Cut to the Quick (40 page)

make her come to heel. She did, with a vengeance! She was in such a funk, she came all the way here from London to make it up with me.

“The problem was, she couldn’t think how to get word to me she was here without my family knowing. She was still bent on keeping things between us a secret. The morning after she arrived, she went out early and met Bliss on the road. They got talking, and when she found he knew the neighbourhood, she got the idea of sending him to me with a message. He told her I'd likely go to the horse fair, so he'd look for me there first. I expect the old devil just wanted to go there himself; he never misses a chance to cadge at places like that.

“When he first saw me at the horse fair, he couldn't deliver Amy's message, because I was with Hugh and Kestrel, and Amy’d told him to catch me alone if he could. He kept an eye on me, and came sidling up as soon as I went off by myself. He told me Amy was here and had sent him to fetch me. He'd put her in the old mill for safekeeping, meantime. I was glad she'd come to heel, but she was still being hell-fired secretive, and I was sick of that. And I wasn't too keen on being summoned like a lackey, with Bliss laughing up his sleeve at me the whole while. So I told him I wasn't ready to leave the horse fair, and if Amy wanted to see me so badly, she could damned well wait till I had time for her. I gave him money and sent him back to tell her to stay at the mill till I came." He turned to Julian. "You know, I almost told you and Hugh all about it on the way home from the horse fair. I wish I had now— then you'd know it all happened just the way I’ve said."

"Why didn't you?"

"I got an idea. I wish to God my brains had rotted before I ever thought of it, but at the time I thought I was monstrous clever. I remembered that after luncheon Hugh was taking you round the estate, and I thought it would be a lark to bring Amy up to your room through the secret passage."

"It's time we talked about that," said Sir Robert. "How long have you known there was a secret stairway to this room?"

"Since I was a boy. I found it by blind chance, and when I realized

I must be the only one who knew about it, I decided to keep it that way. I was always looking for ways to get out of the house at night on the sly. I can't stand being cooped up—I never could.”

He halted and grew pale. They knew what he was thinking: that he might well be facing a worse confinement than any he had ever known. Julian had little sympathy for him. Wherever he might be imprisoned pending trial, it would be far superior to that foul lockup where, thanks to Guy's concealment, Dipper had spent three long days.

"I can't imagine how there could be a stairway in the house that we know nothing about,” said Sir Robert.

“I have an idea about that,” said Julian. “Ever since the murder, I've been racking my brains to think how the girl could have got into the house, and up to my room, without being seen. It never occurred to me there could be a secret passage, because devices like that never are a secret nowadays. They're a source of entertainment, shown off proudly on tours of country houses. When Miss Philippa told me your family were Catholics in Elizabethan days, I began to wonder if the house might have a priest-hole—a room or passage where a visiting priest could hide from the authorities. But I couldn't imagine how a priest-hole could be known to the murderer, yet unknown to anyone else.

“Then I remembered something else Miss Philippa told me. She said she was writing a family history, but she found it hard, because most of the family papers were destroyed in a fire in the civil war. I thought, what if no architectural plans of the house had survived? The sketches you showed me, Sir Robert, are only about half a century old, and you said this part of the house had hardly been altered since Queen Elizabeth's time. There might just be a means of access to this room that none of you knew about, because in all the upheavals of the civil war, the secret was lost.”

He went over to the wall abutting the servants' wing. The others gathered around him. “I reasoned that, if there were a secret way into this room, the entrance was likely to be in this wall. Your office, Rawlinson, is just the other side of it, and below your office is the waiting room where the back door is. I remember thinking your office looked surprisingly large on the floor plans of the house

Sir Robert showed me. I know why now: whoever drew up those plans didn’t know about the secret stairway between your office and this room.

“This part of the wall interested me most.” He went over to the place where the wall met the window recess at right angles. Here, barely visible on the oak panelling, were the five small smears of blood. “The bloodstains are here, and so is the chair where the girl left her shawl and bonnet. I looked along the panelling for some way the wall might open, but there wasn’t any crevice where a spring could be hidden. So I looked here instead.**

He indicated the carved wood panels in the window recess. “These carvings are all emblems of saints. I noticed that the first night I was here, but I didn’t make anything of it. Now I think this room must have been given to priests in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. They would have come to the house masquerading as ordinary guests, but these sacred emblems were an acknowledgment of their true identity. I probed, and at last I found the key to the mystery—appropriately, here,”

He pointed out a carving in the left-hand panel: two crossed keys, the emblem of St. Peter. Where the keys crossed, there was a little hollow in the wood. He pressed it firmly.

A long, low creak, like a wail of protest, sounded from the adjacent wall. The next moment, the panel at right angles to the window— the panel where the bloodstains were—swung slowly outward. Cold air, and a smell of damp and dirt, flowed in from the darkness beyond.

The men peered inside. As their eyes adjusted, they made out a stone cavity some ten feet square, A rough-cut stairway spiralled down, its depths lost in shadow. Julian remembered how he had felt his way down those steep, uneven stairs last night. He had kept the secret door propped open with a chair; it made his skin crawl to think of it swinging to and trapping him in that cold, dank place. Who knew for certain there was any way out at the bottom?

But there was. He explained how he had found a door at the foot of the stairs, leading into the waiting room in the servants’ wing. “From there, of course, an escaping priest could go out the back door and escape through the kitchen garden—or, better still, the

silver lime grove. The trees there would give capital cover to anyone fleeing from the house.”

They were all eager to examine the secret door, and to work the spring that opened it. To Julian’s relief, they did not think to ask how he had gotten into the room last night to look for the passage. He would just as soon not have to explain how he came by the key.

“How did you find the passage?” the colonel asked Guy.

“One night when I was climbing in the window, I happened to grasp the panel right where the hidden spring was. The next thing I knew, the wall nearby gave a groan and swung out at me. That knocked me a regular cock, I can tell you! I went down the stairway and found where it led. I knew then I’d never have to climb out the window again—I could sneak in and out of the house any time I liked. And on top of all that, I knew something about the house that nobody else did, which I thought was a pretty good joke. So I kept it to myself. I didn't use it much when I got older, because I didn't have this room anymore: Aunt Cecily’d made it into a guest room and moved all the family into the new wing.

“Anyway, I got the idea of sneaking Amy in through the passage. With Kestrel gone, I might just be able to get her in and out while the servants were at dinner. The more I thought about it, the funnier it seemed—to bring a bit of muslin under the ancestral roof, with no one the wiser.

“The col— my father nearly dished the whole thing at the last minute. I was in the library, keeping watch out of the window for Hugh and Kestrel to leave. At about half past three I saw their horses being brought round, and I was just going to rush off and collect Amy, when in comes my father and says, What about a rubber of piquet? I didn't have time, but he was looking blue-devilled, so I didn't have the heart to turn him down flat. So I said I was fagged out, and thought I'd go up to my room and have a nap. I went partway upstairs and hung about on the landing till there was no one in sight. Then I slipped out the front door and made a beeline for the old mill. But my father didn't know that!" he added fiercely. “When he told you I went up to my room for a nap, he thought he was telling the truth."

“Never mind, my boy,
^M
said Geoffrey.

“I do mind," insisted Guy.

“What happened then?” said Sir Robert.

“I got to the mill about four o’clock. Amy was there; so was Bliss. He’d stuck to her like glue ever since I sent him back to her. I suppose he thought there was more money to be made from us than from hawking corncob pipes at the horse fair. Lord, it turned out he was right about that!

“Amy was worried to death I was never coming. She flung herself at me and begged me to forgive her for refusing to come to the country with me. I asked her if she was willing to prove she was sorry, and she said she was. So I told her my plan to sneak her into Bellegarde, and of course she bucked, but I said if she was going to fight me again she could turn around and go straight back to London. She started spouting tears and wailing and calling on the Virgin Mary, but in the end she agreed.

“I took her through the Chase, because it was the most direct route to Bellegarde. She was glad to keep away from prying eyes, but it was rough going for her. She wasn’t dressed for it. The place was such a tangle, oftentimes I had to cut our way through. By the time we got to Bellegarde, she was as nervous as a cat. I whisked her through the silver lime courtyard—Kestrel is right, those trees make deuced good cover—and we nipped in through the back door without anybody seeing us. I let us into the secret passage—you know, you can get in from that end, too, through a hidden door in the waiting room. I figured out how to do it years ago, after I found out how the mechanism worked up here. We didn’t have a candle, so we had to feel our way up the stairs. It’s dark as pitch there, even in the daytime. I let us into Kestrel’s room—”

“Hitting that chair with the door,” guessed Julian, pointing to the shieldback chair by the wall.

“I did, now I come to think of it. How did you know?”

Julian pointed out the twin scratches on the wall and the back of the chair. “We thought at first the chair had been knocked against the wall in a struggle. But since nothing is ever what it seems in this business, it turns out to be the wall that hit the chair.”

Guy dropped into an armchair by the hearth. He looked like a man in the grip of an illness—white and exhausted, but unable to rest. The others drew close, impatient for the climax.

“We came in here. Amy made us scrape the dirt off our feet before we stepped on the carpet. The things women worry about! At first everything went all right. She was so taken up with looking at the room, she forgot to worry someone might come in and find us. But soon she started in on me to take her away. I didn’t want to leave so soon. I wanted—I mean—there was a bed— I’m pretty ashamed of myself about this.”

“Go on,” said Sir Robert grimly.

“She put up the deuce of a fight! She said if my family caught us together like that, she’d die. She said she couldn’t stand any more. Ail right, I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong! I was angry, I admit it. But I didn’t kill her. I had another idea. I thought I’d lock her in Kestrel’s room and leave her here. I knew she wouldn’t be able to get out by the secret passage—she didn’t know how to get into it from this end. That would teach her to fret herself and me to death about secrecy. And I thought it would be a good joke on Kestrel. I wondered what he’d do when he came back and found a hysterical female in his room. Because she was pretty well off her head by then, weeping and wailing. I told her there wasn’t much point in trying to keep her presence a secret, if she was going to cry fit to bring the house down.

“Anyway, I left her here. I locked her in and left the key on the hall table, and went off. I could hear her crying all the way down the hall. It was a pretty shabby way to treat her, I know. But the devil got into me, and—I did it. That’s all.”

MacGregor stared. “You mean, that’s the last you saw of her?” “As God’s my witness, that’s the last I saw of her, alive.”

Justice

(juy’s listeners exchanged bewildered glances. All the while he talked, they had felt a bleak sense of relief, thinking that, one way or another, the crime would be solved at last. But if Guy was telling the truth, the mystery remained to plague them. The murderer eluded them still.

Julian asked the question he thought most likely to narrow the field of suspects. “What time was it when you left her here?” “Quarter past five. I remember, I looked at my watch.”

“What did you do next?” asked MacGregor.

“Pretty much what I told Uncle Robert when he questioned us after the murder. I went to my room, rang for my man, and dressed. When I came down to the drawing room, I was surprised nobody seemed to have found Amy yet. Then I heard dinner was delayed because Uncle Robert had some kind of business with Kestrel. So I thought, well, they’ve found her at last. But nobody asked me about her. Nobody paid any heed to me at all. I began to think she must be braving it out, pretending she didn’t know me and had got into the house by herself somehow. I decided to hold my tongue and see what happened. The truth is, I didn’t think my joke was so funny anymore, and I knew Uncle Robert would cut up savage if he found I’d brought a ladybird into Bellegarde on the sly. So I just waited. I played patience to keep my hands occupied, so I wouldn’t look as

nervous as I felt. I wondered what was happening to Amy, and I thought—” His throat closed. “I thought I’d make it up to her— once I got her away from Bellegarde—

“Look, it's not as though I didn’t feel anything for her! When I heard she was dead, I couldn't take it in. I thought at first she'd killed herself, and I knew if she had, I was to blame. Then when I found she'd been murdered—my God, I didn't know what to think! I couldn't imagine who'd done it. I still can’t. But I knew one thing: If I let on I'd brought her into the house, I’d be pegged as her killer straightaway. So I pretended I didn't know anything about her. That wasn’t always easy. When I saw her lying dead on that sofa—well, you can see why I felt sick and had to bolt.