Maisie stepped back into the corridor toward the kitchen. Once again she moved the beam of her torch up and down and across the walls. She directed the light onto the door to what she had assumed was a large cupboard, and opened the door. It was indeed a cupboard. Flour spilled from an open bag; the shelves were sticky to the touch, and when Maisie brought her hand away, her fingers were covered in a thick, black moldy syrup. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket to clean her hands and began to turn away toward the sink, but instead returned her attention to the cupboard again. It was almost a reflex action that led her to rap her knuckles on the back of the piece of furniture. And the sound echoing back to her told her that this was one thing she had missed. There was no wall behind the wood.
Maisie thought back to her first visit, and what she had observed as she stood outside before making her way down the slippery green steps to the basement. There’d been nothing to indicate that this was more than a three-story building sandwiched between other three-story buildings in a row of ten. There was nothing to indicate that the basement rooms would have a means of access to other floors. At first she had wondered why there was a corridor along the lower ground floor at all; then she realized that at one point there might have been two rooms and a kitchen, with the corridor allowing access to both without walking through one to get to the other. But a wall had been taken down at some point—perhaps for the first artisan. It was along that seam in the ceiling that the curtain had been hung. She suspected that, if she looked hard enough, she might find evidence of a small cot having once been situated in the corridor.
The house had no indoor lavatory—she’d seen outhouses in the alleyway where the young girls had played. Now she thought she knew how to gain access to another part of the building.
She washed her hands in cold water, dried them with her handkerchief, and brought her torch back to the cupboard, paying attention to the sides, and running her fingers along the line of wood where it met the wall. She looked inside the cupboard again, trying not to retch as the smell of rancid food and dead rodents wafted up. Then she found it—a small lever. She pushed down, and the cupboard moved toward her, almost knocking her off balance.
She pulled back on the wood of the cupboard to reveal bricks and a narrow platform—just enough room to provide a hiding place for two or three, perhaps at a pinch four people. She flashed the torch up and down the walls. They were cold and damp to the touch. She aimed the light up toward the roof of the hideout and gave a knowing smile. Small ledges had been cut out of the bricks to form a ladder of sorts, leading to the floor above. She could not climb the stairs today, nor would she need to—but she’d found an escape route for anyone who had been in the workshop when it was raided. Except for the one person who had been required to remain and close the door, to secure the lever, to disguise the hideout and draw attention away from it.
Maisie stepped off the platform and into the kitchen. She was about to close the cupboard and leave it as she found it when the torch caught something in its beam. It was not easy to see at first, but Maisie removed the small triangle of fabric snagged on a corner of rough brick, ran the cream silk with the remains of an embroidered red rose through her fingers, and knew she had seen it before. Of course, she could not be completely sure—but if she was right, Elaine Otterburn had taken refuge in the hideout. And Maisie had no doubt that she had been very, very scared.