And something else struck me at last. I turned my light back to the western wall and the line of filing cabinets. I’d assumed the entrance door to this office was farther east than the entrance doors on lower floors because this room was larger. It wasn’t. That wall my white light was drilling into was too close. This room was not a footprint of the tower. It was too small.
I rose. I moved to the end filing cabinet. It was set six inches or so from the wall, as were all these cabinets. I shined my light behind them. Solid wall.
I moved to the door. But before I opened it, I looked back to the western wall. I put the heel of my foot at the edge of the doorjamb and did a yard-stride to the corner. Five paces. About fifteen feet.
I went back to the door. I put my hand to the knob.
I turned stupid. I opened the door and stepped out and immediately before me the shadows had bulked up into the form of a man.
Before I could even twitch I felt the barrel of a pistol press into the dead center of my gut.
Outside, the crowd cheered.
12
“This is just to keep you from being stupid,” a cigarette-blasted British voice said, pushing a little on the pistol.
“Too late,” I said.
“Very well,” he said. “From carrying on being stupid.”
“That’s big of you,” I said.
“Very slowly upend that light of yours and have a look at me,” he said.
I did. The beam came at a sharp angle from below, turning him into a chiaroscuro: a wide, central, corpse-white stripe of a face surrounded by a night-black skull.
It was the lug from the Duke of York’s.
“Mr. Catwalk,” I said.
“Mr. Front Row,” he said.
“You prowl for your boss, I take it,” I said.
“And who do you fancy my boss to be?” he said.
“Stockman.”
“You are mistaken, Mr. Cobb,” he said, his voice pitched down and sounding convincing.
I tried to place this guy in the class system. He sounded, at turns, cultured and working class, never quite either, which meant he was the latter with extended exposure to the former.
It struck me. “You’re Buffington’s man.”
“Lord Buffington,” he corrected.
“You’re the guy in the vicinity.”
“Very near,” he said. “Thanks to the baronet’s need for a bit of outside assistance.”
“At the theater then, you were what?”
“Watching over Isabel Cobb. You and I are on the same side, sir.”
“I’d be more inclined to believe you,” I said, “if you’d take the pistol off the center of my gut.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, and the barrel end vanished at once in a twisting of his body and a ruffling of his suit coat.
“You seem to be doing well,” he said.
“Did you know about the tower?”
“No sir. I just followed you through the window.”
“Bloody hell,” I said. “If you don’t mind my borrowing a phrase.”
“Please,” he said.
“Another case of stupid. I wasn’t even aware,” I said.
“Not at all. I had the advantage of knowing exactly who you are and what you’re up to.”
“Which I need to resume,” I said.
“Of course. But I had to let you know who I am and that I’m at your service.”
“And who are you?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Jeremy.”
“Kit,” I said and we shook hands.
“Unless you have a specific task for me,” Jeremy said, “I think I’d do better to linger downstairs. If someone is to get caught at this, it should be me. You need to keep your identity intact.”
“But no getting caught,” I said.
“I’ll do my best.”
Jeremy half turned to go and then had a thought. He stopped and squared around to me again. “I am obliged to stress, however. If things do get rough, you are to take the opportunity to endeavor a quiet retreat. On no account intervene on my behalf.”
I didn’t like that thought. If we were on the same team, I was reluctant to duck out on him.
“This is imperative,” he said.
I knew I’d be saying the same thing in his place. “All right,” I said.
And he was gone. As quietly as he’d followed me.
I was left with a tower above me and no staircase to get there.
I returned to the doorway of Stockman’s office. I put my heel at the door frame and paced off the five yards. I kept my foot on the spot and took note of where it was: directly across from the left-hand banister.
I paced on, doing the stride I knew to equal about a yard. Seven more to the door of the next room. A little over twenty feet.
I expected this door to give itself away with a pin and tumbler lock. I was wrong. The room had one of the carved oak doors with a simpler warded lock. I drew out my tools. I had half a dozen skeleton keys. On the second try I had the right one. The locking bolt gave way and I opened the door.
I stood beneath the lintel while I shined my flashlight toward this room’s left-hand wall, which should have been shared with Stockman’s office. Then I leaned back and looked down to the banister opposite that western wall in the office. I didn’t need any more measurements. I stepped inside this room, closed the door. The wall before me should have been twenty feet away. It was maybe half that. Against it, left of center, was a massive wardrobe of plain, squared oak built flush to the floor and taller than a man, its only ornamentation being large, beaten-iron hinges and drawer pulls. Of its wide facade — a good twelve feet — the two outer sections were drawers and half-cabinets.
The major center section was a pair of doors. Their small ward lock yielded quickly and I opened them to a thick atmosphere of cedar and moth-balls. Inside, the space was wide enough and tall enough to hang the longest ball gown, but in spite of the smells to protect clothes in storage, it was empty. I had little doubt what was next. The back of the wardrobe was hung with a black cloth.
I stepped in. The cloth split in the middle into a pair of drapes that ran easily open on metal hooks along a heavy curtain rod.
And they revealed the doorway to the tower. This was unconventional castle architecture. Sir Albert’s granddad had been either paranoid or up to something covert himself. The door was what I’d expected for the room. It was like the one on Stockman’s office, and with the same sort of lock. Made by the same locksmith, I figured, for it felt familiar to my fingertips and the pin tumblers all jumped at my first bidding.
I opened the door inward to blackness. I closed the wardrobe behind me, and I stepped into chilled air smelling of damp stone and of all the spores that grow in the dark. I ran the drapes together and shut the door. I shined my light onto a metal staircase commencing immediately to my left and circling its way upward.
I climbed.
About ten feet I reckoned, and I came to another metal platform. The staircase continued up, to the roof of the tower, no doubt, but I stood before a rough-hewn wooden door. No more picking. This one had no lock. No knob either. Just a latch, which I lifted.
And now I stood in the upper room of the Stockman House tower and searched with my flashlight, keeping it angled low to prevent its being visible from outside, straining my eyes to see into the dim edge of spill from its beam.
On the eastern wall, directly before me, was a single, centered, cruciform loophole, which was used in a functioning castle for safe viewing and medieval sniper fire, the shape to accommodate a crossbow, not the Christian God.
I knew all four walls had loopholes because I’d seen them from the outside, but only the one in the eastern wall was visible now in full. The west-facing loophole was in the well of the circular staircase. The other two, in this room, were each shuttered by a wooden door on hinges and a hook and eye. The shutter for the eastern loophole was open.