Murder in the Museum (Fethering Mysteries) (34 page)

‘I did too. I borrowed a coat. There was a great bunch of them hanging up in the hallway.’

‘Was it a blue coat with a hood and some logo on the front?’

‘Sure. Why, it wasn’t yours, was it? You’re not accusing me of stealing your damn coat?’

Carole Seddon shook her head, hardly hearing Marla’s question. Her mind was too full of the new possibilities that had just been opened up. Everything suddenly slotted into place.

Two tall female figures in identical hooded waterproofs. Carole and Jude had been wrong all along. They shouldn’t have been trying to work out who killed Sheila Cartwright. The murderer’s intended victim had been Marla Teischbaum.

This thought only just had time to register, when the women’s attention was attracted by a creaking noise from above.

Both looked up in horror. Carole leapt forward, as if she could do something to change their fate.

But she couldn’t. Colour drained from both their faces, as they saw the seesaw floorboards slowly arc back into place.

They were trapped.

It was late afternoon before Jude was told that Laurence had recovered consciousness. He was deathly pale and wired up to various machines like an undernourished early experiment of Dr Frankenstein.

‘Jude, my dear,’ he croaked incorrigibly. ‘I suppose a cigarette’s out of the question . . .?’

The nursing staff said he was stable, and Jude could detect an undercurrent of annoyance that they should have to deal with someone whose illness was so patently self-inflicted. They said Mr Hawker’s condition was unlikely to change much overnight. She could stay if she wanted to, but it’d probably make more sense if she went home.

As she left the hospital, she tried Carole on the mobile. Answering machine. Back at Woodside Cottage, she went round next door. But there was no reply.

Jude felt restless. The hospital had her mobile number; they’d call if there was any change in Laurence’s condition. She had a nasty feeling that if they did call, it would not be with news of a change for the better.

She looked around her cluttered sitting room, amazed at how much Laurence Hawker had imposed his identity during the short time he had been with her. He was a man of few possessions, and yet he left a trail wherever he went of open newspapers, literary journals, books, and cigarette ends. Every fabric in the house was impregnated with the tang of his tobacco.

And she knew, in a way, that it hadn’t worked, the idea of their cohabiting for the last stage of his life. The cohabitation wasn’t the problem, it was the illusion that they could achieve it while maintaining the same bantering affectionate disengagement with which they entered the agreement. She wasn’t sure whether Laurence felt the same, but Jude had realized that she couldn’t live with someone and not love them. However light and semi-detached they kept their relationship, the latest haemorrhage had brought home to her how much she loved Laurence. It wasn’t the kind of love that would worry about him being with other women; but it was a love that would miss him terribly when, inevitably, he was no longer there.

With an effort, Jude stopped her emotions from going too far down that road. She decided that, if Carole didn’t come back, she’d treat herself to supper down at the Crown and Anchor. Ted Crisp was a restful companion, surprisingly sensitive when things were going badly. And that evening Jude didn’t want to be alone.

They still had light, but that was all they had. They certainly didn’t have hope.

‘God, I was so stupid!’ Carole fumed. ‘To give away my car keys. Everyone’ll think I drove myself away. Then, when they find the car abandoned miles from anywhere, that’s where they’ll start looking for me. Not here.’

‘But surely lots of people know about this Priest’s Hole?’ Tension made Marla’s voice sound even more nasal and whiny. God, thought Carole, if I am going to die here, I’d have chosen another companion to die with.

The thought of never getting out of her prison brought to her the image of Gulliver. Poor, stupid, big, endearing dog, standing by the Aga, waiting for the mistress who was never going to come home. The thought physically hurt her.

‘Lots of people must know about it,’ Marla Teischbaum whinged on.

‘Lots of people know about the Priest’s Hole. Very few, so far as I can gather, know about this hidden bit beneath it.’

‘But people will be in and out of the house. They’ll hear us if we holler.’

‘I’m not so sure they will. The walls of this place are pretty thick. Anyway, Bracketts is closed for the winter. Cleaners do their stuff about once a week, I think. Apart from that, nobody comes in here.’

‘Except for the people who locked us in?’

‘And who do you think they are?’

‘Well, I don’t know. I’d kind of assumed it was Graham. He’s never made much secret of the fact that he despises me. And now his aunt’s given me access to the archive, he might want to get some kind of revenge. He’s a funny guy.’

‘Yes. Or it could be the aunt herself. Maybe her agreeing to opening the archive for you was just a ploy to get you down here, so that she could lock you in.’

‘Why would she
do
that?’ Marla Teischbaum had that unawareness shared by many insufferable people of just how insufferable she was.

‘Or it could be both of them together. Then there’s Gina,’ Carole continued thoughtfully. ‘She certainly facilitated my visit here today, and you say she set everything up for you . . .’

‘Couldn’t have been more helpful.’

Carole tapped her teeth. ‘And it was Gina who asked for my car to be moved, which was why I handed over my keys . . .’

Marla wasn’t listening; she was riffling through her mind for some shreds of hope. ‘Maybe this is just someone’s idea of a joke. Your famous English sense of humour. Someone gives us a fright for an hour or so, and then . . .’

‘Maybe,’ said Carole grimly.

But Marla didn’t even believe her own fantasy. Slowly, pathetically, she started to cry.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Carole snapped. ‘That’s not helping anything.’

‘It’s helping me,’ the great Professor wailed like a two-year-old.

‘You should be ecstatic.’ Carole gestured ironically to the shelves of dusty boxes. ‘You’ve spent so much of your adult life wanting access to Esmond Chadleigh’s private archive, and look – you’re in it!’

‘Yes, I want to be in it,’ Marla Teischbaum howled, ‘but I don’t want to die in it!’

‘I don’t suppose,’ asked Carole coolly, ‘that you by any chance have a mobile phone . . .?’

The tears vanished instantly. The confidence and the smile returned to Marla Teischbaum as she reached down to her bag and crowed, ‘I do too!’

‘Your bloke gone back then, has he?’ asked Ted Crisp.

‘He’s in hospital.’

‘Ah. Didn’t think he looked too clever last time he come in.’

‘No.’

‘Haven’t seen your mate Carole in here much recently either . . .’ Even so long after their brief relationship, there was still an awkwardness when he said the name.

‘I’m sure she’ll be in soon.’

‘Yes. Yes. Sure she will.’ He appeared to put the subject out of his mind. ‘Now, can I get you another of those white wines?’

The lifeline had gone. Either Bracketts’ remote situation or the thickness of the walls that encased them prevented any signal from reaching the mobile. Marla Teischbaum had tried and tried, stabbing emergency numbers with increasing ferocity into the unresponsive unit. Finally, she had given up and lain down on the stone floor, sobbing like a child.

Where’s your gung-ho, can-do American spirit now, thought Carole bitterly. Still, having Marla crying was marginally preferable to having her talking.

Once again the reproachful image of an abandoned Gulliver was conjured up in Carole’s mind.

She could feel panic rising in her, threatening to overwhelm her body and mind, but she swallowed it back, and tried to concentrate on the facts she knew about their current situation.

The thesis made sense that she and Marla had been lured to Bracketts, so that they could be disposed of. Or it made some sense. In her case, she had hardly been lured. She had suggested a time to visit the house, and Gina Locke had said, yes, that was fine.

Marla Teischbaum’s situation was a little different. If Carole’s theory was correct, then the incarceration was a second attempt on the American’s life, the first one having mistakenly killed Sheila Cartwright. Marla’s visit to Belinda Chadleigh had been set up by Gina Locke. Either one of the women – or indeed both working together – could have engineered its outcome.

And that still didn’t include as a suspect the person whose animus against Marla Teischbaum was strongest – Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. He it was who had been rudest about her, he whose fear of the threat she represented to his precious biography had become almost pathological. He had certainly wanted Marla Teischbaum dead.

But then, after what happened at the Emergency Trustees’ Meeting, he had probably wanted Sheila Cartwright dead too . . .

Carole found it was all very confusing. And difficult to concentrate when facing the imminence of a long, lingering death.

Oh well, at least they still had light. Marla’s Camping Gaz was burning steadily. They’d wait till that ran out before they switched the torches on. Fortunately, Graham had left his down there, so light was not an immediate problem.

Nor was food. Yet. Death by starvation lay a long way off. Though Carole was already uncomfortably aware of not having had any lunch. She looked at her watch. Nearly eight in the evening. The minimal chance of anyone other their captors coming into Bracketts had dwindled to nothing.

She stood up to ease the incipient cramp in her legs and, as she did so, felt her foot scuff against some fabric on the floor. She looked down to see the tattered blanket which Mervyn Hunter must have used.

A new thought started in her mind. A hopeful thought.

Mervyn Hunter had used the secret cell as a hideaway. When he’d first come to Bracketts after his escape from Austen, he couldn’t possibly have known that the house had been closed to the public. So he must have assumed that Guided Tours would still be clattering through on a regular basis. Which meant he couldn’t have risked leaving the concealed floorboard entrance open. He’d have been found straight away.

So, unless he’d had an accomplice . . . And that seemed unlikely. Jonny Tyson was the only potential candidate and from what Jude had said, Jonny’s only involvement had been supplying one of his mother’s packed lunches. Mervyn Hunter must have known a way of getting out of the secret cell from the inside.

‘Has anyone you’ve loved ever died, Ted?’

He gave his beard a pensive scratch. ‘Yes. Not while I was still with her. Girl I used to know on the comedy circuit. Clever she was, Jude, sharp as the crease on a car salesman’s trousers. Doing well. I kept bumping into her round all these upstairs rooms of pubs, and that. Then one evening . . . as the old music hall gag goes, one thing led to the other . . . We had . . . I suppose . . . six weeks together. Then she moved on. Didn’t dump me, just let me down softly, like when you got a slow puncture in an airbed. I felt a bit . . . you know, wistful, but . . . got on with things.

‘Then two years later I heard she’d been killed in a car crash. Not even hot news. Heard about it from a mutual friend, had happened four months before. I was surprised how much it hurt.’

‘Mm.’ Jude nodded slowly. She had known Ted Crisp would be the right companion for that evening. She didn’t need to break her word and tell him Laurence was dying. Ted understood.

At the bar of the Crown and Anchor a sad, but complicit silence stretched between them.

Carole dropped to her knees and picked up one of the old books that had been left near Mervyn’s candlestick.

‘What’re you doing?’ Marla whined. ‘There’s no point in doing any research if we’re never going to get out of this place.’

‘I think certain research may be well worth doing,’ said Carole.

The book was thin, leather-bound, probably eighteenth century. Its title page read
Some Oddities Of Construction In The House Known As Bracketts Near South Stapley In The County of Sussex
.

She flipped feverishly through the pages until she came to
The Second, Or Hidden, Priest’s Hole
. There was a diagram of the seesaw floorboards, showing how they pivoted and how they were locked in place by the step in the doorway from the landing.

The next page revealed a sketch of the Second Priest’s Hole’s ceiling, with its lines of carved Tudor roses.

And then there was an enlarged detail of one corner, pointing out one single rose.

‘Come on, Marla, get up! I’m going to need your help.’

‘You don’t need my help. There’s nothing we can do. We’re going to die down here!’ the Professor wailed.

‘You can die down here if you like. I’m not going to. Come on, I need you to hold these shelves steady.’

Reluctant, still protesting, Marla Teischbaum nonetheless did as she was told. The bookshelves were rickety, Carole wondered whether they would hold her weight.