Day woke to the sound of a man screaming. He opened his eyes, but it made no difference. The world was still black. There was something covering his face, a bag or a hood. It reeked of sweat. There was a slit in the bag near his chin, and he breathed through his mouth. He was shivering and tried to move his arms, but they wouldn’t respond. I’m paralyzed, he thought. I’ve been hit in the head and I can’t move, and I’ll never move again. Then he heard the faint clink of metal ringing against stone behind him and realized that he was in chains. Now that he concentrated, he could feel shackles on his wrists and ankles. He couldn’t feel the comfortable weight of his gun and his flask and he understood that his jacket had been taken from him. His hat was gone, too. He remembered dropping his gun, so it wouldn’t have been in his jacket anyway. Perhaps it was still on the tunnel floor. Maybe it was within reach, if he could only move a little.
The man stopped screaming and panted as if out of breath. The sound of him was nearby, yet distant, on the other side of a wall. Day realized he was chained up in one of the three alcoves he had seen and someone else was chained in an alcove next to him.
“March!”
There was no answer. He tried again.
“Adrian! Inspector Adrian March! Can you hear me?”
Something moved. Day felt a change in the air in front of him, but there was no change in the darkness under the hood. Then there was a voice, a low rasp, and it was directly in his ear. Someone was standing with his lips against the rough fabric of the hood, pressing it against Day’s ear. He smelled copper and fish.
“You’ll get your turn,” the voice said. It was deep and muffled. “Be patient.”
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
But there was no answer. Day couldn’t tell whether the man had gone or was still standing right there next to him. He turned his head, but it moved slowly, as if his neck needed to be oiled, and a sharp pain lanced through his skull, radiated outward through his face. Warmth moved down his spine and spread out into his torso, down his limbs to his fingertips and his toes.
He blacked out again.
When he woke up, he sensed he was alone. He could feel his pulse in his temples, beating at his brain. He heard low murmuring somewhere far away and he concentrated on the sound, dragged his attention away from his throbbing head. The voice he heard was somewhere to his left, the opposite side of him from the screaming man he had heard before. There was another wall. There were walls on either side of him and, he could tell by the movement of air around him, a wall behind him. But the space was empty in front of him. He was in one of the cells and it opened out into the tunnel. There were other men, possibly also shackled, on either side of him. He listened harder to the murmuring voice.
“Say anything,” it said. “Anything at all.”
“Go to hell, you monster.” That was March’s voice. Loud and defiant, but there was pain evident in the way he clipped his consonants.
“Oh, I will,” the voice said. “But you’ll be there with me. I thought I knew you. And now I do. By your voice. I heard your voice nearly every day of the past. . What has it been? Did you keep me here for a year? I should look at a newspaper.”
Day heard March coughing.
“Would you like some water? Here.”
March’s cough turned into sputtering and gasping.
“Leave him be!” Day said.
March continued to cough, but Day heard the sound of footsteps approaching. The stranger came through the tunnel, and Day could hear him breathing, standing not more than two feet away.
“I don’t know your voice,” the man said.
“Which one are you? Hoffmann? You’re not Cinderhouse. I’d know his voice.”
“Oh, we’re both playing a game of place-the-voice,” the man said. “Delightful.”
“This is no game.”
“Everything’s a game. Tell me something. .”
“What? What is it you want?”
“Exitus probatur. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know,” Day said. “I don’t understand. Tell me what you want.”
“What I want? I haven’t decided yet what I want. What’s your name, bluebottle?”
“Tell me your name first.”
“Your name, I said. Don’t make me hurt you. Better yet, don’t make me hurt your friend next door.”
“My name is Day. Detective Inspector Day.”
He heard the man gasp and then the sound of hands clapping, three loud echoing reports.
“Day? Not Walter Day, by chance?”
Day felt his stomach turn over and he suddenly couldn’t breathe. The man knew his name. Did he know where he lived? Was Claire in danger?
“Oh, my,” the man said. “Have I guessed correctly? Do you know, Walter Day, that we have a friend in common?”
Day shook his head, and the motion sent another spike of pain through the base of his skull. He sucked in a sharp breath. “Who? Who do you mean?”
“It’s really nobody,” the man said. “I thought he was somebody, but I was mistaken. But now I don’t know what to do with you, Walter Day. I think I’ll keep you for a time. Perhaps I’ll feed you to my fly.”
“Listen-”
“Yes?”
“By order of the Queen, I’m placing you under arrest. Surrender now, while you can, and I’ll see that you’re treated well.”
The man took a step back. Day heard his shoes scuffing on the stones. Then he began to laugh. Day felt himself slipping away. When the man stopped laughing, he sniffed and Day heard him blow his nose.
“Thank you for that,” the man said. “I needed a good hearty chuckle. You know, I quite like you, Walter Day.”
The man’s voice had lost its mocking tone. He sounded sincere. And surprised.
“I really really do,” he said. “You’re so marvelously uncomplicated.”
“Let us go free,” Day said.
A hand clamped against the fabric of the hood over his mouth and Day smelled something sharp and acrid, a chemical seeping into the hood.
“Shh,” the voice said. “No more talking. I still have work to do, and I’m suddenly peckish. Why don’t you take a nap?”
As if the man had given him a hypnotic command, Day felt the floor open up under him and he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
40
Eunice Pye stood just inside the doorway and squinted into the gloom of the Michaels’ house. She listened very hard, harder than she had ever listened before, but heard nothing, no movement, no voice or rustle of paper or cloth anywhere in the house. And so she crept cautiously into the hall, past the coatrack and the little pile of mail on the floor. She left the front door open behind her and sunlight bounced off its painted red exterior, now angled into the hall, and shone deep orange against the wall next to her.
She moved her feet forward, one at a time, barely lifting them from the smooth uneven floorboards. She held her best garden hoe out in front of her with both hands. She knew there was little she could do with it to threaten anyone or protect herself, but it made her feel better and safer to hold it.
The stairway was in front of her, along the right-hand wall. She stopped and looked up. There was a red runner that swam up the middle of the stairs, and she wondered briefly at the extravagance of it. She had a small rug made of rags and cast-off remnants next to her bed that Giles had given her on some long-ago Christmas Eve. She could not even imagine how much such a long strip of carpet must have cost. She blinked and held still and remembered why she was there in that house, and then she took a deep breath and moved forward.
Nothing stirred in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and so she turned her attention to the parlor door, which was now near to her left elbow. That door was standing open, and she could see a giant table painted black just inside the room. She moved two steps sideways and she was standing in the doorway with the table to her right. There were chairs around the table, four of them, but the chairs were empty. There was a bookcase against the wall directly ahead of her, behind the table and next to the fireplace. It held a collection of knickknacks and small painted family portraits and perhaps a dozen books of the kind sold by door-to-door salesmen to the lady of the house. Among the portraits she spotted two or three framed photographs of stiffly posed people in their Sunday finest. She wondered if Mrs Michael would ever be coming back to that house. She wondered if Mrs Michael was dead, perhaps buried in the back garden. But no, that was silly. Eunice had seen Mrs Michael leave the house with three big trunks and ride away in a four-wheeler while Mr Michael was at work.