After leaving the restaurant the previous evening, Maisie had asked the hotel desk clerk if he had such a thing as a Taschenlampe. She had nightmares, she told him, and sometimes awoke frightened in the night, so she liked to have one by her bedside. He smiled, informing her that one would be brought to her room without delay. And it was. Now she stepped toward the door, pulled back the boards once again, and used the torch to illuminate the rooms beyond.
She flashed the light around the kitchen, seeing clearly what had only been in outline before. It seemed strange that there weren’t more utensils, more pots and pans—if the place had been abandoned in a hurry, how would there have been time to collect those things? Of course, the area was far from well-to-do; people might well have pillaged the abandoned property for anything they could use or sell. She opened two cupboards above a table set against a wall—there was nothing inside—and another tall, wide cupboard, like a pantry, to the left. She turned on the tap; a trickle of brown water choked its way out. The pipe behind the sink shuddered, and more water came out in thick filthy spurts, then cleared and flowed into the sink. She turned off the tap. She moved forward into the corridor, again casting the beam up and down the walls. Squares of lighter plasterwork revealed places where pictures or notices had been removed. She looked down, stepping over the detritus of life in the basement. On the floor she noticed a broken pair of pinking shears, and pins spread across the boards. Perhaps the place had indeed been disguised as the workshop of a tailor or someone who took in clothing alterations and repairs.
The front room was spacious, larger than she had thought at first. She stepped toward the remains of machinery, moving the beam across the abandoned ironmongery down to the floor, stained dark with dried ink and blood. Looking closer, she noticed that underneath the broken press were several sewing machines, the cumbersome sort that might be used in a small factory. The whole mass of metal sat on top of torn rags. Maisie directed the torch up to the ceiling, where a rod extending from one side to another still held a few brass rings. Ah, that was it—from the front entrance all anyone would see was a clutch of seamstresses toiling away, yet behind the curtain a small press operated. The rattle of the sewing machines would disguise the sound of the press. The curtain played its part too—any visitor could have concluded that it was there to protect the modesty of customers who came for a fitting, or to protect garments awaiting collection. There would have been little risk of the place being raided. There were so many small workshops of this type in any city, and not all could be policed.
But someone had tipped off the Gestapo.
There was nothing else of note in the room, apart from the broken sign that must have once covered much of the door, and which indicated that this was indeed the workshop of a tailor who took in all manner of work. Maisie’s thoughts turned to the young needlewoman she had become close to in Gibraltar. Miriam Babayoff. She wondered what had become of Miriam, now that she was married. She pictured the small house on a narrow street, the way the sun cast its midday light across the cobblestones, and the warmth on her skin as she made her way from one place to another during her time there. She pictured the small kitchen; the table where Miriam worked, the stove with a kettle on the boil, ready to make tea. And then she remembered the narrow door that led from the kitchen to the upper floors of the whitewashed house. It hardly seemed like a door from one place to another; it was more like a larder. If she remembered correctly, it was even disguised with a curtain.