‘No.’
‘Haven’t seen your mate Carole in here much recently either . . .’ Even so long after their brief relationship, there was still an awkwardness when he said the name.
‘I’m sure she’ll be in soon.’
‘Yes. Yes. Sure she will.’ He appeared to put the subject out of his mind. ‘Now, can I get you another of those white wines?’
The lifeline had gone. Either Bracketts’ remote situation or the thickness of the walls that encased them prevented any signal from reaching the mobile. Marla Teischbaum had tried and tried, stabbing emergency numbers with increasing ferocity into the unresponsive unit. Finally, she had given up and lain down on the stone floor, sobbing like a child.
Where’s your gung-ho, can-do American spirit now, thought Carole bitterly. Still, having Marla crying was marginally preferable to having her talking.
Once again the reproachful image of an abandoned Gulliver was conjured up in Carole’s mind.
She could feel panic rising in her, threatening to overwhelm her body and mind, but she swallowed it back, and tried to concentrate on the facts she knew about their current situation.
The thesis made sense that she and Marla had been lured to Bracketts, so that they could be disposed of. Or it made some sense. In her case, she had hardly been lured. She had suggested a time to visit the house, and Gina Locke had said, yes, that was fine.
Marla Teischbaum’s situation was a little different. If Carole’s theory was correct, then the incarceration was a second attempt on the American’s life, the first one having mistakenly killed Sheila Cartwright. Marla’s visit to Belinda Chadleigh had been set up by Gina Locke. Either one of the women – or indeed both working together – could have engineered its outcome.
And that still didn’t include as a suspect the person whose animus against Marla Teischbaum was strongest – Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. He it was who had been rudest about her, he whose fear of the threat she represented to his precious biography had become almost pathological. He had certainly wanted Marla Teischbaum dead.
But then, after what happened at the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting, he had probably wanted Sheila Cartwright dead too . . .
Carole found it was all very confusing. And difficult to concentrate when facing the imminence of a long, lingering death.
Oh well, at least they still had light. Marla’s Camping Gaz was burning steadily. They’d wait till that ran out before they switched the torches on. Fortunately, Graham had left his down there, so light was not an immediate problem.
Nor was food. Yet. Death by starvation lay a long way off. Though Carole was already uncomfortably aware of not having had any lunch. She looked at her watch. Nearly eight in the evening. The minimal chance of anyone other their captors coming into Bracketts had dwindled to nothing.
She stood up to ease the incipient cramp in her legs and, as she did so, felt her foot scuff against some fabric on the floor. She looked down to see the tattered blanket which Mervyn Hunter must have used.
A new thought started in her mind. A hopeful thought.
Mervyn Hunter had used the secret cell as a hideaway. When he’d first come to Bracketts after his escape from Austen, he couldn’t possibly have known that the house had been closed to the public. So he must have assumed that Guided Tours would still be clattering through on a regular basis. Which meant he couldn’t have risked leaving the concealed floorboard entrance open. He’d have been found straight away.
So, unless he’d had an accomplice . . . And that seemed unlikely. Jonny Tyson was the only potential candidate and from what Jude had said, Jonny’s only involvement had been supplying one of his mother’s packed lunches. Mervyn Hunter must have known a way of getting out of the secret cell from the inside.
‘Has anyone you’ve loved ever died, Ted?’
He gave his beard a pensive scratch. ‘Yes. Not while I was still with her. Girl I used to know on the comedy circuit. Clever she was, Jude, sharp as the crease on a car salesman’s trousers. Doing well. I kept bumping into her round all these upstairs rooms of pubs, and that. Then one evening . . . as the old music hall gag goes, one thing led to the other . . . We had . . . I suppose . . . six weeks together. Then she moved on. Didn’t dump me, just let me down softly, like when you got a slow puncture in an airbed. I felt a bit . . . you know, wistful, but . . . got on with things.
‘Then two years later I heard she’d been killed in a car crash. Not even hot news. Heard about it from a mutual friend, had happened four months before. I was surprised how much it hurt.’
‘Mm.’ Jude nodded slowly. She had known Ted Crisp would be the right companion for that evening. She didn’t need to break her word and tell him Laurence was dying. Ted understood.
At the bar of the Crown and Anchor a sad, but complicit silence stretched between them.
Carole dropped to her knees and picked up one of the old books that had been left near Mervyn’s candlestick.
‘What’re you doing?’ Marla whined. ‘There’s no point in doing any research if we’re never going to get out of this place.’
‘I think certain research may be well worth doing,’ said Carole.
The book was thin, leather-bound, probably eighteenth century. Its title page read Some Oddities Of Construction In The House Known As Bracketts Near South Stapley In The County of Sussex.
She flipped feverishly through the pages until she came to The Second, Or Hidden, Priest’s Hole. There was a diagram of the seesaw floorboards, showing how they pivoted and how they were locked in place by the step in the doorway from the landing.
The next page revealed a sketch of the Second Priest’s Hole’s ceiling, with its lines of carved Tudor roses.
And then there was an enlarged detail of one corner, pointing out one single rose.
‘Come on, Marla, get up! I’m going to need your help.’
‘You don’t need my help. There’s nothing we can do. We’re going to die down here!’ the Professor wailed.
‘You can die down here if you like. I’m not going to. Come on, I need you to hold these shelves steady.’
Reluctant, still protesting, Marla Teischbaum nonetheless did as she was told. The bookshelves were rickety, Carole wondered whether they would hold her weight.
But she reassured herself that they had not collapsed under Mervyn Hunter, and climbed on up.
It was the rose in the corner, and felt reassuringly smooth to the touch, as if it had been handled many times over the centuries. The book had said it should be turned in a clockwise direction.
Carole tried to twist, but the wood felt rigid and unyielding in her hand.
It wasn’t going to work.
Jude got back to Woodside Cottage before nine. Her mobile had been silent all evening, and there was nothing on the answering machine at home.
Nothing from the hospital.
Nothing from Jude either.
Jude felt a little flicker of anxiety.
‘Gard, what the hell’re you doing up there?’ whined Marla Teischbaum. ‘I can’t hold on to this for ever.’
‘You can bloody hold on a bit longer!’
Her anger gave her strength. This time as she strained against the wooden rose, Carole felt a little give, a hint that it wasn’t fixed, that it could be moved.
She released her grip, shook her hand to restore circulation, then once again cupped it around the wooden rose.
This time there was a definite, if reluctant, turn. The pommel moved a little like the head of an old, embedded screw.
Unsteady on top of her bookcase, feeling the strain through her entire body, Carole continued to push the rose around.
Suddenly she felt it ease. And at the same moment she heard a welcome sound from above, a slight rumble as the locking doorstep eased from its mountings and started its long arc across the floor above.