‘We could probably just about afford this place, at a stretch,’ Adam had joked, as they had a pint at the bar of The Causeway Inn and waited for the tide to retreat. Ned had glanced around at the room, looking thoughtful.
Adam could think of few occasions on which he had seen Ned as deferential to anyone – no member, no star, no potential investor – as he was to the Bouchers that afternoon, the old man in his Barbour and the old woman in her purple fleece who had been waiting for them next to a very old Range Rover on the other side of the water. The way he had listened to their stories, patted and chatted to their stinking Labradors, sat for what felt like hours in their freezing house on their sagging, dog-hair-plastered sofas going through old pictures of the island then and now. Album after album of photographs Norman Boucher had dug out for them, opened up for them, while from an actual trolley Veronica Boucher served them crustless cucumber sandwiches on slightly stale and stiffening white bread, to go with their turbo-strength G and Ts. Adam still had vague memories of a very long walk along several gloomy corridors, up and down several sets of stairs, to the toilet, where he had sat for a period of time he subsequently worried had been conspicuous, swaying slightly, just pissed enough to realize how pissed he was, slightly anxious about how he was going to find his way back.
After Adam had eventually rejoined the company, in the hour and a half （or an hour and twenty, to be on the safe side） remaining to them, they had all piled into the Range Rover – ‘Just throw the dogs’ blankets onto the floor, that’s it,’ Norman had instructed him – for the grand tour, juddering and shaking and jolting over the unsurfaced road around the perimeter of the island, Norman pointing out where his land ended and the section of the island he had leased to the MOD began, pointing out areas you could see where the wire had been, the various radio masts. Then, at an unmarked crossroads, with a glance at his watch, he had brought the vehicle to a halt and turned in his seat to face them.
‘Now then,’ he had told them. ‘We’ve probably still got time, if you want to see the bunker.’
The bunker, of course, was the real reason Ned was so obsessed with this place, why he had chosen to buy an island off this stretch of rainy coast and turn it into a Home, why Ned had always smirked when Adam asked whether it might not be more sensible to buy an island and build a club somewhere a bit sunnier. Like the Caribbean. Like the Maldives. Like the Balearics.
Adam could still remember the eerie feeling he’d had as they had made their electric-torch-lit way down a narrow, spiral staircase all the way to the bottom, waited for Norman to fumble the metal tumblers of the lock into place and then to open the three-foot-thick steel door. Adam could remember thinking, what is this place? Late forties, was when Norman assumed it had been built. Or the early fifties. Sometime early in the Cold War anyway – and in such secrecy that not even the Bouchers had known about it until after the land reverted to their ownership in ’91.
The sheer size of it, that was what Adam could not get over. Here was a bunk room, still with green-painted metal bunk beds in it, still with a table and chairs in the corner. Here were the latrines, a room full of what looked like old radio equipment, a kitchen, a storeroom. Here was a boiler room, a room of sinks and shower stalls, a room with a table tennis table in it. Here was another, slightly larger sleeping area with two single beds in it. Perhaps the eeriest thing was that apart from Veronica, waiting up in the Range Rover for their return, not a single soul knew they were there or that this place even existed.
‘So what do you reckon?’ Adam had asked Ned. ‘Turn it into a nightclub? Put some decks here, see what we can do about ventilation?’
The look that Ned had given him was genuinely pitying.
Now, crossing past the open fireplace to the far end of the living room, Adam pressed once on a narrow handle-less door, painted to be totally unnoticeable unless you were looking for it. It opened to reveal a narrow space with a single broom in it. Once inside it, he stepped around the broom, and pushed in the same way on a second door at the end of the cupboard.
He thumbed the code into the metal tumblers and spun the handle. Just as he had watched Norman Boucher do all those years before, just as he had watched Ned do so often in the past few months. The door opened to reveal a familiar room of whirring servers and blinking lights. Wires and cables snaked up and down the walls, across the ceiling, along the various corridors that ran from this central room in all directions. In the centre of the room sat a huge leather couch – on top of which, Adam noted, was Ned’s open laptop. Next to the couch at one end was a fully stocked drinks cabinet, in front of it a long leather footstool.