Chapter 31 #2
“You said you never had the keys!” Isabel took a couple of swift strides towards the stairs.
“Keep back!” Vaughn wielded his steel-ferruled umbrella like a spear. “One jab and you’d go flying.” Without turning his head, he chucked the satchel behind him in the passage. Taking a jangling bunch of keys from his coat pocket, he stepped backward, pulling the door shut.
As it thumped into its frame, Isabel bounded up the steps. Daisy heard the click of the lock. Isabel turned the handle and tugged, but she was too late.
“Blast!” said Daisy.
Isabel sat down on the top step and looked at her watch. “Half past eleven. Five hours till Vera comes home. But Alec will miss you.”
“Not if he’s busy. Vera won’t be able to let us out without a key, unless Vaughn’s left it in the lock. But she won’t know we’re stuck here and she has no reason to try the door.”
“She’ll go to the kitchen for a cuppa. We’ll shout through the keyhole.”
“There’s those little flap things. And he may have left the key in the hole.”
“The first thing is to find out. I brought a pocket torch to get a good look at how the shelves are put together. That’ll help.
” Isabel ascended the stairs. Daisy, standing at the foot, watched her kneel down on the landing and fiddle with the flap.
“It’s not very strong. I may be able to lever it off. ”
“I have a nail file in my pocket. Would that help?”
“Yes.”
Daisy trod carefully up the steps, one hand on the wall rail. “Here you are. I’ll hold the torch, shall I?”
The ceiling light was centrally placed so as to illuminate the racks, and the landing was murky. Daisy trained the torch beam on the keyhole. Isabel easily prised off the little oval piece of brass. She put it in her pocket and stuck the nail file into the hole.
“It goes in quite a way. I don’t think he left the key.”
“In any case, the door fits too tight for us to slide a paper under it and catch the key as it falls, the way they do in thrillers.”
“Let me have the torch a minute.” Isabel tried to shine the light into the keyhole while peering past it and her hand. “I can’t see very well but I’m pretty sure it’s not there.”
“See if you can twist the flap to the side.”
Isabel handed the torch back, stuck the nail file in again, and wiggled it. “That’s not getting anywhere. I’ll try to push it hard enough to bend it. No, I can’t get a good enough grip on the file.”
“I have a propelling pencil. That might work. Just a mo.” Daisy went down to where she had left her notebook. Alec had given her a leather notebook case, with a loop inside to hold a writing implement and a gold propelling pencil to fit in the loop. “Here, use this.”
“It’d get scratched.”
“I’d rather have a little bit of fresh air than a pristine pencil!” Daisy’s suffocating nightmare hovered on the edge of her consciousness. Feeling less casual than she hoped she sounded, she asked, “How long do you think the air in a room this size would last two people?”
“Ages, I’m sure.” Isabel poked the pencil into the keyhole and jabbed.
“A hammer … I know, my shoe.” With the heel of her shoe she bashed the end of the pencil.
The heel hit the keyhole plate with a thump.
She lowered the shoe and peered into the hole again.
“Oh dear, your pencil went all the way through. The flap is bent right out of the way.”
“Good! Not only can we breathe through the hole if the air in here gets bad, but Vera is bound to see the pencil. I wonder if a rolled-up note could be pushed through. Oh, botheration, now I haven’t got anything to write with.”
“Just several pieces of paper would draw attention, even if it’s all blank.”
“True.” Inspiration struck. “I know, we can write SOS in Morse code by making holes with the nail file.”
They found by experiment that a half sheet of paper from Daisy’s notebook could easily be folded small enough to fit through the keyhole.
So they sat on the steps “writing” SOS messages, Daisy with the nail file, Isabel with one of Vera’s kirby grips that she found in her pocket, having picked it up off the floor or some piece of furniture.
A dozen bits of paper would more than suffice, they decided. Isabel pushed them through. Then she sat back on her heels and contemplated the hair grip.
“I’m going to have a go at picking the lock with this. Alec made it look so easy. A little hook at the end, I think.”
Straightening the grip was easy; making a hook at the end not much harder. But the narrow strip of metal was even more difficult to grasp firmly than the nail file. Isabel poked and prodded, until it snapped at the point where she had straightened it.
“It was worth a try,” said Daisy. “Unless you have any more tricks up your sleeve, we might as well get on with your measuring.”
“Except we can’t write down the measurements.”
“What a bore.” She sighed, then wondered if sighing used up more oxygen than just breathing. Her chest felt tight. It must be her imagination. They couldn’t possibly be running short of air yet.
She could smell the carbolic now, and beneath it a faint, barely perceptible sickly sweetness. Her throat closed against it. She coughed, gasped, struggled to inhale.
“Daisy, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
With an effort, Daisy pulled herself together and forced herself to relax. “It’s … nothing,” she wheezed. “Sorry. Just an … aftereffect of being ill. I breathed some nasty smoke from a rubbish fire on the way here … but now it’s all in my imagination. The disinfectant…”
Isabel sniffed. “I can’t smell it. I suppose I’m used to it. If Mrs. Hedger ever comes back, I really must persuade her to stop using so much. Are you going to be all right?”
“Yes, quite all right. Let’s talk about something else. What do you make of Vaughn’s behaviour?”
“Isn’t it obvious? He killed Mrs. Gray and he knows Mr. Underwood and Alec are hot on his trail, so he’s making his escape.”
“I’ve spent too much time with detectives to believe anything is obvious.
If he killed her, why persist in trying to find out where she intended to go?
Before, it could have been an act to disarm suspicion, but that doesn’t explain why he came here just before bolting.
He’d have done better simply to leave with all possible haste. ”
“I suppose so.”
“And then there’s Willie’s side of it. Clearly he’s been involved in something nefarious at work.”
“Cooking the books, expected to boil over today.”
“I’d guess that’s why he’s hopping it. Coming here delayed his departure. Unless he believes, or at least hopes, she’s still alive, it makes no sense.”
“None of it makes sense,” Isabel said crossly. “I hope the police have a better idea of what’s going on. I wish they didn’t have such a mania for secrecy!”
“Let’s check the shelves for a nail we can extract, and I’ll have a go at picking the lock.
I really don’t want to spend five hours in here, plus however long it would take Vera to get help.
” Daisy glanced around. The room seemed to have shrunk.
“And even if breathing through the keyhole helps, we can’t be sure we won’t run out of air. ”