Chapter 21 #3
“My grandfather’s cufflinks,” Tom called, retreating up the stairs.
“The night he went missing, he was dressed for dinner. He always wore cufflinks with a suit. One fell out the other night in the basement, when you were moving him. Did you know that? It had his initials on it. You found the other one, didn’t you?
Kept it. Too cheap to toss it, but too scared to hock it? ”
Another volley cracked out, thwacking into the walls.
Hot pain blasted through Tom’s left ankle.
A hunk of debris had smashed into it, slicing deep into the skin just above his boot.
He sucked in air through his teeth. You could tell how bad an injury was by how long it took for the initial bolt of pain to pass.
This was … not good. Blood dripped onto the stone step.
He went to wipe it off. It was never wise to let on to your enemy that you were wounded.
Or … maybe he could make it work in his favor.
Quickly, he smeared the blood over the step.
Another burst of fire, closer. Tom yelled, as if in great pain, and scrambled up the steps towards the kitchen.
Amelia
After Amelia hauled herself out of the tunnel and dropped the hatch closed, she spent way too long trying to decide whether to weigh it down with something.
Bricks? Rocks? But then she’d be trapping Tom inside with Duncan.
Another burst of gunfire decided it. She sprinted away.
Better if Duncan followed her—once she’d had a chance to take cover.
Not that she had any idea where to hide. Duncan knows every blade of grass by name, Tom had said. Should she set out for the village? More gunshots boomed. They seemed to reverberate through the ground under her feet. Was that a yell of pain—from Tom?
She needed to lure Duncan out. But how? What could possibly—?
Her gaze snagged on the brick wall that enclosed the kitchen garden.
The air raid siren. He can’t stand the sound of it, Xanthe had said.
Plus, there was a chance it’d be heard in the village—by Xanthe, maybe, or the cop.
He might not want to risk letting it wail for too long, in case someone came out to check. Worth a try.
She ran to a wrought-iron gate inset into the brick wall and slipped inside the garden. Another burst of gunfire—louder, less muffled—followed by an agonized scream. Tom. Definitely Tom. She flattened against the brick, her chest tightening. Stay focused.
She would have to cross in front of the kitchen windows to get to the siren.
If Duncan was in the kitchen, he’d have a clear shot.
She crept to the side of the windows and peeked in.
No movement. She took a longer look. Definitely empty.
A weak light spilled in from the corridor.
She was about to pull back when something caught her eye: a dark-red puddle spreading across the flagstones, right under the arched entranceway.
Blood—a lot of it. There was a boot print stepping out of it. Tom’s?
She fisted her hands by her sides, fighting to control her breath. There was no time to freeze. Even less time to freak out. Their survival might well be all up to her.
Once she switched on the siren, she’d need to hightail it, in case Duncan came out of the kitchen door that led to the garden.
She scurried past the window, keeping to the overgrown grass beside the pebbled path to muffle her tread, and stopped at the post with the siren on it.
Xanthe had mentioned a switch… Amelia located a small metal box attached to the post and tugged it open, her hands shaking.
Inside was a single lever. She flicked it on.
Nothing happened. Just as she started looking for another solution, fans began to spin inside the twin turbines.
Now to get clear before it gave away her position.
If Tom was badly wounded, she needed to find him—stop the bleeding, get him somewhere safe.
As the siren began to hum, she took off at a run, heading for an open gate at the other end of the walled garden.
She could sneak back in through the hatch, if necessary.
She flew through the gate, turned, and thumped straight into a man’s chest. He grabbed her upper arms. She looked up, hoping against hope to see Tom’s face, but it was … a cyclops.
She yelped, struggling, but she was pinned. As she stared at the hideous single eye, it morphed into two regular eyes. Not a cyclops—a man, wearing a dark coat. As the hallucination dissolved, so did the one in her memory, of the cyclopses carrying the carpet.
This man was the other cyclops.
Tom
Tom crept into the entrance hall, his fast-swelling ankle throbbing out of time with the echoing tick of the grandfather clock. Sucking up the pain, he synced his breathing with the clock—in for three seconds, out for three. Running was no longer an option, that much was clear.
Outside, the air raid siren wound down to silence. Was Amelia trying to raise the alarm? He was confident Duncan was still in the house, following the trail Tom had left, but he’d swear he heard a cry. An animal, hopefully.
He quietly opened one of the main entrance doors, and then silently limped back across the tiled floor, this time taking care to leave no blood trail. He backed in behind the plinth with the broken bust. From here, he’d spot Duncan before Duncan saw him.
He pictured the old groundskeeper sweeping through the rooms along the corridor.
First the kitchen, where he’d see the pool of blood—actually a mixture of real blood from Tom’s meaty ankle wound, and the remains of the blood-red Chateau Delphine that had spooked Amelia when they were cleaning up.
The trail of bloody footsteps and droplets would lure Duncan along the corridor, through the antechamber, and into the great hall.
If the trick had worked, he’d assume Tom was mortally wounded.
Tom had quietly closed the door between the servants’ corridor and the antechamber. Duncan might know every blade of grass on the estate, but Tom knew every draft in the abbey…
He didn’t have to wait long. First came a click that told him the antechamber door had opened. He could almost count the seconds until—
Boom! The rush of air from the northwesterly breeze shot through the wind funnel, caught the main door, and slammed it. Nice work, poltergeists. From the antechamber, Duncan would have caught the barest glimpse of the main door closing. With luck, he’d assume Tom had exited through it.
Sure enough, Duncan emerged, rifle muzzle first, and then red beanie pulled over his gray hair.
Tom hunched in his ambush spot while Duncan did a quick sweep of the hall, but it was perfunctory.
As Duncan passed Tom and reached for the main door, Tom tossed a grapefruit at the head of the suit of armor that stood by the staircase.
Not his best throw—it struck with a dull clang and bounced off rather than knocking the whole thing to the floor—but it had the desired effect.
Duncan swiveled to face it, putting his back to Tom. Exactly where Tom wanted him.
Tom launched and ran a few steps, ignoring the crunching pain in his foot.
He dived at Duncan’s legs. A textbook rugby tackle: legs shoulder-width apart, knees bent, weight over his feet, head up.
He drove his shoulder into Duncan’s back, wrapping his arms around the guy’s waist and keeping his feet moving until Duncan smashed into the wood paneling at the side of the staircase.
He dropped Duncan to the floor, ripped the rifle away, and turned it on him, backing up, panting.
The pain started back up in his ankle. But the objective was achieved.
Duncan looked like an old man, groaning in pain. He was an old man. Tom had just tackled a wounded old man to the ground.
An old man who’d killed his grandfather and tried to kill him and his … and Amelia.
Tom had to disassociate. Like when he’d looked through his scope at an enemy combatant.
If you stopped to think about the consequences, the hostile would take out your mates before you had a chance to act.
It was possibly the one time in his life he’d forced himself to zoom in and stay there. He had to do the same now.
Duncan backed up against the paneling. “Go on, then. Shoot.”
Tom steadied his breath.
“You don’t have it in you,” Duncan spat, wiping blood from his mouth. “You couldn’t pull the trigger on a dying stag if it looked at you with its eyes rolling and begged you to put it out of its misery.”
Tom adjusted his grip on the rifle. “I might not be able to shoot you in the head, but a shot in the leg would be enough.” Tom pretended to size him up.
He’d much rather stick with his plan, which was to tie Duncan up with the curtain cord he’d grabbed from the butler’s room, and steal the keys to his pickup.
Drive off with Amelia and never come back.
“You’d walk with a hobble the rest of your life. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“You still wouldn’t do it.”
“I suppose you’d know all about killing someone you’d known all your life, wouldn’t you, Duncan? Someone who was like family.”
Duncan scowled. “Your grandfather? It was an accident.”
“Then why didn’t you say so at the time? Explain?”
“Explain,” Duncan said, shaking his head. “You think anyone would believe me?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“We’d both been on the whiskey. We argued. You know how he could get. He came at me, and I defended myself. Simple as that.”
“What did you argue about?”
Duncan glanced sideways. “Can’t even remember.”
Tom could tell that was a lie. “Defended yourself how?”
“Pushed him away. Only, he cracked his head on the mantel. He was bleeding. It was a proper solid knock. Didn’t stop him though. He kept coming at me and coming at me, so I picked up a bookend and struck out. Got him clear in the head.”
“The copper bookends.” Tom hadn’t seen them for years. Duncan must have got rid of them. “You could still have come clean.”
“I didn’t just hit him once,” Duncan growled.
Tom couldn’t decide if Duncan had an urge to confess or was just buying time.
But Tom wanted to know. Needed to. “It just all came out. I kept hitting him and hitting him, even once he was down. Couldn’t stop myself.
He was… By the end his head was… It was no pretty sight.
And not a scratch on me. That sound like self-defense to you? ”
“It really doesn’t.” Tom tried to block out the mind picture Duncan had painted. Like Amelia said: Act now, process later. He pulled the cord from his waistband.
“You see? So, I panicked. Rolled him in that rug and left him there. Couldn’t look at his face after…”
Tom almost felt sorry for him. It was bad enough when Tom had seen the faces of strangers he’d killed in battle. To look at the face of someone you knew so well…
“You’re right, you know,” Duncan continued.
“He was my mate, when it came down to it. We had more differences than most, but he was my mate. I stood there for ages, clock ticking away and chiming, wishing I could turn back the hands. Then I stumbled to the cottage, through the old passage. I had to think. I was shaking like a scared puppy. I threw up. Cleaned myself up, changed my clothes, and sat there, waiting for the reckoning. Had it all mapped out in my head. The coppers would arrive, and I’d put my hands up and say, ‘You got me. I did it.’”
“And what stopped you?”
“Hours later, in the dead of night, the knock came. I told myself, ‘Here we go.’ And I opened it and…”
Tom stared at him. “It was me.”
“Aye, you. Coming to tell me the earl had wandered off and hadn’t come back. You were certain you were the last to see him. You told the cops that, set the whole thing up. No one had checked the study.”
Tom remembered it clearly. Duncan had seemed confused at first, but no more than anyone in a situation like that. And then he’d leaped into action, organizing the search, finding coats and torches.
Getting people out of the house. Clearing his path to hide the body.
“I saw the way out,” Duncan continued, staring through the windows beside the main doors, “set out for me as if God himself had given me a second chance. I thought I’d been saved, my lad had been saved from losing his old man to the slammer—me, the only kin he had left.
How would that look, with him about to start out as a lawyer? ”
“You buried my grandfather in the basement and left him there—for twelve years.”
“Always meant to move him one day, get rid of the body good and proper—give him a decent burial, even—but … I couldn’t.
” He swallowed. His eyes had reddened and watered.
“I wish you hadn’t seen me the other night, Tom.
It would all have gone away, for good this time.
Once the body was gone, and the abbey was gone, it would have been all erased.
But I knew that as soon as you got your memory back… You wouldn’t let it rest.”
“You think I’d let something like that rest? It’s over, Duncan. Time to get it off your conscience. I know you, perhaps not as well as I thought, but I know you. I know this is sitting heavily.”
“If it were just about me, I would.”
“What are you talking about—the Pritchard boys? How are they involved?”
Duncan’s eyes flicked to the front doors. Too late, Tom read the meaning in the glance. He lunged towards the doors, just as one was flung open.
He saw Connor first, face red, thin lips pressed together. And then Amelia. Connor yanked her inside by her arm. He was holding a knife to her throat—Duncan’s farming knife, sharp as a razor.
“Put the gun down, Tom,” Connor said.