Free No Other Darkness by Sarah Hilary

ground now. ‘If you need the paperwork . . .’
    ‘I need the paperwork. Do you have it here?’
    ‘Not here, but I can get it for you, of course. It was a clean project. The only sticking point was moving the gypsies out.’
    ‘Gypsies. You mean travellers?’
    Merrick nodded again. ‘They’d turned the place into a mud pit. The locals were scared to go there. Everyone was happy when we bought the land and started building.’
    ‘Everyone except the travellers, presumably,’ Noah said. ‘What happened to them?’
    ‘God knows. They’re ruining someone else’s field now.’ Merrick looked from Noah to Marnie. ‘Can you tell me what this is about, please?’
    Marnie turned her face in profile, as if she was tired of looking at him. ‘Planning permissions, you have those?’
    ‘For Beech Rise? Yes, of course.’
    ‘You had all the necessary permissions? All the building consents.’
    Merrick nodded. ‘Of course.’
    ‘So you knew about the bunker.’
    From out on the Thames: the blast of a boat’s tannoy.
    Merrick covered his head again. ‘Bunker?’
    ‘In the garden you put down at the end of the terrace. Number 14 Blackthorn Road. The show house you rushed to finish, cutting corners in the process.’
    ‘A bunker?’ Merrick echoed again.
    Marnie turned her head back to look at him. Noah saw how hard she was holding to her patience, and how little of that patience she had left. ‘In the garden. A bunker, under three feet of what you passed off as soil. Are you saying you knew nothing about it? Because I don’t know much about planning permissions, although of course I know plenty of people who do, but I’m thinking you can’t possibly have been allowed to erect houses over ground that wasn’t solid. Over a concrete pit, twelve feet down.’
    ‘Oh,’ Merrick said finally, ‘the bunkers.’
    Bunkers plural?
    A blunt pain in Noah’s chest. He hated that he’d been right.
    Marnie said, ‘You knew, then.’
    ‘Well, yes.’ Merrick looked confused. ‘We knew there’d been bunkers there, once. But it was a long time ago.’
    ‘How many bunkers?’
    ‘Six or seven, I’m not sure. Cold War, they said.’ He shook his head. ‘But the ground was solid. The local authority had filled them in, long before we started building.’
    ‘How long before?’
    ‘Years! In the mid eighties, I think. I have the paperwork to prove it.’
    ‘Really,’ Marnie said. ‘Because I have the corpses to prove it never happened. The bunker at number 14 was never filled in. Mr Doyle, who bought that house shortly after you finished it, yesterday found a manhole cover under his vegetable patch, and since there was nothing on the survey you provided to explain what he’d found, he lifted it and looked inside. His garden is now a crime scene.’
    Merrick shook his head, looking sick. ‘What . . . what was down there?’
    ‘Two bodies,’ Marnie said. ‘Two little bodies.’
    ‘Kids?’ Merrick abandoned his bald head and spread both hands on the surface of his desk. If he was faking it, he was a good actor. ‘Oh God . . . No, no, no.’
    Marnie said immovably, ‘Yes.’
    ‘But how . . .? Who . . .?’
    ‘Ask me when . I can answer that, in broad terms.’
    Merrick’s eyes were swimming with shock. ‘When?’
    ‘Four, maybe five years ago, long after you say the bunkers were filled in.’
    ‘I have the paperwork,’ Merrick insisted. He looked at the filing cabinets, as if by producing the planning permission he could undo the fact of the dead children.
    ‘Good for you. I have the bodies. Who told you the bunkers were filled in?’
    ‘The local authority planning people when they sold me the land! I’d never have bought it otherwise.’
    ‘You’ve never cut corners, on any of your building projects?’
    ‘Of course not . . .’ He pushed at papers on his desk, colouring, but it could’ve been indignation rather than guilt.
    ‘You cut them at number 14. You failed to connect