And another locked door.
This lock was older and much more difficult to pick. The mechanism was more massive—heavier—more stiff—and almost impossible to move with the thin wire of my braces.
I congratulated myself on bringing the pickle fork as a backup.
A bit more squalene from my nose, a bit of twiddling the lock’s wards with my mouthware, a couple of deft twists with the cutlery and—Bob’s your uncle!—the levers lifted and the door swung inward.
I was no longer in the tunnel.
Now, I found myself in a low stone chamber which was obviously part of the crypt.
Iron sconces on the walls had once held torches: massive blotches of black soot on the ceiling, probably hundreds of years old, showed that flaming brands had once been used.
The walls were scratched with names and initials: D.C., R.O.; Playfayre; Madrigall, Wenlock: some of them ancestors of families who still lived in Bishop’s Lacey.
Not a de Luce among the lot.
At the back of the chamber was what I took at first to be a hole: a rectangle of darkness about five feet above the floor. I shone the torch into it, but could not see far. I wasn’t tall enough.
Luckily, someone had made a makeshift stepping-stone of broken granite—old tombstones, perhaps—directly beneath the opening.
Even without the footprints which were everywhere in the dust, it was clear that this opening had been used quite recently.
I climbed up and peered into the chamber. It was surprisingly roomy.
I boosted myself into the darkness, clicked on the torch, and began scraping along on hands and knees. I thought for a moment of Howard Carter crawling through those puzzling passages in the pyramids.
Hadn’t he died by ignoring a curse?
In the cramped stone passageway I could hear the beating of my own heart.
Tanc-red, Tanc-red, Tanc-red, Tanc-red …
Had the saint, like Shakespeare, put a curse on his own grave? Curs’t be he that moves these bones, and so forth?
Is that what had happened to poor Mr. Collicutt?
It seemed unlikely. Even if the spirits of the dead were capable of killing, I doubted that they were able to strap gas masks onto the faces of their victims.
A shiver shook my shoulders at the thought of Mr. Collicutt, who, if my theory was correct, had been dragged, dead or alive, through this very passageway.
I tied a mental string onto my forefinger. I would remember to pray for him properly on Easter Sunday.
And now, quite abruptly, the narrow crawl space branched, and I found myself peering down from above into a large chamber. As with the outer room, someone had piled broken stones handily below the opening, and I was easily able to scramble down onto the rubble-covered floor.
This part of the passage went no farther: This was the end.
I let the torch’s beam sweep slowly round the room, but aside from more names and initials scratched into the stone of the walls, there was little to see.
The place was empty.
Empty, that is, except for a pair of iron brackets that projected from the wall.
Two handgrips had been drilled into opposite ends of a single stone; they could have no purpose other than to shift it.
A quick examination showed that I was right: A razor-thin gap ran across the top of the stone and down both sides. Unlike the other stones in the wall, this one, although it was snug-fitting, had no mortar.
It was meant to come out.
As I traced out the gap, I could feel the draft on my fingertips: the same draft—I was sure of it!—I had felt in the crypt.
Unless I was sadly mistaken, I was now directly behind the wall of the chamber in which Mr. Collicutt’s body had been hidden.
This was how his killer—or killers, more likely—had maneuvered him into an unopened tomb.
The sound came at first as no more than a stirring of the air about my ears. The acute sense of hearing I had inherited from Harriet was like that: imperceptible at first, a kind of audible silence.
Only when I acknowledged its presence did it fully take form, as it now did.
Someone was talking.
The voice was that of a fly in a bottle—a hollow tinny buzzing that rose and fell … rose and fell.
I could not make out the words, only the drone of the insect voice.
My immediate reaction was to switch off the torch.
Which left me in darkness.
I could see instantly that there were beads of light coming through the cracks.
Had they seen the light from my torch? It seemed unlikely: They were in a crypt illuminated by a string of bulbs. Little enough of my torchlight would have been visible.
But who would be in the crypt in the middle of the night? I decided that there must be at least two of them, since one would hardly be talking to himself.
I pressed an ear against the crack and tried to make out the words.
But it was no use. The narrow slit between the stones had a strange filtering effect: It was as if I were hearing only a thin slice of the speaker’s voice—not quite enough to make out the words.
After half a minute or so, I gave it up and, using only my fingertips, began a closer examination of the stone itself.
It was about eighteen inches wide and about a foot high. The depth, I knew, must be the thickness of the wall, which I guessed to be another eighteen inches.
One and a half times one and a half times one equaled two and a quarter cubic feet. How much would it weigh?
That, of course, depended upon its specific gravity. From the tables in Uncle Tar’s handbooks, I knew that gold had a specific gravity of more than twelve hundred, and lead about seven hundred.
St. Tancred’s was famous for the beauty of its sandstone, which, if I remembered correctly, had a specific gravity of somewhere between two and three, and weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds per cubic foot.
The whole stone, then, would weigh somewhere between three and four hundred pounds.
Would I be able to shift it? Obviously, with someone on the other side, now was not the time.
But still, I needed to know, without a doubt, that this tunnel and this stone connected directly with the cavity in which I had found Mr. Collicutt’s corpse.
I didn’t dare pull on the iron handles for fear of being heard.
Perhaps I would have to sit here in darkness and wait until the light went out on the other side of the stone.
How long would it take? I wondered. What on earth could they be doing in there?
I might as well make myself comfortable. I would press my back against the wall behind me and slide down it until I was seated on the floor.
Then, in darkness, I would wait.
I was halfway through this simple maneuver when my feet slipped on a pebble.
I dropped down heavily upon my behind.
Worse, I dropped the torch.
• THIRTEEN •
CLANG! IT WENT, THE sound chillingly loud in the darkness.
I held my breath.
The insect buzzing of voices stopped instantly.
I strained my ears, but the only sound I could hear was the beating of my own heart.
And then a grinding noise—a grating of stone, echoing from wall to wall. I crawled forward and touched my fingers to the block.
It was moving!
They were shoving the stone inward—toward me!
I scrabbled for the torch but my fingers could not locate it in the darkness. I was clutching uselessly at bits of rubble, my nails tearing at the hard stone floor.
The block was still moving. I could not see it, but I could hear it grating. In less than a minute they would be climbing through the opening.
If only there were some way to stop the stone: a stout length of timber, for instance, to wedge against the opposite wall.
But there was nothing in this echoing chamber.
Nothing but Flavia de Luce.
The thought came out of nowhere—or s
o it seemed at the time.
Later, I would realize that my mind had vomited up a sudden memory of snooping through Feely’s unmentionables drawer in search of her diary. Having given up, I was annoyed to find that the drawer would not close completely. No matter how hard I pushed it would not budge.
When I slid it forward and off the tracks, I found the diary taped to the back with strips of sticking plaster. A lesson learned.
I threw myself down onto my back, my feet against the moving stone, and jammed my shoulders against the opposite side of the chamber.
I stiffened every muscle of my body and made myself into a human wedge.
The stone stopped moving.
There was a moment of silence, and then renewed effort from the other side.
Again the stone began inching inward.
Had they brought a lever? I wondered.
Perhaps they were now both shoving.
My knees were beginning to bend. I tried to keep them straight but they were quivering like bowstrings.
Daffy had once read me a story in which the victim was tortured with a device called the Scavenger’s Daughter which, rather than stretching the body like the rack, compressed it into a ball until its fluids caused it to burst like an enormous pimple.
I stretched out both arms full length, trying desperately to grip onto the floor. Anything to increase the resistance.
A sliver of light appeared. The stone was almost clear of the wall.
Now I could hear their voices.
“Bloody thing’s stuck,” one of them said. “Give me the crowbar.”
There was a metallic clanking and I felt the stone move even more powerfully against my feet. I couldn’t hold out much longer.
And then the light went out—and, a few seconds later, came back on again.
“Someone’s coming!” a voice hissed, and the stone grated to a stop.
“Someone’s at the top of the stairs,” another voice said. “They’ve turned the switch off and on.”
“Let’s get out of here!” the first voice whispered, frantically.
“Go round back of the furnace. Use the coalhole.” There was a scuffling, and then absolute silence.
I knew that they were gone.
I counted slowly to a hundred.
No point in crawling like a Commando all the way back through the Cottlestone tomb, I thought, when I was so close to freedom.
I seized the iron handles of the stone and gave it a hard tug. It might have moved a quarter of an inch.
I sat down on the floor so that the stone was between my knees, planted my feet against the wall, and pulled again. Perhaps half an inch, this time, or a little more.
If I concentrated on pulling at one end, it would swing in like a door, just far enough, if I were lucky, to allow me to squeeze past.
At last I had made a gap of about four inches: not wide enough to pass through, but enough to have a look outside. I dropped to my hands and knees and peered out into the crypt. The crowbar was lying where they had dropped it, about two feet from the opening.
I got down onto my stomach and shoved an arm through the opening as far as it would go. My face was crushed so tightly against the stone that I must have looked like something from the ocean depths.
My fingers found the beveled end of the crowbar, but just barely. I didn’t want to shove the thing completely away.
A fraction of an inch at a time, I hooked my fingernails onto the crowbar’s edge and pulled it ever so slowly toward me.
Feely had been nagging me about biting my nails since I was in a pram, and quite recently I had decided she was right. A chemist who is going to be photographed by The Illustrated London News holding up a test tube and peering into it intently needed half-decent hands.
My nails were not yet as long as I liked, but they were enough to do the job.
The crowbar crept toward me. When it was safely within reach, I hauled it in through the opening and gave thanks to the good Saint Tancred who lay somewhere just a few feet below me.
From there on, levering the stone all the way into the chamber was a piece of cake.
A piece of rock cake, I thought, with what was probably a silly grin.
There was now light enough to spot the torch, which had rolled away into a far corner. I flicked the switch to see if it was still working—which it was—then crawled through the wall and into the crypt.
As I stood up straight I realized for the first time how stiff and sore my body had become. My hands and knees were scratched and scraped.
I was quite proud of myself. I understood how the veterans felt who had suffered war wounds.
Before moving on into the main part of the crypt, I stopped to listen.
Not a sound.
Whoever had been in the crypt was gone. There could be no doubt about it. The place was filled with that special stillness that is found where all the occupants are dead.
Still, I’ll admit that, as I crept past the furnace, the hair on the back of my neck bristled—but only a little.
Now I was at the bottom of the steps that led up to the church. Was there anything else to worry about? Would the crypt’s midnight visitors be lying in wait for me outside the church?
They needed only to hide behind the tombstone where Gladys was parked and pounce on me as soon as I appeared—abducting a girl in a churchyard in the middle of the night would not be difficult.
Perhaps I’d better stay in the church: Curl up in a pew, catch forty winks, and race home just as the sun was coming up. No one would even know I’d been away.
Yes, that’s what I’d do.
Up the stone staircase I trudged—one slow step at a time.
In the porch, the outer door was closed, but unlocked, as it probably had been since the time of Henry VIII when the churches of England were looted and vandalized.
To my left, illuminated only by the light which shone down through the stained-glass windows, the carpet of the center aisle was a ribbon of red in the moonlight.
I thought again of the poem, and of the Highwayman, who had, at the end, been shot down like a dog on the highway.
And I thought—for some peculiar reason—of the dead Mr. Collicutt.
Mr. Collicutt, of course, had not lain in his blood on the highway with a bunch of lace at his throat—but he might as well have.
It came back to me in a flash like a news reporter’s camera.
He had been wearing a bunch of lace at his throat.
Or something very much like it.
The Highwayman had died for love, hadn’t he? To warn him that the inn was swarming with King George’s men, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, had shot herself in the breast.
They had both died.
Would there be another victim in Bishop’s Lacey? Were Mr. Collicutt’s killers already plotting to silence someone else—someone who had loved the unfortunate organist?
I moved slowly up the center aisle, touching the ends of every row of pews with my fingertips, absorbing the security of the ancient oak.
There was just enough light to make my way up the chancel steps to the organ without using the torch.
Back to business, I decided.
Although the wall panel was nearly invisible, Feely had opened it easily. Would I be able to find the latch?
I ran my fingers over the polished wood and the carved moldings, but they were as solid as they looked. I pressed here and there—it was no use.
The face of a carved wooden imp grinned at me saucily in the shadows. I touched his puffed-out polished cheeks and gave them a twist.
There was a click and the panel slid open.
I stepped carefully inside.
Closing the panel behind me, I switched on the torch.
Praise be to Saint Tancred, the patron saint of Evidence!
There on the floor, in the beam of light, were Feely’s footprints and my own in the dust. Nobody had walked over them. The police had seen no reason to examine the organ cas
e. Why should they, after all? It was nowhere near the spot where Mr. Collicutt’s body had been hidden.
Even Mr. Haskins hadn’t been in here to extract the bat from the organ pipe—I could spot the prints of his grave-digger boots a mile away—which meant, most likely, that the bat’s carcass was still at the bottom of the sixteen-foot diapason.
Rest in peace, little creature, I thought.
The thing had got in through the coalhole, I supposed, during the nighttime comings and goings of whoever had stuffed Mr. Collicutt into the wall of the crypt.
I gave the pipe a tap with my knuckles, but nothing stirred. The bat was almost certainly dead.
My torch illuminated a couple of fresh gouges in the wood of the organ frame. I dropped to my knees for a closer look.
Yes, there could be no doubt about it—
“Crikey!”
I nearly leaped out of my skin as, in the far corner, the wind chest gave out a dry wheeze. The tombstone of Hezekiah Whytefleet had settled, forcing wind into the organ’s works.
There was also a hissing behind me.
I swung round the torch’s beam and at once spotted the source of the noise. Set into the wooden ductwork was a round, drilled hole, slightly smaller in diameter than a lead pencil, and it was through this that the air was hissing.
On the floor directly beneath it was a dried red stain.
As I took a step forward, something crunched under the sole of my shoe.
I knew even without looking that it was glass.
My own laboratory work had made me quite familiar with the principle of the manometer: that liquid-filled, U-shaped glass tubing which was used to measure air pressure.
It made good sense that the organ would have been fitted with such a device to measure the pressure from the wind chest. The tube, marked in inches, would, until recently, have been partially filled with colored alcohol, its level giving the required reading, very much like an outdoor thermometer.
All that now remained of the manometer, besides the gritty glass crumbs on the floor, was the jagged ring of hollow glass where it had been snapped off level with its wooden socket.
The rest of the glass tubing, if I were any judge at all, I had seen clutched in the hand of the late Mr. Collicutt.
It was here on this spot, in the very heart of the great organ that he had loved and played, that the organist met his death.