the clue was in the name. the black museum is world famous as the in-house museum of crime at new scotland yard. the history books (or at least, wikipedia) told me that it had been set up by inspector neame and pc randall some time after april 1875 as a way to use the prisoners’ property store to instruct new recruits in the art of detection. the name first appears in public in an article in the observer newspaper in 1877, and the historians say it was coined as a grisly headline by a journalist who was snubbed by neame, but i am not so sure. it didn’t seem an accident that douglas black was looking to set up a top secret archive in london at that time, and scotland yard gave him the perfect location. it was central and easy to access. it had several entrances, with a steady flow of visitors, not all of them entirely reputable, that would disguise the comings and goings of the agents and officers of black’s network. best of all it had the entire metropolitan police force standing guard, which was great for black, and tough on me. it would be the ideal location for the shadow archive.
scotland yard had moved to new premises several times since it was first set up, but i was betting that the shadow archive had moved with it, and i spent the best part of three weeks scouting the norman shaw buildings and the new “new scotland yard” next door at the curtis green building. it is not easy to do that without being spotted, hence the night time reconnaissance in the rain. the water and the cold played havoc with my mood, but also with many detector systems so it was worth the discomfort.
no-one was likely to give me the real plans of the place, though harry was happy to provide me with a copy of the official layout, and i used a lidar system to map as much of the outside as i could. comparing the two should have revealed unmarked storage areas and given me some idea how i might get in, but nothing showed up until i had a lucky break. literally. i had lowered the lidar detector down a shaft on the curtis green roof, hoping to get a glimpse into some of the nearby rooms. it had just about reached ground level when the nylon line snapped. it made a hell of a row as it clattered down, and i prepared to run, but no alarms went off and, more importantly, i noticed something significant. it had taken around five seconds for the lidar to crash down, which, at a rough estimate, meant it had fallen free for around one hundred and twenty metres. that would have taken it a long way underground, and there were no basement rooms marked on the plans in that location. i was pretty sure i had found the shadow archive: now i just had to find a way in.