The hasp came free. The lid went up a notch. I could breathe again.
I wrapped my aching fingers over the side of the box, in spite of the risk of giving myself away. I did not want the lid to drop shut on me again.
Hours after we had left Bran—subjectively, although probably half an hour by the clock—the car slowed, turned left down a bumpier surface, then turned again in a near-complete circle. It stopped.
The engine died.
I tightened my grip on the knife.
I did not hear voices. No servants came out to greet the man, no passers-by carried on a conversation. Movement; the creak of the car’s door opening; its springs rose a fraction. The door closed. Footsteps crunched in gravel around the front of the car, coming closer, then stopped—oh God, he was going to open the back door and look inside, see the curls of wood and the tips of my fingers. Hand tight on the knife, every muscle braced, eyes prepared for the dazzle of light, I heard the click of a door’s latch and nearly—so nearly—flung up the lid and attacked.
But the light that seeped in beneath the lid grew no stronger, and before I could make up my mind, the door slammed again.
This time, I did laugh aloud.
It was the front door. He’d been fetching something from his passenger-side floor.
Footsteps, receding. I edged up the lid, blinking against the light. Not too bad—night was near, and we seemed to be in the shade. I lifted my head slowly to peer out, just in time to see him disappear through the trades entrance of a once-grand country house.
When the faint sound of the wooden door closing reached me, I pushed the lid all the way upright against its chains, slipping the knife back into my boot.
Open the door, climb out of the coffin, drop onto a weed-grown forecourt. Lower the lid, ease the door shut—then a quick scurry to the house, bent over for fear of a careless glance out of a window.
I had brought my picklocks, but to my surprise, he had not locked the door behind him.
So I turned the knob and warily, braced for rapid flight, edged open the door.
Chapter Forty-three
This was, as one would expect, the kitchen. At this time of the evening, pots should have been bubbling, footmen straightening their collars, the cook berating the tweeny for being underfoot.
It had been a while since this kitchen had seen a cook and footman.
The copper pans over the big cast-iron stove showed the first dull signs of tarnish. The stove was cold. The dirt on the floor would have been in itself a firing offence.
Not that there weren’t clear signs of habitation: three saucepans in the outer scullery, plates and cutlery rinsed but unwashed beside them, and a small collection of basic provisions—bread, eggs, cheese, and a few tomatoes and onions—looking lonely beside a modern hotplate at one end of the twelve-foot-long countertop.
Was this the doctor’s house? Even in its current state it seemed grand, for a country medic. Perhaps he was caretaking while the owners—and their servants—were away? It would explain the signs of a bachelor’s life. Because there had been servants, until perhaps two weeks ago, to judge by the degree of patina on the copper.
I could hear no sound at all. Should I go out into the house itself, or down, into its cellars?
Following the theory that prisoners were kept in dungeons—and knowing his record of tucking women into dark spaces—I opened the nearest door, looking for a set of stairs. Instead, I found the pantry. It, too, had been active not long ago, with a bowl of potatoes in the early stages of sprouting and a small, dun-coloured moth, disturbed by the door’s motion, that did not bode well for the grains and flour.
Then my eye caught on an object sitting on the floor—an object that would not be completely out of place in any country house in Surrey. Sides of woven willow, leather straps, a stencil declaring F&M: an actual Fortnum & Mason hamper, beloved of explorers and picnicking families the world around. The buckles were unfastened and a thread of excelsior dribbled over one side, so I lifted the lid.
Biscuits both digestive and iced, half a dozen wedges of cheese, and jars of relish, potted shrimp, and caviar. A small tin of Earl Grey tea, which had been opened. No wine—but two large bottles of Malvern Spring water (By Appointment to His Majesty the King) and one of commercial lemonade, with a hole in the excelsior showing where another had rested.
Not everything bore the Fortnum brand. A few of the items I’d have thought more appropriate for upper servants than the household itself—even a Marquis might hesitate to serve Carr’s to guests—but the rest of it was clearly intended for formal use.
Oddly, the hamper contained the only English foodstuffs in the pantry. There were tins, jars, and packets from Germany and France, some dried pasta from Italy, and a handful of things with Cyrillic or Turkish labels, but the majority of the provisions were Roumanian.
From alarmingly close came the sudden hard clack of heels on tiles, sending me into a leap behind the only possible hiding place, the half-closed pantry door. Had he been there all the time, lurking just outside the kitchen? Maybe not—and in case he didn’t know I was there, I daren’t move the door enough to get at my knife.
He came straight across the kitchen and into the pantry. It was a shock to see the shape cross the crack in the door, a foot away from my shoulder, and I braced myself for his “Aha!” of confrontation. Instead, I heard a light slapping sound, followed by a rustle, then the tap of something hard being set on a wooden shelf. Another rustle, a slightly louder slap, then a tiny metallic jingle—the buckles on the hamper lid? A crinkling noise…and then he left—pulling the pantry door shut behind him.
Leaving me in pitch blackness, yet again.
More footsteps, the sound of a door.
Was he leaving? Or merely fetching something from the car before settling down to his snack of water biscuits and cheese?
A car started up, and I cursed my luck.
If I’d only stayed in my coffin…
Instead, I stepped into an empty kitchen, and saw that, yes, the car had gone. As for the hamper, it was missing the Carr’s biscuits, a piece of cheddar, and one of the Malvern Waters.
It seemed a peculiar hour for a picnic. Perhaps he went somewhere to watch the sunset? Then I remembered the hospital—yes, he was probably checking on some patient there. Taking them a treat? That made more sense than serving them to a prisoner. And if he’d intended some kind of perverted wooing of the girl, wouldn’t he have taken her wine and chocolates?
I required more data. But if he had gone into Brașov, he might be away for an hour—and he could be heading for dinner afterwards, rather than face the dreary washing-up and near-empty larder. Even a short absence meant I could search the house without having to tip-toe through the halls.
The next door from the pantry held the stairs to the cellars. It smelled of damp, but there was an electrical light switch, which I turned on.
I found two locked doors. One held nothing but empty shelves. The other took me longer to open, and turned out to be a sort of strong-room. Here, too, the house’s valuables may once have been stored, but now the shelves held only a few pieces of silver plate gone black with age.
I did not bother to lock either door, although I did wipe the soles of my shoes before crossing the kitchen, so as not to betray myself too blatantly.
On the other side of the service door, I could see why I had not heard his approach: carpeting, old and grey-looking in the early part of the hallway, newer and cleaner as it reached the dining room. This confirmed what I had seen in the kitchen, that the house had been maintained until fairly recently, the carpets swept and the fireplaces tidied for the summer. The windows were clean, the dust was not thick, and the cobwebs were in their early stages.
So, yes, perhaps two weeks of abandonment.
The long dining room table had the same dust over its polis
h, except for the end nearest the fireplace. Here, there were signs of a single pair of elbows sitting down to dine—although on closer examination, that area, too, had some dust, just not as much.
As if someone had started out dining in the formal room, but without servants, started to take his dinners elsewhere.
I found that elsewhere in the library.
The room bore all the signs of a long-time bachelor retreat, all dark colours, old paintings, leather-bound books, a couple of marble busts, and a very beautiful family tree produced some fifty years before. This room, too, had been recently abandoned by the cleaners, shown in the half-full waste-baskets, cluttered ash trays, and cups forgotten on tables. It was by no means disgusting, and the air smelt only rather stale, but it was clearly where the man had retreated, to simplify his solitary life.
A crumpled linen napkin on a table beside a well-used armchair testified to the occasional meal eaten with a plate in his lap. The rumpled travelling rug over the back of the settee suggested that he might occasionally fall asleep here as well.
I will be honest: I expected far worse. I expected a loathsome den, a place where an abductor of women could crawl to gloat and recall his foul deeds. I expected filth, not dust; depravity, not lap-top dining and casual naps.
Perverts and degenerates are often quite good at presenting a genial face to the world, but when they retreat to a private space, it does not tend to look like this. The room was untidy, but frankly, it was nicer than one of Holmes’ bolt-holes after he’d been there a few days. There was even an embossed leather book-mark in the German novel he had been reading. A quick glance over the shelves confirmed that many were old and few were in English, but among those was a three-year-old copy of Dracula.
I turned my back on the temptation of the large, leather-topped desk: before investigating its secrets, I had to be certain that Gabriela was not shut away in an attic.
Formal morning room, parlour, entrance hall, another larger parlour, a billiards room—all the usual fittings of a grand house, empty of life. This brought me around to the servants’ realm, but just before that baize door was my first locked door outside of the cellars. I got it open, and found the estate office. There was a wealth of box-files, although nothing more recent than 1913. The War had upended the orderly management of many estates, including, it would seem, this one. An ornately framed but somewhat faded map with a date of 1848 showed a considerable estate, with holdings all over the area, including several in the vicinity of Bran, and—yes, a crooked patch that might have coincided with the derelict barn near the Stoica house. Closer to the centre of the estate was a concentration of tenant farms and an expanse of wild land adjoining the forest, for generations of Mikó men to take their friends out for a day of slaughtering wildlife.
The explanation for the locked door stood on the shelves behind the old desk: jars, packets, and carboys, neatly labelled and arranged, containing drugs for his medical practice. Perhaps he had stopped leaving them in Bran after his surgery was broken into. In any case, the lock on the door was not new. Headache tablets, cough syrup, various ointments and the like, but also paregoric, morphine, ether, and—yes: chloroform.
This door I did lock when I left the room, then walked up the stairs in the gloom of dusk.
Bedrooms, bath-rooms, dressing rooms, guest suites. And on the top storey, servants’ quarters and attics full of old clothing and children’s toys. The occupied rooms up here comprised a sort of suite, a bedroom and sitting-room, with cupboards suggesting a butler-valet and his cook-housekeeper wife.
Two servants for a house this size? Even considering the dust, they must have day help from nearby.
The doctor’s bedroom suite went some way to explaining how two servants could manage: the modern toilet and hot-water geyser replaced a housemaid, electricity did away with the maintenance of lamps and candles, a stack of fresh shirts and linen testified to a laundry service in the town. A patent safety-razor in the doctor’s cupboard said that he took care of his own grooming.
All in all, a house this size was a step above the salary of a Roumanian doctor, but enough corners had been cut to make life manageable—at least in the summer, without the cost of heating.
His wardrobe, too, was a notch above what might be expected, but the only extravagant touches were a beautifully tailored evening suit and a vicuña overcoat I wanted to steal.
A kind of sideboard in one corner of the dressing room functioned as the doctor’s laundry room. On top was a stack of four crisply folded shirts. In the waste-bin beside it was a crumpled-up sheet of off-white paper and twine, and a hand-written receipt for the week’s laundry. Inside its doors were a pair of large canvas bags. One held three days’ worth of shirts and linen—the smudged one I’d noticed on Saturday, and two others. If Saturday’s was twice-worn, then he’d changed out of today’s before going out again. Beneath that top shirt was the tan-coloured suit he’d worn when we met.
The other bag, smaller and lumpy, held a different kind of cleaning: shoes awaiting the polish brush.
One of them was a pair of slick-soled city shoes, approximately 300 millimetres in length, that bore a high-tide line of mud half an inch up their sides.
In the end, I left them there. The doctor had several pairs of shoes in the wardrobe. If he hadn’t rushed to clean these four days ago when the stable-yard mud was fresh, it was unlikely that he would worry about them the moment he returned home tonight.
I replaced the shoes and the canvas bags, looking over the room to be sure there was nothing out of place.
Cellars to attic, front to back, I had seen no sign of any woman under the age of sixty. I made my way back down to the library by the sheltered light of my torch, to settle in at the man’s desk.
The centre drawer held the usual sorts of supplies, debris, and unfiled paperwork. He used a gold-nibbed pen from France, ink from Germany, and Italian paper for his correspondence. There was a piece of card-stock similar to the one sent to the Queen, with the threat against Ileana, but without the original for comparison, I could not draw any conclusions. A pair of letters, their envelopes sliced open, appeared to be from friends, one of them writing to inform him of the death of a mutual friend from university, the other to give news of a daughter’s impending marriage.
The top drawer on the left gave me pause: bullets, gun-oil, and a cleaning rag.
The doctor not only had a pistol, but had taken it with him.
It made the rest of the left-hand side somewhat anticlimactic, being mostly boxes of stationery and such.
The top drawer on the right-hand side revealed a bank pass-book with a balance that made me blink. Father Constantin had said that the doctor came into money a few years ago, but I had not grasped the extent of that understatement.
So why would a man with that bank balance be camping in a house with no servants? I could understand if he’d been hiding a kidnapped girl in his attic, but unless this house had more secret rooms than Castle Bran, it held no prisoner. Perhaps the servants had caught on to his misdeeds, and fled? If so, they’d left their family photographs and winter coats behind.
The next drawer held further revelations: letters from his solicitor, with carbon copies of his own to the man. (I idly noted that there was no sign of a typewriting machine here, or in his Bran surgery. Did he have offices in the hospital? Perhaps with the use of a secretary? Yet another matter to investigate.) These letters illustrated just how much money he had at his command, and where it had come from.
For one thing, there was far more than the cash in his bank account. A French chateau that was in the final stages of being sold, stocks in several countries, half-interest in a yacht that was also being sold. It would take me the rest of the night to read all the long negotiations that the legal gentleman described, but I flipped through, to get a general idea, before returning them to their file.
Th
e next one held business receipts dating back to the first of the year. There was nothing from 1924 in here—perhaps he turned those over to his accounting firm at the end of each year—but even lacking those, there was still too much to spend time on. It was quite dark, and head-lamps could come up the drive at any moment. Again, I merely gave them a quick survey, hoping for any clue as to his wider interests—but then, pushed down and nearly invisible between a coal bill and one for the repairs of his surgery door (in June, though he’d told us the spring) my eye caught on a familiar font.
The letterhead would be familiar to anyone who had ever supplied an outdoor party, overnight rail trip, or sporting weekend in England: Fortnum & Mason.
Dr Mikó had received the hamper in July, having apparently specified that he wanted its contents to be both “hearty” (a request I did not imagine Fortnum often received) and without alcohol. Hence the potted shrimp, the surprising amount of cheese, and bottles of lemonade and Malvern Water.
And yet, there’d been a cut-glass tumbler on the table beside his well-worn leather armchair. I walked over and picked up the glass: yes, a clear aroma of spirits, probably tuica. I settled down in the chair, as if to absorb the man’s intentions from his customary seat, and shut off the torch to think.
A doctor from an old Brașov family, who inherits a fortune. Yet instead of closing his surgery doors and setting off on a world tour—or even using some fraction of the money to restore the family house to its former glory—he orders a couple of nice suits, then continues his life as a village doctor. And when he buys a new motorcar, instead of something sporty or luxurious, it is a machine large enough to be converted into a combination of omnibus and ambulance, so as to better serve a smattering of agricultural accidents and problem births.
One might picture a mildly eccentric gentleman, comfortable with his life and happy to ignore the huge change in his status—except that at the same time, he has begun to convert as much of his new-found estate as he can into cold, hard cash.
Castle Shade Page 27
