Days Without Number

by Robert Goddard

  ‘I agree with Anna,’ said Irene. ‘Besides, I don’t think Dad actually meant to go through with it. I suspect he intended merely to threaten us with disinheritance and use this document to persuade us he meant it.’

  It was a neat line of reasoning, Nick had to admit. But he did not believe it. Nor did he believe that Irene believed it. Their father had never bluffed. What he had threatened he had always delivered.

  ‘I don’t care whether he meant it or not,’ growled Andrew. ‘Anna’s put her finger on it. He had no right to try to do this. Once the will’s gone, no-one can prove anything. It’s obvious what we should do. I don’t know what we’re waiting for.’

  For everyone to have their say. That, of course, was what they were waiting for. Nick cleared his throat uneasily, struggling to find the words to replace the only ones that came into his head. ‘We want the money. And we mean to take it.’ No, that would not do. That was not what any of them wanted to hear. Instead, all he could say—and all he needed to say was, ‘I agree.’

  ‘That we should destroy the will?’ Irene’s tone was mild but insistent.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Basil?’

  ‘Ah.’ Basil leaned forward. ‘My turn, is it?’

  ‘Here we go,’ muttered Andrew.

  ‘Fear not,’ said Basil, with a sidelong glance at his brother. ‘I shall not attempt to dissuade you. I have already made it clear that I will decline my share of the proceeds from the sale of this house.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re the man with the clean hands all right.’

  ‘Please, Andrew,’ said Irene. ‘Let him speak.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Andrew raised his hand in mock surrender.

  ‘I believe,’ Basil continued, ‘that when President Nixon’s advisers came to him to report some damaging leak to the press, he was wont to ask, not whether the particular allegation against his administration was true or false, but whether it was deniable. Well, to apply the Nixon test, is destroying the will deniable? The answer, obviously, is yes.’

  ‘Does that mean you agree?’ asked Anna.

  ‘It means I regard its destruction, given the circumstances of its discovery, as inevitable.’

  ‘We should be clear,’ said Irene. ‘Once we’ve done this, there’s no turning back. We must behave as if we’ve never heard of a cousin Demetrius or a Mr and Mrs Davey. We must forget the will ever existed. I shall say nothing to Laura about it and you must say nothing to Tom, Andrew, nor you to Zack, Anna. Now or ever.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘In fact, none of us must breathe a word to anyone.’ There were nods of assent, even, albeit tardily, from Basil. ‘We draw a line under the whole business. All right?’ There was another round of nods. ‘That’s settled, then.’

  ‘Good,’ said Andrew, jumping up and plucking the will, now restored to its envelope, from the coffee-table. ‘As the eldest, I think this is my prerogative.’

  He tore the envelope and its contents into four, took two strides to the fireplace and tossed the fragments in amongst the blazing logs, stooping to hurry their extinction along with a few prods of the poker. The paper curled and blackened and flamed and was gone.

  ‘Feel better now?’ asked Basil as his brother turned away from the fire.

  Andrew smiled grimly. ‘Much.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Irene had drawn a line for them all to toe. Over the next couple of days arrangements were finalized for the funeral and a headstone was ordered. Baskcomb took delivery of the financial documentation they had assembled and set about the protracted business of probating what he believed was his late client’s only will. Nick telephoned an assortment of his father’s friends and former colleagues to determine who would and who would not be attending the funeral. He was kept busy with the administrative minutiae of death, though not so busy that he could not have found time to visit the chapel of rest to take a private farewell of the deceased—had he wished.

  But he did not wish. And he did not go. His father continued to intimidate him from that halfway ground where he dwelt between death and burial. They had posthumously defied him. But had he found a way, also posthumously, to defeat them? Or was the will he had left in the desk drawer just a macabre joke, a way of guaranteeing himself the last laugh? Nick could not stop thinking about it, partly because he was forbidden to talk about it.

  Yet his nerve held. Until the funeral, he was bound to play his part, with gritted teeth. After that, he would be free. The dull normality of his other life beckoned comfortingly. It would not be long now before he could return to it.

  Meanwhile, he had to move out of the Old Ferry to make way for Laura and live for several days at Trennor. He did not relish the prospect and secretly planned to spend as little time as possible there. On Friday, he drove up from Saltash with his few belongings.

  Pru had made up a bed for him in his old room and was still on the premises when he arrived. He kept her chatting over a pot of tea for as long as he reasonably could, but by mid afternoon she was gone.

  Shortly afterwards, Nick was also gone, almost on a whim, driving west through the rain-washed back roads to Liskeard, where he bought a serviceable black tie for the funeral, then on west along the lanes to St Neot.

  The church was open but he was the only visitor. The cloud-filled winter light seemed warmed and gilded by the stained glass. He sat in a pew in the south aisle, gazing at the Creation Window beyond the rood-screen ahead of him. This and the other windows, maybe the Doom Window too, had endured for five centuries. Generations of parishioners, poor as well as rich, had preserved the glass, sometimes at considerable personal risk. None of them had done so for profit or gain. They had acted out of a combination of religious faith and artistic sensibility, motives that made his family’s involvement in the strange history of the St Neot glass seem venal and ignoble. They would profit from it. They had destroyed a solemnly executed last will and testament to make sure of that. And they would have their reward, Nick along with them, whether he wanted it or not.

  A churchwarden eager to lock up with dusk coming on soon obliged Nick to take his leave. He drove slowly back to Landulph through thickening, wind-slanted rain. When he reached Trennor, the house’s dark and empty present seemed to him a feeble reality to set against its teeming past. He entered through a thicket of memories, switched on lights in every room and turned one of his mother’s Maria Callas CDs up loud on the hi-fi.

  Pru had left him a casserole to put in the oven, apparently convinced that he was unable to cook for himself. He set it to warm, then lit the fire in the drawing room, listening to the wind keening in the chimney and remembering, almost against his will, giving cack-handed assistance to his father during the fitting of an H-pot to the chimney a quarter of a century or so before. Yet the event felt as close as yesterday in that instant—his father barking instructions at him as they perched vertiginously on the roof, his mother watching anxiously from the garden below.

  With the fire going, Nick hunted around the kitchen and scullery for a bottle of wine, but drew a blank. He was, in one sense, unsurprised by this, supporting as it did his theory that his father had gone down to the cellar specifically to fetch some wine. Nick had not been down there since the old man’s death. It was time, he decided, to cross that line.

  The cellar was still and silent, the walls and floor coated with grey masonry paint that made it resemble the hull of a ship. Most of the storage space was taken up with the racks in which Michael Paleologus had kept his stock of chosen vintages. The stock was thinner than had once been the case, Nick noticed. The old man had been running it down, factoring the approach of death into his ordering. Nick smiled at the thought, typifying as it did his father’s cast of mind. He would not have wanted to spend money on wine he would not live to drink, even though he was unlikely to spend the money on anything else.

  Not that Nick or any of the others had ever shown signs of connoisseurship for him to encourage. Nick and Basil had even succeeded in
being banned from the cellar during their childhood following an incident when a bottle had been dislodged from one of the racks and broken. ‘A ‘sixty-one St Emilion sacrificed to the stupidity of two small boys,’ as their father had raged at the time, subsequently became an oft swapped catch-phrase between them.

  At this recollection too, Nick smiled. The breakage had happened because of his attempt to conceal himself in the narrow gap between the far wall and the last rack, which was single-sided, during a game of hide-and-seek. He walked along to the rack to remind himself just how narrow the gap really was.

  But it was not there. The rack was hard against the wall. Nothing larger than a mouse could squeeze between them. Nick was puzzled. Even his father was not normally that cautious. Then he noticed several white patches near the base of the rack. Glancing down, he saw that some of the paint had been scraped from the floor. There were curved grooves in the surface, as if the rack had been pulled away from the wall at one end.

  Nick crouched down for a closer look. Yes, that was indeed the only possible explanation. It had been done recently, too. Flakes of the dislodged paint were still lying around. But who had moved the rack? Surely it could only be his father. Was that why he had come down there on the night of his death? It would at least explain why he had left without a bottle. Yet it would leave much else unexplained.

  ‘Nick?’

  Nick started violently at the sound of Andrew’s voice behind and above him. He stood and turned to see his brother descending the steps, a frown mingling with a smile on his face.

  ‘Not planning to drink our inheritance, are you?’

  ‘God, you nearly gave me a heart attack,’ Nick complained, aware of the thumping in his chest. ‘Couldn’t you have rung the doorbell?’

  ‘I did, but I got no answer, so I let myself in. You can’t hear the bell down here.’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘I thought I’d see if you were all right. First night alone in the old place and all that. Something in the kitchen smells good.’

  ‘One of Pru’s casseroles.’

  ‘Which you’re planning to wash down with a Chateau Lafite before we can auction the lot off and share the proceeds?’

  ‘That’s right. You’ve caught me in the act.’

  ‘Never mind. Break out one for me and we’ll say no more about it.’ Andrew walked up to where Nick was standing. ‘Actually, though, I think it’s all whites down this end.’

  ‘What do you make of this?’ Nick pointed to the marks on the floor.

  Andrew looked down, then back up at Nick. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Somebody’s moved the rack.’

  ‘Yeah. I reckon they have.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Two people could have lifted it without scratching the floor.’

  ‘Why would Dad want to move it at all?’

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘It didn’t use to be hard up against the wall.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Double mystery, then.’ Andrew glanced around, turning the matter over in his mind. ‘Shall we just forget about it?’

  ‘I don’t think I can.’

  Andrew smiled. The neither.’

  They transferred the bottles to spare slots, of which there were plenty, in the next rack. The empty rack was no great weight, though cumbersome. They lifted it clear of the wall without much difficulty. Nothing sinister revealed itself amidst the dust and cobwebs in the corner of the cellar, as far as they could make out in the shadow cast by the rack. Andrew fetched the torch from the scullery to check if the shadow was concealing anything significant. The answer appeared at first glance to be no.

  Then Nick noticed something: an unevenness in the otherwise smooth surface of the floor. Peering closer, he saw two lines of roughness, like flattened ridges, leading out at right angles from the wall, and a third linking them, running along close to the foot of the wall. Neither he nor Andrew could be sure if they had always been there. They suspected not, although their suspicion did not amount to much. They moved the rack as far across as they could for a clearer view.

  This revealed a fourth line, further out and parallel to the wall, completing a rectangle about six feet by three. The suspicion strengthened. Nick stepped into the gap they had opened up between rack and wall and walked along to the rectangular patch of floor. Something felt different as he trod on it. He could not have said what it was. But it was certainly different.

  ‘Is there a hammer over there?’ Nick pointed to the shelf running most of the length of the wall behind Andrew. Various tools were stored on it, along with empty bottles, spare light bulbs and forgotten boxes of who knew what.

  ‘Yeah.’ Andrew held up a wooden-handled ball-pein of indeterminate age.

  ‘Pass it to me, would you?’ Andrew handed it over. Nick crouched down and gave the floor several taps either side of the line around the suspicious patch. ‘This part of the floor sounds less solid.’

  ‘Less solid? You mean hollow?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘It can’t be. There’s never been anything below here.’

  ‘Well, it sounds like there is now. And this line round here? What’s that about?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well, at a guess, I’d say somebody’s dug a hole, laid a slab across it, cemented it in and painted it over.’

  ‘Then pushed the rack over the top to hide it.’

  ‘Certainly looks that way.’

  Andrew tried hammering for himself. He nodded. ‘You could be right.’

  ‘It has to be Dad who did this.’

  ‘Suppose so. When, do you think?’

  ‘When was the rack moved?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing you keep tabs on, is it? Could be any time in the last twenty years.’

  ‘You don’t remember Dad doing any digging?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘But he must have done. Or got someone in to do it.’

  ‘The answer’s the same, Nick. I don’t remember. Anyway, why would Dad want to dig a hole down here?’

  ‘To hide something.’

  ‘Yeah. Exactly. To hide something.’

  But what? That was the question they had no hope of reasoning out an answer to. They went back upstairs and helped themselves to some of the old man’s Scotch. Nick turned off the oven, his appetite suddenly gone. Then he and Andrew sat down by the fire.

  ‘Bloody odd,’ said Andrew, after they had brooded in silence for a while. ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

  ‘Perhaps one of the others knows what it’s all about.’

  ‘Doubt it. Painted over and covered with the rack? Dad didn’t want anyone to know.’

  ‘Can we be certain he knew himself?’

  ‘Of course we can. It hasn’t always been there. He dug it or got someone else to dig it. Christ knows why, though. What’s down there?’

  ‘More than just a hole, I suspect.’

  ‘You bet.’ Andrew laughed. ‘Maybe it’s a tunnel. An emergency exit.’

  ‘It’s strange. Elspeth Hartley reckons something is hidden in this house. Now we find a hiding-place. Coincidence?’

  ‘Has to be. I’m not even sure the cellar’s original. Either way, nobody was stashing anything down there in the seventeenth century.’

  ‘But there’s something stashed there now.’

  Andrew’s eyes narrowed as he reflected on their father’s famously devious thought processes. ‘It couldn’t be the window, could it, Nick? Dad couldn’t have found it and hidden it down there?’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘To spite us, maybe.’

  ‘That hole wasn’t dug last week. And it must be years since Dad was physically capable of the work involved.’

  ‘He could have hired somebody to do it.’

  Nick sighed. ‘We’re going in circles.’
<
br />   ‘Not indefinitely we aren’t. When Tantris gets his hands on this house, that hole will be opened up.’

  ‘True enough. But I doubt he’ll find the Doom Window of St Neot down there.’

  ‘Me too.’ Andrew smiled mischievously. ‘But why wait to find out for certain?’

  Andrew fetched from the barn the tools he reckoned he would need for the job: sledgehammer, chisel, crowbar, shovel. There was no stopping him at this stage, much as Nick would have liked to. Instinct told him they should think long and hard before doing anything. But Andrew was past thinking. Nor, Nick realized, was he taking this action purely to solve a riddle left behind by their father. It was about more than that. It was about several decades’ worth of resentment and deception. Now, with the old man gone, Andrew was free to have done with both.

  ‘He screwed us up good and proper, didn’t he?’ Andrew voiced his thoughts almost on cue as he and Nick lugged the tools down into the cellar. ‘Well, maybe not Irene and Anna. But you, me and Basil? He had a way with his sons all right.’

  ‘I stopped blaming Dad for my problems a long time ago,’ said Nick.

  ‘Good for you. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t to blame for them.’

  ‘Maybe not. I just don’t see how it helps to load it all on him.’

  ‘It feels as if it helps.’ Andrew peeled off his sweater and rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘And this may help some more.’ He crouched over the slab and tapped it with the chisel, flaking off some of the paint to reveal the surface of the stone beneath. ‘Looks like elvan. One good blow should do it.’ With that he stood up, grasped the sledgehammer and let fly.

  One good blow was not, in the event, enough. Debris sprayed up from the slab, pinging against the metalwork of the empty rack and bouncing away past Nick across the room. Only at the third blow was there a loud, cracking sound. Andrew stopped and, stepping closer with the torch, Nick saw a jagged line across the centre of the slab.