The dim overhead lights threw beams across the paved floor, and the shadows of the barrel rows lined up around us like orderly onlookers.
“I wanted to take a proper look down here after the door was left open the other day,” he said as we moved past the newer racks towards the older, darker end of the cellar. “It hasn’t sat well with me, knowing someone was down here.”
The back of my neck prickled. “Have you found any clues about what happened?”
“None at all.” He sighed, the sound edged with frustration. “There’s no sign of a break-in. Nothing missing, no muddy footprints I can see. But…”
He stopped, switching on a hand-held torch. The beam skimmed over the far wall, where the neat modern brickwork gave way to something older, rough-hewn blocks, uneven mortar threaded with hairline cracks, a faint bloom of salt where damp had risen and dried again.
“I noticed something that didn’t seem right,” he said.
I stepped closer, careful not to brush against the barrels. “Okay,” I said, because sometimes you have to say something to prove you’re not spooked. “Define ‘not right’.”
“An old mark on the wall,” he said simply. “Here.”
He rapped his knuckles lightly against one of the larger blocks at knee height. The sound that came back carried a faint emptiness, like tapping a wall and finding a pocket of air instead of solid weight.
He shifted his hand thirty centimetres to the right and tapped again: dull, reassuringly dense. Back to the first spot where the mark was: hollow.
Even my untrained ear heard it.
He ran his fingers along the seam where two blocks met, pressing gently. The cement crumbled under his touch, like it was old chalk. Up close, I could see the mortar here was a different colour to the rest, faintly yellowed, as if someone had repaired it long ago with whatever they had to hand.
The beam of the torch drifted, caught on a minute irregularity, a line that wasn’t quite straight. The kind of thing you could stare at for years and never notice until you were looking for it.
“You think there’s something behind it?” I asked, keeping my voice low because speaking loudly in this space felt like knocking over a glass.
“Maybe a recess,” he said. “Maybe nothing. But I’ve never noticed this before.”
He crouched, sleeves tugging back on his forearms, and for a silly second, I was very aware of how practical his hands were, steady, competent, the kind that had learned a place by touching every part of it over time.
He took a small flathead from his pocket and wedged it into the crumbly edge.
Of course Noah Langston would carry a screwdriver the way other people carried lip balm.
He didn’t force it, just teased at the mortar as if coaxing a pet with food that had decided to be shy.
A thin flake of mortar came away. Another. The hollow tap sounded again when he brushed the stone with his knuckles, more pronounced now.
I realised I was holding my breath and forced myself to inhale.
“Do you think the door being open has anything to do with this?” I asked.
He nodded, eyes still on the work. “Could be coincidence. Could be someone came down to fetch a case and didn’t latch it properly. But the latch is stubborn. You have to mean it.” He paused, easing the screwdriver a fraction deeper. “And if you’d been searching around back here, you might not want to stand around relatching things.”
I studied the hollow space in the wall. “So whoever came down here… they didn’t find this?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“And nobody else knows it’s here?”
Noah glanced up briefly. “I don’t think so.”
He paused then, sitting back on his heels to roll his shoulders once, the careful kind of stretch someone does when they’re about to commit to something.
He looked up at me, and in the torchlight his eyes had that deep, green-brown colour of bottled wine when you hold it up to a window.
“Go on,” I said, suddenly far more invested in this than was probably healthy. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
