Excerpt

 “The guy’s laughing at you.” Isabella shook her head, “Right now, wherever he is, out there he’s laughing at you.”

And for some reason she was surprised to find that the thought of it upset her far more than she expected that it would. Because even though she knew what they were, when it came to it they were also her friends. Friends who over the last several years had done her innumerable small and large kindnesses, who had shared confidences, birthdays, weddings and funerals. Who had seen in Christmas Eve’s and Royal Weddings. Who, all said and done, were as much family as any group of strangers could be.

And more than anything else she was sad for them. Just hopelessly sad.

“That’s more than likely true sweetheart, but if miracles don’t happen on nights like these when will they?” Israel asked her.

“They never happen, Israel.” Isabella replied gently – and then sighed and shook her head, “Well go on then if you’re going to.”

“You want to do the honours Ver?” Israel asked her, because he knew that there was truth, and for that reason power, in Isabella’s words, and that though he was prepared to be complicit in this, he wasn’t yet willing to endure the shame of perpetrating it.

Verity looked at him, reading his thoughts as surely as though they were hers, and because she was better and braver than him, smiled brightly and said, “Sure, why not.”

Verity walked slowly forward to the wall, placed her hand on the exact point that Calvin had touched on his way out, and looked back over her shoulder at them all.

And even Isabella held her breath, though for reasons different to the others.

Hers’ not desperate and dark, but excited. Youthful and pure. Emotions so alien to theirs that she herself may as well have been from Mars as Enfield.

And then Verity pushed, one hand resting on the other, as hard as she could, on the wall panel. Pushed first with her arms, and then her shoulder and then her whole body.

Pushed....forward. A slow ancient groan. Slow and faint from the wall and then...CRASH.

Verity jumped backwards as the wall suddenly gave way in front of her in a sudden hysterical madness of noise, soot, dust and cobwebs streaming out in an impossible thick misty cloud which engulfed and covered her.

Wood from the panels tumbling down both into the darkness where the wall panels had once been and onto the floor of The Empress.

The once blessed Empress.

Isabella gasped in shock, her hand over her mouth, turning to look at Israel who stood numb with his glass in hand and his heart in his throat.

Paul stepped forward, grabbing Verity hard by the shoulders and pulling her away from the expanding cloud of stale, fetid dust and darkness, whispering as he did so, “Holy fucking shit.”

“Holy fucking shit.” He said again.

“What in the name of fuck?” Isabella took half a step forward and then stopped herself, “What the fuck have you done Verity.”

“What do you mean what have I done?” Verity stared opened mouthed at the open door in the wall. Absently scrambling in her pockets, pulling out her fags and lighting one with a shaky hand, impervious to the constraints of the smoking ban.

That and many other things.

Stood there, a pale black haired ghost covered in dust and cobwebs breathing smoke into the air starring into a black abyss.

“You’ve put a fucking hole in the wall is what you’ve done. A motherfucking hole. Mick’s going to fucking kill me.”

“You’re more worried by what Mick’s going to say than the fact that there’s a fucking secret passageway in your wall leading into the mother cunting ground?” Verity shot back in-between long, long drags.

Israel stepped forward, plucked Verity’s cigarette from her lips and took a long drag on it himself. Stepped forward over the long red planks of broken wood on the floor and edged towards the rough door shaped hole in the wall and looked down at four or five rough hewn stone steps disappearing down into total darkness.

“Holy shit.” He breathed, “Holy fucking shit.”