Tunnels 05 - Spiral

utilitarian compared to the bedrooms. With a butler’s sink in the corner, it had several small pens along the longest wall.
    “Any ideas?” Will asked.
    “Nope,” Chester said, his patience growing thin. “Come on, Will, stop messing around. Who were these rooms for? And why are we stopping in the kitchen?”
    “It’s not a kitchen. If I told you these pens were specially built for corgis, would that help?” Will said, stepping into one of them.
    “Corgis?” Chester repeated, then the penny dropped. “You’re joking! This was for the Queen!”
    “You got it! And that’s not all!” Will exclaimed, leading him back through the rooms and out into the corridor again. He groped in his pocket for a key, which he slotted into the solid-looking door of the next room. As it ground open on its chunky hinges, the boys stepped inside. Will turned on the lights, and he and Chester were met by the sight of a whole room of glass display cases on pedestals. The cases were empty, but from the satin-covered stands in the bottom of each of them, it was clear that they’d been constructed to house something specific.
    “This is where the crown jewels would have been brought if we’d been invaded,” Will informed his friend.
    Chester was smiling and shaking his head. “That’s wild. So what else is on this level?”
    “Sergeant Finch said that all these rooms were for the VIPs,” Will said. “And you’ve got to see this next one.”
    Farther down the corridor, there was a door with pm painted on it. Chester was unimpressed because the room itself was rather cramped and completely unremarkable as he walked around it. On the desk was a blotter where someone had begun to draw a wall, brick by brick, underneath which the sentence
Where are you, Mrs. Everest, when I need you the most?
had been written. When he gave the desk drawers a quick check, Chester found nothing, so he took another look around the room, even going as far as investigating the bathroom. He came out brandishing a newspaper — an ancient, yellowed copy of the
Times
.
    “This is old — fifteenth August 1952,” he said, then lobbed it onto the bed where Will was sitting. “I give up — whose room was this?” he asked.
    The plastic dust sheet covering the bed crackled as Will leaned over and opened the bedside stand. He took out a bottle with a label that said HINE , and a box with AROMA DE CUBA emblazoned on it. “Brandy and cigars,” he said, holding both items up.
    Chester could see that the bottle wasn’t full, and the seal on the cigar box had been broken. “That doesn’t help — you’ll have to tell me.”
    “Winston Churchill was the last person to sleep in this bed,” Will announced.
    Chester laughed. “Well, I hope they changed the sheets!”
    Will was looking at the cigar box and the brandy with interest. “Sergeant Finch told me that these have been here since he was Prime Minister. He wanted to spend a night in the Complex to find out for himself what it was like. And he always had a gulp of brandy first thing in the morning to go with his first smoke,” Will said, bouncing up and down on the mattress several times. Then he held the brandy bottle up to study the label. “Why don’t we drink this?”
    “Why?” Chester asked, nonplussed.
    “Because I’ve never been
really
drunk. I suppose I had that beer Tam gave me in the Colony, but it tasted foul.” Will was now staring at the thick brown liquid in the bottle as he swilled it around. “Maybe it’s something we should do. Just in case . . .”
    “In case what?” Chester said, flopping down on the bed beside his friend. “In case we don’t make it through all this?”
    Will nodded somberly.
    “That’s a happy thought,” Chester whispered. He took the cigar box from Will and hinged the lid open, sniffing inside. “These things must have been here for years. Don’t they go off?” he asked, as he picked out one of the stubby cigars and rolled it between his fingers.
    Will shrugged. “Who cares — they’re still cigars, and I’ve never smoked one. I’ve never smoked
anything
yet.” He rooted around in the bedside cabinet until he found a box of matches.
“Whitehall,”
he said, reading what was printed on them. “That follows.”
    “I had a couple of lager shandies once on holiday with Mum and Dad, but that’s it,” Chester admitted. “And I’ve never smoked, either.”
    “Remember the Grays?” Will said, staring into the middle distance as