to your spending accounts as a thank you.’
The volunteers seemed happier after hearing this and there was even a muted cheer.
‘The interior is a demolition zone, so you must wear hard hats and hi-visibility vests. Do not stray away from the designated route.’
A temporary barrier circled the main building, its sole access point guarded by a sergeant from the Royal Engineers Corps. Like everyone else on the demolition team, she’d been living on campus for the past six weeks, but was allowed no outside communication and had not been told where campus actually was. Her uniform would usually be topped with a green beret, but special orange ones had been issued, reminding young agents that she was not to be spoken to under any circumstances.
The sergeant counted everyone through the gate, issuing everyone with a numbered dog tag and strict orders that the necklace must be returned so that they could be counted out of the secure area. She then opened a portable cabin, and distributed yellow vests, dust masks and hard hats, while telling James where to find trolleys and other moving equipment. At the same time, a beeping truck was being reversed up to the gate and four more volunteers jumped out of the back, spurred by the prospect of making fifty quid.
Once they were all equipped, a second orange-hatted army engineer led the way inside, between yellow and black danger high explosive signs. The main doors had been removed to give work crews easy access. The usually polished floor was horribly scarred and James looked forlornly down the hallway leading to the old chairman’s office, missing the wooden bench where he’d so often sat, drumming his foot as he awaited punishment.
But the most dramatic change was in the concrete columns that braced the main hallway that ran all the way to the dining-room at the back of the building. These had been drilled with dozens of three-centimetre-wide holes, into which had been dropped sticks of high explosive. Between sticks ran looms of brightly coloured wiring.
‘Could this go off by accident?’ a girl asked warily, as the army engineer led the way towards the stairs into the basement. James gave a nod, indicating that the soldier was allowed to answer.
‘The explosive and detonators are very stable and I’m not aware of any demolition where there has been a premature explosion. What can happen is that the demolition happens incorrectly and only some of the charges go off. So please don’t touch any wiring, and if any of you should accidentally drop something or trip and touch one of the looms, please let us know so that we can test the circuit.’
James and the engineer led the group down a back staircase to the first basement. Most furniture had been removed, but the decision had been taken to entomb some equipment in the explosion, including an ancient mainframe computer and thousands of document boxes that were no longer needed, but not so sensitive that they had to be incinerated.
After a stretch of floor, James found himself clattering down metal stairs, wrapped around a large cargo lift which he had never previously seen. At the bottom, the stairs continued down to a third basement, much to the astonishment of kids who’d lived in this building for some years but had no idea about these subterranean levels.
The engineer unlocked the door into a final stretch of corridor. There were no explosives, but like most buildings built before the 1980s, the mineral asbestos was used as fireproofing. Now known to cause cancer, every sheet of asbestos had to be removed so that its toxic dust didn’t form part of the cloud when the building detonated. This hallway had been the last to be cleared, and the plaster and ceiling had been stripped back to bare concrete, with some dangerous-looking 1970s electrical wiring on show.
James felt intimidated when he stepped into a room which he realised sat directly beneath the campus dining-hall. There were two dozen rows of metal shelving, each stretching more than thirty metres. Everything had been cleared out, apart from the five hundred and fifty dusty box files, each one recently stickered with Mission Control – do not destroy.
Made from heavy card, each box was more than a metre deep, and James quickly realised that it would take two people to lift each one upstairs.
‘OK,’ James said, as his sister and several kids groaned at the magnitude of the task ahead. ‘It looks like we’ve got our work cut out.’
Four