‘So this little shed is surveillance HQ for Joey?’
‘You get what you get.’
‘You sit for hours with your back to the door?’
‘Take it up with whichever carpenter died fifty years ago.’
‘With the key under a rock?’
‘It’s a budget issue. It’s the sort of thing they suggest. Why not share a key instead of cutting ten? So they can buy a new computer.’
‘No video?’
‘That kind of thing, they like to spend money on. Wireless upload straight out of the binoculars. All day and all night. High definition, but monochrome.’
‘Does the bowling club know you’re here?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Good,’ I said. I figured swearing a busybody committee chairman to silence was like taking out an ad in the newspaper.
Nice said, ‘Suppose they come in to play a game of bowls?’
Bennett said, ‘We changed the lock. That one is ours, not theirs. They’ll think there’s something wrong with their keys. They’ll call a meeting. They’ll vote on whether to spend club funds on a locksmith. They’ll make speeches for and against. By which time either it won’t matter any more, or we’ll have changed the lock back again and gone home happy.’
I said, ‘How well can we see from here?’
He said, ‘Take a look.’
So I shuffled in, and sat down on the middle stool, and took a look.
THIRTY-EIGHT
CLEARLY THE BINOCULARS had some kind of fantastic high technology in them, because the image was spectacular. Not all green and grainy like I was used to, but liquid and silvery and endlessly precise. I was looking at a house about four hundred yards away, at an angle of about forty-five degrees. I could see the front, and all of one side, in large segments, through the bays of an iron fence, which was built on a brick knee-wall, and divided into sections by occasional brick pillars. The effect was reasonably grand, and I was sure the expenditure had been saner than the lunatic scheme at Wallace Court.
The house itself was a large, solid thing, made of brick, made to look Georgian or Palladian or whatever other kind of a symmetrical style was currently in vogue. It was completely conventional. It had a roof, and windows, and doors, in the right numbers, in all the right places. It was like a kid had been given paper and crayons and told to draw a house. Good, now add more rooms. It had an in-and-out driveway, in through one electric gate and out the other. The driveway was made of blocks that looked silvery but might have been brick-coloured. There was a small black sports car crouched near the door, parked at an angle, as if it had arrived in a hurry.
I sat back.
I said, ‘That’s Little Joey’s house?’
Bennett said, ‘Yes, it is.’
‘Great line of sight.’
‘We got lucky.’
‘He designed it himself?’
‘One of his many talents.’
‘It looks like every other house.’
Bennett said, ‘Guess again.’
I sat forward. I took a second look. Roof tiles, bricks, windows, doors, rainwater gutters, all arranged in a boxy rectangular structure filling most of its lot. I said, ‘What am I looking for?’
Bennett said, ‘Start with the Bentley.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘It’s right there by the door.’
‘No, that’s something else. It’s much smaller than the Bentley.’
‘No, the house is much bigger.’
‘Than a car?’
‘Than a normal house. Little Joey is six feet eleven inches tall. Eight-foot ceilings don’t appeal to him. Regular doorways make him stoop. That house is a normal house, except every dimension on every blueprint was increased by fifty per cent. All in perfect proportion. Like it had swollen up, uniformly. The opposite of a doll’s house. An exact replica, but bigger, not smaller. The doors are more than nine feet high. The ceilings are way up there.’
I looked again, and focused on the car, and forced myself to see it for the size it really was, whereupon the house did exactly what Bennett had said. It swelled up, in perfect proportion. An exact replica, but bigger.
Not a doll’s house. A giant’s house.
I sat back.
I said, ‘What do regular people look like, when they go in and out?’
Bennett said, ‘Like dolls.’
Casey Nice squeezed behind me, and sat on a stool, and took a look for herself.
I said, ‘Tell me what you’ve seen so far.’
Bennett said, ‘First of all remember where we are. We’re right next to the motorway up to East Anglia, and right next to the M25, where we can go either east or west, or we could go the other way, and be lost in the East End ten minutes from now. It’s a plausible centre for operations. That’s why they all check in here. Not just because Joey is a control freak. He came to them. That’s why he built his house here, I’m sure of it. He thinks a good boss is always on top of every detail.’