by Agatha Frost
“Let’s go,” Julia whispered. “She’s there.”
Not wanting to waste a second, they both turned around and hurried back down the corridor. They walked through the open door, just as the sun drifted over the horizon in the far distance.
“Can you make sure you’re in the drawing room after the main course?” Julia asked Benjamin when he popped his head out once more. “I’d appreciate it if you found Andrew and brought him along too. I suspect he’s lurking around the castle somewhere.”
“I guess so,” he said with a small shrug as he tinkered with the circuit board. “What if he won’t come? He’s been avoiding me since he was rehired yesterday.”
“Oh, he’ll come,” Julia called over her shoulder as she hurried out of the courtyard. “He won’t want to miss this.”
They hurried back along the path, and by the time they reached the entrance hall, darkness had completely consumed the castle.
“How did you know she’d already be there?” Sue asked.
“She wants to present herself as the gracious host,” Julia whispered as she yanked on the heavy entrance door. “She’s like a robot who adjusts herself perfectly to every situation. She cries when she needs to look like she’s grieving, she’s sweet when she’s dealing with customers, and she’s prompt and organised when she’s hosting a dinner party for her guests.”
They both slipped through the door, instantly stopping in their tracks when they saw Rory standing in the entrance to the office behind the desk. He was wearing a kilt that matched the red and blue tartan running down Charlotte’s dress, and he was so consumed with the piece of paper he was looking over, he didn’t notice that he was no longer alone. Julia glanced to the grand sweeping staircase, each second painfully slipping away. Her window of opportunity wasn’t going to be open for much longer, but she couldn’t risk attracting Rory’s attention.
“I need a distraction,” Julia whispered to Sue as Rory turned his back to them and walked back to the office.
“What kind of distraction?” Sue asked, looking confused at Julia.
“I don’t know,” Julia said with a shrug as she pushed Sue forward. “You’ll think of something.”
Sue stumbled forward, glancing awkwardly over her shoulder at Julia. She looked around the entrance hall as she tiptoed closer to Rory. Julia crept up the first couple of steps, keeping close to the wall. When she looked back over, Sue was reaching up to the top of the giant mantelpiece, the bottom of her chiffon dress fluttering dangerously close to the amber flames of the roaring fire. With the edge of her fingertips, she picked up a white and blue china vase and lifted it above her head. With the same force of Benjamin chopping wood with his one hand, she sent the vase flying into the ground near the reception desk. It shattered into a million pieces with a clatter, and Rory instantly appeared in the doorway.
“What was that?” he cried.
“That vase just flew off the mantelpiece!” Sue cried dramatically, waving her arms above her head. “It could have hit me!”
“What vase? Oh, God. That’s a priceless family heirloom! What have you done, you stupid woman?”
“It was like a poltergeist or something,” Sue cried desperately before glancing to Julia and giving her a fleeting unsure grin. “I’m going to sue you! Sue will sue!”
Rory walked around the reception desk and stared down at the vase with his hands in his red hair. Julia took her moment and crept silently up the stairs, sticking to the wall so as not to disrupt the ancient wood. When she reached the landing, she let out a giant sigh of relief.
Julia gave Sue a thumbs up over the broken section of the bannister before slipping completely out of view. She walked straight to Charlotte’s bedroom door at the end of the wood-lined hall. She paused and stared at the family portrait once more, looking into the dull and lifeless eyes of the redheaded little girl staring back at her. She dreaded to think what the photographs that didn’t make their way into frames and onto the walls looked like.
Without bothering to knock, Julia opened the door. She knew it was very possible that Charlotte had retreated to her bedroom in the time it had taken them to make their way around the castle, but she hoped for the best and stepped inside. The bedroom was empty.
Unsure of what she was specifically looking for, Julia looked around the enormous bedroom, hoping something obvious would jump out at her. The only light in the room was coming from a lamp on the antique desk on the far side of the room. Julia decided it was as good a place to start as any, so she hurried across the bedroom, stepping over Charlotte’s clothes from earlier, which were strewn across the wooden floor.
The surface of the desk lacked a handwritten confession or anything else incriminating. The only thing that was out of place was a single pen, which sat in the centre of the mahogany desk. Julia tried the drawers, but they were locked.
She turned around and looked to the bed, but the box of paperwork she had seen during her brief visit was no longer there. Charlotte was a clever woman; she wasn’t going to leave anything of interest on display for somebody to find. She wouldn’t put it past Charlotte to intentionally clean up after herself in case someone did go snooping.
She set off towards the bed, hoping to find something in one of the bedside tables, but stopped in her tracks when the door handle creaked and the door edged open. Fear fired up in her heart as she looked around the bedroom for a quick place to hide, but she was in the middle of wide open space.
Facing the door in the dim light, she accepted that she had been caught and that it was all over.
Chapter Thirteen
“Julia?” she heard her sister whisper. “Is this the right room?”
Sue slipped inside, closing the door softly behind her. Julia’s heart steadied in her chest, and she let out a thankful laugh. She continued to the bedside table and pulled open the drawer, her heart still pounding hard. She arched a brow when she saw an eye mask, a pack of over-the-counter painkillers, a book, and a pair of tweezers. They were perfectly arranged as though they were part of a show home, and not actually items that were ever used.
“What are we looking for?” Sue whispered, looking around the room as she tucked her caramel curls behind her ears.
“I’m not sure,” Julia whispered back, turning back to the desk. “Those drawers are locked, which makes me think there is something in there, but the key could be anywhere.”
Sue walked over and yanked on them just to make sure. She looked in the pot of pens and pencils on the desk, instantly pulling out a tiny silver key.
“Anywhere, you said?” Sue said with a smirk and a wink. “You give the woman too much credit.”
Sue wriggled the key in the top drawer. The lock clicked, and she stepped to the side to let Julia open it up. Heart banging behind the tight dress, Julia quickly slid open the drawer. Her eyes lit up when she saw a single brown manila envelope. She lifted it out with shaky fingers and pulled out a thick stack of stapled paper. Deciding it wouldn’t make a difference if they were caught at that moment, she sat down and began flicking through the paper.
“It looks like a contract of some kind,” Sue whispered as she looked over Julia’s shoulder. “What’s it for?”
“I think it’s the deeds to the castle,” Julia whispered as she flicked through the legal jargon. “It’s hard to tell.”
She landed on the final page, and her eyes wandered to the three signatures at the bottom. One was Henry’s, one was Charlotte’s, and the other Rory’s. In the bottom right-hand corner, a date had been scribbled in the same handwriting as Henry’s signature.
“This is from a month ago,” Julia said, the surprise obvious in her voice.
“Why would he sign his castle over to his kids a month ago?” Sue asked, taking the contract from Julia. “That makes no sense. I thought Charlotte hated her father.”
“I think she did, but she wanted this castle more than anything.”
“So she forced him to sign over the castle and then killed
him?” Sue theorised out loud as she scratched at the side of her head. “That doesn’t sound right. Why wait a month, and why shoot him like that? There are easier ways to kill a person, too. Why make it so obvious?”
Julia didn’t know. She had seen Rory and Charlotte reading through and signing so much paperwork recently, she had expected to find something suspicious to pin to them. She wasn’t a lawyer, but the contract appeared to be legitimate.
“Rory is just a co-signer,” Sue said, pointing out the small print under his signature. “This is a straight swap from Henry to Charlotte.”
“He’s their lawyer,” Julia said as she put the paperwork back where she had found it, locked the drawer, and dropped the key back into the pot. “This isn’t what we’re looking for, but it helps.”
“But what are we looking for?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think we’ll find it in here. We need to go next door.”
They crept out of Charlotte’s bedroom and back along the hall. Julia didn’t dare look over the edge of the broken bannister, but she could hear that Rory was sweeping up the vase and talking to somebody under his breath. Knowing she didn’t have much time before dinner, Julia pulled Sue into the room where it had all started on the day of their arrival.
“This is weird,” Sue said as they crept into Henry’s dark bedroom. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No,” Julia said bluntly. “Start looking. There must be some more paperwork in here to explain why he was signing things over to his daughter.”
Julia hurried over to Henry’s desk. It was cluttered in accounts, which Julia cast a quick eye over. She didn’t need to consult her accountant to spot that the castle had been losing money every month. It looked like the business account savings were propping up everything and quickly depleting every month, which explained the skeleton staff. She tried the drawers, and to her surprise, they were all unlocked but also filled with more accounts and receipts. The disorganisation made her feel queasy. She spent an afternoon every month getting her own accounts neatly into order before sending them off to her accountant. She dug amongst the papers, but she was sure she wasn’t going to find what she needed to piece together everything she knew.
Sue dropped to her hands and knees and peered under the bed. She pulled out an old sock and a book, but nothing else of interest. Julia rested the back of her hand against her forehead, wondering if she was barking up the wrong tree entirely. In her mind, this should have been easier, and she should have already been back in her room with Sue discussing what they had found.
Julia dug through Henry’s bin, recoiling when she touched a rotten banana skin. She wiped her fingers on the heavy silk curtains, the moonlight twinkling through as she did. She peered out of the window into the dark, which looked down onto the stone courtyard. Sue tried a door on the opposite side of the room and walked through to the bathroom.
“I doubt you’ll find anything in there,” Julia called after her as loudly as she dared. “Maybe the contract is enough?”
“For DI BabyFace?” Sue called back. “You either hand over two signed confessions or you might as well put on your own handcuffs for trespassing and wasting police time.”
Sue flicked on the bathroom light and began grabbing at the bottles on the counter. Julia tried Henry’s bedside table, hoping it would be a little more revealing than Charlotte’s had been. To her surprise, it was stuffed full of various bottles and boxes. She began pulling them out and laying them on the man’s unmade bed. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer, a tube of hand cream, dissolvable tablets for a dry mouth, a pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and a get well soon card.
“He was taking opiate-based painkillers,” Sue said, appearing in the bathroom door with a handful of bottles. “Oramorph, oxycodone, tramadol – doctors don’t prescribe these lightly.”
“Look at this,” Julia said, calling Sue over. “Remember when mum was dying and she constantly had a dry mouth and dry skin?”
“I don’t want to think about that,” Sue mumbled as she placed the bottles on the bed.
“Just look,” Julia said. “What do you see?”
Sue looked down at the items in front of her. It took her a moment to piece together what Julia had only just figured out, but when she did, her eyes opened, and her jaw loosened.
“He was bald,” Sue whispered. “And ghostly white.”
“He had cancer,” Julia whispered back, taking in the items again. “He was dying. That’s why he signed over his castle when he did. That’s why he was divorcing Mary. He wanted to hand Seirbigh Castle down to a McLaughlin, not his fourth stand-in wife. Charlotte said the silver in the drawing room had been passed down three generations. Gran said the family bought this place in the nineteen-thirties.”
“Why Charlotte?” Sue asked. “Surely Rory would be the most obvious choice. He’s oldest, and he’s a man.”
“Charlotte wanted it, and that mattered to Henry,” Julia whispered as she picked up the card. “’Get well soon, mate. Andrew’, brief, but he was part of the family according to Charlotte.”
“What does all of this mean?” Sue asked as she walked over to the door and stood exactly where the murderer would have been standing. “She would have been right here when she shot her father.”
Sue held an invisible rifle, and shot it, her shoulder motioning the pushback that would have caused Charlotte’s bruise. Julia’s eyes opened wide, and she suddenly realised how wrong she had gotten everything.
“Because she didn’t,” Julia said as she stuffed the items back in the drawer. “We need to go. It’s nearly time.”
“What? I thought you said she murdered her father and then Mary to clean up the transfer of the castle?”
“I was wrong,” Julia said with a heavy shake of her head. “I know who killed Henry, even if I don’t know how they managed to get out of here without being seen.”
Julia straightened out the sheets, flicked off the bathroom light, and then the desk lamp. She hurried back to the door, but her heart stopped when she heard the doorknob rattling in the dark. She looked at Sue, who was standing inches away from the door with her hand outstretched, but nowhere near. Without another word, she dragged Sue into the walk-in closet and carefully closed the door just as the bedroom door opened and light flooded in from the hall.
Pressing her finger against her lips, Julia stared through the slats in the door as a shadowy figure stepped into the bedroom, closing the door behind them. She was sure the pounding of her heart would give them away, even if she were barely breathing. In the faint light of the moon, she noticed the figure walk over to the desk. They flicked through the papers before they began screwing up each of them and tossing them into the bin. They peeked through the curtains, and in the silver streak of the moonlight, Julia saw the long and flowing auburn hair.
Charlotte opened a bag and pulled out a variety of different items and laid them on the desk. When she was finished, she began throwing something from a bottle around the room. Before Julia could try and figure out what it was, she smelt the petrol, her hand clenching her nose and mouth.
A match crunched across a piece of sandpaper, and a flame illuminated her soft pale face. She looked down blankly at the bin before dropping the flame. It landed on the soaked paper and immediately engulfed itself. Charlotte stared down into the flickering yellow light for a moment before turning on her heels, tossing the empty petrol bottle on the bed, and walking out of the bedroom.
The second she heard the door close, Julia burst out of the closet and ran into the bathroom. She looked around for something to fill with water, landing on a copper bedpan, which was attached to the wall like a piece of art. She yanked it off and instantly filled it. With the pan of water, she ran back into the bedroom as the flames started to lick at the curtains. She tossed the water, and with a sizzle, darkness swallowed the room again.
“What the -,” she heard Sue cry, followed by the screeching of coat hangers, and a heavy thud.
&n
bsp; Julia dropped the bedpan with a clang and ran over to the closet. Through the dim light, she could just make out the shape of Sue on the floor. It took Julia a moment to realise what was wrong with where Sue was placed in the pile of clothes until she realised she was too far back.
“Another secret door,” Julia exclaimed as she helped Sue up off the floor. “Oh, Sue, you’re a genius! That’s how they got away.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Sue cried as she accepted Julia’s hand. “I tripped over the train of my dress. Maybe you’re right about heels being dangerous.”
Julia pushed back the clothes and they both stood side by side looking beyond the secret wooden panel and down into the dark winding stone staircase. A cold draft licked at their faces as they clung to each other, neither of them saying a word.
“Shall we see where it leads?” Sue whispered, her voice shaking. “You go first.”
“I think I know where it leads,” Julia whispered back. “C’mon, we have a dinner to attend.”
“Are you joking?” Sue cried as they both stepped out of the closet. “That madwoman just tried to set fire to us!”
“She didn’t know we were in here,” Julia said as she walked over to the desk and pulled back the curtains. “Here, look at this.”
The items Charlotte had put on the desk were a whisky decanter, a crystal tumbler, an old mobile phone, and a pair of wire cutters.
“I don’t get it,” Sue mumbled as she squinted into the dark. “It’s just random stuff.”
“No, it points to one person,” Julia said as she pressed a button on the phone to light up the screen. “Andrew McCracken. Look, a picture of the castle as the background wallpaper. Andrew loves this place more than anybody, even if he wouldn’t admit it. Charlotte is trying to frame him for burning it down.”
“Why would she want to do that?” Sue asked, shaking her head. “I thought Charlotte loved this place?”
“Charlotte wanted this place,” Julia corrected her. “Now that she’s got it, she can do what she wants with it.”
