Jacinta had opened the window just wide enough for me to squeeze my fingers between it and the sill. It swung out smoothly until it was almost horizontal, then stopped, leaving an aperture sufficient for me to crawl through. Sufficient or not, though, it was a scramble, with a drop of four feet inside which I had to negotiate without making any noise. At length, I lowered myself to the nursery floor confident that nobody could have heard me.
I took the torch from my pocket, switched it on and moved its beam round the room. Clearly, it was no longer used for anything but storage. There were a couple of mats covering the boards in the centre, a large wooden chest in one corner, some cardboard boxes piled on top of each other, a rocking horse, a play-pen, two large cupboards, and over all a musty air of collective abandonment. Turning back, I leaned out through the window and waved Rodrigo up.
Alone, I doubt Rodrigo could have managed the entry. As it was, I hauled him bodily through the gap and did my best to break his fall. After a few stifled oaths, he pronounced himself ready to proceed. I led the way to the door by an indirect route, hoping to avoid creaking any of the boards. The policy seemed to work, for we reached the door in silence. I opened it cautiously, but there seemed no cause for alarm. The passage outside was quiet and empty.
To the right lay Jacinta’s bedroom. I wondered if she had stayed awake and felt sure, in that instant, that she had; if so, she must surely have heard us by now. To the left the passage curved and descended by a short flight of steps to the gallery above the hall. From there the shapes and alignments of every room fanned out in my mind like diagrams leaping from a page. For a moment, I could believe I was both outside and inside a doll’s house of my own construction, stooping to squint through a tiny window at its still tinier occupant just as I was turning to see a huge eye blinking at me through the glass.
‘Staddon!’
‘Yes, all right. I know what I’m doing.’
‘Then do it.’
I started down the passage, keeping close to the left-hand wall. The gallery was empty and silent, but less dark than the passage; the windows looking out over the courtyard were uncurtained, admitting a meagre ration of moonlight. We reached its far end and there, I knew, a decision would have to be made: whether to go downstairs first or search some of the bedrooms. The obvious room in which to install a safe was the study. The library was another possibility. They both had the additional advantage (from our point of view) of being remote from the staff quarters. I signalled my intention to Rodrigo and eased open the door leading to the stairhead.
We descended slowly, the darkened hall opening up beneath us like a cavern. The height of the treads and the dimensions of the quarter-landings were exactly as I remembered, but for Rodrigo’s sake I shone my torch behind me as I went. Below, some embers were still smouldering in the fireplace, casting across the room a faint yellow light that could have been a failing afterglow of its gaudy inauguration thirteen years ago.
At the foot of the stairs, more memories flew to meet me from a lost time. To my right were the doors to the drawing-room, where she had waited for me that July afternoon before the house-warming. How grateful I was that we did not need to enter. Instead, I turned left, leading Rodrigo out of the hall and into a branch of the lobby that led to the library, study and billiards-room. With luck, we would soon have found the safe and I could set all thoughts of the past aside.
But it was not to prove so easy. The library was unaltered. That became obvious to me as I cast my torch-beam round the well-stocked bookshelves. We hurried on to the study, only to find that the same applied. It was a small enough room for anything as significant as a blocked-off alcove to be immediately obvious, but its proportions were exactly as I had designed them. The only doubt raised by its contents was whether it still served as a study. It had more the appearance of a schoolroom and I wondered if this was where Jacinta received her tutors. If so, obviously the safe must be elsewhere. But where?
Victor was as cautious as he was secretive. In his mind, as much as the architecture of Clouds Frome, the answer surely lay. As I stood and thought of how devious yet logical he was, Rodrigo started to say something in my ear, but I cut him short.
‘I have it! It must be upstairs. Come on.’
I led the way back to the lobby, opened the double doors leading to the hall and was about to step through when there was a noise ahead of us, not loud but quite distinct, something between a snap and a creak. I pulled up at once, my every sense alert, but nothing followed. The wavering glimmer from the fire reached the shuttered windows and played weakly across the furniture. Otherwise there was neither sound nor movement. Rodrigo touched my elbow and whispered: ‘The fire, I think.’
I nodded. Subsiding ash in the grate was indeed the likeliest explanation. Perhaps the acoustics of the unusually high ceiling accounted for the noise seeming to come from a different direction. I headed across the room to the stairs and started up them, theorizing as I went. According to Hermione, Victor retained use of the master bedroom, whilst Consuela’s bedroom was what had originally been dubbed the Wye suite. So, where better for Victor to conceal a safe than in a room only he had the use of and where, as an additional precaution, he slept every night? Except this night, of course, when he was in London and we had a chance we might never have again to learn his best-kept secret.
The master bedroom was directly above the hall, reached by a dog-leg passage from the head of the stairs that led nowhere else. The privacy this was intended to bestow was ideal for our purposes. I opened the door carefully but without hesitation, willing myself to disregard all the memories I knew would be lying in wait for me of the last time I had been there, and why, and with whom.
All trappings of femininity were gone from the room, plain wallpaper and striped curtains replacing the colourful fruit and flower patterns favoured by Consuela. I stood a few feet inside the door and swept the torch-beam methodically round the walls, reconstructing in my mind every detail of the angles and proportions I had planned and setting them against what I saw. Nothing had changed. The recesses either side of the fireplace were not only the same as each other but the same as my recollection of them. There were no tell-tale tamperings with skirting-boards or picture-mouldings, no signs of any kind that a partition had been constructed.
‘Nothing,’ I said, turning back to Rodrigo.
‘You are certain?’
‘Of course I’m certain.’
‘Those doors—’ He pointed across the room. ‘Where do they lead?’
‘Dressing-rooms, communicating with the bathroom. Not very promising, I’m afraid, but we’ll look.’
Twin dressing-rooms, both leading to the same bathroom, had been Victor’s idea. Entering what had been Consuela’s, I realized from the arrangement of brushes, clippers, colognes and razors on the table beneath the mirror that Victor had taken it over, presumably for the sake of its superior view over the orchard. Rodrigo waited in the bedroom whilst I walked round through the bathroom into the second dressing-room. It was unfurnished and clearly no longer used. In fact, the door leading back into the bedroom was locked. I turned round to retrace my steps, glimpsing a stray reflection of myself in the mirror as I did so.
Then I stopped. Something was wrong, different, inconsistent with the plans I had meticulously drawn up for this house so long ago. I looked in the mirror, shone the torch at it, moved the beam away to the door, then back at the mirror. This dressing-room was smaller than the other one, rectangular where it should have been square, narrower by at least two feet. I stepped closer to the wall on which the mirror hung, and tapped it with my knuckle. It was hollow, nothing but a plasterboard partition fashioned to resemble the real wall which stood two feet behind it.
‘What is it?’ whispered Rodrigo from the bathroom doorway. He must have heard the tapping and followed me in.
‘I think we’ve found it.’
‘Where?’
‘Behind here. But I can’t—’ I had moved the torc
h-beam up and down the wall without seeing any crack or crevice that might be part of a hatch. Then, as the beam flashed back at me from the mirror, I realized why. Reaching out with both hands, I tried to lift the mirror away from the surface behind it. It would not budge. It was not suspended, then, but firmly fixed. I ran my fingers carefully round the rim and, as they neared the bottom right-hand corner, felt something catch them. It was a tiny lever and, as I pushed down against it, it moved and clicked. Then the mirror, and the section of wall behind it, swung slowly open.
We had found the safe. It stood on a shelf linking the false and real walls, somehow smaller than I had expected, no more than two feet in any dimension, but as solid and unyielding as one three times its size, black and gleaming, with the manufacturer’s name proudly scrolled in red and gold. There was a handle to open it, raised in a locked position, and, in the centre of the door, a dial with numbers inscribed around it, running from zero to a hundred.
‘You have done well, Staddon,’ said Rodrigo.
‘Can you open it?’
‘Of course. Shine your torch on the dial.’
According to Gleasure, the combination was a set of three two-digit numbers representing the years of birth of Victor, Mortimer and Hermione, with the thousands and hundreds omitted in each case. From the Hereford registrar, Rodrigo had established that Victor was born in 1868, Mortimer in 1864 and Hermione in 1858. The combination was therefore 68–64–58. If this safe operated in the same way as the one used at the office, the first number would need to be dialled four times anti-clockwise, the second number three times clockwise and the third number twice anticlockwise. Following this, it would only be necessary to ease the dial back in a clockwise direction to release the locking mechanism before turning the handle.
As Rodrigo stooped forward, I trained the torch-beam on the dial. He rested his fingers on the knurled boss at its centre for a moment, then began to rotate it, muttering instructions to himself as he did so. ‘Sessenta e oito … Em sentido anti-horário … Um, dois, três, quatro … Agora, sessenta e quatro em sentido horário … Um, dois, três … Por fim, cinquenta e oito em sentido anti-horário … Um, dois … Agora, se Deus quiser …’ Gingerly, he turned the dial for the last time. There was a click. Then he lowered the handle and pulled the door open by an inch. Then he looked back at me and grinned. ‘Maybe I should have done this for a living, eh Staddon?’
‘What’s inside?’
‘The will, I hope and pray. Let us see.’
He stepped back to open the door wide. The torch-beam fell on three shelves filled with neatly stacked documents. To my surprise, on the top shelf, there were also several bundles of freshly minted bank-notes. Peering closer, I saw they were five pound notes. Each bundle must have contained several thousand pounds. The strangest and most irrational thought sprang into my mind. I reached forward, slid the top note out of one of the bundles and slipped it into my pocket.
Rodrigo glared at me in amazement. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ll explain later. Concentrate on finding the will.’ With that, I flashed the torch-beam down to the lower shelves. Rodrigo shrugged his shoulders and stretched out his hands towards the sheaves of documents.
Suddenly, there was a noise to our right. As I swung round, I realized it was a key being turned in the lock of the door leading to the bedroom. In the same instant, the door was framed in yellow and a glimmer of light appeared behind us in the bathroom. ‘Porcaria!’ murmured Rodrigo, snapping off his torch. But it was too late for such precautions. The door was already opening. Light flooded in, blinding me for a moment. I heard a voice shout, ‘Stay where you are!’ and recognized it with a jolt of incredulity. It could not be. We were not merely discovered, but—
‘Victor!’ exclaimed Rodrigo.
Victor Caswell was standing in the doorway, clad in slippers, pyjamas and a dressing-gown. With the light behind him it was difficult to tell what expression was on his face. But there was no doubt about the double-barrelled shot-gun he was holding. It was aimed straight at us. ‘Don’t move, either of you,’ he said in a controlled voice. ‘This is loaded and I’ll use it if I have to.’ Imogen Roebuck appeared behind him. She too wore a dressing-gown, as if she had just been roused from bed. But something was wrong about the sequence of events, something false in the circumstances that confronted me. Why was Victor not in London? And why, since he was here, had we not found him in his bedroom? ‘Miss Roebuck,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘go downstairs and call the police station in Hereford. Tell them we’ve discovered some burglars and will hold them pending their arrival.’ Without a word, she slipped away. I heard the bedroom door close behind her.
‘What do you mean to do with us?’ I heard myself ask in a hoarse parody of my normal voice.
‘Hand you over to the authorities. What else should I do with a pair of housebreakers?’
‘You must realize that’s not what we are.’
‘I realize nothing of the kind.’
‘We came for your will. We came to find out who would have inherited in the event of your death last September.’ Rodrigo was screened from Victor to some extent by the door of the safe. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see he had slipped his right hand into his jacket. I guessed his intention in the same moment that I guessed Victor’s. He was here because he knew we would be here. He was here to spring the trap we had blundered into. ‘Who’s your heir, Victor? That’s all we want to know.’
‘Really? Well, it’s not going to convince the police any more than it convinces me.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘If it is, you’re bigger fools than I thought.’
‘Your fools, you mean. The fools you’ve made of us.’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Gleasure put us up to this. But you know that, don’t you? You know because you told him to.’
‘I’ve heard enough! Close the safe and step out here.’ He moved back a pace.
‘You want us out of the way, don’t you? In prison, where neither of us can do you any harm – or Consuela any good.’
‘I won’t tell you again. Move away from the safe.’
‘Do as he says, Staddon,’ said Rodrigo in a resigned tone, reaching up with his left hand to swing the door shut. ‘We have no—’ Suddenly, he launched himself at Victor, the knife clasped in his right hand and raised behind his head. He shouted as he lunged, some cry of hatred and anger. And, as he shouted, there was a roar that swallowed every other noise, an explosion from the doorway that caught Rodrigo in its path and threw him past me against the wall. The whole room seemed to be vibrating. Blood was spattered across the mirror and dripping onto the floor. And Rodrigo was coughing, choking, clutching at his chest. I heard the knife fall at his feet, then, as slowly as a tree falling, he toppled sideways, struck the door-frame and subsided onto his face.
Sound subsided with him, fading rapidly till only the dripping remained, growing less frequent all the time. The twitching of his limbs stopped, the pool of blood around him ceased to spread. Then, and only then, I nerved myself to look at Victor. He was leaning back against the bedroom door, breathing hard, the shot-gun broken and pointing down, smoke rising from its barrels.
‘You’ve … You’ve killed him.’
‘I had no choice. It was him or me.’
I dropped to my knees. Rodrigo’s face was half-turned towards me, squashed and distorted by his fall, his moustache clotted with blood, one of his eyes open and staring blankly in my direction. ‘You planned it this way,’ I murmured. ‘You wanted this to happen.’
‘Nobody but you will believe that.’
‘He threatened to kill you if Consuela hanged. That’s why, wasn’t it? Because you were afraid he’d be as good as his word.’
‘Oh, I think he would have been, don’t you?’
There was a hollow, sliding sound above me. When I looked up, I realized what it was. Victor had put a cartridge into one of the barrels
of the gun. And now, as I watched, he loaded the other barrel as well and closed the breech. Then he licked his lips nervously and turned towards me.
‘Get up!’
He meant to kill me too. One glimpse of his expression told me it was so.
‘Get up, I say!’
‘Why? So you don’t have to explain why you shot a kneeling man? I’m unarmed, remember.’
‘Pick up the knife.’
‘No.’
‘Pick it up, damn you!’
‘It won’t work, Victor. One man shot in self-defence is credible. But they won’t believe two. Not with only one weapon between us.’
Doubt entered his mind. I could see it wriggling behind the trembling mask of his face. Some part of his brain, if not persuaded by what I had said, was at least uncertain enough to hold him back.
‘Victor!’ The door on the far side of the bedroom opened and Imogen Roebuck hurried in. ‘What’s happened?’ As she approached, she saw Rodrigo’s body on the floor, saw me kneeling beside it, saw Victor pointing the gun straight at me. All this she took in and assessed at a glance. There was surprise but no horror in her expression, dismay but not a hint of panic. ‘I heard the shot. I thought …’
‘He came at me with a knife,’ said Victor over his shoulder.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Victor made sure of that.’
For an instant, his eyes widened, his grip on the gun tightened. Then Miss Roebuck was at his elbow, looking straight at me as she spoke. ‘The police will be here as soon as possible. Why don’t we go downstairs and wait for them there?’
A desire to finish what he had started still gnawed at Victor, but he knew now that it was too late. ‘All right,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Let’s do that.’
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