Chapter Fifteen
We passed through the kitchen once more and asked for a pot of coffee.
‘To warm you up, I’ll be bound,’ said Peggy with a sage nod. ‘I said you’d get cold out there. It’s perishing.’
‘You were right, Peggy dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We should have listened to you.’
This seemed to please her and we left her smiling smugly as we went back upstairs to Lady Hardcastle’s room.
She put the incriminating notes on the desk and looked out of the window at what the poets might have called the gathering gloom. It was still over an hour until sunset, but the clouds were thick and we were glad of the electric lamps.
‘Where are your thoughts taking you now?’ I asked as I settled in the armchair.
‘Hither, thither and, to a certain extent, yon. I remain unconvinced that the thefts and murders were conducted in the cleverest way. There’s superficial evidence of careful planning, but so much was left to chance – there were so many possibilities of being seen going to and from the scenes of the crimes.
I’m sure that in a place like this you and I could come up with half a dozen better ways of going about things. ’
‘We’ve more experience of skulduggery,’ I said.
‘Even so, there’s incongruity here that I can’t reconcile.
And these notes.’ She indicated the papers on the desk.
‘They’re so clumsy, whichever way one looks at it.
Either Bridgewater is a forgetful nincompoop who neglected to clean up after himself, or it’s the most ham-fisted way possible of implicating him. ’
‘Ham-fisted to us, perhaps – we’ve seen quite a few murders in our time – but to someone who’s only read about murder in the newspapers and detective stories it would seem jolly clever.’
‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
This last was spoken in the familiar distracted tone that told me I wasn’t going to get much more out of her for a few minutes, while the cogs whirred and her mighty brain worked through the problem.
If she’d been at home with our crime board she’d have been scrawling notes and drawing lines to connect people and events, but as it was she just stared out of the window.
Crawford arrived with our coffee and I poured her a cup without her apparently noticing either of us.
I took the pen and pad that had been placed on the desk for guests’ use and doodled. I drew a cat wearing a cowboy hat and a tin star, with a speech bubble that said, I’m the sheriff round these parts, son. I ain’t got no patience for your flim-flam.
I was part way through a passable rendition of an octopus having an earnest conversation with a set of bagpipes when Lady Hardcastle returned to reality.
‘I say, thank you for the coffee. When did this get here?’
‘About ten minutes ago,’ I said. ‘Did you really not notice?’
‘No, dear, sorry. On the plus side, though, I think I have an idea.’
‘Which you’re not going to share.’
She laughed. ‘Of course not. Don’t be silly. Go and fetch your lockpicks – I want to see what’s behind that door upstairs.’
It was the work of mere moments to pick the lock on the door at the end of the panelled corridor, and we opened it to find not a room, as I had been expecting, but a flight of circular stone steps leading upwards.
‘A spiral staircase,’ I said. ‘Exactly what a good fort needs.’
‘If one were being pedantic, they’re helical steps rather than spiral, but who are we to go against hundreds of years of geometric misnomerism?’
‘Who indeed? I suppose you’re going to tell me now that the clockwise spiral isn’t to make them easier for right-handed swordsmen to defend.’
‘I did read something about that recently, too, but I’m not convinced, no.
Surely it’s difficult for anyone to wield a sword on a helical staircase, no matter which hand they hold it in.
And, honestly, what’s the point? If attackers are already inside one’s castle and fighting their way upstairs, the battle is lost. Better to have a decent escape route than a fancy staircase.
It’s much more likely that they were built this way because they take up less space and the direction of turn is just an aesthetic choice. ’
‘You make a good point. It seemed like such a clever idea, though.’
‘Sorry. Would you go first, though, dear? If there’s another locked door at the top we don’t want to fall to our deaths in a clumsy attempt to swap places.’
I led the way. There were no lights on the stairs, and no windows, so the only illumination came from the open door at the bottom. After a couple of turns, this had faded to nothing and I found myself walking like a music hall ghost, with my arms out in front of me to feel my way.
Eventually I reached a small landing and groped my way forwards to find, as predicted, another locked door. I soon had it open and we stepped out on to a large square platform at the very top of Guardians Rock Fort.
‘I say, this is a marvellous spot,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘In decent visibility one could see for miles from here. This must have been the lookout.’
I pointed to the embrasures in the waist-high parapet that bounded the platform.
‘You could put smallish guns up here to take pot shots, too.’ We walked over to the wall on the ‘inside’ of the fort and looked down.
‘See? The main gun platform’s down there, but there’s no point in wasting this fantastic vantage point. ’
Turning back, we took in the flagpole mounted in a small stone plinth at the centre of the platform and got a better look at the neat structure that housed the doorway through which we had passed a few moments before. Behind it was a newly built section made of almost-but-not-quite the same stone.
‘What do we think that is?’ I asked.
‘It’s a stone hut.’
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you. Why do you think it’s there?’
She winked at me. ‘“I can think of a way to find out,” as a wise woman once said.’
There was a door on one of the long sides of the little building, which succumbed in seconds to my trusty picks. On a hunch, I felt around on the inside of the door frame for a light switch and soon the small room was illuminated.
A tall iron frame in the centre held a large electric motor and gearbox connected to a sizeable pulley wheel holding a steel cable, one end of which disappeared down the centre of a square shaft with the other going down one side.
‘The dumb waiter mechanism?’ I suggested.
‘That would be my guess,’ she said, looking down through the hole beneath the machinery.
‘It’s a good deal more substantial than I would have expected for something intended just to haul a few dinner plates up from the kitchen.
It seems to have a counterweight. Not the level of sophistication one might think necessary for so simple a purpose. ’
‘The transporty bit – you know, the box thing – is quite a size, though. Perhaps they use it for moving supplies between floors. Even furniture, at a pinch.’
‘JB does like his gadgets and modern inventions, doesn’t he. But look at the way this lift shaft is built. The runners come all the way up, so the car needn’t stop at the dining room on the first floor – you could bring it up here if you needed to.’
‘Or you could stop at, say, the second floor,’ I said.
‘But where would it open out . . . ? Oh, that panelling.’
‘That’s what I was thinking. Shall we take a look?’
Back down in the wood-lined passageway, we carefully examined the panels, looking for any kind of gap that could indicate where an opening might be, but everything had been made to the highest standards of workmanship and the fit was perfect.
Even around the area where we assumed the lift shaft would be, we could find nothing.
‘You have a musical ear,’ I said after a few minutes of fruitless searching.
‘Close your eyes and listen for a change in tone as I tap on the wood. I’ll try to knock in the same place in each panel – surely there’ll be a difference.
Even if they’re all mounted on battens and set away from the stone, there must be a difference in the sound when there’s no wall behind. ’
She nodded and closed her eyes as instructed.
I tapped.
And tapped.
And tapped again.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That one’s subtly different.’
She opened her eyes and together we re-examined the panel. Still nothing.
Almost in desperation, I pressed the centre of one of the elegantly carved linen folds in the middle of the panel. It gave slightly and there was a soft click as though of latches being released. I pressed harder and two of the panels slid back towards the wall.
I looked at Lady Hardcastle and shrugged.
‘Sliding door?’ she suggested.
I placed my hand on the panel and tried to push it to the right and, sure enough, it slid noiselessly aside on greased runners to reveal a large, framed opening in the wall about four feet square.
Through this opening we could see what I presumed to be the elusive lift shaft.
As I moved my head, light glinted on a heavy steel cable within, confirming my guess.
There was a small metal box mounted on the wooden frame of the opening with a pair of vertically mounted buttons labelled ‘Up’ and ‘Down’. There were tiny light bulbs beside the buttons and the one labelled ‘Down’ was illuminated.
I looked at Lady Hardcastle.
She looked back and, with a grin, pressed the button marked ‘Up’.
The cable vibrated and there was the faintest sound of greased wheels on the steel tracks, but the motor in the building above us was all but inaudible.
A few moments later, the lift car arrived and the ‘Down’ light was extinguished – apparently it indicated where the car was in relation to the stop. Clever.
Lady Hardcastle released the button and it halted, almost precisely lined up with the opening with its base level with the floor.
She grinned in satisfaction at her achievement. ‘I could have been a lift attendant, you know.’
I nodded. ‘It’s good to have a trade to fall back on.’