“Ellie, darling. You can’t die. I don’t care what your religion teaches, but I have it on the highest authority that there is no chocolate in heaven.” He was kneeling beside me.
I struggled to sit up. “Ben, I think we are having a joint hallucination. I’m really in the cake and you are in the dungeon at Merlin’s Court.”
“No.” He was rubbing my hands. “I got you out, thanks to Sweetie, who kept whining and chewing at the cake. And Poppa and I escaped the dungeons by means of a secret tunnel which exits under one of the beds. Poppa got the idea from reading about a similar arrangement in one of Edwin Digby’s books. And, interestingly enough, our tunnel ended at the cellar of Digby’s house. Highly convenient for old Wilfred Grantham and his assignations with the two sisters at The Aviary. Wonder if it dates back to smuggling days?”
Ben was talking as though he had been away for the weekend and wanted to share the details. I shuddered and hung my head. “That cake was hell, but I wasn’t in it long and I don’t have claustrophobia… What I am trying to say, Ben, is that I don’t expect you to forgive me for the misery I have inflicted on you, locking you up, forcing you to crawl through that blackness, not knowing where, or whether it would end.”
He leaned backward so that I had to look at him. “Hell was feeling the hall floor disintegrate under my feet. I was livid with you. I planned to murder you the minute I got out, but when I read that green notebook and realised that someone else was in all likelihood making the same plans, I didn’t have time for claustrophobia.”
I touched his face, so handsome, so concerned. “It was the same for me, in a way. When I became caught up in worrying about you, I stopped being frightened of food; I didn’t have time to concentrate on not eating.”
His arms entwined about me. “Ellie, don’t be afraid now. We’re going to the police; this monster-The Founder-will be stopped.” His lips brushed my throat. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but what can we expect, we are only beginners. I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand you completely. I don’t need to understand you to love you. All that matters is that I would have crawled through the centre of the earth to get to you and that I wasn’t too late.”
The moment was so fragile that I was afraid to say anything of what I felt, in case it broke. I cleared my throat and asked if Poppa was all right.
“Yes and no. Physically he’s fine, but he’s worried about how Mum’s feeling and consumed by guilt because in the shock of being plunged into the dungeon he accidentally spoke to me.”
“What made you look for me here?” I asked as Ben helped me to my feet.
“When we were racing up to the gates of Merlin’s Court, Poppa and I saw Miss Primrose Tramwell; she was in a flap about everyone being missing.” He touched his fingers to my lips. “It’s all right, darling. Everyone is found. Poppa is with them. I didn’t know where to look for you until we saw Sweetie coming along Cliff Road, and I clutched at the possibility you might have gone looking for her in the churchyard. When I turned that way, she ran back ahead of me and eventually in here to the cake.”
I shivered, as much at owing Sweetie a lifetime of gratitude as the memory of what I had been through. She had probably only come in here to ‘go’; so Roxie would claim anyway; but I would buy Sweetie a lifetime subscription to How to Train Your Owner. My mind began to whirl with questions. Had Ben and Poppa seen Edwin Digby when they exited in his cellar? What had befallen my comrades-in-arms? And… where was The Founder now?
Ben guided me to the door. “You have to get some fresh air, darling.”
As we stepped onto the grass, my legs went pulpy, and the noonday sky seemed to tilt. The Founder could be behind any one of a hundred tombstones. I gripped Ben’s hand tighter.
Mr. Digby was standing on the sun-dappled path, a gun in his hand, and my surprise was that I was surprised. Everything had pointed to him, but in his drunkenness he may have thought himself invincible. Mother was waddling around him in narrowing circles. I felt sorry for the goose. Mr. Digby’s purplish fingers were pointing the gun, not at Ben and me, but at someone standing in front of an angel monument.
“Mrs. Haskell.” His head moved an inch in my direction. “My abject apologies on behalf of my daughter Wren.”
Ben and I turned in slow motion.
“No!” I exclaimed. “She can’t be, she isn’t… this is Jenny! Jenny Spender.” I had suspected Bunty might be his daughter; she was the right age and admitted she used a nickname. Digby had said Wren was living with a man; gossip said Bunty and Lionel weren’t really married. But, Jenny! Ridiculous! On second thought, maybe not…
Her eyes, those eyes which I had always thought too old for a child’s face, drifted over me and fixed with the most chilling hatred on Mr. Digby’s face.
“Jenny Wren.” Ben stroked my hair back from my face. “Hyacinth Tramwell recorded all the clues in her little green book. That farthing, as well as the photograph in the pocket of the pin-striped suit you borrowed from Mr. Digby, suggested to yours truly that Jenny was the one. The farthing was the smallest coin in the realm and carried the symbol, on one of its sides, of the smallest British bird, the wren.”
“She was such a tiny baby,” Mr. Digby mused, “and she had given me that farthing in the happy days for a good-luck charm. It was easier to believe I had gone mad than to think of her grown evil. These past five years I have cowered in the bottle. But when you, Mr. Haskell, with parent in tow, burst into my house ranting about a widows club, I knew I had to pull the stopper, on myself, on my child.” The gun wavered but he steadied it with his free hand.
Ben stared into the wedge-shaped face framed by the childish plaits. “The Founder had to be someone who could observe and listen unnoticed. A hairdresser? A solicitor? A secretary? A charwoman? All good possibilities, but what better cover than that of a child?”
Jenny smiled, her fingers gripping the angel’s marble wings as if she would snap them.
“You were at Abigail’s the night of Charles Delacorte’s death,” Ben continued, addressing her, “carrying a white plastic raincoat. How convenient! I suppose you walked into the office, smothered him, and wore the murder weapon off the premises.” He paused. “Did you inherit your stage presence from your mother, along with your father’s macabre imagination? Was she eternally youthful, like you?”
“I can’t sing like Mummy,” said Jenny in that dreadful childish voice, “but I do have her ear, as well as her great sense of timing.” Her laughter went right through me. “I was able to phone all the ladies in the aerobics class-pretending to be Bunty Wiseman-and I cancelled the rehearsal. Then I rang her up, claiming to be Miss Thorn, saying the church hall wasn’t available. A clever ploy, wasn’t it, Mrs. Haskell,” she twiddled with a plait, “to get us alone?”
Ben continued remorselessly, his hand tightening around mine. “Ann Delacorte recognised your mother as Sylvania, the singer on whom she had an almost schoolgirl crush, when she went to the Dower House that day with Ellie. That idea sneaked up on me when I read that the nanny called your mother Vania. And I’ll wager the record being played was one of hers, from her heyday. The excitement caused Ann to turn faint-two thrills in one day, Lionel Wiseman and now the discovery of her idol.” Ben shook his head. “Foolish Ann. She made a big mistake. She thought The Founder was pretending to be an invalid, not a child. And she was gripped by the sort of groupie closeness that gave her the confidence to go and ask a favour. That green car that slashed past you, Ellie, when you made your pregnant visit to The Peerless, I wonder if it was Ann’s Morris Minor?”