Chapter Five #3
I also found one of James’s business cards.
He must have given it to him at the party, although it looked quite old and battered.
I took it to be on the safe side, best to sever all connections.
Apart from the connection that was him lying in our mausoleum.
I took the address book, the wallet, and the business card, but there was no phone.
I hurried back to the house, feeling the foul air of the mausoleum clinging to me, then on to my next job: finding what Mrs. B had taken.
I went all over the living area, I searched high and low, I even searched in places I was sure Mrs. B couldn’t reach. There was nothing that wasn’t where it should be, but I was confident that she hadn’t left empty-handed. That had never happened.
In hope rather than expectation, I took a walk around the main house, praying she had spotted an antique that might look good on her mantelpiece, but there were no gaps in the arrangements, no spots missing their dust, no dark rectangles on a faded wall.
Now it made sense that she had said she thought Lennie’s bag was Mr. B’s: she thought she was about to be caught taking the phone.
I went back to the bedroom and took Lennie’s bag out of the wardrobe. I would hide it where I hid my snacks.
It is a little-known fact that Langley Hall has a priest hole, a relic from the days in which to be a Catholic priest was a very daring career choice indeed. It was shown only to the summer visitors who paid for a tour and I was on one of those tours, more than thirty-five years ago now.
Normally, adventures like the Langley Hall tour would be beyond the means of my mum and me when I was growing up, but in the summer I turned eleven, she won ￡50 in a village sweepstake. Langley Hall was our first port of call, obsessed with it as we were.
We arrived just in time for the tour, and within minutes we were amongst a group of around ten, following an excited guide upstairs, where we saw four-poster beds in rooms with painted ceilings, a ballroom like the one Cinderella danced in, a library with more books than our mobile library had ever seen, and cases full of jewelry.
Finally the guide stopped on the staircase and asked:
“Who knows what a priest hole is?”
My hand shot into the air; this had been in the book from the library. “It used to be illegal to be a Catholic and if you had a Catholic priest in your house and he was found, he would be executed. So they made hiding places for them.”
“That’s right,” the guide said—I knew it was right!
“Back in the sixteenth century Catholicism was punishable by death, but people didn’t want to abandon their faith, so the priests came to their houses to say mass and they created hiding places for them, in case the authorities came.
Those places were very hard to find. Can anyone see where it might be? ”
We all looked around for a clue, until the guide crouched down, pressed a panel on one of the stairs, and the step, along with the step above it, lifted to reveal a hidey-hole.
“Would anyone like to get in it?” she asked, and I did not need to be asked twice.
There was room for me, at the age of nearly eleven, to stretch out comfortably.
“But can you imagine how cramped it would be for a full-grown man?” the guide said. “And he could be in there for hours while the soldiers searched. It must have been pitch black.” She partially dropped the stair back down. “Is it dark in there?”
“A little bit,” I said. There was still a fair amount of light getting in, but I got the picture.
“He’d be able to hear the soldiers stomping up and down; he’d hear their voices. And if the householders were taken away, he could be stuck in there indefinitely. Possibly forever.”
She lost her grip on the step then and for a few seconds I had the full priest hole experience—she was right, it was pitch dark—until she managed to lift it back up and was relieved to find me smiling.
That was one of the last tours. Lord Ashbury died the following winter, Langley Hall was never reopened to the public, and its secrets faded from memory.
In recent years, that remarkable piece of history had been used for hiding snacks from James and, now, evidence from a crime. I put Lennie’s satchel and the treats Mrs. Billings had brought that morning inside and closed the priest hole up again.
The effort drained the last of my energy from me; this was the busiest day I’d had for years.
And the most stressful, but there was one more job to do.
I took the clothes we’d been wearing that night, all dry clean only, and set them to soak, with the stained cloth, in cold water.
A couple of hours later, I put them on a hot wash.
After that, I retreated to the sofa and thought about how, if I did kill James, I knew now I could hide him in the mausoleum, if I could think of a way to get him down there.
But that was a question for another day.
I typed out a WhatsApp message: “I can’t cook tonight, I’m too tired.
Can you get a takeaway, please?” and pressed send.
From my pocket, James’s phone beeped on receipt of the message. Oh yeah.