve created in his new wallpaper and grabs hold of the wood. He begins tugging on it, so it slowly comes away from the wall, only breaking at the bottom where the wood is rotten.
‘Well …’ Adam says, still wearing his goggles and holding the wood in his hands. ‘That I did not expect.’ He leans the broken wood against the bookshelf we’ve removed and lifts his goggles, and we both stand staring at what has been revealed. ‘You were right, there is a door there … At least, I think that’s what it is?’
I continue to gaze at the huge piece of metal we’ve uncovered in the wall. There are hinges on one side and a combination lock on the other. ‘But it looks so heavy, doesn’t it? And so thick. I said it looked like the sort of metal you use on a safe, but I didn’t expect it would look like the biggest safe door I’ve ever seen. Why would someone put a door like this up in your shop, then hide it away?’
‘Absolutely no idea. But if you need to put a door up like this, then what on earth are you hiding behind it?’
