‘And if we’re not lucky?’ said Hayley.
‘Do you really need me to say it?’ I said. ‘Apparently you do. All right then, my apologies in advance to those of a delicate sensibility. A hidden passageway would be the perfect place to kill someone without being seen and then hide the bodies. Parker and Baxter’s bodies may already be in there.’
‘But I saw Parker!’ said Martin.
‘You saw somebody,’ I said.
Interesting changes took place in the faces before me. Some of the tension dropped away, as they realized hidden doors and secret tunnels went a long way towards excluding ghosts as a viable explanation. Penny smiled brightly, Hayley nodded thoughtfully, and Doyle began to breathe more easily. Of course, that still didn’t explain how anyone could disappear between the top and bottom of a staircase. I was still working on that one.
‘The whole Lodge could be riddled with secret passages,’ said Doyle. ‘Didn’t some old houses actually have hollow walls, for smugglers and the like?’
‘There was no mention of that in the official family history of Ringstone Lodge,’ said Hayley.
We all looked at her.
‘I didn’t know there was one,’ I said.
‘There’s a copy in the library here,’ said Hayley. ‘Privately published. MacKay mentioned it. I made a point of reading it as soon as I arrived. I like to know as much as possible about any new place I have to work in.’
Doyle looked at her. ‘You never told me … Did this official history mention the family ghosts as well?’
‘Yes,’ said Hayley. ‘Which is why I didn’t tell you. You’ve always had a thing about ghosts.’
‘You should have told me!’ said Doyle.
‘What do we do now?’ Penny said briskly. ‘Go looking for Redd and MacKay? Tap on the walls and kick the panelling?’
‘Martin!’ I said loudly. ‘Are you seeing Redd and MacKay anywhere?’
‘Not so far,’ said Martin. ‘But a lot of my screens are still down. I need more time.’
‘How much time do we have before the reinforcements get here?’ said Doyle.
‘Not long now,’ said Martin. ‘Doctor Hayley … Could you please come back here and join me in the centre? Something has just come up on one of my screens, and I’d value your opinion.’
‘What is it?’ said Hayley.
‘Complicated …’ said Martin. ‘You need to see this for yourself.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said Hayley.
She started off, and then stopped and looked back as she realized Doyle wasn’t going with her. She looked at him inquiringly, and he shook his head.
‘I think I’ve spent long enough following you around, Alice.’
She reacted sharply, as though he’d slapped her. And then her head came up and she turned away, the set of her shoulders making it clear she wasn’t prepared to beg. She strode off, not looking back once. I had intended to go with her, to see what Martin had discovered; but that would have meant leaving Penny alone with Doyle, and I didn’t want her out of my sight. She liked to think she could look after herself, and most of the time she could. But I didn’t trust this house. Or any of the people in it. So the three of us stood together, at the foot of the stairs. Nobody seemed to want to say anything. Finally, Doyle turned to Penny.
‘You’re not a professional assassin, are you?’
‘No,’ said Penny. ‘Not even a little bit.’
‘I didn’t really think so,’ said Doyle. ‘It’s just … when you’re desperate for answers, you can find yourself clasping at some pretty unlikely straws.’
‘How long have you and Alice been together?’ said Penny.
‘Almost fifteen years. She found me in my academic hiding place and brought me out into the world. Showed me places and people I’d never even dreamed of. I’d thought I would be alone forever, but she freed me from the prison I’d made of my life. And for that kindness I would have followed her anywhere.’
‘What did you do, before?’ I said.
‘Linguistics,’ he said. ‘All very theoretical, nothing to do with the real world. Or so I thought. But Alice saw a value in my work … a chance to do something with it that mattered. The things we persuaded people to say saved lives and put an end to all kinds of evils. Or so we were told. It’s taken me till now to understand the kind of person the job made me into.’
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Martin’s voice, ‘but is Doctor Hayley still there with you? I’ve only got sound in the entrance hall.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She left a while back. She should have reached you by now.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Martin. ‘But she isn’t here. And she could hardly have got lost along the way … I’m looking at what screens I’ve got, and I’m not seeing her anywhere.’
A horrible suspicion was growing in Doyle’s face. I started to say something reassuring, but he stopped me with a sharp gesture.
‘Something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘Something’s happened to her.’
‘Let’s go to the security centre,’ I said. ‘She might have stopped along the way to look at something.’
I didn’t believe that for one moment, but I didn’t want him panicking. He nodded quickly, and Penny and I walked him back through the entrance hall. There was no sign of Hayley anywhere; but on the other hand, there were no signs of violence or an abduction. When we finally reached the security centre, Martin already had the door opening for us – a sign of how worried he was. He looked at me inquiringly as we walked in, and I shook my head. Martin sat back in his chair and looked quickly around the various screens. Almost a third of them were still blank.
‘I’ve got the microphones open,’ he said. ‘But I’m not hearing her voice, or any signs of movement. I’ve called out to her, but if she can hear me she isn’t answering.’
‘Then where is she?’ said Doyle.
He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned suddenly and strode out of the security centre. He called out Hayley’s name, increasingly loudly, to no response. Penny and I looked at each other, and went after him. We found him standing at the foot of the stairs, murmuring her name over and over. He turned to look at us, his eyes full of tears.
‘I should have gone with her,’ he said. ‘But I wanted to hurt her, to make a point. I sent her away and now they’ve taken her.’
‘Who’s taken her?’ I said.
‘The ghosts …’ said Doyle. He turned away and screamed up the empty stairs, ‘Give her back to me!’
I had hoped the idea of secret passageways might distract him from his fixation with ghosts, but clearly it hadn’t taken. All his poise and self-confidence were gone again. His face was unhealthily pale, his chest heaved as he tried to get his breath, and his hands were trembling.
‘She could have found one of the hidden doors,’ said Penny, ‘and gone through to see where it led. That is the kind of thing she’d do, isn’t it?’
Doyle just shook his head miserably, refusing to be comforted.
I raised my voice. ‘Martin! Hayley said she found the official history of Ringstone Lodge in the library. Do you know where the library is?’
‘Of course,’ said Martin. ‘I’ve spent some time there. Did I mention how starved we are for entertainment in this dump?’
He gave me directions. I turned to Doyle.
‘Come with us to the library,’ I said. ‘There’s bound to be something in the official history about hidden doors.’
‘The Lodge is full of secrets,’ said Doyle. ‘Bad things have happened in this house, and I think some of them are still happening. We should never have come here.’
The library turned out to be little more than a simple reading room with packed bookshelves and a few comfortable chairs. Very civilized and very quiet, an oasis of peace in a busy house. With just the one small window, covered by a steel shutter. The light was bright and cheerful. I parked Doyle in one of the chairs and looked around the shelves.
‘Martin! Where can
we find this family history? What’s it called?’
‘Beats me,’ said Martin. ‘I can’t even remember the author’s name. It was all a bit dry and dull, as I recall. But it is there, somewhere.’
‘Terrific,’ said Penny, revolving slowly in the middle of the room so she could take in all the shelves. ‘Where do we start?’
‘You take one side of the door and work your way round the room,’ I said. ‘I’ll start from the other and we’ll meet up in the middle.’
Penny looked to Doyle to ask if he wanted to help her. But he was sitting slumped in his chair, lost in his own miserable thoughts.
Most of the books turned out to be the usual suspects; neat leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Trollope, and assorted paperback editions of Agatha Christie and Dick Francis. The kind of books you order by the yard to fill up shelves. Along with a sprinkling of local histories, and a small collection of quite specialized erotica. In the end, Penny found the family history first. Under ‘R’, for Ringstone Lodge. She brought the book triumphantly over to the single reading table, and the two of us studied it carefully. A large square edition, with good paper and binding and a really ugly typeface. Old enough to predate desktop publishing, it was probably a vanity-press production. The History Of Ringstone Lodge covered several hundred years in barely two hundred pages. Penny found the index, which took her straight to the story of the Ringstone Witch – the woman who lay buried out back under the ominous tombstone.
‘Her name was Hettie Longthorne,’ said Penny, glancing quickly through the account. ‘Accused of placing a murrain on the surrounding lands, so that all young things died and the crops withered in the fields. When she refused to remove it, or more likely said she couldn’t, they hanged her.’
‘But what’s her connection with the Lodge?’ I said. ‘Why is she buried here, with such a high-born family?’
‘If I’m reading between the lines correctly,’ said Penny, ‘I’d say Hettie must have been born on the wrong side of the blanket and never acknowledged. Not welcome at the big house during her life, but buried here afterwards because the family felt guilty over not speaking up for her.’
‘Would explain why they felt a need to put that inscription on her tombstone,’ I said. ‘God Grant She Rest Easily.’
‘Supporting an accused witch at her trial would not have been a wise or safe thing to do in those days,’ said Penny.
‘Did the murrain disappear, after she was hanged?’ I said.
‘Doesn’t say,’ said Penny. She shot me a look. ‘You don’t believe in ghosts, but you do believe in witches?’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘Is there a picture of this Hettie Longthorne?’
‘Just an old woodcut from a local broadsheet published at the time,’ said Penny.
I leaned in beside her for a look. The illustration showed a tall slender figure in a long black robe. Something in the way the figure stood made me think she would have been quite young. Not a crone in a witch’s hat with a bubbling cauldron and a black cat. Just a young woman who stood accused. Perhaps because she was different.
‘What does the book have to say about ghosts?’ said Doyle.
Penny and I jumped, just a bit. Doyle had been quiet for so long we’d forgotten about him. He’d sunk right down in the big chair, as though all the strength had gone out of him. He looked lost without Alice to tell him what to do. There was nothing I could say to him. I liked to think Hayley was still out there somewhere, perhaps stumbling along some dark and cobwebbed secret corridor searching for an exit. Though that didn’t seem likely. More likely she was just another dead body waiting to be found. But of course I couldn’t say that to Doyle, so I nodded to Penny and she turned to the index again. And sure enough, there was a whole chapter on the ghosts of Ringstone Lodge.
Penny and I glanced quickly through it, summarizing aloud for Doyle’s benefit. There were any number of reported sightings down the years, but nothing out of the ordinary. A lady in white and a phantom monk, a skull that was supposed to scream on significant occasions, and a bloodstain on an old stone floor that couldn’t be cleaned away. All a bit generic, really, the kind of stories that accumulate around any ancient house. To raise a chill on a winter evening round the fire, or just so there was something to tell the tourists on open days.
‘Martin thought Parker brought some kind of evil power with him,’ I said finally. ‘To disturb and raise up the Ringstone ghosts. But there’s nothing here worth raising up. And I have to say, I never heard of Parker acquiring any kind of power out in the field. We might have worked in some similar areas, but he was basically just a spy. Stealing and selling information, and disposing of people with a price on their head.’
‘Maybe he stole the wrong kind of information,’ said Penny. ‘Or made some kind of deal to become unkillable.’
‘No such thing,’ I said. ‘No … I would have heard something, if Parker had that kind of power. You know how people in our line of work love to gossip. Is there anything in the book about the Lodge’s ghosts terrorizing people recently?’
Penny leafed quickly through the pages. I shot another glance at Doyle. He really wasn’t looking good, but then he’d been up and down a lot in the last few hours. He didn’t have the constitution for this kind of work, or this kind of world. He’d bounced back before, but that had been with Hayley’s help. I’d hoped bringing Doyle to the library with us might help him focus. But instead he looked … haunted.
‘Maybe the ghosts have come under Parker’s power,’ Doyle said slowly, not looking up.
‘What power?’ I said, trying hard not to sound impatient with him. ‘If he’d had anything, the Organization would know and they would have told me. And MacKay, so he could oversee whatever precautions were necessary to hold Parker securely.’
‘There’s nothing in the family history about ghosts acting up in modern times,’ said Penny. ‘It’s all vague sightings, spooky old stories, and dire warnings about the perils of modernization.’
‘Try the index again,’ I said. ‘See if there’s anything on hidden doors or secret passageways.’
Penny sighed loudly, just to make it clear she wasn’t my servant, and turned to the back of the book again.
‘Someone is trying to distract us from the real problem,’ I said. ‘Parker’s murder. Everything that’s happened before and since is only important if it ties in to that.’
Penny closed the book with a snap. ‘Nothing on sliding panels, priest holes or smugglers’ storerooms. Of course, it could be that the family kept such things to themselves, because they felt it was no one else’s business.’
‘Where’s Alice?’ said Doyle. ‘I want Alice.’
‘Don’t worry, Robbie,’ said Penny. ‘We’ll find her for you.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘Only she calls me that.’
Penny and I exchanged looks. The man was falling apart right in front of us, but short of finding Hayley I didn’t see what else we could do for him. Penny put the family history back on the shelf and looked at me thoughtfully.
‘You keep saying we’re being distracted. From what exactly?’
‘From the facts of the case,’ I said. ‘Parker was murdered inside a locked room while under electronic surveillance. Everything that’s happened since has been designed to keep us from thinking about that. If we could solve the mystery of Parker’s murder, I’m convinced everything else would just fall into place.’
Doyle stirred in his chair, and looked directly at me for the first time. ‘Are you saying Baxter’s death and the disappearance of Redd and MacKay and my Alice are just … collateral damage? That they don’t matter in your great scheme of things?’
‘Of course they matter,’ I said. ‘It’s just …’
Doyle surged up out of his chair. ‘You worry about your theories. I’m going to look for Alice. Because somebody has to.’
He strode out of the library, and Penny and I had no choice except to hurry out after him.
>
But once we were on the other side of the door, Doyle didn’t seem to know what to do or where to go. So I led the way back to the security centre, hoping Martin might have his screens working properly again. Doyle said nothing as we moved quickly through the empty corridors, his eyes lost and unbearably sad. We passed by the foot of the stairs leading up to the next floor, and came to a sudden halt. Because there on the bottom step, set carefully side by side, were two severed heads. Hayley and Redd. His face looked resigned; Hayley’s looked quietly betrayed. Their unblinking eyes stared out across the entrance hall. Even as the anger hit me, I couldn’t help noticing how cleanly the severing cuts had been made, to allow the heads to rest neatly on the step. Someone had taken their time, because they wanted to make an impression. And a statement.
Doyle sank to his knees facing Hayley’s head, and sobbed like a small child. Penny put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t even know she was there. Penny studied the two severed heads with cold, furious outrage, her lips pressed tightly together. Angry not just because these people had been murdered, but at what had been done to them. Turning horror and loss into a sideshow attraction. Penny was never more angry than when she was angry on someone else’s behalf.
I was angry because this proved I’d been right all along. This wasn’t the work of a ghost, or any malevolent spirit of the night. Someone was playing games with us.
‘It seems our killer has found another use for his knife,’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘He’s escalating, piling horror upon horror, to keep us from thinking straight. It’s just more distraction. But why? What is it that he’s so desperate to keep us from seeing?’
‘I can’t believe how quickly this has all happened,’ said Penny. ‘So many deaths in just a few hours … We were only talking to Hayley and Redd a short time ago.’
‘This is no simple stabbing,’ I said. ‘This took time and effort. Our killer has tried everything he could think of to scare us. Ghosts and disappearances and mysteries … and now he’s gone for the gore.’